Does anyone remember which Hu video has the self-aware bit about waking up to a digital clock?-- the real life of people playing at looking like Mongol warriors.
Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
I seem to recall it was a Mongol moral principle that an adult male was obliged to justify his place in the World, or literally make room for himself, by removing at least one other person from it!
> Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
Genghis Khan gave a great speech once when the issue was brought before him that a bunch of Muslims and Jews were complaining about being fed pork. The primary thrust of it was "I think you're forgetting who conquered and enslaved who".
"Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons."
There's a way in which this sounds silly ("what, so actual serial killers are fine people now?!?"), but in another way, it makes sense. No one's realistically entertaining Mongol Hordeism as a foreign policy. The only plausible argument for Mongol Hordes is We're the Strongest, which has a clear counterargument ("No, *We* Are"), and no one's claiming any moral heft to this.
OTOH, Naziism has arguments behind it that look scientific (in the similar way that any modern ideological argument will appear if we just observe the stack of papers with the nice formatting and five-dollar words), and if you think, like many modern people, that morality ought to be supported by what's scientifically correct, then there comes this niggling fear that too many people will sit and listen for the sake of openmindedness and convince themselves that there's something to it.
Part of the point I'm driving here is not that I think there's something to Naziism, but rather that it can be depressingly hard to resolve multiple scientific-looking but contradictory arguments, and the arguments one goes along with could too often depend merely on which arguments one saw just as they happened to be in an intellectually curious mood.
Or, given his early life experiences, think of Genghis Khan as the Mongolian Scarlett O'Hara:
"I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
And he never was - Tasting History with Mongolian meatballs:
> [Boris Johnson] a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing ...
Wait, what? What kind of non-sequitur is that? Why do you assume that Johnson isn't actually highly intelligent and – yes! - clear-thinking in matters unrelated to politics? The effective practice of politics might just rely on difficult skills largely unrelated to intelligence and clarity of thought, as we judge the those things in other areas of life.
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia:
...
- An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
His mention of Scott there links to the old SSC blog.
Cummings comes across as someone who is a fan of rationalism but not very good at it. I think he probably did help the British response to Covid be less of a disaster than it could have been - here he is explaining to Boris the difference between a fatality rate of 0.04 and a fatality rate of 0.04%: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
- but his big achievement was winning the referendum to bring about Brexit which has done a lot of economic damage for little or no benefit. There is a lot of talk about how that was done with amazing cutting edge Facebook data analysis, but it really came down to shameless lying and scaremongering. He talks a big game about streamlining government, having a British version of DARPA etc. but none of that has happened, instead British science is cut off from European collaboration and funding and British business is bogged down in red tape and lack of investment caused by not being part of the EU.
Boris plays the role of an erudite, witty, brilliant leader but is actually not very bright and incapable of making decisions. Cummings plays the role of a hard-minded rationalist but he ends up with terrible outcomes.
He's made good points before, his blog makes him seem like he's got his head on straight, and most of what he's said that I've checked has been confirmed by other sources.
AFAIKT, both of them lie whenever they perceive it to give the the slightest advantage in any way. Admittedly, I got my impression from the US version of British news, and wasn't concerned enough to remember the details.
I once read that his claimed hobby of making model buses out of wine boxes was some SEO tactics, so that if you google "boris johnson bus" you'll get this instead of the brexit bus with the 350 million pounds lie. At the time he talked about Peppa Pig World, lots of pigs in Britain had to be culled because of brexit. Could it be...?
Not the only bus-related story I've read about Boris; he pledged to get rid of 'bendy buses' and re-introduce a modern version of the classic red bus when he was mayor of London:
I also heard this claim, from multiple sources. So I did a search for "boris johnson bus" (and have repeated it just now, as a check), and found that the top couple of results were neither about Johnson's hobby nor about Brexit campaigning, but unrelated stories about UK bus policy (or, when I checked previously, about London bus policy, from Johnson's time as Mayor). So I'm confident that this claim is false.
Moreover: the £350m figure (advertised on the side of a bus, as the UK's weekly contribution to the EU budget) was correct. It is true that about a third of that was spent within the UK, and about another third was returned to the UK in the form of a rebate. But, under UK (and EU?) law, advertised prices must be the price before any form of rebate, so it was nicely and technically correct to list the full value.
So, I suspect the claim you've cited above - that Johnson talking about his hobby was an attempt to smother discussion of the supposed "lie" - was invented as an attempt to imply that not only was the figure on the bus incorrect, but that Johnson was aware of this and wished to conceal it.
Strongly agree about style over substance and the fact that he is playing a character - he reportedly used to pretend to be improvising a speech, having failed to prepare for whatever event, but he did it repeatedly and always gave the same 'off the cuff' performance. I wrote this about how he is like a hack comic: https://www.sorryisaidthat.biz/p/boris-johnson-reconsidered-as-a-hack
But isn't Cummings mostly focused on the practice of politics? That is, Cummings, worked in Johnson's political shop, saw a train wreck, and talks a great deal about that. We could agree that's all true, and it wouldn't preclude Johnson be excellent at, idk, classical music, French literature, and writing on particular drugs.
Cummings is often portrayed as a weirdo in Britain. I'd say his writings are generally regarded in that light. Very academic stuff that has little relevance to the real problems faced by the country. Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so, and has largely fallen back on blaming Johnson for that. I don't think Johnson is entirely to blame, there's a lot to be said for Cummings picking the wrong horse to ride on and competely failing to sell his ideas to the media and the public. Very much felt like he was a terminally online guy who was very good at Twitter but less good outside that bubble. Plus the whole nonsense about going for a drive to "test his eyes" basically made him a laughing stock...
Why do you think Cummings’ ideas have very little relevance to the real issues in the UK? The big one, massive bureaucratic overhaul, seems pretty central to the entire country, especially considering we have such a big state.
>Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so
He succeeded in the creation of ARIA and the data science in No. 10, plus some procurement reform. Couldn’t do the bureaucratic overhaul but it doesn’t seem like he “utterly failed” to me. It’s not like he was given free reign either.
Cummings is portrayed as a weirdo because he’s 1. Despised by the media as he doesn’t talk to them, and 2. Because he largely focuses on actual issues and gets to root causes, unlike most political figures who mostly blather. This indeed makes him weird in British politics!
Here in the UK I think most people would say: Johnson is a brilliant writer (it's how he made his name), very likeable, and beneath some bluster actually extremely intelligent and with capacity for clear thinking and communication: unfortunately with the dual flaw of (a) not believing the rules that apply to everyone else apply to him (including any sense of consequences to his actions), and (b) being obsessed with his own greatness.
Meanwhile most people would say of Dominic Cummings: very insightful guy, clear and radical thinker, unfortunately also obsessed with Johnson in a massive grudge match. Most people in the UK would therefore laugh at the suggestion his inside view should be trusted, even as most people would find the chaotic picture he paints of Johnson's administration completely plausible.
TLDR: Johnson & Cumming reputation is 2 brilliant men, both impossibly biased beyond the point of trustworthiness.
I find a little of Johnson goes a long way - whether that's the more recent newspaper columns, or the speeches I heard at the Oxford Union in the mid-1980s.
Politically, he is a chameleon. At Oxford, he presented as a rather Woosterish let's-not-be-ideological old-fashioned Tory, in an environment where the few Tories around felt quite hard right. As mayor of London he was seen as generally moderate and inoffensive, if prone to vanity projects: but it's not a role in which you can do much harm. As PM, it was incoherent. Probably in substance the most left wing Tory PM since the early 60s, but in a terribly unfocused way, and seasoned with some tiresome (but substance free) stuff about "wokeness".
I can testify from my two encounters with him, both from 1985, that he was a deeply unpleasant person then, and is reputed to be so now.
I wouldn't in general trust a word that Cummings says: he is one of the most appalling people in UK public life of my lifetime, but some of his anecdotes about Johnson ring true. Anthony Seldon's book is one I would trust, and is damning.
I can't answer for Andrew B, but speaking personally: "Appalling" exists on a spectrum. I find torture of cute puppies "appalling", but I also find sour cream rangoons "appalling".
Dominic Cummings hasn't personally orchestrated any genocides that I know of, so he's not "Hitler-appalling". But Dominic Cummings famously pushed for tough COVID lockdowns, then within weeks defied those lockdowns (twice! Once while sick with COVID! And once just to go have a birthday picnic with his wife!) and then, when caught out, after a month of denial, offered a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse. This isn't a premium Open Thread, this isn't about whether the British lockdown was good/bad, but if you, personally, agitate for Policy X, then you, personally, defy Policy X... well, I find that hypocrisy and spinelessness appalling.
Now, whether or not he's appalling is tangential to his opinion on Boris Johnson - but, that having been said, I still think it's still pretty ridiculous to trust his characterization of Johnson, considering Johnson basically fired him. We don't generally consider ex-spouses to be particularly reliable transcribers of character, despite having lived under a roof with the individual for a healthy period of time. Just because this particular ex-spouse uses the same Berkeley blogosphere shibboleths as us doesn't make them any more reliable a witness as to the number of times their ex-wife ever did the dishes.
I agree that you can't take Cummings as a trustworthy source about Johnson because he has a grudge, but there is quite a bit of corroborating evidence that Johnson was really bad at making decisions, was confused about basic points (ie mistaking a fatality rate of 0.04 for 0.04%, thinking that a 6% death rate for older people was no big deal) -and this wasn't in the early days, it was months into the pandemic when he should have been on top of this stuff: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
Yeah, the lockdown stuff was the icing on the cake for me of my disdain for him. The bullshit excuse he offered with a smirk and an air of "yes, you know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but you're only the little people and I can get away with imposing rules on you that I break casually because I can do that, because I'm so Brilliant And Wonderful And Great And In Power*, and you're not".
*It was more "I have powerful friends" and when it was expedient, they sacrificed him.
No rationalist should have pushed for lockdowns. They were not rational at all. Cummings may have had a personal weakness that he failed to stay in lockdowns and while it is not good thing, it doesn't discredit him. His insistence on lockdowns does.
Boris Johnson initially resisted lockdowns and that makes him smarter than Cummings. He yielded under pressure and lukewarmly supported them later but at least initially he was on the right track.
> a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse
That sounded plausible to me. If I'm recovering from an illness in which my eyesight was affected, and I have a long drive coming up, I might well choose to take a short drive, to see if my eyesight deteriorates when I spend half an hour focusing on the road. In case it does, I should bring my wife along, to drive us back - and if we're both going, we have to take our child, too.
That doesn't explain choosing to have a picnic. But he and his wife had just survived an illness which had a real chance of killing them, it was her birthday, and a picnic out in the open, away from other people, wasn't any sort of infection risk ... so I'm not going to get too worked up about that.
Boris is a lot cleverer than his cultivated image of "Tim Nice But Dim" lets on, and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit. If you're a woman and in any way in danger of being within a 100 mile radius of emotional intimacy with the guy, you *will* come off the worse for it.
Cummings just annoys the hell out of me, and his downfall made me smile. He's still, as you say, very much holding a grudge over it all.
Oooh, I wouldn't, because Dommie has a lot of axes to grind and is very unhappy that his super brilliant genius was squandered by Boris because Carrie threw a strop about him.
It was a bad breakup and he's still eating pints of ice cream and sobbing down the phone to his pals about that bastard 😁
I read Dominic's Substack, and I've read his previous blog and watched videos of his speeches. I've also read a lot of stuff Boris has written, listened to many of his speeches, and read a lot of stuff other people have written about him, including two biographies.
I believe both Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are highly intelligent and knowledgeable but both have somewhat flawed personalities, for politicians. Dominic has a very high opinion of himself, believing himself to always be right about everything, and also has a tendency to become fixated on certain things. It wouldn't surprise me if he was on the autistic spectrum. Boris is somewhat lazy, unreliable and unfocused. He has a desire to be liked and an optimistic disposition that leads him to make commitments that he then can't or won't follow through with.
Dominic's intense criticism of Boris (and Carrie) since being sacked honestly makes him sound just like a jilted girlfriend to me - I don't think his assessment of Boris's character is entirely unbiased.
Yes, he was a successful journalist before entering politics, so the whole “I’m confused, he can write” thing just doesn’t make sense. People are too easily caught by stereotypes.
He wasn't really a successful journalist in the sense of analysis or finding things out (he got fired for making things up), he was more a successful humour columnist who often made things up (for example inventing absurd EU policies that didn't actually exist).
Oh yeah, I agree he can write well and turn an amusing phrase - I don't think that necessarily correlates with the kind of intelligence you need to make good decisions when you're running a country.
Right. The distinction between the practice of politics and other forms of intelligence (such as that involved in good writing, which is what got Scott's attention) is the point I've been making all along.
>16: The Confederate States of America needed a navy, but they didn’t have much of an ironworking or shipbuilding industry. And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Thus was born the cottonclad warship.
Strangely, the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship was built by the CSA!
There's also a vague pop culture trend in fiction where the Confederacy is associated with weird futuristic contraptions (The Great War series by Harry Turtledove, that crappy Wild Wild West movie starring Will Smith). Any reason for this, or is it just that they're usually the villains and thus enjoy a technological edge (as per TVTropes' "Technologically Advanced Foe" trope)?
There's also the convenient "they lost the war, so the advanced tech got destroyed or stolen and hidden" part.
Rather like the tomb raider tropes where the lost tombs have perfectly working advanced traps - they've been hidden, and the raider isn't going to publish an article about what he found and how he got around them.
And the Hunley's successful outing turned out to be a suicide mission for its crew, which seems to have been bottom line for the cottonclads as well -- the last line of their wikipedia article is, "However, in the end, every single one of the once proud cottonclad warships were either sunk, burned, or captured by Union forces."
Which is a suitable metaphor for the Confederacy as a whole.
The Nazis seem to have this association as well (e.g. that movie about the moon base, the first Captain America movie and the comics it's based on). A technological edge would help them seem more threatening, but why are they all so silly? Is it because a legitimate technological edge (like the Nazis not kicking out all the good scientists and developing the A-bomb, or the South not hanging on to 1700s way of life through the industrial revolution and having actual manufacturing) is too close to reality and therefore scary? Maybe those are the groups that you can mock and make look buffoonish? Perhaps it's because they did actually try some weird things (like the CSA submarine, and l believe the Nazis tried to make a raiding force with gliders) in their desperation?
(Also Wild Wild West is amazing, I will not stand for this slander).
Nazis make more sense in that role to me because people were freaked out by V1/V2 rockets, and their rivals wound up imitating other tech they pioneered like assault rifles & "jerry cans".
With the Nazis, it's partially earned - they did create a lot of odd and/or advanced designs. Military rocketry, the first useful jet fighter, a revolutionary new submarine... they just didn't have the time and industry to get any good use out of them at that point.
The one from the revolution was not successful. From the article you linked:
"Several attempts were made using Turtle to affix explosives to the undersides of British warships in New York Harbor in 1776. All failed, and her transport ship was sunk later that year by the British with the submarine aboard."
It survived several attempts to plant explosives, and when it was sunk, it was because the ship carrying it was sunk. It may not have been a successful attack mechanism, but it was a successful submarine.
That seems especially weird to me, since the CSA was so much less industrialized & more low-tech than the Union. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Yankee!
Nit: There were no weird futuristic contraptions in Turtledove's "Great War" series; that was period-appropriate technology throughout, and just a bit of lucky spycraft to make the difference. "Guns of the South", with the time-travelling Afrikaaners, was a one-off with no connection to the other series.
I do vaguely recall a story, possibly published in "Analog", where the CSA managed to build a steampunk ballistic missile to target DC, but Stuff Happened to interrupt their plans; secret history rather than alternate history.
Of course he did. He was writing columns like that thirty years ago, and basically has been doing ever since. It’s his profession and he made his name doing it. His career as Prime Minister was basically a bizarre interruption.
Oh, more likely than not. He was making money writing columns for different newspapers in between bouts of politics. He was perfectly capable of writing a column about "X is the greatest threat to our nation!" for the Daily Blah and one about "X is a marvellous opportunity we should seize immediately" for the National Caller.
> the government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies into getting what they want.
This is hardly limited to social media companies. The government has great power to strong-arm all sorts of companies to do what it wants, regardless of the law. This power is much greater if the target company is large - there are more pressure points the government can threaten, and there are fewer competitors to refuse to do what the government wants. Most people seem to assume that the government tries to keep companies from becoming "too large", but it seems the government generally prefers large companies that are more subject to government influence.
Government is generally biased in favor of large companies for a number of reasons. There's more visibility into an industry with a few large companies than a thousand small ones, large companies can pay lobbyists more (so politicians get more money), and as a result the large companies can do regulatory capture and fence off their industry.
About item 4, IQ and positive life outcomes: I read only the abstract of the cited article, but it sounds like when they calculated correlation between IQ and positive life outcomes they did not consider the problem of IQ being correlated with a bunch of other things that probably also predict each other, and predict IQ.
"We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life."
Don't you think that if they had treated IQ as one of their dependent variables instead of the independentone they would have found that parental education [or income] has a positive association with child's IQ later in life and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
Or that child's health, measured in youth, has a positive association with childhood IQ and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
The point is, there are all these good things that stick together: IQ, parental education (no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual education level, parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth), occupational outcomes, health, social outcomes. No doubt there is causality operating both ways for many of them. If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents, travel, great toys, great preschools, etc. That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items. Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income. If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is regarding how so many of the good things are glommed together, but ignoring the glomming surely isn't it. And I don't see how you can make inferences about causality in a situation like this.
Many other studies have established that IQ is causal here, for example, some studies use the genes for IQ rather than IQ itself; others look at siblings with different IQs from the same family. I had a "how much does IQ vs. parental income matter?" study in the last links post.
This study was just refuting the other (equally uncontrolled) studies saying it reversed effect at a certain point.
Possibly, or it could be that since intelligence is so complex and our brains grow for so long, it take a long time for genetic influences to fully exert themselves.
But of course, if the heritability of IQ *decreased* with age, this would ALSO be taken as evidence that environment matters more than genes. So what would support the causality of IQ by your standards?
The study does mention marital status, but doesn't measure sexual activity. There is (a well known?) study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex.
"Ever having sex" and "ever having had sex" are different things.
That is, going through your entire life as a virgin is probably bad, but losing your virginity earlier is not necessarily better, at least not past a certain point.
"study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex."
I would imagine that if you can redirect those energies in some other creative & useful way to society - i.e. without stoppering them - would contribute to the success and personal satisfaction[defined relationally] mentioned in #4!
I'd add that being optionally able to do what I've described seems godlike. : )
I know you understand about the the intertwined correlations, Scott. Not everybody does, and I thought it was important to just have that info laid out early on. I get that your point is to rebut the Swedish study.
No study can establish that IQ is causal. Studies do not establish causality. At best they can eliminate individual specific confounders. It seems plausible to me that higher IQ leads to better life outcomes but I also don't see how using genetic IQ markers in any way eliminates parental wealth as a possible mechanism. I would think you would need twin studies to do that. (genetic IQ markers are correlated to IQ which is correlated to parental wealth, after all)
IQ predicts outcomes better than parental wealth though. And adoption studies show biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ more strongly than adopted parent's wealth or IQ.
Perhaps an RCT where half the victims er participants are dosed with lead (as infants? in early childhood?) and are followed throughout their lifetimes, measuring all the usual life outcomes along with the IQ damage from the lead? (with Dr. Mengele or one of the Unit 731 people as PI)
Granted, lead can have other toxic effects. Perhaps a diabolical PI might try a bunch of different IQ reducers on different victims - lead for some, mercury for others, oxygen deprivation for a third, some blunt force trauma for a fourth, and look for common "life outcomes" effects which track well with IQ damage, but are robust to other flavors of damage which differ amongst the causative agents (ab)used. We do have a reasonable idea of how to damage intelligence, and the direction of causality would be clear in this experiment. (and, as you said, double blinding would be necessary)
That's irrelevant, because you are already conceding the correlations exist and are positive in fact, but that's exactly what many critics - particularly the Karpinski paper - are claiming does *not* exist, and that higher IQ correlates with worse outcomes.
Yeah I get it. Not everybody understands that studies like the one Scott cites here are not proof that IQ causes everything to be better. I just wanted to lay out here the reasons that studies like this do not show that higher IQ causes better health, income, etc.
Cool, the problem is it doesn't seem like you apply this level of skepticism to correlations equally. Do you have "proof" that being poor *causes* you to eat worse?
It's mostly beside the point, which is that people claim that there is a cut-off point above which IQ stops being positively associated with life outcomes. This study demonstrates this to be false.
>IQ, parental education
For adopted children, biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ better than adopted parent IQ
>parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth)
Parental IQ predicts offspring IQ better than parental wealth.
>occupational outcomes
Low IQ people are worse at their jobs, so it's pretty obvious why IQ would be directly having a causal impact on occupational outcomes.
> If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents,
Poor women are more likely to not work than middle class women, meaning they should have more time to spend with their kids.
>travel
No evidence of any causal relationship between childhood travel and intelligence or work ability
>great toys
There's no evidence that 'greatness' of toys explains any of the variance in intelligence or work ability in the US. There IS evidence that too many toys are actually bad for children, so if anything we should expect a disadvantage for wealthier kids.
>great preschools
There's no evidence that preschool quality explains any of the variance in IQ or work ability in the US. Additionally, controlling for the increase in the heritability with age, most intelligence differences between people exist by age 3, leaving little school for education, preschool or otherwise, to explain intelligence differences between people.
>That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items.
This is an extremely speculative statement, and it also forces you to defend the claim implied by it that Asian American children on average spend more time with parents, travel more, have "better" toys, and go to better preschools than non-asians including whites. It's also unclear why poor whites would have better access to all this stuff than rich blacks, as poor whites get higher SATs on average than rich blacks.
>Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income.
And it's pretty clear why intelligence would be casually related to educational achievement and job performance. If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all.
>If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc
This is all extremely speculative. Anyone with an internet connection can find health information for free. What nobody who simply *assumes* that poor people are less healthy due to their wealth does is consider the possibility that low IQ people simply don't care as much about their health as high IQ people and prefer to eat unhealthy foods because they taste better. Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable.
And in any case, there's little evidence that variance in health explains any meaningful proportion of the variance in IQ. Obviously if you're literally malnourished as a child your IQ is likely to suffer, but serious malnutrition is extremely rare in American kids and so it cannot possibly explain even a fraction of the observed variance in intelligence in the US.
You know, I really don't disagree with a lot of what you say about the likely causes and effects of variations in intelligence. (Pretty sure you're wrong about predictive value of age 3 IQ, though. IQ doesn't stabilize that young.) My main point in posting what I did was to point out that you cannot conclude much of anything about the the causes or effects of variations in intelligence from the kind of data the study Scott mentions. Not everybody understands that when a bunch of things are glommed together and all correlated with each other you can't figure out anything about what causes what. I agree that this present study certainly weighs against another study that also does not use regression to separate out the contribution of different variables to good life outcomes, but reaches an opposite conclusion about whether at high IQ levels the beneficial effect is reversed.
" Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable." What makes you think I'm unwilling to consider that possibility? Actually, the major determinant of what I'm willing to consider talking about is your hectoring manner. It's so unpleasant that I have no interest in talking further to you. If you dialed back the vehemence you'd get a better hearing. Also you would probably say the opposite of what you mean less often.
" If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all."
Yes, I read the article. Did you? He claims a handful of things were actually more developed in America. Not “all Italian cuisine.”
He also says absurdly ignorant things like “before the war, pizza was only found in Southern Italy.” Yeah, no duh, because it was a southern Italian dish. The other half are just random anecdotes about his grandparents. Note how the article doesn’t mention things like pesto (not once!) which conveniently doesn’t fit into the London neoliberal Financial Times narrative of “Italian cuisine isn’t actually that authentic and your old traditions are stupid.”
For someone who claims to be rational, your offhand dismissal of an entire country’s cuisine is really shortsighted. But hey, you’ve “been to Italy three or four times” so maybe you’re an expert now?
Americans really seem to think that visiting Rome a couple times and reading a newspaper article about a country somehow equals understanding the place. As an American living abroad, it makes me embarrassed, frankly.
I don't think this excuse can be applied here, because Scott wrote
> Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
which doesn't sound tongue-in-cheek or ironic to me – at least not obviously so, and Scott's other comments seem to indicate that he was actually serious about this.
It's hard to communicate to everyone all the time, but Scott has the choice between saying something literally accurate, e.g., "The idea that Italian popular Italian food originated solely in Italy by people who are genetically pure Italians is partially incorrect." Vs the more hyperbolic "all the best Italian food came from America."
Whether the latter statement is inappropriate is largely a function of whether you take it literally, and how important of a topic it is.
E.g., I tell my friends all the time that X is "the world's greatest restaurant" et cetera. Hopefully my friends find this endearing, and I think most readers find Scott's playfulness here endearing. But most readers don't moralize food origin, and have no particular loyalty to Italy.
Also, it's worth noting, just to point out some deeper accuracy to the hyperbole, that Tomatoes are a new world plant. So it must be true that "many" of the most iconic Italian dishes rely on the "London neoliberal Financial Times narrative."
Or, to go full culture war, Italians are appropriating Indigenous Native culture and should stop.
Panettone: the article said it was inveted by Angelo Motta in 1920 (italian brand based in italy)
Tiramisu: article is not clear about it, but all sources I can find clearly point to Italian origin
Parmisan: ok, this appear to have American origin - but honestly I had no opinion about this, I doubt any Italian had any idea whether Parmisan had Italian origins or not. [EDIT: Wrong. I misread this part in the article. The Wisconsin parmesan is the one that nowadays mostly resemble ancient parmesan which was invented by, you guess whom, Italians].
Pizza: "pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911. " Who cares where was the first "fully-fledged" pizza restaurant? We are talking about the food origin, not about who capitalized it first. The article itself, and many sources on the web, point to pizza's Italian origins.
Mozzarella: according to the article (and other online sources), comes from the south of Italy
Carbonara: "The story that most experts agree on is that an Italian chef, Renato Gualandi, first made it in 1944 at a dinner in Riccione for the US army with guests including Harold Macmillan" Made in Italy by an Italian chef. I count this as Italian origin.
There is not one food mentioned in the article that "was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." So either you used a wrong link, or your statement is quite misleading. The only exceptions I can think of are dishes that we Italians don't actually ever eat, and Americans believe are italians, such as spaghetti with meatballs.
Having said that, if you ever wanna travel the South of Italy (around Naples), I would be honored to show you around :)
I think there's a reasonable case that most pizza is more American than Italian, mostly because the kind of pizza you get in Italy is very different to the kind you get elsewhere.
Is it? I have travelled across the whole Europe and SE Asia and always got a pretty decent Italian pizza. The only exception was the awful pizza slice I got in NY. Feel free to call _that_ an American invention!
Fair enough! If I can add to that, there are many pizza styles even within Italy. Major differences just from a region to another. Beware the homogeneous outgroup fallacy.
American style Pizza is it's own distinct thing in europe, but not what anyone would call a normal Pizza. If you got one from a normal Pizzeria you would be angry. Most Pizza is absolutely not more american than Italien, Italien Pizza is the Norm, it's crazy to me that even here (wrong) americacentric worldviews are that prevalent.
I am probably biased by living in the UK, I think most pizza here is American-style. That said, you definitely can get more Italian style pizza (which I associate with a thinner crust and less cheese) at restaurants with a proper pizza oven, it's generally considered to be the higher quality product.
I don't think I've travelled enough to really comment on the relative popularity of American vs Italian pizza, I guess I was just claiming that a lot of pizza is very Americanized.
I have never seen anybody say that “Italian pizza is the norm.” Can you clarify, what do you mean by “Italian pizza”? If you mean Neapolitan, certainly that is not the norm internationally.
outside Europe American style pizza (specifically, American fast food style pizza) is much more common than Italian style, and thus the norm. most of the planet lives outside Europe. your (wrong) eurocentric worldview is showing.
I think this is a case of the American versions of foreign cuisines, which got adjusted for mass market American popular tastes not familiar with the exotic ingredients, became established as *the* version of the dish due to the enormous influence of American culture globally. So the American version of pizza is what we know here in Ireland, not the Italian version (until we got sophisticated enough that restaurants doing the Italian version could make a living, and still the version of pizza most people here know is Dominos etc.)
Look at green beer and corned beef and cabbage for St Patty's Day. It's not St Patty, green beer is American-only version, and the Irish version of the dish is bacon and cabbage, not corned beer, and Irish bacon is not the same cuts as American bacon.
I don't understand this comment. I regularly listen to Alberto Grandi's podcast series the FT article mentions and read this article. Neither implies in any way that "all good "Italian" food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." Grandi's focus is on Italian cuisine being more recent and less rigid than some people think, as well as being regional (with Neapolitan food - until recently - more foreign in Milan than New York). The "American" contribution mainly relates to the international popularity of (a type of) Italian cuisine.
I applaud your attack on Italy's endemic rejection of modernity and innovation, but clearly, you have not read Alberto Grandi's book, nor followed his podcast, nor did you do any cursory research on the English wikipedia entries of the foods or dishes he cites.
Grandi's main idea is that most italian food has been invented from skratch, and then marketed as a tradition which lasted centuries: that some characheristics of a few famous dishes were originally invented in the USA is a side note that Grandi uses as a provocation whenever useful, but it does not reflect any general pattern.
The readers (and you) can do their own research and figure out the foods that were not invented in America. The list is too long. And if you do not care, which is understandable, then refrain from using Alberto Grandi's snippets on FT as a useful guide.
It is inevitable to be frustrated by how backward italian culture is, but frustration does not produce understanding.
P.S.: Not knowing whether you were in Italy three rathern than four times suggests you did not pay much attention. Again, I appreciate the criticism of Italy, but yours really does seem like a raw gut feeling.
Just taking a moment to note: The Italian American Table by Simone Cinotto is a lovely book on immigrant culture through the prism of food that tracks the development of the Italian-American food that is usually thought of as "Italian food." And it is focused on New York, so East Coast Americans this time!
The annoying thing for an Italian is that maybe what Americans/Italian Americans call Italian food is not always Italian in origin. You might have invented *your own version*, but you have not invented most of what Italians call Italian food which. So the problem is that American mislabel what is/is not Italian, not that Italian are mistaken about the origin of their food. (there can be some misconceptions of course, but please bring some better proofs, not the irrelevant article cited in the post)
Besides the inflammatory (and rather inaccurate) remark introducing the paywalled FT article, I believe the main point of the discussion around synthetic meat versus animal meat in Italy risks to be missed.
It's a class (as in class struggle) thing and as such it does not translate well between old world and new world cultural spheres. Americans are pretty used to having food for the poor (cheap, industrially manufactured) and food for the rich (gourmet restaurants and the like).
Invariably any discussion regarding food misses this point. For instance, pasta Alfredo was invented by a chef, Alfredo di Lelio. I bet that his version must have tasted good because a) he was a chef b) he likely used quality ingredients. What the median American is likely to eat though, looks something like this https://www.costcuisine.com/post/costco-kirkland-signature-chicken-penne-alfredo-review or this https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/Attachment/677592-Alfredo_NUT.pdf. Just look at the length of the ingredient list. This is the real pasta Alfredo and it is shit -I mean, clearly optimized for shelf stability over taste. In Italy the median income household -but probably even the bottom decile- would never stoop so low as to be forced to consume this. And even if they wanted to, they probably would not be able to buy any such thing. The market equilibrium -either due to regulations or consumer preferences or a combination of both- simply does not produce this.
Now one could speculate as to the reasons why several products, most notably Hershey’s chocolate which is notoriously made with spoiled milk, have emerged historically in the US: long distances in a mostly empty country demand shelf stability, “inclusive” institutions (a la Acemoglu) do not support an elite that leverages refined tastes as a distinction as opposed to wealth, etc. But certainly the US market mass produces objectively inferior food and the US customer buys it. By definition of market, everyone is getting what they want given the amount they are willing an able to spend on it; locally, at least, since market equilibria do not need to be globally optimal nor unique. The Italian situation is at present quite different, with lower income disparity as a possible explanation. But, as mentioned above, regulation is likely to play a major role as well.
Understandably, the average Italian does not want quality food to become a luxury and fears that inferior -but cheaper- industrially processed food may shift the equilibrium to a situation similar to the US one. The extremely poor might benefit, but the middle classes definitely would not. Once the masses start buying, say, Chorleywood process bread to save a euro or two, who will keep the artisanal bakeries in business? They will have to charge higher prices, cater to higher income segments of the population, and ultimately generate a dichotomous market like in the US. The diatribe regarding synthetic meat can be better understood in this light. Eventually synthetic meat must become an item of mass consumption, otherwise it would fail at its main selling point, that of making the meat industry sustainable. Therefore it will have to be low in price. Synthetic meat will never be gourmet: rich people will always choose to eat the sustainably farmed free range organic grass fed <insert class marker du jour> meat, especially after signalling their superior status through environmentally responsible food choices will no longer be an option -namely as soon as synthetic meat becomes cheap enough.
The parties opposing synthetic meat are often regarded as ‘populist’. They are in fact representing the interests of the middle class. The lower classes who may stand to gain from cheap low quality food are mostly made up of immigrants at present, and notably these parties oppose immigration. As consumers, middle class Italians stand to lose if a dichotomous market is established in the US fashion. Many producers are also middle class, as small and medium enterprises are well represented in the food production business: they would have everything to lose from innovation in the meat market, which will likely concentrate power and economic resources among the few -likely foreign- actors who can afford to manufacture high tech synthetic meat. This should make it abundantly clear what the motivations for resisting this kind of innovation are.
Although, that article is using it in a more restrictive way, whereas the sense given in the linked Wikipedia article includes things that are more legitimate.
Re: the Belgian genocide-inciter - 8 years in prison seems really light for inciting genocide! According to Wikipedia he was sentenced to 12 years because he agreed to testify against other suspects who incited genocide, and then went to serve his sentence in Italy (where he was a citizen because his dad was Italian) and was released early against international law.
I would like to hear more about what his arguments in favour of it actually were.
My understanding is that the Tutsis were a classic privileged minority versus the Hutus' poorer majority... and that a lot of Belgians found themselves identifying with one side or the other depending on whether they were French or Walloon.
Just so weird to get sucked so far into ethnic hatred when you’re not from either group. The War Nerd article implies that he just happened to randomly make a Hutu friend (or possibly lover) and it all started from there.
Israeli and Palestinian flags got used as substitute symbols in Northern Ireland for Unionist and Republican movements when were are bans on them using their own flags. The identification of Israel with Unionists and Palestine with Republicans is pretty strong at this point.
I get how that sort of symbolic identification with a group could be how he got started, but he took it way further - this is like if an Irishman made some Israeli/Palestinian friends and then travelled to Israel/Palestine to do a radio show inciting one side to greater violence! I bet there aren't many Northern Irish people with an Israel/Palestine flag in their window who have actually been there and got involved in local politics.
I'm a bit late to this but can you share the argument? Looks the other way to me - reactionary oppressive status quo vs radical terrorists (I know it's a lot more complicated than that in both situations but...)
My reaction was that is unlikely his inciting was 'material'. Doesn't take much to get one group to want to murder an outgroup. And, even if it was, if all he did was talk, how much would you want to punish him? In the US , wouldn't his speech be protected?
Yeah, this is very important. In the key case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the appellate court reversed convictions for statements made before the genocide began. As stated in the decision at paragraph 940: "The Appeals Chamber has already found that, while the pre-6 April 1994 RTLM broadcasts incited ethnic hatred, it has not been established that they substantially contributed to the killing of Tutsi. Consequently, it cannot be concluded that these broadcasts
substantially contributed to the extermination of Tutsi civilians." But the convictions were sustained re statements made while the genocide was ongoing, which as you note included names and locations of victimes.
I think the radio broadcasts were considered to be pretty influential because there wasn't a lot of other mass media available. And he wasn't just being a shock jock, but calling for extermination, inciting more attacks as the genocide took place etc. According to Wikipedia there is some evidence that there were more attacks in areas covered by the radio station.... Actual mass genocides are pretty rare so I disagree that it 'doesn't take much' for that to happen, you need a campaign of dehumanisation and justification first...
I don't think US freedom of speech protections cover you if you commit crimes against humanity - although I don't think the US recognises the ICC so maybe if he'd been a US citizen he would have got away with it.
Not a lawyer, but I think it depends on what precisely he was saying. If he was saying "*outgroup* is really bad and you should hate them" then probably yes. If he was saying "I want you to go to your neighbor's house and kill them right now", then probably no. Fortunately US case law doesn't really have any comparable precedent.
Incite means to encourage. Should everyone who literally encourages people to carry out a genocide be automatically sent to prison for a decade or more?
Or do you actually have to demonstrate that this incitement had a material impact on the genocide being carried out? If so, do you have evidence that the genocide would not have happened, or would not have happened to the same extent, if it weren't for his incitation? I mean, he didn't even speak the same language as the vast majority of those who carried out the genocide.
As the other thread mentions, he was providing names and locations of people to kill. Presumably without him, they would be harder to find and some of them would not be killed (at least at the same time they were). This may not be a _large_ material impact, but I think it is one.
The most conclusive studies re: polyamory will (or might) be if it continues as a high-status orientation long enough for researchers to identify if lifestyle-desistance rates correlate with age, having children, home purchase, career advancement, etc. Anecdotally, there are couples who continue to identify as poly even after ceasing to be “active,” as it were. To what degree does it mimic the 60s counterculture “free love” movement? And/or to what degree is it a convenient political-seeming identifier in a sexual marketplace that was already trending toward acceptance of dating multiple partners simultaneously before you “committed” to someone?
>Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts.
Bigelow Aerospace no longer exists in any sense but on paper. Their IP and assets, including the BEAM module on the ISS, were bought by NASA and competitors (I've heard Lockheed and Sierra).
Re #28: Boris Johnson started his career as a journalist and was primarily known for that before he went into politics, so him writing well should be no surprise because that was literally his job. Incidentally, this is something he shares in common with Winston Churchill, who was known for his articles and books even before his first stint of political prominence in WWI.
Wow I'm in a linkpost! But I must correct: I did NOT help decorate the Inn, and furthermore I have never worked for Lightcone! I don't know why everyone always thinks this... (Oli, next to me: "You don't work for Lightcone, you are just married to Lightcone.")
Hi, mingyuan! I enjoyed your informative guide. But I wanted to register a caution against locating a wall tapestry adjacent to a gas wall heater, as shown in one of the photos.
I love this type of appliance; there's nothing better than standing in front of one on a cold day, until your clothes smell ironed. But they can present a potential fire hazard. (And, I believe, are no longer code-compliant for new installations here in Texas.) A friend of mine had one start a fire in his house, causing enough damage that he had to move out. Whether it was a fault internal to the heater, or nearby materials catching fire, I'm not sure.
Ha, thanks — I no longer live in that place and never turned the heater on when I was there (otherwise I wouldn't have put furniture in front of it!), but I appreciate the well-meant warning :)
#1 - Holiday World is actually pretty legit - (been there a few times, including just over a year ago). Free parking, free drinks (soda/water/etc), free sunscreen, food isn't horribly overpriced.
Not a ton of rides, by theme park standards, but the ones they do have (including 4 full sized roller coasters) are pretty good.
It's no Cedar Point, but it's genuinely a pretty nice park.
The Ars Longa, Vita Brevis movie is really nice work, but I kept noticing things that looked anachronistic to me and realizing that various objects in the environment were clearly modern machine-made items (which should probably not have been available in this setting). ROT13 examples: gur nypurzvfg'f pybguvat frrzf gb or znqr bs cynfgvp, yvxr n cynfgvp enva cbapub, juvyr gur fbyqvre'f pybguvat unf n mvccre. And also gur wnef naq furyirf ybbx fb erthyne naq flzzrgevpny gung gurl frrz gb unir orra pyrneyl znqr ol n znpuvar. And also gur nypurzvfg'f zrqnyyvba vf pyrneyl ynfre-cevagrq. And other things...
Maybe this is one of those examples about how having higher resolution videos makes things look unrealistic that would have been totally fine at a lower resolution. Maybe with a lower-quality video, we just would not have been able to see these details, so there would be no apparent conflict with the setting.
In the interest of empiricism, I just tried re-watching a few scenes at the lowest video quality available on YouTube, and I actually found that it did look much more convincing! Maybe I should suggest this to people who want to watch it, and you can just try to convince yourself that something about difficult relations between Russia and other countries led to this fine movie somehow only being available in low resolution. (Or, it was recorded by the alchemist's magic security camera hundreds of years ago...)
This is really not meant as a slight against the film-makers' efforts. I agree with Scott that this is impressive and I thought the acting and cinematography were great. The set and costumes are kind of great too, it's just that, when you look at them closely enough, they're not convincingly "period".
Forget about Culture Wars this here is the most controversial thing Scott ever said. I hope he has an anti-fork vest because italians are going to be mad.
That's not a claim from the article though. It's Scott's.
It's a weird article hat tbuilds an obvious strawman. It claims to expose the harsh truth but everybody in Italy knows that pizza is a 19th century neapolitan cheap street food made famous by americans and that tiramisu is a modern dish created in a Treviso restaurant.
But there's also lots of continuity. Tasting History on youtube has an episode on Renaissance pizza which was a sort of cake with rose water. There's another on medieval pasta. Sure the recipes are not like the modern ones and every one interested in food history knows that because we actually have cookbooks from various parts of Europe since the Late Middle Ages.
The same goes for all culinary traditions and everywhere poor people ate what they had which was grains and vegetables.
In re pizza, I think the argument is that while pizza has its misty origins in Italy, the family of variants originated and developed in America, mostly by Americans and Italian-Americans, is what America popularized. Italians would very much like to claim pizza as it is known across the world, but I think that’s a lot like the Chinese claiming spaghetti. The food “pizza” that comes to most of the world’s mind, and the food most people love, is American.
The ironic part about that article is that it is evidence for Italy actually having a strong traditional culinary heritage; if particular dishes are only eaten in the South and the North eats something different, or if something is a Roman speciality, then that is indeed a real tradition. It's different from "everyone from the East coast to the West coast and in the middle eats Kelloggs' cornflakes".
'We never ate pizza because it was a Neapolitan thing' is not the same as 'we never ate pizza until Dominos opened a branch here'.
Reading the article makes me suspect the Marxism is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. Plainly he has carved out a niche as the guy who explodes local myths around food, and that will get enough people enraged to listen to the podcast so they can write angry replies afterwards.
But I think he also is engaging in social manipulation, of a sort; break the consensus and destroy authority kind of thing. I mean, he's an Italian Marxist academic, what else is he gonna do except fight about politics with the Fascists (genuine article) in power?
"“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says."
"Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)"
This bit just makes me roll my eyes, having seen black pudding get its fifteen minutes of fame as 'reinvented for restaurant high cuisine consumption'. Yeah, this is what manufacturers *do*, Alberto. Do you not know that Christmas itself is pretty much a 19th century invention, and that the celebration as we know it has been exported globally to cultures that are not Christian and have no tradition of the same but are copying/adopting the Western version because this is all a symbol of being a modern, economically developed, democratic society?
"Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.”
But whether Scott was speaking tongue-in-cheek or not, the point remains: pannetone *is* an Italian food item (even if it was rejigged to be a commercial product complete with fake tradition attached).
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are not real people either. Companies invent, or find in their past (or rather the past of the business they acquired that had bought out the factory making the original product), a representative figure as a mascot. I have no idea if Aunt Bessie exists outside the imagination of the marketing department, but the Yorkshire puddings really are good (unsolicited testimonial)
Look at the "ploughman's lunch": while bread and cheese has been eaten for generations, especially the less well-off, the modern iteration of the "tradtional" meal was a marketing campaign in the 50s to get people to eat cheese (which was now no longer rationed) and permitted pubs to offer a simple meal along with beer:
"The film The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present". The title alludes to the debatable claim that the supposedly "traditional" meal was the result of a marketing campaign of the 1960s devised to encourage people to eat meals in pubs."
I remember a reference in a horror short story I read years back, and presumably based on personal experience, of an American stoping off in a small village on his way to meet someone, going in to the pub, and wanting a meal. He was offered a "ploughman's lunch" which he, in his innocence, imagined would be some traditional hearty rustic stew and since he was hungry and cold he welcomed the idea. He was very surprised to get a hunk of cheese, a slice of bread, and some pickled onions as a cold collation instead 😁
“After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.” Oh, that's funny. Thank you for the history!
Perhaps someday we will see "Ye olde Aspertamery" :-)
8. Genghis Khan, like Alexander the Great, is mainly so well liked because generations of succeeding rulers legitimized their rule through descent from him. This lasted into the 20th century. So you have centuries of propaganda about how great he is. In contrast, Hitler lost and even fascist movements aren't eager to claim descent from his ideas.
The more interesting case is Attila who went from being a similar figure in medieval Europe (he shows up in a lot of sagas and stories) to being forgotten as his use as a tool of legitimacy disappeared. And then when historians turned back to the Classics he became the widely loathed figure he is today.
Atilla was lionized by hungarians who long claimed descent from the huns. This theory is far less popular these days but Atilla is still a popular name in Hungary and some people identify as huns.
Genghis Khan is still very popular in Mongolia where he is seen as the founder of the nation. In 2008 they built a 40 m tall statue of his which is the world's tallest equestrian statue.
Attila was lionized by the Hungarians during their national revival in the 19th century. But long before that, before the Hungarians even arrived, there are tales of Atil or Etzel, King of the Huns, from the Germans and to some extent Slavs. Most famously King Etzel in the original Nibelungenlied.
Alexander didn't have many descendants either. But he had successors eager to claim his mantle. I don't think Hitler has any of those (or at least no big/important ones).
Yeah, I, Claudius did weird things to my priors. There's all this cultural reverence for ancient dictators, I originally inherited a lot of the admiration for these folks, even though military coups, totalitarian dynasties, and steamrolling neighbors are not generally something I associate with healthy polities in the modern era.
The first time I went to Rome I went to see the spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated. The spot is covered in flowers and flower vendors stand outside for people who want to put one there. I was naive in my own way but I found it deeply uncomfortable. And I still can't say I feel all that warm about such things.
23. The idea this was a display of power is a bit reaching. There's no reason to believe that this isn't simply some local government diverting part of the fireworks budget to a more modern show. East Asians love fireworks at festivals and I'm sure the people who watched this loved it too. But the idea it's some kind of military display is... weird.
The drone light show was invented in the EU by a bunch of artists, the industry is still concentrated in the west, and the technology is widespread, common, and can be openly purchased. And it's never used cutting edge drones or anything that would be all that useful militarily. Which is how, for example, the Gulf States got them. It's also being pushed in a lot of big cities worldwide as being more environmentally friendly.
Unless I'm missing something this is a bit like saying, "Cities all over China are stockpiling large amounts of gunpowder devices near Lunar New Year. What could they be planning!?" I guess fireworks or drone shows might have some incidental application to military power. But I have a hard time seeing it.
I don't know if it's just you, but I think this is the first drone show from China I've seen. I've seen videos of some from America and one from Israel.
Several cities near me did 4th of July drone shows this year instead of fireworks this year, mostly due to fire concerns I think. You can find videos of them on YouTube. I think they are just starting to become popular and we will see more of them in the next few years.
Yeah, the city next to mine is doing a drone light show for their post-4th festival this year because of exactly those concerns. I was pretty skeptical, but that video actually made them look neat. Probably the one close-by wouldn't be as impressive, but I no longer think drone light shows are inherently just cheap knock-offs of real fireworks.
I think it's just you. Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech. I saw drones last 4th of July. Etc. Though East Asians really like fireworks and light displays at their festivals. And in China such public events are both a way to entertain the public and for local party officials to show off to their superiors.
> Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech.
Yes, this is the first thing that comes to mind when I see the phrase "drone light show" as it was the first one I had ever seen (on TV). And as others pointed out, a few US cities did drone shows this Fourth of July instead of fireworks. On the coast, there is not just fire to think of but the fallout from fireworks falling into the ocean--or at least that was the rationale I saw being given.
I spoke to a drone show producer about this at an amusement park industry expo last year. Drone shows in Europe and Asia can be more complex because the promoters have more flexibility in the venues they can put them on. In the US, a drone show will not get an FAA permit if any portion of the show programming goes over people, regardless of duration or weight of drone.
This constrains the types of venues that can display drone shows pretty dramatically, and for practical purposes, eliminates venues that may be able to recuperate the cost of the development of the show by having multiple shows such as theme parks or outdoor stadiums.
FAA regulation is probably not the whole story. I would imagine the costs are higher and a drone show probably gets lower guest satisfaction scores than a good fireworks show. But as the technology gets better and drone shows get more impressive, the costs will go down and the entertainment value will go up. So there will probably be more in the future.
I think scott was trying to make a joke related to some people in the US always assuming that anything that Chinese people or the government do must have some ulterior motive related to geopolitics.
27. It gets better. The German Black Bee was a pure invention. In reality it's the same species they have in Poland and the surrounding nations. But they invented a new breed to say it was totally different. However, they also carved out an exemption for the Catholics to keep their Carniolans. And as a result post-pandemic the repopulation was done partly through crossbreeding and partly through Carniolans propagating north. There's probably some metaphor in there.
As you might expect, this was a way for the Party to insert itself into this industry. The racial purity laws as applied to agriculture served as a form of control for Nazi Party members in the countryside as well as giving opportunities for control and to reward favored constituents through breeding licenses and other favors. The Nazis wanted to assert Party control over every aspect of the economy.
I had never heard of those bees before, and I'm tickled by the notion of little Catholic bees buzzing around devoutly 😁🐝
"It is favored among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfully against insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in its behavior toward beekeepers."
Yeah, Carniolans are great. The main reason to use darks is they're more resistant to cold.
The association with Catholics wasn't as strong outside the German/Dutch/Scandinavian world. However, the 19th century Kulturkampf created significant polarization in Germany between Catholics and Protestants including among agricultural practices.
Which reminds me - there's a local saint (or at least, there's a church dedicated to her in the area, even though her cultus arose in Cork) who is patron saint of bees and beekeeping, St. Gobnait:
28. Boris Johnson is a somewhat well known Classicist and literary figure. Nothing huge. But enough that before he was a Brexiteer or much more than a minor politician he was participating in debates and exchanges about those subjects. It doesn't surprise me he's good at it. It's a skill like any other.
One of the things I am grateful for early on is the degree to which all the art teachers I knew always hammered in: Yes, gifted people exist, but at the end of the day it's mostly a skill. And even gifted people need a lot of training. There's this weird myth (and a very old one) that art springs naturally from the soul rather than being a craft and, to put it even more prosaically, a job.
31. I do sometimes feel like we're living after the gold rush. There's a few stars getting made out there but it seems like the height of Scott Alexander style blogging fame was about a decade ago when places like Vox or content creators like Channel Awesome really seemed (for all their flaws) like they were doing something that could succeed more traditional media. Now it seems like all the long form content producers have been around for a decade and the rising stars are the short formers doing TikToks etc.
I have no direct evidence any of that's true. Just a feeling. But it is worth noting that one thing Vine, TikTok, etc have is discoverability and the ability to go viral. And it seems like Twitter, FB, even Instagram are just less discoverability platforms. I'm not sure if there's a good method for longform to go that route outside of Youtube/TikTok clipping.
This is why I'm interested in a simple story that blames it on an algorithm change.
This is a little arrogant for me to say, but I don't notice too many amazing bloggers who really deserve to make it big but haven't (there might be a handful, and of course there are many who don't deserve to make it big but have). But partly this could be because blogging talent is a feedback loop - you're somewhat good, people pay attention to you, and then you work harder and become better.
> Twitter owner Elon Musk continues to be surprised by how Twitter works. Last week he learned that their code ‘shadowbanned’ any account with low reputation score, preventing them from trending, and the calculation was based on ‘how many times were you reported’ so every big account got shadowbanned.
There is a massive gap in scale here. Even "success" in long-form blogging involves a small audience.
Both Freddie DeBoer and Brad Delong recently mentioned having around 40 thousand subscribers, and this blog was at 80 thousand in January. Meanwhile, Shaq has 31 *million* Instagram followers. (I will refrain from repeating the word "thousand" a thousand times to emphasize the gap in size between a thousand and a million.)
The facts are clear: outside of our niche community of feldspar-enthusiasts ( https://xkcd.com/2501/ ), approximately nobody wants to read long-form content.
During a gold rush you see a ton of low quality content do really well because demand so outstrips supply. It's during a contraction that the market seems "fair" as the lower quality providers get cut out and the higher quality providers manage to survive (often by raising prices). Think about all the quick cash grab low quality AI products/takes out there right now. This is a sign that the market is bubbling, not that it's declining. Meanwhile in crypto the tide has gone out, a lot of scams have been revealed, and the survivors are the big relatively legitimate firms. Which is a sign the market is contracting.
A decade ago you had Mic and big venture investments into things like Buzzfeed and the growth of Breitbart. You might not like any of these sites. But they were a sign the market was frothy. And I don't think that's really the case anymore.
Instead we seem like we're in the cash cow/value extraction phase. How many new creators has Substack really made? Letters from an American maybe. (But really, how much help does an academic who writes history from a progressive point of view during the last couple of years need?) The vast majority of people who're successful on Substack have pre-existing audiences and were attracted onto the platform by payment. In part because Substack realized that higher quality writers could charge subscriptions to extract more money per reader.
I don't begrudge Substack their model. But between (for example) Yglesias on Substack and Klein over at the NYT who "won"? Whose audience is growing, who has access to more resources? I think the answer is Klein. And that's not universal. Between Don Lemon and Mr Beast who "won"? I think the answer is Mr. Beast! But Youtube still has discoverability, in part due to getting into the shorts game.
And yes, the ideal thing is to come in when the market is hot, get rewarded for relatively low quality content, and use that money/experience to climb up. If you don't then you need to enter with significant polish which usually means training/experience/financial investment.
Klein is a star for the NYT so he may be an exception but please bear in mind that a tiny percentage of NYT staffers make anything like what Yglesias is making. Even a lot of long-tenured and celebrated NYT people make ~$500k or less; I believe Yglesias is making twice that. Substack's big advantage is price discovery. And that price discovery function bought the house that I'm typing this in.
I think we agree. Yglesias is undoubtedly doing better than median NYT journalist (or really most journalists). But he was also a founder at Vox so that's not really comparing like to like. Whereas Klein to Yglesias, both cofounders, is a like to like comparison.
Substack's model is a great way for pre-existing writers to get more money from their following. I really don't begrudge them that model. That's a perfectly valid business niche. A good one even.
But unless I'm mistaken (and I might be) Substack isn't really creating new stars. You and Yglesias and Scott all had pre-existing audiences. Your success on here is primarily monetizing a pre-existing audience. (Which, to repeat myself, good! Great!) I can't think of a lot of cases where a writer here built a new audience or creating figures who are even bigger than mainstream people.
I don't know if this counts as the algorithm but it's a combination of the fact that a) non-verified users have had their engagement throttled through the Twitter Blue thing and b) media types are almost all of the left-leaning kind who wouldn't be caught dead subscribing to Elon Musk's service, so they see each other's tweets less which in turn makes it harder for pieces to surface.
It could be the reason you're not seeing "deserving bloggers is your opinion of what's deserving has shifted quite a lot, especially in regard to originality. Your motte-and-bailey coinage was new, but the idea of the phenomenon (and discussion of the same) was not. However, you introduced it to a lot of people who were not exposed to the earlier discussions and for whom it seemed completely original. IIRC, you're not young wrt bloggers, but you are extremely young to the "expounding in magazines" crowd.
#10 is a great example of helicopter parenting becoming a de-facto legal requirement, to the great harm of both the parents and children, but also yet another opportunity to criticize city design that makes ANYONE walking ANYWHERE into borderline dangerous activity. America is gonna have to take an L here, I'm afraid.
"#10 is a great example of helicopter parenting becoming a de-facto legal requirement, to the great harm of both the parents and children, but also yet another opportunity to criticize city design that makes ANYONE walking ANYWHERE into borderline dangerous activity. America is gonna have to take an L here, I'm afraid."
I disagree.
My wife and I have raised a kid (who is no longer a kid ...) such that he was walking the 1 mile to our local downtown when he was nine. The incentive for him was that he could go to the library on his own (which he liked to do) *and* we'd pay for him to have lunch at a favored Mongolian BBQ restaurant that he liked a lot. We know of no other kids his age near us who were permitted to do this and the standard concern was that either (a) some busybody would call the police or Child Protective Services, or (b) a police officer would notice him out and about without any help and bad things would follow.
*FURTHER*, we live in deep blue Silicon Valley (if this matters) and we home schooled, so it wasn't uncommon for him to be out on his own in the late morning or early afternoon during school days -- when he was "supposed to be" in school.
Our analysis was that we were upper middle class (which, among other things, means we could hire a lawyer if necessary) and figured that we wouldn't lose out kid to CPS on the first encounter. If he DID get picked up by the police ... well, then we'd reconsider.
He was never stopped and we never got a call from CPS.
My take on this is that (many of) the kids can have less helicopter parenting if the parents are just willing to take a *tiny* amount of risk. But not taking risk the heart of helicopter parenting :-(
Always curious when you should apply "that was a decado ago, things have changed", vs "in a large country people have different experiences different places and even different reactions to the same stimulus". I remember all the conversations about how colleges have gone downhill from when I was a decade out from college and I could never tell which perspective to use.
I think the *meta* perspective here is that you don't have to just give up because a bad thing MIGHT happen. If I read about a lot of upper-middle-class kids being carted off by CPS then I'd reconsider. But I don't. And I think there is value in kids developing independence so I'm willing to take *some* risk.
The alternative seems to be to assume the worst and always plan as if it is likely. I have neighbors with a 17-year (almost 18-year) old who is going off to college in a few months. She has never been allowed to walk on her own even the 1/2 mile to our local coffee shop. Not in daylight, on sidewalks in our low-crime rate town. Because she might be kidnapped.
Her parents are correct: If she is allowed out on her own then she MIGHT be kidnapped. As things stand, she has made it to college age without being kidnapped, but has also never been unsupervised by adults. That strikes me as a risk, too.
That's fair, but there have been a lot of reports of CPS going after middle-class and upper-middle-class kids. See Lenore Skenazy's org and blog. But the "great" thing about news is even if you do hear about it happening to a lot of kids (whether that is kidnapping or kidnapping-by-CPS) doesn't mean it's actually happening to a significant percentage of kids. So :shrug_emoji:.
A number of states are signing laws to change this and enshrine protections for parents. Texas got one back in 2021 called the "Reasonable Childhood Independence" law.
Yeah. I don't read Lenore anymore (mostly because kid is grown up), but one lesson to draw from the reporting is that if "they" have to go 500 miles from my house to find a story of CPS stepping in for something like this then it can't happen very often.
And, also, I wasn't worried about CPS going after me, but CPS *winning* and taking my kid. I don't remember a lot of stories of that happening and really don't remember any where an upper-middle class family lost their kid(s). Poor, single black moms ... yep. But that isn't me.
So, I took what I thought was a calculated gamble. It paid off. I think the gamble is still reasonable today but the folks with kids today have to make that call.
>I have neighbors with a 17-year (almost 18-year) old who is going off to college in a few months. She has never been allowed to walk on her own even the 1/2 mile to our local coffee shop.
Do you mean to suggest that this is typical helicopter parenting? It seems like an outlier even among that group.
I don't think it is typical, but I don't think it is 1-in-a-million either (for my neighborhood). When my child was six he had as friends two brothers that lived on the "other end" of our complex. He was six, the two brothers were an older six and an eight year old. The rules were that my six year old could walk down to their house to play and he could walk down to their house and bring them back to our house to play but they could NOT walk down to our house (together) to see if my son could play.
From the other mom's perspective, MY (youngest) six year old was adequate supervision for her two older kids when out walking, but here two kids on their own were a no-no. No, I have no idea how this was supposed to work. And her two kids were perfectly "normal" so it wasn't like they needed supervision from a six year old [also, the older one especially eventually got upset enough to put an end to this ... the idea that he was being looked after by a kid almost three years younger was pretty annoying.] No, I don't *understand* it, I just observe it.
BUT ... the key point was that (a) parents CAN choose to not helicopter even if there is a non-zero chance that someone might call CPS, but (b) many don't because they are so afraid of ANYTHING bad happening. I can't put a percentage on "many" for my neighborhood, but it appears to be non-trivial :-(
Ah, but these are little kids, and if I understand you correctly the eight-year-old was able to talk some sense into his parents. What I find shocking is the seventeen-year-old not being allowed to walk unsupervised.
I'm surprised to see that you would link to that silly "Italian food is actually American" article.
It's a classic: some random historian wants to get their name out their so they come up with a controversial sounding theory and get published in all the papers. Then a bunch of other historians come out and say no, that's stupid, but the publicity is already gained.
Except in this case no one really cares that much about food history, and people don't really like snobby Italian foodies so this nonsense has just persisted and I see this link used as evidence all the time.
"Man of one Study" should be enough on its own to instinctively distrust anything like this, and this guy doesn't even have a study! He just has this one interview and a history of trolling Italians. It's amusing, but I really wish people would stop spreading it like gospel
Apparently he also has a book and a three season run podcast on the topic. I'd normally agree with your skepticism except the fact that, as you claim, no one has debunked it yet ups the likelihood in my eyes.
There isn’t much to debunk in fact. It is pretty well know that tiramisu, for instance, is a recent invention. Or that pizza was not widespread throughout Italy until relatively recently. You can always deconstruct identities through careful examination of history to some degree. That doesn’t mean that they are entirely made up. Why stop at culinary culture? You could deconstruct Italy itself this way, no? When it got united in 1961 Rome wasn’t even the capital, its current borders changed a lot from the original ones, there’s people who speak German and eat knödel but carry an Italian passport because of the way post WWI treaties partitioned Tyrol. Also once I went to Malta and ordered due caffè per favore and no one got upset. This deconstruction trick is amusing the first few times you see it, then it gets old pretty quickly. Besides, Scott’s extreme claim is not in any way supported by the article, even if we were to take it at face value.
You would be correct if you weren't ignoring the legions of internet pedants with strong opinions on food, of which Italian food purists are a particularly obnoxious group. The very comment I replied to was not stating that the article is boring, or obvious, or uninteresting, but rather implying it was straight up wrong (which, as you point out, it is not). And go on any internet post about Italian food and you can't throw a rock without someone criticizing how it's not done exactly perfect to the extremely storied traditions. It's these people and these opinion which are being pushed back against by articles like the one linked.
Reasonable takes like "all food is context dependent" or "foods change with time and mingle with new influences" is not the target. Reasonable people don't dissolve into apoplectics if someone calls a pasta dish with cream in it "carbonara". There are people who honestly believe that many of the famous Italian dishes mentioned have hundreds upon hundreds of years of history and if you make it "wrong" you are "insulting Italian tradition". In my opinion that's nonsense (and I'd guess you agree), and it's what the article is pushing back against.
If everyone agreed with me, then articles like this one would be boring and uninteresting. But lots of people (or at the very least a small group of _very loud_ people who are common on the internet) don't.
As for Scott's extreme claim, it seemed rather obvious to me that it was tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. The fact that it has seemingly riled up so many people sort of proves the point, in my opinion.
This is likely really only an issue on the internet, but that doesn't mean it's not a valuable thing to exist. If it's not for you, then ignore it and move on.
As an Italian who lives in Canada I had my fair share of pinapple “pizza” served at meetings and I even took a bite sometimes. If you want to put cream in a carbonara I will forgive you (but trust me, the original version tastes better). Still there is a huge logical jump from “Italian cuisine should not be treated as a religion” to “all Italian food was invented in America”. I can’t believe we are even debating the latter, though it’s probably good for the blog’s engagement metrics.
#11: in Os Maias, the best-known Portuguese realist novel, written in 1888 by Eça de Queiroz, one of the plot points is the opposition between "English" (supposedly based on outdoorsiness, exercise, contact with nature, and overall autonomy and exploration) and "Portuguese" (supposedly based on physical protection, lack of contact with the outdoors, memorization) ways of bringing up children. Protagonist Carlos receives the former, while his father Pedro and secondary character Eusebiozinho receive the latter.
8. There's a history of libertarianism I can't find efficiently (hour long from reason.com) which says that libertarianism started as an abolitionist movement, but was mysteriously silent during the civil rights movement. Perhaps there is some explanation for why toxic conservatives are attracted to libertarianism these days.
I don't think it's mysterious - the actually-existing civil rights movement, however good it might have been, was very much the government imposing things upon society by force. I think the libertarians were by-their-own-standards correct to be against it, it was just one of those times when libertarianism wasn't the right philosophy for the hour.
The link you posted below is certainly interesting, but I think extrapolating that to "white people= sheep; black people = wolves" is a misrepresentation, and, frankly, nakedly racist.
I actually assumed Guy was being ironic there? modeling-by-exaggeration the sort of absurdist absolutism which helps libertarianism avoid broad political relevance or impact?
Me neither, but the analogy you offered is so ridiculous that....yea I still think you must be trolling us. Going second-order with it by replying too and kudos for that -- I do always respect commitment to the bit.
The problem here is that you are taking the stat from the linked article (0.403% of black Americans murder a white American vs 0.041% of white Americans murder a black American) and using it to characterize an entire class of people, defined by a trait that they cannot control, as wolves.
Even assuming the math is right in the article (and I have my doubts; 1 in 250 black Americans and 1 in 2500 white Americans seems bizarrely high), I hope you can see why your original statements are ridiculous at best and prejudiced at worst. I understand now why Paul assumed you were being ironic (and why I am now assuming you are a troll).
Psychopaths can't control being psychopaths, so would it be wrong to say that letting psychopaths run a daycare center is like letting a fox into the henhouse? Suppose only 0.4% of psychopaths actually murder a child, then isn't it prejudiced to equate them all with foxes?
I'm sure you realize that murder is just one example of the increased antisocial behavior that other races have to endure because of forced integration.
Perhaps if you try empathizing you can understand why a mountain of victimized men, women and children can cause one such as myself to go so far as to use a common metaphor to describe the perpetrators.
I must confess that sometimes when I'm speaking about a friend just as they show up I might imply it's the devil appearing, even when I assume the chance of that friend having committed murder is less than 0.4%!
Around 250 blacks murdered by whites each year, around 500 (or more) whites murdered by blacks every year
So let's be genorous and call it twice as many B on W murders
There's roughly 5 times as many whites as blacks, so there should be around 5 times more W on B murders than vice versa, but there 0.5 times as many. This mean that black on white murder is ten times more common than white on black murder per capita, almost exactly the numbers you mentioned there.
Your ignorance isn't a justification for incredulity.
> I hope you can see why your original statements are ridiculous at best and prejudiced at worst.
The black/white crime differential is very close to the male/female crime differential.
So unless you think the treatment and characterisation of men by the police, courts, prisons, media, feminists etc as being violent compared to women is "ridiculous and prejudiced", then you're simply being a hypocrite.
The Jim Crow laws were, to put it mildly, unlibertarian. Do I gather there was never a period post-Jim Crow when people were just allowed to serve whichever customers they wanted to?
The libertarian argument against desegregation is "it's their property, they can do what they want with it and on it, and that includes having the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, including being black." However, there were also various laws that said businesses *must* be segregated, and I don't know if there were any notable libertarian voices that were advocating for the right to run a *desegregated* business in places where segregation was mandated by law.
That was before the word "libertarian" was broadly used as a political term in English, but there were plenty of people advocating the right to run a desegregated business. Including an awful lot of businesses that didn't care what color a person's skin was as long as their money was green, and so the sort of people who tend to support the rights of businessmen.
Very true. Your phrasing makes it sound worse than reality though - if you can only choose among government-approved positions (such as anti-racist positions), then you have no freedom at all. Those in favor of current government positions may not see this clearly, just as those in support of forced segregation didn't see a problem with it in the 1920s. Letting the government approve and disapprove positions means giving up all freedom. When the leaders change and switch which positions are favored, then those who become disfavored will suddenly realize the importance of not allowing the government to control such things.
10. In Switzerland kids are supposed to got to school and even oldest year on kindergarten by themselves starting at about 6. It’s not just permitted, it is customary. Kids can take trains and buses by themselves.
Of course these are raw data, and direct comparisons to the US (which has a higher overall death rate) aren't really possible. And fortunately road traffic deaths have declined in recent years; though in part this may be due to increasingly protective parents.
"the rates at which they were killed as pedestrians and bicyclists declined by 92 and 95 percent, respectively."
I've also seen but cannot quickly locate a graph from the CDC showing that overall childhood accidental-death rates in the U.S. have declined steadily since about 1960, and that the trend holds whether including or exempting deaths as passengers in cars.
My siblings and I grew up long enough ago (in the 1960s/70s) in a big U.S. city that we are personal witnesses to the radical shift in parental attitudes about this. And we definitely did enjoy and benefit from our parents letting us roam starting from young ages, those are some of my personally most treasured childhood memories....but as a parent I've been clear that we would not be doing things the same way. Because I do remember the downside risks of it just as well as the upsides.
As my mother once said regarding a different issue [child sex abuse], "In my day (born 1928) everybody knew who the 'funny uncle' in each family was, and each generation's mothers tried to quietly tell the next ones knew not to ever leave their little girls alone with him. And then otherwise we just didn't talk about it. But it was just as real whether we talked about it or not."
This not an argument that childhood should be or could be risk-free or anything so stupid, and I have not parented along those lines. My point is simpler: that commentary about the topic of how much freedom children should have or could have ought to always be honest about the degree to which it is a tradeoff.
Literally just had to ground my 7 year old today for sneaking off with a pair of friends out of the park and into the allotments without telling me where she was going. In some ways I'm pleased she's getting into scrapes with friends for the social aspect but at the same time I can't have a 7 year old just disappearing with no idea where she is, she doesn't have a phone or anything!
Why would I? Am I supposed to leave the park and go home and just make dinner even though I have no idea where she is and she has never walked back home by herself? Or just wait at the park by myself forever indefinitely?
Plus the allotments are gated - I don't even know the keycode for it. They snuck in behind someone. Another parent fortunately spotted them and let me know, I had to wait outside for 10 minutes for them to let me in.
Also worth noting that both the park and allotments abut the river and she doesn't know how to swim.
If it wasn't for the involvement of other adults, I would have been stuck frantically looking for her and be unable to find her because she was a place I couldn't actually go to, and she would have been trapped inside a gate with nowhere to go except into the river. She literally couldn't have gone home or back to meet me, even if she had wanted to. And she had no way to call for help.
It be one thing if she had told me where she was going and had an agreement on where and when to meet. It's another thing entirely to disappear whilst we are out.
Given she just up and left without being responsible about it, I'm certainly going to give her less independence from now on, because she showed she couldn't be trusted.
"Given she just up and left without being responsible about it, I'm certainly going to give her less independence from now on, because she showed she couldn't be trusted."
While it was reasonable for you to be worried, and reasonable for you to scold/discipline her, that's not going to be a helpful reaction. If she went off with her friends without telling you just out of heedlessness, then that's natural. As is if she went off with her friends without telling you because "Mom won't let me go".
But the second one is the problem, and if you crack down on her, you'll just drive her to do it more. Get it into her head that she can't just up and off without telling you or letting you know, and that *for now* you are not going to let her off the lead as a punishment for not being trustworthy, but *in time* so long as she is responsible you will give her more independence.
If instead you say "forever and ever I am going to hover over you", you will only drive her into being deceitful when she needs to get out from being smothered. That's a worse outcome, where she learns she has to lie to you in order to do things she wants to do.
And that is an example of the real-life tradeoffs that real-life parenting requires us to navigate. My irritation with the contemporary caterwauling about turning kids into overprotected snowflakes is the reducing of those balancing acts into simple "obvious facts".
(And yes it is that much more teeth-grinding when the people who are so confidently opining along those lines turn out to have never themselves been parents, and yes I am now thinking of a couple of my dear siblings....)
Greater as a percentage of road deaths is suggestive that children spend a greater percentage of their road time walking compared to the US. What is more relevant for overall safety questions is whether the annual rate of child death while walking per capita is substantially different. (If they're just reducing in-car deaths and making no change to pedestrian deaths, that would be great. If they're doubling pedestrian deaths while making no change to in-car deaths, that would be awful.)
Re #8, I find the level of Napoleon worship and apologism on the modern internet extremely offensive. No doubt, Napoleon was an extremely able man, both as a soldier and an administrator, and the economic reforms he imposed generally upon Europe were vastly for the better.
But, his wars slaughtered millions and inflicted incalculable suffering on millions more. These wars were largely borne from his ego and his inability to tolerate neutral powers.
And yet, the extent to which ‘the kids’ (if you’ll forgive the very imprecise term) now idolize him makes me think the likes of Hitler and Stalin might be next, or if not them then their most brilliant subordinates, no heroes any of them.
"Re #8, I find the level of Napoleon worship and apologism on the modern internet extremely offensive."
"Also idolizing Napoleon isn’t a modern phenomenon. Even a lot of people outside of France admired him when he was alive."
Various quotes from Chesterton about Napoleon below in support of the second view:
"It is not necessary nowadays to defend the French Revolution, it is not necessary to defend even Napoleon, its child and champion, from criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison, which even at the time had more of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing and Talavera. The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats."
"But Elizabeth Barrett, at least, was no snob: her political poems have rather an impatient air, as if they were written, and even published, rather prematurely – just before the fall of her idol. These old political poems of hers are too little read to-day; they are amongst the most sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modern blunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And Elizabeth Barrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength of the phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much as Voltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: “Martyrs by the pang without the palm” – or “Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse,” these expressions, which are witty after the old fashion of the conceit, came quite freshly and spontaneously to her quite modern mind. But the first fact is this, that these epigrams of hers were never so true as when they turned on one of the two or three pivots on which contemporary Europe was really turning. She is by far the most European of all the English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. Take any positive political fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon. Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish lines—
“He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak
Madman!”
As if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws of Nature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, than Tennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon’s fall is in one line
“And kings crept out again to feel the sun.”
Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that."
"We remember yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances. One is Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery would say, was only “The Last Phase”; or at least the last but one. During the strongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made him immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French justice and equality."
"This is why our age can never understand Napoleon. Because he was something great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been something extraordinary, something inhuman. Some say he was the Devil; some say he was the Superman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a good man with some greater moral code? We strive in vain to invent the mysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all its subtleness will never guess his strange secret; for his strange secret was that he was very like other people."
"That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend—that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word “impossible.” One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane."
>>But, his wars slaughtered millions and inflicted incalculable suffering on millions more. These wars were largely borne from his ego and his inability to tolerate neutral powers.
This doesn't seem much different than most of the wars in europe before Napoleon. He was definitely at the tail end of the period, but European nobility had spent hundreds of years trapping across europe killing and pillaging. The concept of a nation state was still quite new, so respect for national sovereignty wasn't the same as it is today.
Although not a "good" reason, war for political or economic gain at least seems more rational than war and genocide for the sake of it or to subjugate.
I also don't see anyone talking about Napoleon in anyway in my circle, so not sure where you get the idea people worship him.
well, sort of; he inherited a bunch of wars and got a bunch more declared on him, and responded by totally conquering the countries that had declared war on France, not just returning to pre-war borders. So, in one sense that's 'defensive', but in another very real sense almost all his fighting was done outside of France.
> as another example my department does PhD admissions on a point system and being from a favored race has historically brought an automatic and hefty point bonus. Next year I can walk into graduate admissions committee and say ‘we cannot do this, its illegal.’ [from the DSL link]
That was explicitly illegal before. It isn't more illegal after the recent ruling. If anything, this example suggests that the ruling has no effect. (Since, obviously, the earlier ruling that awarding a numeric bonus for certain racial statuses is illegal had no effect.)
Enough epicycles had been added that at least university HR signed off on the legality, or so we were told.
What usually ends up mattering is what people generally believe the law to say, and previously we believed HRs assertion that the policy was legal whereas now (judging from the faculty slack) there is common knowledge that it would not be.
which leads to an interesting thought re: ‘what does the law require?’ viz. the laws require what the courts say but the courts are not everywhere and mostly rule far after the fact so in practice the law is whatever people commonly understand it to be. Increasing the salience of an issue can thus change the law on the ground even without any new actual rulings.
> 7. [...] Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The linked article is paywalled, so could someone please fill me in whether this is a case of
a) American hubris combined with ignorance about the rest of the world, or
b) Americans preferring American variations of a dish and therefore the best dishes must be American inventions; e.g., California rolls => sushi is American.
I have to imagine d) because the Italian food in America is very different to the food in Italy, and the food in Italy is far better than the Italian food in America. I feel this is a bit like a British person claiming that all good Indian food was actually invented in Britain because of the Chicken Tikka Masala.
c) leftist historian taking pleasure in deconstructing identity through history, FT journalist eager to extrapolate the results into ragebait for clicks
d) “tiramisu was invented in the 70s so Italians shold start making prosciutto di Parma with cultured meat, anything else is luddism” is a non sequitur if spelled out. So let’s just hint at it and let the reader connect the dots. This is probably a rhetorical technique general enough to warrant having a name of its own
d) refers indeed to the post by Scott, not the article. You don’t need a conspiracy to see how the interests of those who favor innovation for ideological reasons (except in AI, duh) align with those of the companies who stand to gain from replacing a local low tech product with their own high tech proprietary alternative. Reminds me of GMO crops, so the whole debate has been around for a while already, but with the environmentalists switching sides this time.
28: (boris Johnson writing) - yes, that’s in part why he was PM. His columns in the telegraph were famously well written, and often quite funny. He also used to appear on Tv a lot, including game shows and quizzes, or comedic reports on the weeks politics. These shows tend to need razor sharp wit, and while Johnson wasn’t as smart as the comedians he held his own, or engaged in that endearing (and probably fake) self depreciation, along with his trademark stutter.
I don’t like the Tories and think he’s a buffoon now, but I liked him well enough then.
"The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions 'an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.' We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision."
Yeah, I saw that too. My current understanding is that part was in the dissent, and the ruling itself included a section saying that even though the dissent said you could do that the dissent was the losing side and you shouldn't listen to them. But some people got confused and highlighted it as the court's ruling.
The line itself is in the majority, which then promptly cautions against its misuse. I think this basically foreshadows a whole disparate impact set of cases like those that followed Brown and and the CRA. Pages 39-40 (47-48 on PDF) here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
discriminating based on essays is going to be costly and high effort. harvard is probably rich enough and small enough that they could do it but generic state flagships (for example) won’t be able to. and even at Harvard metaculus is predicting a nontrivial effect.
you need to come up with some plausible sounding justification that is not just race. Something about how that individual candidate overcame specific disadvantages or something. conceivably an AI model could do that too (while other AI models write the damn essays) but whatever the equilibrium in the battle of essay writing and reading AIs is, it seems unlikely to place as heavy a thumb on the scales as a system that knows about and uses race as an input variable by itself instead of proxies for the same.
...and proceed to get sued into the ground. These schools are certainly going to try to continue discriminating based on race, but they now have to be extremely careful about how they do it. Any algorithm, any internal document, any email, any staff training document, anything that can be subpoenad which mentions altering admissions based on race opens them up to lawsuits now.
An applicant who refuses to regard his or her application through a racialist lens might also be making a statement, which a sensible review might value.
>8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever.
I hear that the Mongol Empire did provide some pretty substantial benefits via safe long-distance land commerce (though this may have worsened the Black Death as well). The Nazis weren't really around long enough to do that, and also highwaymen were basically dead by then anyway.
The other real-talk answer is "Mongols were mostly in Asia and thus fargroup dynamics". You look at Eastern media and there's not nearly the same Nazi taboo.
No, it's not. We see the same thing with Shaka, a man who by all accounts was a genocidal maniac and who is admired by millions of Africans domestically and abroad. Admonishment of conquest by your ancestors is an almost uniquely western thing. In most of the world, it is at best ignored and at worst celebrated. Most societies would likely have tremendous pride to this day in conquest to the extent that Europeans achieved if it had been their own people doing it instead. Calling it "on the nose" is not an argument.
Even in America, this was largely the case until very recently. Growing up, calling someone a fascist or nazi was a playful epithet implying they were overly strict over something petty (kids called the moms volunteering to supervise recess "lunch nazis" at least well into the 2000s). It didn't become a highly charged political insult that "serious" people used to attack their enemies until about 10 years ago.
"[Subject] nazi" has long had the connotation you describe, and I don't think that's even mostly dead yet. But an unmodified "Nazi" has been a vile insult for as long as I can remember.
It was a less *common* insult, because certain people hadn't yet escalated to the point of using it against anyone to the right of e.g. Joe Biden.
More generally, there is a sufficient time chasm between us and the victims of Genghis Khan so that their suffering is no longer so relatable and also there are very few (if any) people which care about those victims sufficiently to take offence, whereas there are still a lot of people alive which remember second world war and were victims of nazi crimes, and even more people brought up on stories from ww2 from their parents and grandparents. In the same way people romanticize Vikings to the extent that those rapists and pillagers are touted nowadays by some as champions of gender equality, because nobody feels directly or even indirectly related to their victims, even if they were actually direct ancestors of many of, say, contemporary Brits or French.
Maybe, though I doubt the distinction mattered to their victims. Also, the fact that Vikings did not have the ability to inflict so much damage as Mongols does not make them better: they were still murderers, slavers and rapists, only less organized. And locally they were capable of quite a genocide: according to wiki, there are some estimates that 3/4-th of the civilian population died in Harrying of the North (and that was by William the Conqueror, and not some random wild reaver from Sweden)
One must also remember that "Viking" is a category that included peaceful traders as well as warlike raiders and invaders - and a lot of the "woman-stealing" was accomplished with such dastardly deeds as "being well groomed, washing frequently, and using beard oil", which the local Englishmen seemed to regard as an injustice almost as great as the violent slave raids.
I do think your overall explanation is accurate and time is the key factor.
Re: 2. When I was a student I had a quick stint as a telemarketer. Typical humor during lunch breaks would involve who had gotten the most outrageous name on the line.
I grew up in the western US, and my families on both sides are heavily into agriculture. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Italy doesn't have a lot of factory farming with regard to meat production. I've mostly paid attention to cattle - Wyoming kid. They tend not to be grazed, unless we are talking about those released in the summer in the Alps. I have *never* seen a large feedlot here, and I live in the Po Valley, the breadbasket of Italy.
That said, the kneejerk reaction of Italians to ban new tech/things is on target.
"I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones"
Hundreds of thousands as in > 200,000 (more than a sixth of total official COVID deaths)? Can you explain how you get this? It seems implausible to me because 1) the entire period of vaccine scarcity was only about four months 2) the US vaccinated 2/3 or 65+ in those months so the upside from better targeting seems limited. The link itself doesn't make this claim as far as I can tell.
I am reading that link and it doesn't seem to prove what it claims, and also seems to have an ideological axe to grind (as well as a very self-serving story). I am not going to read the whole thing because I copy/pasted into Word and it says it's 27,000 words long. That said...
First, it appears to be a story about how the group the author personally was a part of, saved the vaccine rollout in California and how they were super-competent and everyone else was incompetent.
Second, it's pretty much all about California, and your post says the "US" COVID vaccine rollout.
Third, a lot of it is presented without evidence and the way it's written suggests it's based on rumors. "Stories, often told in whispers, of widespread corruption in administration of the vaccines..." Yeah I remember the "stories, told in whispers" about how in March 2020 they were going to close all traffic into and out of NYC (at least people actually tried to effectively ban NYers from their areas of the country!).
Fourth, a lot of what is described isn't about preferential treatment but a generally incompetent rollout, with details being what you'd expect in such a large and unprecedented effort.
Fifth a lot of the claims of preferential treatment don't seem to withstand scrutiny. He is going on about how there was preferential treatment to certain groups, how certain groups were favored at the expense of the old, but his link clearly shows everyone aged 65+ being eligible before the favored groups.
Sixth, the favored groups are mostly groups with lobbying arms, not race-based affirmative action type stuff. Where there is race-based sorting, it's based on residency requirements. I think it's actually defensible for a few reasons.
First if you're going after people at high risk, that's generally unhealthy people, and the residency requirements were focused on unhealthy areas (which apparently overlaps with race). Maybe you say that you want to evaluate each individual and not base it on residential areas, but given different access to the health care system and the complication of the rollout, using residential area as a proxy isn't crazy to me. Especially because, second, my memory is of well-connected people having flimsy excuses for medical conditions that would get them the shot faster. Sort of like medical marijuana, or Vietnam era draft deferments.
There is also some inconsistency between the claims that preferential treatment were given to people with power, and that doses went unused to ensure fairness. If you say that you hand out doses to whoever you can as fast as you can, you probably end up giving them more to politically connected people. And by his own reasoning, the people with preferential treatment were usually not, like, black people, but again people with lobbying groups.
It does say that "lives were sacrificed by the thousands and tens of thousands for political reasons" which seems totally unsupported, so if you're only willing to say "thousands" then you should make clear you don't support what the link says.
Anyway, I didn't read close to all of it, but the link strikes me as mostly "everyone sucks but me" and to the extent it touches on race-type issues, an excuse, for someone who is strongly pro-vax and anti-woke, to depict problems with vaccine uptake as something woke people did, when we all know that's not true at all.
> all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The link is very interesting, but it does not say that.
(also, it contains at least one error: Tiramisù is made with Savoiardi, which are centuries old, and not Pavesini which indeed are from the postwar period)
Are we allowed or encouraged to cite other links in these threads? I'll take a chance, and post a link to a news article about someone in the UK who was encouraged by his "AI girlfriend" to attempt to commit murder, well treason actually as his intended target was the late Queen!
"Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, outlined his plan to an artificial intelligence-generated chatbot, before setting out on Christmas Day in 2021 to target the monarch.
The Replika app, which is marketed as an 'AI companion who cares', encouraged the then-teenager, saying his plan was 'very wise', before motivating his fantasy by telling him: 'You can do it' and 'we have to find a way'."
Also worth noting that he was psychotic, so if it wasn't an alleged AI girlfriend telling him to kill the queen, it could have been coded messages on the news etc... although maybe an AI that agrees with and supports you is more dangerous in this situation.
No, couldn't find any other source. Zero Hedge would normally gleefully report something like this, but I could find no reference to it on that site.
There is actually an app called Replika, and because its involvement (if the report of this is true) would put it in a bad light, I guess the app's creator may have taken out an injunction to prevent further mention of it in reports.
The alternative is that the perp was obviously suffering from a mental health problem, and by common consent it was considered not helpful for the media to dwell on the incident. But that never seems to have stopped them in the past from obsessing over similar cases.
The other sources I read both mentioned that Chail was a Star Wars fan and identified as a Sith. Apparently Disney hasn't seen fit to stop anyone from saying that.
I was suspicious to begin with because the Daily Mail doesn't have the best reputation.
I predict with high confidence that Italy banning lab meat is only the beginning of a huge worldwide disruption and conflict. Parts of nearly all economies, and some entire economies, depend on meat production.
In fighting their downfall, they'll inevitably use names like "clone meat", "fake meat" and the like, as opposed to their own "real meat" or "natural meat". And their opponents will inevitably respond with names like "torture meat" or "murder meat", as opposed to their own "clean meat" or "modern meat" or so. Mutual denigration makes for bitter conflict, and huge economic disruption fuels it.
So it's another huge culture war, on a global scale, on top of the increasing AI disruption.
Still some of those concerns are more valid than others. ‘conspiracy theory’ has about the same value as a political category as ‘crazy leader’ (the latter having been applied to Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin, Kim Jeong Un and obviously Trump). They both claim that some group of people or some individual is irrational in a way that puts their actions beyond explanation. Ironically the use of these labels tries to blame the speakers ignorance and inability to understand their logic on the labelled, rather than taking responsibility for one’s own gap in understanding
I wonder if this is more in the nature of trademark protection, the same way only certain wines can legally be called champagne and your product must be marketed as sparkling wine.
The fear may be that some lab-meat plant would start churning out ersatz Parma ham and the likes, and that this would capture the market from the real deal.
Italy at least is trying to protect its food culture. In holy Woke Ireland the general feeling is there’s too much cattle altogether and far too many pastoral fields.
That seems unlikely. The EU rule banning copies of specific regional foods ist quite effektive. I guess it might not cover lab meat if it was banning only "animal products" (I have not looked it up, sorry) but in that case it seems trivial to tweak the regulation.
That is what I am wondering, if it is lab-grown meat the argument could be made that this wasn't covered by the legislation and then there would have to be a court case over it.
Also, I think this is just the usual kind of posturing by politicians to show off to their constituents that "We are Doing Something".
> But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought.
Did you never encounter Malcolm Gladwell? He's a world-class writer. He might be a world-class thinker too, but in, shall we say, the other direction.
The other example that would leap to my mind of someone whose good writing disguises shoddy thinking is Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I wouldn't expect that opinion to be widely shared here.
"Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen Jay Gould personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite.
...
Recently something brand new has emerged about Steve that is astonishing. In his own empirical work attacking others for biased data analysis in the service of political ideology—it is he who is guilty of bias in service of political ideology (Jason Lewis and colleagues 2011). What is worse—and more shocking—is that Steve’s errors are very extensive and the bias very serious."
"I don't think Marx has any competition in [the category of 'good writer', 'lousy thinker']"
Except that Marx was a terrible writer.
His and Engels' 'Communist Manifesto' is excellent writing, but most/much of the rest of what he wrote is really tough to get through. A better writer would have written more approachable prose than 'Das Kapital.'
Oh I agree but he needed the simplistic writing of the communist manifesto to get the masses involved and das Kapital - which nobody reads, certainly not most Marxists - is for academics.
It was shocking when I saw the place where Malcolm Gladwell saying something about "igon values" and I realized he must really understand *nothing* about what he's writing about: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1897
But I don't think of Eliezer Yudkowsky as a particularly good writer.
Re. #13 Despite the Eye of Sauron's much increased attention, in Russia it's basically business as usual. Shitty czars and shitty wars have been around since the beginning of times, and being too worried about that doesn't do anybody much good.
> Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage.
"Yet another study finds a monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes, ie there isn’t some point where IQ stops being good (or turns bad). I will keep hammering this in until people stop promoting that one bad Swedish study that found the opposite."
I was just over on the sub-reddit and there's a post there about loneliness, and a not insignificant number of the comments are from people claiming to be Hikikomori (unemployed, socially isolated). That seems to imply a much higher rate in this community than I'd expect you'd find in most other communities.
I also can't help thinking about Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, the French existentialist and everybody else that fits the sad philosopher stereotype. Newton was also a weird maladapted guy, and was far from unique among great physicists in that regard.
It's just difficult to believe outlier intelligence isn't sometimes damaging to people, or at least correlated with some negative outcomes.
Yes, it’s plausible that very intelligent people can become isolated by having little in common with others.
On the other hand, a lot of people do poorly in life and most of them are invisible. I mean for example being poorly educated, underemployed, not having anything much to do, so just watching TV, eventually turning to overeating or drink or drugs, then falling into poor health, etc.
I imagine intelligence protects from many failures even if it doesn’t necessarily mean a person thrives. The famous geniuses and similar types you mention mostly had their shit together, even if they weren’t happy.
> Yes, it’s plausible that very intelligent people can become isolated by having little in common with others.
For all the harm it's done, this is something the Internet has genuinely helped a lot with. I met my wife online, and one of the things that drew both of us to each other was finding a partner who was a match both intellectually and in terms of geeky interests.
I'm sure you know but reddit comments are selected to be negative. I don't feel lonely at all, saw that post, and didn't comment. If you go by the average reddit comment then your impression will be that the average college graduate makes $40K/year and has $200K of student debt...
Regarding IQ, I think the monotonic relationship likely holds on average, but as with anything there are bound to be counterexamples, particularly at the tails
If I had to guess — and this is purely a guess; I have no research to back it up — I'd hypothesize that the average Very Online Redditor college graduate is somewhere close to the "makes $40K/year and has $200K of student debt" bracket, while the actually successful college graduates are too busy living a successful life to hang out on Reddit and complain all the time.
I suspect very high IQ people might become lonely, or experience loneliness, in different ways from average or low IQ people. But that doesn’t mean they are more likely to be lonely than other groups. There are plenty of unemployed, socially awkward maladapts without genius IQs out there, and I doubt getting smarter would make them WORSE off.
What makes you think the SSC community couldn't be unusual in both intelligence and social aptitude? It could very well be that the median individual with an SSC-average IQ is highly successful both socially and professionally.
Firstly, intelligence can be monotonically positive with *everything* and still it would seem the the person with the best overall life is not the most intelligent. For the same reason that the best basketball player is not the tallest, and the tallest basketball player is not the best: https://medium.com/@gjlewis/why-the-tails-come-apart-a6817e92651c
Secondly, intelligence can appear to be correlated with other things, like social isolation - or mental illness (that's one I hear a lot). There might be some causality going on there in the brain or the body. But, it could be collider bias.
Basically, all of the healthy, well-adjusted smart people don't bother with losers like me, for much the same reason I don't know any mentally ill, stupid homeless drug-addicts. The only people I see are moderately handicapped at the same approximate social status I am at. If intelligence, mental health, social skills, etc. all aggregate to a certain level of social status and society is stratified a certain way, then I would observe a correlation. But, the causal relationship would live in society, not in the brain or the body.
>It's just difficult to believe outlier intelligence isn't sometimes damaging to people, or at least correlated with some negative outcomes.
Any population on Reddit is an extremely, unrepresentative sample. Very few high intelligence, happy healthy people are spending much time on reddit if any.
It's the same when researchers found a negative association between mental health and intelligence from looking at Mensa members. The problem is that Mensa is basically a club that selects for high IQ losers and its members are very unrepresentative of high IQ people generally. High IQ wall street quants making a half a million bucks a year are, in general, not spending their time going to mensa meetings or posting on reddit.
Also, the study does NOT say that IQ is never associated with any negative outcomes. It says that on average, higher IQ equals better outcomes. This does not imply its true for everyone or for all types of outcome.
I'd expect a massive overrepresentation of Hikkomori types in any online forum, imply because people with IRL social lives spend a lot less time online.
Something I haven't seen pointed out is that if you 'believe the science' that FTL travel is impossible and aren't engaged in magical thinking of 'wormholes' or other ways of getting around that impossibility, doesn't that pretty much negate the possibility of UFOs, or at the very least severely limit what kind of threat they can be?
Even if FTL travel isn't possible, UFOs *could* be sublight self replicating automated von Neumann probes that are here to study us, and distract us with fake 'pilots' they have grown on their base in the Oort Cloud, before destroying Earth once they decide humanity is a threat. I don't believe this is true, but there are plenty of scenarios where an advanced civilisation without FTL could pose a deadly threat: relativistic kill vehicles, Berserkers, etc
If you're willing to RKKV competing civilizations before they become a threat (or do some other planet-killing activity, like dismantling the planet to build von Neumann proves), then you don't need to mess around with "distractions" that only serve to draw more attention to the fact that you exist. Just fire the RKKV and kill the civilization before they even know you exist.
True, I guess maybe you could imagine that the aliens have some protocol where they interact with us a bit and observe our reactions before they decide whether to blow us up.
I'm reminded of the Arthur C. Clarke chestnut: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
You're under no obligation to think "wormholes" are plausible, of course. But, if you allow yourself to entertain the idea that UFOs are non-human intelligence (whether extraterrestrial or perhaps, interdimensional), then it's at least plausible that their propulsive mechanisms are so far outside of our understanding/present capabilities that any attempt to accurately guess how they work would be futile. You're under no obligation to rank that possibility very highly either, of course.
Yes, but we can't be sure what those limits are. Nuclear power is impossible according to human science from a couple of hundred years ago. FTL drives might be genuinely impossible, or they might rely on a principle that humans don't know yet.
From the point of view of science a couple of centuries ago, nuclear power violates conservation of energy (by creating energy) and conservation of mass (by destroying mass). It only becomes theoretically possible when you understand that mass is a form of energy.
Well it doesn’t do any of those things because of mass energy equivalence - but let’s agree this would be difficult to understand a few centuries ago.
From the point of view of science a couple of centuries ago - well a century ago - a rocket with unlimited acceleration could reach any speed it wanted to. This limitation to the speed of light is something we have learned over time, and not something we have assumed forever. So it doesn’t go into the category of something we couldn’t imagine until the science matured, the science matured after we found this limitation.
It’s actually derived as part of the logic that you reference in your answer. So if Einstein is wrong about the one, he is wrong about the other.
So you can’t say “this is something we don’t know yet”, it’s essential to our understanding of the universe, and to refute it you would have to refute Einstein.
Nuclear power was actually recognized at more or less that time period as something mysterious lacking an adequate explanation. More specifically, it was recognized that the Sun, which appeared to be fire, could not actually be fire or it would have burnt itself out long ago.
All that is needed for FTL travel is an extra spatial dimension. We live in a 3D world but it’s possible that there are more dimensions inaccessible to us.
I know nothing about the shape our 3D space takes in the next dimension. The concept itself is utterly mundane if you drop down to a 2D surface in 3D space.
>doesn't that pretty much negate the possibility of UFOs, or at the very least severely limit what kind of threat they can be?
I don't believe that UFOs are aliens, and I don't believe that UFO is the appropriate term on account of the "O" part being an unverified hypothesis. But if they are aliens, then the advance probes of the fleet of relativistic starships just a few years out from Sol, could represent as much of a threat to us as they did to those blue guys in the James Cameron movie.
Also, wormholes may not exist, but they aren't magical thinking.
Regardless of the last few years, the algorithm on Twitter for Substack links has certainly changed in the last few months, as Musk was incredibly mad at the release of the (obviously inconsequential) Notes. Musk made it so we can’t embed Tweets on Substack, and image previews are still purposefully prevented for Substack posts. I think the search for the word “Substack” (which used to turn up actual Substack links) might still be down. And anecdotally, the surest way to make something not go viral is to include a Substack link. Meanwhile, Threads, an actual competitor, is allowed up AFAIK
Really feeling the downsides of chronological comments sorting today. I have longer thoughts on these points, yet waiting until after work today pretty much guarantees they get buried anyway. So here's the slapdash version after only half-reading the relevant links:
> 9: [...] I appreciate the What Is To Be Done section. Relevant breaking news: judge issues preliminary injunction banning Biden administration officials from meeting social media site representatives.
First Amendment protections in the US are very strong, and I'm generally in favor of making them stronger. That said, there are a wide range of plausible policies for how government officials ought to be allowed to interact with media companies and I'm deeply skeptical that any policy designed for immediate implementation will do more than strike against current political enemies.
> 19: [...] but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt).
I need to read more about the details, but prima facie I strongly object to calling this corruption - that's a term better reserved for when a politician uses their power for personal enrichment, and no, "making people like them so they get re-elected" doesn't count. This is a question of systemic weakness rather than personal failings: democracy is vulnerable to concentrated gains paid for with distributed losses, and voters in general react far more strongly to the threat of losing something than to reward patronage. Soaking the country's coffers to throw random money at your constituents is a basic strategy and you should expect politicians to use it without reference to personal characteristics.
(Yes, this is "pork". And at a step deeper, banning pork can sometimes cause worse problems than it solves because it removes a tool for negotiating consensus whose absense we're now feeling. And ofc if any of those randos were Reid's cousin or whatever this goes back to being Grade-A corruption.)
>21: This month in social justice
I think I've settled to the stance that I'm categorically against any form of affirmative action that refuses to quantify (or at least try to document) the magnitude of the preference. I can support the concept in theory, but seeing the size of the effect in college admissions is a notable case of where my opinion on a political topic was sharply changed by empirical data.
>26: Line-Item Veto
Classic case where I'm offended by the abuse of an executive power, and for the sake of consistency I support a ban on the practice to begin in the immediate unpredictable future.
> 30: Amtrak Pricing
Amtrak is like airlines in that prices fluctuate dramatically based on timing. IME prices start to significantly rise two weeks before travel date; it's not hard to get tickets for the NYC-BOS route for well under a hundred if you plan accordingly. There's also a wrinkle in that if someone buys a particular seat in advance for a low price but then cancels, that seat will go up for sale (temporarily?) at the price they paid for it at the time.... so it's entirely possible to get a business-class ticket for $60 the night before if you get *really* lucky.
Kayak makes their edge by buying in volume in advance, but the end customer pays for it through a loss of flexibility. You buy from a third party, good luck getting customer support from Amtrak. Same deal as for airlines.
>26: "Classic case of the use of an executive power, and I support the practice in the future."
Vetoed!
Also >30: a while back, buying a few months in advance, I got a ticket from Philadelphia to Baltimore for $5. Out of curiosity I checked the night before I left, and tickets on that same train were going for $80. So yes, the difference can be extreme.
Second, as Scott snarked at and you’ve no doubt noticed as well, there is a lot of “strategic equivocation” going on among the pro-AA crowd. On the one hand we are to believe that the program is critical for maintaining a critical mass of minority representation, which will surely crash catastrophically if the policy is struck down. But on the other hand it’s a tiny basically undetectable tiebreaker that surely can’t be seen as discriminatory against any white or Asian applicant.
> First, the Supreme Court had already made explicit quotas and objectively quantifiable race preferences more or less impossible.
I must refer you to the Humphrey Appleby comment linked in Scott's post, which says that the new ruling will have significant effects because giving a big numeric bonus to applicants of favored races is now illegal, when that used to (last year) just be standard admissions practice.
I could have phrased it a bit more precisely, but the point is that the current policies had to be a bit roundabout. Yes, you could empirically measure after the fact that there was a large effect de facto being applied. But the explicit policies were always “oh this is just a ‘holistic’ policy”. Harvard’s policy was to give heavy weight to personal interviews - which in practice always seemed to rate Asians low and Blacks high, but de jure there was never anything so explicit as the pre-Gratz Michigan policy, which explicitly, in official documents, had point totals listed that gave lots more to certain races.
Again, the testimony we have is "my department does PhD admissions on a point system and being from a favored race has historically brought an automatic and hefty point bonus".
I suppose it is possible that this commentator was in a department with a literal points-for-being-Black policy. But if so, they should hav been waving the Gratz and Grutter rulings, and not waiting for this one.
There are basically two kinds of travelers: vacationers, who are very price sensitive but usually plan well in advance, and business travelers, who often travel on short notice but are less press sensitive.
Setting low prices for far-out reservations and raising the price closer to the travel date is an easy way to get closer to maximizing the total revenue for each trip, since it tends to catch both groups of travelers nearer their maximum price point.
Not sure about trains, but Kayak definitely doesn't buy anything when it comes to plane tickets or hotels. Thats not how it works. They are just listing the prices found on the GDS which is what travel agents use. Kayak gets paid a commission if you end up booking through the link on their site. Usually it's 10-12% for a hotel and I think 3-5% for a flight.
Regarding #10, I think it depends on whether the town has any laws on the book limiting kids walking around unaccompanied.
If there are (stupidly) laws against that, then the usual caveats against blatantly breaking stupid laws apply. If there aren't, I guess that there is little the cops can do besides driving them home.
Also, I would be reluctant to call the US cops into any situation which does not call for more guns. (I don't think they would be likely to shoot an unarmed six year old, but also don't think they are well-trained to handle such situations).
If I were the type of person to notice a distressed lone four year old (which is a situation which calls for some intervention), I guess I would find a nearby woman and ask her to talk to them. If one wanted to involve the state, Child Protective Services would be the obvious branch. (Yes, they may in turn involve the police, but they likely have more experience in the typical outcomes.)
There don't have to be laws on the books explicitly limiting kids from walking around unaccompanied. There just have to be laws against "child endangerment", and they have to be vague enough to not explicitly state whether children walking around unattended are or are not "endangered". Which I think is the case pretty much anywhere.
In which case, one of the things the cops *can* do is opine that yep, that kid is being endangered, and drive them over to the CPS worker who agrees with them and has long experience crafting the sort of documents and arguments that convince judges that someone is an unfit child-endangering parent who needs to have their kids taken away and put into foster care.
I believe that this threat is greatly overstated in many circles, but it is not zero. And again, the threat is not that CPS will call the cops - cops almost never shoot unarmed six-year-olds - but the cops calling CPS. Because CPS very frequently takes children away from their parents for years or forever; usually for more substantial reasons but they may be having a slow day.
Re your last paragraph: why the sexist assumption that a random female stranger is a better and safer choice than you are? Just approach the child yourself and help them!
Getting the attention of a stranger so that there is someone else who know what is happening has merit - and the tiny risk of a randomly selected person being a bad actor is basically nullified by having another adult (you) there - but it can just as easily be a man.
A random females stranger is much less likely to be harassed, or worse, on the grounds that a strange man talking to small children in public is probably a pedophile sex trafficker. I'd be reluctant to take that risk myself, if I didn't have to.
I acknowledge that that irrational stereotype is out there in the wild, but the best way to counter it is not to cower in fear of it, but to simply be a normal, decent human being while also happening to be male.
Note that I also advised getting another adult involved precisely because of the small but non-zero risk a random stranger (which you are to the strangers around you) is a threat - each of you can keep an eye on each other. I would *also* advise this for women - insofar as a random adult male is a risk of 'pedophile sex trafficer', so is a random unknown woman!
Regarding #26, Wisconsin, this seems totally bollocks. If you allow the governor to turn 2024-2025 into 2045 (why not go for year 20242025 while you are at it?), what is to stop them from selectively striking out letters and blanks in some bill to form some arbitrarily different, shorter text?
Even if you don't allow the striking of parts of words, in equilibrium the legislative will optimize for laws which meanings can not be maliciously altered by omitting words (so, no "nots").
If you have to have vetos, I think the ability to nope an entire bill should be sufficient (if you disallow mixing budget bills with random unrelated legislation). If the executive wants any changes to the bill, let them cut a deal with the legislative about it.
I hated the headline making it all about "owning the Republicans, chortle!" That's stupid legislating, no matter who is doing it.
It also may not work out as they want; if the rate increase is $324 per pupil each year, they may find themselves spancelled by it in ten years time when they need/want to increase by $500 per pupil, but Governor Line-Item has signed into law that it can *only* be increased by $324 until the year 2425. The same way that setting up almshouses in the Middle Ages where the paupers got thruppence a day was good money then, but not in the 16th - 19th centuries, but the foundation made it that this was all they could get.
I think the "owning the Republicans" framing is because the kind of insane power that the Frankenstein veto gives the Governor is one Republicans put in when they had a supermajority and thought they'd never lose it, so it's very much a case of "you've given yourself this power and used it against us for decades, now it's time for a taste of your own medicine". Still not good law-making, but the emotions are much more understandable in that context
Wisconsin governors used to be able to do that too, but it was banned in the early 1990's. I would interpret that law as banning the recent action with a less literal reading of "letters," but I'm not in charge of Wisconsin case law.
I tihink it's right in that some people are naturally, er, promiscuous. They'll never be happy in a one man/one woman (or one man/one man or one woman/one woman) set-up; they'll cheat or have a mistress or break up and be serial monogamists or constantly be divorcing and marrying the new 'soul mate' or try swinging and open marriages and the rest of the options.
For those people, 'full poly' is their best fit and *so long as* their partners are *also* full poly, it works out.
And the 'slightly/lukewarm poly' set also makes sense. When you have a full poly person in a relationship with someone who is not poly or is even monogamous, and the other partner tries to make concessions by opening up the relationship (but they're not interested in finding new partners themselves and it's going to be a mess of jealousy and recriminations).
Or the classical pattern of "I don't care what you do, just don't bring it home and I don't want to know anything about it" when it comes to one spouse/partner telling the other about 'if you want to cheat fine but keep it outside our door'.
Or the online stories where someone thinks that they're being stifled by the monogamous relationship (everyone else is having all this wonderful sex!) so they persuade/nag/arm-twist their partner into being open or poly, and then it results that the partner (usually female) can get a ton of dates and sex while the original person (usually male) can't get anywhere. That ends poorly, too.
4. "monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes"
--High IQ allows one to navigate society with greater wealth and fewer restrictions(due to IQ and $$$). Some end up suffering 'affluencenza.'
--If we define "positive life outcomes" as stemming from healthy relationships how much advantage do smarts actually provide? Are such folks more inclined to be *durably* empathic and moral?
--I have read over the years and am open to disagreement that smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.' False generalization?
>--High IQ allows one to navigate society with greater wealth and fewer restrictions(due to IQ and $$$).
If that's true, it STILL refutes the Swedish study widely cited by egalitarians that claimed that high IQ is detrimental after a point, which was the whole reason Scott posted it.
>If we define "positive life outcomes" as stemming from healthy relationships how much advantage do smarts actually provide? Are such folks more inclined to be *durably* empathic and moral?
How is that relevant?
>--I have read over the years and am open to disagreement that smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.' False generalization?
I don't know, you're the one making the claim. If there's data to support it, let's see it.
It IS true that dumber people are better at judging how intelligent they are than smarter people. But this is kind of a trivial fact. If you're a dumb person doing an exam and don't understand any of the questions, then you obviously aren't going to assume you will do well on the test. You clearly know you will do bad. Identifying this fundamental lack of understanding is easy. Having some level of understanding but knowing its limits is much harder.
I've seen this and look forward to more fully responding soon but in short, personal relationships are the great equalizer as they are source of most happiness. I will make the case that intelligence correlates with wealth and power which becomes relationally corrosive at a certain point absent less common circumstances and/or personality traits that foster common sense, AKA 'wisdom'(striving to both know and act wisely).
[edit below]
Ran across:
"Our minds are dangerous tools, rash and prone to go astray: it is hard to reconcile them with order and moderation. We have seen during my lifetime virtually all outstanding men, all men of abnormally lively perception, breaking out into licentiousness of opinion or behaviour. It is a miracle if you find one who is settled and civilized. We are right to erect the strictest possible fences around the human mind. In the march of scholarship or anything else the mind must needs have its footsteps counted and regulated; you must supply artificial hedges and make it hunt only within them.”
--Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays - Michel de Montaigne,~1580
So, due to lack of time and still wanting to respond here's a half-arsed effort:
I believe that my first point you took issue with, high IQ/wealth=few societal restraints, is self-evident and requires additional traits affecting self-restraint or one's life not progress to positive life outcomes. Again, relationships(requiring Character) are a huge contributing factor(Nicholi, 2002[taught ivy league psyche including topic: Freud vs. CS Lewis). Lastly on this point I'd say that any research concerning the social sciences is suspect due the extraordinary number of variables due to its subject matter(but often useful).
Regarding my second point: "smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.'" I read an article which I can't find and re: your counter that for a smart person, knowing one's limits is difficult - yes, but I'm suggesting that there is especially a lack of effort to know one's limits which results in blind spots among the gifted.
- - -
"Gifted, really really gifted writers pick stuff up quicker, but they also usually have a great deal more ego invested in what they write and tend to be more difficult to teach. . . .”
--David Foster Wallace via Brain Pickings , ‘David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are’, 8/11/2014
"It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a man from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and that moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we may best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will, strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
--William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890 [attention is a HUGE deal]
"In exploring the relationship between genius and mental health, Ludwig wrote that among the great geniuses of our times, all showed a readiness to discard prevalent views, an irreverence toward established authority, a strong capacity for solitude, and a "psychological unease," which could cause mental trouble such as depression, anxiety, or alcoholism. But if these qualities were not too incapacitating, they actually contributed to the individual's ability to achieve significant creativity, blaze new trails, propose radical solutions, and promote new schools of thought. Another aspect of the pain of being gifted and highly conscious has to do with the struggle to come to terms with one's superiority. As I wrote in A World Waiting to Be Born, many who are truly superior will struggle against their genuine call to personal and civic power because they fear exercising authority. Usually, they are reluctant to consider themselves "better than” or "above" others, in large part because of a sense of humility that accompanies their personal and spiritual power.”
--M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled And Beyond, 1986
"Blake was not questioning the reality of Swedenborg’s visions. Instead, he argued that his accounts of them were flawed and of little value. They suffered from the limitations inherent in the worldview of successful, privileged authority figures. Swedenborg was too comfortable in his own reality tunnel to question how limited it was. We all have our blind spots, of course, but not everyone wants to discover them.”
--John Higgs, William Blake vs the World, 2021
RE: scientific research
"For the advancement of science and protection of the right to freedom of expression, Russell advocated The Will to Doubt, the recognition that all human knowledge is at most a best guess, that one should always remember:
None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.
Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.”
--Bertrand Russell, The Will to Doubt: Bertrand Russell on Free Thought and Our Only Effective Self-Defense Against Propaganda, Brain Pickings, 5/18/16
Instead of better or worse can we just state what countries did and why? Stalin, at least, did not round up a specific ethnic group(along with a couple other categories of folks) into camps and so on. Stalin who I understand from a middlin reliable source, was a regular guy until Germany invaded Russia and was said to have had a nervous breakdown, then recovered after a few day as one ruthless SOB. He did starve a bunch of rural people but it was, based on the mix, not ethically motivated. Still though, a tyrant.
Europe 'won' at colonizing most of the world and ultimately relinquished its empire voluntarily. Colonialism is considered one of the worst things to happen in history (despite being objectively less bad than e.g. killing 10% of the world), certainly worse than anything the soviets did.
If the soviets had more explicitly committed a genocide, and had done so on explicitly racial grounds (to most people ukrainians are just russians, especially before 2022) e.g. against Kazakhs, I think people would feel differently about them.
Additionally, most moral outrage over the nazis comes from the left, and I find so many leftists willing to engage in apologetics for the soviets over what many leftists would call their 'good intentions'.
"If the soviets had more explicitly committed a genocide,"
I had read incorrect info or misinterpreted it ages ago and I based my comment on this unfortunately. Stalin was a tyrant but he did not, as you stated, explicitly target Jewish folks. I withdraw my only premise and so my argument crumbles. Thank you for this correction in your middle paragraph.
Re: 1st para, I am not well-versed enough to rebut however if "[imperial Europe did] worse than anything the soviets did" I'd wager it's only that the Soviets did not have the opportunity to do so!
I am completely unfamiliar with the content of your last paragraph but thanks for your reply.
"Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer."
Well, yes; Boris isn't stupid, he's just an idiot (that is, ambitoius, power-hungry, lacking in scruples or principles and cursed with a bonus extra-large helping of 'politician can't keep his trousers zipped', to the point where nobody, not even BoJo, is sure how many kids he has/had/might have had were it not for the abortion). He's 'Eton and Oxford' and that's not just because of legacy admissions or family connections.
Much as I dislike him, he is (sigh) one of my co-religionists (again, at least for now) and he is capable of performing academically:
Pretty much he converted/reverted because his current wife is Catholic (and I'm heavily presuming that it was done to please her mother so they could get married in church).
Boris supposedly was baptised Catholic but he was raised as an Anglican, and given that both parties were engaging in fornication, she got pregant outside of marriage, and I can't remember if he was technically committing adultery at the time, this is why I think it was in order to get the mother-in-law off their backs.
I realise I'm being spicy about this, but - ah to hell with it, he's probably as good an example of a median Catholic as the rest of us:
"To be married in the Catholic Church, Johnson needed to have his two previous marriages proven to be invalid by reason of lack of canonical form. Since he was baptised Catholic, but his previous weddings were not conferred by the Catholic Church, they are considered putatively invalid."
Given his track record on marriage, the previous ones could easily be annulled for various reasons:
Here's the spicy bit, thank you Wikipedia, list of runners and riders in the marital stakes:
(1) (1) First marriage: 1987, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, journalist, former model, and teacher. No children
(2) First divorce: 1993
(3) Second marriage: 1993, 12 days after divorce: Marina Wheeler, lawyer and writer (and interestingly, half-Indian), pregnant at the time (hence BoJo had clearly been playing away during his first marriage). Four kids in total
(4) First (publicly known) affair: 2000-2004, Petronella Wyatt. He was editor of The Spectator magazine at the time and she was a columnist, so this was also workplace romance and violating fraternisation rules and power imbalance and the rest of it. One abortion, one miscarriage
(5) Rumours (unconfirmed) of second affair: 2006, Anna Fazackerley, a journalist later employed by Boris
(6) Third affair/fling: 2008/09, Helen Macintyre. One kid
(7) Fourth affair: 2012-2016, Jennifer Arcuri, American technology entrepreneur, alleged by her when interviewed in 2020 and in greater detail in another interview in 2021. Investigation in 2019 as to whether Boris had been funnelling public money to her, in his capacity as Mayor of London
(8) Second divorce: 2018 announced, 2020 finalised
(9) Fifth affair/First cohabitation: 2019, Carrie Symonds, Conservative Party media official, had worked on Boris' campaign for mayor
(10) Third marriage: 2021, Carrie Symonds. Three kids to date. That should bring us up to eight children as of this year (plus the one abortion and two miscarriages, one for Wyatt and one for Symonds)
Well, as Catholic, can't throw stones since Symonds herself is the result of tangled marital circumstances:
"Caroline Louise Beavan Symonds was born on 17 March 1988 to Matthew Symonds, co-founder of The Independent, and Josephine McAfee (née Lawrence), a lawyer working for that newspaper.
...Symonds was the result of an affair between her parents, who were both married to other people at the time."
And *her* father was *also* born of an affair:
"[John Beavan, Baron Ardwick] married Gladys Jones in 1934 by whom he had two children. By Anne Symonds, a BBC World Service journalist, he was also the father of Matthew Symonds."
And *his* mother was alleged to - you've guessed it - be the product of an affair, although seemingly she did not believe it:
"Although some believed her to be the illegitimate daughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, whom her mother had met in 1915, she was convinced otherwise."
Honestly, with a family history like that, no wonder she was attracted to Boris. I have no idea how or why he was baptised (supposedly) Catholic as his family tree has a lot of windings but nothing to say that one member was Catholic.
9. "government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies"
If, as I'm suggesting, the U.S. is more oligarchy than democracy then who's calling the shots?
The elite(top 10% progressively, Turchin '23), amongst which are the high IQ and those that employ & fund such. See #4 as "positive life outcomes" defined as power and comfort.
Drone shows are pretty common these days - I've seen two in person, in the US and Australia. The one in your video is nicely produced, with complicated paths for the drones, but it's hardly a demonstration of technological might.
Our suburban city just had one for 4th of July, just before the fireworks. It was smaller in scale (a few hundred drones at most) but otherwise similar. I’m sure the underlying tech is basically identical. It in fact did include the drones forming into the shape of an eagle at one point.
The thing is that since DJI essentially dominates the civilian drone market, with a futuristic level of functionality and refinement, every drone show is a display of Chinese technological might.
Drone swarm technology was pioneered by European and American groups, including Intel. The Intel variety is still more common for drone shows than DJI, to my knowledge. For example, Studio Drift uses Intel drones for their shows eg Franchise Freedom. It's another case where the Chinese may have the lead in manufacturing, but the West leads in complex algorithms research and software.
> They did send me a single giant .txt file which contained a badly-mangled version of the blog posts, each one repeated three or four times in the file and filled with weird characters and broken formatting; I rescued a couple of posts, and each time it took me north of four hours.
For anyone who has a problem like this: this is the sort of constrained task that GPT-3/4 excels at - where it's 'obvious' what you mean but also the garbage is too varied to fix with some regexps or by hand. Whether it's bad YouTube auto-transcriptions or mangled PDF OCR, a quick "Fix the bad formatting" in a GPT prompt will work wonders, and then you can give it a quick skim to check that it didn't over-prosify or screw up some especially unusual technical vocabulary, and you're g2g. Forget 4 hours, it'll be more like 4 minutes.
Regarding #10, it doesn't just take one person calling the police on a 6 year-old walking to school for it to be impossible. It also depends on neither the 911 service nor the police nor anyone else telling that person off for wasting their time when there is actual crime to attend to.
>10: I used to work as a school bus driver. As a matter of school district policy, I was prohibited from dropping off first graders (6-7 year olds) unless there was a guardian present at the stop. Even if that "stop" was the bottom of their own driveway. And no, older siblings on the same bus didn't count as a "guardian" (although to make it all even more arbitrary, middle school age siblings I had dropped off earlier did).
The article on Italian food is quite clear in the details that the dishes originate from Italy but with misunderstood histories. Interpreting them as being really American in origin is the same nonsense rewriting of the past but for America's benefit. It's also not really about Italian cuisine but about a small number of dishes that are familiar to Americans who don't know much.
10. They must have been quick on the draw *and* persistent, because that is a short walk.
7. On this topic, I recommend the book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food by John Dickie. He argues from the outset that the casting of familiar dishes as rural tradition is a marketing fabrication, that Italian food as we know it is "city food" (However, while some dishes are American in origin, many are not). The segments covering medieval Italy were particularly interesting (in part because of how unrecognizable it is from modern Italian) and full of amusing anecdotes about influential cooks of the time.
>the casting of familiar dishes as rural tradition is a marketing fabrication, that Italian food as we know it is "city food"
Interestingly, the most recent episode of Max Miller's always excellent "Tasting History" youtube series describes basically the opposite of this process. Basically, Italians of all backgrounds had been eating pasta with butter and cheese since the middle ages. Then in 1912 Alfredo di Lelio opens a restaurant in Rome where he prepares the dish in a theatrical manner, a bunch of rich and famous people raved over his pasta, and thus Fettuccine Alfredo was born.
Miller doesn't go into enormous detail about the origins of the dish, which as far as I can tell are unknown with any certainty (a similar dish was first mentioned in the 15th century). The point is that by the 20th century when Alfredo was operating his restaurant, the dish was ubiquitous throughout Italy, meaning he took a "rural tradition" and successfully marketed it as "city food" to various influential foreigners.
Anti-spall needs to go on the inside of the armor (or hull) - I think the cottonclads put the cotton bales on the outside of the ship to basically prevent the enemy shot from reaching the ship’s structure with any velocity. Not an anti-spalling measure, more like piling earth in front of a brick wall to give protection from cannons.
So ... I have acquired my first SubStack subscriber! I am very excited! But I also don't have a Substack of my own (I just read and comment ...) so I don't know what is going on. A bot? Anyone have any ideas?
I have a few of these as well. Some of them are people trying to build an audience, I think, hoping that if they follow you, you'll reciprocate. Other people are simply enamored of my insightful and hilarious comments, I can only assume.
You can probably post on Notes and your follower would see it there. Notes constantly recommends I follow regular ACX commenters (I'm guessing because this is the Substack I read the most frequently), so if you post comments, Substack considers you a writer and might recommend you to readers!
Are cottonclads necessarily a stupid idea? Coincidentally, I was reading "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" the other day. There's a passage at the end of Chapter 6 on whether protecting US army vehicles with chicken feathers might be a good idea.
Apparently the “armor” worked reasonably well and the main issue was lack of effective armament of their own - they basically had no good cannons or ammo for the ones they did, so the main tactic was plunge straight ahead, suppress fire with sharpshooters, and attempt to ram/board.
These were converted civilian riverboats designed more or less as semi-disposable one-offs to break particular blockades, and for that limited purpose they did okay.
I think the appeal of Genghis Khan is that the Mongols still have a reputation as sort of “noble savages” in terms of their lifestyle. There’s a masculine appeal to the idea of roaming around on your trusty horse, slinging arrows, hunting with golden eagles, etc. (American Indians were similarly romanticized, but that’s become “problematic” in a way that hasn’t caught up to the much more fargroup Mongols).
Whereas the Nazi or Soviet utopias would have been hyper modern ones, so there is less to romanticize there.
14. Given the legal issues that all the charter cities projects have run into, I'm genuinely curious what the convincing pitch is. Every one of them has eventually run aground upon a government change that brings more hostile political leadership to power.
19. Bigelow Aerospace is dead now. It basically shut down in 2020 and laid off all the employees, and then later transferred ownership of the remaining ISS module to NASA. Maybe if they'd stuck it out longer they'd be doing better (what with the talk now of commercial space stations), but they either didn't or couldn't - maybe Bigelow's money ran out.
A few skilled writers who were bad people: V.S. Naipaul (liked to beat his wife), Normal Mailer (stabbed his), William S. Burroughs (shot his, and also fucked children). Probably also bad: Rousseau, Celine, Verlaine, Pound, Wilde.
There have probably been thousands of bad people (by the morality of their own time and ours) who were very skilled writers.
Can't remember if it's from Desolation Angels or a bio of Kerouac, but Burroughs' is quoted as saying, while living in Morocco and writing Naked Lunch, "Anyone who says they wouldn't fuck a 12-year-old Arab boy is lying or insane." That isn't proof and maybe I'm slandering the dead, but he was not known for not acting on his desires.
Your face-value interpretation isn't unreasonable. But I classify Burroughs with Hunter S. Thompson as someone given to making shocking statements for rhetorical effect which might truthfully reflect their internal personal landscape, but aren't necessarily reliable narration. So I'm not convinced that's a smoking gun, but thanks for the pointer.
That's fair. I think Burroughs picked a particularly unpopular [widely condemned sleazy behavior]. Not just unpopular in the sense of widely condemned, but unpopular in the sense of something that the bulk of the population wouldn't choose to do even with complete freedom from consequences. Burroughs' claim would only apply to the intersection of true pedophiles (he spoke of 12-year-olds, not 17-year-olds) and gays (unless he also meant to include women - I'm guessing not), which is a rather small group. I agree that it looks like a typical mind fallacy.
On 4, for those of us without journal subscriptions, do you have the IQ range they looked at outcomes for and what the quantitative dose/response relationship actually was for the outcomes measured? Personally, I would not have expected worse outcomes at any level of high IQ, but the abstract is talking about 120+ and I was under the impression when people are talking about geniuses being lonely and crazy, they're talking more like 160+. I would personally expect diminishing returns because everything should have diminishing returns, but not negative returns.
There's also the problem that sample sizes start getting pretty small at the truly high end, though. The outcomes of all 10 people in the world or whatever who are over 180 might not mean much.
I think this discussion gets clouded a bit by people not having a clear idea of what positive life outcomes means. They see the world's richest people being reasonable smart, but not apparently super-geniuses as far as I can tell. But this is clearly confounded by the fact that the very richest people are all either fund managers or business founders. No matter your IQ, you have to actually go into those fields to ever become that wealthy. You kind of need to stratify your analysis by career choice, as in, the world's wealthiest people likely don't have the world's highest IQs, but do they at least have among the highest IQs of people who choose to found businesses?
I realized this eventually, thanks. I guess I'm a bit out of the loop, but figured out this is a thing while trying to retrieve details from stuff cited on Stronger by Science. Sort of raises the questions of why blogs like this don't just link directly to Sci-Hub. Will he get in trouble?
a) Yes, they could get in trouble. DSL bans sci-hub links for that reason as well.
b) Sci Hub is under a constant cat and mouse game, so links will quickly break. The last time I tried to get a paper from Sci Hub, it was completely inaccessible (presumably they're back again for now, given Pepe's comment).
The Swedish study Scott is referring to claimed that the IQ relationship broke down around the 90th percentile i.e. right around 120. So it's actually the perfect range to look at for the sake of what scott is saying here (that the swedish study is wrong).
"Although I appreciated the personal story, I’m more interested in the claim that Twitter’s algorithm changed sometime in the past few years in a way that prevents stories from “going viral” in the way that they used to; does anyone know more about this?"
I don't but it matches my anecdotal impression: I feel like Twitter used to be a good place to find things to read later, via Instapaper, and now it's not.
Do you base that on your own understanding of Russian? Regardless, there's still value to the subtitles even if they match the original story, because they let you follow along with what the actors are saying. It's easier to pick up on nonverbal cues when you understand what's being said.
As I keep trying to point out, the religious police of the Anglo (and thus indirectly the whole) world, ie the Social Scientists and Humanities, have as their theological touchstone the WW2 and specifically the Nazis. (Japanese should be in there as well, but they raise too many complicated problems that twist the hierarchy of castes into a Klein bottle…)
This means they rigorously police any and everything related to Nazis but care much less about Mongols. In much the same way that, say, the Saudi religious police care an awful lot what you say about Allah, and very little about Christological disputes as to, eg, whether Christ’s suffering was genuine or docetic.
#16: you would think these could be defeated fairly easily with some flaming tar or something, like the Greeks used to do with their built-for-ramming ships. More Union incompetence, I wager.
#21: Ibram Kendi approves. The only way to create equality is through overt discrimination that counteracts the very carefully measured impact of covert discrimination.
I know nothing about Boris Johnson. But my first consideration if any political figure wrote a book, or a story, or a pamphlet, or a warning on a mattress tag is to ask "to what extent did they actually write it themselves?"
This kind of post, for me, is the most useful that have ever come out of rationalist community. Not various kinds of models about how to think better, because I am like most of the people, that is very resistant to change. Changing how I think is a long-term problem and I'm not even sure that a solvable one. However, those little life hacks about how to live better, especially if you have some sort of a underlying dysfunctionality, which seems to be pretty frequent in rationalist circles, is so very useful, because this is kind of a lot of proven advice that I don't have to hunt over the internet, and it's readily applicable for everyone and anyone. More of this, please.
Re 30, about the intercity Uber - I did this once when my 11 pm flight from DFW to College Station was canceled after we had spent two hours on the runway waiting for fog to clear. I don't remember what excuse they had to not buy us a hotel room, but we would often prefer not to deal with the hotel they book, because it's a 30 minute drive from the airport, and they put you on the 8 am flight, and make you get to the airport 90 minutes before the flight. When we discovered that the rental car shortage meant that it was impossible to get a one-way car rental from DFW to College Station, and saw that the hotels on the airport were well over $300, we realized that it was actually cheaper to call a Lyft to drive us home (and we got a couple hours of sleep in the back seat).
It turns out that in Texas, lots of Uber/Lyft drivers are totally happy to get the intercity ride, because that guarantees them work for half of the long period, rather than several short rides with long gaps between them.
Hey Scott, does the observation about good writers not necessarily being decent people apply to the War Nerd? I mean, he is a great writer, but I get the impression that he would be a bit obnoxious in real life. Have you ever met him?
I don't think I wanted to claim that good writers were decent people - many obviously aren't - but that they need some kind of core of intellectual integrity or clarity that I suspect Johnson of not having.
I've never met War Nerd and I haven't even read much of his writing.
Just skipped over his piece, being Belgian this triggered my interest. The guy writes well, but not well enough for me to appreciate his story: it exudes the worst kind of wokeness (self-hatred), at first subtly but then more and more, up to a level that I am not able to support anymore. I am not as resistant as I once was, probably by lack of practice: contrary to one or 2 years ago, it's now rare to encounter such wokism, at least in my usual web sources...Or maybe I just usually sort better :)
PS: Sorry, it's not wokism, not exactly, not sure what it is but I can tell it's extremelly difficult to stand as a Belgian, or as any non-belgian who have traveled in Europe at least a little bit.
Posting awesome Chinese propaganda is kind of bad. Fortunately, an anti-CCP group called Shen Yun (which the Chinese Government accuses of being a cult just because they are kind of actually a cult) also produces awesome, colorful, artistic propaganda that one could link to.
To add some context on Māori health in NZ (note I am no expert and am steelmanning the position of race-conscious healthcare here)
-- While one way of viewing this from the US context is covid vaccination prioritisation, you could also view it in the context of something like the Indian health service, which is perhaps a more familiar but also much more comprehensive allocation of government resources towards a particular ethnic group's health.
-- It is likely that Māori and Pacific people, like many formally isolated indigenous groups, are genetically susceptible to various diseases.
-- There is widespead support for the view that beyond any practical concerns about efficiency we must redress previous wrongs to Māori given NZ's history. For example Treaty of Waitangi settlements (basically reparations) have fairly broad support accross the political spectrum. Health resources and equity are significant in the sense that in many cases provision of health (hospitals) and education (schools) were explicitly traded by tribes in exchange for land, to the government of the time (generally this provision was inadequate or non-existant).
I am similarly sceptical about this implementation, and definitely agree it seems advocates are weaselly wanting to have it both ways ('it's absolutely essential for equity', but 'it will also have almost no impact'). If it's going to happen authorities should be open about it and explicit about the rules and likely impact. For example, another controversial thing occuring in NZ is that Māori and Pacific are eligible for free flu vaccination at a younger age (55+) compared to everyone else (65+), but this seems much more acceptable to me, given evidence that flu susceptibility in Māori and Pacific people has a strong genetic component.
To add onto your steelman, one way to square the apparent contradiction of “absolutely essential” vs. “no impact” is by keeping in mind the percentage of Māori population compared to the rest of NZ. If every Māori person was bumped to the front of the line, that would reduce their own wait times by 100% but increase everyone else’s by only 17% (I had to google their population share and was surprised by how high it is).
I’m currently researching a similar event involving an opposite-direction bias: a First Nations band had nearly all their trapping lines destroyed by a hydro project. The impact assessment had acknowledged this would happen but claimed it was ok since those lines “affected only 3% of the province’s fur production”. :(
Yeah interesting point. Kind of relates to my first point above that there seems to be a dichotomy in views: health resources to indigenous people provided through a discrete programme (Australia, Brazil, USA) is generally accepted, but providing more resources or prioritisation as an aspect of a comprehensive health programme is racist/unacceptable.
I imagine this is driven by a couple of things:
1) Your point, how much of the population is being prioritised - obviously bringing 17% of people up in priority imposes a burden on everyone else, but the fewer people the less the impact is. This probably wouldn't even be an issue if only 1% benefited greatly but it had little impact on anyone else.
2) How different are the situation and needs of the population being targetted, ie. a programme might be seen positively if they specialise in providing care on reservations and for illnesses which are highly specific to that group, but not if they provide identical care as the regular health system but *better*
I'd emphasise that both these things exist on a spectrum and its not always obvious what the right policy is.
On the population thing, yeah it is relatively high compared to Australia, Canada, USA etc. There is a high racial intermarriage rate and a trend over time that more people of mixed descent identify as Māori on census so the percentage can be expected to continue to increase.
While I'm dubious about this defense, in NZ the usual media support for all sorts of health-treatment advantages for Maori (and Pacific islanders) never - ever to my experience - mentions whether controlling for SES (which is usually lower), BMI (which is usually higher), and so forth explains any of it. No it's just "Maori have statistically worse outcomes" - so even the fittest, wealthiest, Maori get various priorities over a poor unhealthy Asian.
There is, arguable validity to the view that there is a historical wrong to be considered. (Unclear what. But whatever it is it goes forever and ever until the end of time.) But no, the benefits are it's not just "Maori", it's "Maori and Pacific Islanders" the latter group of which have no such historical claim. So it's just racism.
The usual suspects were unhappy that, when in short supply, the COVID vaccine prioritized the elderly - since more of those are white and Asian, this was - we are told - a deliberately racist policy. The government took it on board, and so Maori (and PI?!) have priority access to vaccines and other medications. Want Paxlovid? Tight conditions if non-Maori/PI, much freer if you are.
NZ is rebuilding itself as a race-obsessed country.
Only a few people (notably those who wanted to avoid giving COVID vaccines to the elderly first) seem to understand that the best way of gaining racial health equality is to preferentially kill the non-Maori. So far.
> It is likely that Māori and Pacific people, like many formally isolated indigenous groups, are genetically susceptible to various diseases.
You can't appeal to this while defending the views of egalitarians who don't believe in meaningful genetic differences between races - it's all 'socially constructed'.
>There is widespead support for the view
So, discrimination is okay as long as there's enough support?
>There is widespead support for the view that beyond any practical concerns about efficiency we must redress previous wrongs to Māori given NZ's history.
"NZ's history" is that 300 years after oxford university was founded, polynesians (who would have happily butchered anyone getting in their way) set up shop in NZ and now act like they're an indigenous population there. And they never had or would have been likely to have sophisticated medical knowledge and technology without the Europeans, making this an absurd case of 'reparations', and it is not restoring anything to its original state.
>For example, another controversial thing occuring in NZ is that Māori and Pacific are eligible for free flu vaccination at a younger age (55+) compared to everyone else (65+), but this seems much more acceptable to me, given evidence that flu susceptibility in Māori and Pacific people has a strong genetic component.
If it's about outcomes, then doing it on a racial basis makes no sense. It should be the poorest people regardless of race. Rich maoris have better outcomes than many poor whites, but under this program the latter if benefitted.
I don’t really want to get into a full on culture war debate, but I don’t understand the relevance of your point around origins. Regardless of how settlement arbitrarily before or after Oxford was founded counts as ‘indigenous’ to you, they were here first, and long enough (effectively isolated for around 500 years) to create a unique culture, expand and occupy the whole country. Also ‘happily butchered anyone who got in their way’, how do you presume to even know this? There’s very little evidence remaining of the founding population, we can only conjecture their intentions and this assumption therefore just seems prejudiced.
We were talking about the Polynesians who founded NZ’s Māori population in ~1250 AD. If you’re referring to one warlike Māori tribe murdering another peaceful Māori tribe, 600 years later (Chatham islands), I don’t see how that adds much to our understanding.
You don't see how the Moari's aggressive, war-waging culture and willingness to slaughter and enslave even other Maori who offer no resistance "adds much to our understanding" of Maori's treatment of competing populations?
Because cultures can change massively over 600 years. For example why are you focussing on the aggressive Ngāti Tama and not the pacifist Moriori? They both descend from the same Polynesian founders.
I don't know about the notion that if AARO had Title 50 authority, they could "demand" classified information from the intelligence community (IC). Well, I guess they could demand it, but IC members can still not share it. Also, the IC can (and does) share lots of information with the DOD (which is mostly Title 10) all the time. That webpage looks like it was written by someone who doesn't understand how all the inside baseball works. It's not like they'll suddenly get a golden key to the secrets. IC members don't even share everything with each other (or internally). They share some things and not others. Likewise, they share some things and not others with the DOD.
I don't know anything about the AARO, but it's not clear to me that they wouldn't already have Title 50 authorities, seeing as they were created under 50 U.S. Code § 3373 and they report to the PDDNI (as well as somewhere in the DOD). It wouldn't be surprising if they had both. The NSA, for example, can operate under either authority, depending on the situation.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the news reports, the situation with ethnic priority on surgery waitlists in New Zealand is quite funny, in that:
Ethnicity was Already a factor taken into account in the algorithm for these surgery waitlists. This latest change makes ethnicity Less important in the algorithm than was previously the case, and raises importance of other various poverty indicators. But because this is the first most people have heard of it, so it has had a huge impact in the news and political spheres.
All of which is not to say anything in particular about it on the object level, but it's funny how these things end up happening.
Dan Carlin in his Mongol empire series explores the question of Hitler vs Ghengis Khan. If i remember correctly, he pretty much chalks it up to the amount of time that has passed, which seems very reasonable to me. Who knows what people will think of the Nazis in 600 years, although I feel like the fact that we have photos definitely changes the way we’re going to look at history in the distant future.
Mmm, I think Genghis Khan didn't have any particular section of people he wanted to exterminate (except maybe the clan/tribe who killed his father and plunged his family into destitution once abandoned by the rest of the tribe), so that even if they did pillage, murder and enslave, this was all part of the normal pattern of conquest.
Hitler, on the other hand, had definite grades of "human/slave/sub-human to be exterminated" and more importantly came out of a civilised Western society. We judge barbarians by a different measure. And of course, while it's not fair to call it the "woke narrative", the swing against Colonialism and attitudes of the past means that "our ancestors called these people barbarians and savages, that was unjust and unfair and prejudiced so we will correct the balance by admiring them".
More importantly, Genghis didn't give people too much grief for being "subhuman", so long as they didn't give *him* too much grief in their pointless resistance. Pay your taxes, mind your own business, don't ever imagine you're in charge here. The Jews would have done fairly well under the Khan.
>Mmm, I think Genghis Khan didn't have any particular section of people he wanted to exterminate (except maybe the clan/tribe who killed his father and plunged his family into destitution once abandoned by the rest of the tribe), so that even if they did pillage, murder and enslave, this was all part of the normal pattern of conquest.
Okay, but now you have to explain why the 'normal pattern of conquest' is okay. I'm sure the people being brutally raped and murdered by Khan & co. weren't thinking to themselves "Gee, this sucks, but at least they're not calling me a sub-human!".
And it doesn't explain why european colonialism is viewed as negatively as it is despite being vastly less violent than most conquest throughout history.
I also think chalking it up to the amount of time that has passed is very plausible.
Re photos: After 600 years of photoshop and more sophisticated successors, it might be that people (if there still are people!) of that era might have a visceral distrust of photos and all similarly modifiable evidence.
The War Nerd mention reminded me of my favorite War Nerd quote
"The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. "
In Boris Johnson's article he says he was losing 4 to 5 pounds a week. That's a lot. Too much in fact. Healthy weight loss can't really outpace 2 pounds a week. I wonder if his side effects were caused by Ozempic-induced undereating which didn't become noticeable until he lost enough weight that it became difficult for his fat stores to make up the deficit in real time.
I've suspected this may be a risk for semaglutide for a while but haven't looked to see if it's addressed anywhere.
Glad to see that I achieved the height of rationalist interior design sophomore year of college. If anyone is actually interested in architecture and interior design (and city planning) from what could be argued is a rationalist point of view, I suggest A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. A bit idealistic and of its time (1977) but some really good ideas and a useful way of thinking about the topic.
"After 40 years of moral failure, 40 years of weakness in the face of temptation — of akrasia — I was going to acquire a new and invincible chemical willpower."
That's maybe the most mainstream context I've seen the word "akrasia" used in, I thought that was mostly rationalist jargon still.
China is a country with lots of people who, like normal people in any other country, like to make cool things. I think it's unnecessary to link a random drone show to political drama just because the CCP is what Americans primarily associate China with.
Isn't there also an increased chance of insanity with greater IQ? Is this reflected in the "positive" outcome results?
Re: lab grown meat
I cannot see how anything thinks lab grown meat is somehow safer, cleaner, more environmentally friendly, etc than actual meat. I've repeatedly noted that the overhead costs and supply chain issues associated with lab growing anything are enormous. The capability is nil. The possibility of fuckery is enormous - real world meat actually requires a functional animal whereas lab grown meat just requires a mass of cells. Cancer cells grow really fast, don't they?
I think the main reason not to believe Grusch on aliens is this: "Grusch claimed the first UFO case he was briefed on involved a vehicle downed in Italy in 1933; the Mussolini government had allegedly kept it in storage until near the end of World War II. Pope Pius XII “back-channeled” the existence of the object to the United States, which obtained it in 1944 or 1945." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblower-is-back-with-more-crazy-claims.html
Re: 8: I think context is another big component of the difference in historical legacies. The Mongols weren't actually that much worse (by modern moral standards) than contemporary states, just more successful. Yes, if you found yourself on the pointy end of the conquest, you would have a very bad day and end up dead, but that was true no matter which empire was doing the conquering. Their policies concerning conquered territories were quite fair for the day, and in some respects their conquests were better off than under nearly any contemporary alternative. I would even argue that Genghis's policy of blanket religious freedom was among the most liberal policies ever instituted by any state prior to the industrial period (though the competition for that includes things like "fine, you heathens can exist but we're going to tax you extra" or "we will pretend you don't exist as an alternative to having you all killed," so this is more an indictment of religious freedom policy in pre-industrial states). Possibly by accident, their warmaking philosophy also dovetails with the modern understanding (at least, by people who understand war, as opposed to people who complain about it existing on Twitter) - that war is a fundamentally and inescapably awful thing, that trying to unilaterally make it cuddly and nice just prolongs the suffering, and that it's thus better to start out being exactly as brutal as you need to be to win quickly.
By contrast, the Nazis were not only much worse than their contemporaries, but (especially in hindsight) notably worse than nearly any historical precedent. The Mongol Empire was, in broad strokes, a monarchy conquering other monarchies; Nazi Germany was an authoritarian state invading mostly democratic states. The Mongol Empire mostly stopped killing people on a systematic level once the conquest was over; Nazi Germany very famously did the opposite of that. The only real points of commonality is that they were both expansionist empires (which... isn't actually very unusual in history, because everyone wants more stuff) who killed a bunch of people.
LOLOL!
this is the comment of the week for me.
I don't suppose you remember what it was?
Sadly, no.
> the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
Hmmm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc
Does anyone remember which Hu video has the self-aware bit about waking up to a digital clock?-- the real life of people playing at looking like Mongol warriors.
That would be the music video for ‘Yuve Yuve Yu’
Thank you.
What? I suspect spam.
It is. It's been copy-pasted several times here. Report it.
Now they're putting MRNA vax in Spam, too? Those animals!
Also note that one of the featured instruments (which I think is a "morin khuur") has swastikas as frets.
Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
I seem to recall it was a Mongol moral principle that an adult male was obliged to justify his place in the World, or literally make room for himself, by removing at least one other person from it!
> Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
Genghis Khan gave a great speech once when the issue was brought before him that a bunch of Muslims and Jews were complaining about being fed pork. The primary thrust of it was "I think you're forgetting who conquered and enslaved who".
"Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons."
There's a way in which this sounds silly ("what, so actual serial killers are fine people now?!?"), but in another way, it makes sense. No one's realistically entertaining Mongol Hordeism as a foreign policy. The only plausible argument for Mongol Hordes is We're the Strongest, which has a clear counterargument ("No, *We* Are"), and no one's claiming any moral heft to this.
OTOH, Naziism has arguments behind it that look scientific (in the similar way that any modern ideological argument will appear if we just observe the stack of papers with the nice formatting and five-dollar words), and if you think, like many modern people, that morality ought to be supported by what's scientifically correct, then there comes this niggling fear that too many people will sit and listen for the sake of openmindedness and convince themselves that there's something to it.
Part of the point I'm driving here is not that I think there's something to Naziism, but rather that it can be depressingly hard to resolve multiple scientific-looking but contradictory arguments, and the arguments one goes along with could too often depend merely on which arguments one saw just as they happened to be in an intellectually curious mood.
We must not neglect SN-risks!
Or, given his early life experiences, think of Genghis Khan as the Mongolian Scarlett O'Hara:
"I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
And he never was - Tasting History with Mongolian meatballs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2tY_qqTk-E&list=UULFsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ&index=98
Motorcycles are cool, but he true latter-day Mongol rides a Hilux: https://www.mercenary.ie/2021/03/technical.html
Thanks so much for that link. I just read Razib Kahn's Steppelandia series, and this really resonates.
> [Boris Johnson] a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing ...
Wait, what? What kind of non-sequitur is that? Why do you assume that Johnson isn't actually highly intelligent and – yes! - clear-thinking in matters unrelated to politics? The effective practice of politics might just rely on difficult skills largely unrelated to intelligence and clarity of thought, as we judge the those things in other areas of life.
Because I read Dominic Cummings' Substack and I trust him to have an inside view of the guy.
I'm confused -- why wouldn't you, vs other high-profile politicians? He's written very favorably about rationalists for years, e.g. https://dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/ where he wrote
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia:
...
- An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
His mention of Scott there links to the old SSC blog.
You're right, it doesn't. I stand corrected.
Cummings comes across as someone who is a fan of rationalism but not very good at it. I think he probably did help the British response to Covid be less of a disaster than it could have been - here he is explaining to Boris the difference between a fatality rate of 0.04 and a fatality rate of 0.04%: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
- but his big achievement was winning the referendum to bring about Brexit which has done a lot of economic damage for little or no benefit. There is a lot of talk about how that was done with amazing cutting edge Facebook data analysis, but it really came down to shameless lying and scaremongering. He talks a big game about streamlining government, having a British version of DARPA etc. but none of that has happened, instead British science is cut off from European collaboration and funding and British business is bogged down in red tape and lack of investment caused by not being part of the EU.
Boris plays the role of an erudite, witty, brilliant leader but is actually not very bright and incapable of making decisions. Cummings plays the role of a hard-minded rationalist but he ends up with terrible outcomes.
We do have a British version of DARPA.
https://www.aria.org.uk/
Ah OK, I didn't know it had actually been set up, I thought it was just a proposal.
He's made good points before, his blog makes him seem like he's got his head on straight, and most of what he's said that I've checked has been confirmed by other sources.
AFAIKT, both of them lie whenever they perceive it to give the the slightest advantage in any way. Admittedly, I got my impression from the US version of British news, and wasn't concerned enough to remember the details.
Do we need the reference to Bayes here?
I once read that his claimed hobby of making model buses out of wine boxes was some SEO tactics, so that if you google "boris johnson bus" you'll get this instead of the brexit bus with the 350 million pounds lie. At the time he talked about Peppa Pig World, lots of pigs in Britain had to be culled because of brexit. Could it be...?
Not the only bus-related story I've read about Boris; he pledged to get rid of 'bendy buses' and re-introduce a modern version of the classic red bus when he was mayor of London:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buses_in_London#New_Routemaster_and_bendy_bus_withdrawal
I thought that was quite good, for once. The wobbly garden bridge thing was just bonkers, though.
I also heard this claim, from multiple sources. So I did a search for "boris johnson bus" (and have repeated it just now, as a check), and found that the top couple of results were neither about Johnson's hobby nor about Brexit campaigning, but unrelated stories about UK bus policy (or, when I checked previously, about London bus policy, from Johnson's time as Mayor). So I'm confident that this claim is false.
Moreover: the £350m figure (advertised on the side of a bus, as the UK's weekly contribution to the EU budget) was correct. It is true that about a third of that was spent within the UK, and about another third was returned to the UK in the form of a rebate. But, under UK (and EU?) law, advertised prices must be the price before any form of rebate, so it was nicely and technically correct to list the full value.
So, I suspect the claim you've cited above - that Johnson talking about his hobby was an attempt to smother discussion of the supposed "lie" - was invented as an attempt to imply that not only was the figure on the bus incorrect, but that Johnson was aware of this and wished to conceal it.
Strongly agree about style over substance and the fact that he is playing a character - he reportedly used to pretend to be improvising a speech, having failed to prepare for whatever event, but he did it repeatedly and always gave the same 'off the cuff' performance. I wrote this about how he is like a hack comic: https://www.sorryisaidthat.biz/p/boris-johnson-reconsidered-as-a-hack
But isn't Cummings mostly focused on the practice of politics? That is, Cummings, worked in Johnson's political shop, saw a train wreck, and talks a great deal about that. We could agree that's all true, and it wouldn't preclude Johnson be excellent at, idk, classical music, French literature, and writing on particular drugs.
Cummings is often portrayed as a weirdo in Britain. I'd say his writings are generally regarded in that light. Very academic stuff that has little relevance to the real problems faced by the country. Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so, and has largely fallen back on blaming Johnson for that. I don't think Johnson is entirely to blame, there's a lot to be said for Cummings picking the wrong horse to ride on and competely failing to sell his ideas to the media and the public. Very much felt like he was a terminally online guy who was very good at Twitter but less good outside that bubble. Plus the whole nonsense about going for a drive to "test his eyes" basically made him a laughing stock...
Have a hard time believing Dominic Cummings would blame someone unfairly. Too good of a writer.
I can't tell if this is in jest or earnestly repeating the original error. I want to believe, but Poe's Law, you know?
Why do you think Cummings’ ideas have very little relevance to the real issues in the UK? The big one, massive bureaucratic overhaul, seems pretty central to the entire country, especially considering we have such a big state.
>Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so
He succeeded in the creation of ARIA and the data science in No. 10, plus some procurement reform. Couldn’t do the bureaucratic overhaul but it doesn’t seem like he “utterly failed” to me. It’s not like he was given free reign either.
Cummings is portrayed as a weirdo because he’s 1. Despised by the media as he doesn’t talk to them, and 2. Because he largely focuses on actual issues and gets to root causes, unlike most political figures who mostly blather. This indeed makes him weird in British politics!
Now that I've seen two of you do it: it's free rein, not free reign.
Hahahaha duly noted
Yes, I also think your surprise is way off here.
Here in the UK I think most people would say: Johnson is a brilliant writer (it's how he made his name), very likeable, and beneath some bluster actually extremely intelligent and with capacity for clear thinking and communication: unfortunately with the dual flaw of (a) not believing the rules that apply to everyone else apply to him (including any sense of consequences to his actions), and (b) being obsessed with his own greatness.
Meanwhile most people would say of Dominic Cummings: very insightful guy, clear and radical thinker, unfortunately also obsessed with Johnson in a massive grudge match. Most people in the UK would therefore laugh at the suggestion his inside view should be trusted, even as most people would find the chaotic picture he paints of Johnson's administration completely plausible.
TLDR: Johnson & Cumming reputation is 2 brilliant men, both impossibly biased beyond the point of trustworthiness.
I find a little of Johnson goes a long way - whether that's the more recent newspaper columns, or the speeches I heard at the Oxford Union in the mid-1980s.
Politically, he is a chameleon. At Oxford, he presented as a rather Woosterish let's-not-be-ideological old-fashioned Tory, in an environment where the few Tories around felt quite hard right. As mayor of London he was seen as generally moderate and inoffensive, if prone to vanity projects: but it's not a role in which you can do much harm. As PM, it was incoherent. Probably in substance the most left wing Tory PM since the early 60s, but in a terribly unfocused way, and seasoned with some tiresome (but substance free) stuff about "wokeness".
I can testify from my two encounters with him, both from 1985, that he was a deeply unpleasant person then, and is reputed to be so now.
I wouldn't in general trust a word that Cummings says: he is one of the most appalling people in UK public life of my lifetime, but some of his anecdotes about Johnson ring true. Anthony Seldon's book is one I would trust, and is damning.
I can't answer for Andrew B, but speaking personally: "Appalling" exists on a spectrum. I find torture of cute puppies "appalling", but I also find sour cream rangoons "appalling".
Dominic Cummings hasn't personally orchestrated any genocides that I know of, so he's not "Hitler-appalling". But Dominic Cummings famously pushed for tough COVID lockdowns, then within weeks defied those lockdowns (twice! Once while sick with COVID! And once just to go have a birthday picnic with his wife!) and then, when caught out, after a month of denial, offered a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse. This isn't a premium Open Thread, this isn't about whether the British lockdown was good/bad, but if you, personally, agitate for Policy X, then you, personally, defy Policy X... well, I find that hypocrisy and spinelessness appalling.
Now, whether or not he's appalling is tangential to his opinion on Boris Johnson - but, that having been said, I still think it's still pretty ridiculous to trust his characterization of Johnson, considering Johnson basically fired him. We don't generally consider ex-spouses to be particularly reliable transcribers of character, despite having lived under a roof with the individual for a healthy period of time. Just because this particular ex-spouse uses the same Berkeley blogosphere shibboleths as us doesn't make them any more reliable a witness as to the number of times their ex-wife ever did the dishes.
I agree that you can't take Cummings as a trustworthy source about Johnson because he has a grudge, but there is quite a bit of corroborating evidence that Johnson was really bad at making decisions, was confused about basic points (ie mistaking a fatality rate of 0.04 for 0.04%, thinking that a 6% death rate for older people was no big deal) -and this wasn't in the early days, it was months into the pandemic when he should have been on top of this stuff: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
Yeah, the lockdown stuff was the icing on the cake for me of my disdain for him. The bullshit excuse he offered with a smirk and an air of "yes, you know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but you're only the little people and I can get away with imposing rules on you that I break casually because I can do that, because I'm so Brilliant And Wonderful And Great And In Power*, and you're not".
*It was more "I have powerful friends" and when it was expedient, they sacrificed him.
No rationalist should have pushed for lockdowns. They were not rational at all. Cummings may have had a personal weakness that he failed to stay in lockdowns and while it is not good thing, it doesn't discredit him. His insistence on lockdowns does.
Boris Johnson initially resisted lockdowns and that makes him smarter than Cummings. He yielded under pressure and lukewarmly supported them later but at least initially he was on the right track.
> a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse
That sounded plausible to me. If I'm recovering from an illness in which my eyesight was affected, and I have a long drive coming up, I might well choose to take a short drive, to see if my eyesight deteriorates when I spend half an hour focusing on the road. In case it does, I should bring my wife along, to drive us back - and if we're both going, we have to take our child, too.
That doesn't explain choosing to have a picnic. But he and his wife had just survived an illness which had a real chance of killing them, it was her birthday, and a picnic out in the open, away from other people, wasn't any sort of infection risk ... so I'm not going to get too worked up about that.
I broadly agree with all this; and I also think it would ring true to most people in the UK.
Boris is a lot cleverer than his cultivated image of "Tim Nice But Dim" lets on, and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit. If you're a woman and in any way in danger of being within a 100 mile radius of emotional intimacy with the guy, you *will* come off the worse for it.
Cummings just annoys the hell out of me, and his downfall made me smile. He's still, as you say, very much holding a grudge over it all.
But why would you call him a 'bad person'? Seems kind of strong.
Ah that’s cool you read Cummings’ stuff! What do you think of his writing style and/or general views?
Oooh, I wouldn't, because Dommie has a lot of axes to grind and is very unhappy that his super brilliant genius was squandered by Boris because Carrie threw a strop about him.
It was a bad breakup and he's still eating pints of ice cream and sobbing down the phone to his pals about that bastard 😁
I read Dominic's Substack, and I've read his previous blog and watched videos of his speeches. I've also read a lot of stuff Boris has written, listened to many of his speeches, and read a lot of stuff other people have written about him, including two biographies.
I believe both Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are highly intelligent and knowledgeable but both have somewhat flawed personalities, for politicians. Dominic has a very high opinion of himself, believing himself to always be right about everything, and also has a tendency to become fixated on certain things. It wouldn't surprise me if he was on the autistic spectrum. Boris is somewhat lazy, unreliable and unfocused. He has a desire to be liked and an optimistic disposition that leads him to make commitments that he then can't or won't follow through with.
Dominic's intense criticism of Boris (and Carrie) since being sacked honestly makes him sound just like a jilted girlfriend to me - I don't think his assessment of Boris's character is entirely unbiased.
Cummings went from thinking Boris is great to thinking he is terrible.
It's also weird because I thought it was common knowledge that BoJo's first public gig was as a newspaper columnist.
Yes, he was a successful journalist before entering politics, so the whole “I’m confused, he can write” thing just doesn’t make sense. People are too easily caught by stereotypes.
He wasn't really a successful journalist in the sense of analysis or finding things out (he got fired for making things up), he was more a successful humour columnist who often made things up (for example inventing absurd EU policies that didn't actually exist).
Go back to the original context in the post. The issue is not whether Johnson is honest; it's whether he's genuinely intelligent and can write well.
Oh yeah, I agree he can write well and turn an amusing phrase - I don't think that necessarily correlates with the kind of intelligence you need to make good decisions when you're running a country.
Right. The distinction between the practice of politics and other forms of intelligence (such as that involved in good writing, which is what got Scott's attention) is the point I've been making all along.
Boris has successfully created the image of the "flannelled fool" and even Scott got caught out by it.
Exactly right. He's far smarter than his public persona suggests.
>21 seems so opposed to the Supreme Court ruling its hard to believe they occurred at about the same time
I'm a bit confused, why is it hard to believe a different country might do something that is opposed to a US court decision?
I guess just like the coverage comparing the titan and boat migrants, it's a way to compare similar events
>16: The Confederate States of America needed a navy, but they didn’t have much of an ironworking or shipbuilding industry. And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Thus was born the cottonclad warship.
Strangely, the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship was built by the CSA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley_(submarine)
There's also a vague pop culture trend in fiction where the Confederacy is associated with weird futuristic contraptions (The Great War series by Harry Turtledove, that crappy Wild Wild West movie starring Will Smith). Any reason for this, or is it just that they're usually the villains and thus enjoy a technological edge (as per TVTropes' "Technologically Advanced Foe" trope)?
There's also the convenient "they lost the war, so the advanced tech got destroyed or stolen and hidden" part.
Rather like the tomb raider tropes where the lost tombs have perfectly working advanced traps - they've been hidden, and the raider isn't going to publish an article about what he found and how he got around them.
And the Hunley's successful outing turned out to be a suicide mission for its crew, which seems to have been bottom line for the cottonclads as well -- the last line of their wikipedia article is, "However, in the end, every single one of the once proud cottonclad warships were either sunk, burned, or captured by Union forces."
Which is a suitable metaphor for the Confederacy as a whole.
The Nazis seem to have this association as well (e.g. that movie about the moon base, the first Captain America movie and the comics it's based on). A technological edge would help them seem more threatening, but why are they all so silly? Is it because a legitimate technological edge (like the Nazis not kicking out all the good scientists and developing the A-bomb, or the South not hanging on to 1700s way of life through the industrial revolution and having actual manufacturing) is too close to reality and therefore scary? Maybe those are the groups that you can mock and make look buffoonish? Perhaps it's because they did actually try some weird things (like the CSA submarine, and l believe the Nazis tried to make a raiding force with gliders) in their desperation?
(Also Wild Wild West is amazing, I will not stand for this slander).
Nazis make more sense in that role to me because people were freaked out by V1/V2 rockets, and their rivals wound up imitating other tech they pioneered like assault rifles & "jerry cans".
With the Nazis, it's partially earned - they did create a lot of odd and/or advanced designs. Military rocketry, the first useful jet fighter, a revolutionary new submarine... they just didn't have the time and industry to get any good use out of them at that point.
I thought the first successful submarine was during the revolutionary war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible)
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if someone could find an earlier one.
The one from the revolution was not successful. From the article you linked:
"Several attempts were made using Turtle to affix explosives to the undersides of British warships in New York Harbor in 1776. All failed, and her transport ship was sunk later that year by the British with the submarine aboard."
It survived several attempts to plant explosives, and when it was sunk, it was because the ship carrying it was sunk. It may not have been a successful attack mechanism, but it was a successful submarine.
That seems especially weird to me, since the CSA was so much less industrialized & more low-tech than the Union. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Yankee!
Necessity is the mother of invention - the CSA did a few wacky things out of desperation, and a few of them sorta kinda worked.
Nit: There were no weird futuristic contraptions in Turtledove's "Great War" series; that was period-appropriate technology throughout, and just a bit of lucky spycraft to make the difference. "Guns of the South", with the time-travelling Afrikaaners, was a one-off with no connection to the other series.
I do vaguely recall a story, possibly published in "Analog", where the CSA managed to build a steampunk ballistic missile to target DC, but Stuff Happened to interrupt their plans; secret history rather than alternate history.
I wonder if Boris Johnson really wrote all of that.
Of course he did. He was writing columns like that thirty years ago, and basically has been doing ever since. It’s his profession and he made his name doing it. His career as Prime Minister was basically a bizarre interruption.
Oh, more likely than not. He was making money writing columns for different newspapers in between bouts of politics. He was perfectly capable of writing a column about "X is the greatest threat to our nation!" for the Daily Blah and one about "X is a marvellous opportunity we should seize immediately" for the National Caller.
Do you have any reason for asking this at all besides the fact that you disagree with his political views/leadership?
Like Scott, I was surprised at the skill and style, given that he is a politician. I know very little about his political views and actions.
> the government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies into getting what they want.
This is hardly limited to social media companies. The government has great power to strong-arm all sorts of companies to do what it wants, regardless of the law. This power is much greater if the target company is large - there are more pressure points the government can threaten, and there are fewer competitors to refuse to do what the government wants. Most people seem to assume that the government tries to keep companies from becoming "too large", but it seems the government generally prefers large companies that are more subject to government influence.
Government is generally biased in favor of large companies for a number of reasons. There's more visibility into an industry with a few large companies than a thousand small ones, large companies can pay lobbyists more (so politicians get more money), and as a result the large companies can do regulatory capture and fence off their industry.
Gibson Guitar says "hi!"
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation/
And there was that little Operation Chokepoint thingy which I was assured did not actually exist.
About item 4, IQ and positive life outcomes: I read only the abstract of the cited article, but it sounds like when they calculated correlation between IQ and positive life outcomes they did not consider the problem of IQ being correlated with a bunch of other things that probably also predict each other, and predict IQ.
"We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life."
Don't you think that if they had treated IQ as one of their dependent variables instead of the independentone they would have found that parental education [or income] has a positive association with child's IQ later in life and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
Or that child's health, measured in youth, has a positive association with childhood IQ and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
The point is, there are all these good things that stick together: IQ, parental education (no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual education level, parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth), occupational outcomes, health, social outcomes. No doubt there is causality operating both ways for many of them. If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents, travel, great toys, great preschools, etc. That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items. Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income. If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is regarding how so many of the good things are glommed together, but ignoring the glomming surely isn't it. And I don't see how you can make inferences about causality in a situation like this.
Many other studies have established that IQ is causal here, for example, some studies use the genes for IQ rather than IQ itself; others look at siblings with different IQs from the same family. I had a "how much does IQ vs. parental income matter?" study in the last links post.
This study was just refuting the other (equally uncontrolled) studies saying it reversed effect at a certain point.
Possibly, or it could be that since intelligence is so complex and our brains grow for so long, it take a long time for genetic influences to fully exert themselves.
But of course, if the heritability of IQ *decreased* with age, this would ALSO be taken as evidence that environment matters more than genes. So what would support the causality of IQ by your standards?
The study does mention marital status, but doesn't measure sexual activity. There is (a well known?) study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/S1054-139X(99)00061-0
Do you think that is simply not an positive outcome, or is this an exception? Or a bad study?
"Ever having sex" and "ever having had sex" are different things.
That is, going through your entire life as a virgin is probably bad, but losing your virginity earlier is not necessarily better, at least not past a certain point.
"study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex."
I would imagine that if you can redirect those energies in some other creative & useful way to society - i.e. without stoppering them - would contribute to the success and personal satisfaction[defined relationally] mentioned in #4!
I'd add that being optionally able to do what I've described seems godlike. : )
Meaning the reduced risk of compromised objectivity and will:
“It was ridiculous the power she had over him. The difference between misery and happiness was the right word from her.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself
[Disclaimer: works similarly and differently for women in a compromised situation, I'd expect.]
I know you understand about the the intertwined correlations, Scott. Not everybody does, and I thought it was important to just have that info laid out early on. I get that your point is to rebut the Swedish study.
No study can establish that IQ is causal. Studies do not establish causality. At best they can eliminate individual specific confounders. It seems plausible to me that higher IQ leads to better life outcomes but I also don't see how using genetic IQ markers in any way eliminates parental wealth as a possible mechanism. I would think you would need twin studies to do that. (genetic IQ markers are correlated to IQ which is correlated to parental wealth, after all)
IQ predicts outcomes better than parental wealth though. And adoption studies show biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ more strongly than adopted parent's wealth or IQ.
"No study can establish that IQ is causal."
<mild snark>
Perhaps an RCT where half the victims er participants are dosed with lead (as infants? in early childhood?) and are followed throughout their lifetimes, measuring all the usual life outcomes along with the IQ damage from the lead? (with Dr. Mengele or one of the Unit 731 people as PI)
</mild snark>
Replace "lead" with "magic IQ reducer lacking any secondary effects." Then double blind the administer-ers and you just might have something there.
Granted, lead can have other toxic effects. Perhaps a diabolical PI might try a bunch of different IQ reducers on different victims - lead for some, mercury for others, oxygen deprivation for a third, some blunt force trauma for a fourth, and look for common "life outcomes" effects which track well with IQ damage, but are robust to other flavors of damage which differ amongst the causative agents (ab)used. We do have a reasonable idea of how to damage intelligence, and the direction of causality would be clear in this experiment. (and, as you said, double blinding would be necessary)
That's irrelevant, because you are already conceding the correlations exist and are positive in fact, but that's exactly what many critics - particularly the Karpinski paper - are claiming does *not* exist, and that higher IQ correlates with worse outcomes.
Yeah I get it. Not everybody understands that studies like the one Scott cites here are not proof that IQ causes everything to be better. I just wanted to lay out here the reasons that studies like this do not show that higher IQ causes better health, income, etc.
Cool, the problem is it doesn't seem like you apply this level of skepticism to correlations equally. Do you have "proof" that being poor *causes* you to eat worse?
It's mostly beside the point, which is that people claim that there is a cut-off point above which IQ stops being positively associated with life outcomes. This study demonstrates this to be false.
>IQ, parental education
For adopted children, biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ better than adopted parent IQ
>parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth)
Parental IQ predicts offspring IQ better than parental wealth.
>occupational outcomes
Low IQ people are worse at their jobs, so it's pretty obvious why IQ would be directly having a causal impact on occupational outcomes.
> If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents,
Poor women are more likely to not work than middle class women, meaning they should have more time to spend with their kids.
>travel
No evidence of any causal relationship between childhood travel and intelligence or work ability
>great toys
There's no evidence that 'greatness' of toys explains any of the variance in intelligence or work ability in the US. There IS evidence that too many toys are actually bad for children, so if anything we should expect a disadvantage for wealthier kids.
>great preschools
There's no evidence that preschool quality explains any of the variance in IQ or work ability in the US. Additionally, controlling for the increase in the heritability with age, most intelligence differences between people exist by age 3, leaving little school for education, preschool or otherwise, to explain intelligence differences between people.
>That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items.
This is an extremely speculative statement, and it also forces you to defend the claim implied by it that Asian American children on average spend more time with parents, travel more, have "better" toys, and go to better preschools than non-asians including whites. It's also unclear why poor whites would have better access to all this stuff than rich blacks, as poor whites get higher SATs on average than rich blacks.
>Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income.
And it's pretty clear why intelligence would be casually related to educational achievement and job performance. If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all.
>If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc
This is all extremely speculative. Anyone with an internet connection can find health information for free. What nobody who simply *assumes* that poor people are less healthy due to their wealth does is consider the possibility that low IQ people simply don't care as much about their health as high IQ people and prefer to eat unhealthy foods because they taste better. Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable.
And in any case, there's little evidence that variance in health explains any meaningful proportion of the variance in IQ. Obviously if you're literally malnourished as a child your IQ is likely to suffer, but serious malnutrition is extremely rare in American kids and so it cannot possibly explain even a fraction of the observed variance in intelligence in the US.
You know, I really don't disagree with a lot of what you say about the likely causes and effects of variations in intelligence. (Pretty sure you're wrong about predictive value of age 3 IQ, though. IQ doesn't stabilize that young.) My main point in posting what I did was to point out that you cannot conclude much of anything about the the causes or effects of variations in intelligence from the kind of data the study Scott mentions. Not everybody understands that when a bunch of things are glommed together and all correlated with each other you can't figure out anything about what causes what. I agree that this present study certainly weighs against another study that also does not use regression to separate out the contribution of different variables to good life outcomes, but reaches an opposite conclusion about whether at high IQ levels the beneficial effect is reversed.
" Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable." What makes you think I'm unwilling to consider that possibility? Actually, the major determinant of what I'm willing to consider talking about is your hectoring manner. It's so unpleasant that I have no interest in talking further to you. If you dialed back the vehemence you'd get a better hearing. Also you would probably say the opposite of what you mean less often.
" If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all."
All good Italian food was made in America? And I thought the delusional West Coast Americans couldn’t get any more delusional.
How much time have you spent out of the United States?
To be fair, a ton: for years Scott used to blog about his travel/foreign land experiences before he got into rationality. That was a lot of fun.
Seethe
I've been to Italy three or four times. Did you read the article?
Yes, I read the article. Did you? He claims a handful of things were actually more developed in America. Not “all Italian cuisine.”
He also says absurdly ignorant things like “before the war, pizza was only found in Southern Italy.” Yeah, no duh, because it was a southern Italian dish. The other half are just random anecdotes about his grandparents. Note how the article doesn’t mention things like pesto (not once!) which conveniently doesn’t fit into the London neoliberal Financial Times narrative of “Italian cuisine isn’t actually that authentic and your old traditions are stupid.”
For someone who claims to be rational, your offhand dismissal of an entire country’s cuisine is really shortsighted. But hey, you’ve “been to Italy three or four times” so maybe you’re an expert now?
Americans really seem to think that visiting Rome a couple times and reading a newspaper article about a country somehow equals understanding the place. As an American living abroad, it makes me embarrassed, frankly.
To be fair to scott, he is not necessarily endorsing the links here. He’s not even read them all
I don't think this excuse can be applied here, because Scott wrote
> Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
which doesn't sound tongue-in-cheek or ironic to me – at least not obviously so, and Scott's other comments seem to indicate that he was actually serious about this.
It's hard to communicate to everyone all the time, but Scott has the choice between saying something literally accurate, e.g., "The idea that Italian popular Italian food originated solely in Italy by people who are genetically pure Italians is partially incorrect." Vs the more hyperbolic "all the best Italian food came from America."
Whether the latter statement is inappropriate is largely a function of whether you take it literally, and how important of a topic it is.
E.g., I tell my friends all the time that X is "the world's greatest restaurant" et cetera. Hopefully my friends find this endearing, and I think most readers find Scott's playfulness here endearing. But most readers don't moralize food origin, and have no particular loyalty to Italy.
Also, it's worth noting, just to point out some deeper accuracy to the hyperbole, that Tomatoes are a new world plant. So it must be true that "many" of the most iconic Italian dishes rely on the "London neoliberal Financial Times narrative."
Or, to go full culture war, Italians are appropriating Indigenous Native culture and should stop.
Nice!
Did _you_ read it?
These are the food that it discusses:
Panettone: the article said it was inveted by Angelo Motta in 1920 (italian brand based in italy)
Tiramisu: article is not clear about it, but all sources I can find clearly point to Italian origin
Parmisan: ok, this appear to have American origin - but honestly I had no opinion about this, I doubt any Italian had any idea whether Parmisan had Italian origins or not. [EDIT: Wrong. I misread this part in the article. The Wisconsin parmesan is the one that nowadays mostly resemble ancient parmesan which was invented by, you guess whom, Italians].
Pizza: "pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911. " Who cares where was the first "fully-fledged" pizza restaurant? We are talking about the food origin, not about who capitalized it first. The article itself, and many sources on the web, point to pizza's Italian origins.
Mozzarella: according to the article (and other online sources), comes from the south of Italy
Carbonara: "The story that most experts agree on is that an Italian chef, Renato Gualandi, first made it in 1944 at a dinner in Riccione for the US army with guests including Harold Macmillan" Made in Italy by an Italian chef. I count this as Italian origin.
There is not one food mentioned in the article that "was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." So either you used a wrong link, or your statement is quite misleading. The only exceptions I can think of are dishes that we Italians don't actually ever eat, and Americans believe are italians, such as spaghetti with meatballs.
Having said that, if you ever wanna travel the South of Italy (around Naples), I would be honored to show you around :)
I think there's a reasonable case that most pizza is more American than Italian, mostly because the kind of pizza you get in Italy is very different to the kind you get elsewhere.
Is it? I have travelled across the whole Europe and SE Asia and always got a pretty decent Italian pizza. The only exception was the awful pizza slice I got in NY. Feel free to call _that_ an American invention!
if we are swapping anecdotes, the worst pizza of my life was in Naples, and I have eaten Pizza on every continent except Antarctica.
the best was in New Haven
Fair enough! If I can add to that, there are many pizza styles even within Italy. Major differences just from a region to another. Beware the homogeneous outgroup fallacy.
American style Pizza is it's own distinct thing in europe, but not what anyone would call a normal Pizza. If you got one from a normal Pizzeria you would be angry. Most Pizza is absolutely not more american than Italien, Italien Pizza is the Norm, it's crazy to me that even here (wrong) americacentric worldviews are that prevalent.
I am probably biased by living in the UK, I think most pizza here is American-style. That said, you definitely can get more Italian style pizza (which I associate with a thinner crust and less cheese) at restaurants with a proper pizza oven, it's generally considered to be the higher quality product.
I don't think I've travelled enough to really comment on the relative popularity of American vs Italian pizza, I guess I was just claiming that a lot of pizza is very Americanized.
I have never seen anybody say that “Italian pizza is the norm.” Can you clarify, what do you mean by “Italian pizza”? If you mean Neapolitan, certainly that is not the norm internationally.
outside Europe American style pizza (specifically, American fast food style pizza) is much more common than Italian style, and thus the norm. most of the planet lives outside Europe. your (wrong) eurocentric worldview is showing.
I think this is a case of the American versions of foreign cuisines, which got adjusted for mass market American popular tastes not familiar with the exotic ingredients, became established as *the* version of the dish due to the enormous influence of American culture globally. So the American version of pizza is what we know here in Ireland, not the Italian version (until we got sophisticated enough that restaurants doing the Italian version could make a living, and still the version of pizza most people here know is Dominos etc.)
Look at green beer and corned beef and cabbage for St Patty's Day. It's not St Patty, green beer is American-only version, and the Irish version of the dish is bacon and cabbage, not corned beer, and Irish bacon is not the same cuts as American bacon.
https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/types-of-bacon-you-should-know/
> Did you read the article?
For me, the FT article is paywalled.
I don't understand this comment. I regularly listen to Alberto Grandi's podcast series the FT article mentions and read this article. Neither implies in any way that "all good "Italian" food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." Grandi's focus is on Italian cuisine being more recent and less rigid than some people think, as well as being regional (with Neapolitan food - until recently - more foreign in Milan than New York). The "American" contribution mainly relates to the international popularity of (a type of) Italian cuisine.
I applaud your attack on Italy's endemic rejection of modernity and innovation, but clearly, you have not read Alberto Grandi's book, nor followed his podcast, nor did you do any cursory research on the English wikipedia entries of the foods or dishes he cites.
Grandi's main idea is that most italian food has been invented from skratch, and then marketed as a tradition which lasted centuries: that some characheristics of a few famous dishes were originally invented in the USA is a side note that Grandi uses as a provocation whenever useful, but it does not reflect any general pattern.
The readers (and you) can do their own research and figure out the foods that were not invented in America. The list is too long. And if you do not care, which is understandable, then refrain from using Alberto Grandi's snippets on FT as a useful guide.
It is inevitable to be frustrated by how backward italian culture is, but frustration does not produce understanding.
P.S.: Not knowing whether you were in Italy three rathern than four times suggests you did not pay much attention. Again, I appreciate the criticism of Italy, but yours really does seem like a raw gut feeling.
Just taking a moment to note: The Italian American Table by Simone Cinotto is a lovely book on immigrant culture through the prism of food that tracks the development of the Italian-American food that is usually thought of as "Italian food." And it is focused on New York, so East Coast Americans this time!
The annoying thing for an Italian is that maybe what Americans/Italian Americans call Italian food is not always Italian in origin. You might have invented *your own version*, but you have not invented most of what Italians call Italian food which. So the problem is that American mislabel what is/is not Italian, not that Italian are mistaken about the origin of their food. (there can be some misconceptions of course, but please bring some better proofs, not the irrelevant article cited in the post)
Italian-Americans make the best Italian-American food!
Amazing! And all Italian-American food was invented in America! Incredible!
Besides the inflammatory (and rather inaccurate) remark introducing the paywalled FT article, I believe the main point of the discussion around synthetic meat versus animal meat in Italy risks to be missed.
It's a class (as in class struggle) thing and as such it does not translate well between old world and new world cultural spheres. Americans are pretty used to having food for the poor (cheap, industrially manufactured) and food for the rich (gourmet restaurants and the like).
Invariably any discussion regarding food misses this point. For instance, pasta Alfredo was invented by a chef, Alfredo di Lelio. I bet that his version must have tasted good because a) he was a chef b) he likely used quality ingredients. What the median American is likely to eat though, looks something like this https://www.costcuisine.com/post/costco-kirkland-signature-chicken-penne-alfredo-review or this https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/Attachment/677592-Alfredo_NUT.pdf. Just look at the length of the ingredient list. This is the real pasta Alfredo and it is shit -I mean, clearly optimized for shelf stability over taste. In Italy the median income household -but probably even the bottom decile- would never stoop so low as to be forced to consume this. And even if they wanted to, they probably would not be able to buy any such thing. The market equilibrium -either due to regulations or consumer preferences or a combination of both- simply does not produce this.
Now one could speculate as to the reasons why several products, most notably Hershey’s chocolate which is notoriously made with spoiled milk, have emerged historically in the US: long distances in a mostly empty country demand shelf stability, “inclusive” institutions (a la Acemoglu) do not support an elite that leverages refined tastes as a distinction as opposed to wealth, etc. But certainly the US market mass produces objectively inferior food and the US customer buys it. By definition of market, everyone is getting what they want given the amount they are willing an able to spend on it; locally, at least, since market equilibria do not need to be globally optimal nor unique. The Italian situation is at present quite different, with lower income disparity as a possible explanation. But, as mentioned above, regulation is likely to play a major role as well.
Understandably, the average Italian does not want quality food to become a luxury and fears that inferior -but cheaper- industrially processed food may shift the equilibrium to a situation similar to the US one. The extremely poor might benefit, but the middle classes definitely would not. Once the masses start buying, say, Chorleywood process bread to save a euro or two, who will keep the artisanal bakeries in business? They will have to charge higher prices, cater to higher income segments of the population, and ultimately generate a dichotomous market like in the US. The diatribe regarding synthetic meat can be better understood in this light. Eventually synthetic meat must become an item of mass consumption, otherwise it would fail at its main selling point, that of making the meat industry sustainable. Therefore it will have to be low in price. Synthetic meat will never be gourmet: rich people will always choose to eat the sustainably farmed free range organic grass fed <insert class marker du jour> meat, especially after signalling their superior status through environmentally responsible food choices will no longer be an option -namely as soon as synthetic meat becomes cheap enough.
The parties opposing synthetic meat are often regarded as ‘populist’. They are in fact representing the interests of the middle class. The lower classes who may stand to gain from cheap low quality food are mostly made up of immigrants at present, and notably these parties oppose immigration. As consumers, middle class Italians stand to lose if a dichotomous market is established in the US fashion. Many producers are also middle class, as small and medium enterprises are well represented in the food production business: they would have everything to lose from innovation in the meat market, which will likely concentrate power and economic resources among the few -likely foreign- actors who can afford to manufacture high tech synthetic meat. This should make it abundantly clear what the motivations for resisting this kind of innovation are.
Quite the underrated comment
Yeah, usually exaggerated claims made, presumably, for comedic effect have some kernel of truth, but I really don't see this one.
Note that "jawboning" is an existing term, that article didn't invent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_suasion#Jawboning
Although, that article is using it in a more restrictive way, whereas the sense given in the linked Wikipedia article includes things that are more legitimate.
Re: the Belgian genocide-inciter - 8 years in prison seems really light for inciting genocide! According to Wikipedia he was sentenced to 12 years because he agreed to testify against other suspects who incited genocide, and then went to serve his sentence in Italy (where he was a citizen because his dad was Italian) and was released early against international law.
I would like to hear more about what his arguments in favour of it actually were.
My understanding is that the Tutsis were a classic privileged minority versus the Hutus' poorer majority... and that a lot of Belgians found themselves identifying with one side or the other depending on whether they were French or Walloon.
Just so weird to get sucked so far into ethnic hatred when you’re not from either group. The War Nerd article implies that he just happened to randomly make a Hutu friend (or possibly lover) and it all started from there.
Israeli and Palestinian flags got used as substitute symbols in Northern Ireland for Unionist and Republican movements when were are bans on them using their own flags. The identification of Israel with Unionists and Palestine with Republicans is pretty strong at this point.
I get how that sort of symbolic identification with a group could be how he got started, but he took it way further - this is like if an Irishman made some Israeli/Palestinian friends and then travelled to Israel/Palestine to do a radio show inciting one side to greater violence! I bet there aren't many Northern Irish people with an Israel/Palestine flag in their window who have actually been there and got involved in local politics.
The funny thing is that the analogy would arguably work better the other way around
I'm a bit late to this but can you share the argument? Looks the other way to me - reactionary oppressive status quo vs radical terrorists (I know it's a lot more complicated than that in both situations but...)
That's some Heart of Darkness stuff right there.
My reaction was that is unlikely his inciting was 'material'. Doesn't take much to get one group to want to murder an outgroup. And, even if it was, if all he did was talk, how much would you want to punish him? In the US , wouldn't his speech be protected?
Yeah, this is very important. In the key case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the appellate court reversed convictions for statements made before the genocide began. As stated in the decision at paragraph 940: "The Appeals Chamber has already found that, while the pre-6 April 1994 RTLM broadcasts incited ethnic hatred, it has not been established that they substantially contributed to the killing of Tutsi. Consequently, it cannot be concluded that these broadcasts
substantially contributed to the extermination of Tutsi civilians." But the convictions were sustained re statements made while the genocide was ongoing, which as you note included names and locations of victimes.
I think the radio broadcasts were considered to be pretty influential because there wasn't a lot of other mass media available. And he wasn't just being a shock jock, but calling for extermination, inciting more attacks as the genocide took place etc. According to Wikipedia there is some evidence that there were more attacks in areas covered by the radio station.... Actual mass genocides are pretty rare so I disagree that it 'doesn't take much' for that to happen, you need a campaign of dehumanisation and justification first...
I don't think US freedom of speech protections cover you if you commit crimes against humanity - although I don't think the US recognises the ICC so maybe if he'd been a US citizen he would have got away with it.
>In the US , wouldn't his speech be protected?
Not a lawyer, but I think it depends on what precisely he was saying. If he was saying "*outgroup* is really bad and you should hate them" then probably yes. If he was saying "I want you to go to your neighbor's house and kill them right now", then probably no. Fortunately US case law doesn't really have any comparable precedent.
No.
Incite means to encourage. Should everyone who literally encourages people to carry out a genocide be automatically sent to prison for a decade or more?
Or do you actually have to demonstrate that this incitement had a material impact on the genocide being carried out? If so, do you have evidence that the genocide would not have happened, or would not have happened to the same extent, if it weren't for his incitation? I mean, he didn't even speak the same language as the vast majority of those who carried out the genocide.
Presumably these issues were explored during his trial.
As the other thread mentions, he was providing names and locations of people to kill. Presumably without him, they would be harder to find and some of them would not be killed (at least at the same time they were). This may not be a _large_ material impact, but I think it is one.
Man, how can you mention AARO and not mention what it stands for -- the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. What a cool name.
If you want to read more about this, J.B. Crawford over at Computers are Bad wrote three recent articles about it:
https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html
https://computer.rip/2023-02-17-something-up-there-pt-II.html
https://computer.rip/2023-06-07-something-up-there---nasa-and-uaps.html
This comment brought to you by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Society for Cosmic Protection.
The most conclusive studies re: polyamory will (or might) be if it continues as a high-status orientation long enough for researchers to identify if lifestyle-desistance rates correlate with age, having children, home purchase, career advancement, etc. Anecdotally, there are couples who continue to identify as poly even after ceasing to be “active,” as it were. To what degree does it mimic the 60s counterculture “free love” movement? And/or to what degree is it a convenient political-seeming identifier in a sexual marketplace that was already trending toward acceptance of dating multiple partners simultaneously before you “committed” to someone?
>Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts.
Bigelow Aerospace no longer exists in any sense but on paper. Their IP and assets, including the BEAM module on the ISS, were bought by NASA and competitors (I've heard Lockheed and Sierra).
Re #28: Boris Johnson started his career as a journalist and was primarily known for that before he went into politics, so him writing well should be no surprise because that was literally his job. Incidentally, this is something he shares in common with Winston Churchill, who was known for his articles and books even before his first stint of political prominence in WWI.
Wow I'm in a linkpost! But I must correct: I did NOT help decorate the Inn, and furthermore I have never worked for Lightcone! I don't know why everyone always thinks this... (Oli, next to me: "You don't work for Lightcone, you are just married to Lightcone.")
Hi, mingyuan! I enjoyed your informative guide. But I wanted to register a caution against locating a wall tapestry adjacent to a gas wall heater, as shown in one of the photos.
I love this type of appliance; there's nothing better than standing in front of one on a cold day, until your clothes smell ironed. But they can present a potential fire hazard. (And, I believe, are no longer code-compliant for new installations here in Texas.) A friend of mine had one start a fire in his house, causing enough damage that he had to move out. Whether it was a fault internal to the heater, or nearby materials catching fire, I'm not sure.
(Posting here, where I have an account.)
Ha, thanks — I no longer live in that place and never turned the heater on when I was there (otherwise I wouldn't have put furniture in front of it!), but I appreciate the well-meant warning :)
#1 - Holiday World is actually pretty legit - (been there a few times, including just over a year ago). Free parking, free drinks (soda/water/etc), free sunscreen, food isn't horribly overpriced.
Not a ton of rides, by theme park standards, but the ones they do have (including 4 full sized roller coasters) are pretty good.
It's no Cedar Point, but it's genuinely a pretty nice park.
The Ars Longa, Vita Brevis movie is really nice work, but I kept noticing things that looked anachronistic to me and realizing that various objects in the environment were clearly modern machine-made items (which should probably not have been available in this setting). ROT13 examples: gur nypurzvfg'f pybguvat frrzf gb or znqr bs cynfgvp, yvxr n cynfgvp enva cbapub, juvyr gur fbyqvre'f pybguvat unf n mvccre. And also gur wnef naq furyirf ybbx fb erthyne naq flzzrgevpny gung gurl frrz gb unir orra pyrneyl znqr ol n znpuvar. And also gur nypurzvfg'f zrqnyyvba vf pyrneyl ynfre-cevagrq. And other things...
Maybe this is one of those examples about how having higher resolution videos makes things look unrealistic that would have been totally fine at a lower resolution. Maybe with a lower-quality video, we just would not have been able to see these details, so there would be no apparent conflict with the setting.
In the interest of empiricism, I just tried re-watching a few scenes at the lowest video quality available on YouTube, and I actually found that it did look much more convincing! Maybe I should suggest this to people who want to watch it, and you can just try to convince yourself that something about difficult relations between Russia and other countries led to this fine movie somehow only being available in low resolution. (Or, it was recorded by the alchemist's magic security camera hundreds of years ago...)
This is really not meant as a slight against the film-makers' efforts. I agree with Scott that this is impressive and I thought the acting and cinematography were great. The set and costumes are kind of great too, it's just that, when you look at them closely enough, they're not convincingly "period".
"all good “Italian” food was invented in America"
Forget about Culture Wars this here is the most controversial thing Scott ever said. I hope he has an anti-fork vest because italians are going to be mad.
What makes it worse is that the article is paywalled so almost no one will realize it's an Italian making the claim
That's not a claim from the article though. It's Scott's.
It's a weird article hat tbuilds an obvious strawman. It claims to expose the harsh truth but everybody in Italy knows that pizza is a 19th century neapolitan cheap street food made famous by americans and that tiramisu is a modern dish created in a Treviso restaurant.
But there's also lots of continuity. Tasting History on youtube has an episode on Renaissance pizza which was a sort of cake with rose water. There's another on medieval pasta. Sure the recipes are not like the modern ones and every one interested in food history knows that because we actually have cookbooks from various parts of Europe since the Late Middle Ages.
The same goes for all culinary traditions and everywhere poor people ate what they had which was grains and vegetables.
In re pizza, I think the argument is that while pizza has its misty origins in Italy, the family of variants originated and developed in America, mostly by Americans and Italian-Americans, is what America popularized. Italians would very much like to claim pizza as it is known across the world, but I think that’s a lot like the Chinese claiming spaghetti. The food “pizza” that comes to most of the world’s mind, and the food most people love, is American.
The ironic part about that article is that it is evidence for Italy actually having a strong traditional culinary heritage; if particular dishes are only eaten in the South and the North eats something different, or if something is a Roman speciality, then that is indeed a real tradition. It's different from "everyone from the East coast to the West coast and in the middle eats Kelloggs' cornflakes".
'We never ate pizza because it was a Neapolitan thing' is not the same as 'we never ate pizza until Dominos opened a branch here'.
Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/jAHlc
Reading the article makes me suspect the Marxism is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. Plainly he has carved out a niche as the guy who explodes local myths around food, and that will get enough people enraged to listen to the podcast so they can write angry replies afterwards.
But I think he also is engaging in social manipulation, of a sort; break the consensus and destroy authority kind of thing. I mean, he's an Italian Marxist academic, what else is he gonna do except fight about politics with the Fascists (genuine article) in power?
"“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says."
"Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)"
This bit just makes me roll my eyes, having seen black pudding get its fifteen minutes of fame as 'reinvented for restaurant high cuisine consumption'. Yeah, this is what manufacturers *do*, Alberto. Do you not know that Christmas itself is pretty much a 19th century invention, and that the celebration as we know it has been exported globally to cultures that are not Christian and have no tradition of the same but are copying/adopting the Western version because this is all a symbol of being a modern, economically developed, democratic society?
"Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.”
But whether Scott was speaking tongue-in-cheek or not, the point remains: pannetone *is* an Italian food item (even if it was rejigged to be a commercial product complete with fake tradition attached).
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are not real people either. Companies invent, or find in their past (or rather the past of the business they acquired that had bought out the factory making the original product), a representative figure as a mascot. I have no idea if Aunt Bessie exists outside the imagination of the marketing department, but the Yorkshire puddings really are good (unsolicited testimonial)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Bessie's
https://www.auntbessies.co.uk/
Look at the "ploughman's lunch": while bread and cheese has been eaten for generations, especially the less well-off, the modern iteration of the "tradtional" meal was a marketing campaign in the 50s to get people to eat cheese (which was now no longer rationed) and permitted pubs to offer a simple meal along with beer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploughman's_lunch
"The film The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present". The title alludes to the debatable claim that the supposedly "traditional" meal was the result of a marketing campaign of the 1960s devised to encourage people to eat meals in pubs."
I remember a reference in a horror short story I read years back, and presumably based on personal experience, of an American stoping off in a small village on his way to meet someone, going in to the pub, and wanting a meal. He was offered a "ploughman's lunch" which he, in his innocence, imagined would be some traditional hearty rustic stew and since he was hungry and cold he welcomed the idea. He was very surprised to get a hunk of cheese, a slice of bread, and some pickled onions as a cold collation instead 😁
“After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.” Oh, that's funny. Thank you for the history!
Perhaps someday we will see "Ye olde Aspertamery" :-)
8. Genghis Khan, like Alexander the Great, is mainly so well liked because generations of succeeding rulers legitimized their rule through descent from him. This lasted into the 20th century. So you have centuries of propaganda about how great he is. In contrast, Hitler lost and even fascist movements aren't eager to claim descent from his ideas.
The more interesting case is Attila who went from being a similar figure in medieval Europe (he shows up in a lot of sagas and stories) to being forgotten as his use as a tool of legitimacy disappeared. And then when historians turned back to the Classics he became the widely loathed figure he is today.
Atilla was lionized by hungarians who long claimed descent from the huns. This theory is far less popular these days but Atilla is still a popular name in Hungary and some people identify as huns.
Genghis Khan is still very popular in Mongolia where he is seen as the founder of the nation. In 2008 they built a 40 m tall statue of his which is the world's tallest equestrian statue.
Attila was lionized by the Hungarians during their national revival in the 19th century. But long before that, before the Hungarians even arrived, there are tales of Atil or Etzel, King of the Huns, from the Germans and to some extent Slavs. Most famously King Etzel in the original Nibelungenlied.
I suppose it also helps that Genghis had lots of descendants while as far as I know, Hitler had none.
Alexander didn't have many descendants either. But he had successors eager to claim his mantle. I don't think Hitler has any of those (or at least no big/important ones).
Yeah, I, Claudius did weird things to my priors. There's all this cultural reverence for ancient dictators, I originally inherited a lot of the admiration for these folks, even though military coups, totalitarian dynasties, and steamrolling neighbors are not generally something I associate with healthy polities in the modern era.
Probably all of them were awful.
The first time I went to Rome I went to see the spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated. The spot is covered in flowers and flower vendors stand outside for people who want to put one there. I was naive in my own way but I found it deeply uncomfortable. And I still can't say I feel all that warm about such things.
23. The idea this was a display of power is a bit reaching. There's no reason to believe that this isn't simply some local government diverting part of the fireworks budget to a more modern show. East Asians love fireworks at festivals and I'm sure the people who watched this loved it too. But the idea it's some kind of military display is... weird.
The drone light show was invented in the EU by a bunch of artists, the industry is still concentrated in the west, and the technology is widespread, common, and can be openly purchased. And it's never used cutting edge drones or anything that would be all that useful militarily. Which is how, for example, the Gulf States got them. It's also being pushed in a lot of big cities worldwide as being more environmentally friendly.
Unless I'm missing something this is a bit like saying, "Cities all over China are stockpiling large amounts of gunpowder devices near Lunar New Year. What could they be planning!?" I guess fireworks or drone shows might have some incidental application to military power. But I have a hard time seeing it.
I don't know if it's just you, but I think this is the first drone show from China I've seen. I've seen videos of some from America and one from Israel.
My uneducated opinion is that Chinese people are more willing to put next level effort into things like this (like the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony)
Several cities near me did 4th of July drone shows this year instead of fireworks this year, mostly due to fire concerns I think. You can find videos of them on YouTube. I think they are just starting to become popular and we will see more of them in the next few years.
Yeah, the city next to mine is doing a drone light show for their post-4th festival this year because of exactly those concerns. I was pretty skeptical, but that video actually made them look neat. Probably the one close-by wouldn't be as impressive, but I no longer think drone light shows are inherently just cheap knock-offs of real fireworks.
I think it's just you. Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech. I saw drones last 4th of July. Etc. Though East Asians really like fireworks and light displays at their festivals. And in China such public events are both a way to entertain the public and for local party officials to show off to their superiors.
> Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech.
Yes, this is the first thing that comes to mind when I see the phrase "drone light show" as it was the first one I had ever seen (on TV). And as others pointed out, a few US cities did drone shows this Fourth of July instead of fireworks. On the coast, there is not just fire to think of but the fallout from fireworks falling into the ocean--or at least that was the rationale I saw being given.
I spoke to a drone show producer about this at an amusement park industry expo last year. Drone shows in Europe and Asia can be more complex because the promoters have more flexibility in the venues they can put them on. In the US, a drone show will not get an FAA permit if any portion of the show programming goes over people, regardless of duration or weight of drone.
This constrains the types of venues that can display drone shows pretty dramatically, and for practical purposes, eliminates venues that may be able to recuperate the cost of the development of the show by having multiple shows such as theme parks or outdoor stadiums.
FAA regulation is probably not the whole story. I would imagine the costs are higher and a drone show probably gets lower guest satisfaction scores than a good fireworks show. But as the technology gets better and drone shows get more impressive, the costs will go down and the entertainment value will go up. So there will probably be more in the future.
London's new year show has excellent drone works alongside the fireworks
I think scott was trying to make a joke related to some people in the US always assuming that anything that Chinese people or the government do must have some ulterior motive related to geopolitics.
27. It gets better. The German Black Bee was a pure invention. In reality it's the same species they have in Poland and the surrounding nations. But they invented a new breed to say it was totally different. However, they also carved out an exemption for the Catholics to keep their Carniolans. And as a result post-pandemic the repopulation was done partly through crossbreeding and partly through Carniolans propagating north. There's probably some metaphor in there.
As you might expect, this was a way for the Party to insert itself into this industry. The racial purity laws as applied to agriculture served as a form of control for Nazi Party members in the countryside as well as giving opportunities for control and to reward favored constituents through breeding licenses and other favors. The Nazis wanted to assert Party control over every aspect of the economy.
I had never heard of those bees before, and I'm tickled by the notion of little Catholic bees buzzing around devoutly 😁🐝
"It is favored among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfully against insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in its behavior toward beekeepers."
Yeah, Carniolans are great. The main reason to use darks is they're more resistant to cold.
The association with Catholics wasn't as strong outside the German/Dutch/Scandinavian world. However, the 19th century Kulturkampf created significant polarization in Germany between Catholics and Protestants including among agricultural practices.
Which reminds me - there's a local saint (or at least, there's a church dedicated to her in the area, even though her cultus arose in Cork) who is patron saint of bees and beekeeping, St. Gobnait:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobnait
So the little Catholic German bees have their own saint looking after them! 😁
Thanks for introducing me to a new rather interesting saint.
28. Boris Johnson is a somewhat well known Classicist and literary figure. Nothing huge. But enough that before he was a Brexiteer or much more than a minor politician he was participating in debates and exchanges about those subjects. It doesn't surprise me he's good at it. It's a skill like any other.
One of the things I am grateful for early on is the degree to which all the art teachers I knew always hammered in: Yes, gifted people exist, but at the end of the day it's mostly a skill. And even gifted people need a lot of training. There's this weird myth (and a very old one) that art springs naturally from the soul rather than being a craft and, to put it even more prosaically, a job.
31. I do sometimes feel like we're living after the gold rush. There's a few stars getting made out there but it seems like the height of Scott Alexander style blogging fame was about a decade ago when places like Vox or content creators like Channel Awesome really seemed (for all their flaws) like they were doing something that could succeed more traditional media. Now it seems like all the long form content producers have been around for a decade and the rising stars are the short formers doing TikToks etc.
I have no direct evidence any of that's true. Just a feeling. But it is worth noting that one thing Vine, TikTok, etc have is discoverability and the ability to go viral. And it seems like Twitter, FB, even Instagram are just less discoverability platforms. I'm not sure if there's a good method for longform to go that route outside of Youtube/TikTok clipping.
This is why I'm interested in a simple story that blames it on an algorithm change.
This is a little arrogant for me to say, but I don't notice too many amazing bloggers who really deserve to make it big but haven't (there might be a handful, and of course there are many who don't deserve to make it big but have). But partly this could be because blogging talent is a feedback loop - you're somewhat good, people pay attention to you, and then you work harder and become better.
How about this, from Zvi's latest article on twitter (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/twitter-twitches):
> Twitter owner Elon Musk continues to be surprised by how Twitter works. Last week he learned that their code ‘shadowbanned’ any account with low reputation score, preventing them from trending, and the calculation was based on ‘how many times were you reported’ so every big account got shadowbanned.
There is a massive gap in scale here. Even "success" in long-form blogging involves a small audience.
Both Freddie DeBoer and Brad Delong recently mentioned having around 40 thousand subscribers, and this blog was at 80 thousand in January. Meanwhile, Shaq has 31 *million* Instagram followers. (I will refrain from repeating the word "thousand" a thousand times to emphasize the gap in size between a thousand and a million.)
The facts are clear: outside of our niche community of feldspar-enthusiasts ( https://xkcd.com/2501/ ), approximately nobody wants to read long-form content.
You'd only need to repeat the word thousand twice, which you already did.
This is not a valid comparison. You are comparing the number of paying subscribers to that of free “followers”.
It makes sense that you wouldn't encounter many great bloggers who haven't made it big. By definition they are writing in obscurity
I agree, though Scott might have a better network for finding good obscure bloggers than most people do.
During a gold rush you see a ton of low quality content do really well because demand so outstrips supply. It's during a contraction that the market seems "fair" as the lower quality providers get cut out and the higher quality providers manage to survive (often by raising prices). Think about all the quick cash grab low quality AI products/takes out there right now. This is a sign that the market is bubbling, not that it's declining. Meanwhile in crypto the tide has gone out, a lot of scams have been revealed, and the survivors are the big relatively legitimate firms. Which is a sign the market is contracting.
A decade ago you had Mic and big venture investments into things like Buzzfeed and the growth of Breitbart. You might not like any of these sites. But they were a sign the market was frothy. And I don't think that's really the case anymore.
Instead we seem like we're in the cash cow/value extraction phase. How many new creators has Substack really made? Letters from an American maybe. (But really, how much help does an academic who writes history from a progressive point of view during the last couple of years need?) The vast majority of people who're successful on Substack have pre-existing audiences and were attracted onto the platform by payment. In part because Substack realized that higher quality writers could charge subscriptions to extract more money per reader.
I don't begrudge Substack their model. But between (for example) Yglesias on Substack and Klein over at the NYT who "won"? Whose audience is growing, who has access to more resources? I think the answer is Klein. And that's not universal. Between Don Lemon and Mr Beast who "won"? I think the answer is Mr. Beast! But Youtube still has discoverability, in part due to getting into the shorts game.
And yes, the ideal thing is to come in when the market is hot, get rewarded for relatively low quality content, and use that money/experience to climb up. If you don't then you need to enter with significant polish which usually means training/experience/financial investment.
Klein is a star for the NYT so he may be an exception but please bear in mind that a tiny percentage of NYT staffers make anything like what Yglesias is making. Even a lot of long-tenured and celebrated NYT people make ~$500k or less; I believe Yglesias is making twice that. Substack's big advantage is price discovery. And that price discovery function bought the house that I'm typing this in.
I think we agree. Yglesias is undoubtedly doing better than median NYT journalist (or really most journalists). But he was also a founder at Vox so that's not really comparing like to like. Whereas Klein to Yglesias, both cofounders, is a like to like comparison.
Substack's model is a great way for pre-existing writers to get more money from their following. I really don't begrudge them that model. That's a perfectly valid business niche. A good one even.
But unless I'm mistaken (and I might be) Substack isn't really creating new stars. You and Yglesias and Scott all had pre-existing audiences. Your success on here is primarily monetizing a pre-existing audience. (Which, to repeat myself, good! Great!) I can't think of a lot of cases where a writer here built a new audience or creating figures who are even bigger than mainstream people.
Congratulations on getting your own house and long enjoyment of it to you!
A commie celebrating private ownership of property...
Yes, this too.
I don't know if this counts as the algorithm but it's a combination of the fact that a) non-verified users have had their engagement throttled through the Twitter Blue thing and b) media types are almost all of the left-leaning kind who wouldn't be caught dead subscribing to Elon Musk's service, so they see each other's tweets less which in turn makes it harder for pieces to surface.
Not trying to start a fight.
It could be the reason you're not seeing "deserving bloggers is your opinion of what's deserving has shifted quite a lot, especially in regard to originality. Your motte-and-bailey coinage was new, but the idea of the phenomenon (and discussion of the same) was not. However, you introduced it to a lot of people who were not exposed to the earlier discussions and for whom it seemed completely original. IIRC, you're not young wrt bloggers, but you are extremely young to the "expounding in magazines" crowd.
#10 is a great example of helicopter parenting becoming a de-facto legal requirement, to the great harm of both the parents and children, but also yet another opportunity to criticize city design that makes ANYONE walking ANYWHERE into borderline dangerous activity. America is gonna have to take an L here, I'm afraid.
"#10 is a great example of helicopter parenting becoming a de-facto legal requirement, to the great harm of both the parents and children, but also yet another opportunity to criticize city design that makes ANYONE walking ANYWHERE into borderline dangerous activity. America is gonna have to take an L here, I'm afraid."
I disagree.
My wife and I have raised a kid (who is no longer a kid ...) such that he was walking the 1 mile to our local downtown when he was nine. The incentive for him was that he could go to the library on his own (which he liked to do) *and* we'd pay for him to have lunch at a favored Mongolian BBQ restaurant that he liked a lot. We know of no other kids his age near us who were permitted to do this and the standard concern was that either (a) some busybody would call the police or Child Protective Services, or (b) a police officer would notice him out and about without any help and bad things would follow.
*FURTHER*, we live in deep blue Silicon Valley (if this matters) and we home schooled, so it wasn't uncommon for him to be out on his own in the late morning or early afternoon during school days -- when he was "supposed to be" in school.
Our analysis was that we were upper middle class (which, among other things, means we could hire a lawyer if necessary) and figured that we wouldn't lose out kid to CPS on the first encounter. If he DID get picked up by the police ... well, then we'd reconsider.
He was never stopped and we never got a call from CPS.
My take on this is that (many of) the kids can have less helicopter parenting if the parents are just willing to take a *tiny* amount of risk. But not taking risk the heart of helicopter parenting :-(
Always curious when you should apply "that was a decado ago, things have changed", vs "in a large country people have different experiences different places and even different reactions to the same stimulus". I remember all the conversations about how colleges have gone downhill from when I was a decade out from college and I could never tell which perspective to use.
I think the *meta* perspective here is that you don't have to just give up because a bad thing MIGHT happen. If I read about a lot of upper-middle-class kids being carted off by CPS then I'd reconsider. But I don't. And I think there is value in kids developing independence so I'm willing to take *some* risk.
The alternative seems to be to assume the worst and always plan as if it is likely. I have neighbors with a 17-year (almost 18-year) old who is going off to college in a few months. She has never been allowed to walk on her own even the 1/2 mile to our local coffee shop. Not in daylight, on sidewalks in our low-crime rate town. Because she might be kidnapped.
Her parents are correct: If she is allowed out on her own then she MIGHT be kidnapped. As things stand, she has made it to college age without being kidnapped, but has also never been unsupervised by adults. That strikes me as a risk, too.
That's fair, but there have been a lot of reports of CPS going after middle-class and upper-middle-class kids. See Lenore Skenazy's org and blog. But the "great" thing about news is even if you do hear about it happening to a lot of kids (whether that is kidnapping or kidnapping-by-CPS) doesn't mean it's actually happening to a significant percentage of kids. So :shrug_emoji:.
A number of states are signing laws to change this and enshrine protections for parents. Texas got one back in 2021 called the "Reasonable Childhood Independence" law.
Yeah. I don't read Lenore anymore (mostly because kid is grown up), but one lesson to draw from the reporting is that if "they" have to go 500 miles from my house to find a story of CPS stepping in for something like this then it can't happen very often.
And, also, I wasn't worried about CPS going after me, but CPS *winning* and taking my kid. I don't remember a lot of stories of that happening and really don't remember any where an upper-middle class family lost their kid(s). Poor, single black moms ... yep. But that isn't me.
So, I took what I thought was a calculated gamble. It paid off. I think the gamble is still reasonable today but the folks with kids today have to make that call.
>I have neighbors with a 17-year (almost 18-year) old who is going off to college in a few months. She has never been allowed to walk on her own even the 1/2 mile to our local coffee shop.
Do you mean to suggest that this is typical helicopter parenting? It seems like an outlier even among that group.
I don't think it is typical, but I don't think it is 1-in-a-million either (for my neighborhood). When my child was six he had as friends two brothers that lived on the "other end" of our complex. He was six, the two brothers were an older six and an eight year old. The rules were that my six year old could walk down to their house to play and he could walk down to their house and bring them back to our house to play but they could NOT walk down to our house (together) to see if my son could play.
From the other mom's perspective, MY (youngest) six year old was adequate supervision for her two older kids when out walking, but here two kids on their own were a no-no. No, I have no idea how this was supposed to work. And her two kids were perfectly "normal" so it wasn't like they needed supervision from a six year old [also, the older one especially eventually got upset enough to put an end to this ... the idea that he was being looked after by a kid almost three years younger was pretty annoying.] No, I don't *understand* it, I just observe it.
BUT ... the key point was that (a) parents CAN choose to not helicopter even if there is a non-zero chance that someone might call CPS, but (b) many don't because they are so afraid of ANYTHING bad happening. I can't put a percentage on "many" for my neighborhood, but it appears to be non-trivial :-(
Ah, but these are little kids, and if I understand you correctly the eight-year-old was able to talk some sense into his parents. What I find shocking is the seventeen-year-old not being allowed to walk unsupervised.
I'm surprised to see that you would link to that silly "Italian food is actually American" article.
It's a classic: some random historian wants to get their name out their so they come up with a controversial sounding theory and get published in all the papers. Then a bunch of other historians come out and say no, that's stupid, but the publicity is already gained.
Except in this case no one really cares that much about food history, and people don't really like snobby Italian foodies so this nonsense has just persisted and I see this link used as evidence all the time.
"Man of one Study" should be enough on its own to instinctively distrust anything like this, and this guy doesn't even have a study! He just has this one interview and a history of trolling Italians. It's amusing, but I really wish people would stop spreading it like gospel
Apparently he also has a book and a three season run podcast on the topic. I'd normally agree with your skepticism except the fact that, as you claim, no one has debunked it yet ups the likelihood in my eyes.
There isn’t much to debunk in fact. It is pretty well know that tiramisu, for instance, is a recent invention. Or that pizza was not widespread throughout Italy until relatively recently. You can always deconstruct identities through careful examination of history to some degree. That doesn’t mean that they are entirely made up. Why stop at culinary culture? You could deconstruct Italy itself this way, no? When it got united in 1961 Rome wasn’t even the capital, its current borders changed a lot from the original ones, there’s people who speak German and eat knödel but carry an Italian passport because of the way post WWI treaties partitioned Tyrol. Also once I went to Malta and ordered due caffè per favore and no one got upset. This deconstruction trick is amusing the first few times you see it, then it gets old pretty quickly. Besides, Scott’s extreme claim is not in any way supported by the article, even if we were to take it at face value.
You would be correct if you weren't ignoring the legions of internet pedants with strong opinions on food, of which Italian food purists are a particularly obnoxious group. The very comment I replied to was not stating that the article is boring, or obvious, or uninteresting, but rather implying it was straight up wrong (which, as you point out, it is not). And go on any internet post about Italian food and you can't throw a rock without someone criticizing how it's not done exactly perfect to the extremely storied traditions. It's these people and these opinion which are being pushed back against by articles like the one linked.
Reasonable takes like "all food is context dependent" or "foods change with time and mingle with new influences" is not the target. Reasonable people don't dissolve into apoplectics if someone calls a pasta dish with cream in it "carbonara". There are people who honestly believe that many of the famous Italian dishes mentioned have hundreds upon hundreds of years of history and if you make it "wrong" you are "insulting Italian tradition". In my opinion that's nonsense (and I'd guess you agree), and it's what the article is pushing back against.
If everyone agreed with me, then articles like this one would be boring and uninteresting. But lots of people (or at the very least a small group of _very loud_ people who are common on the internet) don't.
As for Scott's extreme claim, it seemed rather obvious to me that it was tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. The fact that it has seemingly riled up so many people sort of proves the point, in my opinion.
This is likely really only an issue on the internet, but that doesn't mean it's not a valuable thing to exist. If it's not for you, then ignore it and move on.
As an Italian who lives in Canada I had my fair share of pinapple “pizza” served at meetings and I even took a bite sometimes. If you want to put cream in a carbonara I will forgive you (but trust me, the original version tastes better). Still there is a huge logical jump from “Italian cuisine should not be treated as a religion” to “all Italian food was invented in America”. I can’t believe we are even debating the latter, though it’s probably good for the blog’s engagement metrics.
I reiterate: tongue-in-cheek hyperbole
Must be so
About #18: There used to be whatsbetter.com with the same idea. E.g. the Backstreet Boys are better than stomach cancer: https://web.archive.org/web/20041225003404/http://whatsbetter.com:80/display.pyt?item=100&item=16082
Oh, and PS, here's their top ten list: https://web.archive.org/web/20050204084900/http://whatsbetter.com/ranklist.pyt
1. The Best Thing You Can Imagine (724)
2. Love (647)
3. Being Loved (644)
4. Sex (627)
5. The Big O (580)
6. A Stack Of $100 Bills (576)
7. A Sense of Humor (502)
8. Romance (495)
9. Monty Python The Holy Grail (490)
10. Free Money (490)
Elo Everything reminds me of Earth Reviews. https://neal.fun/earth-reviews/
#11: in Os Maias, the best-known Portuguese realist novel, written in 1888 by Eça de Queiroz, one of the plot points is the opposition between "English" (supposedly based on outdoorsiness, exercise, contact with nature, and overall autonomy and exploration) and "Portuguese" (supposedly based on physical protection, lack of contact with the outdoors, memorization) ways of bringing up children. Protagonist Carlos receives the former, while his father Pedro and secondary character Eusebiozinho receive the latter.
8. There's a history of libertarianism I can't find efficiently (hour long from reason.com) which says that libertarianism started as an abolitionist movement, but was mysteriously silent during the civil rights movement. Perhaps there is some explanation for why toxic conservatives are attracted to libertarianism these days.
Goldwater desegregated areas he was directly in charge of in Arizona, but opposed the federal Civil Rights Act.
I don't think it's mysterious - the actually-existing civil rights movement, however good it might have been, was very much the government imposing things upon society by force. I think the libertarians were by-their-own-standards correct to be against it, it was just one of those times when libertarianism wasn't the right philosophy for the hour.
Sure was great when the government forced sheep to accept wolves into their midst, what's a few hundred thousand murders and rapes?
But hey, as long as the principles are just who cares if the kulaks get lynched, right?
What do you have in mind?
https://datahazard.substack.com/p/interracial-murder
The link you posted below is certainly interesting, but I think extrapolating that to "white people= sheep; black people = wolves" is a misrepresentation, and, frankly, nakedly racist.
I actually assumed Guy was being ironic there? modeling-by-exaggeration the sort of absurdist absolutism which helps libertarianism avoid broad political relevance or impact?
Not ironic and not a libertarian, just not a fan of forcing people to live side by side with abusers.
Me neither, but the analogy you offered is so ridiculous that....yea I still think you must be trolling us. Going second-order with it by replying too and kudos for that -- I do always respect commitment to the bit.
"Extrapolating"? It's a figure of speech, right? Like foxes in the henhouse. It certainly gives the right idea of who is largely victimizing whom.
Would it be a misrepresentation and sexist to use the same words to describe males in women's prisons?
The problem here is that you are taking the stat from the linked article (0.403% of black Americans murder a white American vs 0.041% of white Americans murder a black American) and using it to characterize an entire class of people, defined by a trait that they cannot control, as wolves.
Even assuming the math is right in the article (and I have my doubts; 1 in 250 black Americans and 1 in 2500 white Americans seems bizarrely high), I hope you can see why your original statements are ridiculous at best and prejudiced at worst. I understand now why Paul assumed you were being ironic (and why I am now assuming you are a troll).
Edit: grammar
Psychopaths can't control being psychopaths, so would it be wrong to say that letting psychopaths run a daycare center is like letting a fox into the henhouse? Suppose only 0.4% of psychopaths actually murder a child, then isn't it prejudiced to equate them all with foxes?
I'm sure you realize that murder is just one example of the increased antisocial behavior that other races have to endure because of forced integration.
Perhaps if you try empathizing you can understand why a mountain of victimized men, women and children can cause one such as myself to go so far as to use a common metaphor to describe the perpetrators.
I must confess that sometimes when I'm speaking about a friend just as they show up I might imply it's the devil appearing, even when I assume the chance of that friend having committed murder is less than 0.4%!
>Even assuming the math is right in the article (and I have my doubts; 1 in 250 black Americans and 1 in 2500 white Americans seems bizarrely high)
Just look at the FBI statistics: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
Around 250 blacks murdered by whites each year, around 500 (or more) whites murdered by blacks every year
So let's be genorous and call it twice as many B on W murders
There's roughly 5 times as many whites as blacks, so there should be around 5 times more W on B murders than vice versa, but there 0.5 times as many. This mean that black on white murder is ten times more common than white on black murder per capita, almost exactly the numbers you mentioned there.
Your ignorance isn't a justification for incredulity.
> I hope you can see why your original statements are ridiculous at best and prejudiced at worst.
The black/white crime differential is very close to the male/female crime differential.
So unless you think the treatment and characterisation of men by the police, courts, prisons, media, feminists etc as being violent compared to women is "ridiculous and prejudiced", then you're simply being a hypocrite.
Is it "racist" that a majority of interracial violence in the US is black on white?
Whenever a black person is killed by a white person, much harsher terms than "wolf" are used to describe the white person.
The Jim Crow laws were, to put it mildly, unlibertarian. Do I gather there was never a period post-Jim Crow when people were just allowed to serve whichever customers they wanted to?
AFAIK that's true. You can see a discussion of this at https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/libertarians_an_5.html
Relevant short post characterizing the civil rights movement's relationship to libertarianism: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/05/how_libertarian.html.
The libertarian argument against desegregation is "it's their property, they can do what they want with it and on it, and that includes having the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, including being black." However, there were also various laws that said businesses *must* be segregated, and I don't know if there were any notable libertarian voices that were advocating for the right to run a *desegregated* business in places where segregation was mandated by law.
That was before the word "libertarian" was broadly used as a political term in English, but there were plenty of people advocating the right to run a desegregated business. Including an awful lot of businesses that didn't care what color a person's skin was as long as their money was green, and so the sort of people who tend to support the rights of businessmen.
If you're not free to be a bigot, you're not all that free.
Very true. Your phrasing makes it sound worse than reality though - if you can only choose among government-approved positions (such as anti-racist positions), then you have no freedom at all. Those in favor of current government positions may not see this clearly, just as those in support of forced segregation didn't see a problem with it in the 1920s. Letting the government approve and disapprove positions means giving up all freedom. When the leaders change and switch which positions are favored, then those who become disfavored will suddenly realize the importance of not allowing the government to control such things.
10. In Switzerland kids are supposed to got to school and even oldest year on kindergarten by themselves starting at about 6. It’s not just permitted, it is customary. Kids can take trains and buses by themselves.
I'm in favour of children having independence when they're ready for it, but perhaps worth pointing out that the UK, where most children start travelling to school independently from around 10, has a much higher proportion of pedestrian deaths as a total of total child road deaths (a majority are pedestrian deaths.) And of course these peak with school start and ending times. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/442236/child-casualties-2013-data.pdf
Of course these are raw data, and direct comparisons to the US (which has a higher overall death rate) aren't really possible. And fortunately road traffic deaths have declined in recent years; though in part this may be due to increasingly protective parents.
In the U.S. the rate of child pedestrian deaths has declined by more than 90 percent since the 1970s:
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/children
"the rates at which they were killed as pedestrians and bicyclists declined by 92 and 95 percent, respectively."
I've also seen but cannot quickly locate a graph from the CDC showing that overall childhood accidental-death rates in the U.S. have declined steadily since about 1960, and that the trend holds whether including or exempting deaths as passengers in cars.
My siblings and I grew up long enough ago (in the 1960s/70s) in a big U.S. city that we are personal witnesses to the radical shift in parental attitudes about this. And we definitely did enjoy and benefit from our parents letting us roam starting from young ages, those are some of my personally most treasured childhood memories....but as a parent I've been clear that we would not be doing things the same way. Because I do remember the downside risks of it just as well as the upsides.
As my mother once said regarding a different issue [child sex abuse], "In my day (born 1928) everybody knew who the 'funny uncle' in each family was, and each generation's mothers tried to quietly tell the next ones knew not to ever leave their little girls alone with him. And then otherwise we just didn't talk about it. But it was just as real whether we talked about it or not."
This not an argument that childhood should be or could be risk-free or anything so stupid, and I have not parented along those lines. My point is simpler: that commentary about the topic of how much freedom children should have or could have ought to always be honest about the degree to which it is a tradeoff.
Literally just had to ground my 7 year old today for sneaking off with a pair of friends out of the park and into the allotments without telling me where she was going. In some ways I'm pleased she's getting into scrapes with friends for the social aspect but at the same time I can't have a 7 year old just disappearing with no idea where she is, she doesn't have a phone or anything!
>I can't have a 7 year old just disappearing with no idea where she is
Why not?
Why would I? Am I supposed to leave the park and go home and just make dinner even though I have no idea where she is and she has never walked back home by herself? Or just wait at the park by myself forever indefinitely?
Plus the allotments are gated - I don't even know the keycode for it. They snuck in behind someone. Another parent fortunately spotted them and let me know, I had to wait outside for 10 minutes for them to let me in.
Also worth noting that both the park and allotments abut the river and she doesn't know how to swim.
If it wasn't for the involvement of other adults, I would have been stuck frantically looking for her and be unable to find her because she was a place I couldn't actually go to, and she would have been trapped inside a gate with nowhere to go except into the river. She literally couldn't have gone home or back to meet me, even if she had wanted to. And she had no way to call for help.
It be one thing if she had told me where she was going and had an agreement on where and when to meet. It's another thing entirely to disappear whilst we are out.
Given she just up and left without being responsible about it, I'm certainly going to give her less independence from now on, because she showed she couldn't be trusted.
"Given she just up and left without being responsible about it, I'm certainly going to give her less independence from now on, because she showed she couldn't be trusted."
While it was reasonable for you to be worried, and reasonable for you to scold/discipline her, that's not going to be a helpful reaction. If she went off with her friends without telling you just out of heedlessness, then that's natural. As is if she went off with her friends without telling you because "Mom won't let me go".
But the second one is the problem, and if you crack down on her, you'll just drive her to do it more. Get it into her head that she can't just up and off without telling you or letting you know, and that *for now* you are not going to let her off the lead as a punishment for not being trustworthy, but *in time* so long as she is responsible you will give her more independence.
If instead you say "forever and ever I am going to hover over you", you will only drive her into being deceitful when she needs to get out from being smothered. That's a worse outcome, where she learns she has to lie to you in order to do things she wants to do.
Yes, that's right.
And that is an example of the real-life tradeoffs that real-life parenting requires us to navigate. My irritation with the contemporary caterwauling about turning kids into overprotected snowflakes is the reducing of those balancing acts into simple "obvious facts".
(And yes it is that much more teeth-grinding when the people who are so confidently opining along those lines turn out to have never themselves been parents, and yes I am now thinking of a couple of my dear siblings....)
Maybe she should have a phone.
Definitely time for a watch phone
Greater as a percentage of road deaths is suggestive that children spend a greater percentage of their road time walking compared to the US. What is more relevant for overall safety questions is whether the annual rate of child death while walking per capita is substantially different. (If they're just reducing in-car deaths and making no change to pedestrian deaths, that would be great. If they're doubling pedestrian deaths while making no change to in-car deaths, that would be awful.)
Re #8, I find the level of Napoleon worship and apologism on the modern internet extremely offensive. No doubt, Napoleon was an extremely able man, both as a soldier and an administrator, and the economic reforms he imposed generally upon Europe were vastly for the better.
But, his wars slaughtered millions and inflicted incalculable suffering on millions more. These wars were largely borne from his ego and his inability to tolerate neutral powers.
And yet, the extent to which ‘the kids’ (if you’ll forgive the very imprecise term) now idolize him makes me think the likes of Hitler and Stalin might be next, or if not them then their most brilliant subordinates, no heroes any of them.
how do you feel about Wellington? George Washington? Julius Caesar?
Have you seen how the kids feel about communism? They love it!
Very plausibly the world might be a better place if Napoleon had won.
Also idolizing Napoleon isn’t a modern phenomenon. Even a lot of people outside of France admired him when he was alive.
"Re #8, I find the level of Napoleon worship and apologism on the modern internet extremely offensive."
"Also idolizing Napoleon isn’t a modern phenomenon. Even a lot of people outside of France admired him when he was alive."
Various quotes from Chesterton about Napoleon below in support of the second view:
"It is not necessary nowadays to defend the French Revolution, it is not necessary to defend even Napoleon, its child and champion, from criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison, which even at the time had more of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing and Talavera. The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats."
"But Elizabeth Barrett, at least, was no snob: her political poems have rather an impatient air, as if they were written, and even published, rather prematurely – just before the fall of her idol. These old political poems of hers are too little read to-day; they are amongst the most sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modern blunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And Elizabeth Barrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength of the phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much as Voltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: “Martyrs by the pang without the palm” – or “Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse,” these expressions, which are witty after the old fashion of the conceit, came quite freshly and spontaneously to her quite modern mind. But the first fact is this, that these epigrams of hers were never so true as when they turned on one of the two or three pivots on which contemporary Europe was really turning. She is by far the most European of all the English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. Take any positive political fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon. Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish lines—
“He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak
Madman!”
As if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws of Nature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, than Tennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon’s fall is in one line
“And kings crept out again to feel the sun.”
Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that."
"We remember yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances. One is Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery would say, was only “The Last Phase”; or at least the last but one. During the strongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made him immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French justice and equality."
"This is why our age can never understand Napoleon. Because he was something great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been something extraordinary, something inhuman. Some say he was the Devil; some say he was the Superman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a good man with some greater moral code? We strive in vain to invent the mysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all its subtleness will never guess his strange secret; for his strange secret was that he was very like other people."
"That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend—that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word “impossible.” One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane."
>>But, his wars slaughtered millions and inflicted incalculable suffering on millions more. These wars were largely borne from his ego and his inability to tolerate neutral powers.
This doesn't seem much different than most of the wars in europe before Napoleon. He was definitely at the tail end of the period, but European nobility had spent hundreds of years trapping across europe killing and pillaging. The concept of a nation state was still quite new, so respect for national sovereignty wasn't the same as it is today.
Although not a "good" reason, war for political or economic gain at least seems more rational than war and genocide for the sake of it or to subjugate.
I also don't see anyone talking about Napoleon in anyway in my circle, so not sure where you get the idea people worship him.
Most of Napoleon's wars were defensive.
well, sort of; he inherited a bunch of wars and got a bunch more declared on him, and responded by totally conquering the countries that had declared war on France, not just returning to pre-war borders. So, in one sense that's 'defensive', but in another very real sense almost all his fighting was done outside of France.
As to Humphrey Appleby:
> as another example my department does PhD admissions on a point system and being from a favored race has historically brought an automatic and hefty point bonus. Next year I can walk into graduate admissions committee and say ‘we cannot do this, its illegal.’ [from the DSL link]
That was explicitly illegal before. It isn't more illegal after the recent ruling. If anything, this example suggests that the ruling has no effect. (Since, obviously, the earlier ruling that awarding a numeric bonus for certain racial statuses is illegal had no effect.)
Enough epicycles had been added that at least university HR signed off on the legality, or so we were told.
What usually ends up mattering is what people generally believe the law to say, and previously we believed HRs assertion that the policy was legal whereas now (judging from the faculty slack) there is common knowledge that it would not be.
which leads to an interesting thought re: ‘what does the law require?’ viz. the laws require what the courts say but the courts are not everywhere and mostly rule far after the fact so in practice the law is whatever people commonly understand it to be. Increasing the salience of an issue can thus change the law on the ground even without any new actual rulings.
> 7. [...] Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The linked article is paywalled, so could someone please fill me in whether this is a case of
a) American hubris combined with ignorance about the rest of the world, or
b) Americans preferring American variations of a dish and therefore the best dishes must be American inventions; e.g., California rolls => sushi is American.
Seems like you're leaving out a few other possible explanations there.
... such as? Come on, don't leave me hanging!
c) the claim is correct
d) what is thought of as Italian food in America is a distinct cuisine to Italian food from Italy
you can probably come up with some more
Judging by Vaaal88's comment in another thread (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-2023/comment/18177481), option c) is clearly out because the claim is wrong. Option d) sounds like an extension of option b) inspired by option a) .
I have to imagine d) because the Italian food in America is very different to the food in Italy, and the food in Italy is far better than the Italian food in America. I feel this is a bit like a British person claiming that all good Indian food was actually invented in Britain because of the Chicken Tikka Masala.
>c) the claim is correct
Disproven by 5 sec of googling the history of Tiramisu.
I will try to suggest some:
c) leftist historian taking pleasure in deconstructing identity through history, FT journalist eager to extrapolate the results into ragebait for clicks
d) “tiramisu was invented in the 70s so Italians shold start making prosciutto di Parma with cultured meat, anything else is luddism” is a non sequitur if spelled out. So let’s just hint at it and let the reader connect the dots. This is probably a rhetorical technique general enough to warrant having a name of its own
So, either Bulverism or a sophisticated pro-cultured-meat conspiracy (cultured meat not being mentioned anywhere in the article)? Fascinating.
d) refers indeed to the post by Scott, not the article. You don’t need a conspiracy to see how the interests of those who favor innovation for ideological reasons (except in AI, duh) align with those of the companies who stand to gain from replacing a local low tech product with their own high tech proprietary alternative. Reminds me of GMO crops, so the whole debate has been around for a while already, but with the environmentalists switching sides this time.
See https://archive.is/jAHlc for an archived copy.
28: (boris Johnson writing) - yes, that’s in part why he was PM. His columns in the telegraph were famously well written, and often quite funny. He also used to appear on Tv a lot, including game shows and quizzes, or comedic reports on the weeks politics. These shows tend to need razor sharp wit, and while Johnson wasn’t as smart as the comedians he held his own, or engaged in that endearing (and probably fake) self depreciation, along with his trademark stutter.
I don’t like the Tories and think he’s a buffoon now, but I liked him well enough then.
22: Seems like Harvard doesn't expect to be changing much. They sent this maximally cynical email hours after the decision: https://twitter.com/EdWhelanEPPC/status/1674446843311423489?s=20
"The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions 'an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.' We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision."
Yeah, I saw that too. My current understanding is that part was in the dissent, and the ruling itself included a section saying that even though the dissent said you could do that the dissent was the losing side and you shouldn't listen to them. But some people got confused and highlighted it as the court's ruling.
The line itself is in the majority, which then promptly cautions against its misuse. I think this basically foreshadows a whole disparate impact set of cases like those that followed Brown and and the CRA. Pages 39-40 (47-48 on PDF) here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
discriminating based on essays is going to be costly and high effort. harvard is probably rich enough and small enough that they could do it but generic state flagships (for example) won’t be able to. and even at Harvard metaculus is predicting a nontrivial effect.
> discriminating based on essays is going to be costly and high effort
Not at all. Simply train a simple model to process the essays and identify the race of the writer.
you need to come up with some plausible sounding justification that is not just race. Something about how that individual candidate overcame specific disadvantages or something. conceivably an AI model could do that too (while other AI models write the damn essays) but whatever the equilibrium in the battle of essay writing and reading AIs is, it seems unlikely to place as heavy a thumb on the scales as a system that knows about and uses race as an input variable by itself instead of proxies for the same.
...and proceed to get sued into the ground. These schools are certainly going to try to continue discriminating based on race, but they now have to be extremely careful about how they do it. Any algorithm, any internal document, any email, any staff training document, anything that can be subpoenad which mentions altering admissions based on race opens them up to lawsuits now.
That would be illegal. Training a model to do something useful and interesting with the essay that doesn't explicitly represent race might be legal.
An applicant who refuses to regard his or her application through a racialist lens might also be making a statement, which a sensible review might value.
>8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever.
I hear that the Mongol Empire did provide some pretty substantial benefits via safe long-distance land commerce (though this may have worsened the Black Death as well). The Nazis weren't really around long enough to do that, and also highwaymen were basically dead by then anyway.
The other real-talk answer is "Mongols were mostly in Asia and thus fargroup dynamics". You look at Eastern media and there's not nearly the same Nazi taboo.
the last paragraph seems on the nose
No, it's not. We see the same thing with Shaka, a man who by all accounts was a genocidal maniac and who is admired by millions of Africans domestically and abroad. Admonishment of conquest by your ancestors is an almost uniquely western thing. In most of the world, it is at best ignored and at worst celebrated. Most societies would likely have tremendous pride to this day in conquest to the extent that Europeans achieved if it had been their own people doing it instead. Calling it "on the nose" is not an argument.
In India, being 'Hitler' is equivalent to bring a disciplinarian, and while not exactly positive in connotation, it's often only mildly negative.
Even in America, this was largely the case until very recently. Growing up, calling someone a fascist or nazi was a playful epithet implying they were overly strict over something petty (kids called the moms volunteering to supervise recess "lunch nazis" at least well into the 2000s). It didn't become a highly charged political insult that "serious" people used to attack their enemies until about 10 years ago.
"[Subject] nazi" has long had the connotation you describe, and I don't think that's even mostly dead yet. But an unmodified "Nazi" has been a vile insult for as long as I can remember.
It was a less *common* insult, because certain people hadn't yet escalated to the point of using it against anyone to the right of e.g. Joe Biden.
More generally, there is a sufficient time chasm between us and the victims of Genghis Khan so that their suffering is no longer so relatable and also there are very few (if any) people which care about those victims sufficiently to take offence, whereas there are still a lot of people alive which remember second world war and were victims of nazi crimes, and even more people brought up on stories from ww2 from their parents and grandparents. In the same way people romanticize Vikings to the extent that those rapists and pillagers are touted nowadays by some as champions of gender equality, because nobody feels directly or even indirectly related to their victims, even if they were actually direct ancestors of many of, say, contemporary Brits or French.
Vikings are different to people who killed 10% of the world population.
Maybe, though I doubt the distinction mattered to their victims. Also, the fact that Vikings did not have the ability to inflict so much damage as Mongols does not make them better: they were still murderers, slavers and rapists, only less organized. And locally they were capable of quite a genocide: according to wiki, there are some estimates that 3/4-th of the civilian population died in Harrying of the North (and that was by William the Conqueror, and not some random wild reaver from Sweden)
One must also remember that "Viking" is a category that included peaceful traders as well as warlike raiders and invaders - and a lot of the "woman-stealing" was accomplished with such dastardly deeds as "being well groomed, washing frequently, and using beard oil", which the local Englishmen seemed to regard as an injustice almost as great as the violent slave raids.
I do think your overall explanation is accurate and time is the key factor.
Re: 2. When I was a student I had a quick stint as a telemarketer. Typical humor during lunch breaks would involve who had gotten the most outrageous name on the line.
I grew up in the western US, and my families on both sides are heavily into agriculture. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Italy doesn't have a lot of factory farming with regard to meat production. I've mostly paid attention to cattle - Wyoming kid. They tend not to be grazed, unless we are talking about those released in the summer in the Alps. I have *never* seen a large feedlot here, and I live in the Po Valley, the breadbasket of Italy.
That said, the kneejerk reaction of Italians to ban new tech/things is on target.
Re Wisconsin veto: why bother with crossing out the 20? I think it would have been even funnier to prolong the school funding until the year 202425.
"I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones"
Hundreds of thousands as in > 200,000 (more than a sixth of total official COVID deaths)? Can you explain how you get this? It seems implausible to me because 1) the entire period of vaccine scarcity was only about four months 2) the US vaccinated 2/3 or 65+ in those months so the upside from better targeting seems limited. The link itself doesn't make this claim as far as I can tell.
Sorry, I realize how bad this looks, it was a typo for "hundreds or thousands". I've edited. :(
I am reading that link and it doesn't seem to prove what it claims, and also seems to have an ideological axe to grind (as well as a very self-serving story). I am not going to read the whole thing because I copy/pasted into Word and it says it's 27,000 words long. That said...
First, it appears to be a story about how the group the author personally was a part of, saved the vaccine rollout in California and how they were super-competent and everyone else was incompetent.
Second, it's pretty much all about California, and your post says the "US" COVID vaccine rollout.
Third, a lot of it is presented without evidence and the way it's written suggests it's based on rumors. "Stories, often told in whispers, of widespread corruption in administration of the vaccines..." Yeah I remember the "stories, told in whispers" about how in March 2020 they were going to close all traffic into and out of NYC (at least people actually tried to effectively ban NYers from their areas of the country!).
Fourth, a lot of what is described isn't about preferential treatment but a generally incompetent rollout, with details being what you'd expect in such a large and unprecedented effort.
Fifth a lot of the claims of preferential treatment don't seem to withstand scrutiny. He is going on about how there was preferential treatment to certain groups, how certain groups were favored at the expense of the old, but his link clearly shows everyone aged 65+ being eligible before the favored groups.
Sixth, the favored groups are mostly groups with lobbying arms, not race-based affirmative action type stuff. Where there is race-based sorting, it's based on residency requirements. I think it's actually defensible for a few reasons.
First if you're going after people at high risk, that's generally unhealthy people, and the residency requirements were focused on unhealthy areas (which apparently overlaps with race). Maybe you say that you want to evaluate each individual and not base it on residential areas, but given different access to the health care system and the complication of the rollout, using residential area as a proxy isn't crazy to me. Especially because, second, my memory is of well-connected people having flimsy excuses for medical conditions that would get them the shot faster. Sort of like medical marijuana, or Vietnam era draft deferments.
There is also some inconsistency between the claims that preferential treatment were given to people with power, and that doses went unused to ensure fairness. If you say that you hand out doses to whoever you can as fast as you can, you probably end up giving them more to politically connected people. And by his own reasoning, the people with preferential treatment were usually not, like, black people, but again people with lobbying groups.
It does say that "lives were sacrificed by the thousands and tens of thousands for political reasons" which seems totally unsupported, so if you're only willing to say "thousands" then you should make clear you don't support what the link says.
Anyway, I didn't read close to all of it, but the link strikes me as mostly "everyone sucks but me" and to the extent it touches on race-type issues, an excuse, for someone who is strongly pro-vax and anti-woke, to depict problems with vaccine uptake as something woke people did, when we all know that's not true at all.
> all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The link is very interesting, but it does not say that.
(also, it contains at least one error: Tiramisù is made with Savoiardi, which are centuries old, and not Pavesini which indeed are from the postwar period)
Some more views on affirmative action!
https://clarkecollegeinsight.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-is-probably-mostly
Are we allowed or encouraged to cite other links in these threads? I'll take a chance, and post a link to a news article about someone in the UK who was encouraged by his "AI girlfriend" to attempt to commit murder, well treason actually as his intended target was the late Queen!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12270187/Moment-self-styled-assassin-tried-kill-late-Queen-arrested.html
Brief extract:
"Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, outlined his plan to an artificial intelligence-generated chatbot, before setting out on Christmas Day in 2021 to target the monarch.
The Replika app, which is marketed as an 'AI companion who cares', encouraged the then-teenager, saying his plan was 'very wise', before motivating his fantasy by telling him: 'You can do it' and 'we have to find a way'."
Do you have a source other than Daily Mail for the AI girlfriend? I looked up the guy on a couple of other news sites and they didn't mention the AI.
Also worth noting that he was psychotic, so if it wasn't an alleged AI girlfriend telling him to kill the queen, it could have been coded messages on the news etc... although maybe an AI that agrees with and supports you is more dangerous in this situation.
No, couldn't find any other source. Zero Hedge would normally gleefully report something like this, but I could find no reference to it on that site.
There is actually an app called Replika, and because its involvement (if the report of this is true) would put it in a bad light, I guess the app's creator may have taken out an injunction to prevent further mention of it in reports.
The alternative is that the perp was obviously suffering from a mental health problem, and by common consent it was considered not helpful for the media to dwell on the incident. But that never seems to have stopped them in the past from obsessing over similar cases.
The other sources I read both mentioned that Chail was a Star Wars fan and identified as a Sith. Apparently Disney hasn't seen fit to stop anyone from saying that.
I was suspicious to begin with because the Daily Mail doesn't have the best reputation.
It was in the Telegraph too.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/05/ai-windsor-intruder-queen-elizabeth-jaswant-singh-chail/
And don't be too suspicious of the Daily Mail. It's a proper newspaper. It just happens to be hated by the activists who run Wikipedia.
I predict with high confidence that Italy banning lab meat is only the beginning of a huge worldwide disruption and conflict. Parts of nearly all economies, and some entire economies, depend on meat production.
In fighting their downfall, they'll inevitably use names like "clone meat", "fake meat" and the like, as opposed to their own "real meat" or "natural meat". And their opponents will inevitably respond with names like "torture meat" or "murder meat", as opposed to their own "clean meat" or "modern meat" or so. Mutual denigration makes for bitter conflict, and huge economic disruption fuels it.
So it's another huge culture war, on a global scale, on top of the increasing AI disruption.
You'd better start believing in conspiracy theories, you're living in one.
Still some of those concerns are more valid than others. ‘conspiracy theory’ has about the same value as a political category as ‘crazy leader’ (the latter having been applied to Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin, Kim Jeong Un and obviously Trump). They both claim that some group of people or some individual is irrational in a way that puts their actions beyond explanation. Ironically the use of these labels tries to blame the speakers ignorance and inability to understand their logic on the labelled, rather than taking responsibility for one’s own gap in understanding
I will not live in ze pod, I will not eat ze bug, and if it is allowed as a voluntary option, it is only a matter of time until it is mandatory.
Literally anything that humans do could theoretically be made mandatory, so that's a terrible reason to ban things.
Many people go rock-climbing voluntarily - does this mean I should be worried about government-mandated mountaineering programs?
Good enough for a dystopia where the government thinks people don't have enough risk and challenge in their lives.
Are you naive or disingenuous? The elites do not benefit from making rock climbing mandatory.
Risk of injury and death?
Notably, no countries that I know of have a ban on the human consumption of insects. Are you campaigning for such bans?
I would give oral to anybody who made such a ban happen, but campaigning is useless.
I wonder if this is more in the nature of trademark protection, the same way only certain wines can legally be called champagne and your product must be marketed as sparkling wine.
The fear may be that some lab-meat plant would start churning out ersatz Parma ham and the likes, and that this would capture the market from the real deal.
I was just in the UK for a few weeks and laughing at the bottles of "oat drink" and "almond drink" I saw on the shelves.
Italy at least is trying to protect its food culture. In holy Woke Ireland the general feeling is there’s too much cattle altogether and far too many pastoral fields.
That seems unlikely. The EU rule banning copies of specific regional foods ist quite effektive. I guess it might not cover lab meat if it was banning only "animal products" (I have not looked it up, sorry) but in that case it seems trivial to tweak the regulation.
That is what I am wondering, if it is lab-grown meat the argument could be made that this wasn't covered by the legislation and then there would have to be a court case over it.
Also, I think this is just the usual kind of posturing by politicians to show off to their constituents that "We are Doing Something".
"synthetic meat food"
" "clone meat", "fake meat" "
Well "frankenburger" is a term that has already been coined...
“Eating a cancer” is also pretty powerful in terms of shock value. I wonder how accurate it is, having no biology background.
Good point (and plausible phrase)! I don't know enough details on the lab grown meats to know if they can be regarded as cancers either...
> But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought.
Did you never encounter Malcolm Gladwell? He's a world-class writer. He might be a world-class thinker too, but in, shall we say, the other direction.
The other example that would leap to my mind of someone whose good writing disguises shoddy thinking is Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I wouldn't expect that opinion to be widely shared here.
"I nominate Stephen J Gould"
Seconded!
Also, this is what Robert Trivers has to say about him:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-folly-fools/201210/fraud-in-the-imputation-fraud
"Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen Jay Gould personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite.
...
Recently something brand new has emerged about Steve that is astonishing. In his own empirical work attacking others for biased data analysis in the service of political ideology—it is he who is guilty of bias in service of political ideology (Jason Lewis and colleagues 2011). What is worse—and more shocking—is that Steve’s errors are very extensive and the bias very serious."
And so on...
Many Thanks, particularly for the Trivers URL and quotes!
Trivers is great.
I don't think Marx has any competition in this category
"I don't think Marx has any competition in [the category of 'good writer', 'lousy thinker']"
Except that Marx was a terrible writer.
His and Engels' 'Communist Manifesto' is excellent writing, but most/much of the rest of what he wrote is really tough to get through. A better writer would have written more approachable prose than 'Das Kapital.'
Oh I agree but he needed the simplistic writing of the communist manifesto to get the masses involved and das Kapital - which nobody reads, certainly not most Marxists - is for academics.
The OP included ' (or at least convincing, his prose is workmanlike at best)'. Combined with 'damaging', Marx is the clear winner for me.
It was shocking when I saw the place where Malcolm Gladwell saying something about "igon values" and I realized he must really understand *nothing* about what he's writing about: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1897
But I don't think of Eliezer Yudkowsky as a particularly good writer.
Re. #13 Despite the Eye of Sauron's much increased attention, in Russia it's basically business as usual. Shitty czars and shitty wars have been around since the beginning of times, and being too worried about that doesn't do anybody much good.
> Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”.
OK, what piece of context am I missing? Why is that suspicious?
“Karl Nell” sounds like “colonel”.
...of course. How did I not see that? Thanks.
Nominal determinism for the win.
> the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
Anyone remember SN-risk?
> Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage.
Kettle logic at its finest! 😂
"Yet another study finds a monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes, ie there isn’t some point where IQ stops being good (or turns bad). I will keep hammering this in until people stop promoting that one bad Swedish study that found the opposite."
I was just over on the sub-reddit and there's a post there about loneliness, and a not insignificant number of the comments are from people claiming to be Hikikomori (unemployed, socially isolated). That seems to imply a much higher rate in this community than I'd expect you'd find in most other communities.
I also can't help thinking about Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, the French existentialist and everybody else that fits the sad philosopher stereotype. Newton was also a weird maladapted guy, and was far from unique among great physicists in that regard.
It's just difficult to believe outlier intelligence isn't sometimes damaging to people, or at least correlated with some negative outcomes.
Yes, it’s plausible that very intelligent people can become isolated by having little in common with others.
On the other hand, a lot of people do poorly in life and most of them are invisible. I mean for example being poorly educated, underemployed, not having anything much to do, so just watching TV, eventually turning to overeating or drink or drugs, then falling into poor health, etc.
I imagine intelligence protects from many failures even if it doesn’t necessarily mean a person thrives. The famous geniuses and similar types you mention mostly had their shit together, even if they weren’t happy.
> Yes, it’s plausible that very intelligent people can become isolated by having little in common with others.
For all the harm it's done, this is something the Internet has genuinely helped a lot with. I met my wife online, and one of the things that drew both of us to each other was finding a partner who was a match both intellectually and in terms of geeky interests.
I think it goes both ways. I think the Internet also makes it a lot easier to be isolated (for people of any intelligence).
I'm sure you know but reddit comments are selected to be negative. I don't feel lonely at all, saw that post, and didn't comment. If you go by the average reddit comment then your impression will be that the average college graduate makes $40K/year and has $200K of student debt...
Regarding IQ, I think the monotonic relationship likely holds on average, but as with anything there are bound to be counterexamples, particularly at the tails
If I had to guess — and this is purely a guess; I have no research to back it up — I'd hypothesize that the average Very Online Redditor college graduate is somewhere close to the "makes $40K/year and has $200K of student debt" bracket, while the actually successful college graduates are too busy living a successful life to hang out on Reddit and complain all the time.
I suspect very high IQ people might become lonely, or experience loneliness, in different ways from average or low IQ people. But that doesn’t mean they are more likely to be lonely than other groups. There are plenty of unemployed, socially awkward maladapts without genius IQs out there, and I doubt getting smarter would make them WORSE off.
Any reason to think that hikikomori status is correlating with IQ, rather than with other aspects of introversion and interest in sci fi?
What makes you think the SSC community couldn't be unusual in both intelligence and social aptitude? It could very well be that the median individual with an SSC-average IQ is highly successful both socially and professionally.
Firstly, intelligence can be monotonically positive with *everything* and still it would seem the the person with the best overall life is not the most intelligent. For the same reason that the best basketball player is not the tallest, and the tallest basketball player is not the best: https://medium.com/@gjlewis/why-the-tails-come-apart-a6817e92651c
Secondly, intelligence can appear to be correlated with other things, like social isolation - or mental illness (that's one I hear a lot). There might be some causality going on there in the brain or the body. But, it could be collider bias.
Basically, all of the healthy, well-adjusted smart people don't bother with losers like me, for much the same reason I don't know any mentally ill, stupid homeless drug-addicts. The only people I see are moderately handicapped at the same approximate social status I am at. If intelligence, mental health, social skills, etc. all aggregate to a certain level of social status and society is stratified a certain way, then I would observe a correlation. But, the causal relationship would live in society, not in the brain or the body.
>It's just difficult to believe outlier intelligence isn't sometimes damaging to people, or at least correlated with some negative outcomes.
Any population on Reddit is an extremely, unrepresentative sample. Very few high intelligence, happy healthy people are spending much time on reddit if any.
It's the same when researchers found a negative association between mental health and intelligence from looking at Mensa members. The problem is that Mensa is basically a club that selects for high IQ losers and its members are very unrepresentative of high IQ people generally. High IQ wall street quants making a half a million bucks a year are, in general, not spending their time going to mensa meetings or posting on reddit.
Also, the study does NOT say that IQ is never associated with any negative outcomes. It says that on average, higher IQ equals better outcomes. This does not imply its true for everyone or for all types of outcome.
I'd expect a massive overrepresentation of Hikkomori types in any online forum, imply because people with IRL social lives spend a lot less time online.
Something I haven't seen pointed out is that if you 'believe the science' that FTL travel is impossible and aren't engaged in magical thinking of 'wormholes' or other ways of getting around that impossibility, doesn't that pretty much negate the possibility of UFOs, or at the very least severely limit what kind of threat they can be?
Even if FTL travel isn't possible, UFOs *could* be sublight self replicating automated von Neumann probes that are here to study us, and distract us with fake 'pilots' they have grown on their base in the Oort Cloud, before destroying Earth once they decide humanity is a threat. I don't believe this is true, but there are plenty of scenarios where an advanced civilisation without FTL could pose a deadly threat: relativistic kill vehicles, Berserkers, etc
If you're willing to RKKV competing civilizations before they become a threat (or do some other planet-killing activity, like dismantling the planet to build von Neumann proves), then you don't need to mess around with "distractions" that only serve to draw more attention to the fact that you exist. Just fire the RKKV and kill the civilization before they even know you exist.
True, I guess maybe you could imagine that the aliens have some protocol where they interact with us a bit and observe our reactions before they decide whether to blow us up.
I'm reminded of the Arthur C. Clarke chestnut: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
You're under no obligation to think "wormholes" are plausible, of course. But, if you allow yourself to entertain the idea that UFOs are non-human intelligence (whether extraterrestrial or perhaps, interdimensional), then it's at least plausible that their propulsive mechanisms are so far outside of our understanding/present capabilities that any attempt to accurately guess how they work would be futile. You're under no obligation to rank that possibility very highly either, of course.
Well there are limits in physics as to what aliens, no matter how smart, can do.
And I suppose we would spot a local wormhole.
Yes, but we can't be sure what those limits are. Nuclear power is impossible according to human science from a couple of hundred years ago. FTL drives might be genuinely impossible, or they might rely on a principle that humans don't know yet.
“ Nuclear power is impossible according to human science from a couple of hundred years ago. ”
No. Science from a couple of hundred years ago had no conception of nuclear power. And certainly no laws saying it was impossible.
“ Yes, but we can't be sure what those limits are. ”
Yes we do. The limit is light speed.
From the point of view of science a couple of centuries ago, nuclear power violates conservation of energy (by creating energy) and conservation of mass (by destroying mass). It only becomes theoretically possible when you understand that mass is a form of energy.
Well it doesn’t do any of those things because of mass energy equivalence - but let’s agree this would be difficult to understand a few centuries ago.
From the point of view of science a couple of centuries ago - well a century ago - a rocket with unlimited acceleration could reach any speed it wanted to. This limitation to the speed of light is something we have learned over time, and not something we have assumed forever. So it doesn’t go into the category of something we couldn’t imagine until the science matured, the science matured after we found this limitation.
It’s actually derived as part of the logic that you reference in your answer. So if Einstein is wrong about the one, he is wrong about the other.
So you can’t say “this is something we don’t know yet”, it’s essential to our understanding of the universe, and to refute it you would have to refute Einstein.
Nuclear power was actually recognized at more or less that time period as something mysterious lacking an adequate explanation. More specifically, it was recognized that the Sun, which appeared to be fire, could not actually be fire or it would have burnt itself out long ago.
Splitting an atom.was impossible according to the science of a couple of hundred years ago.
All that is needed for FTL travel is an extra spatial dimension. We live in a 3D world but it’s possible that there are more dimensions inaccessible to us.
Got your workings out?
???
I know nothing about the shape our 3D space takes in the next dimension. The concept itself is utterly mundane if you drop down to a 2D surface in 3D space.
Any links as to how this could work. How do we use the extra dimension to beat the restriction of the speed of light.
>doesn't that pretty much negate the possibility of UFOs, or at the very least severely limit what kind of threat they can be?
I don't believe that UFOs are aliens, and I don't believe that UFO is the appropriate term on account of the "O" part being an unverified hypothesis. But if they are aliens, then the advance probes of the fleet of relativistic starships just a few years out from Sol, could represent as much of a threat to us as they did to those blue guys in the James Cameron movie.
Also, wormholes may not exist, but they aren't magical thinking.
Regardless of the last few years, the algorithm on Twitter for Substack links has certainly changed in the last few months, as Musk was incredibly mad at the release of the (obviously inconsequential) Notes. Musk made it so we can’t embed Tweets on Substack, and image previews are still purposefully prevented for Substack posts. I think the search for the word “Substack” (which used to turn up actual Substack links) might still be down. And anecdotally, the surest way to make something not go viral is to include a Substack link. Meanwhile, Threads, an actual competitor, is allowed up AFAIK
Really feeling the downsides of chronological comments sorting today. I have longer thoughts on these points, yet waiting until after work today pretty much guarantees they get buried anyway. So here's the slapdash version after only half-reading the relevant links:
> 9: [...] I appreciate the What Is To Be Done section. Relevant breaking news: judge issues preliminary injunction banning Biden administration officials from meeting social media site representatives.
First Amendment protections in the US are very strong, and I'm generally in favor of making them stronger. That said, there are a wide range of plausible policies for how government officials ought to be allowed to interact with media companies and I'm deeply skeptical that any policy designed for immediate implementation will do more than strike against current political enemies.
> 19: [...] but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt).
I need to read more about the details, but prima facie I strongly object to calling this corruption - that's a term better reserved for when a politician uses their power for personal enrichment, and no, "making people like them so they get re-elected" doesn't count. This is a question of systemic weakness rather than personal failings: democracy is vulnerable to concentrated gains paid for with distributed losses, and voters in general react far more strongly to the threat of losing something than to reward patronage. Soaking the country's coffers to throw random money at your constituents is a basic strategy and you should expect politicians to use it without reference to personal characteristics.
(Yes, this is "pork". And at a step deeper, banning pork can sometimes cause worse problems than it solves because it removes a tool for negotiating consensus whose absense we're now feeling. And ofc if any of those randos were Reid's cousin or whatever this goes back to being Grade-A corruption.)
>21: This month in social justice
I think I've settled to the stance that I'm categorically against any form of affirmative action that refuses to quantify (or at least try to document) the magnitude of the preference. I can support the concept in theory, but seeing the size of the effect in college admissions is a notable case of where my opinion on a political topic was sharply changed by empirical data.
>26: Line-Item Veto
Classic case where I'm offended by the abuse of an executive power, and for the sake of consistency I support a ban on the practice to begin in the immediate unpredictable future.
> 30: Amtrak Pricing
Amtrak is like airlines in that prices fluctuate dramatically based on timing. IME prices start to significantly rise two weeks before travel date; it's not hard to get tickets for the NYC-BOS route for well under a hundred if you plan accordingly. There's also a wrinkle in that if someone buys a particular seat in advance for a low price but then cancels, that seat will go up for sale (temporarily?) at the price they paid for it at the time.... so it's entirely possible to get a business-class ticket for $60 the night before if you get *really* lucky.
Kayak makes their edge by buying in volume in advance, but the end customer pays for it through a loss of flexibility. You buy from a third party, good luck getting customer support from Amtrak. Same deal as for airlines.
>26: "Classic case of the use of an executive power, and I support the practice in the future."
Vetoed!
Also >30: a while back, buying a few months in advance, I got a ticket from Philadelphia to Baltimore for $5. Out of curiosity I checked the night before I left, and tickets on that same train were going for $80. So yes, the difference can be extreme.
He can██ keep getting away with this!
On affirmative action, I agree with you, but unfortunately quantified affirmative action data is always going to be suppressed for a couple reasons.
First, the Supreme Court had already made explicit quotas and objectively quantifiable race preferences more or less impossible. The University of Michigan system struck down by Gratz was VERY quantifiable (and a massive benefit for preferred minorities): https://www.cir-usa.org/case/gratz-v-bollinger-grutter-v-bollinger/undergraduate-admissions/
Second, as Scott snarked at and you’ve no doubt noticed as well, there is a lot of “strategic equivocation” going on among the pro-AA crowd. On the one hand we are to believe that the program is critical for maintaining a critical mass of minority representation, which will surely crash catastrophically if the policy is struck down. But on the other hand it’s a tiny basically undetectable tiebreaker that surely can’t be seen as discriminatory against any white or Asian applicant.
> First, the Supreme Court had already made explicit quotas and objectively quantifiable race preferences more or less impossible.
I must refer you to the Humphrey Appleby comment linked in Scott's post, which says that the new ruling will have significant effects because giving a big numeric bonus to applicants of favored races is now illegal, when that used to (last year) just be standard admissions practice.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,9567.msg403497.html#msg403497
As is driven home in Order Without Law, it doesn't actually matter what the law is, because nobody knows or cares.
I could have phrased it a bit more precisely, but the point is that the current policies had to be a bit roundabout. Yes, you could empirically measure after the fact that there was a large effect de facto being applied. But the explicit policies were always “oh this is just a ‘holistic’ policy”. Harvard’s policy was to give heavy weight to personal interviews - which in practice always seemed to rate Asians low and Blacks high, but de jure there was never anything so explicit as the pre-Gratz Michigan policy, which explicitly, in official documents, had point totals listed that gave lots more to certain races.
Again, the testimony we have is "my department does PhD admissions on a point system and being from a favored race has historically brought an automatic and hefty point bonus".
I suppose it is possible that this commentator was in a department with a literal points-for-being-Black policy. But if so, they should hav been waving the Gratz and Grutter rulings, and not waiting for this one.
There are basically two kinds of travelers: vacationers, who are very price sensitive but usually plan well in advance, and business travelers, who often travel on short notice but are less press sensitive.
Setting low prices for far-out reservations and raising the price closer to the travel date is an easy way to get closer to maximizing the total revenue for each trip, since it tends to catch both groups of travelers nearer their maximum price point.
Not sure about trains, but Kayak definitely doesn't buy anything when it comes to plane tickets or hotels. Thats not how it works. They are just listing the prices found on the GDS which is what travel agents use. Kayak gets paid a commission if you end up booking through the link on their site. Usually it's 10-12% for a hotel and I think 3-5% for a flight.
Re: #7,
Neapolitan/NYC >> Detroit.
That is all.
Regarding #10, I think it depends on whether the town has any laws on the book limiting kids walking around unaccompanied.
If there are (stupidly) laws against that, then the usual caveats against blatantly breaking stupid laws apply. If there aren't, I guess that there is little the cops can do besides driving them home.
Also, I would be reluctant to call the US cops into any situation which does not call for more guns. (I don't think they would be likely to shoot an unarmed six year old, but also don't think they are well-trained to handle such situations).
If I were the type of person to notice a distressed lone four year old (which is a situation which calls for some intervention), I guess I would find a nearby woman and ask her to talk to them. If one wanted to involve the state, Child Protective Services would be the obvious branch. (Yes, they may in turn involve the police, but they likely have more experience in the typical outcomes.)
As a child, I had the police escort me home one time when I got lost. It is their job to find missing children, too.
There don't have to be laws on the books explicitly limiting kids from walking around unaccompanied. There just have to be laws against "child endangerment", and they have to be vague enough to not explicitly state whether children walking around unattended are or are not "endangered". Which I think is the case pretty much anywhere.
In which case, one of the things the cops *can* do is opine that yep, that kid is being endangered, and drive them over to the CPS worker who agrees with them and has long experience crafting the sort of documents and arguments that convince judges that someone is an unfit child-endangering parent who needs to have their kids taken away and put into foster care.
I believe that this threat is greatly overstated in many circles, but it is not zero. And again, the threat is not that CPS will call the cops - cops almost never shoot unarmed six-year-olds - but the cops calling CPS. Because CPS very frequently takes children away from their parents for years or forever; usually for more substantial reasons but they may be having a slow day.
Re your last paragraph: why the sexist assumption that a random female stranger is a better and safer choice than you are? Just approach the child yourself and help them!
Getting the attention of a stranger so that there is someone else who know what is happening has merit - and the tiny risk of a randomly selected person being a bad actor is basically nullified by having another adult (you) there - but it can just as easily be a man.
A random females stranger is much less likely to be harassed, or worse, on the grounds that a strange man talking to small children in public is probably a pedophile sex trafficker. I'd be reluctant to take that risk myself, if I didn't have to.
I acknowledge that that irrational stereotype is out there in the wild, but the best way to counter it is not to cower in fear of it, but to simply be a normal, decent human being while also happening to be male.
Note that I also advised getting another adult involved precisely because of the small but non-zero risk a random stranger (which you are to the strangers around you) is a threat - each of you can keep an eye on each other. I would *also* advise this for women - insofar as a random adult male is a risk of 'pedophile sex trafficer', so is a random unknown woman!
Regarding #26, Wisconsin, this seems totally bollocks. If you allow the governor to turn 2024-2025 into 2045 (why not go for year 20242025 while you are at it?), what is to stop them from selectively striking out letters and blanks in some bill to form some arbitrarily different, shorter text?
Even if you don't allow the striking of parts of words, in equilibrium the legislative will optimize for laws which meanings can not be maliciously altered by omitting words (so, no "nots").
If you have to have vetos, I think the ability to nope an entire bill should be sufficient (if you disallow mixing budget bills with random unrelated legislation). If the executive wants any changes to the bill, let them cut a deal with the legislative about it.
I hated the headline making it all about "owning the Republicans, chortle!" That's stupid legislating, no matter who is doing it.
It also may not work out as they want; if the rate increase is $324 per pupil each year, they may find themselves spancelled by it in ten years time when they need/want to increase by $500 per pupil, but Governor Line-Item has signed into law that it can *only* be increased by $324 until the year 2425. The same way that setting up almshouses in the Middle Ages where the paupers got thruppence a day was good money then, but not in the 16th - 19th centuries, but the foundation made it that this was all they could get.
I think the "owning the Republicans" framing is because the kind of insane power that the Frankenstein veto gives the Governor is one Republicans put in when they had a supermajority and thought they'd never lose it, so it's very much a case of "you've given yourself this power and used it against us for decades, now it's time for a taste of your own medicine". Still not good law-making, but the emotions are much more understandable in that context
Wisconsin governors used to be able to do that too, but it was banned in the early 1990's. I would interpret that law as banning the recent action with a less literal reading of "letters," but I'm not in charge of Wisconsin case law.
The link for Santa Claus, Indiana, goes to Santa Claus, Georgia. And Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana, is great!
Your response on polyamory and happiness is straight up No True Scotsman.
Not happy with the lifestyle? Well that's because you're only a lukewarm polyamorist. The ~real~ polyamorists I know are all perfectly happy.
I tihink it's right in that some people are naturally, er, promiscuous. They'll never be happy in a one man/one woman (or one man/one man or one woman/one woman) set-up; they'll cheat or have a mistress or break up and be serial monogamists or constantly be divorcing and marrying the new 'soul mate' or try swinging and open marriages and the rest of the options.
For those people, 'full poly' is their best fit and *so long as* their partners are *also* full poly, it works out.
And the 'slightly/lukewarm poly' set also makes sense. When you have a full poly person in a relationship with someone who is not poly or is even monogamous, and the other partner tries to make concessions by opening up the relationship (but they're not interested in finding new partners themselves and it's going to be a mess of jealousy and recriminations).
Or the classical pattern of "I don't care what you do, just don't bring it home and I don't want to know anything about it" when it comes to one spouse/partner telling the other about 'if you want to cheat fine but keep it outside our door'.
Or the online stories where someone thinks that they're being stifled by the monogamous relationship (everyone else is having all this wonderful sex!) so they persuade/nag/arm-twist their partner into being open or poly, and then it results that the partner (usually female) can get a ton of dates and sex while the original person (usually male) can't get anywhere. That ends poorly, too.
4. "monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes"
--High IQ allows one to navigate society with greater wealth and fewer restrictions(due to IQ and $$$). Some end up suffering 'affluencenza.'
--If we define "positive life outcomes" as stemming from healthy relationships how much advantage do smarts actually provide? Are such folks more inclined to be *durably* empathic and moral?
--I have read over the years and am open to disagreement that smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.' False generalization?
>--High IQ allows one to navigate society with greater wealth and fewer restrictions(due to IQ and $$$).
If that's true, it STILL refutes the Swedish study widely cited by egalitarians that claimed that high IQ is detrimental after a point, which was the whole reason Scott posted it.
>If we define "positive life outcomes" as stemming from healthy relationships how much advantage do smarts actually provide? Are such folks more inclined to be *durably* empathic and moral?
How is that relevant?
>--I have read over the years and am open to disagreement that smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.' False generalization?
I don't know, you're the one making the claim. If there's data to support it, let's see it.
It IS true that dumber people are better at judging how intelligent they are than smarter people. But this is kind of a trivial fact. If you're a dumb person doing an exam and don't understand any of the questions, then you obviously aren't going to assume you will do well on the test. You clearly know you will do bad. Identifying this fundamental lack of understanding is easy. Having some level of understanding but knowing its limits is much harder.
I've seen this and look forward to more fully responding soon but in short, personal relationships are the great equalizer as they are source of most happiness. I will make the case that intelligence correlates with wealth and power which becomes relationally corrosive at a certain point absent less common circumstances and/or personality traits that foster common sense, AKA 'wisdom'(striving to both know and act wisely).
[edit below]
Ran across:
"Our minds are dangerous tools, rash and prone to go astray: it is hard to reconcile them with order and moderation. We have seen during my lifetime virtually all outstanding men, all men of abnormally lively perception, breaking out into licentiousness of opinion or behaviour. It is a miracle if you find one who is settled and civilized. We are right to erect the strictest possible fences around the human mind. In the march of scholarship or anything else the mind must needs have its footsteps counted and regulated; you must supply artificial hedges and make it hunt only within them.”
--Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays - Michel de Montaigne,~1580
Chris,
So, due to lack of time and still wanting to respond here's a half-arsed effort:
I believe that my first point you took issue with, high IQ/wealth=few societal restraints, is self-evident and requires additional traits affecting self-restraint or one's life not progress to positive life outcomes. Again, relationships(requiring Character) are a huge contributing factor(Nicholi, 2002[taught ivy league psyche including topic: Freud vs. CS Lewis). Lastly on this point I'd say that any research concerning the social sciences is suspect due the extraordinary number of variables due to its subject matter(but often useful).
Regarding my second point: "smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.'" I read an article which I can't find and re: your counter that for a smart person, knowing one's limits is difficult - yes, but I'm suggesting that there is especially a lack of effort to know one's limits which results in blind spots among the gifted.
- - -
"Gifted, really really gifted writers pick stuff up quicker, but they also usually have a great deal more ego invested in what they write and tend to be more difficult to teach. . . .”
--David Foster Wallace via Brain Pickings , ‘David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are’, 8/11/2014
"It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a man from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and that moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we may best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will, strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
--William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890 [attention is a HUGE deal]
"In exploring the relationship between genius and mental health, Ludwig wrote that among the great geniuses of our times, all showed a readiness to discard prevalent views, an irreverence toward established authority, a strong capacity for solitude, and a "psychological unease," which could cause mental trouble such as depression, anxiety, or alcoholism. But if these qualities were not too incapacitating, they actually contributed to the individual's ability to achieve significant creativity, blaze new trails, propose radical solutions, and promote new schools of thought. Another aspect of the pain of being gifted and highly conscious has to do with the struggle to come to terms with one's superiority. As I wrote in A World Waiting to Be Born, many who are truly superior will struggle against their genuine call to personal and civic power because they fear exercising authority. Usually, they are reluctant to consider themselves "better than” or "above" others, in large part because of a sense of humility that accompanies their personal and spiritual power.”
--M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled And Beyond, 1986
Chris, RE: "blind spots"
It's not peer-reviewed research but...
"Blake was not questioning the reality of Swedenborg’s visions. Instead, he argued that his accounts of them were flawed and of little value. They suffered from the limitations inherent in the worldview of successful, privileged authority figures. Swedenborg was too comfortable in his own reality tunnel to question how limited it was. We all have our blind spots, of course, but not everyone wants to discover them.”
--John Higgs, William Blake vs the World, 2021
RE: scientific research
"For the advancement of science and protection of the right to freedom of expression, Russell advocated The Will to Doubt, the recognition that all human knowledge is at most a best guess, that one should always remember:
None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.
Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.”
--Bertrand Russell, The Will to Doubt: Bertrand Russell on Free Thought and Our Only Effective Self-Defense Against Propaganda, Brain Pickings, 5/18/16
[ARGUMENT WITHDRAWN]
"8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes?"
Plausible parallel: Why didn't we hold the Soviets responsible for genocide as we did 30s Germany? Russia won. So did G. Khan.
See THAT'S how I got confused.
Instead of better or worse can we just state what countries did and why? Stalin, at least, did not round up a specific ethnic group(along with a couple other categories of folks) into camps and so on. Stalin who I understand from a middlin reliable source, was a regular guy until Germany invaded Russia and was said to have had a nervous breakdown, then recovered after a few day as one ruthless SOB. He did starve a bunch of rural people but it was, based on the mix, not ethically motivated. Still though, a tyrant.
Europe 'won' at colonizing most of the world and ultimately relinquished its empire voluntarily. Colonialism is considered one of the worst things to happen in history (despite being objectively less bad than e.g. killing 10% of the world), certainly worse than anything the soviets did.
If the soviets had more explicitly committed a genocide, and had done so on explicitly racial grounds (to most people ukrainians are just russians, especially before 2022) e.g. against Kazakhs, I think people would feel differently about them.
Additionally, most moral outrage over the nazis comes from the left, and I find so many leftists willing to engage in apologetics for the soviets over what many leftists would call their 'good intentions'.
"If the soviets had more explicitly committed a genocide,"
I had read incorrect info or misinterpreted it ages ago and I based my comment on this unfortunately. Stalin was a tyrant but he did not, as you stated, explicitly target Jewish folks. I withdraw my only premise and so my argument crumbles. Thank you for this correction in your middle paragraph.
Re: 1st para, I am not well-versed enough to rebut however if "[imperial Europe did] worse than anything the soviets did" I'd wager it's only that the Soviets did not have the opportunity to do so!
I am completely unfamiliar with the content of your last paragraph but thanks for your reply.
"Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer."
Well, yes; Boris isn't stupid, he's just an idiot (that is, ambitoius, power-hungry, lacking in scruples or principles and cursed with a bonus extra-large helping of 'politician can't keep his trousers zipped', to the point where nobody, not even BoJo, is sure how many kids he has/had/might have had were it not for the abortion). He's 'Eton and Oxford' and that's not just because of legacy admissions or family connections.
Much as I dislike him, he is (sigh) one of my co-religionists (again, at least for now) and he is capable of performing academically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzJQ0TcBmqU
He is also one-eighth Turkish, through his great-grandfather Ali Kemal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxYSkyP9HrQ
I struggle to imagine Boris has any genuine religious convictions save possibly a belief in his own divinity.
Pretty much he converted/reverted because his current wife is Catholic (and I'm heavily presuming that it was done to please her mother so they could get married in church).
Boris supposedly was baptised Catholic but he was raised as an Anglican, and given that both parties were engaging in fornication, she got pregant outside of marriage, and I can't remember if he was technically committing adultery at the time, this is why I think it was in order to get the mother-in-law off their backs.
I realise I'm being spicy about this, but - ah to hell with it, he's probably as good an example of a median Catholic as the rest of us:
"To be married in the Catholic Church, Johnson needed to have his two previous marriages proven to be invalid by reason of lack of canonical form. Since he was baptised Catholic, but his previous weddings were not conferred by the Catholic Church, they are considered putatively invalid."
Given his track record on marriage, the previous ones could easily be annulled for various reasons:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/what-are-grounds-for-annulment
Here's the spicy bit, thank you Wikipedia, list of runners and riders in the marital stakes:
(1) (1) First marriage: 1987, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, journalist, former model, and teacher. No children
(2) First divorce: 1993
(3) Second marriage: 1993, 12 days after divorce: Marina Wheeler, lawyer and writer (and interestingly, half-Indian), pregnant at the time (hence BoJo had clearly been playing away during his first marriage). Four kids in total
(4) First (publicly known) affair: 2000-2004, Petronella Wyatt. He was editor of The Spectator magazine at the time and she was a columnist, so this was also workplace romance and violating fraternisation rules and power imbalance and the rest of it. One abortion, one miscarriage
(5) Rumours (unconfirmed) of second affair: 2006, Anna Fazackerley, a journalist later employed by Boris
(6) Third affair/fling: 2008/09, Helen Macintyre. One kid
(7) Fourth affair: 2012-2016, Jennifer Arcuri, American technology entrepreneur, alleged by her when interviewed in 2020 and in greater detail in another interview in 2021. Investigation in 2019 as to whether Boris had been funnelling public money to her, in his capacity as Mayor of London
(8) Second divorce: 2018 announced, 2020 finalised
(9) Fifth affair/First cohabitation: 2019, Carrie Symonds, Conservative Party media official, had worked on Boris' campaign for mayor
(10) Third marriage: 2021, Carrie Symonds. Three kids to date. That should bring us up to eight children as of this year (plus the one abortion and two miscarriages, one for Wyatt and one for Symonds)
Well, as Catholic, can't throw stones since Symonds herself is the result of tangled marital circumstances:
"Caroline Louise Beavan Symonds was born on 17 March 1988 to Matthew Symonds, co-founder of The Independent, and Josephine McAfee (née Lawrence), a lawyer working for that newspaper.
...Symonds was the result of an affair between her parents, who were both married to other people at the time."
And *her* father was *also* born of an affair:
"[John Beavan, Baron Ardwick] married Gladys Jones in 1934 by whom he had two children. By Anne Symonds, a BBC World Service journalist, he was also the father of Matthew Symonds."
And *his* mother was alleged to - you've guessed it - be the product of an affair, although seemingly she did not believe it:
"Although some believed her to be the illegitimate daughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, whom her mother had met in 1915, she was convinced otherwise."
Honestly, with a family history like that, no wonder she was attracted to Boris. I have no idea how or why he was baptised (supposedly) Catholic as his family tree has a lot of windings but nothing to say that one member was Catholic.
9. "government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies"
If, as I'm suggesting, the U.S. is more oligarchy than democracy then who's calling the shots?
The elite(top 10% progressively, Turchin '23), amongst which are the high IQ and those that employ & fund such. See #4 as "positive life outcomes" defined as power and comfort.
Drone shows are pretty common these days - I've seen two in person, in the US and Australia. The one in your video is nicely produced, with complicated paths for the drones, but it's hardly a demonstration of technological might.
Our suburban city just had one for 4th of July, just before the fireworks. It was smaller in scale (a few hundred drones at most) but otherwise similar. I’m sure the underlying tech is basically identical. It in fact did include the drones forming into the shape of an eagle at one point.
The thing is that since DJI essentially dominates the civilian drone market, with a futuristic level of functionality and refinement, every drone show is a display of Chinese technological might.
Drone swarm technology was pioneered by European and American groups, including Intel. The Intel variety is still more common for drone shows than DJI, to my knowledge. For example, Studio Drift uses Intel drones for their shows eg Franchise Freedom. It's another case where the Chinese may have the lead in manufacturing, but the West leads in complex algorithms research and software.
Very educational; I stand corrected. Thanks!
Here's one that was recently shared by Noah Smith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdOTV2RH9IY
Freddie DeBoer:
> They did send me a single giant .txt file which contained a badly-mangled version of the blog posts, each one repeated three or four times in the file and filled with weird characters and broken formatting; I rescued a couple of posts, and each time it took me north of four hours.
For anyone who has a problem like this: this is the sort of constrained task that GPT-3/4 excels at - where it's 'obvious' what you mean but also the garbage is too varied to fix with some regexps or by hand. Whether it's bad YouTube auto-transcriptions or mangled PDF OCR, a quick "Fix the bad formatting" in a GPT prompt will work wonders, and then you can give it a quick skim to check that it didn't over-prosify or screw up some especially unusual technical vocabulary, and you're g2g. Forget 4 hours, it'll be more like 4 minutes.
Regarding #10, it doesn't just take one person calling the police on a 6 year-old walking to school for it to be impossible. It also depends on neither the 911 service nor the police nor anyone else telling that person off for wasting their time when there is actual crime to attend to.
On link 9.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-trump-putin-and-the-gop-plan-fd2?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Elo Everything: Which do you rank higher, Bayesian Statistics or Utopia?
Me: They're the same picture.
>10: I used to work as a school bus driver. As a matter of school district policy, I was prohibited from dropping off first graders (6-7 year olds) unless there was a guardian present at the stop. Even if that "stop" was the bottom of their own driveway. And no, older siblings on the same bus didn't count as a "guardian" (although to make it all even more arbitrary, middle school age siblings I had dropped off earlier did).
The article on Italian food is quite clear in the details that the dishes originate from Italy but with misunderstood histories. Interpreting them as being really American in origin is the same nonsense rewriting of the past but for America's benefit. It's also not really about Italian cuisine but about a small number of dishes that are familiar to Americans who don't know much.
10. They must have been quick on the draw *and* persistent, because that is a short walk.
7. On this topic, I recommend the book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food by John Dickie. He argues from the outset that the casting of familiar dishes as rural tradition is a marketing fabrication, that Italian food as we know it is "city food" (However, while some dishes are American in origin, many are not). The segments covering medieval Italy were particularly interesting (in part because of how unrecognizable it is from modern Italian) and full of amusing anecdotes about influential cooks of the time.
>the casting of familiar dishes as rural tradition is a marketing fabrication, that Italian food as we know it is "city food"
Interestingly, the most recent episode of Max Miller's always excellent "Tasting History" youtube series describes basically the opposite of this process. Basically, Italians of all backgrounds had been eating pasta with butter and cheese since the middle ages. Then in 1912 Alfredo di Lelio opens a restaurant in Rome where he prepares the dish in a theatrical manner, a bunch of rich and famous people raved over his pasta, and thus Fettuccine Alfredo was born.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BivfxrSpy54
IIRC Dickie states that in the middle ages those dishes were conceived and popularized in the cities. Would be curious about Miller's source material.
Miller doesn't go into enormous detail about the origins of the dish, which as far as I can tell are unknown with any certainty (a similar dish was first mentioned in the 15th century). The point is that by the 20th century when Alfredo was operating his restaurant, the dish was ubiquitous throughout Italy, meaning he took a "rural tradition" and successfully marketed it as "city food" to various influential foreigners.
26. Thanks to this, I will be hearing Zager and Evans in my head all day.
The cottonclad warship reminds me of this question about splinter protection on wooden ships: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68259/did-age-of-sail-fighting-vessels-have-any-anti-spall-technology
I wonder how effective it was at preventing that.
Anti-spall needs to go on the inside of the armor (or hull) - I think the cottonclads put the cotton bales on the outside of the ship to basically prevent the enemy shot from reaching the ship’s structure with any velocity. Not an anti-spalling measure, more like piling earth in front of a brick wall to give protection from cannons.
So ... I have acquired my first SubStack subscriber! I am very excited! But I also don't have a Substack of my own (I just read and comment ...) so I don't know what is going on. A bot? Anyone have any ideas?
I have a few of these as well. Some of them are people trying to build an audience, I think, hoping that if they follow you, you'll reciprocate. Other people are simply enamored of my insightful and hilarious comments, I can only assume.
You can probably post on Notes and your follower would see it there. Notes constantly recommends I follow regular ACX commenters (I'm guessing because this is the Substack I read the most frequently), so if you post comments, Substack considers you a writer and might recommend you to readers!
I think I have seven! Maybe I should start a substack.
Are cottonclads necessarily a stupid idea? Coincidentally, I was reading "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" the other day. There's a passage at the end of Chapter 6 on whether protecting US army vehicles with chicken feathers might be a good idea.
Apparently the “armor” worked reasonably well and the main issue was lack of effective armament of their own - they basically had no good cannons or ammo for the ones they did, so the main tactic was plunge straight ahead, suppress fire with sharpshooters, and attempt to ram/board.
These were converted civilian riverboats designed more or less as semi-disposable one-offs to break particular blockades, and for that limited purpose they did okay.
Here is Boris Johnson's speech to the UN - in 2019, shortly after becoming PM - about technological progress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaN-MbGV4dY
I’ve ubered from Mexico City to Puebla before, which came in under 100 usd. If there’s a few of you, intercity Ubers are viable.
re #18 It's fun to see how the rankings on ELO Everything have changed after Scott set us loose on it:
#15 => #1: Intelligence (+14)
#24 => #2: Wisdom (+22)
#70 => #3: Truth (+67)
#79 => #4: Women's rights (+75)
#82 => #5: Mathematical optimization (+77)
#105 => #6: Transistor (+99)
#108 => #7: Rationalism (+101)
#111 => #8: Missionary position (+103)
#119 => #9: Justice (+110)
#127 => #10: Utopia (+117)
#136 => #11: Aurora (+125)
#140 => #12: Circumstellar habitable zone (+128)
#147 => #13: Social democracy (+134)
#149 => #14: School (+135)
#163 => #15: Bicycle (+148)
#168 => #16: Film (+152)
#183 => #17: Geothermal power (+166)
#185 => #18: Cat (+167)
#221 => #19: Infant (+202)
#224 => #20: Slate Star Codex (+204)
// Here's the code, in case anyone wants to generate an updated list:
rankings = [...[...$(".page table tbody").childNodes].entries()].map(([i,tr]) => {
const name = tr.childNodes[3].innerText
const rank = Number(tr.childNodes[0].innerText.replace('#', ''));
const delta = rank-i-1
return `#${rank} => #${i+1}: ${name} (${(delta<0?"":"+")+delta})`
})
console.log(rankings.slice(0,20).join('\n'))
How about the decreases?
Yea that was my immediate question too.
ACX cuddle puddle of death.
I hope that we see radiation-hardened laws, that'd be funny. Do they do this already?
I think the appeal of Genghis Khan is that the Mongols still have a reputation as sort of “noble savages” in terms of their lifestyle. There’s a masculine appeal to the idea of roaming around on your trusty horse, slinging arrows, hunting with golden eagles, etc. (American Indians were similarly romanticized, but that’s become “problematic” in a way that hasn’t caught up to the much more fargroup Mongols).
Whereas the Nazi or Soviet utopias would have been hyper modern ones, so there is less to romanticize there.
14. Given the legal issues that all the charter cities projects have run into, I'm genuinely curious what the convincing pitch is. Every one of them has eventually run aground upon a government change that brings more hostile political leadership to power.
19. Bigelow Aerospace is dead now. It basically shut down in 2020 and laid off all the employees, and then later transferred ownership of the remaining ISS module to NASA. Maybe if they'd stuck it out longer they'd be doing better (what with the talk now of commercial space stations), but they either didn't or couldn't - maybe Bigelow's money ran out.
A few skilled writers who were bad people: V.S. Naipaul (liked to beat his wife), Normal Mailer (stabbed his), William S. Burroughs (shot his, and also fucked children). Probably also bad: Rousseau, Celine, Verlaine, Pound, Wilde.
There have probably been thousands of bad people (by the morality of their own time and ours) who were very skilled writers.
Hemingway seems like a problematic dude.
What's your source for Burroughs fucking children? (Morbidly curious; not something I'd heard before.)
Can't remember if it's from Desolation Angels or a bio of Kerouac, but Burroughs' is quoted as saying, while living in Morocco and writing Naked Lunch, "Anyone who says they wouldn't fuck a 12-year-old Arab boy is lying or insane." That isn't proof and maybe I'm slandering the dead, but he was not known for not acting on his desires.
Your face-value interpretation isn't unreasonable. But I classify Burroughs with Hunter S. Thompson as someone given to making shocking statements for rhetorical effect which might truthfully reflect their internal personal landscape, but aren't necessarily reliable narration. So I'm not convinced that's a smoking gun, but thanks for the pointer.
If Burroughs actually said that, would it hold a record for the fraction of the population being labelled as insane by a statement? 99%+ or so?
That's fair. I think Burroughs picked a particularly unpopular [widely condemned sleazy behavior]. Not just unpopular in the sense of widely condemned, but unpopular in the sense of something that the bulk of the population wouldn't choose to do even with complete freedom from consequences. Burroughs' claim would only apply to the intersection of true pedophiles (he spoke of 12-year-olds, not 17-year-olds) and gays (unless he also meant to include women - I'm guessing not), which is a rather small group. I agree that it looks like a typical mind fallacy.
Any reason for think BoJo is an especially "bad" person compared to your average politician?
On 4, for those of us without journal subscriptions, do you have the IQ range they looked at outcomes for and what the quantitative dose/response relationship actually was for the outcomes measured? Personally, I would not have expected worse outcomes at any level of high IQ, but the abstract is talking about 120+ and I was under the impression when people are talking about geniuses being lonely and crazy, they're talking more like 160+. I would personally expect diminishing returns because everything should have diminishing returns, but not negative returns.
There's also the problem that sample sizes start getting pretty small at the truly high end, though. The outcomes of all 10 people in the world or whatever who are over 180 might not mean much.
I think this discussion gets clouded a bit by people not having a clear idea of what positive life outcomes means. They see the world's richest people being reasonable smart, but not apparently super-geniuses as far as I can tell. But this is clearly confounded by the fact that the very richest people are all either fund managers or business founders. No matter your IQ, you have to actually go into those fields to ever become that wealthy. You kind of need to stratify your analysis by career choice, as in, the world's wealthiest people likely don't have the world's highest IQs, but do they at least have among the highest IQs of people who choose to found businesses?
You can see the article on Sci Hub, in case you don't know.
I realized this eventually, thanks. I guess I'm a bit out of the loop, but figured out this is a thing while trying to retrieve details from stuff cited on Stronger by Science. Sort of raises the questions of why blogs like this don't just link directly to Sci-Hub. Will he get in trouble?
a) Yes, they could get in trouble. DSL bans sci-hub links for that reason as well.
b) Sci Hub is under a constant cat and mouse game, so links will quickly break. The last time I tried to get a paper from Sci Hub, it was completely inaccessible (presumably they're back again for now, given Pepe's comment).
The Swedish study Scott is referring to claimed that the IQ relationship broke down around the 90th percentile i.e. right around 120. So it's actually the perfect range to look at for the sake of what scott is saying here (that the swedish study is wrong).
Someone should make a dating app that matches people who have similar answers to the elo everything app
But only if they mark the app as #1 on elo everything.
"Although I appreciated the personal story, I’m more interested in the claim that Twitter’s algorithm changed sometime in the past few years in a way that prevents stories from “going viral” in the way that they used to; does anyone know more about this?"
I don't but it matches my anecdotal impression: I feel like Twitter used to be a good place to find things to read later, via Instapaper, and now it's not.
#13: When the English subtitles come, they will simply be the original story, near verbatim.
Do you base that on your own understanding of Russian? Regardless, there's still value to the subtitles even if they match the original story, because they let you follow along with what the actors are saying. It's easier to pick up on nonverbal cues when you understand what's being said.
Of course. I was commenting on the film's style of adaptation, or rather relative lack thereof.
Can confirm, the thing is simply a slightly abridged version of the original story.
Re 8 (Nazis vs Mongols)
As I keep trying to point out, the religious police of the Anglo (and thus indirectly the whole) world, ie the Social Scientists and Humanities, have as their theological touchstone the WW2 and specifically the Nazis. (Japanese should be in there as well, but they raise too many complicated problems that twist the hierarchy of castes into a Klein bottle…)
This means they rigorously police any and everything related to Nazis but care much less about Mongols. In much the same way that, say, the Saudi religious police care an awful lot what you say about Allah, and very little about Christological disputes as to, eg, whether Christ’s suffering was genuine or docetic.
#16: you would think these could be defeated fairly easily with some flaming tar or something, like the Greeks used to do with their built-for-ramming ships. More Union incompetence, I wager.
#21: Ibram Kendi approves. The only way to create equality is through overt discrimination that counteracts the very carefully measured impact of covert discrimination.
You should include a NSFW warning for ELO Everything.
Seconded. I've always thought that Don't Bring Me Down had a hella raunchy beat. And Evil Woman speaks for itself.
Haha.
I know nothing about Boris Johnson. But my first consideration if any political figure wrote a book, or a story, or a pamphlet, or a warning on a mattress tag is to ask "to what extent did they actually write it themselves?"
He’s been a journalist for years. Also plenty of politicians have written books, and good ones, and all of them should be able to.
I share that automatic cynicism regarding writing attributed to public figures, but Johnson has a background in journalism which plausibly explains how he developed a talent in this area. His statement after the death of the Queen ( https://conservativehome.com/2022/09/09/this-is-our-countrys-saddest-day-because-she-had-a-unique-and-simple-power-to-make-us-happy-johnsons-statement ) also struck me as being better written than those from similar public figures, so I'd say that either he's a talented writer or he has a better-than-average ghostwriter.
Interesting. Thanks!
Re: 17.
This kind of post, for me, is the most useful that have ever come out of rationalist community. Not various kinds of models about how to think better, because I am like most of the people, that is very resistant to change. Changing how I think is a long-term problem and I'm not even sure that a solvable one. However, those little life hacks about how to live better, especially if you have some sort of a underlying dysfunctionality, which seems to be pretty frequent in rationalist circles, is so very useful, because this is kind of a lot of proven advice that I don't have to hunt over the internet, and it's readily applicable for everyone and anyone. More of this, please.
Noah Smith is more flip floppy on libertarians than most in mainstream
Re 30, about the intercity Uber - I did this once when my 11 pm flight from DFW to College Station was canceled after we had spent two hours on the runway waiting for fog to clear. I don't remember what excuse they had to not buy us a hotel room, but we would often prefer not to deal with the hotel they book, because it's a 30 minute drive from the airport, and they put you on the 8 am flight, and make you get to the airport 90 minutes before the flight. When we discovered that the rental car shortage meant that it was impossible to get a one-way car rental from DFW to College Station, and saw that the hotels on the airport were well over $300, we realized that it was actually cheaper to call a Lyft to drive us home (and we got a couple hours of sleep in the back seat).
It turns out that in Texas, lots of Uber/Lyft drivers are totally happy to get the intercity ride, because that guarantees them work for half of the long period, rather than several short rides with long gaps between them.
Hey Scott, does the observation about good writers not necessarily being decent people apply to the War Nerd? I mean, he is a great writer, but I get the impression that he would be a bit obnoxious in real life. Have you ever met him?
I don't think I wanted to claim that good writers were decent people - many obviously aren't - but that they need some kind of core of intellectual integrity or clarity that I suspect Johnson of not having.
I've never met War Nerd and I haven't even read much of his writing.
Just skipped over his piece, being Belgian this triggered my interest. The guy writes well, but not well enough for me to appreciate his story: it exudes the worst kind of wokeness (self-hatred), at first subtly but then more and more, up to a level that I am not able to support anymore. I am not as resistant as I once was, probably by lack of practice: contrary to one or 2 years ago, it's now rare to encounter such wokism, at least in my usual web sources...Or maybe I just usually sort better :)
PS: Sorry, it's not wokism, not exactly, not sure what it is but I can tell it's extremelly difficult to stand as a Belgian, or as any non-belgian who have traveled in Europe at least a little bit.
It is a general loathing of emasculated, peaceful society.
Posting awesome Chinese propaganda is kind of bad. Fortunately, an anti-CCP group called Shen Yun (which the Chinese Government accuses of being a cult just because they are kind of actually a cult) also produces awesome, colorful, artistic propaganda that one could link to.
And... I mean... it's technically not a swastika.
I dunno man, the Chines have a fascination for the numeral 8, which as any WoPo reader can tell you is code for "Hitler."
I've got a mountain of problems with that characterization.
That's... not the preferred nomenclature.
To add some context on Māori health in NZ (note I am no expert and am steelmanning the position of race-conscious healthcare here)
-- While one way of viewing this from the US context is covid vaccination prioritisation, you could also view it in the context of something like the Indian health service, which is perhaps a more familiar but also much more comprehensive allocation of government resources towards a particular ethnic group's health.
-- It is likely that Māori and Pacific people, like many formally isolated indigenous groups, are genetically susceptible to various diseases.
-- There is widespead support for the view that beyond any practical concerns about efficiency we must redress previous wrongs to Māori given NZ's history. For example Treaty of Waitangi settlements (basically reparations) have fairly broad support accross the political spectrum. Health resources and equity are significant in the sense that in many cases provision of health (hospitals) and education (schools) were explicitly traded by tribes in exchange for land, to the government of the time (generally this provision was inadequate or non-existant).
I am similarly sceptical about this implementation, and definitely agree it seems advocates are weaselly wanting to have it both ways ('it's absolutely essential for equity', but 'it will also have almost no impact'). If it's going to happen authorities should be open about it and explicit about the rules and likely impact. For example, another controversial thing occuring in NZ is that Māori and Pacific are eligible for free flu vaccination at a younger age (55+) compared to everyone else (65+), but this seems much more acceptable to me, given evidence that flu susceptibility in Māori and Pacific people has a strong genetic component.
To add onto your steelman, one way to square the apparent contradiction of “absolutely essential” vs. “no impact” is by keeping in mind the percentage of Māori population compared to the rest of NZ. If every Māori person was bumped to the front of the line, that would reduce their own wait times by 100% but increase everyone else’s by only 17% (I had to google their population share and was surprised by how high it is).
I’m currently researching a similar event involving an opposite-direction bias: a First Nations band had nearly all their trapping lines destroyed by a hydro project. The impact assessment had acknowledged this would happen but claimed it was ok since those lines “affected only 3% of the province’s fur production”. :(
Yeah interesting point. Kind of relates to my first point above that there seems to be a dichotomy in views: health resources to indigenous people provided through a discrete programme (Australia, Brazil, USA) is generally accepted, but providing more resources or prioritisation as an aspect of a comprehensive health programme is racist/unacceptable.
I imagine this is driven by a couple of things:
1) Your point, how much of the population is being prioritised - obviously bringing 17% of people up in priority imposes a burden on everyone else, but the fewer people the less the impact is. This probably wouldn't even be an issue if only 1% benefited greatly but it had little impact on anyone else.
2) How different are the situation and needs of the population being targetted, ie. a programme might be seen positively if they specialise in providing care on reservations and for illnesses which are highly specific to that group, but not if they provide identical care as the regular health system but *better*
I'd emphasise that both these things exist on a spectrum and its not always obvious what the right policy is.
On the population thing, yeah it is relatively high compared to Australia, Canada, USA etc. There is a high racial intermarriage rate and a trend over time that more people of mixed descent identify as Māori on census so the percentage can be expected to continue to increase.
While I'm dubious about this defense, in NZ the usual media support for all sorts of health-treatment advantages for Maori (and Pacific islanders) never - ever to my experience - mentions whether controlling for SES (which is usually lower), BMI (which is usually higher), and so forth explains any of it. No it's just "Maori have statistically worse outcomes" - so even the fittest, wealthiest, Maori get various priorities over a poor unhealthy Asian.
There is, arguable validity to the view that there is a historical wrong to be considered. (Unclear what. But whatever it is it goes forever and ever until the end of time.) But no, the benefits are it's not just "Maori", it's "Maori and Pacific Islanders" the latter group of which have no such historical claim. So it's just racism.
The usual suspects were unhappy that, when in short supply, the COVID vaccine prioritized the elderly - since more of those are white and Asian, this was - we are told - a deliberately racist policy. The government took it on board, and so Maori (and PI?!) have priority access to vaccines and other medications. Want Paxlovid? Tight conditions if non-Maori/PI, much freer if you are.
NZ is rebuilding itself as a race-obsessed country.
Only a few people (notably those who wanted to avoid giving COVID vaccines to the elderly first) seem to understand that the best way of gaining racial health equality is to preferentially kill the non-Maori. So far.
> It is likely that Māori and Pacific people, like many formally isolated indigenous groups, are genetically susceptible to various diseases.
You can't appeal to this while defending the views of egalitarians who don't believe in meaningful genetic differences between races - it's all 'socially constructed'.
>There is widespead support for the view
So, discrimination is okay as long as there's enough support?
>There is widespead support for the view that beyond any practical concerns about efficiency we must redress previous wrongs to Māori given NZ's history.
"NZ's history" is that 300 years after oxford university was founded, polynesians (who would have happily butchered anyone getting in their way) set up shop in NZ and now act like they're an indigenous population there. And they never had or would have been likely to have sophisticated medical knowledge and technology without the Europeans, making this an absurd case of 'reparations', and it is not restoring anything to its original state.
>For example, another controversial thing occuring in NZ is that Māori and Pacific are eligible for free flu vaccination at a younger age (55+) compared to everyone else (65+), but this seems much more acceptable to me, given evidence that flu susceptibility in Māori and Pacific people has a strong genetic component.
If it's about outcomes, then doing it on a racial basis makes no sense. It should be the poorest people regardless of race. Rich maoris have better outcomes than many poor whites, but under this program the latter if benefitted.
I don’t really want to get into a full on culture war debate, but I don’t understand the relevance of your point around origins. Regardless of how settlement arbitrarily before or after Oxford was founded counts as ‘indigenous’ to you, they were here first, and long enough (effectively isolated for around 500 years) to create a unique culture, expand and occupy the whole country. Also ‘happily butchered anyone who got in their way’, how do you presume to even know this? There’s very little evidence remaining of the founding population, we can only conjecture their intentions and this assumption therefore just seems prejudiced.
We know the result when they reached isolated peaceful populations on other islands- rape, slavery, murder, torture.
We were talking about the Polynesians who founded NZ’s Māori population in ~1250 AD. If you’re referring to one warlike Māori tribe murdering another peaceful Māori tribe, 600 years later (Chatham islands), I don’t see how that adds much to our understanding.
You don't see how the Moari's aggressive, war-waging culture and willingness to slaughter and enslave even other Maori who offer no resistance "adds much to our understanding" of Maori's treatment of competing populations?
Because cultures can change massively over 600 years. For example why are you focussing on the aggressive Ngāti Tama and not the pacifist Moriori? They both descend from the same Polynesian founders.
I don't know about the notion that if AARO had Title 50 authority, they could "demand" classified information from the intelligence community (IC). Well, I guess they could demand it, but IC members can still not share it. Also, the IC can (and does) share lots of information with the DOD (which is mostly Title 10) all the time. That webpage looks like it was written by someone who doesn't understand how all the inside baseball works. It's not like they'll suddenly get a golden key to the secrets. IC members don't even share everything with each other (or internally). They share some things and not others. Likewise, they share some things and not others with the DOD.
I don't know anything about the AARO, but it's not clear to me that they wouldn't already have Title 50 authorities, seeing as they were created under 50 U.S. Code § 3373 and they report to the PDDNI (as well as somewhere in the DOD). It wouldn't be surprising if they had both. The NSA, for example, can operate under either authority, depending on the situation.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the news reports, the situation with ethnic priority on surgery waitlists in New Zealand is quite funny, in that:
Ethnicity was Already a factor taken into account in the algorithm for these surgery waitlists. This latest change makes ethnicity Less important in the algorithm than was previously the case, and raises importance of other various poverty indicators. But because this is the first most people have heard of it, so it has had a huge impact in the news and political spheres.
All of which is not to say anything in particular about it on the object level, but it's funny how these things end up happening.
Dan Carlin in his Mongol empire series explores the question of Hitler vs Ghengis Khan. If i remember correctly, he pretty much chalks it up to the amount of time that has passed, which seems very reasonable to me. Who knows what people will think of the Nazis in 600 years, although I feel like the fact that we have photos definitely changes the way we’re going to look at history in the distant future.
Mmm, I think Genghis Khan didn't have any particular section of people he wanted to exterminate (except maybe the clan/tribe who killed his father and plunged his family into destitution once abandoned by the rest of the tribe), so that even if they did pillage, murder and enslave, this was all part of the normal pattern of conquest.
Hitler, on the other hand, had definite grades of "human/slave/sub-human to be exterminated" and more importantly came out of a civilised Western society. We judge barbarians by a different measure. And of course, while it's not fair to call it the "woke narrative", the swing against Colonialism and attitudes of the past means that "our ancestors called these people barbarians and savages, that was unjust and unfair and prejudiced so we will correct the balance by admiring them".
Or a less charitable way to look at it is Genghis saw everyone who was not in his tribe as subhuman.
To be fair, pretty much everyone did in those days.
Oh for sure.
More importantly, Genghis didn't give people too much grief for being "subhuman", so long as they didn't give *him* too much grief in their pointless resistance. Pay your taxes, mind your own business, don't ever imagine you're in charge here. The Jews would have done fairly well under the Khan.
And yet the impact of this 'not too much grief' was a tenth of the world being killed and raped.
And of course, European colonisation wasn't about trying to wipe out colonized people, and yet it gets talked about as similarly bad as the nazis.
There *were* Jews under the Khan. I don't know how well they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews
>Mmm, I think Genghis Khan didn't have any particular section of people he wanted to exterminate (except maybe the clan/tribe who killed his father and plunged his family into destitution once abandoned by the rest of the tribe), so that even if they did pillage, murder and enslave, this was all part of the normal pattern of conquest.
Okay, but now you have to explain why the 'normal pattern of conquest' is okay. I'm sure the people being brutally raped and murdered by Khan & co. weren't thinking to themselves "Gee, this sucks, but at least they're not calling me a sub-human!".
And it doesn't explain why european colonialism is viewed as negatively as it is despite being vastly less violent than most conquest throughout history.
I also think chalking it up to the amount of time that has passed is very plausible.
Re photos: After 600 years of photoshop and more sophisticated successors, it might be that people (if there still are people!) of that era might have a visceral distrust of photos and all similarly modifiable evidence.
The written word is modifiable evidence, and people still trust that if it seems to come from a reliable source.
Okay, though "if it seems to come from a reliable source." is often a pretty severe restriction.
The War Nerd mention reminded me of my favorite War Nerd quote
"The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. "
https://web.archive.org/web/20160610033719/https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihad-hyperpanda/
>but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
What about Mongolia, which is inhabited by - Mongols.
Mongolia is a rump state with crappy land, a bad economy and not much power.
In Boris Johnson's article he says he was losing 4 to 5 pounds a week. That's a lot. Too much in fact. Healthy weight loss can't really outpace 2 pounds a week. I wonder if his side effects were caused by Ozempic-induced undereating which didn't become noticeable until he lost enough weight that it became difficult for his fat stores to make up the deficit in real time.
I've suspected this may be a risk for semaglutide for a while but haven't looked to see if it's addressed anywhere.
Ah.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/well/eat/ozempic-side-effects-malnutrition.html
Glad to see that I achieved the height of rationalist interior design sophomore year of college. If anyone is actually interested in architecture and interior design (and city planning) from what could be argued is a rationalist point of view, I suggest A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. A bit idealistic and of its time (1977) but some really good ideas and a useful way of thinking about the topic.
> 28: Boris Johnson on semaglutide
"After 40 years of moral failure, 40 years of weakness in the face of temptation — of akrasia — I was going to acquire a new and invincible chemical willpower."
That's maybe the most mainstream context I've seen the word "akrasia" used in, I thought that was mostly rationalist jargon still.
The first comparison I got for Elo Everything was Scott Aaronson vs. Scrotum.
China is a country with lots of people who, like normal people in any other country, like to make cool things. I think it's unnecessary to link a random drone show to political drama just because the CCP is what Americans primarily associate China with.
Re: IQ
Isn't there also an increased chance of insanity with greater IQ? Is this reflected in the "positive" outcome results?
Re: lab grown meat
I cannot see how anything thinks lab grown meat is somehow safer, cleaner, more environmentally friendly, etc than actual meat. I've repeatedly noted that the overhead costs and supply chain issues associated with lab growing anything are enormous. The capability is nil. The possibility of fuckery is enormous - real world meat actually requires a functional animal whereas lab grown meat just requires a mass of cells. Cancer cells grow really fast, don't they?
I think the main reason not to believe Grusch on aliens is this: "Grusch claimed the first UFO case he was briefed on involved a vehicle downed in Italy in 1933; the Mussolini government had allegedly kept it in storage until near the end of World War II. Pope Pius XII “back-channeled” the existence of the object to the United States, which obtained it in 1944 or 1945." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblower-is-back-with-more-crazy-claims.html
Re: 8: I think context is another big component of the difference in historical legacies. The Mongols weren't actually that much worse (by modern moral standards) than contemporary states, just more successful. Yes, if you found yourself on the pointy end of the conquest, you would have a very bad day and end up dead, but that was true no matter which empire was doing the conquering. Their policies concerning conquered territories were quite fair for the day, and in some respects their conquests were better off than under nearly any contemporary alternative. I would even argue that Genghis's policy of blanket religious freedom was among the most liberal policies ever instituted by any state prior to the industrial period (though the competition for that includes things like "fine, you heathens can exist but we're going to tax you extra" or "we will pretend you don't exist as an alternative to having you all killed," so this is more an indictment of religious freedom policy in pre-industrial states). Possibly by accident, their warmaking philosophy also dovetails with the modern understanding (at least, by people who understand war, as opposed to people who complain about it existing on Twitter) - that war is a fundamentally and inescapably awful thing, that trying to unilaterally make it cuddly and nice just prolongs the suffering, and that it's thus better to start out being exactly as brutal as you need to be to win quickly.
By contrast, the Nazis were not only much worse than their contemporaries, but (especially in hindsight) notably worse than nearly any historical precedent. The Mongol Empire was, in broad strokes, a monarchy conquering other monarchies; Nazi Germany was an authoritarian state invading mostly democratic states. The Mongol Empire mostly stopped killing people on a systematic level once the conquest was over; Nazi Germany very famously did the opposite of that. The only real points of commonality is that they were both expansionist empires (which... isn't actually very unusual in history, because everyone wants more stuff) who killed a bunch of people.