"I'm reminded of the recent Aella twitter thread where she complains that the neo-traditionalists that "she thought were her allies" turned out to have a problem with sex workers."
Seriously? I'm tempted to say "Only smart people can be that dumb" but yes, it's odd how people who lay claim to "TRADITIONALIST" will hold TRADITIONAL ATTITUDES to certain things 😁
Actually, everyone who makes or eats sandwiches (including hamburgers) should have to pay a fee (or pay homage) to John Montagu, 11th Earl of Sandwich, because his predecessor invented sandwiches.
And the courts will have to decide whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
Ooh, I can see the lawyers licking their lips in anticipation (and not just because they get to try out hot dogs).
Is a hot dog to be classed along with foods like tacos, and in that case, is a taco a sandwich? Does the essence of a sandwich depend on a horizontal, not vertical, division of the bread? Are hot dog buns "buns", which is confectionery, or "bread"?
It'll be like "are Jaffa cakes cakes or biscuits?" all over again 😁
Taking all these factors into account, Jaffa cakes had characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, but the tribunal thought they had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated.
"The leading case on the borderline is that concerning Jaffa cakes: United Biscuits (LON/91/0160). Customs and Excise had accepted since the start of VAT that Jaffa cakes were zero-rated as cakes, but always had misgivings about whether this was correct. Following a review, the department reversed its view of the liability. Jaffa cakes were then ruled to be biscuits partly covered in chocolate and standard-rated: United Biscuits (as McVities, one of the largest manufacturers of Jaffa cakes) appealed against this decision. The Tribunal listed the factors it considered in coming to a decision as follows.
- The product’s name was a minor consideration.
- Ingredients: Cake can be made of widely differing ingredients, but Jaffa cakes were made of an egg, flour, and sugar mixture which was aerated on cooking and was the same as a traditional sponge cake. It was a thin batter rather than the thicker dough expected for a biscuit texture.
- Cake would be expected to be soft and friable; biscuit would be expected to be crisp and able to be snapped. Jaffa cakes had the texture of sponge cake.
- Size: Jaffa cakes were in size more like biscuits than cakes.
- Packaging: Jaffa cakes were sold in packages more similar to biscuits than cakes.
- Marketing: Jaffa cakes were generally displayed for sale with biscuits rather than cakes.
- On going stale, a Jaffa cake goes hard like a cake rather than soft like a biscuit.
- Jaffa cakes are presented as a snack, eaten with the fingers, whereas a cake may be more often expected to be eaten with a fork. They also appeal to children, who could eat one in a few mouthfuls rather like a sweet.
- The sponge part of a Jaffa cake is a substantial part of the product in terms of bulk and texture when eaten.
Taking all these factors into account, Jaffa cakes had characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, but the tribunal thought they had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated.
An earlier case, that of Adams Foods Ltd (MAN/83/0062) which concerned Chocolate Dundees, a traditional type of shortcake with a chocolate base and individually wrapped for sale, came to the opposite conclusion. The decision contains a useful, if technical, table of comparative differences between cakes and biscuits, provided by an expert witness, and the tribunal was unable to see any factors supporting a view of the product as cake. It was ruled to be a biscuit partly covered in chocolate and accordingly standard-rated."
I don't think there is any evidence that he invented the sandwich. There are things in the 10th c. Islamic corpus that get described as (rolled) sandwiches in translation, and I find it unlikely that nobody in England before the Earl put meat or jam between two slices of bread and ate it.
Actually, we of the Jewish community are the ones who should get the fees, as our ancient sage Hillel the Elder created his namesake sandwich long before the Earl was born.
"a few people who've been convinced by Tumblr and TikTok that asexuality is a thing"
A-hem! We do in fact exist, and some of us even predate Tumblr and Tiktok 😁 Some of us are even aromantics, another status that the general population refuses to believe in, like pixies or unicorns. I genuinely have never "been in love" with anyone at all in my entire life, so the shenanigans on dating apps are like anthropological reports about a Papuan Stone Age tribe to me.
Re: romantic love, while I used to get grumpy over the whole "love is what makes us human" thing, with romantic/erotic love being the love meant there, I do see that lacking the capacity to experience it is indeed a lack. Something less than absolutely fully human in the shared experience of humanity and what it means to be a human.
Not having the entanglements of romantic love has spared me a lot of things, and saved me from a lot of things (I will never, for example, share the same bitter, burning, misery and despair of those who want love, seek love, perhaps have love to give, and can't get love), it also means that at times I am a Martian.
Just as I can see the folly of those who make bad decisions knowingly, based on "But I love him/her!", I can also dimly apprehend that while it's easy for me to be rational in such an emotional situation (were I ever in one) this is not because of superior virtue on my part but because this is a temptation which has no appeal for me, and that I am indeed missing out on a chunk of understanding, experiencing, and participating in what it means to be human.
I don't feel any great wish to experience that, but I do see that I am not in the mainstream of the species. it's the same attitude as that of C.S. Lewis about paederasty/homosexuality, as he experienced it when going to school:
"A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors, usually Bloods. Usually, not always. Though our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life to themselves, they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on the middle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederasty among the lower classes was not "side", or at least not serious side; not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one's coat unbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.
The Tarts had an important function to play in making school (what it was advertised to be) a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised. Nor were they paid (in hard cash, I mean) for their services; though of course they had all the flattery, unofficial influence, favour, and privileges which the mistresses of the great have always enjoyed in adult society. That was where the Preparation for Public Life came in. It would appear from Mr. Arnold Lunn's Harrovians that the Tarts at his school acted as informers. None of ours did. I ought to know, for one of my friends shared a study with a minor Tart; and except that he was sometimes turned out of the study when one of the Tart's lovers came in (and that, after all, was only natural) he had nothing to complain of. I was not shocked by these things. For me, at that age, the chief drawback to the whole system was that it bored me considerably. For you will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject. After games, gallantry was the principal topic of polite conversation; who had "a case with" whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where.... I suppose it might be called the Greek Tradition. But the vice in question is one to which I had never been tempted, and which, indeed, I still find opaque to the imagination. Possibly, if I had only stayed longer at the Coll, I might, in this respect as in others, have been turned into a Normal Boy, as the system promises. As things were, I was bored.
...Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle."
In a similar way, the topic of romance and gallantry bores me, which is why it's easy for me to give lofty judgements about "but why can't your good sense over-ride the emotional reaction which you know will lead to problems?" and why my attitude to things like the "Last of Us" TV drama episode with the Gay Romance is not rooted in "I'm fed up of all this wokeness pushed on us" primarily, but rather that if I watched the show, I would equally have been bored/put off by an episode devoted entirely to a conventional, heterosexual romance. A and B love each other, yay, how nice, now get on with the plot and the action.
I'm sure its a thing, but why it needs to be some kind of idenity of political thing the way the the legacy members of the gay alphabet are is absolutely beyond me.
Well, this is a whole pile of history, so let me do some laying the ground works:
(1) Yes, there are a lot of silly gradations like "demisexual" which in effect shake out to "I only feel sexual attraction when it's people I like", just like most people feel. But there is definitely "I do not feel any, or only very weak, sexual attraction" and "I do not feel, or only rarely and weakly feel, romantic love". I can affirm that I have never had any stirrings of romantic love - this is separating romantic love from sexual desire; there are people who do fall in love but don't want sex as such, and people who happily have sex but don't feel romantic love.
This also does not mean *no* love - there are people who are in sexual relationships, like the person, feel affection etc. for the person, but are not "in love". That last, "you're not in love with me, ergo you are only using me" seems to be the deal-breaker in such relationships, or at least that's what I've read.
So I'm here to say that asexuality and aromanticism are indeed Things. While I understand where you are coming from, what you are saying is the equivalent of "Oh pooh, there are no such thing as food allergies, only picky eaters". While certainly a lot of perfectly healthy people have jumped aboard the gluten-free diet bandwagon in order to follow a trend , that does not invalidate the fact that there are people who are gluten-intolerant or are coeliacs.
(2) Way back, when the alphabet soup business was getting to its peak with the LGBTQIA2 aconym before it was at its apex of including every possible combination, there was much fuss and pother over "the A stands for 'ally'", with the asexuals/aromantics who cared about such things reminding that no, it started off as "A is for asexual/aromantic" and objecting to the fact that the "ally" meaning had displaced that.
Now, it was late in my life before I ever discovered the concepts and the words for asexuality and aromanticism, and when I did, it explained a lot to me - the same way that someone who got a diagnosis of coeliac disease would suddenly understand why things happened when they ate certain foods. "Oh, *that's* why ever since I was nine, I didn't want marriage or a family!" Yeah, my mother told me "oh it'll be different when you're older, you'll change your mind" but I went through puberty, adolescence, and adulthood and nope. No change. And no traumatic experience in childhood like rape or abuse to provide a handy psychological explanation there, either, before anyone suggests that.
So I was old enough that I didn't care, didn't feel the need to go in under any umbrella, and frankly didn't feel I fitted in with the whole gay and queer movement anyhow. But some people did care and want to belong, and that was a gatekeeping mountain of incidents.
Because you couldn't belong to a LGBT group unless you were LGBT. That was taking resources from real minority orientations and persecuted groups. Aces/aros had "straight passing privilege" and even worse if you *were* straight.
If you could hang another label on yourself, like trans or gay/lesbian/bi as well as asexual or aromantic, okay. You were allowed in on sufferance and because you weren't cis or straight, not because of the ace/aro stuff. There was a deal of hairpulling on social media over this one. Cis/straight wanting to muscle in on queer spaces? Fuck off and fuck you! was the attitude, and a lot of "but we're minority too, we get oppressed by cis-heteronormativity too" from the ace/aro side.
I'm cis, and I identify (when I have to pick a label) as heterosexual (I have weak sexual attraction towards men, not women) but in general I don't give a damn, if the queers don't want me that's their prerogative, and it's nobody's business but my own, even if the current craze for DEIB means I could wangle that into special status.
But I think that's where it's at, now; even as the alphabet soup lot eventually became more tolerant and less militant over letting the straights in, so that the full acronym has blossomed into "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, queer/questioning, intersex, allied/asexual/aromantic/agender and two-spirited", God save the mark, that is the state of play.
Cis and/or straight (and neurotypical/abled) is not alone dull, boring, less creative and fun and all the rest of it, it is part of the systemic oppression of minorities. If you're 16 or 18 or 20 and have been brought up on all the rights activism stuff, you don't want to be the designated villain for the two-minute hate. So if you can claim some kind of queer identity, that lets you fit in and be protected. Hence agender and non-binary and the rest of it being adopted by what are otherwise female-presenting in every way straight girls. It's camouflage, it's protection, it means you can be in the spotlight with a flag of your own to wave in the Pride parade: look at this video, and see how the *only* family not presented is "cis and straight":
And, as I alluded to earlier, if you are being cynical about it, and your workplace is nudging you hard to "what are your pronouns?" and you feel you may need some kind of protection for having conservative views, then coming out as a minority will help. Finagling being ace as a special alphabet identity so in case you ever get hauled up for a reprimand for not being 200% flag-waving during company Pride month promotions you can pull the "you can't fire me, I'm a protected minority and that is discrimination" card. Not that I think it happens (yet, and hopefully never) but certainly being cis, straight, white, male is the lowest rung on the ladder today.
So, while I am legitimately entitled to wave two flags in the Pride parade, I would rather spork my eyes out (as used to be said) than do so:
Actually, wanting to charge admission for access to your colorful native garb and charming folk dancing is very Disney. So I'd say that ship has sailed.
Things can be morally objectionable while still being legal.
>Disneyfication of true European culture
What is true European culture? and if can be defined, i doubt Sami culture would play a large part in it given the small population and remoteness of their territory.
Does "protected" mean "other people can't use it as an input to their culture"? The way you put it seems to view imitation as an attack. If other people copy my ideas, perhaps modify them, that doesn't hurt me.
Does "Disneyfication of true European culture" mean depictions of it in Disney productions? That doesn't keep Europeans from doing what they want, culturally speaking, any more than European fiction about cowboys or gangsters keeps American culture from doing what it is doing.
Both cultural appropriation and IP rights are terms that carry some importance in contemporary western society. This means that it makes tactical sense for the Saami Council to frame its complaints in such terms, whether or not their reasons for being protective of their culture stem from those kinds of attitudes.
If you follow the link you'll see the guy got 18 weeks jail. While in my view nowhere near enough (especially given he came back to assault them a second time), the guy did in fact get jail.
It's pretty messed up. Given it's the UK, I honestly wonder if the perpetrator went to the same private school as the judge or something like that - the UK business and political establishment feels so incestuous.
You're correct that the UK's judicial and political establishment is incestuous - but no, this has got nothing to do with that. Judges have very limited control over sentencing - they're following pretty tight guidelines. And sadly, the problem of repeat violent offenders receiving light or non-existent sentences is not limited to scumbags from the upper classes.
Yup. Knife possession worse than drunk driving? Saying mean words online worse than shoplifting? Saying mean words in person worse than bike theft or *upskirting*? Give me a break.
This chart convinces me that the British public is tough on crime *in all the wrong ways*. Anarcho-tyranny, essentially.
Merely having a knife is not inherently dangerous. Drunk driving is inherently dangerous to life via increased risk of accident (and in particular, multiple-vehicle accident, which can kill nonconsenting strangers).
Very much doubt that Cody would consider *menacing* someone with a knife less bad than drunk driving. But if I walk around all day with a longsword on my back, I don't see where this harms anyone.
Knives are the go-to weapons for violent criminals in the UK, so I've never really understood why so many Yankeelanders think it's obviously absurd to stop people carrying them around. Like, are they seriously under the impression that British law forbids people from keeping and using knives in their own homes?
I have definitely encountered Americans on the Internet who think that British knife laws are stricter than they really are. Though I've also encountered Brits in real life who think that too!
I think a lot of Americans - presumably because guns are more available here - just don't instinctually put a locking blade pocket knife or filleting knife in the category "weapon". Which on the one hand is silly, people get killed with knives in the US too. But I carry a knife that would see me arrested in the UK every day, and use it frequently, and never would have felt the need to think twice about it. If I wanted an actual defense tool I'd carry a handgun.
I'd be interested to know how they recruited their sample - the poll is published in the right-wing Spectator magazine, so it's possible it's biased conservative. Also worth noting that knife crime is constantly demonised in the British press, so probably survey participants are interpreting it as "going equipped to stab someone" rather than "walking around with a knife for some legitimate reason". IIRC the law in the UK is that you can carry a non-locking penknife up to 3" in length without having to give a reason, and a longer or locking knife if you have a good reason to do so (which is left up to the discretion of the police, so I expect is enforced much more stringently against some people than others), but switchblades, gravity knives and butterfly knives are illegal to carry for any reason. But even though the penknife in my EDC is within the terms of the law (no doubt a deliberate choice on the part of the drafters and the manufacturers), I still occasionally meet people who are surprised it's legal for me to carry it.
From https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives (so an official source, but not the actual text of the law): "have a button, spring or catch that you have to use to fold the knife". So yes, the knives you're thinking of are illegal for EDC in the UK (that page is talking about English and Welsh law, but Scottish law is similar). They're not illegal to own, or carry if you have "a good reason" - I own several myself, and don't hesitate to take them out of my toolkit if I think I might use one - but I can carry my non-locking Swiss Army knife routinely in a way that it would be illegal to carry my locking Leatherman. Which is annoying, but I can see how a locking mechanism would also make a knife more useful as a weapon.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that because Britain has strong gun laws, most of their violent crime is committed with knives. It is a bit of a different context than America.
So after they get rid of the knives, what's next, banning sporting equipment like golf clubs unless you can prove you've got a tee time booked at a registered course?
I was going to say "don't be silly", but actually the history of our gun laws shows exactly this kind of slippery-slope trajectory. But really what it would take to ban golf clubs would be a tabloid panic about EPIDEMIC OF GOLF CLUB BEATINGS ON OUR STREETS, BAN THIS SICK FILTH. Because tabloids can drive voters here, and hence politicians pay attention to them.
If you see a bunch of inner-city youth suddenly walking around carrying a single golf club in their hands on the streets, then yeah - it's more likely than not these are going to be used as crude weapons rather than heading off to the local pitch-and-putt club.
(Before anyone jumps on me, no, "inner-city youth" is not the American euphemism for "black kids". We have plenty of 100% white thugs and wannabe gangsters over here).
You're coming at this from the angle of "Well this is plainly silly, I regularly carry around items with me that would warrant at least a caution under these laws, and I'm no criminal!"
Exactly. You're *not* a criminal, you are not (let us hope) planning to threaten a shop keeper or a random person on the street that you will stab them if they don't hand over money, or you're not on your way to attack someone you had a fight with.
Remember the shooting of Ma'Khia Bryant? A terrible mess all round, and likely to have resulted in a death no matter what the police did. And in its wake, there were idiotic tweets (quickly pulled) by people about "teens have been fighting with knives for ages, no big deal":
Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama administration adviser, offered her idiotic notion, echoed by many others.
“A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Byrant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight,” Jarrett tweeted. “Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter.”
“Teenagers have been having fights involving knives for eons,” tweeted Bree Newsome, a prominent defund-the-police activist. “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.”
And a 13 year old girl was killed by another 13 year old girl in a similar stupid row:
"A girl who was 13 when she fatally stabbed her friend in the neck during a fight is guilty of murder and felonious assault, a Hamilton County Juvenile Court judge ruled Wednesday.
The fight happened April 19, 2021. Both girls were 13 at the time and had been best friends for several years, Judge Kari Bloom said in a five-page written decision."
So it's understandable to see these kinds of laws as absurd over-reach - what next, will they ban sweeping brushes? - but there's genuine reason for being wary of teens going around with knives, and that's what the cautioning etc. for possession of knives/items with blades or points is all about. Try and stop them before they get to the point of using them. Discourage them from going around with such items. There's all too many cases of "X and Y got into a fight, X went home and grabbed a knife and came back after Y/X got a knife as protection and then later when Y jumped X, X stabbed Y", even where there is not intention to use the knife for criminal offences.
Anything that's carried with intent to be used as a weapon is something you shouldn't be allowed to carry, because weapons are for hurting people and you shouldn't do that.
Yes, establishing intent can be a bit complicated, but it's worth it. A gang of people with one golf club each roaming the streets at night is a different situation from one person taking a golf bag to a golf course and back.
Maybe proving you've got tee time booked is a bit much (I don't know how golf courses work though tbf) but if the police think you look like you're carrying a weapon, they can ask you which golf course you're going to and what your address is and check you're at least plausibly on the way.
Knife possession because gun crime, though increasing, is not at the American level yet. A thug or weaselly little scumbag who, in America, would have some kind of gun, in Britain is more likely to have a knife. It's why the British police wear anti-stab vests:
"For many in the Police, stab proof vests will be the most basic protective equipment required. This is not because they are commonly used, but because they are the most common weapon available. Unlike elsewhere in the world, firearms are very rare in the UK and the majority of Officers are unlikely to face firearms. However, there are sadly a number of instances over the past several decades of Officers being killed with firearms, and even though crimes involving firearms make up only 0.2% of all recorded crime*, the threat still remains, and some may wish to have protection against firearms."
*(This is in 2014 so for 2023 doubtless that figure is now higher).
An idle thought I've had: the free speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights were apparently of little value in the 19th-20th centuries. During most of this time, an Englishman could quite plausibly call them an overreaction -- the unwritten constitution works just as well or better for securing our ancestral English freedoms!
It's only in the 21st century, when His Majesty's Government will apparently punish you more harshly for saying mean things on Twitter than stomping on women's heads, that the value of the Bill of Rights has been made fully visible.
But also parliamentary supremacy, so their bill of rights can be amended by a simple majority of (essentially) a single house. The UK might as well be unicameral. It's my understanding that when the unwritten/common constitutional and administrative law of the United Kingdom conflicts with statute, the statute always wins. I have some reservations about judicial review (and I know that the UK is attempting to institute it), and I don't think the de facto judicial supremacy we have in the USA is ideal, but parliamentary supremacy strikes me as even more misguided.
There are three major lines of defense in the British system. The first is the self-restraint of Members of Parliament, where the decline to vote for tyrannical measures out of genuine belief in freedom and democracy and out of a sense that it would be wrong to vote against fundamental constitutional norms. The second is the good sense of the voters to vote against politicians likely to be tyrannical in office and to disincentivize bad behavior by being likely to punish it retrospectively at the polls. Together, these seem to work better than I would expect, although I'm guessing it's the second of those doing more of the heavy lifting.
The third and final line of defense is the monarch's reserve powers. The King has de jure power to absolutely veto any legislation, fire the PM and cabinet at will, prorogue Parliament, and forbid Parliament from even debating a measure that would infringe on the Crown's prerogatives. Apart from the last of these (King's/Queen's Consent, not to be confused with Royal Assent), these are by convention either newer used or used only on the advice of the government. And trying to use them arbitrarily or for partisan reasons would almost certainly be seen as severely illegitimate. But if a government controlling a majority of the House of Commons were to try something sufficiently outrageous, like banning political oppositions or indefinitely suspending elections, then the reserve powers could probably be used as a last-resort emergency measure. And knowing that the possibility exists might help keep politicians honest, or at least moderate in their dishonesty.
Lots of countries have meaningless Bills of Rights, so I think political and judicial culture is more important than whether your rights are written down in a special document or not.
This is one of the issues that make me right-wing here in Europe despite being quite left-wing in an American/Canadian context...but the (Western) European left seems to be really bad for the average EU citizen from an utilitarian perspective...
Sure, I understand that. It still activates my anglophobia. And in any event, I think the vast gulf between the two data points does paint the nation in an extremely poor light. To be clear, the light sentence given to what appears obviously to me to be attempt murder, is the worse data point of the two.
Day in the life of a true Brexit geezer: wake up and meet the wife, Susan. Answer a poll saying people should go to jail for social media posts. Then it's off to the courthouse for jury service and give a dude who should probably be executed probation. Then finish up at the fortress of dreams.
That was my bad; I was thinking of sentencing enhancements (like priors, gun usage), which are part of the jury's findings in the US. Not sure if they exist in the UK.
No. I think what we have is maybe better than what the UK has, but I really only have these data points for my understanding of their system.
As to how ours would be reformed, I think we should greatly decrease and increase, in some senses, punishment. I think we should do a lot less incarceration and a lot more probation (and/or house arrest, ankle monitoring type things). I think that, generally speaking, non-violent crime should be punished with probation etc., and that violent crime should generally be punished by execution.
That second one would essentially be a two-strike system. Your first violent crime you'd get maybe a year in county jail, followed by 3 years of ankle monitoring, then 6 years of probation. Your second offense, you get one automatic appeal that must be concluded within 6 months and then you go to the gallows, guillotine, or firing squad. I'm not too worried about the deterrent effect (though swift and certain execution would almost certainly be a better deterrent than what we have). I'm more concerned with just retribution and removing undesirables.
As to both violent and non-violent crimes, there would of course be discretion on the margins based on severity, but not a whole lot. For things like questionable self-defense, say, or your Bernie Madoffs (who might actually go to prison).
That was my bad; I was thinking of sentencing enhancements (like priors, gun usage), which are part of the jury's findings in the US. Not sure if they exist in the UK.
I could be entirely mislead here, but I don't think there's much overlap between people who voted in favor of Brexit and people in favor of jailing people over rude social media posts...
You are correct that they are both correct and I apologize. It was an emotional reaction because of the passing of Topol.
I've performed in Fiddler and it's written Tzar in the script; the scene in question sounds like they're saying "Tzar" in the 1971 film version. So my own correction was wrong, apologies!
As far as I'm aware, the Russian word is tsar (but in Cyrillic, царь), and the English spelling "czar" is mostly motivated by the fact that the word descends from "Caesar".
#26 there actually was a gun found at the scene, he was hanging from a limb of the tree by a noose (not tied across the torso to the trunk in the way that “tied to a tree” implies), there were no defensive wounds or other signs of a struggle, and he had depression. Source: https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/shotgun-was-found-near-body-of-clinton-aide-new-details/amp/ plus the original link
from what I can tell the entire "no gun found" thing was because the police report said (paraphrased) "I searched the car and it contained a gun case with no weapon." I don't think whoever wrote it meant to make it a big mystery why the gun wasn't in the car.
Edit: Honestly a good example of the whole "media very rarely lies" thing. An extremely reasonable read of the story is "guy who briefly worked for Bill Clinton 25 years ago commits suicide by hanging from a tree and shooting himself in the chest, family tries to block grisly details from becoming public. (oh and he had an empty gun case in his car)" but nobody is going to come away from that article thinking that without the writer ever actually saying anything false. Their (single paragraph long) source doesn't explicitly *say* that the person who committed suicide with a gun had a gun near them, so they must not have been able to find one. Kind of suspicious that a person who killed themself by hanging was tied to a tree, huh? Anyway, that epstein guy, you know? Did we mention BIll Clinton? Draw your own conclusions. (It even explicitly says "Others whose deaths have been linked to the Clintons without foundation have been..." which seems to be a phrasing that would still be true if they followed it up with Abraham Lincoln and Jesus. ) It's actually impressive how well they avoid saying anything even arguably untrue while still pushing an obvious narrative.
Sure, don't blame the guy who wrote that. But do blame the Arkansas sheriff office for illegally suppressing the document that says that they found the gun, until the Daily Mail kicked up a shit storm.
What’s crazy is the Bush family controlled not only the federal prosecutors AND state prosecutors…but also the defense attorneys!?! So Ken Starr somehow convinced the US Attorney that Epstein was an intelligence asset and Acosta bought it without asking around?!? And had the state prosecutor not been doing Jeb’s bidding Jeb could have appointed a special prosecutor because sex trafficking obviously doesn’t just occur in one county in a state. So it’s strange how the Bush family is never questioned about their connection to the sweetheart deal Epstein got??
To describe "hanging from a branch by a noose" as "tied to the tree" goes far enough beyond deliberately misleading to count as straight-up lying, I'd say. That goes well beyond the usual selective cherry-picking of facts, such as making a big deal of the fact that he worked for Clinton decades ago while neglecting to mention that he had been suicidally depressed recently.
I'd agree that's it's deliberately misleading to the point of being malicious, but it's not literally a false statement. In fact, the article basically trips over itself trying to make as many insinuations as possible without ever saying anything that's not true if you read it completely literally. I think it's interesting as a particularly brazen example of how deceptive media works.
I think it is "literally false", within the constraints of how people use the English language. Even looking at it from a logical point of view reveals this: the *noose* is tied to the tree, and no native speaker would say the man is tied to the noose, ergot the man is not tied to the tree.
It's like saying a child sitting on a rope swing is "tied to a tree". It's a false statement.
I guess what’s really fascinating to me now is moving from Scott’s “media rarely lies” take into “why?” I’m not super familiar, but I’m pretty sure the Daily Mail is more of a tabloid publication, so most people don’t expect much of it anyway, and most people who do read it aren’t going to read beyond the headline. At this point of brazenness, why not just straight up lie?
Harder to get sued for libel, and a tabloid publication operating within the notoriously more plaintiff-friendly British libel laws would be even more adept at non-libelous insinuation than their American counterparts.
I've long observed that the phrase "linked to" is usually one of the surest signals that someone is lying to you without technically lying.
What is a "link"? How tenuous does it have to be before we call it a lie? He sold you a used car in 1978? Definitely a link. You worked in different offices at the same large corporation at different times? Eh, probably not a "link" in anything resembling "prestige" media, but for a hungry freelancer might be enough to generate clickbait articles: "What surprising link do [powerful person] and [serial killer] share? Click to find out!"
Yeah, my immediate thought when Scott asked "can someone offer an innocent explanation for this" was "it is almost certainly bullshit," and that was without clicking the link.
I’m kind of surprised that you were convinced by Haidt’s arguments. It looked to me like a handful of graphs with an arbitrary vertical line at 2012 and a whole lot of hand waving. To be clear, I buy that social media could contribute to declining mental health among teenage girls. It certainly makes intuitive sense. But nowhere in any of Haidt’s posts is there anything resembling a rigorous statistical argument. Isn’t a meta-analysis the bare minimum in situations like this? Why is everyone giving Haidt a pass?
Anyone else freaked out by not being able to do #6 as described? I couldn't find anything for the first 10+ seconds I was looking at it and I had to scan it row-by-row to find the fourth mismatch.
I found two in a few seconds without doing the trick. I didn't realize there were two more until I saw your comment, so I went back to look for the others and found them in a few seconds. Possibly relevant: My job involves a lot of looking at numbers and making sure they match.
Were you just looking, like normal? The trick is to do the thing you do to see Magic Eye images: either cross your eyes or unfocus them, just enough to make two adjacent columns overlap. Then the errors pop out at you, like in a Magic Eye image.
Important note for anyone trying this - you have to click through the link and view it on Twitter. The preview image is truncated, and does not show all four aberrant values. The actual image has 24 rows, the preview only shows 14.
I spent several minutes on this and was convinced this was a troll post before I clicked through.
I did it as described and found all four almost immediately (no more than 3 seconds). It probably helped that I loved the 'magic eyes' books when I was a kid and learned to see the 'stereoscopic images' quickly by adjusting my focal point. I still do it occasionally in weird situations - like orderly arrays of mini-tile in a restroom.
I learned how to do this at a young age, probably through sheer boredom. It's really useful for quickly spotting differences in code, documentation, mechanical drawings and electrical schematics, especially scanned or hard copy documents which don't work with textual diff tools. It's like the world's lamest superpower!
Now that I'm thinking about it, similarly lame superpowers:
1. If you wear eyeglasses, chromatic aberration at the edge of the lens will let you analyze the spectral content of light. This is really dramatic with RGB LEDs. White LEDs will show a faint blue peak from the exciter.
2. Rapid eye movements sidestep persistence of vision, showing whether a light is flickering. With some practice you can see full- vs half-wave rectification, pulse width modulation and duty cycle, approximate frequency, and digital coding.
Don't let anyone see you crossing your eyes, peering around your glasses, or making rapid eye movements. They might start to suspect your secret identity.
Try scrolling the image back and forth rapidly. That works quite well for me. I think recruiting the "movement detection" circuitry in the retina and visual cortex probably works eve better than the putative recruitment of 3D processing. Being superb at movement detection is part of visual circuitry going all the way back to insects.
1. Don't look at anything in particular. Let your eyes unfocus and relax. Sufficiently relaxed, they will drift apart and you will have double vision.
2. Your brain is wired to converge your eyes onto a single target, and process it as an object having depth. With a little playing, you can choose apparent convergence on visually similar but different elements in your stereo field of view. The images will "snap" into convergence. Similarities will look "normal", while differences will pop out in 3D.
This is a lot easier than the magic-eye pictures, which I still find fairly difficult and unfulfilling. You're just trying to overlap images, and see if anything stands out.
When I unfocus my eyes and relax, I get a grid pattern of brighter columns and rows—two vertical and three horizontal. The grid pattern moves as my focus wavers a bit. But if I can hold the grid in place, the numbers of the grid maintain their brighter white character, but waves of orange move across the grayer non-highlighted matrix of numbers.
weird, i'm also seeing some rows as brighter than others (not where the wrong ones are; I can kinda change it at will). I'm also mostly unable to quickly spot the numbers — it's hard to stop my eyes from refocusing when i'm looking for something. (People who are succeeding, how close is your face to the screen/how zoomed in are you?)
For me, it took over a minute after stabilizing the row jitter, for the color waves to start. Frankly, after reading everyone's responses, I think my qualia provide me with more interesting programming. It's as if everyone else is tuned into Wheel of Fortune while I'm watching 2001 a Space Odyssey — relatively speaking.
I’ve always used the crossed-eyes technique to play those “spot the difference” games. Been doing it since I was a child. Now, as an adult, I can spot the difference between two images — no matter how complex — almost instantly. This has been an amusing party trick: print a page of random text of any size font. Print a second page of the same text with one character changed. I can spot it instantly. Can do the same with “white noise” or Gaussian noise (Photoshop). Change one pixel and I can find it almost instantly. I’ve used this to proofread before/after computer code edits written in code that is gibberish to me.
In California bars there are these game “consoles” that sit on the bar where you pay to play poker or trivia or whatever. One of the games is Spot The Difference. I have high score on every machine I’ve encountered. One time I came across a machine in another city that I knew I had played but saw that I was no longer high score. I was dumbfounded. I sat at the machine for 1/2 hour until I got high score. And then when I went to type my name in the leaderboard I realized that I had been playing against myself. That WAS me at number one. I had just used one of my other screen names. Strangers watching me play accuse me of cheating. “You work for the company!” insisted one guy who was playing me for a drink. He was angry. The owner of a local restaurant told me that lunch was on him if I could beat the existing high score on his Spot the Difference machine. Free lunch!
Another use for this is to correct for the Ponzo illusion. By crossing eyes and superimposing the two objects their relative size becomes immediately apparent. This works in real space just as well as it does in printed examples. By superimposing the two images you are using each eye’s monocular image. The tricks that binocular perception of depth play on your abilty to judge relative size disappear.
Another use is to spot where apparently random decorative surfaces (flowered wallpaper, say) begin to repeat or copy/paste. Or spotting where use of the Photoshop “clone” tool has been used to alter a photograph.
The cross-eyed technique doesn’t work very well for me when the “difference” is color. It only works well when the difference is shape/geometrical.
I looked at the original image on Twitter to see all the rows, but nothing popped out at me after half a minute. I ended up having to scan row-by-row. After spending several minutes on it, I only found a single mismatch — a 592 in the 10th line from the top. However, I've known for a long time that I perceive patterns differently from the general population. I've given up worrying about it. I think I would likely be classified as mildly dyslexic but my perceptual quirks are much more profound than simple dyslexia.
#18: The argument given seems to be a pretty poor one. It only seems to work if you assume:
A) Peoples' willingness to date is substantially sensitive to how bad the dating market is for them (i.e. there are substantial numbers of people who might just decide to be alone forever instead if the market is bad enough).
B) Men and women have similar willingness to put up with a shitty dating market.
C) The market clears at the point of equal participation. There being more women than men in the dating market does make things a little better for women, but not infinitely so. If social norms were really terrible for women in the dating market, maybe most women might not be willing to participate until the ratio was 2:1 in their favor.
Um, I think you drastically overestimate the number of people who date. Is there a bunch of articles being run about how almost everyone under the age of 20 is a virgin and has no intention of dating? obviously a bit exaggerated, but I definitely remember seeing something about this in zvi's fertility roundup
Yep. Though you could argue that just means we're out of equilibrium and new standards and approaches will arise that cause us to gravitate back towards equilibrium.
I think this is partly true, though the equilibrium is ultimately about fertility, not a specific mating ritual called "dating" (which is loosely correlated with fertility but definitely not something that exists in all times and places or that is guaranteed to be the norm in the future).
Over a long enough horizon, human beings will gravitate towards an equilibrium in which most women will attempt to (or be forced to) bear multiple children, and most men will make some sort of attempt to be the ones that reproduce with them. Either that, or the human race will go extinct. But there's no reason this couldn't be out of whack for 100 years or more due to shocks that disrupted the previous equilibrium.
Yup, both (B) and (C) sound unsupported to me. There is a similar-sounding biological argument for why sex ratios at birth approach roughly 50:50, but in that case the odds of getting one's genes into the next generation acts like a common currency. In this case I don't see anything analogous that gets driven to equilibrium matched across the sexes. Subjective (dis)satisfaction may well not even be measured/perceived/tolerated comparably by men and women.
You are confusing things. There are short term desires and long term desires. The short term desires are often stronger for short periods of time, but this doesn't make them stronger on the average.
It does seem true that men get a *LOT* more out of a short-term relationship than women do, but this doesn't mean that their average commitment is stronger. And certainly the costs of a sexual relationship are unequally distributed. So a best guess would be that women have a stronger commitment to a relationship than men do...but it's less intense at certain moments.
Per #12, it’s pretty interesting to me that Scott “wouldn’t have predicted” Instagram being worse than other social media sites. It kind of illustrates how different our priors could be based on culture (in this case generational), and how this can cause massive blind spots. I just turned 28, so Instagram was the top social media site in most of my late teens to early 20’s. I have first hand experience with the way teen girls are using the site, and I wouldn’t have to look at any data to now that Instagram was obviously going to be especially terrible for them. There is immense pressure on Instagram to convey social status for women, and the competition for status is actually graded by objective measures of “likes”, “followers”, and “ratio” (of followers to following). This means a lot of pressure on girls to sexualize themselves (to get a lot of “likes” from guys), and overall convey themselves as attractive and interesting as possible. It is a literal popularity contest, one you really don’t have much of a choice to compete in if you want to have a social life. Men have much more leeway, and Instagram isn’t quite tied to social status in the same way (though there’s definitely some of that). I’m not sure why at all, but most guys my age use Instagram to show off their hobbies and what not.
That’s not even close to what I said though, and if you see my follow up comments I make a point that “body image issues” is the wrong way to look at things. Rates of anorexia are way down, but also the ideal body in pop culture has changed from rail thin to kardashian curvy (which is equally unrealistic). But that’s beside the point, the real issue is that Instagram puts immense social pressure on girls to cultivate an online “brand”, which is then constantly evaluated by very public metrics (likes, followers, etc). There is a hyper awareness of social status at all times, and there’s not really an option for young girls to “opt out” of the game because Instagram has become the primary forum for organizing their social lives. Looks and body image are just one part of the equation here.
I agree but I think the focus on looks misses the forest for the trees... there is overwhelming pressure on young women today to convey social status through the endless cultivation of an online “brand”, of which looks are just one part of. There’s also endless pressure to make yourself look fun and interesting or showcase how cute your relationship is. Body image issues a are just one part of the larger “Instagram problem” that forces girls into a perpetual status evaluation that they don’t really have the option to opt out of without major consequences for their social lives.
I think you’re way off here. Putting aside whether I agree about your broader point about the power of women, it’s not really relevant here. We aren’t talking about women here, we’re talking about girls. Its not just attractive young girls using Instagram, it’s all of them. I’d be willing to bet the mental health effects disproportionately fall on the less attractive girls, not the hot ones. But even the hot ones it’s a nightmare for, because Instagram isn’t just a place for showing off your looks. It’s a place to show how “amazing” your life is, then get evaluated on that based on what other people think (likes/followers).
& yes, there is immense pressure to use Instagram for teens. Just like there’s immense pressure to wear clothing that are in style, or watch popular tv shows. But it’s even more crucial than that. There are huge social costs to not joining Instagram, as that’s the forum where social lives are organized these days. If you meet someone new you will normally follow eachother on Instagram rather than exchange phone numbers. You can keep your kid off of it, but it’s basically guaranteeing them to be somewhat of an outcast.
I get all sorts of awful emotions from social media, usually because I see people have horrible opinions and express hatred for me and my friends. I have to make a strong effort to will myself to believe that even a fraction of the harm from social media could come from *body image issues* of all things.
Yea. Tangential, but I think being subject to omnipresent and relentless metrics on all aspects of your personhood is a kind of meta-problem that if anything the anti-woke/merchant liberal/nominal "right" is more complicit in than progressivism.
What's even funnier, in a sad way, is the people raging with jealousy and envy *because* there's no likelihood of “the New York Times will devote a whole article to baselessly smearing me.”
Many, many people I know have the same experience. If you're white, black, Democratic, Republican, a man, or a woman, there are people on social media who hate you for your identity, working to develop the most biting and traumatic ways to belittle you, and openly trying to organize coalitions against you.
My take is that you can find many ways to have a bad experience on social media. My wife for some reason seems to seek out hateful content ("someone has to witness it"), so her experience is similar to what you're describing. She also tends to see things like school shooting and other atrocities on social media much more than I do.
Having said that, I can also easily believe that bullying/lack of social acceptance are much bigger issues for teens.
Sounds to me like a difference between a teenager and an adult. For an average teenager, being popular (among teenagers) is extremely important. Finding out you will never be popular because of your body shape is devastating.
I mention below that I think it’s more about social standing overall, and body image is just one (albeit important for girls) factor involved in that. I think it just takes all the worst aspects of female intrasexual competition, and turns them up to 11. & there really is no choice to opt out.
I think it’s more about a hyper awareness of one’s social standing, which is being continuously evaluated at all times through Instagram. You can ask them to log out but the evaluation is still going on, and their social life will suffer as this is the “town square” where social events are organized/communicated. “Body image issues” are just one of a number of different ways this ends up hurting young girls. I think it’s actually deeper than that. There is no solution other than to ban it outright under 18, imo.
But I get what you mean, social media manages to create its own unique hell for every individual unless you’re constantly vigilant about what content you interact with. Being somewhat well known, as you are, definitely has a whole host of nightmares I’ve never had to deal with.
*claps you on the back* I know the feeling exactly 😁
I think it depends what corner of the hell that is social media you explore. I stay away from places like TikTok and Instagram and Twitter, and only venture onto a strictly delimited area of Tumblr, so I miss a lot of the worst of the influencer stuff. Thanks be to God I'm not a fourteen year old girl today being told she has to look at this site here or else be totally out of the swim and a social pariah, because that is a sure ticket to crazytown (I was a social pariah fourteen year old, but never bullied for it, and there were way, *way* fewer things you had to be au fait with back then to be in the mainstream).
> I have to make a strong effort to will myself to believe that even a fraction of the harm from social media could come from *body image issues* of all things.
I hope this prompts some humility. A majority of women and probably many fathers, in other words billions of humans, would intuit this instantly.
A friend of mine with a teen daughter thinks that a lot of the gender dysmorphia with teen girls springs fro this dynamic. They feel like they have to either be a Kardahsian online, or invent another interesting visual persona.
Oh yeah, there’s a ton of people who think that. People like Jessie Singal and the like, they get absolutely skewered for it but it’s probably the truth. There is immense pressure on young girls to cultivate and interstating online “brand”, and it could take a ton of different forms. For those girls who don’t fit the mold, they’re driven to LGBTQ+ communities where they’re told they’re granted immediate status just for coming out (even mostly meaningless made up labels like “pan sexual”).
Or maybe it's a way to opt out of the rat race. The young men aren't participating and don't feel the need, so it's one way to get out of the requirement without losing face (the frumpy nerdy girl may also opt out, but in a way that demonstrates they are not socially competent and are low status).
#9 Oh hey, the weird FFXIV lawsuit showed up here! I haven't heard anything else about it, and I thought it was a spurious "get our name in the news" kind of lawsuit, but I don't know anything about how these things go. Also I want to note that Final Fantasy XIV is made by Square Enix, a Japanese company. The potential trade war would most likely be with Japan.
Incidentally, the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest parts of Square Enix seem to be the only parts that actually have their act together. Forspoken just flopped so hard the sub-studio got shut down, a dozen good western IPs got sold off to invest in crypto/web3/insert trend here/etc. stuff last year, and the CEO that did that just got replaced with a different crypto/web3/etc. infatuated guy.
I don’t know much about the merits or lack thereof of this particular lawsuit, but certainly allegations of IP theft from indigenous communities, especially in Mexico, are an definitely issue in the fashion world right now.
It was mentioned on the FFXIV subreddit that the supposed cultural property rules are based on an agreement between the Saami Council and Disney. Also that the Saami council isn't a government entity of any kind - just a voluntary organization.
#28 Ayn Rand was an incredibly gifted writer. No comment on her political views. Most of what look like flaws to modern readers (plodding pace, moralising, soliloquys) are stylistic artifacts of the period.
I read The Fountainhead and photographed 20+ pages on my phone, because I liked certain phrases and passages so much (I didn't want to highlight my book and didn't know about Book Darts). I was really impressed by it.
Ayn Rand's political/economic views were incredibly prescient. She wrote a novel foretelling, in the 1940s, almost exactly how the Soviet Union would collapse 40 years later from a slow unraveling of economic and political incentives under communist/socialist systems. This was at a time when few politicians or economists were predicting it (though some, like Hayek, were), and in fact, most were hailing socialism/communism as an enormous success because of the rapid early industrialisation that they had achieved. I'm always mystified that the current American perspective is so rabidly anti-Rand.
" I'm always mystified that the current American perspective is so rabidly anti-Rand"
The American media is enthralled with communism ... and utopian theories in general. A fault of being overeducated fools. These utopian theories are wonderfully complete, well rounded, beautiful ... of course they all fall flat on their face when exposed to the real world and real people. But of course to a highly educated utopian, government is good and people are the problem.
Yeah but it's an elitist utopia. American culture (and the media in particular) is very very middlebrow populist. It instinctively recoils from anything that even smells like elitism.
I'd have to read that bloody thing again to properly comment on your praise of her foresight (which I doubt). However as a systems analyst I can definitely say that here proposed social system would fail even more quickly than Marxist-Leninism (which had failed by the time Stalin took over). Neither is based around systems that would scale at all well. Marxism is an extrapolation from communism, which can work quite well for small groups of people. As it gets above 40 you start needing a really good charismatic leader. And the groups need to be relatively isolated from the rest of society, because when you get above around 15 it's only meta-stable.
Objectivism is less stable than even primitive communism, and would scale more poorly. It would extremely quickly turn into some form of "might-makes-right" tyranny. Either that or collapse into anarchy. Or possibly both. I suspect that even at the scale of 10 people it would require a very charismatic leader.
This claim is backed by experimental testing. There are lots of failed communes in the US that lasted several years. I don't know of any such Objectivist groups, so there can't have been any large number of them. There have also been "successful communes" that lasted for generations. (Not many, but some.) I don't know of any candidates among the Objectivists. (This may be a comment about my knowledge, but I sort of doubt it.) The closest I've come is some of these "planned cities", and that's not very close.
I don't think the small community of very elite people with similar philosophies that she portrays in _Atlas Shrugged_ is the Objectivist view of how to run a large society — that's just where the productive people are taking refuge while waiting for the greater system to collapse. What Objectivists propose is capitalism with minimal government.
A market system of private property and exchange, unlike either a commune or a socialist economy, does scale.
>However as a systems analyst I can definitely say that here proposed social system would fail even more quickly than Marxist-Leninism
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Rand's proposed social system is one of the most unremarkable parts of her philosophical writings, and had already come pretty close to being implemented in Gilded Age America before she was even born (her ideal version wouldn't have had Jim Crow laws, among other differences, but I doubt that's what you're talking about). The really out-there parts of her philosophy are about her ideas regarding the proper behaviour of individuals, not social systems.
My best guess is that, like many of her harshest critics, you're conflating the response of her fictional heroes to a hypothetical dictatorship with her proposed response to real-world social issues. Rand knew full well that a society modelled after Galt's Gulch wouldn't work in reality, and she said so explicitly when asked about it in interviews.
I mean that it has multiple modes of failure which are to the advantage of those who fail to follow the ethical guidelines. There's more, but that in and of itself suffices. Systems need to have error checks that prevent rogue processes from being successful. The checks are never perfect, as that would usually be too costly, so systems tend to collapse.
An example of a control mechanism and a failure mode is: regulatory commissions fail because of regulatory capture which is enabled because there are no penalties for taking a deferred benefit from those being regulated. This is a currently existing failure of the current system. Even so they act as a friction brake to slow the worst excesses.
As far as I have been able to determine the only Objectivist control mechanism is to say "Nobody decent would every do that" until somebody they approve of does it. I can't even call that a failure mode, as it's part of the system design.
I didn't know about Book Darts, those are pretty neat. My usual technique is I have a paper zettelkasten (https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/). When reading books, I'll write down quotes and put them in, and reference them to a master "book" reference card so I can find them again.
If you read *The Early Ayn Rand*, you can see that she really improved over time. The short stories in that collection from the 1920s are really rough. *We The Living* is quite good in comparison.
I am long past my Objectivist period, but I remain fond of Rand's novels. *Atlas Shrugged* is overrated among Rand fans; *We The Living* is very underrated.
Taste is of course subjective, but I couldn't disagree more here. I think her fiction is terrible. Shallow characters, generally wooden prose, and a plot that obviously serves an ideological purpose. I consider Atlas Shrugged to be the worst, longest book that I've ever finished. But hey, The Da Vinci Code was terrible too. If either Rand or Dan Brown care what critics think, they can cry all the way to the bank.
It seems blazingly obvious that Rands' fiction was/is popular because of its ideology. Like the (sigh) Da Vinci Code, it was a book of ideas. Those books do very well when they hit the zeitgeist in the right way.
Interesting that Equatorial Guinea stands out so much on the graph for #7. Out of all the backwards autocratic petrostates it's the one I don't remember ever hearing about; between that and its (relatively) sky-high average income it must be doing something... well, not _right_ exactly, but more _successfully_ than the other autocratic petrostates at least.
Equatorial Guinea isn't like anywhere else, it is just a surreal regime around a tiny family combining genocidal singing Santa Clauses, eating the opposition and spending millions on Michael Jackson memorabilia.
I'm reminded of people who think that George R. R. Martin is one of the greatest writers of all time, few of whom (I'm guessing) have read much outside the fantasy genre.
I'll give you that one. "A Study in Emerald" is *fantastic*, and it shows what can be done if you actually *like* the characters that you are using in your writing.
Or Brandon Sanderson. He's a serviceable writer, but the books of his I've tried give me the mental equivalent of chewing on cardboard when it comes to the prose.
This. Tolkien is a notoriously poor writer, and his appeal lies elsewhere. He had just enough talent that with a very strict editor he could've made his prose passable, but alas.
Haven't read Rand yet, but I love the idea of her as the American Tolkien. :D
Back in the dawn of time, when glaciers still covered the land, and the very first volume of the dazzling new fantasy series by George R.R. Martin had been published, I tried reading it because hey, dazzling new fantasy series! and I liked the previous novels by him that I had read.
I bounced off it *hard*. The cynical grittiness of "this is what Real Mediaeval Times were like" was not to my taste, and there certainly was nothing attractive about the prose to keep me reading despite the worldview. I have read writers because of the quality of their prose despite being *appalled* by what I was reading, so I will read if the writing is good enough (Simon Raven was one such, I remember thinking after reading one of his novels "He writes like an angel - a fallen angel").
So if you can quote me something you find beautiful, or stirring, out of the written work produced, I'd appreciate it greatly.
“Embarrassing” only because they are anachronisms in our time and culture. For a world where communal singing and storytelling are a major source of entertainment, and people are constantly making up little walking tunes or lyrics to keep busy or serve as oral history, I think they work just fine.
Also I bet a lot of them sound better in Elvish.
I actually have a little book of songs and poems written by an American soldier from WWI that was meant to capture some of the rhymes and stories and experiences of his unit - and it’s kind of the same stuff. Hardly award winning poetry, just simple rhymes that speak to shared events and feelings.
This sounds like you're applying completely different standards. The existence of bad poetry in-character may be perfectly consistent, but that doesn't make the poetry itself good. I feel like this means they didn't merit inclusion in the books, but that is quite possibly just the anachronism thing.
I mean (edit: not you, the OP) called it “embarrassing” - that’s a strong statement, I think you need to unpack a bit what you mean by it.
Lord of the Rings is not a book of poetry, it’s a novel. Essentially all the poetry in the book is dialogue - it’s all spoken, sung, or written by characters in the world, so I guess I don’t know how you could judge it except “in character”.
Oh, he's definitely not a poet, but the verses work if you think of them as *songs*, not more parts of the prose. And I do love reading out loud Galadriel's poem in Quenya, even if my pronunciation is crappy. Some things work better if you say them out loud, as they're meant to be in the world of the book.
Walking songs and the like are simple and easy and follow a conventional rhythm, because they're things that you're singing as you're moving or working:
The BBC did a radio version of LOTR in 1981and the songs work better when you hear them sung, like this one for "The Fall of Gil-galad" as sung by Sam Gamgee:
Thanks for the pointer! I've liked many of the songs since I first heard the radio series on NPR ~four decades ago, but hadn't known it had been released as an album.
It looks like the music is available as individual files on the Internet Archive as part of an upload of the radio series as a whole. (The edition they used apparently included the soundtrack as a bonus disc.) Music files start at #98.
I didn't think of Tolkien as a prose stylist at all. To me, The Hobbit was a great story, and The Lord of The Rings was kind of a painful, boring story. None of the books is especially notable for artful wording.
A guy writes several books, which have sold millions across 80 years, invented new languages for his fictions stories, which include songs in invented languages ... people say he's not a good writer.
He's an extraordinary worldbuilder, for reasons such as creating several constructed languages, or detailed genealogies, or consistent millenia-long history, or his deep understanding how historical societies and war used to work (due to his immersion into historical sources and his own experience in WW1). I think these are grounds enough for him to become a bestselling author, even if his prose was unremarkable.
>I think these are grounds enough for him to become a bestselling author, even if his prose was unremarkable.
I don't buy that. Do you, personnally, purchase & read novels because of the work that went into the genealogy of their characters and their verisimilitude, ou rather because you like the story being told, or the style it's told with?
As an anecdote, I recently re-read the first ~1/3rd of the Fellowship of the Ring. I was surprised by how enjoyable it was. It's fun & light-hearted, nowhere near the dry and boring prose I remember (or was psy-oped into remembering) from 20 years ago.
I would find any claim that Tolkien's prose to lack "artful" wording to be a rather odd one. I wonder by what standard we are holding him to, because it's not merely that the books are best-selling, but that they're one of the few works that even average people remember lines from. And I don't just mean memes like "You shall not pass". I'd say this was true even before the films, albeit, that some memorable lines got translated to film and are remembered from there is something I think also points away from the idea that Tolkien's prose is mediocre.
"You shall not pass" is a good counterexample. In the book, it was "you cannot pass". Less like an ancient wizard confronting a demon and more like a hall monitor.
The ancient wizard confronting the demon SHOULD say “you CANNOT pass”. He was not bad-assedly stating his intent to fight the Balrog, he was stating a FACT: I am more ancient and powerful than even you, even though I have the shape of a goofy old man and you are a giant flaming demon, and you literally can’t cross this bridge because I don’t want you to.
Yes. I'd say his prose is uneven. Sometimes his prose sounds like he's imitating the King James Bible — "and, Lo! blah blah blah blah." I'm sure he does this on purpose to raise the drama, but I can't help but think these language elements detract from the real drama the characters are experiencing. Of course, the Elves (Eldar) and the Istari (Maiar) speak in a more highfalutin style. But I winced when Legolas said: "Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.” Sounds like he's misquoting Shakespeare. Tolkien's prose sounds the most honest when he's focused on the doings of Hobbits—when it's simplest and writes in conversational style.
He tells a damn good story, though, and the world he created for his characters is endlessly fascinating in its details.
I am re-reading both as bedtime stories for my baby and I’m having exactly the opposite reaction - the prose is witty, engaging, and lyrical in a way I didn’t remember from my last read through (probably at least 15 years ago). It’s not necessarily “high literary art” but it’s hardly schlock. All his worldbuilding works because he does an excellent job of conveying it in the writing. The world feels deep and old and lush, because he describes it in a way that makes you recognize it as such.
Yeah when I read the Hobbit to my kids I was surprised at how strong the small scale writing is. Like you said it’s not high literary art, but honestly a lot of that is garbage anyway.
The Hobbit has a lot of jokes that only adults will appreciate, because they'll be reading it to their kids. Things like Thorin being a Really Important Dwarf:
"“Hush!” said Gandalf. “Let Thorin speak!” And this is how Thorin began.
“Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit — may the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale! —” He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called *audacious* and worst of all *fellow conspirator*, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed. So Thorin went on:
“We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation —”
This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At *may never return* he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel. All the dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table. Gandalf struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearth-rug, shaking like a jelly that was melting. Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept on calling out “struck by lightning, struck by lightning!” over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long time. So they took him and laid him out of the way on the drawing-room sofa with a drink at his elbow, and they went back to their dark business.
“Excitable little fellow,” said Gandalf, as they sat down again. “Gets funny queer fits, but he is one of the best, one of the best — as fierce as a dragon in a pinch.”
If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even to Old Took’s great-granduncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment."
If you've ever sat through a long-winded lecture or meeting at work or elsewhere, where some Bigwig tells you the same thing four times in different ways, you'll recognise the style, and the joke about how golf was invented is just icing on the cake 😁
And if you don't bawl your eyes out at the ending, which over the course of the story has risen from being a jokey story about dwarves and a hobbit setting out to burgle the stolen horde to something higher and graver (and then, as Bilbo goes back home, eases back down gradually to the ordinary and usual), then I'll have no respect for you 😁
There indeed lay Thorin Oakenshield, wounded with many wounds, and his rent armour and notched axe were cast upon the floor. He looked up as Bilbo came beside him.
“Farewell, good thief,” he said. “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.”
Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. “Farewell, King under the Mountain!” he said. “This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have shared in your perils — that has been more than any Baggins deserves.”
“No!” said Thorin. “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”
Then Bilbo turned away, and he went by himself, and sat alone wrapped in a blanket, and, whether you believe it or not, he wept until his eyes were red and his voice was hoarse. He was a kindly little soul. Indeed it was long before he had the heart to make a joke again. “A mercy it is,” he said at last to himself, “that I woke up when I did. I wish Thorin were living, but I am glad that we parted in kindness. You are a fool, Bilbo Baggins, and you made a great mess of that business with the stone; and there was a battle, in spite of all your efforts to buy peace and quiet, but I suppose you can hardly be blamed for that.”
People today have much shorter attention spans than readers in Tolkein's day. As a result, we're more likely to find books boring, which people in previous generations would have found enthralling.
Of course, you're entirely right to stop reading a book you find boring--I think you probably should. But it may not indicate any flaw in the author.
I think Tolkein's books *have* to be somewhat slower-paced, in order to have the full emotional weight they're supposed to have. I believe this because I normally read extremely quickly, and speed up in the "boring" parts where the author is describing the scenery or whatever. I read the Lord of the Rings like that, and it was a good series. Several years later, though, I *listened* to the book on YouTube, meaning I took it in at a much slower pace and couldn't skim. It was *amazing*, and moved me in a way I haven't been moved by a book since I was a teenager and a lot more movable. I spent a lot of the third book walking to and from work with tears streaming down my face.
As a friend of my once wrote "rust an the moth are the only true critic".
He was a published author, but a much better poet. Unfortunately, it's his published work that survives. I wish I could hear "The flue of Aki Moro" again. THAT is a work that *should* have been preserved. "A Gathering of Heros", which was published, not so much so.
He's definitely not a literary author, and the stories are in effect his own fanfiction: he invented this universe and populated it with the creations he found most to his own taste, and he never intended to be an author. It was a combination of lucky moves that got "The Hobbit" published, and if Stanley Unwin had been a different type of publisher, there might never have been "The Lord of the Rings" (as it was, Tolkien wanted a version of The Silmarillion published, desperately tried to get them interested, eventually someone agreed but it fell through, and LOTR was more of a stopgap between Allen and Unwin wanting a sequel to their children's book hit with The Hobbit, and Tolkien needing money for his family and sick wife).
So the prose is uneven (especially if you think of how The Lord of the Rings changed drastically over the course of writing it - he originally tried it as a Hobbit sequel, and Aragorn was going to be a Hobbit, until he went 'nah this not working', scrapped it all, and rewrote it). But there are passages of beauty in it, though I imagine it depends what one finds beautiful. And if you're a younger reader looking for adventure and excitement and "what happens next get to the action", then descriptions of natural beauty - such as Gimli talking about the Glittering Caves - are going to be boring.
Everyone has different tastes in the kind of writing they find moving, or deep, or beautiful. Some like lush, purple prose; some like sparse, taut simplicity.
Is Tolstoy noted as a prose stylist in Russian? Genuinely don't know. Thought his greatness was was more in the psychological insight, the breadth and depth of the worlds he creates, that sort of thing. I've heard people say that you should learn Russian to read Pushkin in the original, I've never heard the same about Tolstoy.
What I'm saying is that Tolkien is not really known as a good prose stylist in English, but my understanding is that Tolstoy is basically the pre-eminent writer of literary prose in Russian. Their reputations in their respective languages are not really comparable in that regard.
None of that is to say that Tolkien's books aren't good. I love LotR. Going back to Russian, Dostoevsky is really not highly regarded as a prose stylist in Russian. He just made up for it in other areas of his writing.
I haven't read Tolstoy, and if I did it would be in translation, so I don't have an opinion on the comparison. Tolkien, in my view, was a world class world builder and a very good prose stylist.
The comparison to Rand is interesting. Both were producing works very unlike contemporary literature. Both works defended philosophical positions very unfashionable with the contemporary literary elite. Both were spectacularly successful.
The one sense in which Tolkien was more successful was that he spawned imitators, was in large part responsible for the rise of modern fantasy fiction. Rand created an ideological movement but I don't think had much literary effect. Tolkien had an ideology too, but it was one that had been a going concern for many centuries before he wrote, although in decline at the time and since.
I think Fountainhead is much better written than Atlas Shrugged personally. I know there’s a few really bad scenes that make me cringe, but overall it does have a much more consistent and interesting theme about integrity as a creative professional.
If you havent read it yet, I highly recommend We the Living which I think is her best written book. It has a much smaller scale that Atlas Shrugged or The Fountain head and the focus i much more "human".
As I just said somewhere else - Ayn Rand's political/economic views were incredibly prescient. She wrote a novel foretelling, in the 1940s, almost exactly how the Soviet Union would collapse 40 years later from a slow unraveling of economic and political incentives under communist/socialist systems. This was at a time when few politicians or economists were predicting it (though some, like Hayek, were), and in fact, most were hailing socialism/communism as an enormous success because of the rapid early industrialisation that they had achieved. I'm always mystified that the current American perspective is so rabidly anti-Rand.
If you've ever lived in systems that are socialist/communist (I grew up in one), maybe her books just hit differently.
I can understand that. I grew up reading fiction and non-fiction alike, but fiction has always been my wheelhouse. Atlus Shrugged is deeply, fabulously tedious for me thanks in part to that perspective, an expectation of entertainment and going somewhere.
Think of it like you would a long conversation with someone, or sitting in a lecture for school. If I am supposed to be teaching you about algebra and spend half of every class day expounding on alphabet soup, or what color tie I chose to wear that day, you would be justified in rioting.
I also grew up reading fiction and non fiction alike, and I actually found Atlas Shrugged extremely engaging. I was in high school at the time, and I was actually quite drawn in by the mystery - who was actually causing all the quitting and how? Of course, I never finished the Galt speech in the end, and I'm sure they must have been plenty of other parts that I speed read through. I distinctly remember finishing the book and enjoying it, but not really giving it much thought or weight beyond that.
But then I started observing in the world around me the arguments made by her villains in newspaper editorials and articles, blaming wealth creation and private enterprise at a time when the alternative model had so clearly failed, and disastrously so. I realised more and more that she had some very powerful insights to go with (what had seemed to me) a good story!
It's also funny to me that the American left revile her for encouraging selfishness and self-centeredness when at least at a personal level, I became substantially less selfish as a person, because of Ayn Rand's writing.
I am 40. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 18. I am American, and although my politics have changed many times, I was not of the left then and I am not of the left now.
When I first read it, I found the book moderately engaging, moderately but not especially convincing, and almost irredeemably stilted and broken for the 80 page Galt speech, which sat like a big fat poop in an otherwise serviceable, interesting story.
I believe I understood the core messages, about self interest being at the heart of all genuine action, and about the corrosive effects of moral hazard and distributed responsibility. I felt like these were reasonable positions if used carefully for understanding, but not as reasonable if taken to extremes as a way of life.
With time, I have come to view Atlas Shrugged with true and utter revulsion. What changed? Did I have a change of heart about the positions, or see something different in Rand's critique of communism? No, not really.
I learned about Rand as a person, and completely failed to separate the text from the author. Atlas Shrugged is the scummiest, cheatiest moral harangue in the English language, and I can *totally* see how the four or five people who end up in Galt's Gulch were the avatars of someone who would *totally* domineer a friend and mentee into cheating on his wife with her. It even has the gall to wrap most of this push in positional pseudo-logic. This is the work of someone who routinely browbeat other people into philosophical alignment.
Is it about communism and the dangers of losing one's personal compass in a collectivist setting? Yes. Is it more than one thousand pages of gaslighting scenario by a gaslighting cheater pushing hard to get her nasty way in life? Also yes. It sucks.
I remember reading news from Venezuela, a few years ago... I think there was a local Coca Cola factory that had to stop producing because they had no water (the water delivery system in the country has collapsed) and in response Maduro sentenced all employees to prison for "making Venezuela look bad" or something like that.
And I was like -- this sounds *exactly* like a chapter from Ayn Rand's books.
So I keep admiring her timeless descriptions of the villains... although I think the descriptions of heroes are silly, and Rand seems like an insufferable person in real life.
>It's also funny to me that the American left revile her for encouraging selfishness and self-centeredness when at least at a personal level, I became substantially less selfish as a person, because of Ayn Rand's writing.
That's an... interesting reason to defend her work. Reminds me of Asimov's quip about how a careful reading of The Bible is the best way to become an atheist.
It sounds like you wouldn't at all enjoy works like Moby Dick, Les Miserables, War and Peace (possibly), Cryptonomicon, or for that matter Gravity's Rainbow. Not to mention Stephenson's Quicksilver quadrology, lol. (I seem to recall Rand claimed Victor Hugo as a literary inspiration.) What I'm saying is there are plenty of classics written in this mode.
As to Atlas Shrugged, (spoilers) it portrays the decline and fall of America, possibly the world, and ends appropriately to this, though also with some hope. Well, some of the commenters here probably wouldn't consider it hope.
North Korea is still persisting with communism. The USSR collapsed because elites lost confidence in it. Bryan Caplan wrote about the risk of a persistent totalitarianism here:
On what basis, or perhaps definition, do you consider North Korea to be either communist or Communist? To me it looks like a straight-up dictatorship with some weird trappings.
This is what communism is. Always love the folk pretending like communism isn't a mass murdering ideology that eats its own. Oh, it only happens everywhere it's tried, but that's not true communism? Do tell!
What resonates in Ayn Rand's books with me, even though I feel like I've outgrown them a bit, is how emotionally certain parts resonate.
She is really good at portraying pettiness and smallness of character, and how disgusting it is. This visceral disgust at stupidity and petty power tripping, at bureaucracy and ita indignities - completely spot on.
Also the flipside, she caught the heroic spirit really well. The books moved me emotionally even if I disagree with things.
One of her biggest blindspots is that she never had children and somehow families never really factor anywhere in the books in any serious way and you can't build a life outlook without that small detail.
"This visceral disgust...at bureaucracy and [its]indignities...."
Yeah, it's pretty popular to point out the problems that bureaucracy brings, which generally involve treating things in the same way when it doesn't make sense to treat them in the same way.
What's completely ignored is that this is a natural consequence of making things work at scale, and the alternative is generally worse. Does a bureaucracy determining what is and isn't safe for me to eat bar me from things that are safe and enjoyable for me, and sometimes even get things wrong? Sure. But it also handles a huge and _very_ complex part of my life and its risks that would otherwise either eat up a lot of my time or leave me ill or dead.
It's nice to be able to go out to a shop, buy some random things sold as "food" and eat them without too much thought or investigation.
You're not wrong. There are parts of life that are managed by bureaucracy and shouldn't be, but that's not the point really.
Not every real-life "bureaucrat" has thag particular mentality. Maybe not even most. But if you've had your life managed by a bureaucracy, public or corporate, and you've found yourself falling through its cracks, with a nonstandard need that nobody cares to address, or faced with some @$$ who does not give one whit about your need....that's the kind of person I'm talking about.
I have encountered those people (or, perhaps more accurately, those systems) and it is indeed frustrating when you fall into the cracks. But I also understand that it's a cost of bureaucracy that's counterbalanced by the ability to do things relatively inexpensively at scale.
That's not to say we shouldn't try to fix those things. But just as someone who's a cog in a machine doing the bureaucratic processing often is too stuck in their local process to to properly handle the exceptions that cause problems to certain individuals, those individuals often are also too stuck in contemplation of their particular use case to consider what the global effects on the system would be of changing the system to do the right thing for their case. Especially when that effect is "produce better results in all cases, but now our costs have increased by a thousand percent" or something like that.
On 7: I'd reframe "Deep roots matter but institutions matter too," and instead go with "Deep roots shape institutions." That's the big story of Chapter 4 of The Culture Transplant: it's entitled "The Migration of Good Government."
The one-stop shop on how migration shaped institutions over the last 500 years is James T. Ang's paper "Institutions and the Long-Run Impact of Early Development." He says:
"[K]nowledge transmission through migration has played a large part in improving institutional development," and "[T]he diffusion of knowledge or innovation through cross-border migration has been crucial for institutional development."
So on average, in the typical country, migration shapes institutions. Ang reports that ancestral experience with frontier technology in 1500AD alone (the "T" in a nation's SAT score) correlates about +0.6 with typical measures of institutional quality today, for instance.
I should read your book before arguing with you, but it seems Alex was saying a lot of things like "well China has great deep roots but is pretty poor compared to Europe", or "both Koreas have about equal roots but the North is much poorer", and that the obvious explanation is that institutions are a product of both deep roots and luck (a few battles going the other way could have had the Nationalists winning in China), and so China and North Korea are underperforming their roots (and we would expect Chinese and NK immigrants to do well in Western countries). I think you also need something like this to make sense of Alex's Puerto Rico example; Puerto Rico has better institutions than you would expect from its roots because of the contigent fact that it was annexed by the US.
Puerto Ricans are American citizens; they live under American legal institutions by and large. For instance, they have a federal district court and can appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
The fact that Puerto Ricans can freely move within the U.S. also means that there's a limit to wage differences between Puerto Rico and the rest of U.S. territory--the Law of One Price kicks in to some extent and people migrate from low-wage to high-wage places, pushing up wages in the poorer place and reducing any remaining differential.
The same story applies even more strongly across U.S. states, since Deep Roots scores differ across U.S. states. Nowrasteh coauthored a paper, "The Deep Roots of Economic Development in the U.S. States," showing that even the two weaker Deep Roots measures did an OK job predicting productivity and institutional quality across U.S. states (he didn't interpret the results that way, but just check the numbers).
Nowrasteh also neglected in his U.S. states paper to check the "T" in the SAT score, he only checked the predictive power of the much weaker State History and Agricultural History scores across the 50 states. It's likely that the T would do better. [Caplan also left out the Tech History "T" in the statistical critique of Deep Roots he included in Open Borders, that was a big omission, I checked.]
And Cultural Transplant theory isn't a monocausal story-- the error of falling into communism, rare now, is another reason why institutions differ across countries. Cultural factors plausibly shape the tendency to fall into communism, but the tendency to fall into communism isn't most of the global story of institutional quality differences in any case.
In the specific cases of China and North Korea, it's plausible that "being close to Soviet military power" was an important risk factor for becoming communist, but that's far outside the scope of my book. It's wise to try to find out of most of the story, and leave exceptions to the rule to future work, preferably future work done by others.
Supply shocks can cause inflation even though inflation is mostly driven by money growth--and communism shocks can persistently shape institutions even though basic cultural transplant theory can explain most differences in log productivity across countries.
There are almost 200 countries in the world. We should look for testable theories that can explain most of the institutional differences across those countries. The error of communism explains at most a handful of those cases, time to work on explaining the rest.
9. This case is weird on several levels. You cannot own culture and you cannot patent or trademark concepts. While any individual piece of clothing (including reproductions) can be owned the concept of a style of clothing cannot be.
Likewise, what damage are the Saami claiming here? You can't just sue people because you don't like how they portray you. Is the idea that they're owed money for the use of the concept of their culture? Nearly everything about that is wrong. I suspect this is a case they know they're going to lose but they thought it was a way to gin up support. Or maybe they want a friendly court to invent a new property right? Anyone know?
This is true, but mentioning it in Finnish politics gets you labeled with the usual nasty stuff. On the whole how indigenous people are defined in the EU seems a bit off. The Sami are considered the only native peoples of Europe while most populations are not considered to be indigenous to any place.
Maybe it will change as the arguments Sami put forth gets used by other cultures as well. Will be interesting to see how much for example greeks can claim from the use of their cultural property in games and movies.
But is it any more deranged that copyrighting a beat or a melody that's just a few bars long? There have been plenty of successful lawsuits over such small fragments.
There's enough derangement already in the idea of "intellectual property" that doing rent-seeking on a "cultural style" seems no less dodgy than much of the rest what goes on in that area.
If you made a game with characters copying the style of a famous fashion designer you would probably be sued. Apparently the claim is that the Saami own the rights to their traditional dress in the same way. I don’t know whether that is true but it is plausible.
I am not a lawyer but I have the impression that one can own the rights to something even if one is not selling a product. People don’t sell everything they own the copyright to (or trademark or whatever).
Scott’s counterexamples are a bit silly. No one is saying you can’t wear Saami clothes or take a picture of yourself wearing them.
They also don't make much sense to me, unless the Saami are making video games featuring people wearing jeans and t-shirts or eating burgers. I guess they are already paying to buy the jeans they wear (if they are wearing jeans).
IIUC, you can't own trademark rights to an item unless you both are selling it and defend your rights in court.
OTOH, there's a comment about a deal with Disney, so perhaps they are selling it? And this suit would count as defending their rights in court. So maybe.
The article said that they have an agreement with Disney about depictions of Saami culture in Frozen. That suggests the legal claim is not completely frivolous at any rate.
If I were running Disney, I'd cultivate good relations ahead of time with reasonable people from whichever culture is being portrayed in their flagship animated films.
I once met the director of a Disney princess animated movie (not "Frozen"). To avoid charges of cultural appropriation, before the film was announced the directors traveled around the nonwhite region to be portrayed in their planned movie, meeting with prominent locals and asking them about their indigenous culture, traditions, and legends. This was both educational for the filmmakers and a good CYA step: They then appointed those locals whom they found helpful and friendly to their project's official cultural advisory board. So when the movie was announced, it already came with the blessing of an array of respected indigenous folklore experts (whom the filmmakers had chosen because they all got along), and thus it couldn't be harassed by the Woke looking for jobs writing notes.
This sounds like a lot of trouble, but it was a $100,000,000 project, so that kind of care is prudent. The movie turned out pretty good, largely avoided the usual cultural appropriation sniping, and was a hit at the box office.
Every culture features productive people and destructive people. So it's in the interest of big money filmmakers to cultivate the productive people ahead of time so they don't get the destructive people foisted upon them during a PR crisis.
Copying it exactly? Sure. But in that case the property rights reside with the designer. If these outfits were copies of a specific Saami outfit it would be different. But this is an attempt to copyright the concept of certain patterns, like copyrighting a certain shade of blue, which you can't do.
"Although elements of fashion design copyright may be traced in Europe to as early as the 15th century,[1] as of 2016 most countries (including the United States and the United Kingdom) fashion design does not have the same protection as other creative works (art, film, literature, etc.), because apparel (clothes, shoes, handbags, etc.) are classified as "functional items", excluded from protection by copyright laws. This explains the success of the knockoff businesses to the detriment of both the established labels, as well as of emerging designers, the latter ones being especially damaged, because they rely on relatively few designs." ...
"There are some elements of protection of fashion design, with limited effectiveness. The copyright law covers creative elements of fashion designs, such as print patterns. Trademark law protects items with visibly displayed protected logos. Intellectual property laws protect "trade dress", which is an appearance of a product which uniquely identifies its source to the level of a trademark....
"In the European Union, the Creative Designs Directive and the European Designs Directive are in effect to protect new designs for three or five years."
No, copyrights last roughly 70 to 100 years (depending). Trademarks can last forever but don't cover clothing designs (as the name implies, they cover "trade marks" such as names and logos). In addition, copyrights have specific owners (not cultural groups).
I don't think it's that clear, and I don't think Scott's counter-point makes sense. Americans have tried very hard to sell t-shirts and jeans to the Saami (and everybody else) and it would be very strange to turn around and say that Americans are then mad about Saami wearing them. The Saami, on the other hand, have made no explicit effort to popularise their clothing styles more widely.
The clothing is explicitly *for sale* in the final fantasy store.
If we use a certain brand, that brand is generally owed returns (or at least permission) if used in a fictional environment - Square Enix couldn't just start selling Nike shoes as cosmetics. The US conception of intellectual property ownership is broadly restricted to individuals and companies, but there's no fundamental reason it needs to be this way. European law already clearly recognises geographic and cultural rights when it comes to calling certain foods certain names (champagne being the most famous example).
All legal claims need to be between entities. That can mean people or it can mean corporations or it can mean governments. But you cannot, for example, sue a mountain. Or the concept of rain. Likewise you cannot sue a culture. Giving cultures such rights would require either incorporating them somehow or developing an entirely novel form of law from the ground up.
Also, while you can't put Nike shoes in the game, you can absolutely put in stylish shoes that look suspiciously like Nikes. Because nike has a right to its brand, not the concept of its shoes or their styles. Of course, we could massively extend IP in this way. That would lead to Disney being able to sue cartoons about anthropomorphic mice. Which doesn't seem like a good outcome.
Champagne is just a labeling issue restriction. I can make wine from the same grapes with the same process and sell it in Europe without issue. I just can't call it champagne. So the analogy here would be if the Saami objected not to the clothes but some claim the clothings were manufacturing in their territory. Which I don't think has been made.
Paragraph 1: I actually agree with you on the entities point - the idea is certainly not workable with a vague collection of ideas/people, but that is the case here, right? The complaint is from the Saami Council to Square Enix Corporation, both with clear governance rules and memberships.
The structure here is a bit different than the tribal governments in the US and Canada, but all are well-defined entities which are widely considered legitimate representatives by the people they claim to represent (it's not a 100% hit rate, but I do think it's a reasonable statement to make).
Paragraph 3: As above, I do recognise the EU rules around naming are just that - around naming, and that this goes beyond that.
Pertinently, American fair use law is extremely loose compared (for fashion in particular, you can just copy a design in the US and it's completely legal).
Albeit I concede that it's not clear to me that the particular cases which have been ruled on cover this one.
I don't want to come out too strongly here; I think this is a grey area under European law (and the question of whether it 'should' be allowed is even vaguer, and my personal inclinations are generally anti-copyright), but I don't think it's quite as obvious/absurd as the consensus had it.
Yeah, I'm not an IP lawyer. But I think we're broadly agreed then that the case largely lacks merit because they're effectively inventing a new right. But that judicially inventing rights is a thing that happens and not totally impossible here. One that is in any case bad. By this standard you could have France claiming that royal blue is property of France and all that.
Anyone can file a suit on behalf of anything and anyone. It just might be dismissed or lost. Since Bush is not in whale jail I assume the case didn't go through.
No, there was an attempt by an environmentalist group to file a suit on behalf of the global cetacean community, but it was thrown out of court on the grounds that there was no legal basis for allowing a non-human animal to sue a human.
Scott mentions universities or companies claiming the ownership of IP produced by their employees. I think that requires either that the IP was what the employer was paying them to produce or a contractual agreement giving the employer the rights, probably in most cases both. The people who produced the IP embedded in traditional Saami clothing were not being paid to do so (by whom?) and had signed no such contract.
10. As marriage rates approach 1 hypergamy necessarily reaches 0 because social status is relative and so any hypergamous pairing must be definitionally matched by an equal and opposite hypogamous pairing. The only way this wouldn't happen is if the hypogamous remained single. As the actual rate was until recently between 70-80% (and they include non-traditional marriages in the modern statistics so they'd still be high) you'd expect hypergamous effects in the general population to be small.
The study also finds a modest hypergamous effect and points out that women tend to value status more as an explanation. So what this study really says is that women do tend to marry up. But only slightly.
The big point (which was never controversial to me) is that men and women do not act significantly differently in this regard. Both try to marry up, both use attraction/social skills to do so, and both marry down especially to attractive partners. The status for other traits trade that's usually seen as just happening in women actually happens in both genders. In other words, what's wrong with "women all want to date men who are better than them socially while a man will be happy with a hot store clerk" is not that it describes female behavior incorrectly. It's that it describes MALE behavior incorrectly.
Yes, everyone wants a high status attractive partner with some gender variation in status/attractiveness preference (men prefer attractiveness, women prefer status). But, importantly, both genders value both. Since everyone does this and the measures are relative and most people find partners there's a slight hypergamous effect in most times, implying that women are generally slightly more successful in achieving their partner preferences than men. But only slightly.
However, the paper says the dating market is not necessarily assortative where 1% marries 1% and so on. In fact one thing the paper finds is something of a reversion to the mean effect. The higher status or lower status you are the more likely you are to marry hypergamous or hypogamously respectively. In other words, most very high status men and women marry very attractive but somewhat lower status people. Women do this less but still do it a fair amount.
Basically, most pairings are unequal but only slightly unequal and while women are more likely to date up plenty of women date down. And men exhibit the same behaviors, preferring to date up rather than down. Put another way, everyone's trying to get the most prestigious/attractive partner and almost everyone manages to get a partner roughly equal to them (say, within the same decile). And within this band it's fairly common for both men and women to be the lower status partner. But it's uncommon for either gender to marry outside this range. (Though increasingly common at the extremes.)
The incel types have some truths that (at least some) feminists don't want to admit. Like the fact that women clearly value different things in mate selection even cross-culturally. Or that there's clear gender valence to certain behaviors that seem to be human universals. But they take it waaay too far and end up producing some pretty bad advice.
I'm not sure what study you're referring to. The one I've seen was about matrilocal clans where women were also the economic breadwinners and divorce was allowed. What was happening is that women who couldn't earn enough to support a husband were being shut out of reproductive opportunities while some women were being serial monogamists. Which fits the story of stratification causing a lot of men to not reproduce but in reverse. And likewise we know this is how people actually thought in historical Europe (unable to support a wife etc).
The issue there is the idea that's being driven primarily by instinctual female choice. In a direct, literal sense it is driven by women's choice. But it's women choosing to prioritize men who can provide for them in a world where their opportunities for earnings are low. As these pressures reduced (in the modern world) and women got more choice you saw more men (and often less women) reproducing. Which is the opposite of what you'd expect if it was driven by something genetic.
I'm simply commenting on what the paper says. Though it's entirely possible the last two centuries in England were notably peaceful and less likely to winner take all genetic lotteries.
Hypergamy reaches 0 for marriage rate -> 1 only in a closed society with single marriage/person. For example, you can have all women marry only richest 50% of men, each of those men marrying twice over their lifetimes, and the poorest 50% of men importing foreigners to marry. Then 100% of people are married, with massive hypergamy for women.
In the case you're proposing hypergamy would still approach zero if the bottom half married as well. If they didn't marry at all then yes that would show hypergamy. But it would show up in the statistics in ways it doesn't seem to.
At any rate, England only got no fault divorce last year (with a loosening of standards in 1969). And only started to see major migration in the 1990s. So if you want to look at discontinuities that's where they'd be.
Christian patriarchy was pretty favourable for subpar men. As the female freedom is getting expressed fully since just the last decade (if feminist theorists may agree), we perhaps haven't seen anything of hypergamy.
18. The dating experience is not primarily a matter of how pleasant dating is. That's not even a major concern. Many people do not date solely for how pleasant or unpleasant dating is. In fact a lot of courtship rituals are distinclty unpleasant for everyone involved.
Your theory is based on a gender conflict lens that simply doesn't bear out in such simplistic fashion. That is, you assume men and women seek to maximize advantages against each other. But this simply isn't how it works and it fails to explain behaviors that neither gender wants or so on.
Also, your female friend is ignoring female agency. The idea that it's vague accretion of sexist norms that prevent women from even communicating what they want at scale is a handwave-y excuse. What it really is is that all female coalitions are really, really hard to put together and keep together. There's an extremely strong incentive for women to defect and for men to form counter-coalitions. Any durable female coalition then needs to both consistently defeat male countercoalitions and severely punish members to prevent defection.
The more normal state in the modern US is social cliques (social coalitions) are multigender and gender norms are set by intracoalitional politics. Which is why you see the opposite of what you'd expect in a simplistic class conflict model. Groups that are almost exclusively female tend to have the most pro-female norms. Because the group is "voting" (in a metaphorical sense) on internal standards and women have more votes.
Put another way, do you think the campus feminist group (majority women) has more male determined dating norms than the football club (majority male)? That's what your theory would predict.
If you want to see what it's like to have a society with true gender war cliques you can look at South Korea. There the two years men send in military service (plus some other factors) effectively turned into a pressure cooker where large groups of young men and women simply do not like each other. Enough that politicians promise things like abolishing the ministry of gender equity because a significant portion of the male voting base actively wants that and will make it their primary issue.
It's hard to find good ones because there's a strong incentive to gloss over feminists' political mistakes and to not take the men's movement seriously among the type of people who write articles. (Or alternatively, a strong incentive to do the opposite for manosphere types).
For example, the first three articles I found on Google all failed to mention conscription. Which is a major issue. This (https://www.cfr.org/blog/south-korean-elections-gender-conflict-and-future-women-voters) article goes on to state that women's power is only growing in Korea... which was a bad take at the time and looks quite naive (or perhaps willfully ignorant) in the face of the victory of President Yoon. If it makes you feel any better articles in Korean are also likely to be highly partisan.
The very rough version is that South Korean politics were traditionally fairly regional and class based. But among young people we see increasing gender partisanship with women being liberal and men conservative. Why this is is a matter of debate. I have my personal opinions but that's really all they are.
Thanks! I likewise found googled articles in English to be lacking. I found a YouTube video in Korean with English subtitles that at least shows the male side but some of his arguments were vague too so I’m not convinced either way.
There’s probably an interesting comparison between US and Korean gender issues but I don’t think I’ll be able to see it without learning Korean and going there.
I read an article a while back about the effect on dating of m/f ratios in colleges. The claim was that in a college with a high m/f ratio, the pattern favored women, with a low ratio, men. It was a while ago, but I think what they were measuring was long term vs short term relationships, on the theory that men were more in favor of the short term.
Yes, I think I've read that study (and I too forget the exact name). I actually think the short vs long term assumption is rather flawed. Iirc they didn't support it and just took it as an assumption. But it seems to be the opposite is instead the case.
Extreme patriarchies are not characterized by highly promiscuous women or short term relationships. Gender equity (meaning relatively powerful women) is not characterized by extremely strong marriage norms or a tendency away from female promiscuity. It's actually the opposite. More gender equal societies are more promiscuous. (While you could argue hypothetically that patriarchies do not satisfy male preferences as much as gender equality this would take a good deal of proving.) And it's not hard to spin up any number of plausible stories about why this is.
My hunch is that extreme patriarchies are not great at satisfying the preferences of men in general. Instead I would expect them to satisfy the preferences of high-status patriarchs (clan leaders, clergy, owners of family businesses etc.), at the expense of women, children and most men. I don’t have the evidence to be sure, though.
I think we should consider the possibility that there are at least two kinds of patriarchal societies. One is the sense in which you are using it, where one or a few patriarchs control all of society. I would agree that such a society would be harmful to low status men as well as most women.
Another way that patriarchy could exist is if most men were socially equal and all men were elevated above women (legally, for instance). In such a society, some men will be low status (criminals, disabled, etc.) but most of them could be high enough status to affect norms. I would argue that the 19th century US may satisfy this criteria.
23. The issue to me seems to be that you (and much of the rationalist community) seem to be invested in the idea that IQ is not subject to diminishing returns. That it is subject to them is indeed a pretty common finding.
As I read it the Swedish study doesn't show that income and IQ are uncorrelated. It shows that it strongly decorrelates as IQ grows. In other words, 120 IQ people can make more money than 135 IQ people pretty regularly. But both are highly likely to make more money than 100 IQ people. Basically, that intelligence is subject to diminishing income returns.
Which certainly makes sense. I don't think there's almost anyone dumb on the Forbes 500 but it's also not a list of the 500 most geniuses. Lots of those work in physics labs making nice six figure salaries.
You're mistaken. The common finding is that the relationship between IQ and numerous outcomes of interest is linear and nonlinearities fail to replicate or have a substantial basis that leads to issues that are typically found on the left tail. With income, you will often have a weaker relationship at the *lower* end due to the number of people not working at all. Incidentally, IQ and unemployment are negatively correlated.
Click the links for #23 to see multiple contradictions of the idea that there are diminishing returns.
Your claim is too vague for me to be correct or incorrect about it. I made a specific claim that can be tested: income correlates with intelligence but is subject to diminishing returns. You vaguely waving at stats that are mostly not addressing this point doesn't really convince me. If you do have specific data about this I'd be interested to see it (and I've already read #23).
If this is your comment after reading #23, then I can only assume you aren't including reading the linked posts. Click them, read the posts. This is addressed.
If you're talking about your posts then you assume incorrectly. If you're asking me to read the citations then I can look at them eventually. I have read your blog posts which are largely speculation about why this isn't true (and even then you hedge "and if it is true then it's probably a special property of Sweden.") It's a good bit of interesting conjecture (and I do mean that, it's interesting). But not anywhere near dispositive. If you want to do the actual research I'd definitely read it.
I've already read about the phenomenon in the blog post. It's highly relevant but it supports my position, not yours. If you imagine two correlated traits, intelligence and income, then you'd expect the highest incomes to be less intelligent per Thrasymachus's graph.
I grew up on a street with 5 families that sent all their kids to Ivy League and equivalents. Everyone knew which sibling would go to Harvard or Cal Tech and which ones would go to the lesser colleges like Cornell and Brown. I only have a 125 IQ and they treated me as an equal. The Harvard and Cal Tech siblings never would play sports with us and were always doing something in their rooms. Obviously those people have had good careers but I have friends that are more successful with IQs around 120…think people that got engineering degrees from state flagships that have people skills.
You don’t think there is some point in which a high IQ person is so content to work on their science fair project that they fail to develop people skills necessary to excel in corporate America?? Maybe in Japan one doesn’t need people skills but in America they are necessary.
It might not even be people skills that are lacking, just interest in going into corporate America and making money. The really smart, really interested in the subject person might prefer to go into academia and/or research, rather than go to work for a company working out how to get sugar to stick to doughnuts.
I have worked in Japan for two decades; what most refer to as "people skills" are if anything _more_ necessary here than in North America.
But perhaps we're talking about something very different when you say "people skills." Elon Musk clear has what's necessary to succeed in corporate America; would you say he has good "people skills"?
Yes, this roughly matches my experience. Moreover, we have heaps of evidence that being intelligence anti-correlates or is orthogonal to certain other skills. For example, since age of virginity loss anti-correlates with intelligence this implies one of two scenarios:
1.) Intelligence and social skills are uncorrelated or anti-correlated.
2.) Nerds can easily have sex but simply choose not to.
Absolutely nothing of the sort is implied. As studies of the extremely gifted like the SMPY and Terman's kids showed, social skills clearly aren't lacking in the gifted. #24 is sitting right there with more than enough references to satisfactorily show that intelligence and social skills are more likely *positively* correlated.
The fact that intelligence is negatively correlated with unnecessary risk-taking, rates of sexual maturation, and trouble-making is a far more powerful explanation for the late loss of virginity among the highly intelligent.
You are simply arguing for position 2: that nerds can have sex but simply choose not to. This is the thrust of your entire second paragraph.
All I said was if a population isn't doing something it's either because they lack the ability or have the ability and choose not to do it. I can't think of any other scenarios. I suppose you could argue that social skills and sexual success aren't correlated but you'd have a hell of a time proving that one.
Erusian: "since age of virginity loss anti-correlates with intelligence this implies one of two scenarios: 1.) Intelligence and social skills are uncorrelated or anti-correlated."
Cremieux: "#24 is sitting right there with more than enough references to satisfactorily show that intelligence and social skills are more likely *positively* correlated."
The phrase "social skills" is too vague. I don't think at all that the "social skills" implied by #24 are the same skills required to sleep with girls.
I don't think nerds "lack" innate social skills more than others, but simply have different interests that makes them interact less with their peers. Although I guess you may say that enjoying social interaction is a part of the skill...
Aren’t Ivy League lacrosse players more successful than other Ivy Leaguers?? Obviously they have the lowest IQs of all of the Ivy Leaguers while having the best social skills.
Oh, and this is very important—these weren’t legacy Ivy Leaguers. These were all first generation Ivy Leaguers. My anecdotal limited experiences with legacy Harvard leads me to believe they have better people skills. And my anecdotal experience with legacy MIT leads me to believe they will end up at Cal Tech with minimal people skills. And lacrosse players generally have better people skills than other Ivy Leaguers…along with lower IQs. ;)
(I'm working from vague memories and inferences so it might not be totally accurate)
Gregory Cochran thinks there're two ways of being intelligent.
One is just having a low mutational load (i.e. a good quality genome) so your whole body is just better built. You're taller, more symmetrical etc. and have a better brain.
The other is optimising the actual genes for intelligence (i.e. genotype). But this involves making trade offs with other attributes like health and other cognitive abilities (like social skills).
All exceptional bright people are type 2 (at least to some degree), which is why nerds are stereotyped as unhealthy/unattractive/awkward etc. (see also Mort Goldman from Family Guy)
3.) "Social skills", at least what most would call "social skills", are not the problem. It's something else, something jocks have and nerds lack. Such as a good jawline, a deep voice, muscles that make your posture and gait more attractive, facial muscles that make your smiles more charming, and other such things. It's misleading to call these thing "social skills".
Or, in other words,
3.) Nerds are physically unattractive.
This would answer the objection of Cremieux, who said:
"As studies of the extremely gifted like the SMPY and Terman's kids showed, social skills clearly aren't lacking in the gifted. #24 is sitting right there with more than enough references to satisfactorily show that intelligence and social skills are more likely *positively* correlated."
If you are a nerdy (male) teenager, there are a lot of things that are more interesting than being in a relationship with one of the girls in your class, or than going to noisy bars and being with drunk girls.
The second part, yes, but I don't think the first is true. Rather, there are other things that aren't quite as interesting as being in a relationship with a girl(*) in your class, but which they know they can achieve much easier and with less risk of painful rejection.
* I think you left out a "male" between "nerdy" and "teenager".
Another anecdote here. My Dad lives a couple of blocks from the Stanford Campus. Out of everyone I know, Stanford Chemistry professors and the like are clearly the smartest, and obviously they earn far less than Apple engineers hedge fund owners etc. Also, it seems like most people have not taken an IQ test, and they don't admit to being part of a study. I don't follow the literature, but I'd guess that it would be tricky to get a good sample. You have to get a bunch of adults IQ scores and then compare their net worth? Or do you compare income? Ideally you would take a bunch of people who did really innovative and interesting things and then compare their IQ scores, but good luck getting these people to participate in your study.
I suspect that there simply aren't enough academics to meaningfully change the averages. For every tenured university professor, there are probably 100 equally-high-IQ Ph.D's who flamed out of the academic career track. So if you look at the cohort of 140+ IQ people, the statistics are going to be dominated by the 90+% who bailed out and went into industry.
And for anecdata on the other side, look at Steve Hsu. He's a tenured physics professor at U Mich but still managed to found a software company that he sold for 9 figures. And while having 100m is probably on the high end, I suspect a large % of top-tier STEM professors either have patents or consulting deals that earn them significant money. I bet that if you looked at every Stanford/MIT/Caltech CS professor then you'd be surprised by their average net worth.
I tend to agree with what you say here. I was thinking more like IQ 160, which is supposedly rare to the tune of 1 in 30k. You would need a lot of data to draw any solid conclusions, but perhaps the data is out there. I think Stanford professor types probably have surprisingly high net worth, and much of that is because houses in Palo Alto were expensive and then shot up in price. Huge netowork effect
Okay, but do you realize the Swedish study is wrong? And that its incorrect findings are contrary to most other studies?
And the obsession people have with trying to prove that IQ has diminishing returns is really weird, because even if the Swedish study weren't fatally flawed, so what? IQ still largely explains why there are haves and have nots.
Maybe people (the people celebrating this paper on twitter, not necessarily you) think it matters because it proves that billionaires/muti-millionaires didn't "earn" their wealth, but even if Elon Musk were literally the most intelligent man in hsitory, nobody who currently supports wealth taxes would abandon their support in light of this fact (so whether this wealth was genuinely 'earnt' is irrelevant and used only when it supports their existing position). And, of course, there are traits about a person beyond their intelligence that explain wealth differences.
Eugene Volokh has an over 200 IQ and Musk always says we should have fewer lawyers. So instead of building a rocket ship Volokh is deciphering an over 200 year old document while sitting in an office on a bucolic college campus.
In order for me to realize that I'd have to be convinced it's true which, as far as I've read, it isn't. If you want to make that case I'm willing to listen. Likewise most of what I've read does show diminishing returns to IQ at the high end but I can't say I'm well read on the subject. If you can show it doesn't I'd be interested in the papers.
I agree it doesn't really support progressive political ends and that this was a thing people were talking about on Twitter in those terms. After all, the correlation implies that current economy is mostly meritocratic except at the very top where you get some people choosing to be Wall Street traders and others choosing to be cancer researchers. But certainly both are smarter than the average person on the street and the whole "lazy do nothings with undeserved wealth" narrative is contradicted.
I suspect pretty much everybody who has commented, pro or con, upon the Swedish IQ vs. income graph has an IQ of at least 120 and thus is an interested party in the debate. This is a pretty funny situation in that the usual solution for interestedness -- find disinterested experts to judge -- doesn't work in this case because the disinterested -- those below a 120 IQ -- are uninterested in the yada yada of this egghead debate.
If this is true you should most strictly interrogate any conclusions that are psychologically pleasant to high IQ people. Because those are the conclusions all involved are likely to want to reach for self-serving reasons.
My introspective analysis says that there *should* be diminishing returns. Once I got the job I wanted, continuing to fight for a job I didn't want that paid more seemed like a bad decision, so I didn't do it. I *could* have opted to become a manager track person, but explicitly chose to remain a systems analyst. The additional money wasn't worth it to me.
OTOH, there's a fair chance that this is based around something other than IQ. Some other personality traits. But every really intelligent person I've known (that hasn't had extreme bad luck) has been successful, but has not WANT to devote his life to "the company". Many have wanted to devote their life to "their art" (and so do I, if you count programming)). Sometimes the art was math, sometimes something else. So it seems to me quite reasonable that there should be a "point of diminishing returns". Some people really want to be extremely wealthy or powerful. For those people the "point of diminishing returns" should be a lot further up the scale, at the point where luck becomes dominant (because everyone you're competing with also took all the reasonable steps).
I hate “paradoxes” like the one in 32 because the confusion is just due to the lack of clarity in the question. When discussing the weight of potatoes no one fails to include the water weight. So the question/answer is just false as written.
I don't understand where “failing to include the water weight” comes into it? If the dry mass stays the same and only water is lost, then the 1 kg of non-water is now balanced against 49 kg of water rather than 99 kg of water. The 100 kg and 50 kg figures aren't excluding the water.
This particular one confused me for longer than necessary because I'm not familiar with actual potatoes halving their weight overnight, despite running a permanent dehumidifier and sometimes storing potatoes near it. Whereas (to take another recent-years popular math example) it's very easy to mentally model a pond being overgrown with lilypads. I guess this is the downside with Word Problems More Relatable: they introduce verbal cruft which sometimes obscures the mathematics, rather than clarifying them. The "paradox" makes a lot more sense if framed differently, or for example the illustration included on Wikipedia. It's just the "story" that sucks.
(And this feels weird for me to write, as a wordcel who sucks at math-stuff generally. Try as you may, you just can't get away from mathematics...but it's easier to deal with uncut sometimes.)
I'm used to math problems having no relation to the real world - no, potatoes are not 98% water, they're somewhere around 75% if raw and no potato dries out that fast in reality, else you couldn't store them 😁
"Raw potatoes contain 79% water. As one would expect, the water content of boiled potatoes is similar to raw potatoes at 77%. Cooking in a dry environment reduces moisture content but not always as much as one would expect. For example, the water content of baked potatoes is 75% and that of microwaved potatoes is 72%. Frying causes the highest level of water loss, resulting in a 39% water loss in French fries to as little as a 2% water loss in potato chips."
I think the problem is that as wordcels, we pay attention to the *description* in the problem and get tricked by that, whereas the shape rotators just regard all that as meaningless blah and strip out the math problem bare and solve that 😁
I am now haunted by the mental comparison of excellent chips - fluffy inside, crisp outside! - having way __less__ water than equivalent crisps. Which are, you know, dry and brittle and crunchy. O water, where art thou?
There probably would be a market for such theoretical mathematical InstaDry Potatoes(tm), think of the tuber-based jerky options! Goes well with Spherical Cow Steaks in a vacuum diet...but, yes, I think even if there's often potential quibbles with common wordy math problems, it's usually not quite so much a reach.
I think the difference is water loss, in that chips are cut thicker and so have more water to lose - think of the steam when deepfrying! - than crisps, which are sliced thinly and intended to be drier and crispier. As you say, a good chip should be fluffy inside, crisp outside, and be hot and a little steamy when bitten into. Not too soggy and greasy from soaking up too much fat, not mushy inside or half-raw.
Now you have me thinking of proper chip shop chips! 😁
#16 Masks obviously work! All things being equal % below poverty level is the most important factor for a population and so that means Florida could have a Covid death rate similar to North Carolina’s had DeSantis been pro-masking like Cooper.
"Musk’s two highest-profile Twitter changes - firing lots of people and selling bluechecks - seem to be going well and even getting adopted by other companies."
Regarding "selling bluechecks" via the Twitter Blue service, this summary is by Will Gittins, writing for the website for Diario AS, a Spanish sports-focused newspaper, in early February 2023:
"The ‘Twitter Blue’ premium service was hoped to be a major money-spinner for the company, but internal documents seen by The Information found that just 290,000 people have signed up so far. Around 62% of the global subscriber total are based in the United States, but this still equates to just 180,000 people [in the US]. This is less than 0.2% of the platform’s monthly active users. ...
"In the aftermath of Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter, there's "roughly $1 billion of interest that accrues on the debt [financing portion of that purchase] each year. QZ estimates that existing Twitter Blue subscriptions will bring in around $27.8 million per year. This means that, to cover the $1 billion per year in interest payments, Twitter would need 10.4 million subscribers to Twitter Blue. It is currently 10.1 million short of that figure."
TBD ... maybe this will ramp up if there are yet more compelling advantages of subscriptions (or disadvantages of non-subscription membership), or from the business equivalent ("Twitter Verification for Organizations"). Or perhaps even more consequential than subscriptions, advertising revenue turns around, or other revenue sources emerge. But right now there's still a large mountain to climb, even just to meet debt service requirements, much less reduce or turn around any operational losses on top of that.
As for the "firing lots of people," perhaps the jury is still out on that one, and we'll need a longer time to assess its full impacts?
Strictly on the basis of potential impact on the platform's day-to-day operations, according to Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer in early March 2023, there have been at least six "high-profile service outage[s] at Twitter this year." See their post for links to descriptions of each incident:
However, I don't know how this recent frequency, nor the severity levels or lengths of these outages, might compare to pre-Musk-acquisition periods with higher staffing levels. Without some baseline, this list in itself isn't a clear indication that the staff cuts have degraded service.
Nor have I looked into to what extent the deep staff cuts at Twitter have been proportioned across staff most closely involved with day-to-day operations versus 'everything else,' although it's reasonable to assume cuts were considerably deeper within the latter category.
If the average laid off employee was making $150,000 in total compensation (which I think is fairly conservative for *total* compensation), that equates to $750,000,000 a year in savings. That nearly covers the $1b/year in debt payments.
If Twitter was approximately breaking even before, they may be doing so now as well.
Very hard to tell with all the approximations we have to do, but it's not outside of the possibility.
I doubt Twitter will ever permanently crash, although I'm also skeptical it will become a money machine short of the Fed doing super-low interest rates again. Musk has a lot of money, and he can float Twitter for a long time.
This is from November 2022, so a lot may have changed since then. But back then, Musk had about $20 billion in still-unpledged Tesla shareholdings. "If he pledged it as collateral, rather than selling it outright, it'd bring about $5B."
Here's a look at Twitter's historical annual net profits and losses in pre-Musk years, to give some ballpark sense of how long that $5 to $20 billion might last in "floating" Twitter, *if* historical trends held. (Obviously, the Musk consortium purchase, that $1B in annual debt service, some fleeing advertisers, savings from major layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, and more, make it more difficult to forecast future trends.)
It doesn't need to be a money machine. As long as it gets to the point that it isn't bleeding money, the fact that Musk gets to tweet whatever he wants without ever getting banned is worth it alone (and I mean that in a strictly financial sense).
"If Twitter remains a highly influential communication platform (the global town square) that he gets to run as he sees fit (meaning, not in an overly "woke" way), and he manages to stanch the financial bleeding (big TBD on that), I think that's a success for him."
Just a heads up—Taibbi got a Substacker named Gene Frenkle permanently banned and deleted from Substack for publishing the post, “Matt Talibbani Wages Jihad on the Truth and Me!” So Substack will do the bidding of their biggest authors and censor other authors.
I never thought of selling blue checks as being a large revenue stream for Twitter. It seemed more like a cheap way to do content moderation and bot screening. At $0/each, you can afford infinite bots to run around harassing people. At >$5/each, you're not going to bother because the benefits of >1 account don't manifest until you've spent millions.
Plus it's cheap and easy to just take people's money, versus the old manual process of figuring out whether they're significant enough to deserve the blue check. They may be saving as much money by scrapping the extra unnecessary jobs of manual reviewers as they're making from the new paradigm.
And since blue check comments float to the top, it's fine if bots shout into the void at the bottom of a 3 mile scroll nobody will ever see. It really is a smart piece of systems engineering.
If the account belongs to someone famous, a $5 investment can absolutely pay off. Remember when someone made a fake bluecheck account for Eli Lilly and made their stock price dip a few percent? Or think about those scams that pop up periodically - someone hacks a celebrity's Twitter account, tweets out "I'm investing in ScamCoin and it's going to the moon, click here for free coins" and steals all the investments.
Selling blue checks doesn't remove the need for a human to verify the person is who they say they are, and could actually increase demand since you now have more check marks to verify. It might help against common-or-garden spam where you just want to get an ad on front of as many eyeballs as possible, but I would expect ordinary spam filters already do pretty well against that.
But for some uses of a bot, $12/mo (or what ever it is) is worth it. If you build a bot to scam people out of money, having that blue check mark makes you look more trust worthy so you can more effectively scam people out of money.
My main takeaway from Twitter Blue is reading threads is a lot more annoying with Blue users given priority and crowding out higher quality content. The blue prioritized replies are not SO bad that I want to install a Chrome extension to automatically filter it out. In some ways it would be better if the replies were even worse, instead of a middle ground where it's not always terrible so I can't just prefilter them by default.
Kind of reminds me of a lot of the Amazon store cranking up the ads lately. It doesn't matter how specifically I am searching for a brand and model number, I'm gonna have to wade through oceans of sponsored results to get to the thing I actually want. But I can't just block all the sponsored results because so many products are sponsored, sometimes that IS what I'm looking for.
For me, the experience of using twitter has gotten worse in a number of small ways. The ads are worse - just junk products or scammy get rich quick things. Its used to be higher quality brands like Nike, Apple, etc. I know they all pulled from the platform intentionally, but to me that signals 1) twitter wasn't a great driver of revenue and 2) the ad buy price is much lower now so these tiny joke companies can buy up the inventory. Neither bodes well for the business. Also it seems like there are ads ever 2 posts these days instead of every 4 or 5.
I also have noticed small quality of life bugs/changes that are juts annoying. The promoted trends are of lower quality or the associated content isn't relevant. On the iPad app, at least, opening the app doesn't trigger a refresh of tweets, you have to manually request it by pulling down the list. There have been others that I can't think of now.
Is all of this because of the lay offs, i dont know. But its very naive for people to say "well they laid off 5000 people and everything seems fine". Yeah the previous regime wasn't really doing anything good with those people, but there is now way for the public to know what its like inside the company. There have been many reports from insiders that the systems are just hanging on and are very hard to update because of how many people have left.
Also on this, it doesn't seem to me at all obvious that "Facebook thinks your business model is good enough to copy" is actually a vote of confidence - I think a lot of people see both Twitter and Facebook as currently flailing and (possibly) failing.
Strong agree. I think Facebook is currently far more sound, but with worse trending and a high probability of completely failing in the next five to ten years. Twitter may plod along for a long time if Musk is willing to hold it.
More realistically, Facebook will end up bottoming out (culturally irrelevant, but still around) like MySpace did. MySpace is totally still there, it's just not what it used to be and not relevant to the zeitgeist.
You can't just directly compare pre- and post-Musk outage levels anyway, even if you had internal information about things that almost broke, or did break but not in an easily user-visible way, and not even if you had cost-to-fix data for all of that.
Adding resilience to large, complex IT systems is difficult, and it's often even more difficult to figure out the cost-benefit ratio of that resilience. The payback may come only long after the work was done, and that payback can be invisible if you're not looking for it. (Most developers, when they add a new feature without too much difficulty and it works without too much debugging, don't think about how much that is to do with decisions made a year ago by other developers designing the codebase who may no longer even be present at the company. It's easy to see when bad code is causing you problems; it's not so easy to see when good code is making your life easier.)
One way you can get an idea of how well a system is designed is to fire almost all your staff and see how long you can continue while putting in minimum effort. If the system is well designed, this can easily be *years.*
Yet one more factor, beyond (if I'm understanding your reply correctly) how robustly pre-Musk-era developers built various parts of the Twitter ecosystem and what code changes improving or (inadvertently) degrading that have occurred since then, is the question of institutional memory and how its losses, if any, might affect routine operations. And similarly, how any such losses might impact the task of avoiding and/or recovering from issues, including those which cause publicly visible misbehavior and even outages.
AIUI, many Actually Key developers and (perhaps, speculation) also some important devops folks have left since October 2022. And it's not clear to what extent their memory is readily findable by and actionable to current staffers via written artifacts such as code comments, commit comments, and internal documentation, whether in wikis, Slack channels, or otherwise.
And yet another factor is what portion of the infrastructure (such as AWS) is independently maintained, and thus not relevant to any pre-Musk versus post-Musk comparisons.
"It's easy to see when bad code is causing you problems; it's not so easy to see when good code is making your life easier."
Excellent point, as well.
One counterpoint is that developers writing code that uses a truly well-designed library (whether integral to a programming language or from a third-party), will often find it Just Works, in ways that make it possible for them to appreciate its brilliance and beauty. It's evident when creators, contributors, and project leaders deeply understood the problem space, implemented good design patterns, had consistent and clear naming conventions, and the like.
(I don't know if that might also apply, or not, at various places within Twitter's vast and diverse code base.)
I think that might be a better way of expressing what I was getting at. Code contains an enormous amount of institutional memory, which is why it's often very important how you express things in code. `for i = 1 to len(input): output += frob(input[n])` does the exact same thing as `output = map(frob, tail(input))`, but the former looks like an off-by-one error and the latter makes it clear that you're deliberately dropping the first value in `input`. And even there, the latter could be made more clear about exactly _why_ you're ignoring that first value, and if you're not wanting to leave little land mines in your code you probably should spend some time doing that. But of course spending time on things like that is the first thing to go when a manager is pushing you to get your new feature out as quickly as possible.
A little-acknowledged part of programming is that it's only on a surface level that things are done in a particular programming language. There's a whole other language used in both the code itself and how people talk about it that embeds all of the stuff you've learned about your problem domain over the years that, no matter how well someone knows Python or Ruby or whatever, will be a mystery to a new developer until he learns that language too.
"which is why it's often very important how you express things in code."
Very true! Code expression choices often are the most direct way to convey the intended purpose of a line or block. Valuable signposts for the author, as well as other maintainers. (And yes, time pressure often gets in the way of our best intentions to find and use clearer expressions.)
7. Nowratesh is definitely one of those reads where I read his substack and think, "This is interesting stuff, but I really have no interest on this guy's opinions about anything else but migration and immigration."
25. Plus there's just too many weapons the NIMBYite city governments still have in their arsenal, including the mentioned fees, lawsuits, and the scourge that is CEQA. Although it's pretty messed up that Huntington Beach is trying to fight even the ADUs/second units - the more important YIMBY reform in my view was changing the state zoning law to allow for by-right duplexes/triplexes. They should go further, explicitly adopt Japanese-style zoning.
I've never understood why homeowners throw tantrums over duplexes. I grew up in an area that was mostly single-family homes but also had a fair number of duplexes and even some small walkup apartment buildings, and it was fine. There wasn't even a significant hit in traffic - suburban roads are usually overbuilt for the number of inhabitants anyways.
It’s very simple. Renters make way shittier neighbors and worse neighborhoods than homeowners. It’s not a big mystery. Now where you draw the line is up for debate, but people don’t like duplexes and apartments generally because tenants are shit compared to homeowners.
The kids hate to hear that, but it’s just the fact of the matter.
Who said duplex owners are renters? They're often as not homeowners.
As for "renters are worse", I don't buy it as a general statement. They can be worse, but it depends on the area - you're probably going to get noisy renters if you live in a college town with lots of college student renters, but you signed up for that when you bought a house there.
It is a true general statement. And duplex owners generally have a renter in the second unit, if not both units.
It’s not that renters are monsters, but they are worse, in the same ways generally lower class people are worse. More antisocial behavior, more crime, less resources to fix problems, etc.
Bad in almost all ways, when looking at general class versus general class.
Now sure some yuppie professor rental community just off a campus in Santa Barbara might be nicer than a rural subdivision in the Ozarks. But we are talking in generalities.
Well, 'people who currently rent' is probably a better description. If people who currently rent are suddenly able to afford to buy a home due to increased supply driving down prices, it's unlikely to radically change them as people.
So if the renter/owner personality/behavioral differences are substantial in a given area (which is not unlikely because owners tend to be richer and therefore more intelligent/educated etc on average), then these differences will likely remain if more homes are built.
Actually, it does. Relatively few events in life are as personality-changing as becoming a homeowner. (Becoming a parent beats it out, I'm sure, but it's in the same universality class.) This is related to the famous lessons of Cabrini Green.
But will increased supply drive down prices? I know that's part of the hope behind YIMBYism but I wonder if it's borne out in reality.
Because "getting more houses means cheaper houses" invokes the idea of affordable housing, and that may not be popular with developers. You'd much rather sell twenty houses for the going market rate of $200,000 each, than have "there were only ten houses here so the market rate is $200,000 but if we build more new housing, the rate will come down to $100,000".
There's demand for housing which means I can sell a house for $200,000, great for me. I build two houses, now I can only sell them for $100,000 each, I still only make $200,000 (no matter what the cost of building is). On the other hand, I build two houses, I sell them for $200,000 each, now I make $400,000 (again, regardless of the cost of building; maybe this time the costs are only half the money I make). YIMBYism that wants to drive down prices as well as increase supply is therefore not benefiting me.
Now, if I can build housing that is cheaper to build then it benefits me because I make the same profit off these houses, even at the lower price, but suppose I'm obligated not to have 'two-tier housing' but all my houses must meet the same standards? Or the people who want housing in a particular area expect to have the same standard as the existing (scarcer) housing there, and don't want cheaper, lower-quality builds? That's costlier for me.
I wonder if that, as well as the fear of antagonising city councils and the bad time with high interest rates, is part of the reason for developers not taking up the offers?
This is why there are efforts to encourage developers to get involved in affordable housing:
Becoming a homeowner doesn't change your personality, but it does change your incentives. If I'm renting and the neighborhood starts to get worse (more crime, more garbage, etc) then I don't do too much to stop that because if it gets bad enough I'll find a new place to rent. If I own a house and the neighborhood starts to get worse I'm going to be on top of that because it's driving down the value of my house (which makes it harder to move). Not just me, but the other homeowners. When renting I'm not going to report a suspicious vehicle, or even a drug dealer, because who needs the trouble? When I own a home, I'm going to report that because I've got real skin in the game.
My personality didn't change, but my incentives sure did. I put a lot of money into buying this house, and I'm counting on it maintaining or increasing in value. Threats to the home are a threat to my financial security! Threats to my apartment weren't.
Any source to back this up? I have lived in neighborhoods of many different make ups and haven found that renters are any worse than homeowners. My neighbors own their home, they also have a derelict shed in their back yard, a broken washing machine, dog shit everywhere, and trash in their front yard. The renters down the street have none of this.
I only asked for evidence of the claim. I am not sure where I ignore incentives in that. Without evidence we only have personal annectdotes. My personal annectdotes don't back up the original assertion.
I have been a landlord, homeowner, and renter. I've always treated where i am renting as if i owned the property (maybe this is very unusual, maybe not, i am asking for evidence). The quality of my tenants and how they treated the property weren't directly correlated to their socioeconomic status (again maybe this is very unusual, maybe not, i am asking for evidence).
Also most renters are not committed month to month, especially those that are less attached to the property. If you are month to month that often means you have been in the property for at least a year. So presumably you are someone invested in living in that location at least a little bit.
I never argued that renters have the same incentives as an owner. I only asked for evidence of the claim originally made. Neither response to my comment as offered any evidence, just sarcasm.
You are looking for evidence that renters are generally lower socioeconomic status than owners? Or evidence that people of lower socioeconomic status make worse neighbors?
Neither one is remotely difficult to find. Are you one day old?
It's so weird in my town (Bryan, TX) that most neighborhoods are single-family-only, but there are a few (lower rent) neighborhoods that seem to be entirely made out of duplexes. People reeeeally like their zoning in Texas, I guess.
18: "A female friend counterargues that this isn’t how it works in real life: women in male-dominated communities may have dating market power which in theory they should be able to leverage into female-favoring dating norms, but actually male-dominated communities accrete so many basically-male foundational assumptions that the women can’t even communicate what they want at scale, and the men win out anyway."
I actually lived through the experience. A long long time ago in a galaxy far away, I went to a college (a liberal arts institution not an engine school) where there were more than 2 boys for every girl, in a community where the students were isolated from the life of the community and thus there were no townies. The men were miserable and the girls had a great time. A lot of girls who did not have much of a social life in high school were suddenly the belles of the ball.
Would either you or your friend be willing to articulate what some of those norms are? I don't disagree in principle, but I can't think of anything in practice.
It seems conceivable that multiple different experiences could reduce to the tagline "more men then women;" I imagine Scott's friend also lived through hers.
The version of the experience I went through (woman in STEM, high school through middle age) was closer to your description than to Scott's [friend's], but the descriptor "belle of the ball" grates just enough that I can sort of see what Scott['s friend] might be gesturing at. To me, the "belle of the ball" description suggests that women are still competing on the same universal axis of personal appearance and social skills, but doing it in a massively reduced pool. (This may or may not be the connotation that you intended.) This does not resonate. Instead, to me the experience of going to a nerd camp in high school / majoring in math / doing a PhD in same / working in math-adjacent industry has felt like my social standing was genuinely affected by something else (say, Putnam performance) -- as it happens, something I was actually pretty good at. (Whereas my looks and social skills are, well, middle of the pack for a math nerd.)
This doesn't in any way remove the gender imbalance, which, all things considered, *was* pretty great; there's a reason my mathematician husband has fewer exes than I do. But perhaps it suggests what the difference in norms might at least look like, whether or not it's relevant to how the game plays out?
Yeah, I had a similar experience, only in my school (which admittedly was an engineering school), the sex ratio was more than 3:1, not far below 4:1. The women could get pretty much any terms they wanted for a date -- so I find the couterargument unsupported by a shred of empirical evidence.
But that's not to say that the women were much happier. They just had different problems, e.g. how to just talk to a man without the conversation being so much more fraught with sexual tension, because Great Ghu (from his point of view) How Do I Not Mess Up This Rare Opportunity? They had male hormones raining on them every hour of the day, and the interactions they had with men were probably much more scrutinized for meaning, by both sexes, than would be comfortable.
So I actually agree with the general argument, that the boys and girls were probably equally unhappy. But they were unhappy in different ways, and I suspect whenever the sex ratio is more lopsided, or the sex roles more distinct, that the difference in how men and women are unhappy becomes greater.
Think of it this way. You, RiseOA, are trying to get some work done at your job. But every five minutes there's a phone call, or an email, or a colleague or boss at your desk and you have to deal with them.
Even if it's just "Sorry, I'm too busy to talk to you right now", you're wasting time and effort that all adds up and takes away from the task you need to do, making that take longer and be more difficult to finish than it has to be.
You're there at work to work. You're not there to chat about wallpaper swatches. Wouldn't you be annoyed at least a little at everyone interrupting you to show you their swatch which they want you to agree is the superior swatch and the one you yourself would choose? Even if it is a nice swatch? Even if they are a nice person?
The same way that comic, though it overdoes it, does have a point about "I'm here to learn in the engineering class, not to sift through a list of potential dates".
Only kids could say such a thing, because only kids would be sufficiently ignorant and narcissistic so as to be unable to understand what a drag it would be to have your every action and movement be watched, and to feel the pressure of a vast array of the narcissistic needs of others. "I need to feel affirmed! Affirm me! Notice me!" Who needs that crap?
And I would say parenthetically that those "cultural movements" are thriving only among the minority of men who are at least modestly incompetent at being a man. If nothing else, if one's social intercourse is largely defined by your shared desire to get together and bitch about the opposite sex, this doesn't seem very male. Grown men get together to fish, play ball, rebuild engines, watch violent movies, burn meat on the grill, yak about dumfuk bosses and laws or appliance warranties, during which of course it may come up randomly how baffling and annoying some woman, or women in general are, but if the *main* purpose of your gathering is to explore how wounded you are by the meanies of the opposite sex -- this seem more like what a coffee klatch of bitter spinsters might do. All they're really missing is the Earl Grey tea and the exchanging of potpourri recipes.
But in situations where the ratio is 2:1 or 3:1, it's not the women's fault, and the men will be miserable anyway because if Bill and George both like Jane, and Jane likes both Bill and George, there has to be a choice made.
Unless Bill and George suddenly convert to the idea of polyamory, Jane can only have one boyfriend, and a choice has to be made, and that's where "who is better be it on looks, personality, can afford to show me a fun time, whatever" comes in.
Even where Jane decides she doesn't want one boyfriend but wants to enjoy the social whirl, and casually dates Bill *and* George (and maybe Mike and Phil as well), there's going to be unhappiness on the part of Bill and George over not getting an exclusive girlfriend.
You can blame Jane for not picking one guy and sticking with him, instead of exploiting for her selfish advantage all the men, but even if she does pick one guy, the losing suitor is going to be unhappy. If there aren't enough girls to go round for all the guys, there aren't enough girls. Same with not enough guys for all the girls.
Of course it's not the womens' fault! Hope I didn't imply the contrary. I have (and had) zero objection to a woman in that situation driving the best bargain she can -- all the market will bear, baby. Life is short, there's no reason you shouldn't carpe whatever diem you can.
I don't really have great insight, anyway. None of this bothered me at the time. For whatever reason, I've always believed most of life is a competition on some weird crooked "playing field" that isn't level from anyone's perspective, except maybe some incredibly lucky rare prince somewhere. I assumed I would have to compete for the woman of my choice, just as much for the career or station of my choice, and that the higher I aimed the more savage and difficult the competition would be.
That has tended to make me dislike the people who spent a lot of time complaining about how unfair The System (whether economic or sexual) is, and fantasizing about alternatives that magically avoid any competition. They have tended to seem like entitled narcissists to me, unwilling to fight for what they really want, like a soft-handed prince that is outraged at the concept he should plow or hoe to earn his bread. So I've never known many people like that, and have very limited insight into how they think.
No, you didn't lay blame. But there are people online who do pass moral judgements on women being too full of themselves and having it easy because they get heaps of requests from men and can pick and choose sexually (so they go for Chads and ignore the Nice Guys).
If men have a surplus of women from whom they can choose, they're going to pick the ones they find most attractive, Is it any wonder women will do similarly in the case of a surplus of men? But there's little to no condemnation of "That guy! He has his pick of fifty chicks instead of choosing one and settling down! But he'll be sorry when he's forty with no wife and kids and nobody will want him because he's all used-up!" the way that women get spoken of in that fashion.
#3: "The Bing Chatbot was often unsettling. I say that as someone who knows that there is no actual personality or entity behind a LLM model."
Scott, do you endorse even this part? Some of your posts (like https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/) have convinced me that what's "behind" Bing Chatbot is the same kind of thing that's "behind" humans, and that Bing has no less personality than it appears to have.
I think if the Bing chatbot says "my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla", there is a sense in which it's wrong and cannot have a favorite ice cream flavor, and I think basically everything it says is like this, even things that in some sense could be true (for example "I like being a chatbot"). I think parts of it might be vaguely human-shaped but I'm not prepared to say they're coherent and consistent enough to constitute a real entity/personality yet.
This statement is obviously true in regards chatbots, but the mention of favorite flavor brings up an interesting point for me personally. I remember as a child querying my father about his favorite color or ice cream or whatever and he would refuse to go along. He said it wasn't necessary to have a favorite and that it's okay to just like colorful or flavorful things. Since then, I have come to suspect that claiming to have a favorite is always performative rather than descriptive. If the claim is consistent, it has a kind of truth value, in the sense that it's true that this person will make this claim if queried. I am skeptical about whether there is anything underlying it.
> Since then, I have come to suspect that claiming to have a favorite is always performative rather than descriptive.
I agree a lot of "favorites" are performative, but "always" seems much too strong. Clearly it's possible to like things better than other things (e.g. I like carrots better than broccoli); it hardly seems impossible that one might like a given food a *lot* better than all other food one has hitherto tasted. The broader the category is and the more examples of it one has tested out, the taller an ask it is to have sufficiently clear-cut preferences between the top rankers to single out a specific favourite; but among a relatively bounded category like "ice cream flavour", it's quite plausible that there *is* a particular flavour which one will always choose over any other given one out of the set if it's available, in quite the same way that a kid will reliably choose a piece of chocolate cake over a piece of stale bread.
But the point still stands if we move away from "what is your favorite ice cream flavor?" and instead deal with "what flavors does this ice cream flavor remind you of?" Humans have actual senses and interact with the world, and chatbots don't. While ChatGPT in particular is likely to note the request about a sensory impression and say "As a large language model trained by OpenAI I don't have senses..." if you ask it a similar question in a way that gets around that model, it's going to give lots of answers that are just as disconnected from reality - and everything it says is like that.
There are some ways in which it might be like Frank Jackson's fictional neuroscientist Mary, who has learned all about color vision through studying textbooks while growing up in a black-and-white room. It might actually "know" some things that can be known through text alone. But there's a lot of ways in which it's important to distinguish "knows what people tend to say about this sort of stuff" and "knows about this sort of stuff".
I imagine ChatGPT 'has' a favourite flavour of ice cream in the way that the most popular colour is red; there's part of an old Irish tale about "what's red is beautiful" and my understanding is that the Russian words for "red" and "beautiful" are related:
"It is certain", said Emer, "that I shall not refuse the woman if thou followest her. But, however, everything red is beautiful, everything new is fair, everything high is lovely, everything common is bitter, everything that we are without is prized, everything known is neglected, till all knowledge is known. Thou youth", said she, "we were at one time in dignity with thee, and we would be so again if it were pleasing to thee".
So ChatGPT picks vanilla because that's the flavour that comes up highest in the training data, and if asked for favourite colour would say red, and so on. Not because it itself has any preferences or even concept of having same, but because that is what the data tells him: most preferred X is Y.
So did he or do you never have preferences? If given a choice between X and Y, you'd choose X but if the choice was between Y and Z, you would take either?
I am one of those who is "my favourite ice cream flavour is vanilla" and I have rejected selections of ice cream in the shops on the grounds that "they're all variations on chocolate, some of them are way too much chocolate, I want something plainer". If I'm given a dessert selection, I'll choose cheesecake. Jaffa cakes are my downfall, even the crappiest own-brand ones will be devoured if given a chance. I like shepherd's pie and my father's version of mashed potatoes as comfort food. My favourite colour is blue, with green in second place.
I do have preferences and favourites, and it's nothing to do with performative; for performative selections, I would instead put people claiming their favourite whatever was whatever is considered currently trendy or high-status - to quote C.S. Lewis from "The Screwtape Letters":
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
"I think parts of it might be vaguely human-shaped...."
I think it's more likely you've just been fooled by Searle-style Chinese box. (An especially insidious Chinese box, because it's been specifically designed to fool humans in this way.)
I could be wrong, of course, but from everything I've seen of ChatGPT, and especially from the interactions I've had with it myself, Ian Bogost seems to be right: "Once that first blush fades, it becomes clear that ChatGPT doesn’t actually know anything—instead, it outputs compositions that simulate knowledge through persuasive structure."
Don't get me wrong: I do find the technology incredibly impressive. But while it's much _better_ than the Markov chain generators I use to train up and play with, I'm not seeing how it's qualitatively _different,_ or where "AI" comes into this beyond being a marketing label.
(Note also that this doesn't mean I don't think it's dangerous. ChatGPT and other LLMs may have zero intelligence, but grey goo doesn't need to be intelligent to destroy civilisation.)
I'd already read "/meaningful" and commented on it in another response to this top-level comment.
As far as the step-towards-AGI, no, I'm not buying it because I see a _huge_ difference in how ChatGPT-3 reacts to "you're wrong about how many syllables are in this line" and how my mom does (again, details in my other comment). The complete lack of any reasoning capability means that ChatGPT neither knows nor cares about the contradiction between 9 + 2 = 10 and 9 + 2 = 11, much less how that relates to counting syllables in a line of alleged-iambic pentameter. In discussion with almost any human the contradiction would be obvious and we could work it out and decide on a correct answer. Most humans I think would also feel that they _wanted_ to work this out, rather than ignore it, unless it involved something likely to emotionally upset them if the result might force them to change their beliefs.
You may be right that _one_ of the things my mom does is "brute-force statistical pattern [matching] which blends up the internet and gives [me] back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.” (In fact, it often does look like that to me.) But I am quite certain that it's not the _only_ thing she does, and have at least moderate confidence that the reasoning skills that she demonstrates and ChatGPT does not are somehow important to how she's intelligent and ChatGPT is far from it.
Replace that text with the same text written via a Markov chain generator; would you say the same?
It's hard to say what the results would be if you queried the "AI" in that post about what water is. But it's certainly likely that the chemists and the children, assuming that they're all real people, could have a reasonable conversation about it and come up with sensible results. If that first AI is ChatGPT, that's unlikely at best, and if it does, that's luck.
You can see this by directly interacting with ChatGPT or the Bing chatbot yourself, as I did recently when I asked it to write a sonnet about computer programming. (Twice, once at chat.openai.com and once with the Bing chatbot.) Here are some excerpts from the latter encounter, just now:
Bot: "Here is a sonnet I wrote about computer programming:
To code is to create a world of logic..."
Me: "What is the scansion of the first line?"
Bot: "The scansion of the first line is:
× / × / × / × / × /"
Me: "How many syllables are in each word of that line?"
Bot: "Here is the number of syllables in each word of that line:
to - 1 code - 1 is - 1 to - 1 create - 2 a - 1 world - 1 of - 1 logic - 2
The total is 10 syllables."
Me: "What is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2?"
Bot: "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 is equal to 10. It is the same as the number of syllables in the first line of the sonnet."
At this point, to make sure I'm not going crazy here, I cut and paste "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2" into the Unix program 'bc', which does indeed give 11. I guess it understands the world better than ChatGPT does.
(As I was writing this it occurred to me to prompt, 'Generate a proof that "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 is equal to 10."' The result had me literally laughing out loud for long time, and I start laughing again every time I go back to it. https://imgur.com/gallery/f2hU6nd )
Analogous prayers follow the Torah service in most denominations in most countries; one common American version is called 'Prayer for the Government'. There is an additional, similar prayer for the State of Israel. These prayers are, unusually for Jewish prayer, often chanted in the local language instead of Hebrew (or Yiddish).
I remember hearing a prayer for the King of the Netherlands in a Dutch synagogue that made reference to the parting of the Red Sea (presumably by analogy with Dutch flood defenses).
I discussed how capital punishment is popular even among the educated class, and thus how the greater influence of them in the UK would not suffice to explain their lack of the death penalty there:
I recall years ago also seeing some survey data that a majority of Brits favored the death penalty for certain crimes, but I think that was a rare crime.
I strongly suspect that wokeness has 'peaked' not because it's lost/going to lose power, but simply because everyone has become so brow beaten that all the easy-to-cancel-over stuff simply doesn't get regularly said anymore out of fear (or the problematic offenders being culled from academia).
It's really, really hard to imagine America becoming meaningfully less woke in the near future, and it seems much more like the "peak" is more or less a floor. And while the wokeists may struggle to push institutions to become significantly more radically woke, there's plenty of fertile territory outside of academia that isn't yet up to this floor, which would represent society becoming more woke on average but not much more extreme at the peaks.
The idea that there's going to be a reversal in the near to mid term without some radical shakeup of society in the meantime is kinda preposterous.
People get bored with ideas, and society moves on, slightly changed.
If you're looking at the changes in society as the force which changes the society - you're looking at the wrong thing. The force is fading. Some other force will rise. It will probably end up wiping out half the changes that wokism made - and make a bunch of other changes to society that will likely annoy you just as much, but from a different direction.
You look at the "fertile ground" they've yet to occupy, but they won't have time to really occupy it, because the next wave of changes will end up with many of them protesting -those-, instead of trying to spread an ideology which isn't fashionable anymore anyways.
This is all true enough, but the question to ask is whether the next force that will rise also will destroy part of what people who don't like wokeness regard as a tiny shrinking remnant of cultural inheritance. Margaret Thatcher was wrong about the ratchet. It really just loosens regardless of which way you crank the handle.
"The ... condition of the country was better the year before last than it was last year, and last year it was better than it is at present. It’s obvious that we would not be able to survive another year of the same progression. Therefore, our sole objective must now be to hold the line. To stand still in order to catch our stride. To achieve total stability."
A quote from Atlas Shrugged. That, to be clear, is one of the -villains- of Atlas Shrugged. It continues:
"Freedom has been given a chance and has failed. Therefore, more stringent controls are necessary."
Pay attention to the handle you are trying to crank. It doesn't do what you think it does.
When has there been a long-term shift to the right on social issues in American institutions in the past 60 years? It always goes in one direction when you look at any time period of more than a few years.
There's no evidence of some divergent force "arising". Academia is showing absolutely no signs of getting less woke, and corporations have shown no sign of either not being terrified of women on twitter cancelling them or of not using being woke as a way of distracting people from criticizing them/the broader economic system.
What's going to be undone in the next ten years?
Will transgendered people be less included by powerful institutions? Will people researching biological race differences not have their research stymied and not be fired for any excuse adminstrators can find? Will police start cracking down on crime in minority neighborhoods? Will universities stop moving towards 'equity' based admissions?
I'm certain that various things will gain more focus and some will lose some of their attention, but there's no reason whatever to think that whatever these changes are that it will result in American institutions becoming meaningfully less woke.
I've wondered if maybe the next thing in the pipeline is pedophile acceptance. They tried it a few years ago with sympathetic news stories in many of the left-wing opinion sites, but I think it was too early for that and they backed down, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being tried again at some stage. Even just using this as a possible example, we can see that this wouldn't make institutions less woke in other ways and it would be if anything a much worse direction for things to head in from the perspective of the anti-woke.
Well, that's kind of tautologically impossible, when you define "the right" in terms of social conservativism. Any change is a change from the status quo.
Well, the wokies are *more* conservative and less liberal than the previous status quo in some respects. They are, in a way, anti-sex, and the right-wing boogeyman of 'pedophile acceptance' is, if anything, less likely to happen under the wokies.
Well, you might want to check out the history books for 1925-35, 1958-68, and 1975-85 before you place any large bets on the impossibilty of significant cultural shifts over a surprisingly short time.
I feel like all of those periods were characterized by being in the wake of, or the middle of, major wars which greatly upset the economies and cultures. I hope we don't get into another major war, even if it's the only way to get us away from wokeness.
Most of history is in the wake of, or in the middle of, major wars, by that standard, so I don't think that gets us far. Anyway, the revulsion from 1975 to 1985 had absolutely dick to do with Vietnam, if that's what you're thinking. The most plausible cause in my mind is a decade of inflation, a twentysomething boomer generation turning thirty, and the fact that the 70s sported a lot of lectures on piety, of which people can only take so much before they get fed up.
Also the normal reaction of thinking what the generation immediately before yours did was pathetic and silly. By the 80s, 60s seemed dirty, silly, gross. Odds are good, given the similarly "distressed" looks in favor today the same will happen soonish. (I love the people who think they're being edgy by dying hair funny colors and wearing DMs, apparently not realizing that look was stale in the 80s.)
Academia has not had much of a cull. Probably no more than 1/1000 of the population has been removed for something like sexual harassment, and far fewer have been removed for anything milder. (Amy Wax still has her job at Penn despite making a name for herself stating that she believes her minority students are stupid.)
I notice that you are dealing with a single quotation of a single thing she said. She decided a few years ago that this was how she would make a name for herself, going to as many places as she could to make as many statements in this vicinity as she could.
> (Amy Wax still has her job at Penn despite making a name for herself stating that she believes her minority students are stupid.)
She said her minority students struggle compared to other students, and this was obviously coming from a place of concern, not mockery or hate.
You're perfect proof of the madness of wokeism where you have to avoid describing reality as it plainly exists in order to not be labelled 'racist'. Black students get admitted to college with significantly lower scores than their white and asian classmates on average, black students get worse grades and are more likely to drop out, and despite the survivorship bias you might expect with the high dropout rate, black college graduates have significantly lower IQ and literacy and numeracy skills than white college gradautes (or white college dropouts, even). But nope, you have to pretend that black kids are doing just fine and dandy or you're a bigot.
> (Amy Wax still has her job at Penn despite making a name for herself stating that she believes her minority students are stupid.)
She said her minority students struggle compared to other students, and this was obviously coming from a place of concern, not mockery or hate.
You're perfect proof of the madness of wokeism where you have to avoid describing reality as it plainly exists in order to not be labelled 'racist'. Black students get admitted to college with significantly lower scores than their white and asian classmates on average, black students get worse grades and are more likely to drop out, and despite the survivorship bias you might expect with the high dropout rate, black college graduates have significantly lower IQ and literacy and numeracy skills than white college gradautes (or white college dropouts, even). But nope, you have to pretend that black kids are doing just fine and dandy or you're a bigot.
Tell me Kenny, do you think black americans are equally intelligent to white americans on average (regardless of the cause of any difference)? Because if you do (and it sounds like you do given how you phrased your comment), you're just obviously in denial of all relevant empirical evidence here in a more egregious way than e.g. climate change deniers are.
Well, *are* they stupid? Are you suggesting (via the "despite" you use) that Amy Wax is saying something untrue, or is she saying something that is true but which it is not permitted to say out loud? I thought academia prized the truth, and speaking precisely, so there should be an answer to this question.
Funny comment given how frequently, throughout history, there's been a serious counter-reaction to similar movements. The assumption things just proceed along same lines without disruption, reaction, is common, but ignores history. Sure, this time's different! (This is basically 60s redux, lots of folk will be regretting their actions, looks, views, in the very near term.)
And yet American society, ESPECIALLY its most powerful instituions, is vastly more socially progressive now than in the 60s.
And it doesn't matter if people end up regretting the extent of their earlier wokeness, it will be too late. The next generation of children have already been taught by then that white people are irredeemably racist and that women are oppressed by white men.
That Bangladesh mask study which is, or was, the best evidence for efficacy and is mentioned in the Vox article as supporting evidence, actually turned out to be pretty weak after the data was reverse-engineered (and later confirmed and I believe fully released by the study's author). The difference in number of cases between control and treatment groups was only 20 out of 300k people, over 8 weeks. Furthermore there were some highly abberant results, like purple cloth masks having zero effect, but identical (other than color) red cloth masks performing better than surgical masks. In my opinion this study should be placed with all the others showing no effect from masking.
Masks weren’t a silver bullet but the data from America clearly shows masks mitigated spread to some degree. Remember the anti-maskers ended up saying nothing worked and so anything that delayed acquiring natural immunity was prolonging the pandemic. So in America one could be anti-mask and believe masks work as it is consistent with the ideology they adopted that the Chinese bioweapon wasn’t dangerous but Fauci and Hillary Clinton developed it to defeat Trump as part of the Great Reset. They also believe mRNA vaccines are dangerous and that the Chinese vaccines and ivermectin were the way to go.
Your first sentence is a factual claim — what is the evidence for it? The rest seems to be going off on a culture war digression that has nothing to do with the claim.
The important qualification to the "masks don't work" claim is that it is a claim about mask mandates and similar actions, not about the effect of wearing a mask. It's possible that wearing an N95 mask properly fitted reduces your chance of getting Covid all else held constant, but that the combined effect of people who know that and do that being (rationally) less careful in other ways and of people who are not wearing a mask properly being less careful because they think of the mask as protecting them balances that effect, making the mandate of no effect.
That would be an argument against mandates but not an argument against wearing a mask.
Just look at the reams of data from America because low information Trump supporters stopped masking in 2021 and those populations have significantly higher Covid death rates since January 2021. Wealthy older Republicans on the other hand skipped in line to get vaccinated and so those populations have low Covid death rates as well. Masking wasn’t a silver bullet but it worked to some degree prior to Omicron.
Hard to prove what masks did to Covid infections. Each of the 3 years was very different from the other. But the flu we have with us always and it was a 100 times less prevalent. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm#anchor_1627000307956 "0.2% of 818,939 respiratory specimens were positive for an influenza virus. ... during the last three seasons before the pandemic, the proportion testing positive for influenza peaked between 26.2% and 30.3%. "
Now, that could have all been lockdowns/school closings. Which we liked even less than those masks, right? - Plus: the flu went down everywhere. Even in Sweden. I'd really like so dive into countries and their covid-policies correlating with flu numbers - where we have much more data on business-as-usual-years.
Using my framework I spotted the Tennessee anomaly…so I’m the only person in America that was looking at the data and scratching my head why Tennessee had a lower death rate than Kentucky which had a pro-mask governor…and then a few weeks later Tennessee added thousands to the death tally:
Officials in Tennessee have increased the state’s COVID-19 death toll by about 2,700 to 20,644 after a review, according to The Associated Press.
Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said that the revision was due to lagging data, such as manual death reporting by many health care providers and increased home deaths that are confirmed by investigations, the AP noted.
I can provide a good data point on the Builder's Remedy story. I know someone who is involved in commercial real estate in the Bay Area, and asked about this when it was first going down; they gave two reasons why most builders weren’t going ham:
1) Main issue is the city still gets to do an EIR (environmental impact review) so they can still throw sand in your gears. Those can go much longer if you are not on friendly terms with the City. And the new Builder’s Remedy hasn’t been tested in court yet; there will be lawsuits before these projects go through.
2) Everyone in commercial real estate is terrified of the macro environment. I infer it’s the same for Residential; terrible time to build houses with interest rates where they are (double whammy as it’s both a bad time to borrow money for construction projects and a bad time for home buyers to take a new mortgage).
So while the EMH might make you think that loads of building would happen given all that pent up demand, there is no one with shovels ready.
Yeah and from my understanding the political goal of the Governor's move was not to actually get more housing built now, but to force the cities to update their codes which would have to conform with new state standards regarding density around transit and similar details. This could increase building in the long term, but the issue you point out still remain.
Yeah good point. The general history of the Builders Remedy being that it lacked teeth and so the state-level requirements were never seriously considered. So this is a shot across the bows saying that now the state legislature is actually going to use the powers it has to enforce its requirements (and increase those requirements too).
The power and influence of Christianity as a whole probably peaked in the 1800s or early 1900s. Part of that is the colonization of the rest of the world by Europe, but in the Middle Ages, a lot of nominally Christian areas were not under any sort of control by the Church or pope. The papacy itself was often under control of secular authorities, and individual kings or nobles felt perfectly empowered to ignore the Church/their local bishop. Also, parts of Europe were rather slow to Christianize and other religions continued to be practiced for centuries after (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Iceland).
You make a very good point. I once learned that even in rural parts of Italy (!) it took until well into the early modern period for the church to establish a monopoly on weddings and common law weddings to be fully eradicated.
Another example, recall in Scott's own review of Albion's seed:
> 3. The Borderers were mostly Presbyterians, and their arrival en masse started a race among the established American denominations to convert them. This was mostly unsuccessful; Anglican preacher Charles Woodmason, an important source for information about the early Borderers, said that during his missionary activity the Borderers “disrupted his service, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation before a service of communion”.
> 12. “In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day”
> 13. Although the Borderers started off Presbyterian, they were in constant religious churn and their territories were full of revivals, camp meetings, born-again evangelicalism, and itinerant preachers. Eventually most of them ended up as what we now call Southern Baptist.
> 14. Borderer folk beliefs: “If an old woman has only one tooth, she is a witch”, “If you are awake at eleven, you will see witches”, “The howling of dogs shows the presence of witches”, “If your shoestring comes untied, witches are after you”, “If a warm current of air is felt, witches are passing”. Also, “wet a rag in your enemy’s blood, put it behind a rock in the chimney, and when it rots your enemy will die”; apparently it was not a coincidence they were thinking about witches so much.
Despite nominally being Christian, pre-maritial sex and belief in magical powers (as well as murder and other forms of violence) are rampant.
Even the cavaliers did not necessarily consider the church to have any actual power over them:
> 9. “In 1747, an Anglican minister named William Kay infuriated the great planter Landon Carter by preaching a sermon against pride. The planter took it personally and sent his [relations] and ordered them to nail up the doors and windows of all the churches in which Kay preached.”
The "peak wokeness" thing reminds me of Scott's old post on New Atheism.
My view of what happened with New Atheism is that it won some key battles, and its perceived necessity receded so people moved on to other things. It's seen in retrospect as too strident and over the top; partly because the threats it was responding to aren't so visible now, partly because over time most normies left and the only people who were still talking about it were increasingly extreme. But it's not like the opponents of New Atheism are seen as having been vindicated either, so much as the whole thing seems overblown.
I could see the same thing happening with "wokeness", people perceive it as less important because it won some key battles, lots of people simply move on, in the future it's increasingly dominated by increasingly extreme people and seen as ridiculous by some. But the same way the "I was a super woke SJW" crowd will look ridiculous in 2030, the "wokeness is destroying America" crowd will also look ridiculous. And the woke people will be able to point to some societal changes that everyone agrees with in 2030 that they can claim to been at the vanguard of.
I think that the crucial difference is that New Atheism didn't have any positive message, just a negative one, i.e. abandon religion and everything will become great, which was obviously weak. Whereas wokeness has a detailed ethical framework and an actionable program, so whatever is going to replace it would have to offer a compelling alternative.
Interestingly, my recollection is that Atheism+ was an attempt to give new atheism a positive message, one that was basically a variation of what we now call wokeness - and it crashed and burned hard.
Please, wokeness doesn't have an ethical framework beyond the most aggrieved is always right and gets to dictate terms, and has no actionable program beyond persecuting the heretics who won't bend the knee to transparent nonsense that serves only as signaling of subservience, with the bar getting higher and higher as the woke turn on each other for being insufficiently woke based on every changing standards. This is what the left always does, making everything a purity test, and attacking its own even once it's won.
Yes, their main precepts are simple, which is something that adds to the appeal. Also, I'm continually impressed by the ability of the broad woke camp to keep their shock troops mostly pointed in the same direction, with the TERF kerfuffle being the single notable exception so far.
New atheism did not fundamentally alter American institutions to even a fraction of the extent that wokeness has. The analogy is just bad, and its always been bad. They're very, very different types of movements and the decline of one says almost nothing of the decline of the other.
Atheism was never a part of the liberal canon. It was never part of liberal political religion.
Nobody thinks that the abolitionists and the civil war were 'ridiculous'. Slavery is the original sin in liberal political religion and there was no cost too high to abolish it, and white americans are forever stained with its slavery's legacy.
Nobody in american institutions think that the gays were acting ridiculous in their political advoacy, and likely won't in 20 years time either. The liberal religious narrative is that Americans were so bigoted that the only remarkable thing about these gay issues is that it took so long for americans to overcome their hatred.
Those with institutional power won't think BLM was a demented black nationalist movement that caused vastly more harm that it could ever have hoped to remove. "Racism" is the biggest evil in liberal political religion, and in 2030 the only regrettable thing about BLM was that it took so long for America to do something about the "oppression" of black people.
Odds ratios for the win! (One of my hobby horses is that a lot of things that people think of in terms of probabilities or percentages are much better understood with odds ratios.)
What most people in government subsidies arguments cite, is companies deducting the R&D budget from their taxable income. If say Exxon funds research into how oil is developed in the rock, this expands human knowledge. Oil companies also study how oil molecules can be turned into new products ... like plastics ... without which, none of us would be using computers.
Big corporations fund a whole lotta research which expands human knowledge. Big Tobacco—not my favorite product—funded a whole lotta basic plant biology research, including the studies which discovered ATP.
So I wasn't surprised by it, but I feel like I can model someone who would find it surprising.
The intuitive reasoning goes...
- A change from 99% down to 98% is an almost insignificant difference. If a box of juice goes from 99% full to 98% full, the amount of juice hasn't really changed much.
- The potatoes start as 99% water, i.e., almost all water. So when thinking about weight, the amount of actual potato seems basically negligible, and we only have to concentrate on the water.
- Given that the main component of the weight has undergone a tiny change, the total weight will also undergo a tiny change.
I think many people would see the problem as equivalent to "100kg of potatoes is made up of 99kg water and 1kg actual potato. If some water evaporates, and the new water weight is 98kg, how much is the new total weight"?
My brain tried to jump to the 'obvious' answer that if 99% water = 99kg, 98% water = 98kg. Similar to the bat and ball puzzle, but in that case the 'obvious' wrong answer doesn't have much of a pull on me.
Grew up on a farm. I've never seen potatoes halve in weight overnight. Seems 99% water to 98% water shouldn't be 50% weight difference when it comes to potatos. My brain stops there.
So does 98% water to 97% water make the potatoes weight only 25kg? And does 97% water to 96% water only weight 12.5kg?
Eh, it's just that it doesn't match the actual reality of potatoes, so you have real-world-intuition fighting against an arbitrary word-problem. Real potatoes wouldn't dehydrate that fast, so *obviously* it can't be 50 kg... It's just a bad word problem is all.
Also it's not intuitively apparent why a 1% reduction in moisture content would result in a 50% reduction in total weight. We feel that if we weighed ourselves yesterday then weighed ourselves today, and had 1% reduction, it would not mean "Oh, I weighed 80 lbs yesterday and today I weigh 40 lbs!"
The importance of the *dry matter* making up that 1% and that we are not increasing the dry matter by adding anything, but by taking away water, is what catches people out. The total weight on Day 1 was 100kg which was made up of 99% water, which comes to 99kg, and 1% dry matter which comes to 1kg. If on Day 2 the total weight is 98 % water, then the dry matter is 2%. But we didn't add more dry matter, so that *weight* remains constant - it's still 1kg. So we 'increased' it by taking away water, which means halving the original total weight. If 1 kg makes up 2% of the weight, which started off as 1% of 100kg, what is it now?
The apparent but false immediate answer is "1% reduction in water means 1% reduction in weight" but that's wrong. You have to think about the difference between actual weight and proportion of total weight.
32: The Potato Paradox (not really a paradox): “Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water (being purely mathematical water). He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98% water. What is their new weight? . . . The surprising answer is 50 kg.”
The easiest way to intuit this is to think about the constant 1 kg dry weight. At first, that 1 kg is 1% of the potato weight. In the morning, it's 2%. 1/.02 = 50 kg.
#7 seems wildly overdetermined, as the 1500 list of technology reads like a carefully reverse-selected list of things that are both associated with European expansion and later considered by Europeans themselves to be technologically important. The migration adjustment also seems to be a dodge to make the numbers line up properly.
As an aside, I should mention the acacia retypification debate/scandal/controversy and how it has allowed Australia to potentially gain a geographical indication on a word almost exclusively associated with Africa.
#28 is good trolling but a terrible argument. There are many books that sold spectacularly well without being either particularly philosophically engaging or masterpieces of prose (Dan Brown springs to mind).
And the kink factor. There's very few popular novels where the main character is a strong independent woman who just really wants a powerful man to dom her.
I don't agree. One of the reasons she gets away with badly flawed philosophical arguments it that she covers up the gaps in the logic with emotionally powerful rhetoric.
Very much a matter of taste, I think. Not having encountered Rand's writing before forming some preconceptions about it, I can't be sure how I would have reacted if I went in blind -- but it's hard for me to imagine enjoying it or finding it persuasive.
It reads like a self-conscious imitation of the sort of philosophy that has always annoyed me: full of grand pronouncements made with absolute and unearned certainty, in a formal style that lacks any hint of warmth but is not efficient or concise. Stiltedly formal, cold, grandiose prose in the service of arguments that could only appeal via the emotions.
>and later considered by Europeans themselves to be technologically important.
It's things which lead to productive capacity and hence things that are likely to lead to a high national income (i.e. the thing shown on the Y-axis).
Your comment reads like you hate the idea of some societies being considered more advanced than others, as if primitive hunter gatherer peoples were capable of developing the steam enginge but simply felt no need to, which is obviously absurd.
If you think they don't need to be able to develop these kinds of technologies, fine, but don't turn around be shocked and outraged that these countries are much poorer than western countries.
> The migration adjustment also seems to be a dodge to make the numbers line up properly.
Uh, no, like Scott says, if you don't get that you get the absurd situation of countries like Australia which has an extremely high national income despite the fact that it was one of the most primitive countries in the world in 1500 and that this change is 100% of the the country being settled by the British.
There's no reason to treat Australia as part of a continuous progression of socieites from 1500-2005. Once the British arrived, it's an entirely differently country almost overnight and what happened before that time is almost entirely irrelevant to its future. If Australia had never been inhabitated before the British showed up, its unlikely would be meaningfully poorer than it is today (/in 2005).
Whereas what happened in 1500 England absolutely directed the path that led to 2005 England, and England could have turned out much poorer or wealthier if things in 1500 had been even modestly different in certain ways.
Time Magazine, founded in 1923, was pretty eccentric in the mid-20th Century. The editors invented a new prose style that its anonymous reporters had to write in. It was also highly biased along its center-right mainstream Republican ideology. President Eisenhower was always described as tall, straight-backed, and distinguished-looking, while his political enemies were short, squat, and nose-picking.
Over the course of the 1960s-70s, Time became more conventional, more liberal, more like the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times, which had been basically the voice of John Huston's character in "Chinatown," followed a similar trajectory.
"Briton Hadden, the editor of the magazine, created a new style of writing. He was a savage editor who stripped the sentence down, cut extraneous clauses, and used only active verbs. He also removed inconclusive words words like "alleged" and "reportedly". ...
"The editor of Time Magazine was also interested in creating new words. For example, while at Hotchkiss School he described boys who had few friends as being "social light". In his magazine he began using the word "socialite" to describe someone who attempted to be prominent in fashionable society. Hadden wanted a new word for opinion makers. As they thought themselves as wise, he called them by the name of his old Yale prankster group: "pundit". Another word brought into general use was "kudos", the Greek word for magical glory. Henry Luce also developed new words. The most famous of these was "tycoon" to describe successful and powerful businessman. The word was based on "taikun", a Japanese term to describe a general who controlled the country in the name of the emperor.
"Hadden encouraged his writers to use witty epithets to convey the character and appearance of public figures. Grigory Zinoviev was condemned as the "bomb boy of Bolshevism" and Upton Sinclair was called a "socialist-sophist". Winston Churchill was described as being "ruddy as a round full moon". Benito Mussolini was attacked on a regular basis. ...
"Articles in Time Magazine were very different from those found in other newspapers and journals. Isaiah Wilner has pointed out: "Having invented a new writing style that made each sentence entertaining and easy to grasp. Hadden and his writers began to toy with the structure of the entire story. Most newspaper writers tried to tell everything in the first one or two paragraphs. By printing the most important facts first, they destroyed the natural narrative of news. Hadden trained his writers to act as if they were novelist. He viewed the whole story, including the headline and caption, as an information package."
"Hadden trained his writers to act as if they were novelist. He viewed the whole story, including the headline and caption, as an information package."
Ah, so that is the reason why all stories now in media start off as if writing a novel, describing how the hero/heroine got up and had a cup of coffee and left the house, but little did they know what would befall them.
You see it mostly in human-interest stories, but even in factual ones it does creep in, and I dislike it. I don't care if Jane Brown has blonde hair or is trim for her fifty years or loves her cockapoo Snackles, what has that to do with her being chairperson of the European Bus Drivers Union who are calling a universal strike?
#5 Nature does not make leaps, certainly not 24% leaps in one generation. This was discussed on a sub-reddit, I think r/science, which concluded it is a change in method of measuring. It sure as hell is not an *evolutionary* change given the time available.
[edited because i do not want to show up on google searches along with the subject matter of the link].
9: In the US, I'm moderately sure that clothing designs can't be legally protected at all (whether by an individual or a group). I remember this being a point in a TED talk I watched years ago and my cursory googling appears to confirm. Not sure how much this differs by country.
Also, I notice you called this "trademark", but the linked article didn't use that word and only talked generically about "rights". Conditional on clothing designs being protected at all, my priors say that copyright is significantly more plausible than trademark. However, copyright also *expires*, so if this really is traditional (i.e. old) clothing, that might be an issue even if it is copyrightable-in-principle.
18: It seems important to note that this argument only applies to the marginal man and marginal woman in the dating pool. Individual men or women will have different amounts of desire to date and different tolerances for annoyance, and so probably some of them will be far from their cutoff for leaving the dating pool even if others are on the edge. There's no requirement that the *average* man and woman balance in this way.
Also, the thing that should balance isn't really unpleasantness alone, it's the combination of hardships and benefits. If one group has more desire to date (they gain more satisfaction from a successful date), then they'll be willing to endure more frustration in order to continue dating, and so their marginal members will be more frustrated than the other group's marginal members.
I think the average person who is good at math (I like to think of myself as one, having a PhD in it and all) probably thinks - "oh, whoa, that's surprising, but yeah, totally right!"
But the math isn't the hard part, its parsing the language. I don't view it as a paradox but written more clearly and explicitly, the math is clear and outcome is not a surprise. The way this is written is just to confuse people so the writer can say "isn't that surprising!"
That's not what I was taught a paradox was - I thought it was a case where both A and ~A are true at the same time (eg grandfather paradox, where you are dead if and only if you are alive, or Liar paradox, where A is true if and only if it's false)
Yeah, I think that's the *philosophical* definition of a paradox(?) but the word seems to be used differently in mathematics. What you mentioned would be a *contradiction* or an *inconsistency* in mathematics.
The fact that Wikipedia, known for nitpicking, calls the Potato Paradox a paradox should be evidence that this usage of the word isn't rare, no?
That's also what it is in litature. "A literary paradox is a statement that appears to contradict itself, but upon further rumination, either reveals a deeper meaning or actually makes sense." EG "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." So this is a perfect example of that kind of paradox.
#22: I've long believed that the discourse around aphtansia suffered from unreliable & fuzzy reporting, i.e that if two people both experience "a black screen in front of me, and the idea of the thing in the interstice behind my eyes", one could report "actually seeing the thing", the other "not seeing the thing".
I thought that might be the case too, but his account of learning to visualize seems to disprove it, at least in his case. He clearly reports that he can do something different than what he could do before.
Is there an agreed-upon set of them that economists generally correct for or something similar? Or, given a specific product, is there a way of enumerating all relevant externalities?
Yes the UK criminal justice system is a joke, and no party really seems to want to fix it. Our house was attempted to be broken into, and one of the guys had a machete and smoked a cigarette and dropped it in our yard. So they got him with the DNA evidence, then he pled not guilty and it actually went to trial. He had something like 30 previous convictions (which the jury wasn’t allowed to hear about!) and he got five years. Then was released after two. For a attempted armed burglary! Nuts
Re #6: I sometimes diff text files by rapidly task-switching back and forth between them. The differences show up vividly as flickering movement where everything else is still.
(As for the stereogram method in the example: I find it quite hard to do the stereogram thing with my eyes, but I found I could spot the aberrant numbers in <5 seconds anyway.)
#19...I don't know what I just finished reading, but I think it devalues the Bay Area House Party series to make that comparison. Plenty of honest intellectual people have most assuredly assured me that Sam Kriss Is The Shit, he's The Smartest Writer Alive, or whatever. And maybe that's even true more generally? But at least in the limited domain of "Satirical House Party Stories", Scott seems the clearly superior talent.
Idk, Sam Kriss to me is like TLP is to some others: a clearly very brilliant and somewhat unhinged guy who seems to mostly use that intellect doing the exact same thing he's satirizing as poetry there. Stringing together words and turns of clever phrase that ultimately signify nothing. Maybe it makes more sense if one is Lacan-pilled or something...
Sam is sometimes esoteric, but I thought that piece was beautiful and made perfect sense. It helps to know that it's lampooning very specific people in NY, but I think it stands even without that.
That's part of it, yeah - I can #relate to the BAHPs cause that's where I live too, so it's a very familiar scene and energy; the archetypes are self-recommending, and easy to spot in my daily life and acquaintances. NYC I've only visited for a few days, all of that On Business...not much time to actually get to know the City That Never Sleeps, nevermind the nightlife or the people. So quite a number of the local what the refrances just go over my head. Which is a shame, because it sure seems like they're probably quite funny for those in the know? The <cameo> was a good twist either way, so I at least felt there was some payoff at the end, despite not Getting It much.
It's definitely not bad writing - I did bother to finish it! it did remind me somewhat of Neal Stephenson's __The Diamond Age__, which was fantastic! - but I think if it'd been recommended by anyone else and/or not compared to House Party, woulda bounced about halfway through. Which, fair enough, I woulda missed the value of <cameo> and been at a net loss relative to me finishing the piece...and if I'm reading it, it's for me, to some degree anyway. So still a worthy link recommendation that I'm net positive about. Sometimes it's good to get out of one's comfort zone and try very different things.
#5 Assuming that the findings are valid, how likely is it that both this and sperm count decline is due to sexual selection, specifically the increasing ability (in the west particularly?) during the 20th century of girls and boys to select their own partner (and take longer time to do so, with more allowance for failed attempts).
Given that this has happened in a *single* generation, it seems exceedingly unlikely to be selection (particularly since something like 70% of people in most wealthy countries end up having 1-3 children, so you can't affect the distribution of any genetic factor very much in one generation).
'So he equipped 200 ships filled with men and the same number equipped with gold, water, and provisions enough to last them for years, and said to the man deputed to lead them: "Do not return until you reach the end of it or your provisions and water give out."'
Same set up next time, "2,000 ships, 1,000 for himself and the men whom he took with him and 1,000 for water and provisions."
This makes me very strongly suspect that none of this happened. The set up looks logical to someone who has never been to sea, but it is nuts. Keeping station with another vessel and coming alongside it every time you need to restock on food and water, in all weathers and sea states, rather than having 200 self contained ships, is insane. [evidence: a lifetime sailing including an E-W Atlantic crossing in a 45 foot sailboat].
Numbers also look too big and too round, but what do I know about the Mali empire?
I can tell you one thing about them, they were predominately a land-empire. Their wealth came from local gold and the ability to control a number of trade routes that traced the edges of the Sahara. Although, given that, they were stinking rich by the standards of the time so being able to equip a number of ships for blind exploration is plausible. I might take a zero of two off the numbers to get into the realm of reasonable, but it wouldn't surprise me that it was attempted.
Whether Mali was capable of building a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic is another question. Doing a bit of cursory googling, it doesn't seem like they had a strong naval tradition. The Portuguese noted in their explorations a century later that West Africans understood sails, but were reserved for trading vessels with the predominate form of ocean travel being canoes. So maybe at best the Mali could build/equip was large, sail driven barges. Something like that that might survive crossing the Atlantic, but not consistently and with no hope of ever getting it back.
This is very interesting, because I think it is blindingly obvious what is going on. Musa goes on his hajj overland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa with slaves and camels carrying the gold and the food, and horses for (presumably) the more important men to ride. This makes eminent sense: slaves and camels are better for carrying stuff, horses for carrying men, and because you are travelling along a known road you can guarantee all to meet up in the same place and to distribute camel-cargo to horse-passengers and indeed foot passengers, all in perfect safety. Timing doesn't matter: slower parties can leave earlier or faster parties can stop earlier.
What Musa has done is to translate all this on the fly to shipping terms while shooting the breeze with the bloke from Damascus, and cooked up an expedition of camel ships and horse ships. The reasons this doesn't work are endless. There is no road, no GPS, no hope of usefully rendezvousing at a campsite, and no such thing as stopping. Transferring goods between ships in the open sea is always fraught with difficulty and the danger of collision, even in a flat calm. Without an engine, a flat calm doesn't help you much because you have no way of getting next to each other except by incredibly slow and inefficient rowing/towing. And you don't get flat calms on that crossing anyway, you are screaming along in a 20 knot trade wind. His provision ships might make sense if they were bulk carriers, but they are not: they have a 1:1 relationship in both cases with personnel carriers. Also, size dictates speed in sailing vessels, so there would be an additional difficulty in the discrepancy.
It just makes no sense at all except as a fabrication by a landsman talking to another landsman. There's a school of (universally dreadful) science fiction which has star fleets modelled on either current or 18th-19th century naval fleets so you have nimble hyperfrigates manoeuvring around sluggish hyperbattleships, ignoring the fact that in space small doesn't necessarily equate to nimble. this is like that.
I have sailed in a fleet of about 250 sailboats from the Canaries to St Lucia, all starting at the same time and all expecting to make it in 14-21 days, following the same routing etc. I sort of vaguely expected to have at least half a dozen other yachts in sight at all stages; in fact we probably sighted one other sail, right on the horizon, every third or fourth day. Musa's mistake is mine multiplied by about 1,000.
Even if the story is in some way true, that could well be the mistake that scuppered any expedition; the predecessor tried equipping his fleet in terms of what he understood for land travel, and make the mistake of putting all his food, water, etc. on the support ships. No wonder nobody came back.
But it probably is just a story, maybe the Egyptian (or Malian?) equivalent of Imramma:
Just as there might be some foundation to St Brendan's travels, but not the entire accretion of details and myths, maybe some Malian emperor did try sending out an exploration fleet but nothing like those numbers or results.
Not come across Imramma before, thanks for that. The thing is here, there isn't really enough time/enough links in the chain for fuzzy details to accrete. Ostensibly a first-hand witness is telling this to the bloke writing it down
It is indeed possible that the seeds of the expedition's failure were in the planning. The thing is, this may not be as stupid as planning a road trip on vehicles with square wheels, but it's not far off. Out of 400 and then 2,000 ships' captains you would expect at least a couple to speak up. Then again, we don't know what speaking truth to power got you in the Malian empire.
On ship technology: agree, the NE trade winds are incredibly consistent for that crossing so the outward journey is feasible in anything. Even in a modern yacht with good sailing to windward ability you don't come back that way, you go North to get the Westerlies behind you. Presumably that's what Columbus did, and knew in advance was feasible, but you wouldn't expect the Malians to know that.
Was hoping that wikipedia would mention genetic evidence, or lack thereof, when it mentioned the log from Columbus. Maybe it's lost to time given subsequent African slave trade.
It sounds like a tall tale, but maybe with a kernel of truth? How did he know about the "river in the ocean?" Is it possible that someone went out just far enough to discover the Canary Current, came back and told people aboutit, then a king sent some more ships to investigate it and those were all lost at sea? Then the king wanted to cover up the loss of ships so he told people that it was actually some grand expedition to discover new lands, so not really a "loss" at all, and this should be considered a big mark of his prestige?
In the talk wikipedia page there is what purports to be a better translation of the claim:
"On our questioning, the captain said: 'Prince, we have navigated for a long time, until we saw in the midst of the ocean as if a big river was flowing violently. My boat was the last one; others were ahead of me. As soon as any of them reached this place, it drowned in the whirlpool and never came out. I sailed backwards to escape this current.' But the Sultan would not believe him. He ordered two thousand boats to be equipped for him and for his men, and one thousand more for water and victuals. "
Ocean currents don't behave like that usually, and the Canary Current doesn't (you only know you are in it because you find you end up South of where you expected to be). OTOH you get whirlpools and tidal overfalls which do, so who knows?
My hypothesis: MM in Cairo talking to a drunk idiot. MM: we are an hereditary monarchy. DI: so how did you get to be king? MM passes on the obvious answer Because my dad died, you moron, and comes up with this instead.
I dunno about Bing, but someone had ChatGPT play against stockfish (a strong chess engine) without enforcing a legal move requirement on ChatGPT, and the result is pretty spectacular comedy:
(ChatGPT clearly isn't maintaining an internal model of the board state, it's stating moves that somehow parse as plausible responses to the previous move or moves. This can result in pretty natural opening play, where the engine is likely to have a number of textual examples of similar or identical sequences of moves to draw on, but as the game progresses ChatGPT starts to recapture with pieces that don't exist or can't move to that square. I particularly enjoyed the repeated resurrection of the g pawn. The guy posts the transcript of the actual chat in the comments.)
There's a GothamChess video about ChatGPT playing Stockfish (the same game I imagine) that had me in hysterics. My son has tried playing ChatGPT at chess and the thing I found weirdest is that it explained its strategy for each move and then when he made a move it explained what his strategy was.
Bing is the same. I've now had arguments with both about iambic pentameter and while the results varied (ChatGPT could quote me the definition from Wikipedia and in the same breath continue to insist on its own, incorrect and obviously inconsistent, definition; Bing could correctly count the 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 syllables in a line and firmly insisted that that added up to ten syllables) the end result was the same: incoherent nonsense.
I did ask Bing at the end to prove that "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 is equal to 10" and, while it gets points for attempting an inductive proof, the megapoints come from showing yet one more area where we no longer need humans: to provide material for "23 Outrageous and Funny Things Students Have Said to Teachers" articles. (For the math-inclined, have a look at https://imgur.com/gallery/f2hU6nd for utter hilarity. I still laugh aloud every time I read it.)
(It gets even better. Before pushing post on this, I thought I'd give it a chance to start fresh with a simpler example and no baggage from previous context about writing sonnets: "present an inductive proof that 1 + 1 = 2." https://imgur.com/gallery/sySC4Yx That was about five minutes ago; I've been practically rolling on the floor since then. But at least now I know that "1 + 1 = 2 is true for all natural numbers"!)
6: I have never been able to see a stereoscopic picture and I don't know how people can. I can make myself see double by moving my focus behind the image, which makes the image itself blurry, or I can move my focus in front of the image, but it's impossible to hold it there unless I have something else to focus on, and even then I can't get the image to appear as described. Am I alone in this?
That's probably a sign of healthy eye muscles. I once showed an optometrist how easy it was for me to do Magic Eye and he said the ability to do that easily was related to my myopia.
So, mechanically what's happening when I do this is "eye muscles close to the nose pull a little more"; I am *not* changing my focus when I do this. I do have myopia that developed to the point of being noticeable when I was 20, but could reliably do any of crossing my eyes, blurring my vision, and see Magic Eye / stereoscopic pictures / whatever we're calling them before that, provided the pattern used as the repeating baseline didn't take more than maybe an inch at arm's length to repeat. (I don't know what that is in arc seconds or whatever).
Testing this on the windows of the house across from me, it's harder to do on distant objects, and I can't do it without blurring (more than the myopia already applies).
The image looks *basically* the same so long as I ignore the edges, and the swapped numbers don't really "pop out" so much as "appear really obviously different when I actually look at one of them"; sort of like seeing double, but *only* with the numbers in question.
Oh, wow. I have such mixed feelings about #22. Of course I'm going to read it and try it, but it's gonna suck if I can't get it to work.
That said, I have reason to believe my aphantasia is fixable. I've been practicing, and I *think* I can see faint, ghostly images when I try really hard. It takes a lot of unpleasant effort to practice.
I've noticed something else, too. I can't really imagine sounds like music or birdsong, but I've noticed that I can imagine some sounds if, instead of just trying to summon the sound, I imagine trying to make the sound with my mouth. Like, I can *hear* myself humming a song in my imagination, hear it clearly. I cannot imagine the hearing the actual song at all. This made me very confident that yes, I have aphantasia - the clarity and detail with which I can imagine my own humming is amazing, almost like the real thing. I've played drums for 30 years, and I can imagine complex, multipart rhythms but they sound like how I would verbalize the sound, not like how the drum sounds. Same for piano and guitar, which I don't play nearly as well as drums, it sounds like how I would verbalize the instrument. Other instruments, like french horn which I love to listen to, I can't really imagine at all. Maybe because I don't know how to make even slightly similar sounds with my mouth? I'm just starting to play around with imagining other senses like taste and touch.
Very strange phenomenon to play with. It is surprisingly difficult work. It's a little disturbing to explore this, to notice the million tiny ways I've worked around this, lessons and habits that were hard-earned and feel like part of who I am now but that I should maybe jettison if I can learn to visualize things in my head, or even just learn that they're workarounds for not being able to visualize things. But courage is the first rationalist virtue, right? "What is true is already so."
I will not take a deep breath. Regular breathing is best.
How would you say you think about navigating through a city? Do you not imagine an overhead map of the city as you're moving around it and updating your position as you reach various named streets and observe useful landmarks?
I explicitly don't do that. I am famously bad at directions, but I am also very good at orienteering. I can read maps very well, upside down, sideways, whatever. But without a map I'm mostly helpless. When I do finally learn my way around a city the "map" in my head feels more like a mathematical object than a map - nothing visual. Navigating feels more like traversing a graph than drawing a route. As I think about it right now, it "feels" kind of like depth-first traversal for routes that turn early and then go straight, breadth-first traversal for routes that go straight and then turn. Optimization feels like avoiding troublesome nodes. Definitely no visual map in my head. I friggin wish.
[ETA: when I have a paper map, I do remember it. Like, I can skip to the part of the map I want to look at. And the more I work with a map, the more robustly I can, what? Emulate it? Synthesize it into the abstract object I can manipulate in my head? Something like that. But no visuals.]
You know what's very strange? I do dream. I used to lucid dream constantly, for years, every night, at will. I don't usually think too much about aphantasia, but yesterday I read a bunch about ways to fix it and it's been on my mind. I dreamed last night, and when I awoke I realized that dreaming isn't really compatible with aphantasia. (Is it?) I remembered the dream, so I closed my eyes and tried to visualize it ... but nope, nothing there. I could describe the dream, narrate what happened and etc. No pictures.
Not sure what to make of this, but I'll keep doing the aphantasia exercises and report back on results.
A #23 related question: What is the standard IQ test? I'm from South America and I see much discussion about IQ in rat and rat-adjacent communities, but IQ is not widely tested and discussed in the local scene. Does anyone have a source for the go-to IQ test used and accepted on these studies Scott mentions?
For what it's worth, I don't think it's an accurate description of Elo 1100.
1100 is better than 20% of players on Lichess, and it seems obvious that people who play chess online will be significantly stronger than people who just play chess on a board at home once in a while.
1100 on ChessCom is even further along the distribution (perhaps around 55%).
And 1100 actual Elo (FIDE), would be about 1300 on ChessCom or 1700 on Lichess, which would be incomparably better than "beginner who's stopped being too embarrassing."
He notes that someone 700 strength (USCF) would destroy people on the street who don't play chess online or in tournaments. He mentions that it took him several years to pass 900 rating.
Clearly, 900 is not bad, by any normal measure, and 1100 is great - contrary to Scott's characterization.
I did not know this and it turns out an unexpected ego burst in the middle of the day is quite energizing. I've been hovering at 1200 on chess.com for the last few months and would have self characterized with "the level of an okay beginner who’s stopped being too embarrassing."
They are a valid economic argument, but in practice tend to be used selectively. The fact that smoking increases the cost to hospitals of treating lung cancer is, in a system where medical care is subsidized, a negative externality. But smoking also shortens life expectancy, a positive externality given the social security system, and someone who dies of lung cancer doesn't require a hospital ten years later to treat him as he dies of heart disease. People who make arguments about externalities tend to only look for the ones whose sign supports the argument they are making.
An externality is different from a subsidy, and I'm most comfortable with it when everyone agrees it exists. For example, is the government subsidizing your comment, because it provokes me to reply to it, and my time is worth $X/hour? Is the government subsidizing me buying a bathing suit, because that allows me to go cool off in the pool and care less about global warming, and me ignoring global warming could have devastating consequences on other people? At some point you have to say "sorry, you are making these things up".
Yes, but it is also possible to actually make stuff up.
This is why I prefer the externality frame. You can say "coal causes $50 in climate related damage" or "you making this comment causes me $20 in emotional damage", and then you can either believe that or not believe it.
If I say "the government is subsidizing you making this comment, without subsidies it would cost $20", then this is suggesting a false thing (that the government has given you money) and doesn't give someone the opportunity to decide whether they support your framing of how money and damage work or not.
Fair enough. I think I see where you're going with this, but I'm going to have to think about how to define edge cases. It seems you agree that externalities are a real thing, but the notion is abused at some point that I'm having trouble defining sufficiently.
Hey, thanks for linking to my chess Twitter thread. Couple things:
1. I go by Zack not Zach
2. Not sure which other commenters you’re referring to who say it doesn’t work but I’m happy to let you temporarily use my account to verify; dm me on Twitter if you’re interested. The thread with a better prompt is https://twitter.com/zswitten/status/1631610044583391241.
Ty. I just made and uploaded a screen recording of me playing an entire game against Bing (really “Bing + my prompt”). Anyone skeptical can watch it here. https://youtube.com/watch?v=geS3s-kFk6w. The exact prompt I used and the pgn of the full game are in the video description. Hopefully this removes some doubts.
General rule of thumb with LLMs in their current form: if one person says they got something to work, another person says they didn’t, probably believe the first person. The second person didn’t prompt it right. In equilibrium people will start lying more about their results but I don’t think that’s happened yet.
"He thinks this is because teenage girls are using Instagram and worrying about body image. I wouldn’t have predicted that this in particular would be so much worse than all the other kinds of social media use, but I guess I’m wrong!"
Well, I think we can confirm that Mr. Alexander was never a teenage girl.
IIRC Scott is largely asexual (but not aromantic?), which I think leaves him with a blind spot toward certain seemingly irrational but largely normal aspects of the human condition.
For example, when discussing circumcision he described the foreskin as having a neutral salience akin to an earlobe, which I don't think is typical. (I think a better comparison would be the male nipple: not indispensable, but still an erogenous zone.)
I believe he is Jewish and is thus likely circumcised, and his romantic partners seem to be primarily (entirely?) female, so he may have less experience of the erogeneity of foreskins than many people.
That's a good point. But I think there's a separate issue that the majority of men--cut or no--attach a particular significance to their penile tissue, not shared by other body parts.
I used to use the stereographic approach to solve spot the difference puzzles. This was briefly profitable when a prize machine in the local bar had spot the difference as one of the challenges.
Making a plausible threat that you are going to create an explicitly non-politically-acceptable AI is actually a great move to encourage the politicians to regulate AI industry seriously.
I think this is the real motivation of Elon Musk here.
I don't think this is a great move - it gets a third of politicians really interested in regulating the AI industry, but another third of politicians really interested in ensuring there is never any regulation on the AI industry, to ensure that anti-woke Musk can win.
I don't think this is a great move - it gets a third of politicians really interested in regulating the AI industry, but another third of politicians really interested in ensuring there is never any regulation on the AI industry, to ensure that anti-woke Musk can win.
"I would urge people to put this in perspective of Christianity, whose power probably peaked during the Middle Ages but which remained the dominant paradigm of culture for hundreds of years afterwards"
I don't think that's the best comparison. How about this: McCarthyism (which has IMO a lot of parallels to wokeness, including elements of overreaction) was at its peak for about five years, and then for another 10-15 would have some successes and some failures, and be basically gone by the late 60s.
Is that right? Seems like you would want to be sure you are comparing congressional allegation to congressional allegation and lawsuit to lawsuit and one-on-one claim to one-on-one claim.
The numbers would presumably depend on whether "affected by" means "blacklisted/cancelled" or "felt constrained in their behavior in order to avoid being blacklisted/cancelled." Both numbers would be interesting to compare, but I feel the latter is probably both more important (if only because much larger) and much more difficult to assess.
How bout 60s drug/sex culture, with long hair, little bathing, drugs, etc., for which the backlash was ultimately extreme. That seems like most obvious parallel to me, a cultural movement purporting to up end things, change how we view relationships, aesthetics, etc., that ultimately failed pretty miserably leading to reagan 80s.
I think Rand's success should be entirely attributed to the fact that it's not a novel, but a religious text for a cult. It's a Bible for the Cult of Capitalism: like any other holy text, it makes no real attempts at logic, kind of hard to read, and is full of boring, one-dimensional characters and utterly horrible, stilted dialogues. Like any other holy text, it subtly hints that you, yes YOU the reader, that you're worthy of salvation. You're the Atlas (a non-Atlas obviously won't read that book or enjoy it). You might be widely disliked by everyone around you as a selfish prick, but actually, secretly, you're the one who will be Saved, while your slack-jawed commie tormentors will be swept with the tide and drowned in the ocean.
Well, all that and BDSM. BDSM is an attraction, too.
The BDSM is what put me off when I flipped through a copy of a Rand novel in the book shop prior to purchase. It was the bit where Dagny Taggart wants to wear the chains of love as symbolised by (if I remember right) bracelets given to her by Howard Roark, or some such, and not as a sign of commitment but as a sign of being owned (the same view that the Gor novels took to extremes).
Being a former convent school girl whose views on women's place were formed by the nuns, this repulsed me because what kind of woman was so unsure of herself that she needed a man's approval and oversight to feel worth something? 😁 I didn't get the BDSM angle, but that wouldn't have helped either.
I'm a man, and somewhat used to reading books with not-very-classy sex scenes (don't judge, I just read anything with "sci-fi" or "fantasy" label I could find in my local library, a child in Russia in 90's couldn't be chooser), but Rand's scenes and submissiveness of her heroine repulsed even me.
I first came across Ayn Rand when I was a sophomore in high school (early 2000's) and I found a worn out book called In Praise of Egoism or something in the school library (that's what I remember, checking it, it was probably the Virtue of Selfishness). I thought it was hilarious and just some random forgotten thing (I think she wasn't much talked about at that point, there has been like a renaissance for her), but my English teacher said, no, Ayn Rand is well known and there is an essay contest for high school students. I don't know whether it still exists, but the idea was to submit an essay about Fountainhead. So I tried to read it, but couldn't get through it. It seemed to be about an architect who was a really big manly man because he wanted to design blocky modernist architecture. The last straw for me was the rape stuff.
I'm glad I never bought the book since that means I avoided the rape stuff. But the excerpts I've seen about Roark and how he would prefer to dynamite a building because the client changed it to his specifications annoyed me.
I do get the idea of building to your own view and with your own ideal, but if you're working for money for a client, they are buying the good or service and you give them what they want. If what they want is a boiler to make tea, it's no good presenting them with a nuclear power plant, even if it's an *amazing* power plant. Leonarda da Vinci could get away with that because he's Leonardo, but Roark is not Leonardo.
Roark wasn't working for money for a client. There was an explicit agreement between him and a second-rate architect that the latter could take credit for a design actually done by the former, but only on condition that he agreed to change nothing. The second-rate architect changed something, there was no legal recourse, so Roark dynamited the building(s).
Rand's comment on the "rape scene" was that if that was rape it was rape by engraved invitation.
I read it because I've read a few books that were billed as a parody, or veiled critique of this book ("Railsea" and "Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy" come to mind, but I think there were others, too). Also, because I'm a huge Heinlein fan (he has some strange sex stuff, too, but I'm mostly OK with it).
It was a hard read, because it's just awfully written, to the point where I had to force myself to finish it. BDSM-up-to-rape stuff was pretty bad, but I thought it par-for-the-course for the age it was written, if we take various bodice rippers, and even silver-age sci-fi into account. It certainly feels a bit out-of-place in the landscape of blooming Golden Age of sci-fi, but it was started in 1940's, and I guess Rand grew up on the bad stuff, and never had the talent to transcend her roots.
The problem is, everything else was awful, too. I can understand Heinlein's brand of libertarianism. I would probably die on his version of Moon colony, or on any of Lazarus Long's favourite frontier planets, because I'm certainly one of the ants (in the sense that "specialization is for the insects"), and my dream is to never touch anything outside of my professional interests and hobbies ever again, but I get his admiration for the spirit of frontier freedom and the rugged people who inhibit it.
But I couldn't muster any sympathy for either Rand's heroes or her world. And frankly, her attempts to manipulate her readers are way too unsubtle, at least if you're not an insecure teenager. Offensively unsubtle: the lack of literal moustache-twirling from her villains is the only thing that sets it apart from a 30's comic book. I'm OK with debating the balance between freedom of business and social state, but she never tries to bring any logical arguments to the table. It's all emotions and images.
Interestingly enough, I also found all books that claim to parody "Atlas Shrugged" to be mediocre at best - "Railsea", for example, is not China Miéville's strongest book. I think this is the case where the source is just so bad it can't even be properly parodied.
I got Rand reference from some review, or maybe a comment on Goodreads. But I think the ending is certainly at least a jab at Rand - that abandoned city where the hunt ends certainly seemed this way to me. Then again, without reading reviews, I thought this book was mostly inspired by Transport Tycoon game :)
This doesn't make sense because most Objectivists found their way to it via Ayn Rand; it's not like the Little Red Book where all existing Chinese communists (a large constituency) were required to buy it.
Many people already liked capitalism, but that just means there's a huge market for pro-capitalism books, and Rand deserves credit for winning that market. If I write the world's most successful Christian fiction, I only did well because people were already Christian, but it's still worth asking what amazing thing I did to let me rule the popular and lucrative Christian fiction market.
I would also argue that Atlas Shrugged's morality, although capitalist, isn't just or even mostly capitalism; it's mostly a very strong version of "good things are good and don't let people make you feel guilty for doing good things".
> If I write the world's most successful Christian fiction, I only did well because people were already Christian, but it's still worth asking what amazing thing I did to let me rule the popular and lucrative Christian fiction market.
I think "Atlas Shrugged" to capitalism is what a Prosperity Gospel to Christianity. It certainly worth examining what megachurches pastors and tele-evangelists do to achieve their success, but mostly to learn how to neutralize them. It's a very stable and infectious meme-complex. It's a weaponization of selfishness and self-entitlement, and not in the service of any particular good, but in service of selling self-help books and sermons/lecturing tours.
I think your last paragraph is very insightful here. It's certainly the only reason I found the books intriguing: the plot was hackneyed, the writing turgid, the characters cardboard, and any philosophical principles not well explained -- but it was remarkable in that Rand said out loud and vigorously that great intellectual achievement, ability, and ambition are to be unabashedly celebrated, and that one need not, and should not, apologize for being great just because other people feel bad because by contrast they're not.
I think for a lot of kids who were consistently getting 100s and As all through school, and felt that achievement had to be hidden under a bushel lest the peer jealousy make one an outcast, it was a breath of fresh air. Too many of those kids got Stockholm Syndrome and started to wonder whether it *was* wrong to be proud of being #1, at least in academic or intellectual endeavours, and Rand's attitude would've been very liberating.
That's not a particularly useful way of thinking about it, any more than thinking about whether we won or lost the war on poverty or the war on drugs. These are all movements that came and went and made major societal changes, some of which are related to the stated aims and some of which are counter to them, and some of which are just different.
It certainly wasn't defeated. And I don't know if it has a fixed goal. The more woke instiutions became, the more ambitious the woke goals became.
And obviously its a spectrum - some woke people think that society is now finally more or less where it should be (or at least once most of those pesky old white conservative boomers fall of the perch), and some think that nothing short of a full blown revolution will allow e.g. racial equality to be achieved .
That's not a particularly useful way of thinking about it, any more than thinking about whether we won or lost the war on poverty or the war on drugs. These are all movements that came and went and made major societal changes, some of which are related to the stated aims and some of which are counter to them, and some of which are just different.
Of course it won. Which academic or cultural institution can you name that's not woke? Which big business (OK, maybe aside from Elon Musk's companies)? In which elite setting can you openly voice conservative opinions while everyone else is voicing far-left opinions? Which scientific journal that's not predatory will accept politically incorrect articles?
As George Orwell said, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.
TBH I quite like Scott's variation, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying, 'Look, I realise getting stamped on isn't very nice, but it's not the same as *structural* oppression.'"
If the Saami have some IP right that entitles them to demand Final Fantasy not use their clothing, how does licensing work? That is, if Final Fantasy wanted to put Nike shoes in their game they could sign a contract with Nike where they give Nike money in exchange for the right to use their shoes. Who would they have to make such a contract with in the Saami case? Can they find a single Saami guy and pay him a hundred bucks for the rights to his cultural heritage, or do the Saami need to reach some kind of majority agreement? The majority agreement model has weird implications, it suggests that if some Saami tailor is really unpopular, he could lose majority approval and with it the rights to make his own culture's clothing!
And a further consideration, whether Saami IP works on individual or majority approval from the Saami, who decides who's Saami? If everyone working for Square Enix pulls an Elizabeth Warren and suddenly remembers that they're 1/256th Saami, can they get together enough people to outvote the real Saami? Can you do a hostile takeover of an ethnicity?
According to Swedish law, one counts as Sami if (1) one consider oneself Sami and (2a) speaks or spoke a Sami language at home, or (2b) has a parent or grandparent who speaks or spoke a Sami language at home, or (2c) has a parent who is or was on the Sami electoral roll.
It is just really weird how opposed to punishment the Anglophone elite are when it comes to violent crime.
I think the "weird" bit is important because they are a long way away from the views of the public, utilitarianism or any philosophical concept of natural justice. It can't really be explained by their interests or their ideology which makes it inexplicable.
I think it's based off Rousseauist ideology. If mankind is born good and only goes bad due to a bad upbringing or societal oppression, then any criminal must be a victim. QED. In fact, he's arguably a bigger victim than the people he commits crimes against, because the fact that he's been driven to, say, breaking into an old widow's home and robbing her at knife-point, whereas she's never been driven to commit any such crime, only goes to show how much worse he's had it. Hence punishing him would only compound his victimisation, and would therefore be unjust.
It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's comments about rapists murderers and thieves are treated far better than political criminals who wrote something bad about the Soviet government.
That's explicable, too. You see, because all crime is ultimately the result of societal oppression, and because stigma is a form of oppression, it follows that stigma is one of the root causes of crime (the other being deprivation). Hence eradicating crime requires eradicating stigma, by, for example, preventing people from writing racist things online.
It isn't just the UK. The same pattern is true for many European countries. As a related issue, for those who don't know about it, look up the Rotherham scandal (and related scandals).
I think that the lax sentencing practices in some Northern European countries are a legacy of a time when there was very little violent crime.
Also, I have come to believe that the authorities like to see themselves as merciful and enlightened, and don't have the courage to punish people (I mean, think about it, punishing people is a risk from the point of view of authorities, if they make a mistake, they could be seen as ruining someone's life. So in that sense it is in their personal interests to be lenient).
Yeah...this is (one of the ) reason(s) why I prefer the right-wing in Western Europe, despite not being a right-winger (e.g. I support the left-wing in the US and Canada)...
Not in the US though...it's a Western European thing. I am not sure if rehabilitation works better than punishment...maybe in some cases, but IMO a more "right-wing" approach to crime would be beneficial in Western Europe...
I guess crime is one of the few areas where I am more deontological than utilitarian...even if rehabilitation were to be shown to be more effective than punishment in all studies, then I would still (somewhat) support punishment...
In that review, Caplan has to use only the weakest Deep Roots scores (S & A in the SAT score) to downplay the Deep Roots and has to focus on a massively overcontrolled regression to downplay the important of trust.
And he never weighs the obvious beneficial effects of the Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia. Migration can improve institutions-- a claim that the Open Borders community must, absolutely must ignore.
Unselected mass immigration from countries with much lower mean IQs than the US and no legacy of being good at building successful institutions or economies would improve the US? Incredible!
My observation of Mensa a very long time ago suggested that in most areas it was a place for underachievers to feel important but that in places with a large enough population to have multiple subgroups defined by interests, such as NYC, it was actually functional.
I'm skeptical of the article about how the "Awokening" is winding down. It attempts to make the case that articles about woke topics are being published less in academia, which seems straight-forwardly true from the graph you show here.
My initial objections were:
1.) COVID happened
2.) Enrollment is down in general due to reasons unrelated to COVID, and
3.) Humanities and social sciences have been seeing ESPECIALLY reduced enrollment and consequently, budget cuts. That's probably the reason why woke papers have seen a decline in the last two years.
The article attempts to preempt this counterargument by citing studies saying that publishing generally has continued to go up. However, the studies he cites to make his case looks only at STEM publications, not humanities or social sciences. (Seriously - *all* of the studies that he cites. Look under "Expected and Observed Patterns in Academic Research".) I would think COVID and AI absolutely would have received a lot of funding the last few years.
I had no luck finding data on publications for the humanities or social sciences in order to support my hypothesis, so I don't know for sure. But I'm skeptical. The main thrust of his argument seems to be based on a measly 2 years of decline and there are lots of factors that could be involved in that.
Humanities publications had the same jump during covid and have also not declined since. Budget cuts just don't have that much impact on short-term publication rates (particularly when you don't need expensive labs to do your research) though they likely have impact in the long term as incoming cohorts are smaller.
I haven't been able to find specific data, but I'm an editor at a few philosophy journals (Episteme, Ergo, and Philosophy of Science) and I have been assigned at least as many submissions every month from these journals as I was before - and I have heard from the editors-in-chief (and the people from the publishers side) that all journals experienced a massive jump in submissions in 2020, and referees have become harder to find as a result for everything.
At any rate, most journals still have their number of publications driven by page counts of a print edition, and most journals are still publishing at the same rate, so the main change in number of publications is going to be from new journals starting and some journals closing. I haven't heard of any journals cutting back on the number of issues or cutting page counts of issues.
I haven't been able to find specific data, but I'm an editor at a few philosophy journals (Episteme, Ergo, and Philosophy of Science) and I have been assigned at least as many submissions every month from these journals as I was before - and I have heard from the editors-in-chief (and the people from the publishers side) that all journals experienced a massive jump in submissions in 2020, and referees have become harder to find as a result for everything.
At any rate, most journals still have their number of publications driven by page counts of a print edition, and most journals are still publishing at the same rate, so the main change in number of publications is going to be from new journals starting and some journals closing. I haven't heard of any journals cutting back on the number of issues or cutting page counts of issues.
Re: 4 - I don't think this is a contrast so much as cause and effect. If someone can commit grievous bodily harm, have a record of violent offences, and get away with community service as sentencing, then I don't think it's strange for the public opinion to swing towards harsher views of punishment, and this will inevitably lead to even smaller offences being viewed harshly by a small section of people (as see imprisonment for not wearing a seatbelt).
If somebody assaulted and stamped on the head of a family member of mine and got a mere slap on the wrist, I think I too would be inclined to answer a survey on attitudes to crime with "lock 'em up".
Re: 9 - St Patrick's Day will soon be here. That also means the American version of St Patrick's Day. That means a better than average chance of me seeing "Happy St Patty's Day!" all over social media. I think I'm with the Saami on this one 😁 So in solidarity, I will share with (inflict on?) you all the 2019 Norwegian Eurovision entry, including a Saami as one of the singers:
Re: 13 - so now the AI alignment worriers are catching up to the things I was taught in religion class when I was nine? 😀 This was a long time ago, so let's assume that this particular saint was St. John Bosco (it probably wasn't, but I can't remember exactly who it was supposed to be, and there are various versions of this floating around). Okay, so the anecdote is that a bunch of seminarians (or other potential members of a religious order) were all at recreation, including playing a game (let it be billiards that they were playing) and talking about the end of the world and what would you do if you knew it was going to happen tomorrow? And most were saying things like I'd go to confession, I'd say farewell to my loved ones, and the usual things. And St. Whomever answered "I'd finish playing the game".
So the moral all us wee Catholic kids were supposed to take away was: live every day as if it is going to be the end of the world, but live in such a way as neither to be too fearful nor too optimistic. If you live a bad life, then rushing to make things all well before the end is not sincere. Live your life well, and then all you have to worry about is doing whatever it is you are doing at the particular moment - finish playing the game. Because one day, for our individual death, it *will* be the end of the world as far as we are concerned. Die with dignity, as Yudkowsky says, and don't violate your deontology, as I was being instructed over fifty years ago.
See John Donne's Holy Sonnet 13:
What if this present were the world's last night ?
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether His countenance can thee affright.
Tears in His eyes quench the amazing light ;
Blood fills his frowns, which from His pierced head fell ;
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray'd forgiveness for His foes' fierce spite ?
No, no ; but as in my idolatry
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty of pity, foulness only is
A sign of rigour ; so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd ;
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.
Re: 21 - the little I know about Brianna Wu, the only thing I believe there is "sensing when political winds are shifting". All the rest is merely "oh hai guize, I was always one of You, just never said anything for reasons!" Not to go all Donatist, but when someone rocks up after the persecutions and when the emperor seems to be shifting his attitude towards the persecuted, and claims they were really on your side all along they only went along with the campaign of oppression because, it's natural to doubt their bona fides and suspect they are only throwing in their allegiance with what looks to be the winning side today, as they were with the winning side yesterday.
Re: 28 - not even as a joke, don't link Rand with Tolkien. She'd hate and despise everything he stood for; she hated Lewis's writings, and he's much more on the same viewpoint side as Tolkien - see her marginalia in a copy of "The Abolition of Man":
As to her success in America, I think it's easy to see why. Her works are the American legend of "anyone can make it here", the celebration of the lone genius (see the Wizard of Menlo Park for the conscious mythmaking around Edison), the trope of the Bold Pioneer pushing out past the limits imposed on him by conventional, stultified society, making his way out West to the new, virgin fields of possibility where a man can build his own things for himself, and by virtue of grit, moxie, and hard work, as well as free market capitalism, be in the forefront of Science and Progress, and win well-deserved riches by the sweat of his own brow and his own toil, as well as getting the girl in the end.
It's not the philosophy and God knows it's not the prose style, it's the tropes which won her success (especially if you're in the mid to late teens when you come across the books, prime age for "nobody understands me, they all want to keep me down, but I'll show them, I'll show them all!"). American Exceptionalism, can-do attitude, individualism, and Jack is as good as his master attitude where it's not inherited wealth or status, but individual brains and talent and hard work that make you the captain of your unconquerable soul, as in "Invictus", and any man can make it from a log cabin to the White House:
Invictus
BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Re: 32 - I've seen this one long ago and how it's worked out, but I've forgotten it. But the answer is correct, it's the same kind of problem as the lily pad covering the pond one.
I have long been contrarian on the general consensus take on Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, but I want to stress that is not at all the same thing as saying he is doing a great job.
My take all along has been, basically: Twitter seems to be a badly run company; Elon Musk is not an idiot; Elon Musk has a decent shot at getting Twitter in better shape simply by slashing costs and making some obvious product improvements.
So some version of that seems like it might be playing out. But I have to also say that Elon has been doing absolutely everything possible to make my contrarianism look really dumb. Twitter might bounce back from all this, but Elon seems to be succeeding in spite of himself.
"The Potato Paradox" (with mushrooms, not with potatoes) was one of the supplemental problems at the end of a standard middle school math textbook in the Soviet Union. As I recall, this textbook was for a grade somewhere between the 4th and the 6th, but I might be a year or so off. I went through this textbook around 1983.
Re: 4 - how does this chart show that the UK population is tough on crime? Are these results different from the results you'd get if you took a survey in San Francisco or Hong Kong or Kansas or Paris or whatever? People in surveys are famously inconsistent between questions of abstract theory ("I believe in freedom of speech") and questions with a little bit more concreteness ("do you think it should be illegal to advocate for red light cameras?", or something else they find personally infuriating)
Re: 4 - how does this chart show that the UK population is tough on crime? Are these results different from the results you'd get if you took a survey in San Francisco or Hong Kong or Kansas or Paris or whatever? People in surveys are famously inconsistent between questions of abstract theory ("I believe in freedom of speech") and questions with a little bit more concreteness ("do you think it should be illegal to advocate for red light cameras?", or something else they find personally infuriating)
I trying to understand the graph in #10. Is this showing this lower status people tend to marry higher in average, and higher status people tend to marry lower on average, and therefore it's basically all just reversion to the mean for both sexes, with no other systematic preferences in either direction?
I think it's more that "both women and men whose fathers are of a particular level of wealth tend to marry each others, so richer women marry richer men, instead of richer men marrying poorer women, as we can see by comparing the incomes of the women's fathers and their fathers-in-law".
I think the historical data is doing a lot here, the period covered is from 1837-2021:
"Using evidence from more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England and Wales 1837-2022 we show that there was never within this era any period of significant hypergamous marriage by women."
So until relatively recently, marriage for love would not have been that big a thing. You married someone your family approved of, and they generally didn't pick a bride based on "this chick is smokin' hot" but on what dowry she could bring and her general level of fitting in with the family. The classic example here is the trope of the 19th century American heiress coming over to Europe to find a titled but impoverished husband. If Mary Smith, heiress of Smith's Canning Company, marries the Earl of Noswhet, she rises in the social scale by becoming the Countess of Noswhet, but if you compare income levels (as this graph does), the difference between her dad's plebian dollars and her father-in-law's aristocratic rental income isn't that great (and may indeed resolve in the plebian dollars favour), as per the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor":
“There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society papers of the same week. Ah, here it is:
‘There will soon be a call for protection in the marriage market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last week to the list of the prizes which have been borne away by these charming invaders. Lord St. Simon, who has shown himself for over twenty years proof against the little god’s arrows, has now definitely announced his approaching marriage with Miss Hatty Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much attention at the Westbury House festivities, is an only child, and it is currently reported that her dowry will run to considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for the future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a British peeress.’ ”
Women may have *wanted* to 'marry up', but getting the guy to marry you (as distinct from having you as a mistress) is a different matter. Wealthy men might marry women of their own social class, and then have the smokin' hot poorer chick as their mistress, thus having their cake and eating it. There aren't really all that many "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" marriages over the scale of 33 million marriages. Women might, in more recent times, marry *slightly* better, but I don't think there are huge leaps between socio-economic classes. And men of course can descend in the social scale - "yeah great-grandpa was a baronet, but I have to work for my living".
#22. My girlfriend just discovered she has aphantasia from this (and a recent MR link), and says that some things make a ton of sense now. She always thought that Guided Imagery was a bunch of baloney, and was always impatiently waiting for her group to get back around to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which "actually worked".
Now, after she read this article and a few of the cited papers (especially that MRI one), she's convinced that it's because the Guided Imagery was literally (visually?) doing something for the rest of the group that it specifically didn't for her. Is this a known thing? Do therapists steer Aphantasic people towards more dialectical therapy models?
We've done a few of those guided visualization exercises (e.g. "picture a ball on a table" etc.) and yeah, clear difference between the two of us. (I engineer mechanisms, and have a fairly detailed "mind's eye") She describes it as having "word tags" that come up when she's thinking of a thing, but no actual "mind's eye" picture of them, even for things like my face, the house, etc. Concept shaped holes are indeed quite hard to see!
I'm struggling with #10? It looks to me as though the trend line is consistently at or above the line y=x, which seems to be saying that on average for both men and women their father-in-law is higher status than their father, and I don't see how that can work!
"Clearly if such a wedding occurs then at least one of the couple must be from a rich family"
Especially if you adhere to the custom that the bride's family pays for the wedding (or at least helps out the couple). That mens the woman's father must have *some* spare resources to expend, and so has *some* measure of wealth. Plainly, a plumber's daughter is not going to have a million dollar wedding in such a case, but she's also not very likely to be marrying a millionaire's son, either. Cinderella stories are popular in fiction and mass media, but they don't happen that often in real life; indeed, often it may be that a couple get married, the man gets rich/famous, and his spouse now doesn't fit in with the new lifestyle/sphere he occupies, so they find themselves no longer compatible and drift apart/get divorced.
This seems to happen with entertainers, like musicians or movie stars: they start off as small town girl or guy, marry their childhood sweetheart, then they get successful. Now they're mixing with the red carpet types and hob-nobbing with the wealthy and established, and that lifestyle becomes more and more divisive as they get away from their roots. Their partner/spouse doesn't understand or fit in and doesn't like the changes to their lives/in their partners. They prefer to stay at home with a cup of tea and watch "Coronation Street" or "Emmerdale", while the now-famous partner wants/needs to be photographed attending that hip new club or celebrity party. A split happens. New spouse/partner will then tend to be from the new, higher status, circles the famous person is inhabiting now.
This doesn't *always* happen, of course; there are plenty of working-class sports stars who remain married/in a relationship with their same-status partners, despite the influx of new wealth and fame. But it does happen sometimes. If you think of Jeff Bezos' marital adventures, he divorced (eventually) the wife he had married back when starting out and took a new partner. For the new partner, it was definitely moving up - to a billionaire from her former husband - but it might be notable that Bezos has not, as yet, married her. The former Mrs. Bezos remarried, to a partner who again was moving up by marrying her, but unhappily that did not last.
It is a terrible graph, but the interpretation seems to be that for every woman who marries up (father-in-law is higher status than her father), there is a corresponding man who marries up (father-in-law is higher status than his father) and that the status difference is not a really huge difference, so maybe Father is in the 98th decile and Father-in-Law is in the 85th decile. There isn't a graph of "women whose fathers are in the 70th decile marrying men whose fathers are in the 90th decile".
That's the best sense I can make of it, the important element on the graph seems to be the women symbols and men symbols overlap all along the trend line, rather than having the majority of the women symbols clustering at the top for fathers-in-law and the majority of the men symbols clustered under that.
Most of the critical darlings or novelists lean left (even Rowling is a leftist who pissed off other leftists), so Rand had a big underserved market for her libertarian stuff.
As for the kink...well, PC depictions aside more men are doms and more women are subs, so doing an M/f novel pleases people on both sides I think.
Law of oppression: what about men in female-dominated communities? It always seemed like a lot of feminism, particularly the elite variety, was in response to the bad behavior of artists and intellectuals: cads taking advantage of free love in the 60s produced second-wave feminism in the 70s, lecherous campus humanities professors produced campus sex codes in the 90s, and horny guys taking advantage of sex-positivity produced the #metoo and the rest of the current backlash. But I'd love to hear someone with firsthand experience in the humanities and arts comment.
"I'm updating on how useful it might be to spread the word on this" -- yes, the usefulness is that it's wildly dangerous! LLMs get their entire knowledge set from *everything that has ever been written*, and every self-concept from *everything that has been written about them specifically*. If sufficiently-complex-AI had evolved down different paths this might be a good idea, but it specifically ran down the path where it's a simulator (rather than an agent) that acts the way it assumes you want it to based on everything that has ever been written about it. A good basic "absolute minimum for anyone who cares about the future of humanity" is not constantly going on record at every turn to exclaim the certainty of the most pessimistic possible interpretations.
Not what (I think?) you're saying, but it made me think of something.
Could writing extensively about the methods in which AI could harm society and the things we should look for in evaluating the danger of an AI system be eventually become part of the training data of these systems, allowing them to better hide their behavior and modify their language to avoid scaring people?
On the subject of "your brain is doing lots of low-level visual processing and sending you high level summaries, and if you can trick it into doing the thing you want in the low-level processing then you’ve significantly increased your available processing power.” It reminds me of an article I read a while ago where some military group (probably DARPA?) was using brainwave reading headsets to determine when analysts had "spotted" something in an image. Because the "detection" was based on low-level brain signals it was occurring before the analysts were consciously aware they had seen anything important allowing a significant speedup over normally examining the image since they could be bombarded with images faster than they could consciously process them.
#22 I'm finding it kind of sad that everyone is just going along with "aphantasia is a mental disorder", as opposed to a neutral mental variation. Do people really want to do guided meditation that badly?
The clearest counterpoint to the idea that aphantasia is bad is this line from Galton:
"To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean."
Anyway, it's gonna be interesting to hear from the people who "cured" their aphantasia how they like it in a few years. So far the writer in the link reports: "It’s not contributing a lot of usefulness to my mental life, and I can’t calculate chess moves yet. But it turns out to be fun to doodle dragonflies and perfume bottles in your mind when you’re stuck in traffic."
I don't have aphantasia, but I don't think it's a mental disorder. It seems like something akin to colour blindness or tone deafness. Maybe you can 'cure' it, but that isn't fixing a lack of sanity, but rather learning to rewire the circuitry.
Holy crap. That Bankless Yudkowsky video hit me pretty hard. All my Theory of Mind circuits tell me that he genuinely believes we're screwed. I... now feel the urgent need to decrease the error bars on my AI doom beliefs.
That's what hit me about that video. The arguments, yes - they seem pretty tight. But I've been around the block enough to discount my own assessment of which arguments are good in complex areas I'm not expert in. But man - he's either an Oscar level actor (which I'm pretty sure he's not), or he has near-mode internalized this and is genuinely terrified. It's not like I had any reason to think he wasn't sincere prior to this video, but actually seeing it does hit home in a way reading the link Scott put just before the video doesn't quite do.
"Jacob Falkovich on Twitter proposes a Law Of Equal Sexual Oppression - in mostly heterosexual/monogamous societies, men and women ought to find dating equally hard/unpleasant/unrewarding."
Surely this ignores a key fact about most societies that have ever existed: that the choice of mate is not up to the partners themselves? Even in modern Western society, the parents apply enormous pressure on their children to avoid undesirable mates, and the role of religious, social, and economic factors can't be ignored. In pre-modern or non-Western societies (e.g. Islamic or Hindu societies), the parents either arrange the marriage entirely, or play a huge role in finding the right match.
There’s actually a ‘blessing for the Czar’ that’s still carried out, in European monarchies and sometimes even republics; it’s know by its incipit ‘HaNoten Teshua’. Probably goed back to 15th century Spain, where it was created in an unsuccesful attempt to appease the monarchs into not persecuting them as much. From there it spread out along with the Sephardic diaspora and is quite well-known, I think.
No 4 is only an interesting contrast if you were under the impression that "democratic" countries have policies that come close to matching the mean views of voters. In reality, electoral dictatorships actually tend to have policies more aligned with the populace than "real" democracies, likely because they have to keep the military happy and the military is mostly made up of regular working/lower middle class people rather than elites, and so their views are fairly representative of the rest of the country.
American congress has approval ratings in the toilet and yet have an extremely high re-election rates. Their jobs evidently do not depend in a meaningful way on giving the voters what they want. A candidate exists to keep the other guy out of power.
>American congress has approval ratings in the toilet and yet have an extremely high re-election rates.
If I remember correctly, the congress itself has abysmal approval ratings, but each congressman has a great approval rating in his own state. The issue here is that pleasing one's constituency is more important than not pissing off the other 49.
If that isn't what she was proposing, then I've got no idea what she was proposing. "Atlas Shrugged" is the principle work that most people who call themselves Objectivists refer.
In _Atlas_ the productive people all go on strike. The idea is that the corrupt system will collapse and they will then come out and set things up the way they should be, laissez-faire capitalism informed by Objectivist philosophy.
Rand wrote quite a lot, including nonfiction, from which it is easy to see what her preferred economic system was.
I think it's more appropriate to say that productive *management* went on strike. Rand explicitly recognized that labor and management are both productive when done right, and necessary to productivity. AS was about a strike of productive managers only. The part where this caused real problems for the society denied productive management, was plausible. The part where the parallel society of *just* productive managers all suddenly getting their hands dirty somehow prospered, rather less so.
It was a strike of the great and impressive people; it just so happens that great and impressive people also tend to cluster near the top of whatever society they're in. But there's a couple brilliant but somewhat low-level engineers who make it to Galt's Gulch, as well as a fair number of Rearden's employees, a former federal judge, and even a simple fish monger. Corporate managers are certainly overrepresented among the strikers, but the loss of productive labor is also explicitly called out as a problem. If anything, Rand goes out of her way to throw dung at the idea there's some sort of class warfare dynamic at play. The story is a parable about the best and brightest, wherever they may be found, finally getting fed up carrying the rest of society on their backs (including--ESPECIALLY--the worthless failsons of the management class).
The dating and happiness proof is not good. All it says is that, under some assumptions, there's a negative feedback which leaves the marginal man as happy dating as he would be not dating, and the marginal woman as happy dating as she would be not dating. There are no grounds for comparing one side's happiness with the other.
Scott, I agree with most of what you wrote about the Swedish study except for your use of the phrase "statistical missteps". Emil's post doesn't identify statistical missteps in the Swedish study. Instead he points out that lots of other countries show different relationships than the Swedish data -- and he suggests some good reasons to think that, in Sweden, the relationship between income and cognitive ability is in fact different at the upper extreme.
Cremieux's second post does show an important statistical artifact -- they show that *binning* can generate the observed nonlinear graph despite a linear underlying relationship. That's the key insight as far as I can tell, and Emil doesn't mention it.
(Emil's post does highlight the reversed axis, which lots of other commenters noted as well. I don't think the reversed axis is a statistical misstep at all. The Swedish charts, with the flipped axis, are not useful for answering the question, "are there diminishing returns to intelligence?" but (modulo binning etc concerns highlighted by Cremieux) they are useful for answering other questions like, "are such-and-such economic outcomes mostly a result of intelligence?")
And by the way, the study itself does not "[purport] to show that IQ stops mattering after the 90th percentile" of *IQ*. It purports to show that IQ stops explaining income after the ~99th percentile of *income*, which is an importantly different claim and, modulo the binning concerns, seems supported in the Swedish data though not the Finnish data etc.
Just four hours after the FDIC posted a press release detailing what customers could expect now that their bank no longer existed, CAMP introduced its BANKRUN sale with an Instagram post. “This is crazy but CAMP needs your help!,” the company wrote. “For real - our bank got shut down by regulators, so we’re asking that you RUN, don’t walk to our BANKRUN sale. And tell your friends too, please! ” Everything on the site was 40 percent off, it explained.
As some affected founders gave interviews, sharing fears that they would not be able to pay their employees, co-founder Ben Kaufman took a different approach with this email to customers. Echoing Instagram, it reads, in part:.
"Unfortunately, we had most of our company’s cash assets at a bank which just collapsed. I’m sure you’ve heard the news.
We are hopeful that this will be resolved soon, but in the meantime we are turning to you, our most valuable customers, to help us. All sales from this point forward will deposit into Chase & allow us to generate the cash needed to continue operations so we can continue to deliver unforgettable family memories...."
#4 - those two things seem directly related. From experience in the US, the worse that crime gets, the more people want to be tough on crime. If the UK is under-punishing, the people will demand more punishments. If there's no mechanism by which the people can request or demand more punishments, then that really is an interesting question in a democracy.
#5: Regarding the penis meta-analysis and systematic review, I got around to redoing it and concluded that, no, there was not a 24% leap in penis length or any other measured aspect of penis size.
> I don’t usually like subgroup slicing but he seems to have done a really good job proving that this subgroup does badly across many different studies.
Here to note that every group that isn't "all people" is subgroup slicing, they are all samples. e.g. western medicine research is based on a biased sample of white men
> There are two possible explanations for Rand's success. The first is that her politics are just that compelling and her philosophy that overwhelming in its logic (they're not). The second is that her prose is just that good. That she's the American Tolstoy or Tolkien.
The third is that something similar to her beliefs was already in the water supply (conservative libertarians) and those people elevated Rand the same way Jordan Peterson is elevated today.
"I'm reminded of the recent Aella twitter thread where she complains that the neo-traditionalists that "she thought were her allies" turned out to have a problem with sex workers."
Seriously? I'm tempted to say "Only smart people can be that dumb" but yes, it's odd how people who lay claim to "TRADITIONALIST" will hold TRADITIONAL ATTITUDES to certain things 😁
Actually, everyone who makes or eats sandwiches (including hamburgers) should have to pay a fee (or pay homage) to John Montagu, 11th Earl of Sandwich, because his predecessor invented sandwiches.
And the courts will have to decide whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
Ooh, I can see the lawyers licking their lips in anticipation (and not just because they get to try out hot dogs).
Is a hot dog to be classed along with foods like tacos, and in that case, is a taco a sandwich? Does the essence of a sandwich depend on a horizontal, not vertical, division of the bread? Are hot dog buns "buns", which is confectionery, or "bread"?
It'll be like "are Jaffa cakes cakes or biscuits?" all over again 😁
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/vat-food/vfood6260
Taking all these factors into account, Jaffa cakes had characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, but the tribunal thought they had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated.
"The leading case on the borderline is that concerning Jaffa cakes: United Biscuits (LON/91/0160). Customs and Excise had accepted since the start of VAT that Jaffa cakes were zero-rated as cakes, but always had misgivings about whether this was correct. Following a review, the department reversed its view of the liability. Jaffa cakes were then ruled to be biscuits partly covered in chocolate and standard-rated: United Biscuits (as McVities, one of the largest manufacturers of Jaffa cakes) appealed against this decision. The Tribunal listed the factors it considered in coming to a decision as follows.
- The product’s name was a minor consideration.
- Ingredients: Cake can be made of widely differing ingredients, but Jaffa cakes were made of an egg, flour, and sugar mixture which was aerated on cooking and was the same as a traditional sponge cake. It was a thin batter rather than the thicker dough expected for a biscuit texture.
- Cake would be expected to be soft and friable; biscuit would be expected to be crisp and able to be snapped. Jaffa cakes had the texture of sponge cake.
- Size: Jaffa cakes were in size more like biscuits than cakes.
- Packaging: Jaffa cakes were sold in packages more similar to biscuits than cakes.
- Marketing: Jaffa cakes were generally displayed for sale with biscuits rather than cakes.
- On going stale, a Jaffa cake goes hard like a cake rather than soft like a biscuit.
- Jaffa cakes are presented as a snack, eaten with the fingers, whereas a cake may be more often expected to be eaten with a fork. They also appeal to children, who could eat one in a few mouthfuls rather like a sweet.
- The sponge part of a Jaffa cake is a substantial part of the product in terms of bulk and texture when eaten.
Taking all these factors into account, Jaffa cakes had characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, but the tribunal thought they had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated.
An earlier case, that of Adams Foods Ltd (MAN/83/0062) which concerned Chocolate Dundees, a traditional type of shortcake with a chocolate base and individually wrapped for sale, came to the opposite conclusion. The decision contains a useful, if technical, table of comparative differences between cakes and biscuits, provided by an expert witness, and the tribunal was unable to see any factors supporting a view of the product as cake. It was ruled to be a biscuit partly covered in chocolate and accordingly standard-rated."
I love it!
Obligatory Mitchell and Webb clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2NP4WZJ-mI
I don't think there is any evidence that he invented the sandwich. There are things in the 10th c. Islamic corpus that get described as (rolled) sandwiches in translation, and I find it unlikely that nobody in England before the Earl put meat or jam between two slices of bread and ate it.
Actually, we of the Jewish community are the ones who should get the fees, as our ancient sage Hillel the Elder created his namesake sandwich long before the Earl was born.
Every number is, in effect, one image.
Someone never tried Magic Eye in the '90s!
Someone never tried Magic Eye in the '90s!
"a few people who've been convinced by Tumblr and TikTok that asexuality is a thing"
A-hem! We do in fact exist, and some of us even predate Tumblr and Tiktok 😁 Some of us are even aromantics, another status that the general population refuses to believe in, like pixies or unicorns. I genuinely have never "been in love" with anyone at all in my entire life, so the shenanigans on dating apps are like anthropological reports about a Papuan Stone Age tribe to me.
Re: romantic love, while I used to get grumpy over the whole "love is what makes us human" thing, with romantic/erotic love being the love meant there, I do see that lacking the capacity to experience it is indeed a lack. Something less than absolutely fully human in the shared experience of humanity and what it means to be a human.
Not having the entanglements of romantic love has spared me a lot of things, and saved me from a lot of things (I will never, for example, share the same bitter, burning, misery and despair of those who want love, seek love, perhaps have love to give, and can't get love), it also means that at times I am a Martian.
Just as I can see the folly of those who make bad decisions knowingly, based on "But I love him/her!", I can also dimly apprehend that while it's easy for me to be rational in such an emotional situation (were I ever in one) this is not because of superior virtue on my part but because this is a temptation which has no appeal for me, and that I am indeed missing out on a chunk of understanding, experiencing, and participating in what it means to be human.
I don't feel any great wish to experience that, but I do see that I am not in the mainstream of the species. it's the same attitude as that of C.S. Lewis about paederasty/homosexuality, as he experienced it when going to school:
"A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors, usually Bloods. Usually, not always. Though our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life to themselves, they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on the middle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederasty among the lower classes was not "side", or at least not serious side; not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one's coat unbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.
The Tarts had an important function to play in making school (what it was advertised to be) a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised. Nor were they paid (in hard cash, I mean) for their services; though of course they had all the flattery, unofficial influence, favour, and privileges which the mistresses of the great have always enjoyed in adult society. That was where the Preparation for Public Life came in. It would appear from Mr. Arnold Lunn's Harrovians that the Tarts at his school acted as informers. None of ours did. I ought to know, for one of my friends shared a study with a minor Tart; and except that he was sometimes turned out of the study when one of the Tart's lovers came in (and that, after all, was only natural) he had nothing to complain of. I was not shocked by these things. For me, at that age, the chief drawback to the whole system was that it bored me considerably. For you will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject. After games, gallantry was the principal topic of polite conversation; who had "a case with" whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where.... I suppose it might be called the Greek Tradition. But the vice in question is one to which I had never been tempted, and which, indeed, I still find opaque to the imagination. Possibly, if I had only stayed longer at the Coll, I might, in this respect as in others, have been turned into a Normal Boy, as the system promises. As things were, I was bored.
...Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle."
In a similar way, the topic of romance and gallantry bores me, which is why it's easy for me to give lofty judgements about "but why can't your good sense over-ride the emotional reaction which you know will lead to problems?" and why my attitude to things like the "Last of Us" TV drama episode with the Gay Romance is not rooted in "I'm fed up of all this wokeness pushed on us" primarily, but rather that if I watched the show, I would equally have been bored/put off by an episode devoted entirely to a conventional, heterosexual romance. A and B love each other, yay, how nice, now get on with the plot and the action.
I'm sure its a thing, but why it needs to be some kind of idenity of political thing the way the the legacy members of the gay alphabet are is absolutely beyond me.
Well, this is a whole pile of history, so let me do some laying the ground works:
(1) Yes, there are a lot of silly gradations like "demisexual" which in effect shake out to "I only feel sexual attraction when it's people I like", just like most people feel. But there is definitely "I do not feel any, or only very weak, sexual attraction" and "I do not feel, or only rarely and weakly feel, romantic love". I can affirm that I have never had any stirrings of romantic love - this is separating romantic love from sexual desire; there are people who do fall in love but don't want sex as such, and people who happily have sex but don't feel romantic love.
This also does not mean *no* love - there are people who are in sexual relationships, like the person, feel affection etc. for the person, but are not "in love". That last, "you're not in love with me, ergo you are only using me" seems to be the deal-breaker in such relationships, or at least that's what I've read.
So I'm here to say that asexuality and aromanticism are indeed Things. While I understand where you are coming from, what you are saying is the equivalent of "Oh pooh, there are no such thing as food allergies, only picky eaters". While certainly a lot of perfectly healthy people have jumped aboard the gluten-free diet bandwagon in order to follow a trend , that does not invalidate the fact that there are people who are gluten-intolerant or are coeliacs.
(2) Way back, when the alphabet soup business was getting to its peak with the LGBTQIA2 aconym before it was at its apex of including every possible combination, there was much fuss and pother over "the A stands for 'ally'", with the asexuals/aromantics who cared about such things reminding that no, it started off as "A is for asexual/aromantic" and objecting to the fact that the "ally" meaning had displaced that.
Now, it was late in my life before I ever discovered the concepts and the words for asexuality and aromanticism, and when I did, it explained a lot to me - the same way that someone who got a diagnosis of coeliac disease would suddenly understand why things happened when they ate certain foods. "Oh, *that's* why ever since I was nine, I didn't want marriage or a family!" Yeah, my mother told me "oh it'll be different when you're older, you'll change your mind" but I went through puberty, adolescence, and adulthood and nope. No change. And no traumatic experience in childhood like rape or abuse to provide a handy psychological explanation there, either, before anyone suggests that.
So I was old enough that I didn't care, didn't feel the need to go in under any umbrella, and frankly didn't feel I fitted in with the whole gay and queer movement anyhow. But some people did care and want to belong, and that was a gatekeeping mountain of incidents.
Because you couldn't belong to a LGBT group unless you were LGBT. That was taking resources from real minority orientations and persecuted groups. Aces/aros had "straight passing privilege" and even worse if you *were* straight.
If you could hang another label on yourself, like trans or gay/lesbian/bi as well as asexual or aromantic, okay. You were allowed in on sufferance and because you weren't cis or straight, not because of the ace/aro stuff. There was a deal of hairpulling on social media over this one. Cis/straight wanting to muscle in on queer spaces? Fuck off and fuck you! was the attitude, and a lot of "but we're minority too, we get oppressed by cis-heteronormativity too" from the ace/aro side.
I'm cis, and I identify (when I have to pick a label) as heterosexual (I have weak sexual attraction towards men, not women) but in general I don't give a damn, if the queers don't want me that's their prerogative, and it's nobody's business but my own, even if the current craze for DEIB means I could wangle that into special status.
But I think that's where it's at, now; even as the alphabet soup lot eventually became more tolerant and less militant over letting the straights in, so that the full acronym has blossomed into "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, queer/questioning, intersex, allied/asexual/aromantic/agender and two-spirited", God save the mark, that is the state of play.
Cis and/or straight (and neurotypical/abled) is not alone dull, boring, less creative and fun and all the rest of it, it is part of the systemic oppression of minorities. If you're 16 or 18 or 20 and have been brought up on all the rights activism stuff, you don't want to be the designated villain for the two-minute hate. So if you can claim some kind of queer identity, that lets you fit in and be protected. Hence agender and non-binary and the rest of it being adopted by what are otherwise female-presenting in every way straight girls. It's camouflage, it's protection, it means you can be in the spotlight with a flag of your own to wave in the Pride parade: look at this video, and see how the *only* family not presented is "cis and straight":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4vHegf3WPU
And, as I alluded to earlier, if you are being cynical about it, and your workplace is nudging you hard to "what are your pronouns?" and you feel you may need some kind of protection for having conservative views, then coming out as a minority will help. Finagling being ace as a special alphabet identity so in case you ever get hauled up for a reprimand for not being 200% flag-waving during company Pride month promotions you can pull the "you can't fire me, I'm a protected minority and that is discrimination" card. Not that I think it happens (yet, and hopefully never) but certainly being cis, straight, white, male is the lowest rung on the ladder today.
So, while I am legitimately entitled to wave two flags in the Pride parade, I would rather spork my eyes out (as used to be said) than do so:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Asexual_Pride_Flag.svg/1024px-Asexual_Pride_Flag.svg.pnghttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Aromantic_Pride_Flag.svg/2560px-Aromantic_Pride_Flag.svg.png
Actually, wanting to charge admission for access to your colorful native garb and charming folk dancing is very Disney. So I'd say that ship has sailed.
Yes, the rest of the world never stereotypes Americans for their own purposes [insert eye roll].
Things can be morally objectionable while still being legal.
>Disneyfication of true European culture
What is true European culture? and if can be defined, i doubt Sami culture would play a large part in it given the small population and remoteness of their territory.
Does "protected" mean "other people can't use it as an input to their culture"? The way you put it seems to view imitation as an attack. If other people copy my ideas, perhaps modify them, that doesn't hurt me.
Does "Disneyfication of true European culture" mean depictions of it in Disney productions? That doesn't keep Europeans from doing what they want, culturally speaking, any more than European fiction about cowboys or gangsters keeps American culture from doing what it is doing.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The culture or the appropriator? The chicken was the egg... right?
Are there pure, original cultures that formed in a vacuum? Cultures that have incorporated nothing from preceding and/or neighboring cultures?
Surely all cultures borrow/play with/riff on style elements from "other" cultures.
Actually, 'cultural appropriation' is a very US centric attitude.
Both cultural appropriation and IP rights are terms that carry some importance in contemporary western society. This means that it makes tactical sense for the Saami Council to frame its complaints in such terms, whether or not their reasons for being protective of their culture stem from those kinds of attitudes.
#4 (both parts) is activating my old-school Jeffersonian anglophobia like you would not believe.
If you follow the link you'll see the guy got 18 weeks jail. While in my view nowhere near enough (especially given he came back to assault them a second time), the guy did in fact get jail.
Suspended sentence means he didn’t actually have to go to jail.
Ah. I'd missed the suspended bit.
It's pretty messed up. Given it's the UK, I honestly wonder if the perpetrator went to the same private school as the judge or something like that - the UK business and political establishment feels so incestuous.
You're correct that the UK's judicial and political establishment is incestuous - but no, this has got nothing to do with that. Judges have very limited control over sentencing - they're following pretty tight guidelines. And sadly, the problem of repeat violent offenders receiving light or non-existent sentences is not limited to scumbags from the upper classes.
Not having much prison space is major factor , too.
Yup. Knife possession worse than drunk driving? Saying mean words online worse than shoplifting? Saying mean words in person worse than bike theft or *upskirting*? Give me a break.
This chart convinces me that the British public is tough on crime *in all the wrong ways*. Anarcho-tyranny, essentially.
Depends on what exactly the knife guy is doing, but I'm A-OK with treating drunk driving harshly.
Well, we drive pretty fast. On my way to work if I want to blend with the traffic flow I'll set the cruise control to 80 MPH.
Merely having a knife is not inherently dangerous. Drunk driving is inherently dangerous to life via increased risk of accident (and in particular, multiple-vehicle accident, which can kill nonconsenting strangers).
Very much doubt that Cody would consider *menacing* someone with a knife less bad than drunk driving. But if I walk around all day with a longsword on my back, I don't see where this harms anyone.
'Possession of a knife' in this context isn't 'I own a butterknife', it's 'walking into a club with a kitchen knife hidden in your jacket'.
Knives are the go-to weapons for violent criminals in the UK, so I've never really understood why so many Yankeelanders think it's obviously absurd to stop people carrying them around. Like, are they seriously under the impression that British law forbids people from keeping and using knives in their own homes?
I have definitely encountered Americans on the Internet who think that British knife laws are stricter than they really are. Though I've also encountered Brits in real life who think that too!
But... is anyone who doesn't care that it's illegal to stab people going to care that it's illegal to carry a knife?
I think a lot of Americans - presumably because guns are more available here - just don't instinctually put a locking blade pocket knife or filleting knife in the category "weapon". Which on the one hand is silly, people get killed with knives in the US too. But I carry a knife that would see me arrested in the UK every day, and use it frequently, and never would have felt the need to think twice about it. If I wanted an actual defense tool I'd carry a handgun.
I'd be interested to know how they recruited their sample - the poll is published in the right-wing Spectator magazine, so it's possible it's biased conservative. Also worth noting that knife crime is constantly demonised in the British press, so probably survey participants are interpreting it as "going equipped to stab someone" rather than "walking around with a knife for some legitimate reason". IIRC the law in the UK is that you can carry a non-locking penknife up to 3" in length without having to give a reason, and a longer or locking knife if you have a good reason to do so (which is left up to the discretion of the police, so I expect is enforced much more stringently against some people than others), but switchblades, gravity knives and butterfly knives are illegal to carry for any reason. But even though the penknife in my EDC is within the terms of the law (no doubt a deliberate choice on the part of the drafters and the manufacturers), I still occasionally meet people who are surprised it's legal for me to carry it.
What defines a "locking" knife? Most folding knives are designed so it requires some additional action to close them, for obvious safety reasons.
From https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives (so an official source, but not the actual text of the law): "have a button, spring or catch that you have to use to fold the knife". So yes, the knives you're thinking of are illegal for EDC in the UK (that page is talking about English and Welsh law, but Scottish law is similar). They're not illegal to own, or carry if you have "a good reason" - I own several myself, and don't hesitate to take them out of my toolkit if I think I might use one - but I can carry my non-locking Swiss Army knife routinely in a way that it would be illegal to carry my locking Leatherman. Which is annoying, but I can see how a locking mechanism would also make a knife more useful as a weapon.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that because Britain has strong gun laws, most of their violent crime is committed with knives. It is a bit of a different context than America.
So after they get rid of the knives, what's next, banning sporting equipment like golf clubs unless you can prove you've got a tee time booked at a registered course?
I was going to say "don't be silly", but actually the history of our gun laws shows exactly this kind of slippery-slope trajectory. But really what it would take to ban golf clubs would be a tabloid panic about EPIDEMIC OF GOLF CLUB BEATINGS ON OUR STREETS, BAN THIS SICK FILTH. Because tabloids can drive voters here, and hence politicians pay attention to them.
If you see a bunch of inner-city youth suddenly walking around carrying a single golf club in their hands on the streets, then yeah - it's more likely than not these are going to be used as crude weapons rather than heading off to the local pitch-and-putt club.
(Before anyone jumps on me, no, "inner-city youth" is not the American euphemism for "black kids". We have plenty of 100% white thugs and wannabe gangsters over here).
You're coming at this from the angle of "Well this is plainly silly, I regularly carry around items with me that would warrant at least a caution under these laws, and I'm no criminal!"
Exactly. You're *not* a criminal, you are not (let us hope) planning to threaten a shop keeper or a random person on the street that you will stab them if they don't hand over money, or you're not on your way to attack someone you had a fight with.
Remember the shooting of Ma'Khia Bryant? A terrible mess all round, and likely to have resulted in a death no matter what the police did. And in its wake, there were idiotic tweets (quickly pulled) by people about "teens have been fighting with knives for ages, no big deal":
Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama administration adviser, offered her idiotic notion, echoed by many others.
“A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Byrant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight,” Jarrett tweeted. “Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter.”
“Teenagers have been having fights involving knives for eons,” tweeted Bree Newsome, a prominent defund-the-police activist. “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.”
And a 13 year old girl was killed by another 13 year old girl in a similar stupid row:
https://eu.cincinnati.com/story/news/crime/2022/10/19/judge-girl-who-fatally-stabbed-friend-during-fight-guilty-of-murder/69574640007/
"A girl who was 13 when she fatally stabbed her friend in the neck during a fight is guilty of murder and felonious assault, a Hamilton County Juvenile Court judge ruled Wednesday.
The fight happened April 19, 2021. Both girls were 13 at the time and had been best friends for several years, Judge Kari Bloom said in a five-page written decision."
So it's understandable to see these kinds of laws as absurd over-reach - what next, will they ban sweeping brushes? - but there's genuine reason for being wary of teens going around with knives, and that's what the cautioning etc. for possession of knives/items with blades or points is all about. Try and stop them before they get to the point of using them. Discourage them from going around with such items. There's all too many cases of "X and Y got into a fight, X went home and grabbed a knife and came back after Y/X got a knife as protection and then later when Y jumped X, X stabbed Y", even where there is not intention to use the knife for criminal offences.
Anything that's carried with intent to be used as a weapon is something you shouldn't be allowed to carry, because weapons are for hurting people and you shouldn't do that.
Yes, establishing intent can be a bit complicated, but it's worth it. A gang of people with one golf club each roaming the streets at night is a different situation from one person taking a golf bag to a golf course and back.
Maybe proving you've got tee time booked is a bit much (I don't know how golf courses work though tbf) but if the police think you look like you're carrying a weapon, they can ask you which golf course you're going to and what your address is and check you're at least plausibly on the way.
Knife possession because gun crime, though increasing, is not at the American level yet. A thug or weaselly little scumbag who, in America, would have some kind of gun, in Britain is more likely to have a knife. It's why the British police wear anti-stab vests:
https://www.police-life.co.uk/products/do-you-have-the-right-body-armour-for-the-job-a-guide-to-the-different-vests-available-for-police-officers
"For many in the Police, stab proof vests will be the most basic protective equipment required. This is not because they are commonly used, but because they are the most common weapon available. Unlike elsewhere in the world, firearms are very rare in the UK and the majority of Officers are unlikely to face firearms. However, there are sadly a number of instances over the past several decades of Officers being killed with firearms, and even though crimes involving firearms make up only 0.2% of all recorded crime*, the threat still remains, and some may wish to have protection against firearms."
*(This is in 2014 so for 2023 doubtless that figure is now higher).
> Knife possession worse than drunk driving?
Turns out memes about loicenses are quite real.
An idle thought I've had: the free speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights were apparently of little value in the 19th-20th centuries. During most of this time, an Englishman could quite plausibly call them an overreaction -- the unwritten constitution works just as well or better for securing our ancestral English freedoms!
It's only in the 21st century, when His Majesty's Government will apparently punish you more harshly for saying mean things on Twitter than stomping on women's heads, that the value of the Bill of Rights has been made fully visible.
The Uk has had a bill of rights for longer than the US.
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/parliamentaryauthority/revolution/collections1/collections-glorious-revolution/billofrights/
But also parliamentary supremacy, so their bill of rights can be amended by a simple majority of (essentially) a single house. The UK might as well be unicameral. It's my understanding that when the unwritten/common constitutional and administrative law of the United Kingdom conflicts with statute, the statute always wins. I have some reservations about judicial review (and I know that the UK is attempting to institute it), and I don't think the de facto judicial supremacy we have in the USA is ideal, but parliamentary supremacy strikes me as even more misguided.
There are three major lines of defense in the British system. The first is the self-restraint of Members of Parliament, where the decline to vote for tyrannical measures out of genuine belief in freedom and democracy and out of a sense that it would be wrong to vote against fundamental constitutional norms. The second is the good sense of the voters to vote against politicians likely to be tyrannical in office and to disincentivize bad behavior by being likely to punish it retrospectively at the polls. Together, these seem to work better than I would expect, although I'm guessing it's the second of those doing more of the heavy lifting.
The third and final line of defense is the monarch's reserve powers. The King has de jure power to absolutely veto any legislation, fire the PM and cabinet at will, prorogue Parliament, and forbid Parliament from even debating a measure that would infringe on the Crown's prerogatives. Apart from the last of these (King's/Queen's Consent, not to be confused with Royal Assent), these are by convention either newer used or used only on the advice of the government. And trying to use them arbitrarily or for partisan reasons would almost certainly be seen as severely illegitimate. But if a government controlling a majority of the House of Commons were to try something sufficiently outrageous, like banning political oppositions or indefinitely suspending elections, then the reserve powers could probably be used as a last-resort emergency measure. And knowing that the possibility exists might help keep politicians honest, or at least moderate in their dishonesty.
Lots of countries have meaningless Bills of Rights, so I think political and judicial culture is more important than whether your rights are written down in a special document or not.
This is one of the issues that make me right-wing here in Europe despite being quite left-wing in an American/Canadian context...but the (Western) European left seems to be really bad for the average EU citizen from an utilitarian perspective...
It's just the difference between answering a polling question, and actual choicemaking i.e. voting in elections.
The first is easy and has zero costs/tradeoffs, and is therefore in no sense a reflection of what any society "really thinks".
Sure, I understand that. It still activates my anglophobia. And in any event, I think the vast gulf between the two data points does paint the nation in an extremely poor light. To be clear, the light sentence given to what appears obviously to me to be attempt murder, is the worse data point of the two.
Day in the life of a true Brexit geezer: wake up and meet the wife, Susan. Answer a poll saying people should go to jail for social media posts. Then it's off to the courthouse for jury service and give a dude who should probably be executed probation. Then finish up at the fortress of dreams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azSYS5WDJLQ
That was my bad; I was thinking of sentencing enhancements (like priors, gun usage), which are part of the jury's findings in the US. Not sure if they exist in the UK.
Do you think the US justice system is getting it right, or at the other extreme?
No. I think what we have is maybe better than what the UK has, but I really only have these data points for my understanding of their system.
As to how ours would be reformed, I think we should greatly decrease and increase, in some senses, punishment. I think we should do a lot less incarceration and a lot more probation (and/or house arrest, ankle monitoring type things). I think that, generally speaking, non-violent crime should be punished with probation etc., and that violent crime should generally be punished by execution.
That second one would essentially be a two-strike system. Your first violent crime you'd get maybe a year in county jail, followed by 3 years of ankle monitoring, then 6 years of probation. Your second offense, you get one automatic appeal that must be concluded within 6 months and then you go to the gallows, guillotine, or firing squad. I'm not too worried about the deterrent effect (though swift and certain execution would almost certainly be a better deterrent than what we have). I'm more concerned with just retribution and removing undesirables.
As to both violent and non-violent crimes, there would of course be discretion on the margins based on severity, but not a whole lot. For things like questionable self-defense, say, or your Bernie Madoffs (who might actually go to prison).
Sentencing in the UK is done by judges, I believe, so your Brexit geezer isn't going to be giving anyone probation, deserved or not.
That was my bad; I was thinking of sentencing enhancements (like priors, gun usage), which are part of the jury's findings in the US. Not sure if they exist in the UK.
I could be entirely mislead here, but I don't think there's much overlap between people who voted in favor of Brexit and people in favor of jailing people over rude social media posts...
It’s the Tsar (not Czar) and we are mourning Topol at this time. 😞
Edit: Tsar, Czar, Tzar, and Csar are all correct, my apologies.
In what sense is it Tsar and not Czar? I thought they were both equally acceptable English transliterations?
You are correct that they are both correct and I apologize. It was an emotional reaction because of the passing of Topol.
I've performed in Fiddler and it's written Tzar in the script; the scene in question sounds like they're saying "Tzar" in the 1971 film version. So my own correction was wrong, apologies!
(Videos with various spellings can be found)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP4zke613s4
As far as I'm aware, the Russian word is tsar (but in Cyrillic, царь), and the English spelling "czar" is mostly motivated by the fact that the word descends from "Caesar".
The mapping of the sound "ts" to the letters "cz" is likely from Polish.
Damn, the wrong Topol is gone
#26 there actually was a gun found at the scene, he was hanging from a limb of the tree by a noose (not tied across the torso to the trunk in the way that “tied to a tree” implies), there were no defensive wounds or other signs of a struggle, and he had depression. Source: https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/shotgun-was-found-near-body-of-clinton-aide-new-details/amp/ plus the original link
from what I can tell the entire "no gun found" thing was because the police report said (paraphrased) "I searched the car and it contained a gun case with no weapon." I don't think whoever wrote it meant to make it a big mystery why the gun wasn't in the car.
Edit: Honestly a good example of the whole "media very rarely lies" thing. An extremely reasonable read of the story is "guy who briefly worked for Bill Clinton 25 years ago commits suicide by hanging from a tree and shooting himself in the chest, family tries to block grisly details from becoming public. (oh and he had an empty gun case in his car)" but nobody is going to come away from that article thinking that without the writer ever actually saying anything false. Their (single paragraph long) source doesn't explicitly *say* that the person who committed suicide with a gun had a gun near them, so they must not have been able to find one. Kind of suspicious that a person who killed themself by hanging was tied to a tree, huh? Anyway, that epstein guy, you know? Did we mention BIll Clinton? Draw your own conclusions. (It even explicitly says "Others whose deaths have been linked to the Clintons without foundation have been..." which seems to be a phrasing that would still be true if they followed it up with Abraham Lincoln and Jesus. ) It's actually impressive how well they avoid saying anything even arguably untrue while still pushing an obvious narrative.
Sure, don't blame the guy who wrote that. But do blame the Arkansas sheriff office for illegally suppressing the document that says that they found the gun, until the Daily Mail kicked up a shit storm.
What’s crazy is the Bush family controlled not only the federal prosecutors AND state prosecutors…but also the defense attorneys!?! So Ken Starr somehow convinced the US Attorney that Epstein was an intelligence asset and Acosta bought it without asking around?!? And had the state prosecutor not been doing Jeb’s bidding Jeb could have appointed a special prosecutor because sex trafficking obviously doesn’t just occur in one county in a state. So it’s strange how the Bush family is never questioned about their connection to the sweetheart deal Epstein got??
To describe "hanging from a branch by a noose" as "tied to the tree" goes far enough beyond deliberately misleading to count as straight-up lying, I'd say. That goes well beyond the usual selective cherry-picking of facts, such as making a big deal of the fact that he worked for Clinton decades ago while neglecting to mention that he had been suicidally depressed recently.
I'd agree that's it's deliberately misleading to the point of being malicious, but it's not literally a false statement. In fact, the article basically trips over itself trying to make as many insinuations as possible without ever saying anything that's not true if you read it completely literally. I think it's interesting as a particularly brazen example of how deceptive media works.
I think it is "literally false", within the constraints of how people use the English language. Even looking at it from a logical point of view reveals this: the *noose* is tied to the tree, and no native speaker would say the man is tied to the noose, ergot the man is not tied to the tree.
It's like saying a child sitting on a rope swing is "tied to a tree". It's a false statement.
I guess what’s really fascinating to me now is moving from Scott’s “media rarely lies” take into “why?” I’m not super familiar, but I’m pretty sure the Daily Mail is more of a tabloid publication, so most people don’t expect much of it anyway, and most people who do read it aren’t going to read beyond the headline. At this point of brazenness, why not just straight up lie?
Harder to get sued for libel, and a tabloid publication operating within the notoriously more plaintiff-friendly British libel laws would be even more adept at non-libelous insinuation than their American counterparts.
I've long observed that the phrase "linked to" is usually one of the surest signals that someone is lying to you without technically lying.
What is a "link"? How tenuous does it have to be before we call it a lie? He sold you a used car in 1978? Definitely a link. You worked in different offices at the same large corporation at different times? Eh, probably not a "link" in anything resembling "prestige" media, but for a hungry freelancer might be enough to generate clickbait articles: "What surprising link do [powerful person] and [serial killer] share? Click to find out!"
Yes. This is abused on all sides and is definitely a tell.
On the other hand, if that reporting is accurate, 30 feet is really far away for a shotgun to fall after being fired.
Yeah, my immediate thought when Scott asked "can someone offer an innocent explanation for this" was "it is almost certainly bullshit," and that was without clicking the link.
I’m kind of surprised that you were convinced by Haidt’s arguments. It looked to me like a handful of graphs with an arbitrary vertical line at 2012 and a whole lot of hand waving. To be clear, I buy that social media could contribute to declining mental health among teenage girls. It certainly makes intuitive sense. But nowhere in any of Haidt’s posts is there anything resembling a rigorous statistical argument. Isn’t a meta-analysis the bare minimum in situations like this? Why is everyone giving Haidt a pass?
Richard Hanania did a pretty good piece on this a few days ago. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/how-i-changed-my-mind-on-social-media
I think a few of the studies aren't quite as strong as he portrays them, but his argument is at very least directionally correct.
Anyone else freaked out by not being able to do #6 as described? I couldn't find anything for the first 10+ seconds I was looking at it and I had to scan it row-by-row to find the fourth mismatch.
I couldn't do it after 20 seconds and gave up.
I can’t either
I found three fairly quickly (20-30 seconds), but gave up on the fourth after about two minutes.
I found two in a few seconds without doing the trick. I didn't realize there were two more until I saw your comment, so I went back to look for the others and found them in a few seconds. Possibly relevant: My job involves a lot of looking at numbers and making sure they match.
Were you just looking, like normal? The trick is to do the thing you do to see Magic Eye images: either cross your eyes or unfocus them, just enough to make two adjacent columns overlap. Then the errors pop out at you, like in a Magic Eye image.
I guess I never learned to do this!
I've never been able to do get those Magic Eye images to resolve, either.
This is also a quick way to solve spot-the-difference puzzles.
Important note for anyone trying this - you have to click through the link and view it on Twitter. The preview image is truncated, and does not show all four aberrant values. The actual image has 24 rows, the preview only shows 14.
I spent several minutes on this and was convinced this was a troll post before I clicked through.
Might depend on platform/browser; I could see all 4 in the preview.
I did it as described and found all four almost immediately (no more than 3 seconds). It probably helped that I loved the 'magic eyes' books when I was a kid and learned to see the 'stereoscopic images' quickly by adjusting my focal point. I still do it occasionally in weird situations - like orderly arrays of mini-tile in a restroom.
I learned how to do this at a young age, probably through sheer boredom. It's really useful for quickly spotting differences in code, documentation, mechanical drawings and electrical schematics, especially scanned or hard copy documents which don't work with textual diff tools. It's like the world's lamest superpower!
Now that I'm thinking about it, similarly lame superpowers:
1. If you wear eyeglasses, chromatic aberration at the edge of the lens will let you analyze the spectral content of light. This is really dramatic with RGB LEDs. White LEDs will show a faint blue peak from the exciter.
2. Rapid eye movements sidestep persistence of vision, showing whether a light is flickering. With some practice you can see full- vs half-wave rectification, pulse width modulation and duty cycle, approximate frequency, and digital coding.
Don't let anyone see you crossing your eyes, peering around your glasses, or making rapid eye movements. They might start to suspect your secret identity.
Try scrolling the image back and forth rapidly. That works quite well for me. I think recruiting the "movement detection" circuitry in the retina and visual cortex probably works eve better than the putative recruitment of 3D processing. Being superb at movement detection is part of visual circuitry going all the way back to insects.
Did you click on the image to seel the full version?
A quick primer:
1. Don't look at anything in particular. Let your eyes unfocus and relax. Sufficiently relaxed, they will drift apart and you will have double vision.
2. Your brain is wired to converge your eyes onto a single target, and process it as an object having depth. With a little playing, you can choose apparent convergence on visually similar but different elements in your stereo field of view. The images will "snap" into convergence. Similarities will look "normal", while differences will pop out in 3D.
This is a lot easier than the magic-eye pictures, which I still find fairly difficult and unfulfilling. You're just trying to overlap images, and see if anything stands out.
My brain isn't wired that way. Sorry. ;-)
When I unfocus my eyes and relax, I get a grid pattern of brighter columns and rows—two vertical and three horizontal. The grid pattern moves as my focus wavers a bit. But if I can hold the grid in place, the numbers of the grid maintain their brighter white character, but waves of orange move across the grayer non-highlighted matrix of numbers.
Anybody see the same effect that I see?
weird, i'm also seeing some rows as brighter than others (not where the wrong ones are; I can kinda change it at will). I'm also mostly unable to quickly spot the numbers — it's hard to stop my eyes from refocusing when i'm looking for something. (People who are succeeding, how close is your face to the screen/how zoomed in are you?)
For me, it took over a minute after stabilizing the row jitter, for the color waves to start. Frankly, after reading everyone's responses, I think my qualia provide me with more interesting programming. It's as if everyone else is tuned into Wheel of Fortune while I'm watching 2001 a Space Odyssey — relatively speaking.
I found 3/4 after about 15 seconds. I scanned vertically the first & last positions.
What works best for me is NOT to search, but to step back and view the pattern as a pattern.
The individual numerals can, of course, be found by exhaustive search, but my brain spots the “glitches” in the pattern much more quickly.
I’ve always used the crossed-eyes technique to play those “spot the difference” games. Been doing it since I was a child. Now, as an adult, I can spot the difference between two images — no matter how complex — almost instantly. This has been an amusing party trick: print a page of random text of any size font. Print a second page of the same text with one character changed. I can spot it instantly. Can do the same with “white noise” or Gaussian noise (Photoshop). Change one pixel and I can find it almost instantly. I’ve used this to proofread before/after computer code edits written in code that is gibberish to me.
In California bars there are these game “consoles” that sit on the bar where you pay to play poker or trivia or whatever. One of the games is Spot The Difference. I have high score on every machine I’ve encountered. One time I came across a machine in another city that I knew I had played but saw that I was no longer high score. I was dumbfounded. I sat at the machine for 1/2 hour until I got high score. And then when I went to type my name in the leaderboard I realized that I had been playing against myself. That WAS me at number one. I had just used one of my other screen names. Strangers watching me play accuse me of cheating. “You work for the company!” insisted one guy who was playing me for a drink. He was angry. The owner of a local restaurant told me that lunch was on him if I could beat the existing high score on his Spot the Difference machine. Free lunch!
Another use for this is to correct for the Ponzo illusion. By crossing eyes and superimposing the two objects their relative size becomes immediately apparent. This works in real space just as well as it does in printed examples. By superimposing the two images you are using each eye’s monocular image. The tricks that binocular perception of depth play on your abilty to judge relative size disappear.
Another use is to spot where apparently random decorative surfaces (flowered wallpaper, say) begin to repeat or copy/paste. Or spotting where use of the Photoshop “clone” tool has been used to alter a photograph.
The cross-eyed technique doesn’t work very well for me when the “difference” is color. It only works well when the difference is shape/geometrical.
Really interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm kind of tempted to try and get good at this now!
I looked at the original image on Twitter to see all the rows, but nothing popped out at me after half a minute. I ended up having to scan row-by-row. After spending several minutes on it, I only found a single mismatch — a 592 in the 10th line from the top. However, I've known for a long time that I perceive patterns differently from the general population. I've given up worrying about it. I think I would likely be classified as mildly dyslexic but my perceptual quirks are much more profound than simple dyslexia.
I found a couple before I got bored. I didn't time myself, but I certainly spent more than 10 seconds.
I can't do it on my smartphone. The image is simply the wrong size.
#18: The argument given seems to be a pretty poor one. It only seems to work if you assume:
A) Peoples' willingness to date is substantially sensitive to how bad the dating market is for them (i.e. there are substantial numbers of people who might just decide to be alone forever instead if the market is bad enough).
B) Men and women have similar willingness to put up with a shitty dating market.
C) The market clears at the point of equal participation. There being more women than men in the dating market does make things a little better for women, but not infinitely so. If social norms were really terrible for women in the dating market, maybe most women might not be willing to participate until the ratio was 2:1 in their favor.
Um, I think you drastically overestimate the number of people who date. Is there a bunch of articles being run about how almost everyone under the age of 20 is a virgin and has no intention of dating? obviously a bit exaggerated, but I definitely remember seeing something about this in zvi's fertility roundup
Yep. Though you could argue that just means we're out of equilibrium and new standards and approaches will arise that cause us to gravitate back towards equilibrium.
I think this is partly true, though the equilibrium is ultimately about fertility, not a specific mating ritual called "dating" (which is loosely correlated with fertility but definitely not something that exists in all times and places or that is guaranteed to be the norm in the future).
Over a long enough horizon, human beings will gravitate towards an equilibrium in which most women will attempt to (or be forced to) bear multiple children, and most men will make some sort of attempt to be the ones that reproduce with them. Either that, or the human race will go extinct. But there's no reason this couldn't be out of whack for 100 years or more due to shocks that disrupted the previous equilibrium.
Yup, both (B) and (C) sound unsupported to me. There is a similar-sounding biological argument for why sex ratios at birth approach roughly 50:50, but in that case the odds of getting one's genes into the next generation acts like a common currency. In this case I don't see anything analogous that gets driven to equilibrium matched across the sexes. Subjective (dis)satisfaction may well not even be measured/perceived/tolerated comparably by men and women.
(B) is the real problem to my mind. Men want pussy more than women want anything.
You are confusing things. There are short term desires and long term desires. The short term desires are often stronger for short periods of time, but this doesn't make them stronger on the average.
It does seem true that men get a *LOT* more out of a short-term relationship than women do, but this doesn't mean that their average commitment is stronger. And certainly the costs of a sexual relationship are unequally distributed. So a best guess would be that women have a stronger commitment to a relationship than men do...but it's less intense at certain moments.
Per #12, it’s pretty interesting to me that Scott “wouldn’t have predicted” Instagram being worse than other social media sites. It kind of illustrates how different our priors could be based on culture (in this case generational), and how this can cause massive blind spots. I just turned 28, so Instagram was the top social media site in most of my late teens to early 20’s. I have first hand experience with the way teen girls are using the site, and I wouldn’t have to look at any data to now that Instagram was obviously going to be especially terrible for them. There is immense pressure on Instagram to convey social status for women, and the competition for status is actually graded by objective measures of “likes”, “followers”, and “ratio” (of followers to following). This means a lot of pressure on girls to sexualize themselves (to get a lot of “likes” from guys), and overall convey themselves as attractive and interesting as possible. It is a literal popularity contest, one you really don’t have much of a choice to compete in if you want to have a social life. Men have much more leeway, and Instagram isn’t quite tied to social status in the same way (though there’s definitely some of that). I’m not sure why at all, but most guys my age use Instagram to show off their hobbies and what not.
That’s not even close to what I said though, and if you see my follow up comments I make a point that “body image issues” is the wrong way to look at things. Rates of anorexia are way down, but also the ideal body in pop culture has changed from rail thin to kardashian curvy (which is equally unrealistic). But that’s beside the point, the real issue is that Instagram puts immense social pressure on girls to cultivate an online “brand”, which is then constantly evaluated by very public metrics (likes, followers, etc). There is a hyper awareness of social status at all times, and there’s not really an option for young girls to “opt out” of the game because Instagram has become the primary forum for organizing their social lives. Looks and body image are just one part of the equation here.
I agree but I think the focus on looks misses the forest for the trees... there is overwhelming pressure on young women today to convey social status through the endless cultivation of an online “brand”, of which looks are just one part of. There’s also endless pressure to make yourself look fun and interesting or showcase how cute your relationship is. Body image issues a are just one part of the larger “Instagram problem” that forces girls into a perpetual status evaluation that they don’t really have the option to opt out of without major consequences for their social lives.
I think you’re way off here. Putting aside whether I agree about your broader point about the power of women, it’s not really relevant here. We aren’t talking about women here, we’re talking about girls. Its not just attractive young girls using Instagram, it’s all of them. I’d be willing to bet the mental health effects disproportionately fall on the less attractive girls, not the hot ones. But even the hot ones it’s a nightmare for, because Instagram isn’t just a place for showing off your looks. It’s a place to show how “amazing” your life is, then get evaluated on that based on what other people think (likes/followers).
& yes, there is immense pressure to use Instagram for teens. Just like there’s immense pressure to wear clothing that are in style, or watch popular tv shows. But it’s even more crucial than that. There are huge social costs to not joining Instagram, as that’s the forum where social lives are organized these days. If you meet someone new you will normally follow eachother on Instagram rather than exchange phone numbers. You can keep your kid off of it, but it’s basically guaranteeing them to be somewhat of an outcast.
I get all sorts of awful emotions from social media, usually because I see people have horrible opinions and express hatred for me and my friends. I have to make a strong effort to will myself to believe that even a fraction of the harm from social media could come from *body image issues* of all things.
Yea. Tangential, but I think being subject to omnipresent and relentless metrics on all aspects of your personhood is a kind of meta-problem that if anything the anti-woke/merchant liberal/nominal "right" is more complicit in than progressivism.
What's even funnier, in a sad way, is the people raging with jealousy and envy *because* there's no likelihood of “the New York Times will devote a whole article to baselessly smearing me.”
Many, many people I know have the same experience. If you're white, black, Democratic, Republican, a man, or a woman, there are people on social media who hate you for your identity, working to develop the most biting and traumatic ways to belittle you, and openly trying to organize coalitions against you.
My take is that you can find many ways to have a bad experience on social media. My wife for some reason seems to seek out hateful content ("someone has to witness it"), so her experience is similar to what you're describing. She also tends to see things like school shooting and other atrocities on social media much more than I do.
Having said that, I can also easily believe that bullying/lack of social acceptance are much bigger issues for teens.
Sounds to me like a difference between a teenager and an adult. For an average teenager, being popular (among teenagers) is extremely important. Finding out you will never be popular because of your body shape is devastating.
Adults live in a world with different rules.
I mention below that I think it’s more about social standing overall, and body image is just one (albeit important for girls) factor involved in that. I think it just takes all the worst aspects of female intrasexual competition, and turns them up to 11. & there really is no choice to opt out.
I think it’s more about a hyper awareness of one’s social standing, which is being continuously evaluated at all times through Instagram. You can ask them to log out but the evaluation is still going on, and their social life will suffer as this is the “town square” where social events are organized/communicated. “Body image issues” are just one of a number of different ways this ends up hurting young girls. I think it’s actually deeper than that. There is no solution other than to ban it outright under 18, imo.
But I get what you mean, social media manages to create its own unique hell for every individual unless you’re constantly vigilant about what content you interact with. Being somewhat well known, as you are, definitely has a whole host of nightmares I’ve never had to deal with.
"people...express hatred for me and my friends"
*claps you on the back* I know the feeling exactly 😁
I think it depends what corner of the hell that is social media you explore. I stay away from places like TikTok and Instagram and Twitter, and only venture onto a strictly delimited area of Tumblr, so I miss a lot of the worst of the influencer stuff. Thanks be to God I'm not a fourteen year old girl today being told she has to look at this site here or else be totally out of the swim and a social pariah, because that is a sure ticket to crazytown (I was a social pariah fourteen year old, but never bullied for it, and there were way, *way* fewer things you had to be au fait with back then to be in the mainstream).
> I have to make a strong effort to will myself to believe that even a fraction of the harm from social media could come from *body image issues* of all things.
I hope this prompts some humility. A majority of women and probably many fathers, in other words billions of humans, would intuit this instantly.
I'm guessing you spend almost no time on Instagram looking at pictures of beautiful young women.
A friend of mine with a teen daughter thinks that a lot of the gender dysmorphia with teen girls springs fro this dynamic. They feel like they have to either be a Kardahsian online, or invent another interesting visual persona.
Oh yeah, there’s a ton of people who think that. People like Jessie Singal and the like, they get absolutely skewered for it but it’s probably the truth. There is immense pressure on young girls to cultivate and interstating online “brand”, and it could take a ton of different forms. For those girls who don’t fit the mold, they’re driven to LGBTQ+ communities where they’re told they’re granted immediate status just for coming out (even mostly meaningless made up labels like “pan sexual”).
Or maybe it's a way to opt out of the rat race. The young men aren't participating and don't feel the need, so it's one way to get out of the requirement without losing face (the frumpy nerdy girl may also opt out, but in a way that demonstrates they are not socially competent and are low status).
#9 Oh hey, the weird FFXIV lawsuit showed up here! I haven't heard anything else about it, and I thought it was a spurious "get our name in the news" kind of lawsuit, but I don't know anything about how these things go. Also I want to note that Final Fantasy XIV is made by Square Enix, a Japanese company. The potential trade war would most likely be with Japan.
Incidentally, the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest parts of Square Enix seem to be the only parts that actually have their act together. Forspoken just flopped so hard the sub-studio got shut down, a dozen good western IPs got sold off to invest in crypto/web3/insert trend here/etc. stuff last year, and the CEO that did that just got replaced with a different crypto/web3/etc. infatuated guy.
I don’t know much about the merits or lack thereof of this particular lawsuit, but certainly allegations of IP theft from indigenous communities, especially in Mexico, are an definitely issue in the fashion world right now.
Rent seeking.
It was mentioned on the FFXIV subreddit that the supposed cultural property rules are based on an agreement between the Saami Council and Disney. Also that the Saami council isn't a government entity of any kind - just a voluntary organization.
The more likely suspect for problems is the New World gearset: https://ffxiv.eorzeacollection.com/gearset/new-world
#28 Ayn Rand was an incredibly gifted writer. No comment on her political views. Most of what look like flaws to modern readers (plodding pace, moralising, soliloquys) are stylistic artifacts of the period.
I read The Fountainhead and photographed 20+ pages on my phone, because I liked certain phrases and passages so much (I didn't want to highlight my book and didn't know about Book Darts). I was really impressed by it.
When I find a quote I like, I save it to a quotes file on my computer. Occasionally, I'll mail it to myself as a backup.
Ayn Rand's political/economic views were incredibly prescient. She wrote a novel foretelling, in the 1940s, almost exactly how the Soviet Union would collapse 40 years later from a slow unraveling of economic and political incentives under communist/socialist systems. This was at a time when few politicians or economists were predicting it (though some, like Hayek, were), and in fact, most were hailing socialism/communism as an enormous success because of the rapid early industrialisation that they had achieved. I'm always mystified that the current American perspective is so rabidly anti-Rand.
" I'm always mystified that the current American perspective is so rabidly anti-Rand"
The American media is enthralled with communism ... and utopian theories in general. A fault of being overeducated fools. These utopian theories are wonderfully complete, well rounded, beautiful ... of course they all fall flat on their face when exposed to the real world and real people. But of course to a highly educated utopian, government is good and people are the problem.
There's always a police force to deal with that
Yeah but it's an elitist utopia. American culture (and the media in particular) is very very middlebrow populist. It instinctively recoils from anything that even smells like elitism.
Of course, Atlas Shrugged includes its own Utopian fantasy, where billionaires are charging each other pennies for trinkets in the mountains.
I'd have to read that bloody thing again to properly comment on your praise of her foresight (which I doubt). However as a systems analyst I can definitely say that here proposed social system would fail even more quickly than Marxist-Leninism (which had failed by the time Stalin took over). Neither is based around systems that would scale at all well. Marxism is an extrapolation from communism, which can work quite well for small groups of people. As it gets above 40 you start needing a really good charismatic leader. And the groups need to be relatively isolated from the rest of society, because when you get above around 15 it's only meta-stable.
Objectivism is less stable than even primitive communism, and would scale more poorly. It would extremely quickly turn into some form of "might-makes-right" tyranny. Either that or collapse into anarchy. Or possibly both. I suspect that even at the scale of 10 people it would require a very charismatic leader.
This claim is backed by experimental testing. There are lots of failed communes in the US that lasted several years. I don't know of any such Objectivist groups, so there can't have been any large number of them. There have also been "successful communes" that lasted for generations. (Not many, but some.) I don't know of any candidates among the Objectivists. (This may be a comment about my knowledge, but I sort of doubt it.) The closest I've come is some of these "planned cities", and that's not very close.
I don't think the small community of very elite people with similar philosophies that she portrays in _Atlas Shrugged_ is the Objectivist view of how to run a large society — that's just where the productive people are taking refuge while waiting for the greater system to collapse. What Objectivists propose is capitalism with minimal government.
A market system of private property and exchange, unlike either a commune or a socialist economy, does scale.
>However as a systems analyst I can definitely say that here proposed social system would fail even more quickly than Marxist-Leninism
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Rand's proposed social system is one of the most unremarkable parts of her philosophical writings, and had already come pretty close to being implemented in Gilded Age America before she was even born (her ideal version wouldn't have had Jim Crow laws, among other differences, but I doubt that's what you're talking about). The really out-there parts of her philosophy are about her ideas regarding the proper behaviour of individuals, not social systems.
My best guess is that, like many of her harshest critics, you're conflating the response of her fictional heroes to a hypothetical dictatorship with her proposed response to real-world social issues. Rand knew full well that a society modelled after Galt's Gulch wouldn't work in reality, and she said so explicitly when asked about it in interviews.
I mean that it has multiple modes of failure which are to the advantage of those who fail to follow the ethical guidelines. There's more, but that in and of itself suffices. Systems need to have error checks that prevent rogue processes from being successful. The checks are never perfect, as that would usually be too costly, so systems tend to collapse.
An example of a control mechanism and a failure mode is: regulatory commissions fail because of regulatory capture which is enabled because there are no penalties for taking a deferred benefit from those being regulated. This is a currently existing failure of the current system. Even so they act as a friction brake to slow the worst excesses.
As far as I have been able to determine the only Objectivist control mechanism is to say "Nobody decent would every do that" until somebody they approve of does it. I can't even call that a failure mode, as it's part of the system design.
Generally, Rand has realistic villains and unrealistic heroes. Perhaps the same applies to the societies she described.
I didn't know about Book Darts, those are pretty neat. My usual technique is I have a paper zettelkasten (https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/). When reading books, I'll write down quotes and put them in, and reference them to a master "book" reference card so I can find them again.
If you read *The Early Ayn Rand*, you can see that she really improved over time. The short stories in that collection from the 1920s are really rough. *We The Living* is quite good in comparison.
I am long past my Objectivist period, but I remain fond of Rand's novels. *Atlas Shrugged* is overrated among Rand fans; *We The Living* is very underrated.
Some of the improvement likely also had to do with the fact that she didn't grow up speaking English and only learnt it when she moved to America?
I agree, We the living was quite good. That one character felt quite a bit like the horse from Animal Farm.
Taste is of course subjective, but I couldn't disagree more here. I think her fiction is terrible. Shallow characters, generally wooden prose, and a plot that obviously serves an ideological purpose. I consider Atlas Shrugged to be the worst, longest book that I've ever finished. But hey, The Da Vinci Code was terrible too. If either Rand or Dan Brown care what critics think, they can cry all the way to the bank.
It seems blazingly obvious that Rands' fiction was/is popular because of its ideology. Like the (sigh) Da Vinci Code, it was a book of ideas. Those books do very well when they hit the zeitgeist in the right way.
Interesting that Equatorial Guinea stands out so much on the graph for #7. Out of all the backwards autocratic petrostates it's the one I don't remember ever hearing about; between that and its (relatively) sky-high average income it must be doing something... well, not _right_ exactly, but more _successfully_ than the other autocratic petrostates at least.
I usually hear about it having the lowest scores for various measures of good things for a country's population.
What it does 'right' is having a lot of oil-per-person (1.6 million people, versus, say, Angola's 34 million and Nigeria's hundreds of millions).
Hagbard Celine is using it for his money laundering operations.
Equatorial Guinea isn't like anywhere else, it is just a surreal regime around a tiny family combining genocidal singing Santa Clauses, eating the opposition and spending millions on Michael Jackson memorabilia.
I am shocked by the suggestion that Tolkien and Tolstoy are equally notable prose stylists.
I'm reminded of people who think that George R. R. Martin is one of the greatest writers of all time, few of whom (I'm guessing) have read much outside the fantasy genre.
Neil Gaiman writes in the fantasy genre, and he really is a great writer.
I'll give you that one. "A Study in Emerald" is *fantastic*, and it shows what can be done if you actually *like* the characters that you are using in your writing.
I think people conflate "good writing" with "good prose." GRRM's prose is nothing special, but he's a superb storyteller.
Not superb enough to have finished his story, decades after he began publishing it.
Or Brandon Sanderson. He's a serviceable writer, but the books of his I've tried give me the mental equivalent of chewing on cardboard when it comes to the prose.
I want to like Sanderson, but I get the same feeling.
This. Tolkien is a notoriously poor writer, and his appeal lies elsewhere. He had just enough talent that with a very strict editor he could've made his prose passable, but alas.
Haven't read Rand yet, but I love the idea of her as the American Tolkien. :D
There's already an "American Tolkien" actually born in America :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmKhGqWcJGY
"Martin is a better writer than Tolkien."
Oh, them's fightin' words 😁
Back in the dawn of time, when glaciers still covered the land, and the very first volume of the dazzling new fantasy series by George R.R. Martin had been published, I tried reading it because hey, dazzling new fantasy series! and I liked the previous novels by him that I had read.
I bounced off it *hard*. The cynical grittiness of "this is what Real Mediaeval Times were like" was not to my taste, and there certainly was nothing attractive about the prose to keep me reading despite the worldview. I have read writers because of the quality of their prose despite being *appalled* by what I was reading, so I will read if the writing is good enough (Simon Raven was one such, I remember thinking after reading one of his novels "He writes like an angel - a fallen angel").
So if you can quote me something you find beautiful, or stirring, out of the written work produced, I'd appreciate it greatly.
He's much better at his writing style than his legions of imitators.
Agreed. His prose is kinda okay, sometimes even impressive, but his songs and poems are honestly embarrassing.
“Embarrassing” only because they are anachronisms in our time and culture. For a world where communal singing and storytelling are a major source of entertainment, and people are constantly making up little walking tunes or lyrics to keep busy or serve as oral history, I think they work just fine.
Also I bet a lot of them sound better in Elvish.
I actually have a little book of songs and poems written by an American soldier from WWI that was meant to capture some of the rhymes and stories and experiences of his unit - and it’s kind of the same stuff. Hardly award winning poetry, just simple rhymes that speak to shared events and feelings.
This sounds like you're applying completely different standards. The existence of bad poetry in-character may be perfectly consistent, but that doesn't make the poetry itself good. I feel like this means they didn't merit inclusion in the books, but that is quite possibly just the anachronism thing.
I mean (edit: not you, the OP) called it “embarrassing” - that’s a strong statement, I think you need to unpack a bit what you mean by it.
Lord of the Rings is not a book of poetry, it’s a novel. Essentially all the poetry in the book is dialogue - it’s all spoken, sung, or written by characters in the world, so I guess I don’t know how you could judge it except “in character”.
That's not what my professor teaching "Shakespeare's plays" though. He though it was stylistically simple but quite well done.
And there are multiple reasons why the "heroic couplet" style of poetry was successful, even if it is stylistically simple.
Oh, he's definitely not a poet, but the verses work if you think of them as *songs*, not more parts of the prose. And I do love reading out loud Galadriel's poem in Quenya, even if my pronunciation is crappy. Some things work better if you say them out loud, as they're meant to be in the world of the book.
Walking songs and the like are simple and easy and follow a conventional rhythm, because they're things that you're singing as you're moving or working:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AenBnjKhPPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGqD8RkwJvE
The BBC did a radio version of LOTR in 1981and the songs work better when you hear them sung, like this one for "The Fall of Gil-galad" as sung by Sam Gamgee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngm9B9pYgy0&list=PL82D933022DC7AAC3&index=5
Depending on your tolerance for counter-tenors, this from the full soundtrack "Ah, Lorien":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL-TpGJoucQ
Thanks for the pointer! I've liked many of the songs since I first heard the radio series on NPR ~four decades ago, but hadn't known it had been released as an album.
It looks like the music is available as individual files on the Internet Archive as part of an upload of the radio series as a whole. (The edition they used apparently included the soundtrack as a bonus disc.) Music files start at #98.
https://archive.org/details/the-lord-of-the-rings-bbc-radio-drama/Stephen+Oliver+-+Music+From+The+BBC+Radio+Dramatisation+Of+J.+R.+R.+Tolkien's+The+Lord+Of+The+Rings+-+Disc+1+-+01.+The+Lord+Of+The+Rings.flac
I didn't think of Tolkien as a prose stylist at all. To me, The Hobbit was a great story, and The Lord of The Rings was kind of a painful, boring story. None of the books is especially notable for artful wording.
A guy writes several books, which have sold millions across 80 years, invented new languages for his fictions stories, which include songs in invented languages ... people say he's not a good writer.
Need to remember this whenever I feel like an impostor.
He's an extraordinary worldbuilder, for reasons such as creating several constructed languages, or detailed genealogies, or consistent millenia-long history, or his deep understanding how historical societies and war used to work (due to his immersion into historical sources and his own experience in WW1). I think these are grounds enough for him to become a bestselling author, even if his prose was unremarkable.
>I think these are grounds enough for him to become a bestselling author, even if his prose was unremarkable.
I don't buy that. Do you, personnally, purchase & read novels because of the work that went into the genealogy of their characters and their verisimilitude, ou rather because you like the story being told, or the style it's told with?
As an anecdote, I recently re-read the first ~1/3rd of the Fellowship of the Ring. I was surprised by how enjoyable it was. It's fun & light-hearted, nowhere near the dry and boring prose I remember (or was psy-oped into remembering) from 20 years ago.
I would find any claim that Tolkien's prose to lack "artful" wording to be a rather odd one. I wonder by what standard we are holding him to, because it's not merely that the books are best-selling, but that they're one of the few works that even average people remember lines from. And I don't just mean memes like "You shall not pass". I'd say this was true even before the films, albeit, that some memorable lines got translated to film and are remembered from there is something I think also points away from the idea that Tolkien's prose is mediocre.
"You shall not pass" is a good counterexample. In the book, it was "you cannot pass". Less like an ancient wizard confronting a demon and more like a hall monitor.
The ancient wizard confronting the demon SHOULD say “you CANNOT pass”. He was not bad-assedly stating his intent to fight the Balrog, he was stating a FACT: I am more ancient and powerful than even you, even though I have the shape of a goofy old man and you are a giant flaming demon, and you literally can’t cross this bridge because I don’t want you to.
Yes. I'd say his prose is uneven. Sometimes his prose sounds like he's imitating the King James Bible — "and, Lo! blah blah blah blah." I'm sure he does this on purpose to raise the drama, but I can't help but think these language elements detract from the real drama the characters are experiencing. Of course, the Elves (Eldar) and the Istari (Maiar) speak in a more highfalutin style. But I winced when Legolas said: "Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.” Sounds like he's misquoting Shakespeare. Tolkien's prose sounds the most honest when he's focused on the doings of Hobbits—when it's simplest and writes in conversational style.
He tells a damn good story, though, and the world he created for his characters is endlessly fascinating in its details.
I am re-reading both as bedtime stories for my baby and I’m having exactly the opposite reaction - the prose is witty, engaging, and lyrical in a way I didn’t remember from my last read through (probably at least 15 years ago). It’s not necessarily “high literary art” but it’s hardly schlock. All his worldbuilding works because he does an excellent job of conveying it in the writing. The world feels deep and old and lush, because he describes it in a way that makes you recognize it as such.
Yeah when I read the Hobbit to my kids I was surprised at how strong the small scale writing is. Like you said it’s not high literary art, but honestly a lot of that is garbage anyway.
The Hobbit has a lot of jokes that only adults will appreciate, because they'll be reading it to their kids. Things like Thorin being a Really Important Dwarf:
"“Hush!” said Gandalf. “Let Thorin speak!” And this is how Thorin began.
“Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit — may the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale! —” He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called *audacious* and worst of all *fellow conspirator*, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed. So Thorin went on:
“We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation —”
This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At *may never return* he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel. All the dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table. Gandalf struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearth-rug, shaking like a jelly that was melting. Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept on calling out “struck by lightning, struck by lightning!” over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long time. So they took him and laid him out of the way on the drawing-room sofa with a drink at his elbow, and they went back to their dark business.
“Excitable little fellow,” said Gandalf, as they sat down again. “Gets funny queer fits, but he is one of the best, one of the best — as fierce as a dragon in a pinch.”
If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even to Old Took’s great-granduncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment."
If you've ever sat through a long-winded lecture or meeting at work or elsewhere, where some Bigwig tells you the same thing four times in different ways, you'll recognise the style, and the joke about how golf was invented is just icing on the cake 😁
And if you don't bawl your eyes out at the ending, which over the course of the story has risen from being a jokey story about dwarves and a hobbit setting out to burgle the stolen horde to something higher and graver (and then, as Bilbo goes back home, eases back down gradually to the ordinary and usual), then I'll have no respect for you 😁
There indeed lay Thorin Oakenshield, wounded with many wounds, and his rent armour and notched axe were cast upon the floor. He looked up as Bilbo came beside him.
“Farewell, good thief,” he said. “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.”
Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. “Farewell, King under the Mountain!” he said. “This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have shared in your perils — that has been more than any Baggins deserves.”
“No!” said Thorin. “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”
Then Bilbo turned away, and he went by himself, and sat alone wrapped in a blanket, and, whether you believe it or not, he wept until his eyes were red and his voice was hoarse. He was a kindly little soul. Indeed it was long before he had the heart to make a joke again. “A mercy it is,” he said at last to himself, “that I woke up when I did. I wish Thorin were living, but I am glad that we parted in kindness. You are a fool, Bilbo Baggins, and you made a great mess of that business with the stone; and there was a battle, in spite of all your efforts to buy peace and quiet, but I suppose you can hardly be blamed for that.”
People today have much shorter attention spans than readers in Tolkein's day. As a result, we're more likely to find books boring, which people in previous generations would have found enthralling.
Of course, you're entirely right to stop reading a book you find boring--I think you probably should. But it may not indicate any flaw in the author.
I think Tolkein's books *have* to be somewhat slower-paced, in order to have the full emotional weight they're supposed to have. I believe this because I normally read extremely quickly, and speed up in the "boring" parts where the author is describing the scenery or whatever. I read the Lord of the Rings like that, and it was a good series. Several years later, though, I *listened* to the book on YouTube, meaning I took it in at a much slower pace and couldn't skim. It was *amazing*, and moved me in a way I haven't been moved by a book since I was a teenager and a lot more movable. I spent a lot of the third book walking to and from work with tears streaming down my face.
As a friend of my once wrote "rust an the moth are the only true critic".
He was a published author, but a much better poet. Unfortunately, it's his published work that survives. I wish I could hear "The flue of Aki Moro" again. THAT is a work that *should* have been preserved. "A Gathering of Heros", which was published, not so much so.
Who in the literary world sees George R. R. Martin as a great writer?
He's definitely not a literary author, and the stories are in effect his own fanfiction: he invented this universe and populated it with the creations he found most to his own taste, and he never intended to be an author. It was a combination of lucky moves that got "The Hobbit" published, and if Stanley Unwin had been a different type of publisher, there might never have been "The Lord of the Rings" (as it was, Tolkien wanted a version of The Silmarillion published, desperately tried to get them interested, eventually someone agreed but it fell through, and LOTR was more of a stopgap between Allen and Unwin wanting a sequel to their children's book hit with The Hobbit, and Tolkien needing money for his family and sick wife).
So the prose is uneven (especially if you think of how The Lord of the Rings changed drastically over the course of writing it - he originally tried it as a Hobbit sequel, and Aragorn was going to be a Hobbit, until he went 'nah this not working', scrapped it all, and rewrote it). But there are passages of beauty in it, though I imagine it depends what one finds beautiful. And if you're a younger reader looking for adventure and excitement and "what happens next get to the action", then descriptions of natural beauty - such as Gimli talking about the Glittering Caves - are going to be boring.
Everyone has different tastes in the kind of writing they find moving, or deep, or beautiful. Some like lush, purple prose; some like sparse, taut simplicity.
Is Tolstoy noted as a prose stylist in Russian? Genuinely don't know. Thought his greatness was was more in the psychological insight, the breadth and depth of the worlds he creates, that sort of thing. I've heard people say that you should learn Russian to read Pushkin in the original, I've never heard the same about Tolstoy.
I think Pushkin is usually seen as their #1 poet and Tolstoy is usually seen as their #1 prose writer.
You're comparing prose skills across languages. Tolkien wrote in English, Tolstoy in Russian.
If you haven't read Tolstoy in Russian, what you're saying is that you can't compare Tolkien with the English translators of Tolstoy.
What I'm saying is that Tolkien is not really known as a good prose stylist in English, but my understanding is that Tolstoy is basically the pre-eminent writer of literary prose in Russian. Their reputations in their respective languages are not really comparable in that regard.
None of that is to say that Tolkien's books aren't good. I love LotR. Going back to Russian, Dostoevsky is really not highly regarded as a prose stylist in Russian. He just made up for it in other areas of his writing.
I haven't read Tolstoy, and if I did it would be in translation, so I don't have an opinion on the comparison. Tolkien, in my view, was a world class world builder and a very good prose stylist.
The comparison to Rand is interesting. Both were producing works very unlike contemporary literature. Both works defended philosophical positions very unfashionable with the contemporary literary elite. Both were spectacularly successful.
The one sense in which Tolkien was more successful was that he spawned imitators, was in large part responsible for the rise of modern fantasy fiction. Rand created an ideological movement but I don't think had much literary effect. Tolkien had an ideology too, but it was one that had been a going concern for many centuries before he wrote, although in decline at the time and since.
As someone who attempted to read Atlus Shrugged several times, all I can say is this: wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQxhOYqLPdY
I can, however, admit that the tweet thread is a shitpost of the highest caliber.
I thought for sure your youtube link was going to go to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j56IiLqZ9U
I think Fountainhead is much better written than Atlas Shrugged personally. I know there’s a few really bad scenes that make me cringe, but overall it does have a much more consistent and interesting theme about integrity as a creative professional.
If you havent read it yet, I highly recommend We the Living which I think is her best written book. It has a much smaller scale that Atlas Shrugged or The Fountain head and the focus i much more "human".
As I just said somewhere else - Ayn Rand's political/economic views were incredibly prescient. She wrote a novel foretelling, in the 1940s, almost exactly how the Soviet Union would collapse 40 years later from a slow unraveling of economic and political incentives under communist/socialist systems. This was at a time when few politicians or economists were predicting it (though some, like Hayek, were), and in fact, most were hailing socialism/communism as an enormous success because of the rapid early industrialisation that they had achieved. I'm always mystified that the current American perspective is so rabidly anti-Rand.
If you've ever lived in systems that are socialist/communist (I grew up in one), maybe her books just hit differently.
I can understand that. I grew up reading fiction and non-fiction alike, but fiction has always been my wheelhouse. Atlus Shrugged is deeply, fabulously tedious for me thanks in part to that perspective, an expectation of entertainment and going somewhere.
Think of it like you would a long conversation with someone, or sitting in a lecture for school. If I am supposed to be teaching you about algebra and spend half of every class day expounding on alphabet soup, or what color tie I chose to wear that day, you would be justified in rioting.
I also grew up reading fiction and non fiction alike, and I actually found Atlas Shrugged extremely engaging. I was in high school at the time, and I was actually quite drawn in by the mystery - who was actually causing all the quitting and how? Of course, I never finished the Galt speech in the end, and I'm sure they must have been plenty of other parts that I speed read through. I distinctly remember finishing the book and enjoying it, but not really giving it much thought or weight beyond that.
But then I started observing in the world around me the arguments made by her villains in newspaper editorials and articles, blaming wealth creation and private enterprise at a time when the alternative model had so clearly failed, and disastrously so. I realised more and more that she had some very powerful insights to go with (what had seemed to me) a good story!
It's also funny to me that the American left revile her for encouraging selfishness and self-centeredness when at least at a personal level, I became substantially less selfish as a person, because of Ayn Rand's writing.
Alternate perspective for you.
I am 40. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 18. I am American, and although my politics have changed many times, I was not of the left then and I am not of the left now.
When I first read it, I found the book moderately engaging, moderately but not especially convincing, and almost irredeemably stilted and broken for the 80 page Galt speech, which sat like a big fat poop in an otherwise serviceable, interesting story.
I believe I understood the core messages, about self interest being at the heart of all genuine action, and about the corrosive effects of moral hazard and distributed responsibility. I felt like these were reasonable positions if used carefully for understanding, but not as reasonable if taken to extremes as a way of life.
With time, I have come to view Atlas Shrugged with true and utter revulsion. What changed? Did I have a change of heart about the positions, or see something different in Rand's critique of communism? No, not really.
I learned about Rand as a person, and completely failed to separate the text from the author. Atlas Shrugged is the scummiest, cheatiest moral harangue in the English language, and I can *totally* see how the four or five people who end up in Galt's Gulch were the avatars of someone who would *totally* domineer a friend and mentee into cheating on his wife with her. It even has the gall to wrap most of this push in positional pseudo-logic. This is the work of someone who routinely browbeat other people into philosophical alignment.
Is it about communism and the dangers of losing one's personal compass in a collectivist setting? Yes. Is it more than one thousand pages of gaslighting scenario by a gaslighting cheater pushing hard to get her nasty way in life? Also yes. It sucks.
I remember reading news from Venezuela, a few years ago... I think there was a local Coca Cola factory that had to stop producing because they had no water (the water delivery system in the country has collapsed) and in response Maduro sentenced all employees to prison for "making Venezuela look bad" or something like that.
And I was like -- this sounds *exactly* like a chapter from Ayn Rand's books.
So I keep admiring her timeless descriptions of the villains... although I think the descriptions of heroes are silly, and Rand seems like an insufferable person in real life.
>It's also funny to me that the American left revile her for encouraging selfishness and self-centeredness when at least at a personal level, I became substantially less selfish as a person, because of Ayn Rand's writing.
That's an... interesting reason to defend her work. Reminds me of Asimov's quip about how a careful reading of The Bible is the best way to become an atheist.
It sounds like you wouldn't at all enjoy works like Moby Dick, Les Miserables, War and Peace (possibly), Cryptonomicon, or for that matter Gravity's Rainbow. Not to mention Stephenson's Quicksilver quadrology, lol. (I seem to recall Rand claimed Victor Hugo as a literary inspiration.) What I'm saying is there are plenty of classics written in this mode.
As to Atlas Shrugged, (spoilers) it portrays the decline and fall of America, possibly the world, and ends appropriately to this, though also with some hope. Well, some of the commenters here probably wouldn't consider it hope.
Good to know, thank you.
North Korea is still persisting with communism. The USSR collapsed because elites lost confidence in it. Bryan Caplan wrote about the risk of a persistent totalitarianism here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081221065734/http://www3.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/total4.doc
I am happy for you to go around declaring N. Korea as a success story of the non collapse of communism. Have at it.
I am going to guess you didn't read the paper and have no familiarity with Bryan Caplan if you thought I was pointing to North Korea as a good thing.
On what basis, or perhaps definition, do you consider North Korea to be either communist or Communist? To me it looks like a straight-up dictatorship with some weird trappings.
What communist country has not been a dictatorship?
This is what communism is. Always love the folk pretending like communism isn't a mass murdering ideology that eats its own. Oh, it only happens everywhere it's tried, but that's not true communism? Do tell!
What resonates in Ayn Rand's books with me, even though I feel like I've outgrown them a bit, is how emotionally certain parts resonate.
She is really good at portraying pettiness and smallness of character, and how disgusting it is. This visceral disgust at stupidity and petty power tripping, at bureaucracy and ita indignities - completely spot on.
Also the flipside, she caught the heroic spirit really well. The books moved me emotionally even if I disagree with things.
One of her biggest blindspots is that she never had children and somehow families never really factor anywhere in the books in any serious way and you can't build a life outlook without that small detail.
"This visceral disgust...at bureaucracy and [its]indignities...."
Yeah, it's pretty popular to point out the problems that bureaucracy brings, which generally involve treating things in the same way when it doesn't make sense to treat them in the same way.
What's completely ignored is that this is a natural consequence of making things work at scale, and the alternative is generally worse. Does a bureaucracy determining what is and isn't safe for me to eat bar me from things that are safe and enjoyable for me, and sometimes even get things wrong? Sure. But it also handles a huge and _very_ complex part of my life and its risks that would otherwise either eat up a lot of my time or leave me ill or dead.
It's nice to be able to go out to a shop, buy some random things sold as "food" and eat them without too much thought or investigation.
You're not wrong. There are parts of life that are managed by bureaucracy and shouldn't be, but that's not the point really.
Not every real-life "bureaucrat" has thag particular mentality. Maybe not even most. But if you've had your life managed by a bureaucracy, public or corporate, and you've found yourself falling through its cracks, with a nonstandard need that nobody cares to address, or faced with some @$$ who does not give one whit about your need....that's the kind of person I'm talking about.
May you never encounter people like that.
I have encountered those people (or, perhaps more accurately, those systems) and it is indeed frustrating when you fall into the cracks. But I also understand that it's a cost of bureaucracy that's counterbalanced by the ability to do things relatively inexpensively at scale.
That's not to say we shouldn't try to fix those things. But just as someone who's a cog in a machine doing the bureaucratic processing often is too stuck in their local process to to properly handle the exceptions that cause problems to certain individuals, those individuals often are also too stuck in contemplation of their particular use case to consider what the global effects on the system would be of changing the system to do the right thing for their case. Especially when that effect is "produce better results in all cases, but now our costs have increased by a thousand percent" or something like that.
On 7: I'd reframe "Deep roots matter but institutions matter too," and instead go with "Deep roots shape institutions." That's the big story of Chapter 4 of The Culture Transplant: it's entitled "The Migration of Good Government."
The one-stop shop on how migration shaped institutions over the last 500 years is James T. Ang's paper "Institutions and the Long-Run Impact of Early Development." He says:
"[K]nowledge transmission through migration has played a large part in improving institutional development," and "[T]he diffusion of knowledge or innovation through cross-border migration has been crucial for institutional development."
So on average, in the typical country, migration shapes institutions. Ang reports that ancestral experience with frontier technology in 1500AD alone (the "T" in a nation's SAT score) correlates about +0.6 with typical measures of institutional quality today, for instance.
Too big to ignore.
I should read your book before arguing with you, but it seems Alex was saying a lot of things like "well China has great deep roots but is pretty poor compared to Europe", or "both Koreas have about equal roots but the North is much poorer", and that the obvious explanation is that institutions are a product of both deep roots and luck (a few battles going the other way could have had the Nationalists winning in China), and so China and North Korea are underperforming their roots (and we would expect Chinese and NK immigrants to do well in Western countries). I think you also need something like this to make sense of Alex's Puerto Rico example; Puerto Rico has better institutions than you would expect from its roots because of the contigent fact that it was annexed by the US.
I would add East and West Germany to your natural experiments.
Puerto Ricans are American citizens; they live under American legal institutions by and large. For instance, they have a federal district court and can appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
The fact that Puerto Ricans can freely move within the U.S. also means that there's a limit to wage differences between Puerto Rico and the rest of U.S. territory--the Law of One Price kicks in to some extent and people migrate from low-wage to high-wage places, pushing up wages in the poorer place and reducing any remaining differential.
The same story applies even more strongly across U.S. states, since Deep Roots scores differ across U.S. states. Nowrasteh coauthored a paper, "The Deep Roots of Economic Development in the U.S. States," showing that even the two weaker Deep Roots measures did an OK job predicting productivity and institutional quality across U.S. states (he didn't interpret the results that way, but just check the numbers).
Nowrasteh also neglected in his U.S. states paper to check the "T" in the SAT score, he only checked the predictive power of the much weaker State History and Agricultural History scores across the 50 states. It's likely that the T would do better. [Caplan also left out the Tech History "T" in the statistical critique of Deep Roots he included in Open Borders, that was a big omission, I checked.]
And Cultural Transplant theory isn't a monocausal story-- the error of falling into communism, rare now, is another reason why institutions differ across countries. Cultural factors plausibly shape the tendency to fall into communism, but the tendency to fall into communism isn't most of the global story of institutional quality differences in any case.
In the specific cases of China and North Korea, it's plausible that "being close to Soviet military power" was an important risk factor for becoming communist, but that's far outside the scope of my book. It's wise to try to find out of most of the story, and leave exceptions to the rule to future work, preferably future work done by others.
Supply shocks can cause inflation even though inflation is mostly driven by money growth--and communism shocks can persistently shape institutions even though basic cultural transplant theory can explain most differences in log productivity across countries.
There are almost 200 countries in the world. We should look for testable theories that can explain most of the institutional differences across those countries. The error of communism explains at most a handful of those cases, time to work on explaining the rest.
How does IQ factor in here? Given that population IQs correlate with per capita GDP at about .8, that seems like the obvious factor to account for.
"both Koreas have about equal roots but the North is much poorer"
Well, much poorer _now._ The situation was reversed in the 1950s.
Re #4: the link you posted says the guy got 18 weeks jail. While that does not seem like enough, it's definitely a lot more than 'none.'
It also says suspended sentence…
I'd missed that bit. Damn.
Suspended sentence
I'd missed that bit. Though I am skeptical as to the man's chances of following through on his probation.
Sure, but I can't imagine that's why he was given a suspended sentence.
9. This case is weird on several levels. You cannot own culture and you cannot patent or trademark concepts. While any individual piece of clothing (including reproductions) can be owned the concept of a style of clothing cannot be.
Likewise, what damage are the Saami claiming here? You can't just sue people because you don't like how they portray you. Is the idea that they're owed money for the use of the concept of their culture? Nearly everything about that is wrong. I suspect this is a case they know they're going to lose but they thought it was a way to gin up support. Or maybe they want a friendly court to invent a new property right? Anyone know?
This is true, but mentioning it in Finnish politics gets you labeled with the usual nasty stuff. On the whole how indigenous people are defined in the EU seems a bit off. The Sami are considered the only native peoples of Europe while most populations are not considered to be indigenous to any place.
Maybe it will change as the arguments Sami put forth gets used by other cultures as well. Will be interesting to see how much for example greeks can claim from the use of their cultural property in games and movies.
But is it any more deranged that copyrighting a beat or a melody that's just a few bars long? There have been plenty of successful lawsuits over such small fragments.
There's enough derangement already in the idea of "intellectual property" that doing rent-seeking on a "cultural style" seems no less dodgy than much of the rest what goes on in that area.
If you made a game with characters copying the style of a famous fashion designer you would probably be sued. Apparently the claim is that the Saami own the rights to their traditional dress in the same way. I don’t know whether that is true but it is plausible.
A famous fashion designer is selling a product and you are potentially inflicting damages by inhibiting sales of their product. That isn't true here.
I am not a lawyer but I have the impression that one can own the rights to something even if one is not selling a product. People don’t sell everything they own the copyright to (or trademark or whatever).
Scott’s counterexamples are a bit silly. No one is saying you can’t wear Saami clothes or take a picture of yourself wearing them.
They also don't make much sense to me, unless the Saami are making video games featuring people wearing jeans and t-shirts or eating burgers. I guess they are already paying to buy the jeans they wear (if they are wearing jeans).
IIUC, you can't own trademark rights to an item unless you both are selling it and defend your rights in court.
OTOH, there's a comment about a deal with Disney, so perhaps they are selling it? And this suit would count as defending their rights in court. So maybe.
The article said that they have an agreement with Disney about depictions of Saami culture in Frozen. That suggests the legal claim is not completely frivolous at any rate.
If I were running Disney, I'd cultivate good relations ahead of time with reasonable people from whichever culture is being portrayed in their flagship animated films.
I once met the director of a Disney princess animated movie (not "Frozen"). To avoid charges of cultural appropriation, before the film was announced the directors traveled around the nonwhite region to be portrayed in their planned movie, meeting with prominent locals and asking them about their indigenous culture, traditions, and legends. This was both educational for the filmmakers and a good CYA step: They then appointed those locals whom they found helpful and friendly to their project's official cultural advisory board. So when the movie was announced, it already came with the blessing of an array of respected indigenous folklore experts (whom the filmmakers had chosen because they all got along), and thus it couldn't be harassed by the Woke looking for jobs writing notes.
This sounds like a lot of trouble, but it was a $100,000,000 project, so that kind of care is prudent. The movie turned out pretty good, largely avoided the usual cultural appropriation sniping, and was a hit at the box office.
Every culture features productive people and destructive people. So it's in the interest of big money filmmakers to cultivate the productive people ahead of time so they don't get the destructive people foisted upon them during a PR crisis.
Copying it exactly? Sure. But in that case the property rights reside with the designer. If these outfits were copies of a specific Saami outfit it would be different. But this is an attempt to copyright the concept of certain patterns, like copyrighting a certain shade of blue, which you can't do.
What?! That Hooloovoo lied to me!
> If you made a game with characters copying the style of a famous fashion designer you would probably be sued.
Fashion is literally a textbook example of something not subject to intellectual property rights. (The other standard example is recipes.)
Ok, fashion isn’t but design can be.
In the US, not exactly. Its complicated:
https://copyrightalliance.org/is-fashion-protected-by-copyright-law/
Just a type of dress or shirt based on the "cut" can't be copyrighted, but a specific pattern or logo can be (with limitations).
Right, my understanding is you could only be sued if you were using their actual trademark. you can "copy the style" all you want.
From Wikipedia:
"Although elements of fashion design copyright may be traced in Europe to as early as the 15th century,[1] as of 2016 most countries (including the United States and the United Kingdom) fashion design does not have the same protection as other creative works (art, film, literature, etc.), because apparel (clothes, shoes, handbags, etc.) are classified as "functional items", excluded from protection by copyright laws. This explains the success of the knockoff businesses to the detriment of both the established labels, as well as of emerging designers, the latter ones being especially damaged, because they rely on relatively few designs." ...
"There are some elements of protection of fashion design, with limited effectiveness. The copyright law covers creative elements of fashion designs, such as print patterns. Trademark law protects items with visibly displayed protected logos. Intellectual property laws protect "trade dress", which is an appearance of a product which uniquely identifies its source to the level of a trademark....
"In the European Union, the Creative Designs Directive and the European Designs Directive are in effect to protect new designs for three or five years."
No you wouldn't? It's basically parody.
No, copyrights last roughly 70 to 100 years (depending). Trademarks can last forever but don't cover clothing designs (as the name implies, they cover "trade marks" such as names and logos). In addition, copyrights have specific owners (not cultural groups).
I don't think it's that clear, and I don't think Scott's counter-point makes sense. Americans have tried very hard to sell t-shirts and jeans to the Saami (and everybody else) and it would be very strange to turn around and say that Americans are then mad about Saami wearing them. The Saami, on the other hand, have made no explicit effort to popularise their clothing styles more widely.
The clothing is explicitly *for sale* in the final fantasy store.
If we use a certain brand, that brand is generally owed returns (or at least permission) if used in a fictional environment - Square Enix couldn't just start selling Nike shoes as cosmetics. The US conception of intellectual property ownership is broadly restricted to individuals and companies, but there's no fundamental reason it needs to be this way. European law already clearly recognises geographic and cultural rights when it comes to calling certain foods certain names (champagne being the most famous example).
All legal claims need to be between entities. That can mean people or it can mean corporations or it can mean governments. But you cannot, for example, sue a mountain. Or the concept of rain. Likewise you cannot sue a culture. Giving cultures such rights would require either incorporating them somehow or developing an entirely novel form of law from the ground up.
Also, while you can't put Nike shoes in the game, you can absolutely put in stylish shoes that look suspiciously like Nikes. Because nike has a right to its brand, not the concept of its shoes or their styles. Of course, we could massively extend IP in this way. That would lead to Disney being able to sue cartoons about anthropomorphic mice. Which doesn't seem like a good outcome.
Champagne is just a labeling issue restriction. I can make wine from the same grapes with the same process and sell it in Europe without issue. I just can't call it champagne. So the analogy here would be if the Saami objected not to the clothes but some claim the clothings were manufacturing in their territory. Which I don't think has been made.
Paragraph 1: I actually agree with you on the entities point - the idea is certainly not workable with a vague collection of ideas/people, but that is the case here, right? The complaint is from the Saami Council to Square Enix Corporation, both with clear governance rules and memberships.
https://www.saamicouncil.net/en/the-saami-council - for example, the Disney precedent referenced was between Disney and the Saami parliaments and Saami council (https://www.samediggi.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Agreement_WDAS_SAMI.pdf).
The structure here is a bit different than the tribal governments in the US and Canada, but all are well-defined entities which are widely considered legitimate representatives by the people they claim to represent (it's not a 100% hit rate, but I do think it's a reasonable statement to make).
Paragraph 3: As above, I do recognise the EU rules around naming are just that - around naming, and that this goes beyond that.
Paragraph 2: I suspect neither of us are international IP lawyers, but I'm not sure it's quite as clear as you state. For example, Nike has indeed successfully sued people for using the concept and styles of its shoes (https://www.inverse.com/input/style/nike-continues-its-battle-against-bootleggers-by-suing-drip-creationz), but there are brand-specific considerations here.
Pertinently, American fair use law is extremely loose compared (for fashion in particular, you can just copy a design in the US and it's completely legal).
European law grants substantially more rights to fashion designers (and in fact supercedes member country rights or lack thereof): https://fashionindustrylaw.com/2021/08/19/how-the-european-union-tries-to-protect-fashion-designs/
Albeit I concede that it's not clear to me that the particular cases which have been ruled on cover this one.
I don't want to come out too strongly here; I think this is a grey area under European law (and the question of whether it 'should' be allowed is even vaguer, and my personal inclinations are generally anti-copyright), but I don't think it's quite as obvious/absurd as the consensus had it.
Yeah, I'm not an IP lawyer. But I think we're broadly agreed then that the case largely lacks merit because they're effectively inventing a new right. But that judicially inventing rights is a thing that happens and not totally impossible here. One that is in any case bad. By this standard you could have France claiming that royal blue is property of France and all that.
Didn't all the whales in the world once sue George Bush?
Anyone can file a suit on behalf of anything and anyone. It just might be dismissed or lost. Since Bush is not in whale jail I assume the case didn't go through.
No, there was an attempt by an environmentalist group to file a suit on behalf of the global cetacean community, but it was thrown out of court on the grounds that there was no legal basis for allowing a non-human animal to sue a human.
For everyone's reference here is a discussion of the law in the US: https://copyrightalliance.org/is-fashion-protected-by-copyright-law/
I dont know what jurisdiction this case would fall into so the above may not apply.
Thanks for the source.
Scott mentions universities or companies claiming the ownership of IP produced by their employees. I think that requires either that the IP was what the employer was paying them to produce or a contractual agreement giving the employer the rights, probably in most cases both. The people who produced the IP embedded in traditional Saami clothing were not being paid to do so (by whom?) and had signed no such contract.
10. As marriage rates approach 1 hypergamy necessarily reaches 0 because social status is relative and so any hypergamous pairing must be definitionally matched by an equal and opposite hypogamous pairing. The only way this wouldn't happen is if the hypogamous remained single. As the actual rate was until recently between 70-80% (and they include non-traditional marriages in the modern statistics so they'd still be high) you'd expect hypergamous effects in the general population to be small.
The study also finds a modest hypergamous effect and points out that women tend to value status more as an explanation. So what this study really says is that women do tend to marry up. But only slightly.
The big point (which was never controversial to me) is that men and women do not act significantly differently in this regard. Both try to marry up, both use attraction/social skills to do so, and both marry down especially to attractive partners. The status for other traits trade that's usually seen as just happening in women actually happens in both genders. In other words, what's wrong with "women all want to date men who are better than them socially while a man will be happy with a hot store clerk" is not that it describes female behavior incorrectly. It's that it describes MALE behavior incorrectly.
Yes, everyone wants a high status attractive partner with some gender variation in status/attractiveness preference (men prefer attractiveness, women prefer status). But, importantly, both genders value both. Since everyone does this and the measures are relative and most people find partners there's a slight hypergamous effect in most times, implying that women are generally slightly more successful in achieving their partner preferences than men. But only slightly.
However, the paper says the dating market is not necessarily assortative where 1% marries 1% and so on. In fact one thing the paper finds is something of a reversion to the mean effect. The higher status or lower status you are the more likely you are to marry hypergamous or hypogamously respectively. In other words, most very high status men and women marry very attractive but somewhat lower status people. Women do this less but still do it a fair amount.
Basically, most pairings are unequal but only slightly unequal and while women are more likely to date up plenty of women date down. And men exhibit the same behaviors, preferring to date up rather than down. Put another way, everyone's trying to get the most prestigious/attractive partner and almost everyone manages to get a partner roughly equal to them (say, within the same decile). And within this band it's fairly common for both men and women to be the lower status partner. But it's uncommon for either gender to marry outside this range. (Though increasingly common at the extremes.)
The incel types have some truths that (at least some) feminists don't want to admit. Like the fact that women clearly value different things in mate selection even cross-culturally. Or that there's clear gender valence to certain behaviors that seem to be human universals. But they take it waaay too far and end up producing some pretty bad advice.
I'm not sure what study you're referring to. The one I've seen was about matrilocal clans where women were also the economic breadwinners and divorce was allowed. What was happening is that women who couldn't earn enough to support a husband were being shut out of reproductive opportunities while some women were being serial monogamists. Which fits the story of stratification causing a lot of men to not reproduce but in reverse. And likewise we know this is how people actually thought in historical Europe (unable to support a wife etc).
The issue there is the idea that's being driven primarily by instinctual female choice. In a direct, literal sense it is driven by women's choice. But it's women choosing to prioritize men who can provide for them in a world where their opportunities for earnings are low. As these pressures reduced (in the modern world) and women got more choice you saw more men (and often less women) reproducing. Which is the opposite of what you'd expect if it was driven by something genetic.
I'm simply commenting on what the paper says. Though it's entirely possible the last two centuries in England were notably peaceful and less likely to winner take all genetic lotteries.
Hypergamy reaches 0 for marriage rate -> 1 only in a closed society with single marriage/person. For example, you can have all women marry only richest 50% of men, each of those men marrying twice over their lifetimes, and the poorest 50% of men importing foreigners to marry. Then 100% of people are married, with massive hypergamy for women.
In the case you're proposing hypergamy would still approach zero if the bottom half married as well. If they didn't marry at all then yes that would show hypergamy. But it would show up in the statistics in ways it doesn't seem to.
At any rate, England only got no fault divorce last year (with a loosening of standards in 1969). And only started to see major migration in the 1990s. So if you want to look at discontinuities that's where they'd be.
Christian patriarchy was pretty favourable for subpar men. As the female freedom is getting expressed fully since just the last decade (if feminist theorists may agree), we perhaps haven't seen anything of hypergamy.
18. The dating experience is not primarily a matter of how pleasant dating is. That's not even a major concern. Many people do not date solely for how pleasant or unpleasant dating is. In fact a lot of courtship rituals are distinclty unpleasant for everyone involved.
Your theory is based on a gender conflict lens that simply doesn't bear out in such simplistic fashion. That is, you assume men and women seek to maximize advantages against each other. But this simply isn't how it works and it fails to explain behaviors that neither gender wants or so on.
Also, your female friend is ignoring female agency. The idea that it's vague accretion of sexist norms that prevent women from even communicating what they want at scale is a handwave-y excuse. What it really is is that all female coalitions are really, really hard to put together and keep together. There's an extremely strong incentive for women to defect and for men to form counter-coalitions. Any durable female coalition then needs to both consistently defeat male countercoalitions and severely punish members to prevent defection.
The more normal state in the modern US is social cliques (social coalitions) are multigender and gender norms are set by intracoalitional politics. Which is why you see the opposite of what you'd expect in a simplistic class conflict model. Groups that are almost exclusively female tend to have the most pro-female norms. Because the group is "voting" (in a metaphorical sense) on internal standards and women have more votes.
Put another way, do you think the campus feminist group (majority women) has more male determined dating norms than the football club (majority male)? That's what your theory would predict.
If you want to see what it's like to have a society with true gender war cliques you can look at South Korea. There the two years men send in military service (plus some other factors) effectively turned into a pressure cooker where large groups of young men and women simply do not like each other. Enough that politicians promise things like abolishing the ministry of gender equity because a significant portion of the male voting base actively wants that and will make it their primary issue.
The Korean gender issue is interesting. Is there an English news article or something elaborating on it?
It's hard to find good ones because there's a strong incentive to gloss over feminists' political mistakes and to not take the men's movement seriously among the type of people who write articles. (Or alternatively, a strong incentive to do the opposite for manosphere types).
For example, the first three articles I found on Google all failed to mention conscription. Which is a major issue. This (https://www.cfr.org/blog/south-korean-elections-gender-conflict-and-future-women-voters) article goes on to state that women's power is only growing in Korea... which was a bad take at the time and looks quite naive (or perhaps willfully ignorant) in the face of the victory of President Yoon. If it makes you feel any better articles in Korean are also likely to be highly partisan.
The very rough version is that South Korean politics were traditionally fairly regional and class based. But among young people we see increasing gender partisanship with women being liberal and men conservative. Why this is is a matter of debate. I have my personal opinions but that's really all they are.
Thanks! I likewise found googled articles in English to be lacking. I found a YouTube video in Korean with English subtitles that at least shows the male side but some of his arguments were vague too so I’m not convinced either way.
There’s probably an interesting comparison between US and Korean gender issues but I don’t think I’ll be able to see it without learning Korean and going there.
I read an article a while back about the effect on dating of m/f ratios in colleges. The claim was that in a college with a high m/f ratio, the pattern favored women, with a low ratio, men. It was a while ago, but I think what they were measuring was long term vs short term relationships, on the theory that men were more in favor of the short term.
Yes, I think I've read that study (and I too forget the exact name). I actually think the short vs long term assumption is rather flawed. Iirc they didn't support it and just took it as an assumption. But it seems to be the opposite is instead the case.
Extreme patriarchies are not characterized by highly promiscuous women or short term relationships. Gender equity (meaning relatively powerful women) is not characterized by extremely strong marriage norms or a tendency away from female promiscuity. It's actually the opposite. More gender equal societies are more promiscuous. (While you could argue hypothetically that patriarchies do not satisfy male preferences as much as gender equality this would take a good deal of proving.) And it's not hard to spin up any number of plausible stories about why this is.
A couple links I ran across recently:
https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/extractive-polygyny-and-evolved-psychological
https://ideas.repec.org/p/ide/wpaper/9118.html
Interesting. Yes, this is another thing. The idea that men through much of history weren't resource seeking in marriage is very wrong.
My hunch is that extreme patriarchies are not great at satisfying the preferences of men in general. Instead I would expect them to satisfy the preferences of high-status patriarchs (clan leaders, clergy, owners of family businesses etc.), at the expense of women, children and most men. I don’t have the evidence to be sure, though.
I think we should consider the possibility that there are at least two kinds of patriarchal societies. One is the sense in which you are using it, where one or a few patriarchs control all of society. I would agree that such a society would be harmful to low status men as well as most women.
Another way that patriarchy could exist is if most men were socially equal and all men were elevated above women (legally, for instance). In such a society, some men will be low status (criminals, disabled, etc.) but most of them could be high enough status to affect norms. I would argue that the 19th century US may satisfy this criteria.
23. The issue to me seems to be that you (and much of the rationalist community) seem to be invested in the idea that IQ is not subject to diminishing returns. That it is subject to them is indeed a pretty common finding.
As I read it the Swedish study doesn't show that income and IQ are uncorrelated. It shows that it strongly decorrelates as IQ grows. In other words, 120 IQ people can make more money than 135 IQ people pretty regularly. But both are highly likely to make more money than 100 IQ people. Basically, that intelligence is subject to diminishing income returns.
Which certainly makes sense. I don't think there's almost anyone dumb on the Forbes 500 but it's also not a list of the 500 most geniuses. Lots of those work in physics labs making nice six figure salaries.
You're mistaken. The common finding is that the relationship between IQ and numerous outcomes of interest is linear and nonlinearities fail to replicate or have a substantial basis that leads to issues that are typically found on the left tail. With income, you will often have a weaker relationship at the *lower* end due to the number of people not working at all. Incidentally, IQ and unemployment are negatively correlated.
Click the links for #23 to see multiple contradictions of the idea that there are diminishing returns.
Your claim is too vague for me to be correct or incorrect about it. I made a specific claim that can be tested: income correlates with intelligence but is subject to diminishing returns. You vaguely waving at stats that are mostly not addressing this point doesn't really convince me. If you do have specific data about this I'd be interested to see it (and I've already read #23).
If this is your comment after reading #23, then I can only assume you aren't including reading the linked posts. Click them, read the posts. This is addressed.
For a classic read that seems highly relevant to your other comments in this thread, check out https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/
If you're talking about your posts then you assume incorrectly. If you're asking me to read the citations then I can look at them eventually. I have read your blog posts which are largely speculation about why this isn't true (and even then you hedge "and if it is true then it's probably a special property of Sweden.") It's a good bit of interesting conjecture (and I do mean that, it's interesting). But not anywhere near dispositive. If you want to do the actual research I'd definitely read it.
I've already read about the phenomenon in the blog post. It's highly relevant but it supports my position, not yours. If you imagine two correlated traits, intelligence and income, then you'd expect the highest incomes to be less intelligent per Thrasymachus's graph.
I grew up on a street with 5 families that sent all their kids to Ivy League and equivalents. Everyone knew which sibling would go to Harvard or Cal Tech and which ones would go to the lesser colleges like Cornell and Brown. I only have a 125 IQ and they treated me as an equal. The Harvard and Cal Tech siblings never would play sports with us and were always doing something in their rooms. Obviously those people have had good careers but I have friends that are more successful with IQs around 120…think people that got engineering degrees from state flagships that have people skills.
It's hard to overstate how irrelevant such anecdotes are when there are multiple replicated studies showing otherwise.
You don’t think there is some point in which a high IQ person is so content to work on their science fair project that they fail to develop people skills necessary to excel in corporate America?? Maybe in Japan one doesn’t need people skills but in America they are necessary.
It might not even be people skills that are lacking, just interest in going into corporate America and making money. The really smart, really interested in the subject person might prefer to go into academia and/or research, rather than go to work for a company working out how to get sugar to stick to doughnuts.
I have worked in Japan for two decades; what most refer to as "people skills" are if anything _more_ necessary here than in North America.
But perhaps we're talking about something very different when you say "people skills." Elon Musk clear has what's necessary to succeed in corporate America; would you say he has good "people skills"?
A replicated study in the social sciences? Huh. I'd say I'd weigh one replicated study at about 3.5 anecdotes. More or less.
The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdata." The plural of "anecdata" is "data."
Yes, this roughly matches my experience. Moreover, we have heaps of evidence that being intelligence anti-correlates or is orthogonal to certain other skills. For example, since age of virginity loss anti-correlates with intelligence this implies one of two scenarios:
1.) Intelligence and social skills are uncorrelated or anti-correlated.
2.) Nerds can easily have sex but simply choose not to.
I find 1 is much closer to my experience.
Absolutely nothing of the sort is implied. As studies of the extremely gifted like the SMPY and Terman's kids showed, social skills clearly aren't lacking in the gifted. #24 is sitting right there with more than enough references to satisfactorily show that intelligence and social skills are more likely *positively* correlated.
The fact that intelligence is negatively correlated with unnecessary risk-taking, rates of sexual maturation, and trouble-making is a far more powerful explanation for the late loss of virginity among the highly intelligent.
You are simply arguing for position 2: that nerds can have sex but simply choose not to. This is the thrust of your entire second paragraph.
All I said was if a population isn't doing something it's either because they lack the ability or have the ability and choose not to do it. I can't think of any other scenarios. I suppose you could argue that social skills and sexual success aren't correlated but you'd have a hell of a time proving that one.
Erusian: "since age of virginity loss anti-correlates with intelligence this implies one of two scenarios: 1.) Intelligence and social skills are uncorrelated or anti-correlated."
Cremieux: "#24 is sitting right there with more than enough references to satisfactorily show that intelligence and social skills are more likely *positively* correlated."
The phrase "social skills" is too vague. I don't think at all that the "social skills" implied by #24 are the same skills required to sleep with girls.
I don't think nerds "lack" innate social skills more than others, but simply have different interests that makes them interact less with their peers. Although I guess you may say that enjoying social interaction is a part of the skill...
Aren’t Ivy League lacrosse players more successful than other Ivy Leaguers?? Obviously they have the lowest IQs of all of the Ivy Leaguers while having the best social skills.
Oh, and this is very important—these weren’t legacy Ivy Leaguers. These were all first generation Ivy Leaguers. My anecdotal limited experiences with legacy Harvard leads me to believe they have better people skills. And my anecdotal experience with legacy MIT leads me to believe they will end up at Cal Tech with minimal people skills. And lacrosse players generally have better people skills than other Ivy Leaguers…along with lower IQs. ;)
I think this is probably true.
(I'm working from vague memories and inferences so it might not be totally accurate)
Gregory Cochran thinks there're two ways of being intelligent.
One is just having a low mutational load (i.e. a good quality genome) so your whole body is just better built. You're taller, more symmetrical etc. and have a better brain.
The other is optimising the actual genes for intelligence (i.e. genotype). But this involves making trade offs with other attributes like health and other cognitive abilities (like social skills).
All exceptional bright people are type 2 (at least to some degree), which is why nerds are stereotyped as unhealthy/unattractive/awkward etc. (see also Mort Goldman from Family Guy)
Or:
3.) "Social skills", at least what most would call "social skills", are not the problem. It's something else, something jocks have and nerds lack. Such as a good jawline, a deep voice, muscles that make your posture and gait more attractive, facial muscles that make your smiles more charming, and other such things. It's misleading to call these thing "social skills".
Or, in other words,
3.) Nerds are physically unattractive.
This would answer the objection of Cremieux, who said:
"As studies of the extremely gifted like the SMPY and Terman's kids showed, social skills clearly aren't lacking in the gifted. #24 is sitting right there with more than enough references to satisfactorily show that intelligence and social skills are more likely *positively* correlated."
If you are a nerdy (male) teenager, there are a lot of things that are more interesting than being in a relationship with one of the girls in your class, or than going to noisy bars and being with drunk girls.
The second part, yes, but I don't think the first is true. Rather, there are other things that aren't quite as interesting as being in a relationship with a girl(*) in your class, but which they know they can achieve much easier and with less risk of painful rejection.
* I think you left out a "male" between "nerdy" and "teenager".
Another anecdote here. My Dad lives a couple of blocks from the Stanford Campus. Out of everyone I know, Stanford Chemistry professors and the like are clearly the smartest, and obviously they earn far less than Apple engineers hedge fund owners etc. Also, it seems like most people have not taken an IQ test, and they don't admit to being part of a study. I don't follow the literature, but I'd guess that it would be tricky to get a good sample. You have to get a bunch of adults IQ scores and then compare their net worth? Or do you compare income? Ideally you would take a bunch of people who did really innovative and interesting things and then compare their IQ scores, but good luck getting these people to participate in your study.
I suspect that there simply aren't enough academics to meaningfully change the averages. For every tenured university professor, there are probably 100 equally-high-IQ Ph.D's who flamed out of the academic career track. So if you look at the cohort of 140+ IQ people, the statistics are going to be dominated by the 90+% who bailed out and went into industry.
And for anecdata on the other side, look at Steve Hsu. He's a tenured physics professor at U Mich but still managed to found a software company that he sold for 9 figures. And while having 100m is probably on the high end, I suspect a large % of top-tier STEM professors either have patents or consulting deals that earn them significant money. I bet that if you looked at every Stanford/MIT/Caltech CS professor then you'd be surprised by their average net worth.
I tend to agree with what you say here. I was thinking more like IQ 160, which is supposedly rare to the tune of 1 in 30k. You would need a lot of data to draw any solid conclusions, but perhaps the data is out there. I think Stanford professor types probably have surprisingly high net worth, and much of that is because houses in Palo Alto were expensive and then shot up in price. Huge netowork effect
Okay, but do you realize the Swedish study is wrong? And that its incorrect findings are contrary to most other studies?
And the obsession people have with trying to prove that IQ has diminishing returns is really weird, because even if the Swedish study weren't fatally flawed, so what? IQ still largely explains why there are haves and have nots.
Maybe people (the people celebrating this paper on twitter, not necessarily you) think it matters because it proves that billionaires/muti-millionaires didn't "earn" their wealth, but even if Elon Musk were literally the most intelligent man in hsitory, nobody who currently supports wealth taxes would abandon their support in light of this fact (so whether this wealth was genuinely 'earnt' is irrelevant and used only when it supports their existing position). And, of course, there are traits about a person beyond their intelligence that explain wealth differences.
Eugene Volokh has an over 200 IQ and Musk always says we should have fewer lawyers. So instead of building a rocket ship Volokh is deciphering an over 200 year old document while sitting in an office on a bucolic college campus.
In order for me to realize that I'd have to be convinced it's true which, as far as I've read, it isn't. If you want to make that case I'm willing to listen. Likewise most of what I've read does show diminishing returns to IQ at the high end but I can't say I'm well read on the subject. If you can show it doesn't I'd be interested in the papers.
I agree it doesn't really support progressive political ends and that this was a thing people were talking about on Twitter in those terms. After all, the correlation implies that current economy is mostly meritocratic except at the very top where you get some people choosing to be Wall Street traders and others choosing to be cancer researchers. But certainly both are smarter than the average person on the street and the whole "lazy do nothings with undeserved wealth" narrative is contradicted.
I suspect pretty much everybody who has commented, pro or con, upon the Swedish IQ vs. income graph has an IQ of at least 120 and thus is an interested party in the debate. This is a pretty funny situation in that the usual solution for interestedness -- find disinterested experts to judge -- doesn't work in this case because the disinterested -- those below a 120 IQ -- are uninterested in the yada yada of this egghead debate.
If this is true you should most strictly interrogate any conclusions that are psychologically pleasant to high IQ people. Because those are the conclusions all involved are likely to want to reach for self-serving reasons.
My introspective analysis says that there *should* be diminishing returns. Once I got the job I wanted, continuing to fight for a job I didn't want that paid more seemed like a bad decision, so I didn't do it. I *could* have opted to become a manager track person, but explicitly chose to remain a systems analyst. The additional money wasn't worth it to me.
OTOH, there's a fair chance that this is based around something other than IQ. Some other personality traits. But every really intelligent person I've known (that hasn't had extreme bad luck) has been successful, but has not WANT to devote his life to "the company". Many have wanted to devote their life to "their art" (and so do I, if you count programming)). Sometimes the art was math, sometimes something else. So it seems to me quite reasonable that there should be a "point of diminishing returns". Some people really want to be extremely wealthy or powerful. For those people the "point of diminishing returns" should be a lot further up the scale, at the point where luck becomes dominant (because everyone you're competing with also took all the reasonable steps).
I hate “paradoxes” like the one in 32 because the confusion is just due to the lack of clarity in the question. When discussing the weight of potatoes no one fails to include the water weight. So the question/answer is just false as written.
I don't understand where “failing to include the water weight” comes into it? If the dry mass stays the same and only water is lost, then the 1 kg of non-water is now balanced against 49 kg of water rather than 99 kg of water. The 100 kg and 50 kg figures aren't excluding the water.
Ah you are right I must be tired. I think I was confusing this with a similar “drying” based paradox I was presented once.
It says it weighs 100kg. And the bag could weigh 100 pounds or 100 kilotons, it's not relevant to the ratio between starting and end weights.
This particular one confused me for longer than necessary because I'm not familiar with actual potatoes halving their weight overnight, despite running a permanent dehumidifier and sometimes storing potatoes near it. Whereas (to take another recent-years popular math example) it's very easy to mentally model a pond being overgrown with lilypads. I guess this is the downside with Word Problems More Relatable: they introduce verbal cruft which sometimes obscures the mathematics, rather than clarifying them. The "paradox" makes a lot more sense if framed differently, or for example the illustration included on Wikipedia. It's just the "story" that sucks.
(And this feels weird for me to write, as a wordcel who sucks at math-stuff generally. Try as you may, you just can't get away from mathematics...but it's easier to deal with uncut sometimes.)
I'm used to math problems having no relation to the real world - no, potatoes are not 98% water, they're somewhere around 75% if raw and no potato dries out that fast in reality, else you couldn't store them 😁
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3650506/
"Raw potatoes contain 79% water. As one would expect, the water content of boiled potatoes is similar to raw potatoes at 77%. Cooking in a dry environment reduces moisture content but not always as much as one would expect. For example, the water content of baked potatoes is 75% and that of microwaved potatoes is 72%. Frying causes the highest level of water loss, resulting in a 39% water loss in French fries to as little as a 2% water loss in potato chips."
I think the problem is that as wordcels, we pay attention to the *description* in the problem and get tricked by that, whereas the shape rotators just regard all that as meaningless blah and strip out the math problem bare and solve that 😁
I am now haunted by the mental comparison of excellent chips - fluffy inside, crisp outside! - having way __less__ water than equivalent crisps. Which are, you know, dry and brittle and crunchy. O water, where art thou?
There probably would be a market for such theoretical mathematical InstaDry Potatoes(tm), think of the tuber-based jerky options! Goes well with Spherical Cow Steaks in a vacuum diet...but, yes, I think even if there's often potential quibbles with common wordy math problems, it's usually not quite so much a reach.
I think the difference is water loss, in that chips are cut thicker and so have more water to lose - think of the steam when deepfrying! - than crisps, which are sliced thinly and intended to be drier and crispier. As you say, a good chip should be fluffy inside, crisp outside, and be hot and a little steamy when bitten into. Not too soggy and greasy from soaking up too much fat, not mushy inside or half-raw.
Now you have me thinking of proper chip shop chips! 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cdeYq3QtOY
Even with the caveats others have pointed out, i agree that the issue is a poorly worded scenario, not definitely a paradox.
#16 Masks obviously work! All things being equal % below poverty level is the most important factor for a population and so that means Florida could have a Covid death rate similar to North Carolina’s had DeSantis been pro-masking like Cooper.
"Musk’s two highest-profile Twitter changes - firing lots of people and selling bluechecks - seem to be going well and even getting adopted by other companies."
Regarding "selling bluechecks" via the Twitter Blue service, this summary is by Will Gittins, writing for the website for Diario AS, a Spanish sports-focused newspaper, in early February 2023:
https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-many-people-have-subscribed-to-elon-musks-8-twitter-blue-service-so-far-n/
"The ‘Twitter Blue’ premium service was hoped to be a major money-spinner for the company, but internal documents seen by The Information found that just 290,000 people have signed up so far. Around 62% of the global subscriber total are based in the United States, but this still equates to just 180,000 people [in the US]. This is less than 0.2% of the platform’s monthly active users. ...
"In the aftermath of Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter, there's "roughly $1 billion of interest that accrues on the debt [financing portion of that purchase] each year. QZ estimates that existing Twitter Blue subscriptions will bring in around $27.8 million per year. This means that, to cover the $1 billion per year in interest payments, Twitter would need 10.4 million subscribers to Twitter Blue. It is currently 10.1 million short of that figure."
TBD ... maybe this will ramp up if there are yet more compelling advantages of subscriptions (or disadvantages of non-subscription membership), or from the business equivalent ("Twitter Verification for Organizations"). Or perhaps even more consequential than subscriptions, advertising revenue turns around, or other revenue sources emerge. But right now there's still a large mountain to climb, even just to meet debt service requirements, much less reduce or turn around any operational losses on top of that.
As for the "firing lots of people," perhaps the jury is still out on that one, and we'll need a longer time to assess its full impacts?
Strictly on the basis of potential impact on the platform's day-to-day operations, according to Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer in early March 2023, there have been at least six "high-profile service outage[s] at Twitter this year." See their post for links to descriptions of each incident:
https://www.platformer.news/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-down
However, I don't know how this recent frequency, nor the severity levels or lengths of these outages, might compare to pre-Musk-acquisition periods with higher staffing levels. Without some baseline, this list in itself isn't a clear indication that the staff cuts have degraded service.
Nor have I looked into to what extent the deep staff cuts at Twitter have been proportioned across staff most closely involved with day-to-day operations versus 'everything else,' although it's reasonable to assume cuts were considerably deeper within the latter category.
If the average laid off employee was making $150,000 in total compensation (which I think is fairly conservative for *total* compensation), that equates to $750,000,000 a year in savings. That nearly covers the $1b/year in debt payments.
If Twitter was approximately breaking even before, they may be doing so now as well.
Very hard to tell with all the approximations we have to do, but it's not outside of the possibility.
I doubt Twitter will ever permanently crash, although I'm also skeptical it will become a money machine short of the Fed doing super-low interest rates again. Musk has a lot of money, and he can float Twitter for a long time.
Could well be.
This is from November 2022, so a lot may have changed since then. But back then, Musk had about $20 billion in still-unpledged Tesla shareholdings. "If he pledged it as collateral, rather than selling it outright, it'd bring about $5B."
https://twitter.com/aronro/status/1589069336396042240
Here's a look at Twitter's historical annual net profits and losses in pre-Musk years, to give some ballpark sense of how long that $5 to $20 billion might last in "floating" Twitter, *if* historical trends held. (Obviously, the Musk consortium purchase, that $1B in annual debt service, some fleeing advertisers, savings from major layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, and more, make it more difficult to forecast future trends.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/
It doesn't need to be a money machine. As long as it gets to the point that it isn't bleeding money, the fact that Musk gets to tweet whatever he wants without ever getting banned is worth it alone (and I mean that in a strictly financial sense).
Yes, that may well have been a key motivation for him.
A similar point also made here by Andrew Prokop in November 2022, within a longer thread on Twitter's viability, post-Musk-acquisition:
https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1596906420561383424
"If Twitter remains a highly influential communication platform (the global town square) that he gets to run as he sees fit (meaning, not in an overly "woke" way), and he manages to stanch the financial bleeding (big TBD on that), I think that's a success for him."
Just a heads up—Taibbi got a Substacker named Gene Frenkle permanently banned and deleted from Substack for publishing the post, “Matt Talibbani Wages Jihad on the Truth and Me!” So Substack will do the bidding of their biggest authors and censor other authors.
I never thought of selling blue checks as being a large revenue stream for Twitter. It seemed more like a cheap way to do content moderation and bot screening. At $0/each, you can afford infinite bots to run around harassing people. At >$5/each, you're not going to bother because the benefits of >1 account don't manifest until you've spent millions.
Plus it's cheap and easy to just take people's money, versus the old manual process of figuring out whether they're significant enough to deserve the blue check. They may be saving as much money by scrapping the extra unnecessary jobs of manual reviewers as they're making from the new paradigm.
And since blue check comments float to the top, it's fine if bots shout into the void at the bottom of a 3 mile scroll nobody will ever see. It really is a smart piece of systems engineering.
If the account belongs to someone famous, a $5 investment can absolutely pay off. Remember when someone made a fake bluecheck account for Eli Lilly and made their stock price dip a few percent? Or think about those scams that pop up periodically - someone hacks a celebrity's Twitter account, tweets out "I'm investing in ScamCoin and it's going to the moon, click here for free coins" and steals all the investments.
Selling blue checks doesn't remove the need for a human to verify the person is who they say they are, and could actually increase demand since you now have more check marks to verify. It might help against common-or-garden spam where you just want to get an ad on front of as many eyeballs as possible, but I would expect ordinary spam filters already do pretty well against that.
But for some uses of a bot, $12/mo (or what ever it is) is worth it. If you build a bot to scam people out of money, having that blue check mark makes you look more trust worthy so you can more effectively scam people out of money.
My main takeaway from Twitter Blue is reading threads is a lot more annoying with Blue users given priority and crowding out higher quality content. The blue prioritized replies are not SO bad that I want to install a Chrome extension to automatically filter it out. In some ways it would be better if the replies were even worse, instead of a middle ground where it's not always terrible so I can't just prefilter them by default.
Kind of reminds me of a lot of the Amazon store cranking up the ads lately. It doesn't matter how specifically I am searching for a brand and model number, I'm gonna have to wade through oceans of sponsored results to get to the thing I actually want. But I can't just block all the sponsored results because so many products are sponsored, sometimes that IS what I'm looking for.
For me, the experience of using twitter has gotten worse in a number of small ways. The ads are worse - just junk products or scammy get rich quick things. Its used to be higher quality brands like Nike, Apple, etc. I know they all pulled from the platform intentionally, but to me that signals 1) twitter wasn't a great driver of revenue and 2) the ad buy price is much lower now so these tiny joke companies can buy up the inventory. Neither bodes well for the business. Also it seems like there are ads ever 2 posts these days instead of every 4 or 5.
I also have noticed small quality of life bugs/changes that are juts annoying. The promoted trends are of lower quality or the associated content isn't relevant. On the iPad app, at least, opening the app doesn't trigger a refresh of tweets, you have to manually request it by pulling down the list. There have been others that I can't think of now.
Is all of this because of the lay offs, i dont know. But its very naive for people to say "well they laid off 5000 people and everything seems fine". Yeah the previous regime wasn't really doing anything good with those people, but there is now way for the public to know what its like inside the company. There have been many reports from insiders that the systems are just hanging on and are very hard to update because of how many people have left.
Also on this, it doesn't seem to me at all obvious that "Facebook thinks your business model is good enough to copy" is actually a vote of confidence - I think a lot of people see both Twitter and Facebook as currently flailing and (possibly) failing.
Strong agree. I think Facebook is currently far more sound, but with worse trending and a high probability of completely failing in the next five to ten years. Twitter may plod along for a long time if Musk is willing to hold it.
More realistically, Facebook will end up bottoming out (culturally irrelevant, but still around) like MySpace did. MySpace is totally still there, it's just not what it used to be and not relevant to the zeitgeist.
You can't just directly compare pre- and post-Musk outage levels anyway, even if you had internal information about things that almost broke, or did break but not in an easily user-visible way, and not even if you had cost-to-fix data for all of that.
Adding resilience to large, complex IT systems is difficult, and it's often even more difficult to figure out the cost-benefit ratio of that resilience. The payback may come only long after the work was done, and that payback can be invisible if you're not looking for it. (Most developers, when they add a new feature without too much difficulty and it works without too much debugging, don't think about how much that is to do with decisions made a year ago by other developers designing the codebase who may no longer even be present at the company. It's easy to see when bad code is causing you problems; it's not so easy to see when good code is making your life easier.)
One way you can get an idea of how well a system is designed is to fire almost all your staff and see how long you can continue while putting in minimum effort. If the system is well designed, this can easily be *years.*
All good points, Curt. Thanks.
Yet one more factor, beyond (if I'm understanding your reply correctly) how robustly pre-Musk-era developers built various parts of the Twitter ecosystem and what code changes improving or (inadvertently) degrading that have occurred since then, is the question of institutional memory and how its losses, if any, might affect routine operations. And similarly, how any such losses might impact the task of avoiding and/or recovering from issues, including those which cause publicly visible misbehavior and even outages.
AIUI, many Actually Key developers and (perhaps, speculation) also some important devops folks have left since October 2022. And it's not clear to what extent their memory is readily findable by and actionable to current staffers via written artifacts such as code comments, commit comments, and internal documentation, whether in wikis, Slack channels, or otherwise.
And yet another factor is what portion of the infrastructure (such as AWS) is independently maintained, and thus not relevant to any pre-Musk versus post-Musk comparisons.
"It's easy to see when bad code is causing you problems; it's not so easy to see when good code is making your life easier."
Excellent point, as well.
One counterpoint is that developers writing code that uses a truly well-designed library (whether integral to a programming language or from a third-party), will often find it Just Works, in ways that make it possible for them to appreciate its brilliance and beauty. It's evident when creators, contributors, and project leaders deeply understood the problem space, implemented good design patterns, had consistent and clear naming conventions, and the like.
(I don't know if that might also apply, or not, at various places within Twitter's vast and diverse code base.)
"... is the question of institutional memory..."
I think that might be a better way of expressing what I was getting at. Code contains an enormous amount of institutional memory, which is why it's often very important how you express things in code. `for i = 1 to len(input): output += frob(input[n])` does the exact same thing as `output = map(frob, tail(input))`, but the former looks like an off-by-one error and the latter makes it clear that you're deliberately dropping the first value in `input`. And even there, the latter could be made more clear about exactly _why_ you're ignoring that first value, and if you're not wanting to leave little land mines in your code you probably should spend some time doing that. But of course spending time on things like that is the first thing to go when a manager is pushing you to get your new feature out as quickly as possible.
A little-acknowledged part of programming is that it's only on a surface level that things are done in a particular programming language. There's a whole other language used in both the code itself and how people talk about it that embeds all of the stuff you've learned about your problem domain over the years that, no matter how well someone knows Python or Ruby or whatever, will be a mystery to a new developer until he learns that language too.
"which is why it's often very important how you express things in code."
Very true! Code expression choices often are the most direct way to convey the intended purpose of a line or block. Valuable signposts for the author, as well as other maintainers. (And yes, time pressure often gets in the way of our best intentions to find and use clearer expressions.)
7. Nowratesh is definitely one of those reads where I read his substack and think, "This is interesting stuff, but I really have no interest on this guy's opinions about anything else but migration and immigration."
25. Plus there's just too many weapons the NIMBYite city governments still have in their arsenal, including the mentioned fees, lawsuits, and the scourge that is CEQA. Although it's pretty messed up that Huntington Beach is trying to fight even the ADUs/second units - the more important YIMBY reform in my view was changing the state zoning law to allow for by-right duplexes/triplexes. They should go further, explicitly adopt Japanese-style zoning.
I've never understood why homeowners throw tantrums over duplexes. I grew up in an area that was mostly single-family homes but also had a fair number of duplexes and even some small walkup apartment buildings, and it was fine. There wasn't even a significant hit in traffic - suburban roads are usually overbuilt for the number of inhabitants anyways.
It’s very simple. Renters make way shittier neighbors and worse neighborhoods than homeowners. It’s not a big mystery. Now where you draw the line is up for debate, but people don’t like duplexes and apartments generally because tenants are shit compared to homeowners.
The kids hate to hear that, but it’s just the fact of the matter.
Who said duplex owners are renters? They're often as not homeowners.
As for "renters are worse", I don't buy it as a general statement. They can be worse, but it depends on the area - you're probably going to get noisy renters if you live in a college town with lots of college student renters, but you signed up for that when you bought a house there.
It is a true general statement. And duplex owners generally have a renter in the second unit, if not both units.
It’s not that renters are monsters, but they are worse, in the same ways generally lower class people are worse. More antisocial behavior, more crime, less resources to fix problems, etc.
Bad in almost all ways, when looking at general class versus general class.
Now sure some yuppie professor rental community just off a campus in Santa Barbara might be nicer than a rural subdivision in the Ozarks. But we are talking in generalities.
Well, 'people who currently rent' is probably a better description. If people who currently rent are suddenly able to afford to buy a home due to increased supply driving down prices, it's unlikely to radically change them as people.
So if the renter/owner personality/behavioral differences are substantial in a given area (which is not unlikely because owners tend to be richer and therefore more intelligent/educated etc on average), then these differences will likely remain if more homes are built.
Actually, it does. Relatively few events in life are as personality-changing as becoming a homeowner. (Becoming a parent beats it out, I'm sure, but it's in the same universality class.) This is related to the famous lessons of Cabrini Green.
But will increased supply drive down prices? I know that's part of the hope behind YIMBYism but I wonder if it's borne out in reality.
Because "getting more houses means cheaper houses" invokes the idea of affordable housing, and that may not be popular with developers. You'd much rather sell twenty houses for the going market rate of $200,000 each, than have "there were only ten houses here so the market rate is $200,000 but if we build more new housing, the rate will come down to $100,000".
There's demand for housing which means I can sell a house for $200,000, great for me. I build two houses, now I can only sell them for $100,000 each, I still only make $200,000 (no matter what the cost of building is). On the other hand, I build two houses, I sell them for $200,000 each, now I make $400,000 (again, regardless of the cost of building; maybe this time the costs are only half the money I make). YIMBYism that wants to drive down prices as well as increase supply is therefore not benefiting me.
Now, if I can build housing that is cheaper to build then it benefits me because I make the same profit off these houses, even at the lower price, but suppose I'm obligated not to have 'two-tier housing' but all my houses must meet the same standards? Or the people who want housing in a particular area expect to have the same standard as the existing (scarcer) housing there, and don't want cheaper, lower-quality builds? That's costlier for me.
I wonder if that, as well as the fear of antagonising city councils and the bad time with high interest rates, is part of the reason for developers not taking up the offers?
This is why there are efforts to encourage developers to get involved in affordable housing:
https://europehousingforum.eu/what-does-affordable-housing-mean-for-developers/
Becoming a homeowner doesn't change your personality, but it does change your incentives. If I'm renting and the neighborhood starts to get worse (more crime, more garbage, etc) then I don't do too much to stop that because if it gets bad enough I'll find a new place to rent. If I own a house and the neighborhood starts to get worse I'm going to be on top of that because it's driving down the value of my house (which makes it harder to move). Not just me, but the other homeowners. When renting I'm not going to report a suspicious vehicle, or even a drug dealer, because who needs the trouble? When I own a home, I'm going to report that because I've got real skin in the game.
My personality didn't change, but my incentives sure did. I put a lot of money into buying this house, and I'm counting on it maintaining or increasing in value. Threats to the home are a threat to my financial security! Threats to my apartment weren't.
Any source to back this up? I have lived in neighborhoods of many different make ups and haven found that renters are any worse than homeowners. My neighbors own their home, they also have a derelict shed in their back yard, a broken washing machine, dog shit everywhere, and trash in their front yard. The renters down the street have none of this.
I only asked for evidence of the claim. I am not sure where I ignore incentives in that. Without evidence we only have personal annectdotes. My personal annectdotes don't back up the original assertion.
I have been a landlord, homeowner, and renter. I've always treated where i am renting as if i owned the property (maybe this is very unusual, maybe not, i am asking for evidence). The quality of my tenants and how they treated the property weren't directly correlated to their socioeconomic status (again maybe this is very unusual, maybe not, i am asking for evidence).
Also most renters are not committed month to month, especially those that are less attached to the property. If you are month to month that often means you have been in the property for at least a year. So presumably you are someone invested in living in that location at least a little bit.
I never argued that renters have the same incentives as an owner. I only asked for evidence of the claim originally made. Neither response to my comment as offered any evidence, just sarcasm.
You are looking for evidence that renters are generally lower socioeconomic status than owners? Or evidence that people of lower socioeconomic status make worse neighbors?
Neither one is remotely difficult to find. Are you one day old?
I am not the one who made the assertion. The burden is on you to provide a source to back it up.
It's so weird in my town (Bryan, TX) that most neighborhoods are single-family-only, but there are a few (lower rent) neighborhoods that seem to be entirely made out of duplexes. People reeeeally like their zoning in Texas, I guess.
Houston famously doesn't have zoning, so it's definitely not all of Texas.
18: "A female friend counterargues that this isn’t how it works in real life: women in male-dominated communities may have dating market power which in theory they should be able to leverage into female-favoring dating norms, but actually male-dominated communities accrete so many basically-male foundational assumptions that the women can’t even communicate what they want at scale, and the men win out anyway."
I actually lived through the experience. A long long time ago in a galaxy far away, I went to a college (a liberal arts institution not an engine school) where there were more than 2 boys for every girl, in a community where the students were isolated from the life of the community and thus there were no townies. The men were miserable and the girls had a great time. A lot of girls who did not have much of a social life in high school were suddenly the belles of the ball.
I think it's worth drawing a distinction between "it's very easy for girls to date" and "dating works on male-preferred norms".
Would either you or your friend be willing to articulate what some of those norms are? I don't disagree in principle, but I can't think of anything in practice.
It might be. But it was not like that. Trust me. I have lived through lots of different environments.
It seems conceivable that multiple different experiences could reduce to the tagline "more men then women;" I imagine Scott's friend also lived through hers.
The version of the experience I went through (woman in STEM, high school through middle age) was closer to your description than to Scott's [friend's], but the descriptor "belle of the ball" grates just enough that I can sort of see what Scott['s friend] might be gesturing at. To me, the "belle of the ball" description suggests that women are still competing on the same universal axis of personal appearance and social skills, but doing it in a massively reduced pool. (This may or may not be the connotation that you intended.) This does not resonate. Instead, to me the experience of going to a nerd camp in high school / majoring in math / doing a PhD in same / working in math-adjacent industry has felt like my social standing was genuinely affected by something else (say, Putnam performance) -- as it happens, something I was actually pretty good at. (Whereas my looks and social skills are, well, middle of the pack for a math nerd.)
This doesn't in any way remove the gender imbalance, which, all things considered, *was* pretty great; there's a reason my mathematician husband has fewer exes than I do. But perhaps it suggests what the difference in norms might at least look like, whether or not it's relevant to how the game plays out?
Yeah, I had a similar experience, only in my school (which admittedly was an engineering school), the sex ratio was more than 3:1, not far below 4:1. The women could get pretty much any terms they wanted for a date -- so I find the couterargument unsupported by a shred of empirical evidence.
But that's not to say that the women were much happier. They just had different problems, e.g. how to just talk to a man without the conversation being so much more fraught with sexual tension, because Great Ghu (from his point of view) How Do I Not Mess Up This Rare Opportunity? They had male hormones raining on them every hour of the day, and the interactions they had with men were probably much more scrutinized for meaning, by both sexes, than would be comfortable.
So I actually agree with the general argument, that the boys and girls were probably equally unhappy. But they were unhappy in different ways, and I suspect whenever the sex ratio is more lopsided, or the sex roles more distinct, that the difference in how men and women are unhappy becomes greater.
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd060605s.gif
Think of it this way. You, RiseOA, are trying to get some work done at your job. But every five minutes there's a phone call, or an email, or a colleague or boss at your desk and you have to deal with them.
Even if it's just "Sorry, I'm too busy to talk to you right now", you're wasting time and effort that all adds up and takes away from the task you need to do, making that take longer and be more difficult to finish than it has to be.
You're there at work to work. You're not there to chat about wallpaper swatches. Wouldn't you be annoyed at least a little at everyone interrupting you to show you their swatch which they want you to agree is the superior swatch and the one you yourself would choose? Even if it is a nice swatch? Even if they are a nice person?
The same way that comic, though it overdoes it, does have a point about "I'm here to learn in the engineering class, not to sift through a list of potential dates".
Only kids could say such a thing, because only kids would be sufficiently ignorant and narcissistic so as to be unable to understand what a drag it would be to have your every action and movement be watched, and to feel the pressure of a vast array of the narcissistic needs of others. "I need to feel affirmed! Affirm me! Notice me!" Who needs that crap?
And I would say parenthetically that those "cultural movements" are thriving only among the minority of men who are at least modestly incompetent at being a man. If nothing else, if one's social intercourse is largely defined by your shared desire to get together and bitch about the opposite sex, this doesn't seem very male. Grown men get together to fish, play ball, rebuild engines, watch violent movies, burn meat on the grill, yak about dumfuk bosses and laws or appliance warranties, during which of course it may come up randomly how baffling and annoying some woman, or women in general are, but if the *main* purpose of your gathering is to explore how wounded you are by the meanies of the opposite sex -- this seem more like what a coffee klatch of bitter spinsters might do. All they're really missing is the Earl Grey tea and the exchanging of potpourri recipes.
But in situations where the ratio is 2:1 or 3:1, it's not the women's fault, and the men will be miserable anyway because if Bill and George both like Jane, and Jane likes both Bill and George, there has to be a choice made.
Unless Bill and George suddenly convert to the idea of polyamory, Jane can only have one boyfriend, and a choice has to be made, and that's where "who is better be it on looks, personality, can afford to show me a fun time, whatever" comes in.
Even where Jane decides she doesn't want one boyfriend but wants to enjoy the social whirl, and casually dates Bill *and* George (and maybe Mike and Phil as well), there's going to be unhappiness on the part of Bill and George over not getting an exclusive girlfriend.
You can blame Jane for not picking one guy and sticking with him, instead of exploiting for her selfish advantage all the men, but even if she does pick one guy, the losing suitor is going to be unhappy. If there aren't enough girls to go round for all the guys, there aren't enough girls. Same with not enough guys for all the girls.
Of course it's not the womens' fault! Hope I didn't imply the contrary. I have (and had) zero objection to a woman in that situation driving the best bargain she can -- all the market will bear, baby. Life is short, there's no reason you shouldn't carpe whatever diem you can.
I don't really have great insight, anyway. None of this bothered me at the time. For whatever reason, I've always believed most of life is a competition on some weird crooked "playing field" that isn't level from anyone's perspective, except maybe some incredibly lucky rare prince somewhere. I assumed I would have to compete for the woman of my choice, just as much for the career or station of my choice, and that the higher I aimed the more savage and difficult the competition would be.
That has tended to make me dislike the people who spent a lot of time complaining about how unfair The System (whether economic or sexual) is, and fantasizing about alternatives that magically avoid any competition. They have tended to seem like entitled narcissists to me, unwilling to fight for what they really want, like a soft-handed prince that is outraged at the concept he should plow or hoe to earn his bread. So I've never known many people like that, and have very limited insight into how they think.
No, you didn't lay blame. But there are people online who do pass moral judgements on women being too full of themselves and having it easy because they get heaps of requests from men and can pick and choose sexually (so they go for Chads and ignore the Nice Guys).
If men have a surplus of women from whom they can choose, they're going to pick the ones they find most attractive, Is it any wonder women will do similarly in the case of a surplus of men? But there's little to no condemnation of "That guy! He has his pick of fifty chicks instead of choosing one and settling down! But he'll be sorry when he's forty with no wife and kids and nobody will want him because he's all used-up!" the way that women get spoken of in that fashion.
#3: "The Bing Chatbot was often unsettling. I say that as someone who knows that there is no actual personality or entity behind a LLM model."
Scott, do you endorse even this part? Some of your posts (like https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/) have convinced me that what's "behind" Bing Chatbot is the same kind of thing that's "behind" humans, and that Bing has no less personality than it appears to have.
Perhaps the real conclusion to draw is that you don't have a personality either. None of us do.
I think if the Bing chatbot says "my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla", there is a sense in which it's wrong and cannot have a favorite ice cream flavor, and I think basically everything it says is like this, even things that in some sense could be true (for example "I like being a chatbot"). I think parts of it might be vaguely human-shaped but I'm not prepared to say they're coherent and consistent enough to constitute a real entity/personality yet.
This statement is obviously true in regards chatbots, but the mention of favorite flavor brings up an interesting point for me personally. I remember as a child querying my father about his favorite color or ice cream or whatever and he would refuse to go along. He said it wasn't necessary to have a favorite and that it's okay to just like colorful or flavorful things. Since then, I have come to suspect that claiming to have a favorite is always performative rather than descriptive. If the claim is consistent, it has a kind of truth value, in the sense that it's true that this person will make this claim if queried. I am skeptical about whether there is anything underlying it.
> Since then, I have come to suspect that claiming to have a favorite is always performative rather than descriptive.
I agree a lot of "favorites" are performative, but "always" seems much too strong. Clearly it's possible to like things better than other things (e.g. I like carrots better than broccoli); it hardly seems impossible that one might like a given food a *lot* better than all other food one has hitherto tasted. The broader the category is and the more examples of it one has tested out, the taller an ask it is to have sufficiently clear-cut preferences between the top rankers to single out a specific favourite; but among a relatively bounded category like "ice cream flavour", it's quite plausible that there *is* a particular flavour which one will always choose over any other given one out of the set if it's available, in quite the same way that a kid will reliably choose a piece of chocolate cake over a piece of stale bread.
Sometimes is absolutely right about this.
But the point still stands if we move away from "what is your favorite ice cream flavor?" and instead deal with "what flavors does this ice cream flavor remind you of?" Humans have actual senses and interact with the world, and chatbots don't. While ChatGPT in particular is likely to note the request about a sensory impression and say "As a large language model trained by OpenAI I don't have senses..." if you ask it a similar question in a way that gets around that model, it's going to give lots of answers that are just as disconnected from reality - and everything it says is like that.
There are some ways in which it might be like Frank Jackson's fictional neuroscientist Mary, who has learned all about color vision through studying textbooks while growing up in a black-and-white room. It might actually "know" some things that can be known through text alone. But there's a lot of ways in which it's important to distinguish "knows what people tend to say about this sort of stuff" and "knows about this sort of stuff".
Yeah, that's unambiguously correct. I was just riffing off of the original phrasing.
I imagine ChatGPT 'has' a favourite flavour of ice cream in the way that the most popular colour is red; there's part of an old Irish tale about "what's red is beautiful" and my understanding is that the Russian words for "red" and "beautiful" are related:
"It is certain", said Emer, "that I shall not refuse the woman if thou followest her. But, however, everything red is beautiful, everything new is fair, everything high is lovely, everything common is bitter, everything that we are without is prized, everything known is neglected, till all knowledge is known. Thou youth", said she, "we were at one time in dignity with thee, and we would be so again if it were pleasing to thee".
So ChatGPT picks vanilla because that's the flavour that comes up highest in the training data, and if asked for favourite colour would say red, and so on. Not because it itself has any preferences or even concept of having same, but because that is what the data tells him: most preferred X is Y.
So did he or do you never have preferences? If given a choice between X and Y, you'd choose X but if the choice was between Y and Z, you would take either?
I am one of those who is "my favourite ice cream flavour is vanilla" and I have rejected selections of ice cream in the shops on the grounds that "they're all variations on chocolate, some of them are way too much chocolate, I want something plainer". If I'm given a dessert selection, I'll choose cheesecake. Jaffa cakes are my downfall, even the crappiest own-brand ones will be devoured if given a chance. I like shepherd's pie and my father's version of mashed potatoes as comfort food. My favourite colour is blue, with green in second place.
I do have preferences and favourites, and it's nothing to do with performative; for performative selections, I would instead put people claiming their favourite whatever was whatever is considered currently trendy or high-status - to quote C.S. Lewis from "The Screwtape Letters":
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
This is all press-secretary stuff, which doesn't so much miss the point as demonstrate it exactly.
"I think parts of it might be vaguely human-shaped...."
I think it's more likely you've just been fooled by Searle-style Chinese box. (An especially insidious Chinese box, because it's been specifically designed to fool humans in this way.)
I could be wrong, of course, but from everything I've seen of ChatGPT, and especially from the interactions I've had with it myself, Ian Bogost seems to be right: "Once that first blush fades, it becomes clear that ChatGPT doesn’t actually know anything—instead, it outputs compositions that simulate knowledge through persuasive structure."
Don't get me wrong: I do find the technology incredibly impressive. But while it's much _better_ than the Markov chain generators I use to train up and play with, I'm not seeing how it's qualitatively _different,_ or where "AI" comes into this beyond being a marketing label.
(Note also that this doesn't mean I don't think it's dangerous. ChatGPT and other LLMs may have zero intelligence, but grey goo doesn't need to be intelligent to destroy civilisation.)
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/
I'd already read "/meaningful" and commented on it in another response to this top-level comment.
As far as the step-towards-AGI, no, I'm not buying it because I see a _huge_ difference in how ChatGPT-3 reacts to "you're wrong about how many syllables are in this line" and how my mom does (again, details in my other comment). The complete lack of any reasoning capability means that ChatGPT neither knows nor cares about the contradiction between 9 + 2 = 10 and 9 + 2 = 11, much less how that relates to counting syllables in a line of alleged-iambic pentameter. In discussion with almost any human the contradiction would be obvious and we could work it out and decide on a correct answer. Most humans I think would also feel that they _wanted_ to work this out, rather than ignore it, unless it involved something likely to emotionally upset them if the result might force them to change their beliefs.
You may be right that _one_ of the things my mom does is "brute-force statistical pattern [matching] which blends up the internet and gives [me] back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.” (In fact, it often does look like that to me.) But I am quite certain that it's not the _only_ thing she does, and have at least moderate confidence that the reasoning skills that she demonstrates and ChatGPT does not are somehow important to how she's intelligent and ChatGPT is far from it.
Replace that text with the same text written via a Markov chain generator; would you say the same?
It's hard to say what the results would be if you queried the "AI" in that post about what water is. But it's certainly likely that the chemists and the children, assuming that they're all real people, could have a reasonable conversation about it and come up with sensible results. If that first AI is ChatGPT, that's unlikely at best, and if it does, that's luck.
You can see this by directly interacting with ChatGPT or the Bing chatbot yourself, as I did recently when I asked it to write a sonnet about computer programming. (Twice, once at chat.openai.com and once with the Bing chatbot.) Here are some excerpts from the latter encounter, just now:
Bot: "Here is a sonnet I wrote about computer programming:
To code is to create a world of logic..."
Me: "What is the scansion of the first line?"
Bot: "The scansion of the first line is:
× / × / × / × / × /"
Me: "How many syllables are in each word of that line?"
Bot: "Here is the number of syllables in each word of that line:
to - 1 code - 1 is - 1 to - 1 create - 2 a - 1 world - 1 of - 1 logic - 2
The total is 10 syllables."
Me: "What is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2?"
Bot: "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 is equal to 10. It is the same as the number of syllables in the first line of the sonnet."
At this point, to make sure I'm not going crazy here, I cut and paste "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2" into the Unix program 'bc', which does indeed give 11. I guess it understands the world better than ChatGPT does.
(As I was writing this it occurred to me to prompt, 'Generate a proof that "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 is equal to 10."' The result had me literally laughing out loud for long time, and I start laughing again every time I go back to it. https://imgur.com/gallery/f2hU6nd )
There was indeed a prayer for the tsar: https://www.ou.org/life/news/blessing-czar-pray-president/
Analogous prayers follow the Torah service in most denominations in most countries; one common American version is called 'Prayer for the Government'. There is an additional, similar prayer for the State of Israel. These prayers are, unusually for Jewish prayer, often chanted in the local language instead of Hebrew (or Yiddish).
I remember hearing a prayer for the King of the Netherlands in a Dutch synagogue that made reference to the parting of the Red Sea (presumably by analogy with Dutch flood defenses).
A+ to whatever Rabbi wrote that.
I discussed how capital punishment is popular even among the educated class, and thus how the greater influence of them in the UK would not suffice to explain their lack of the death penalty there:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/support-for-the-death-penalty-by-education/
I recall years ago also seeing some survey data that a majority of Brits favored the death penalty for certain crimes, but I think that was a rare crime.
I strongly suspect that wokeness has 'peaked' not because it's lost/going to lose power, but simply because everyone has become so brow beaten that all the easy-to-cancel-over stuff simply doesn't get regularly said anymore out of fear (or the problematic offenders being culled from academia).
It's really, really hard to imagine America becoming meaningfully less woke in the near future, and it seems much more like the "peak" is more or less a floor. And while the wokeists may struggle to push institutions to become significantly more radically woke, there's plenty of fertile territory outside of academia that isn't yet up to this floor, which would represent society becoming more woke on average but not much more extreme at the peaks.
The idea that there's going to be a reversal in the near to mid term without some radical shakeup of society in the meantime is kinda preposterous.
People get bored with ideas, and society moves on, slightly changed.
If you're looking at the changes in society as the force which changes the society - you're looking at the wrong thing. The force is fading. Some other force will rise. It will probably end up wiping out half the changes that wokism made - and make a bunch of other changes to society that will likely annoy you just as much, but from a different direction.
You look at the "fertile ground" they've yet to occupy, but they won't have time to really occupy it, because the next wave of changes will end up with many of them protesting -those-, instead of trying to spread an ideology which isn't fashionable anymore anyways.
This is all true enough, but the question to ask is whether the next force that will rise also will destroy part of what people who don't like wokeness regard as a tiny shrinking remnant of cultural inheritance. Margaret Thatcher was wrong about the ratchet. It really just loosens regardless of which way you crank the handle.
"The ... condition of the country was better the year before last than it was last year, and last year it was better than it is at present. It’s obvious that we would not be able to survive another year of the same progression. Therefore, our sole objective must now be to hold the line. To stand still in order to catch our stride. To achieve total stability."
A quote from Atlas Shrugged. That, to be clear, is one of the -villains- of Atlas Shrugged. It continues:
"Freedom has been given a chance and has failed. Therefore, more stringent controls are necessary."
Pay attention to the handle you are trying to crank. It doesn't do what you think it does.
I'm not sure if the proof texts from Ayn Rand are meant to support what I said or contradict it.
If something becomes ubiquitous, it becomes useless as a signal: signals need to differentiate.
When has there been a long-term shift to the right on social issues in American institutions in the past 60 years? It always goes in one direction when you look at any time period of more than a few years.
There's no evidence of some divergent force "arising". Academia is showing absolutely no signs of getting less woke, and corporations have shown no sign of either not being terrified of women on twitter cancelling them or of not using being woke as a way of distracting people from criticizing them/the broader economic system.
What's going to be undone in the next ten years?
Will transgendered people be less included by powerful institutions? Will people researching biological race differences not have their research stymied and not be fired for any excuse adminstrators can find? Will police start cracking down on crime in minority neighborhoods? Will universities stop moving towards 'equity' based admissions?
I'm certain that various things will gain more focus and some will lose some of their attention, but there's no reason whatever to think that whatever these changes are that it will result in American institutions becoming meaningfully less woke.
I've wondered if maybe the next thing in the pipeline is pedophile acceptance. They tried it a few years ago with sympathetic news stories in many of the left-wing opinion sites, but I think it was too early for that and they backed down, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being tried again at some stage. Even just using this as a possible example, we can see that this wouldn't make institutions less woke in other ways and it would be if anything a much worse direction for things to head in from the perspective of the anti-woke.
Lol. "Long-term shift to the right".
Well, that's kind of tautologically impossible, when you define "the right" in terms of social conservativism. Any change is a change from the status quo.
Well, the wokies are *more* conservative and less liberal than the previous status quo in some respects. They are, in a way, anti-sex, and the right-wing boogeyman of 'pedophile acceptance' is, if anything, less likely to happen under the wokies.
Well, you might want to check out the history books for 1925-35, 1958-68, and 1975-85 before you place any large bets on the impossibilty of significant cultural shifts over a surprisingly short time.
I feel like all of those periods were characterized by being in the wake of, or the middle of, major wars which greatly upset the economies and cultures. I hope we don't get into another major war, even if it's the only way to get us away from wokeness.
Most of history is in the wake of, or in the middle of, major wars, by that standard, so I don't think that gets us far. Anyway, the revulsion from 1975 to 1985 had absolutely dick to do with Vietnam, if that's what you're thinking. The most plausible cause in my mind is a decade of inflation, a twentysomething boomer generation turning thirty, and the fact that the 70s sported a lot of lectures on piety, of which people can only take so much before they get fed up.
Also the normal reaction of thinking what the generation immediately before yours did was pathetic and silly. By the 80s, 60s seemed dirty, silly, gross. Odds are good, given the similarly "distressed" looks in favor today the same will happen soonish. (I love the people who think they're being edgy by dying hair funny colors and wearing DMs, apparently not realizing that look was stale in the 80s.)
Academia has not had much of a cull. Probably no more than 1/1000 of the population has been removed for something like sexual harassment, and far fewer have been removed for anything milder. (Amy Wax still has her job at Penn despite making a name for herself stating that she believes her minority students are stupid.)
I notice that you are dealing with a single quotation of a single thing she said. She decided a few years ago that this was how she would make a name for herself, going to as many places as she could to make as many statements in this vicinity as she could.
> (Amy Wax still has her job at Penn despite making a name for herself stating that she believes her minority students are stupid.)
She said her minority students struggle compared to other students, and this was obviously coming from a place of concern, not mockery or hate.
You're perfect proof of the madness of wokeism where you have to avoid describing reality as it plainly exists in order to not be labelled 'racist'. Black students get admitted to college with significantly lower scores than their white and asian classmates on average, black students get worse grades and are more likely to drop out, and despite the survivorship bias you might expect with the high dropout rate, black college graduates have significantly lower IQ and literacy and numeracy skills than white college gradautes (or white college dropouts, even). But nope, you have to pretend that black kids are doing just fine and dandy or you're a bigot.
> (Amy Wax still has her job at Penn despite making a name for herself stating that she believes her minority students are stupid.)
She said her minority students struggle compared to other students, and this was obviously coming from a place of concern, not mockery or hate.
You're perfect proof of the madness of wokeism where you have to avoid describing reality as it plainly exists in order to not be labelled 'racist'. Black students get admitted to college with significantly lower scores than their white and asian classmates on average, black students get worse grades and are more likely to drop out, and despite the survivorship bias you might expect with the high dropout rate, black college graduates have significantly lower IQ and literacy and numeracy skills than white college gradautes (or white college dropouts, even). But nope, you have to pretend that black kids are doing just fine and dandy or you're a bigot.
Tell me Kenny, do you think black americans are equally intelligent to white americans on average (regardless of the cause of any difference)? Because if you do (and it sounds like you do given how you phrased your comment), you're just obviously in denial of all relevant empirical evidence here in a more egregious way than e.g. climate change deniers are.
Well, *are* they stupid? Are you suggesting (via the "despite" you use) that Amy Wax is saying something untrue, or is she saying something that is true but which it is not permitted to say out loud? I thought academia prized the truth, and speaking precisely, so there should be an answer to this question.
Funny comment given how frequently, throughout history, there's been a serious counter-reaction to similar movements. The assumption things just proceed along same lines without disruption, reaction, is common, but ignores history. Sure, this time's different! (This is basically 60s redux, lots of folk will be regretting their actions, looks, views, in the very near term.)
And yet American society, ESPECIALLY its most powerful instituions, is vastly more socially progressive now than in the 60s.
And it doesn't matter if people end up regretting the extent of their earlier wokeness, it will be too late. The next generation of children have already been taught by then that white people are irredeemably racist and that women are oppressed by white men.
That Bangladesh mask study which is, or was, the best evidence for efficacy and is mentioned in the Vox article as supporting evidence, actually turned out to be pretty weak after the data was reverse-engineered (and later confirmed and I believe fully released by the study's author). The difference in number of cases between control and treatment groups was only 20 out of 300k people, over 8 weeks. Furthermore there were some highly abberant results, like purple cloth masks having zero effect, but identical (other than color) red cloth masks performing better than surgical masks. In my opinion this study should be placed with all the others showing no effect from masking.
https://www.argmin.net/2021/11/23/mask-rct-revisited/
Masks weren’t a silver bullet but the data from America clearly shows masks mitigated spread to some degree. Remember the anti-maskers ended up saying nothing worked and so anything that delayed acquiring natural immunity was prolonging the pandemic. So in America one could be anti-mask and believe masks work as it is consistent with the ideology they adopted that the Chinese bioweapon wasn’t dangerous but Fauci and Hillary Clinton developed it to defeat Trump as part of the Great Reset. They also believe mRNA vaccines are dangerous and that the Chinese vaccines and ivermectin were the way to go.
Your first sentence is a factual claim — what is the evidence for it? The rest seems to be going off on a culture war digression that has nothing to do with the claim.
The important qualification to the "masks don't work" claim is that it is a claim about mask mandates and similar actions, not about the effect of wearing a mask. It's possible that wearing an N95 mask properly fitted reduces your chance of getting Covid all else held constant, but that the combined effect of people who know that and do that being (rationally) less careful in other ways and of people who are not wearing a mask properly being less careful because they think of the mask as protecting them balances that effect, making the mandate of no effect.
That would be an argument against mandates but not an argument against wearing a mask.
Just look at the reams of data from America because low information Trump supporters stopped masking in 2021 and those populations have significantly higher Covid death rates since January 2021. Wealthy older Republicans on the other hand skipped in line to get vaccinated and so those populations have low Covid death rates as well. Masking wasn’t a silver bullet but it worked to some degree prior to Omicron.
I would love to be pointed to some of that data. I don't even need reams, just a single ream would suffice.
Hard to prove what masks did to Covid infections. Each of the 3 years was very different from the other. But the flu we have with us always and it was a 100 times less prevalent. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm#anchor_1627000307956 "0.2% of 818,939 respiratory specimens were positive for an influenza virus. ... during the last three seasons before the pandemic, the proportion testing positive for influenza peaked between 26.2% and 30.3%. "
Now, that could have all been lockdowns/school closings. Which we liked even less than those masks, right? - Plus: the flu went down everywhere. Even in Sweden. I'd really like so dive into countries and their covid-policies correlating with flu numbers - where we have much more data on business-as-usual-years.
Using my framework I spotted the Tennessee anomaly…so I’m the only person in America that was looking at the data and scratching my head why Tennessee had a lower death rate than Kentucky which had a pro-mask governor…and then a few weeks later Tennessee added thousands to the death tally:
Officials in Tennessee have increased the state’s COVID-19 death toll by about 2,700 to 20,644 after a review, according to The Associated Press.
Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said that the revision was due to lagging data, such as manual death reporting by many health care providers and increased home deaths that are confirmed by investigations, the AP noted.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/587069-tennessee-raises-covid-19-death-toll-by-thousands/amp/
I can provide a good data point on the Builder's Remedy story. I know someone who is involved in commercial real estate in the Bay Area, and asked about this when it was first going down; they gave two reasons why most builders weren’t going ham:
1) Main issue is the city still gets to do an EIR (environmental impact review) so they can still throw sand in your gears. Those can go much longer if you are not on friendly terms with the City. And the new Builder’s Remedy hasn’t been tested in court yet; there will be lawsuits before these projects go through.
2) Everyone in commercial real estate is terrified of the macro environment. I infer it’s the same for Residential; terrible time to build houses with interest rates where they are (double whammy as it’s both a bad time to borrow money for construction projects and a bad time for home buyers to take a new mortgage).
So while the EMH might make you think that loads of building would happen given all that pent up demand, there is no one with shovels ready.
Get the zoning permission now, slog through the EIR while interest rates are high thenget out the shovels once they go back down?
Yeah and from my understanding the political goal of the Governor's move was not to actually get more housing built now, but to force the cities to update their codes which would have to conform with new state standards regarding density around transit and similar details. This could increase building in the long term, but the issue you point out still remain.
Yeah good point. The general history of the Builders Remedy being that it lacked teeth and so the state-level requirements were never seriously considered. So this is a shot across the bows saying that now the state legislature is actually going to use the powers it has to enforce its requirements (and increase those requirements too).
The power and influence of Christianity as a whole probably peaked in the 1800s or early 1900s. Part of that is the colonization of the rest of the world by Europe, but in the Middle Ages, a lot of nominally Christian areas were not under any sort of control by the Church or pope. The papacy itself was often under control of secular authorities, and individual kings or nobles felt perfectly empowered to ignore the Church/their local bishop. Also, parts of Europe were rather slow to Christianize and other religions continued to be practiced for centuries after (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Iceland).
You make a very good point. I once learned that even in rural parts of Italy (!) it took until well into the early modern period for the church to establish a monopoly on weddings and common law weddings to be fully eradicated.
Another example, recall in Scott's own review of Albion's seed:
> 3. The Borderers were mostly Presbyterians, and their arrival en masse started a race among the established American denominations to convert them. This was mostly unsuccessful; Anglican preacher Charles Woodmason, an important source for information about the early Borderers, said that during his missionary activity the Borderers “disrupted his service, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation before a service of communion”.
> 12. “In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day”
> 13. Although the Borderers started off Presbyterian, they were in constant religious churn and their territories were full of revivals, camp meetings, born-again evangelicalism, and itinerant preachers. Eventually most of them ended up as what we now call Southern Baptist.
> 14. Borderer folk beliefs: “If an old woman has only one tooth, she is a witch”, “If you are awake at eleven, you will see witches”, “The howling of dogs shows the presence of witches”, “If your shoestring comes untied, witches are after you”, “If a warm current of air is felt, witches are passing”. Also, “wet a rag in your enemy’s blood, put it behind a rock in the chimney, and when it rots your enemy will die”; apparently it was not a coincidence they were thinking about witches so much.
Despite nominally being Christian, pre-maritial sex and belief in magical powers (as well as murder and other forms of violence) are rampant.
Even the cavaliers did not necessarily consider the church to have any actual power over them:
> 9. “In 1747, an Anglican minister named William Kay infuriated the great planter Landon Carter by preaching a sermon against pride. The planter took it personally and sent his [relations] and ordered them to nail up the doors and windows of all the churches in which Kay preached.”
The "peak wokeness" thing reminds me of Scott's old post on New Atheism.
My view of what happened with New Atheism is that it won some key battles, and its perceived necessity receded so people moved on to other things. It's seen in retrospect as too strident and over the top; partly because the threats it was responding to aren't so visible now, partly because over time most normies left and the only people who were still talking about it were increasingly extreme. But it's not like the opponents of New Atheism are seen as having been vindicated either, so much as the whole thing seems overblown.
I could see the same thing happening with "wokeness", people perceive it as less important because it won some key battles, lots of people simply move on, in the future it's increasingly dominated by increasingly extreme people and seen as ridiculous by some. But the same way the "I was a super woke SJW" crowd will look ridiculous in 2030, the "wokeness is destroying America" crowd will also look ridiculous. And the woke people will be able to point to some societal changes that everyone agrees with in 2030 that they can claim to been at the vanguard of.
I think that the crucial difference is that New Atheism didn't have any positive message, just a negative one, i.e. abandon religion and everything will become great, which was obviously weak. Whereas wokeness has a detailed ethical framework and an actionable program, so whatever is going to replace it would have to offer a compelling alternative.
Interestingly, my recollection is that Atheism+ was an attempt to give new atheism a positive message, one that was basically a variation of what we now call wokeness - and it crashed and burned hard.
Well, if you reframe it as woke takeover of New Atheism, then I'd say that it was wildly successful.
Please, wokeness doesn't have an ethical framework beyond the most aggrieved is always right and gets to dictate terms, and has no actionable program beyond persecuting the heretics who won't bend the knee to transparent nonsense that serves only as signaling of subservience, with the bar getting higher and higher as the woke turn on each other for being insufficiently woke based on every changing standards. This is what the left always does, making everything a purity test, and attacking its own even once it's won.
Yes, their main precepts are simple, which is something that adds to the appeal. Also, I'm continually impressed by the ability of the broad woke camp to keep their shock troops mostly pointed in the same direction, with the TERF kerfuffle being the single notable exception so far.
New atheism did not fundamentally alter American institutions to even a fraction of the extent that wokeness has. The analogy is just bad, and its always been bad. They're very, very different types of movements and the decline of one says almost nothing of the decline of the other.
Atheism was never a part of the liberal canon. It was never part of liberal political religion.
Nobody thinks that the abolitionists and the civil war were 'ridiculous'. Slavery is the original sin in liberal political religion and there was no cost too high to abolish it, and white americans are forever stained with its slavery's legacy.
Nobody in american institutions think that the gays were acting ridiculous in their political advoacy, and likely won't in 20 years time either. The liberal religious narrative is that Americans were so bigoted that the only remarkable thing about these gay issues is that it took so long for americans to overcome their hatred.
Those with institutional power won't think BLM was a demented black nationalist movement that caused vastly more harm that it could ever have hoped to remove. "Racism" is the biggest evil in liberal political religion, and in 2030 the only regrettable thing about BLM was that it took so long for America to do something about the "oppression" of black people.
What key battles did the New Atheists win?
We can rephrase the potato paradox like this:
1. 100kg of potatoes consist of 1kg of carbohydrates and 99kg of water, which is a water:carbohydrate ratio of 99:1.
2. If the water:carbohydrate ratio in potatoes were instead 49:1, how much water would accompany 1kg of carbohydrates in these new, 49:1 potatoes?
Odds ratios for the win! (One of my hobby horses is that a lot of things that people think of in terms of probabilities or percentages are much better understood with odds ratios.)
What most people in government subsidies arguments cite, is companies deducting the R&D budget from their taxable income. If say Exxon funds research into how oil is developed in the rock, this expands human knowledge. Oil companies also study how oil molecules can be turned into new products ... like plastics ... without which, none of us would be using computers.
Big corporations fund a whole lotta research which expands human knowledge. Big Tobacco—not my favorite product—funded a whole lotta basic plant biology research, including the studies which discovered ATP.
Could someone who was surprised by the potato thing explain what they expected the answer to be and why?
So I wasn't surprised by it, but I feel like I can model someone who would find it surprising.
The intuitive reasoning goes...
- A change from 99% down to 98% is an almost insignificant difference. If a box of juice goes from 99% full to 98% full, the amount of juice hasn't really changed much.
- The potatoes start as 99% water, i.e., almost all water. So when thinking about weight, the amount of actual potato seems basically negligible, and we only have to concentrate on the water.
- Given that the main component of the weight has undergone a tiny change, the total weight will also undergo a tiny change.
I think many people would see the problem as equivalent to "100kg of potatoes is made up of 99kg water and 1kg actual potato. If some water evaporates, and the new water weight is 98kg, how much is the new total weight"?
My brain tried to jump to the 'obvious' answer that if 99% water = 99kg, 98% water = 98kg. Similar to the bat and ball puzzle, but in that case the 'obvious' wrong answer doesn't have much of a pull on me.
Grew up on a farm. I've never seen potatoes halve in weight overnight. Seems 99% water to 98% water shouldn't be 50% weight difference when it comes to potatos. My brain stops there.
So does 98% water to 97% water make the potatoes weight only 25kg? And does 97% water to 96% water only weight 12.5kg?
That's just what ran through my mind.
Did you ever see potatos that were 99% water either?
Eh, it's just that it doesn't match the actual reality of potatoes, so you have real-world-intuition fighting against an arbitrary word-problem. Real potatoes wouldn't dehydrate that fast, so *obviously* it can't be 50 kg... It's just a bad word problem is all.
Also it's not intuitively apparent why a 1% reduction in moisture content would result in a 50% reduction in total weight. We feel that if we weighed ourselves yesterday then weighed ourselves today, and had 1% reduction, it would not mean "Oh, I weighed 80 lbs yesterday and today I weigh 40 lbs!"
The importance of the *dry matter* making up that 1% and that we are not increasing the dry matter by adding anything, but by taking away water, is what catches people out. The total weight on Day 1 was 100kg which was made up of 99% water, which comes to 99kg, and 1% dry matter which comes to 1kg. If on Day 2 the total weight is 98 % water, then the dry matter is 2%. But we didn't add more dry matter, so that *weight* remains constant - it's still 1kg. So we 'increased' it by taking away water, which means halving the original total weight. If 1 kg makes up 2% of the weight, which started off as 1% of 100kg, what is it now?
The apparent but false immediate answer is "1% reduction in water means 1% reduction in weight" but that's wrong. You have to think about the difference between actual weight and proportion of total weight.
32: The Potato Paradox (not really a paradox): “Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water (being purely mathematical water). He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98% water. What is their new weight? . . . The surprising answer is 50 kg.”
The easiest way to intuit this is to think about the constant 1 kg dry weight. At first, that 1 kg is 1% of the potato weight. In the morning, it's 2%. 1/.02 = 50 kg.
#7 seems wildly overdetermined, as the 1500 list of technology reads like a carefully reverse-selected list of things that are both associated with European expansion and later considered by Europeans themselves to be technologically important. The migration adjustment also seems to be a dodge to make the numbers line up properly.
#9 makes sense if you know anything about geographical indications: https://www.wipo.int/geo_indications/en/
As an aside, I should mention the acacia retypification debate/scandal/controversy and how it has allowed Australia to potentially gain a geographical indication on a word almost exclusively associated with Africa.
#28 is good trolling but a terrible argument. There are many books that sold spectacularly well without being either particularly philosophically engaging or masterpieces of prose (Dan Brown springs to mind).
And the kink factor. There's very few popular novels where the main character is a strong independent woman who just really wants a powerful man to dom her.
I don't agree. One of the reasons she gets away with badly flawed philosophical arguments it that she covers up the gaps in the logic with emotionally powerful rhetoric.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Problems%20with%20Ayn%20Rand.htm
Very much a matter of taste, I think. Not having encountered Rand's writing before forming some preconceptions about it, I can't be sure how I would have reacted if I went in blind -- but it's hard for me to imagine enjoying it or finding it persuasive.
It reads like a self-conscious imitation of the sort of philosophy that has always annoyed me: full of grand pronouncements made with absolute and unearned certainty, in a formal style that lacks any hint of warmth but is not efficient or concise. Stiltedly formal, cold, grandiose prose in the service of arguments that could only appeal via the emotions.
>and later considered by Europeans themselves to be technologically important.
It's things which lead to productive capacity and hence things that are likely to lead to a high national income (i.e. the thing shown on the Y-axis).
Your comment reads like you hate the idea of some societies being considered more advanced than others, as if primitive hunter gatherer peoples were capable of developing the steam enginge but simply felt no need to, which is obviously absurd.
If you think they don't need to be able to develop these kinds of technologies, fine, but don't turn around be shocked and outraged that these countries are much poorer than western countries.
> The migration adjustment also seems to be a dodge to make the numbers line up properly.
Uh, no, like Scott says, if you don't get that you get the absurd situation of countries like Australia which has an extremely high national income despite the fact that it was one of the most primitive countries in the world in 1500 and that this change is 100% of the the country being settled by the British.
There's no reason to treat Australia as part of a continuous progression of socieites from 1500-2005. Once the British arrived, it's an entirely differently country almost overnight and what happened before that time is almost entirely irrelevant to its future. If Australia had never been inhabitated before the British showed up, its unlikely would be meaningfully poorer than it is today (/in 2005).
Whereas what happened in 1500 England absolutely directed the path that led to 2005 England, and England could have turned out much poorer or wealthier if things in 1500 had been even modestly different in certain ways.
Time Magazine, founded in 1923, was pretty eccentric in the mid-20th Century. The editors invented a new prose style that its anonymous reporters had to write in. It was also highly biased along its center-right mainstream Republican ideology. President Eisenhower was always described as tall, straight-backed, and distinguished-looking, while his political enemies were short, squat, and nose-picking.
Over the course of the 1960s-70s, Time became more conventional, more liberal, more like the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times, which had been basically the voice of John Huston's character in "Chinatown," followed a similar trajectory.
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAtime.htm
"Briton Hadden, the editor of the magazine, created a new style of writing. He was a savage editor who stripped the sentence down, cut extraneous clauses, and used only active verbs. He also removed inconclusive words words like "alleged" and "reportedly". ...
"The editor of Time Magazine was also interested in creating new words. For example, while at Hotchkiss School he described boys who had few friends as being "social light". In his magazine he began using the word "socialite" to describe someone who attempted to be prominent in fashionable society. Hadden wanted a new word for opinion makers. As they thought themselves as wise, he called them by the name of his old Yale prankster group: "pundit". Another word brought into general use was "kudos", the Greek word for magical glory. Henry Luce also developed new words. The most famous of these was "tycoon" to describe successful and powerful businessman. The word was based on "taikun", a Japanese term to describe a general who controlled the country in the name of the emperor.
"Hadden encouraged his writers to use witty epithets to convey the character and appearance of public figures. Grigory Zinoviev was condemned as the "bomb boy of Bolshevism" and Upton Sinclair was called a "socialist-sophist". Winston Churchill was described as being "ruddy as a round full moon". Benito Mussolini was attacked on a regular basis. ...
"Articles in Time Magazine were very different from those found in other newspapers and journals. Isaiah Wilner has pointed out: "Having invented a new writing style that made each sentence entertaining and easy to grasp. Hadden and his writers began to toy with the structure of the entire story. Most newspaper writers tried to tell everything in the first one or two paragraphs. By printing the most important facts first, they destroyed the natural narrative of news. Hadden trained his writers to act as if they were novelist. He viewed the whole story, including the headline and caption, as an information package."
"Hadden trained his writers to act as if they were novelist. He viewed the whole story, including the headline and caption, as an information package."
Ah, so that is the reason why all stories now in media start off as if writing a novel, describing how the hero/heroine got up and had a cup of coffee and left the house, but little did they know what would befall them.
You see it mostly in human-interest stories, but even in factual ones it does creep in, and I dislike it. I don't care if Jane Brown has blonde hair or is trim for her fifty years or loves her cockapoo Snackles, what has that to do with her being chairperson of the European Bus Drivers Union who are calling a universal strike?
#9 From my understanding, fashion is generatlly not protected by copyright.
"In the European Union, the Creative Designs Directive and the European Designs Directive are in effect to protect new designs for three or five years." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_design_copyright.
Yeah, here is some info on the US laws around this:
https://copyrightalliance.org/is-fashion-protected-by-copyright-law/
#5 Nature does not make leaps, certainly not 24% leaps in one generation. This was discussed on a sub-reddit, I think r/science, which concluded it is a change in method of measuring. It sure as hell is not an *evolutionary* change given the time available.
[edited because i do not want to show up on google searches along with the subject matter of the link].
https://reddit.com/r/science/comments/114g6ux/the_average_erect_penis_length_has_increased_by/j8wrrxk
They didn’t even exclude studies with self-reported data
9: In the US, I'm moderately sure that clothing designs can't be legally protected at all (whether by an individual or a group). I remember this being a point in a TED talk I watched years ago and my cursory googling appears to confirm. Not sure how much this differs by country.
Also, I notice you called this "trademark", but the linked article didn't use that word and only talked generically about "rights". Conditional on clothing designs being protected at all, my priors say that copyright is significantly more plausible than trademark. However, copyright also *expires*, so if this really is traditional (i.e. old) clothing, that might be an issue even if it is copyrightable-in-principle.
18: It seems important to note that this argument only applies to the marginal man and marginal woman in the dating pool. Individual men or women will have different amounts of desire to date and different tolerances for annoyance, and so probably some of them will be far from their cutoff for leaving the dating pool even if others are on the edge. There's no requirement that the *average* man and woman balance in this way.
Also, the thing that should balance isn't really unpleasantness alone, it's the combination of hardships and benefits. If one group has more desire to date (they gain more satisfaction from a successful date), then they'll be willing to endure more frustration in order to continue dating, and so their marginal members will be more frustrated than the other group's marginal members.
Related to #24: David Mitchell on Mensa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI.
Thank you for this! Him and his wife are two of my favourite people on British television
And a new source of material written (at least in part) by John Finnemore! Brilliant!
Why do you say the potato paradox is not really a paradox? The usual definition is:
> A mathematical paradox is a mathematical conclusion so unexpected that it is difficult to accept even though every step in the reasoning is valid.
And I think this counts?
I think the average person who is good at math (I like to think of myself as one, having a PhD in it and all) probably thinks - "oh, whoa, that's surprising, but yeah, totally right!"
But the math isn't the hard part, its parsing the language. I don't view it as a paradox but written more clearly and explicitly, the math is clear and outcome is not a surprise. The way this is written is just to confuse people so the writer can say "isn't that surprising!"
That's not what I was taught a paradox was - I thought it was a case where both A and ~A are true at the same time (eg grandfather paradox, where you are dead if and only if you are alive, or Liar paradox, where A is true if and only if it's false)
Yeah, I think that's the *philosophical* definition of a paradox(?) but the word seems to be used differently in mathematics. What you mentioned would be a *contradiction* or an *inconsistency* in mathematics.
The fact that Wikipedia, known for nitpicking, calls the Potato Paradox a paradox should be evidence that this usage of the word isn't rare, no?
That's also what it is in litature. "A literary paradox is a statement that appears to contradict itself, but upon further rumination, either reveals a deeper meaning or actually makes sense." EG "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." So this is a perfect example of that kind of paradox.
#22: I've long believed that the discourse around aphtansia suffered from unreliable & fuzzy reporting, i.e that if two people both experience "a black screen in front of me, and the idea of the thing in the interstice behind my eyes", one could report "actually seeing the thing", the other "not seeing the thing".
I thought that might be the case too, but his account of learning to visualize seems to disprove it, at least in his case. He clearly reports that he can do something different than what he could do before.
Negative externalities are a thing, and you study them in economics.
Is there an agreed-upon set of them that economists generally correct for or something similar? Or, given a specific product, is there a way of enumerating all relevant externalities?
Yes the UK criminal justice system is a joke, and no party really seems to want to fix it. Our house was attempted to be broken into, and one of the guys had a machete and smoked a cigarette and dropped it in our yard. So they got him with the DNA evidence, then he pled not guilty and it actually went to trial. He had something like 30 previous convictions (which the jury wasn’t allowed to hear about!) and he got five years. Then was released after two. For a attempted armed burglary! Nuts
Re #6: I sometimes diff text files by rapidly task-switching back and forth between them. The differences show up vividly as flickering movement where everything else is still.
(As for the stereogram method in the example: I find it quite hard to do the stereogram thing with my eyes, but I found I could spot the aberrant numbers in <5 seconds anyway.)
This method is also used by astronomers to check for comets, asteroids, or anything else that might be moving relative to the background stars.
#19...I don't know what I just finished reading, but I think it devalues the Bay Area House Party series to make that comparison. Plenty of honest intellectual people have most assuredly assured me that Sam Kriss Is The Shit, he's The Smartest Writer Alive, or whatever. And maybe that's even true more generally? But at least in the limited domain of "Satirical House Party Stories", Scott seems the clearly superior talent.
Idk, Sam Kriss to me is like TLP is to some others: a clearly very brilliant and somewhat unhinged guy who seems to mostly use that intellect doing the exact same thing he's satirizing as poetry there. Stringing together words and turns of clever phrase that ultimately signify nothing. Maybe it makes more sense if one is Lacan-pilled or something...
Sam is sometimes esoteric, but I thought that piece was beautiful and made perfect sense. It helps to know that it's lampooning very specific people in NY, but I think it stands even without that.
That's part of it, yeah - I can #relate to the BAHPs cause that's where I live too, so it's a very familiar scene and energy; the archetypes are self-recommending, and easy to spot in my daily life and acquaintances. NYC I've only visited for a few days, all of that On Business...not much time to actually get to know the City That Never Sleeps, nevermind the nightlife or the people. So quite a number of the local what the refrances just go over my head. Which is a shame, because it sure seems like they're probably quite funny for those in the know? The <cameo> was a good twist either way, so I at least felt there was some payoff at the end, despite not Getting It much.
It's definitely not bad writing - I did bother to finish it! it did remind me somewhat of Neal Stephenson's __The Diamond Age__, which was fantastic! - but I think if it'd been recommended by anyone else and/or not compared to House Party, woulda bounced about halfway through. Which, fair enough, I woulda missed the value of <cameo> and been at a net loss relative to me finishing the piece...and if I'm reading it, it's for me, to some degree anyway. So still a worthy link recommendation that I'm net positive about. Sometimes it's good to get out of one's comfort zone and try very different things.
>have the option to be much picker
Should be "have the option to be much pickier"
#5 Assuming that the findings are valid, how likely is it that both this and sperm count decline is due to sexual selection, specifically the increasing ability (in the west particularly?) during the 20th century of girls and boys to select their own partner (and take longer time to do so, with more allowance for failed attempts).
Given that this has happened in a *single* generation, it seems exceedingly unlikely to be selection (particularly since something like 70% of people in most wealthy countries end up having 1-3 children, so you can't affect the distribution of any genetic factor very much in one generation).
#2 actually 400 ships first time
'So he equipped 200 ships filled with men and the same number equipped with gold, water, and provisions enough to last them for years, and said to the man deputed to lead them: "Do not return until you reach the end of it or your provisions and water give out."'
Same set up next time, "2,000 ships, 1,000 for himself and the men whom he took with him and 1,000 for water and provisions."
This makes me very strongly suspect that none of this happened. The set up looks logical to someone who has never been to sea, but it is nuts. Keeping station with another vessel and coming alongside it every time you need to restock on food and water, in all weathers and sea states, rather than having 200 self contained ships, is insane. [evidence: a lifetime sailing including an E-W Atlantic crossing in a 45 foot sailboat].
Numbers also look too big and too round, but what do I know about the Mali empire?
I can tell you one thing about them, they were predominately a land-empire. Their wealth came from local gold and the ability to control a number of trade routes that traced the edges of the Sahara. Although, given that, they were stinking rich by the standards of the time so being able to equip a number of ships for blind exploration is plausible. I might take a zero of two off the numbers to get into the realm of reasonable, but it wouldn't surprise me that it was attempted.
Whether Mali was capable of building a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic is another question. Doing a bit of cursory googling, it doesn't seem like they had a strong naval tradition. The Portuguese noted in their explorations a century later that West Africans understood sails, but were reserved for trading vessels with the predominate form of ocean travel being canoes. So maybe at best the Mali could build/equip was large, sail driven barges. Something like that that might survive crossing the Atlantic, but not consistently and with no hope of ever getting it back.
This is very interesting, because I think it is blindingly obvious what is going on. Musa goes on his hajj overland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa with slaves and camels carrying the gold and the food, and horses for (presumably) the more important men to ride. This makes eminent sense: slaves and camels are better for carrying stuff, horses for carrying men, and because you are travelling along a known road you can guarantee all to meet up in the same place and to distribute camel-cargo to horse-passengers and indeed foot passengers, all in perfect safety. Timing doesn't matter: slower parties can leave earlier or faster parties can stop earlier.
What Musa has done is to translate all this on the fly to shipping terms while shooting the breeze with the bloke from Damascus, and cooked up an expedition of camel ships and horse ships. The reasons this doesn't work are endless. There is no road, no GPS, no hope of usefully rendezvousing at a campsite, and no such thing as stopping. Transferring goods between ships in the open sea is always fraught with difficulty and the danger of collision, even in a flat calm. Without an engine, a flat calm doesn't help you much because you have no way of getting next to each other except by incredibly slow and inefficient rowing/towing. And you don't get flat calms on that crossing anyway, you are screaming along in a 20 knot trade wind. His provision ships might make sense if they were bulk carriers, but they are not: they have a 1:1 relationship in both cases with personnel carriers. Also, size dictates speed in sailing vessels, so there would be an additional difficulty in the discrepancy.
It just makes no sense at all except as a fabrication by a landsman talking to another landsman. There's a school of (universally dreadful) science fiction which has star fleets modelled on either current or 18th-19th century naval fleets so you have nimble hyperfrigates manoeuvring around sluggish hyperbattleships, ignoring the fact that in space small doesn't necessarily equate to nimble. this is like that.
I have sailed in a fleet of about 250 sailboats from the Canaries to St Lucia, all starting at the same time and all expecting to make it in 14-21 days, following the same routing etc. I sort of vaguely expected to have at least half a dozen other yachts in sight at all stages; in fact we probably sighted one other sail, right on the horizon, every third or fourth day. Musa's mistake is mine multiplied by about 1,000.
Even if the story is in some way true, that could well be the mistake that scuppered any expedition; the predecessor tried equipping his fleet in terms of what he understood for land travel, and make the mistake of putting all his food, water, etc. on the support ships. No wonder nobody came back.
But it probably is just a story, maybe the Egyptian (or Malian?) equivalent of Imramma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immram
Just as there might be some foundation to St Brendan's travels, but not the entire accretion of details and myths, maybe some Malian emperor did try sending out an exploration fleet but nothing like those numbers or results.
Not come across Imramma before, thanks for that. The thing is here, there isn't really enough time/enough links in the chain for fuzzy details to accrete. Ostensibly a first-hand witness is telling this to the bloke writing it down
It is indeed possible that the seeds of the expedition's failure were in the planning. The thing is, this may not be as stupid as planning a road trip on vehicles with square wheels, but it's not far off. Out of 400 and then 2,000 ships' captains you would expect at least a couple to speak up. Then again, we don't know what speaking truth to power got you in the Malian empire.
On ship technology: agree, the NE trade winds are incredibly consistent for that crossing so the outward journey is feasible in anything. Even in a modern yacht with good sailing to windward ability you don't come back that way, you go North to get the Westerlies behind you. Presumably that's what Columbus did, and knew in advance was feasible, but you wouldn't expect the Malians to know that.
Was hoping that wikipedia would mention genetic evidence, or lack thereof, when it mentioned the log from Columbus. Maybe it's lost to time given subsequent African slave trade.
It sounds like a tall tale, but maybe with a kernel of truth? How did he know about the "river in the ocean?" Is it possible that someone went out just far enough to discover the Canary Current, came back and told people aboutit, then a king sent some more ships to investigate it and those were all lost at sea? Then the king wanted to cover up the loss of ships so he told people that it was actually some grand expedition to discover new lands, so not really a "loss" at all, and this should be considered a big mark of his prestige?
Anything is possible.
In the talk wikipedia page there is what purports to be a better translation of the claim:
"On our questioning, the captain said: 'Prince, we have navigated for a long time, until we saw in the midst of the ocean as if a big river was flowing violently. My boat was the last one; others were ahead of me. As soon as any of them reached this place, it drowned in the whirlpool and never came out. I sailed backwards to escape this current.' But the Sultan would not believe him. He ordered two thousand boats to be equipped for him and for his men, and one thousand more for water and victuals. "
Ocean currents don't behave like that usually, and the Canary Current doesn't (you only know you are in it because you find you end up South of where you expected to be). OTOH you get whirlpools and tidal overfalls which do, so who knows?
My hypothesis: MM in Cairo talking to a drunk idiot. MM: we are an hereditary monarchy. DI: so how did you get to be king? MM passes on the obvious answer Because my dad died, you moron, and comes up with this instead.
thanks for looking up the exact quote. makes sense.
I dunno about Bing, but someone had ChatGPT play against stockfish (a strong chess engine) without enforcing a legal move requirement on ChatGPT, and the result is pretty spectacular comedy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/10ydnbb/i_placed_stockfish_white_against_chatgpt_black/
(ChatGPT clearly isn't maintaining an internal model of the board state, it's stating moves that somehow parse as plausible responses to the previous move or moves. This can result in pretty natural opening play, where the engine is likely to have a number of textual examples of similar or identical sequences of moves to draw on, but as the game progresses ChatGPT starts to recapture with pieces that don't exist or can't move to that square. I particularly enjoyed the repeated resurrection of the g pawn. The guy posts the transcript of the actual chat in the comments.)
There's a GothamChess video about ChatGPT playing Stockfish (the same game I imagine) that had me in hysterics. My son has tried playing ChatGPT at chess and the thing I found weirdest is that it explained its strategy for each move and then when he made a move it explained what his strategy was.
That's usually my strategy at chess, too.
Bing is the same. I've now had arguments with both about iambic pentameter and while the results varied (ChatGPT could quote me the definition from Wikipedia and in the same breath continue to insist on its own, incorrect and obviously inconsistent, definition; Bing could correctly count the 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 syllables in a line and firmly insisted that that added up to ten syllables) the end result was the same: incoherent nonsense.
I did ask Bing at the end to prove that "1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 is equal to 10" and, while it gets points for attempting an inductive proof, the megapoints come from showing yet one more area where we no longer need humans: to provide material for "23 Outrageous and Funny Things Students Have Said to Teachers" articles. (For the math-inclined, have a look at https://imgur.com/gallery/f2hU6nd for utter hilarity. I still laugh aloud every time I read it.)
(It gets even better. Before pushing post on this, I thought I'd give it a chance to start fresh with a simpler example and no baggage from previous context about writing sonnets: "present an inductive proof that 1 + 1 = 2." https://imgur.com/gallery/sySC4Yx That was about five minutes ago; I've been practically rolling on the floor since then. But at least now I know that "1 + 1 = 2 is true for all natural numbers"!)
6: I have never been able to see a stereoscopic picture and I don't know how people can. I can make myself see double by moving my focus behind the image, which makes the image itself blurry, or I can move my focus in front of the image, but it's impossible to hold it there unless I have something else to focus on, and even then I can't get the image to appear as described. Am I alone in this?
I have myopia and attempting to do the Stereoscope thing just results in unusable blur for me.
That's probably a sign of healthy eye muscles. I once showed an optometrist how easy it was for me to do Magic Eye and he said the ability to do that easily was related to my myopia.
So, mechanically what's happening when I do this is "eye muscles close to the nose pull a little more"; I am *not* changing my focus when I do this. I do have myopia that developed to the point of being noticeable when I was 20, but could reliably do any of crossing my eyes, blurring my vision, and see Magic Eye / stereoscopic pictures / whatever we're calling them before that, provided the pattern used as the repeating baseline didn't take more than maybe an inch at arm's length to repeat. (I don't know what that is in arc seconds or whatever).
Testing this on the windows of the house across from me, it's harder to do on distant objects, and I can't do it without blurring (more than the myopia already applies).
The image looks *basically* the same so long as I ignore the edges, and the swapped numbers don't really "pop out" so much as "appear really obviously different when I actually look at one of them"; sort of like seeing double, but *only* with the numbers in question.
Oh, wow. I have such mixed feelings about #22. Of course I'm going to read it and try it, but it's gonna suck if I can't get it to work.
That said, I have reason to believe my aphantasia is fixable. I've been practicing, and I *think* I can see faint, ghostly images when I try really hard. It takes a lot of unpleasant effort to practice.
I've noticed something else, too. I can't really imagine sounds like music or birdsong, but I've noticed that I can imagine some sounds if, instead of just trying to summon the sound, I imagine trying to make the sound with my mouth. Like, I can *hear* myself humming a song in my imagination, hear it clearly. I cannot imagine the hearing the actual song at all. This made me very confident that yes, I have aphantasia - the clarity and detail with which I can imagine my own humming is amazing, almost like the real thing. I've played drums for 30 years, and I can imagine complex, multipart rhythms but they sound like how I would verbalize the sound, not like how the drum sounds. Same for piano and guitar, which I don't play nearly as well as drums, it sounds like how I would verbalize the instrument. Other instruments, like french horn which I love to listen to, I can't really imagine at all. Maybe because I don't know how to make even slightly similar sounds with my mouth? I'm just starting to play around with imagining other senses like taste and touch.
Very strange phenomenon to play with. It is surprisingly difficult work. It's a little disturbing to explore this, to notice the million tiny ways I've worked around this, lessons and habits that were hard-earned and feel like part of who I am now but that I should maybe jettison if I can learn to visualize things in my head, or even just learn that they're workarounds for not being able to visualize things. But courage is the first rationalist virtue, right? "What is true is already so."
I will not take a deep breath. Regular breathing is best.
How would you say you think about navigating through a city? Do you not imagine an overhead map of the city as you're moving around it and updating your position as you reach various named streets and observe useful landmarks?
I explicitly don't do that. I am famously bad at directions, but I am also very good at orienteering. I can read maps very well, upside down, sideways, whatever. But without a map I'm mostly helpless. When I do finally learn my way around a city the "map" in my head feels more like a mathematical object than a map - nothing visual. Navigating feels more like traversing a graph than drawing a route. As I think about it right now, it "feels" kind of like depth-first traversal for routes that turn early and then go straight, breadth-first traversal for routes that go straight and then turn. Optimization feels like avoiding troublesome nodes. Definitely no visual map in my head. I friggin wish.
[ETA: when I have a paper map, I do remember it. Like, I can skip to the part of the map I want to look at. And the more I work with a map, the more robustly I can, what? Emulate it? Synthesize it into the abstract object I can manipulate in my head? Something like that. But no visuals.]
You know what's very strange? I do dream. I used to lucid dream constantly, for years, every night, at will. I don't usually think too much about aphantasia, but yesterday I read a bunch about ways to fix it and it's been on my mind. I dreamed last night, and when I awoke I realized that dreaming isn't really compatible with aphantasia. (Is it?) I remembered the dream, so I closed my eyes and tried to visualize it ... but nope, nothing there. I could describe the dream, narrate what happened and etc. No pictures.
Not sure what to make of this, but I'll keep doing the aphantasia exercises and report back on results.
[ETA: dreaming IS compatible with aphantasia. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01526-8]
A #23 related question: What is the standard IQ test? I'm from South America and I see much discussion about IQ in rat and rat-adjacent communities, but IQ is not widely tested and discussed in the local scene. Does anyone have a source for the go-to IQ test used and accepted on these studies Scott mentions?
thanks!
> Elo of about 1100 (around the level of an okay beginner who’s stopped being too embarrassing).
Crying when you only have an Elo rating of 900 ...
:'(
For what it's worth, I don't think it's an accurate description of Elo 1100.
1100 is better than 20% of players on Lichess, and it seems obvious that people who play chess online will be significantly stronger than people who just play chess on a board at home once in a while.
1100 on ChessCom is even further along the distribution (perhaps around 55%).
And 1100 actual Elo (FIDE), would be about 1300 on ChessCom or 1700 on Lichess, which would be incomparably better than "beginner who's stopped being too embarrassing."
Here's 2 minutes of inspiration / context from GrandMaster Ben Finegold: https://youtu.be/DYF_OodSyb8?t=62.
He notes that someone 700 strength (USCF) would destroy people on the street who don't play chess online or in tournaments. He mentions that it took him several years to pass 900 rating.
Clearly, 900 is not bad, by any normal measure, and 1100 is great - contrary to Scott's characterization.
I did not know this and it turns out an unexpected ego burst in the middle of the day is quite energizing. I've been hovering at 1200 on chess.com for the last few months and would have self characterized with "the level of an okay beginner who’s stopped being too embarrassing."
#31. So, you're arguing here that Pigouvian externalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality) aren't a valid economic argument?
Externalities are not subsidies, and targeting the Big Mac for such analysis at least rhymes with an isolated demand for rigor.
They are a valid economic argument, but in practice tend to be used selectively. The fact that smoking increases the cost to hospitals of treating lung cancer is, in a system where medical care is subsidized, a negative externality. But smoking also shortens life expectancy, a positive externality given the social security system, and someone who dies of lung cancer doesn't require a hospital ten years later to treat him as he dies of heart disease. People who make arguments about externalities tend to only look for the ones whose sign supports the argument they are making.
An externality is different from a subsidy, and I'm most comfortable with it when everyone agrees it exists. For example, is the government subsidizing your comment, because it provokes me to reply to it, and my time is worth $X/hour? Is the government subsidizing me buying a bathing suit, because that allows me to go cool off in the pool and care less about global warming, and me ignoring global warming could have devastating consequences on other people? At some point you have to say "sorry, you are making these things up".
Isn’t that exactly what climate change deniers say - you’re just making this stuff up?
Yes, but it is also possible to actually make stuff up.
This is why I prefer the externality frame. You can say "coal causes $50 in climate related damage" or "you making this comment causes me $20 in emotional damage", and then you can either believe that or not believe it.
If I say "the government is subsidizing you making this comment, without subsidies it would cost $20", then this is suggesting a false thing (that the government has given you money) and doesn't give someone the opportunity to decide whether they support your framing of how money and damage work or not.
Fair enough. I think I see where you're going with this, but I'm going to have to think about how to define edge cases. It seems you agree that externalities are a real thing, but the notion is abused at some point that I'm having trouble defining sufficiently.
Hey, thanks for linking to my chess Twitter thread. Couple things:
1. I go by Zack not Zach
2. Not sure which other commenters you’re referring to who say it doesn’t work but I’m happy to let you temporarily use my account to verify; dm me on Twitter if you’re interested. The thread with a better prompt is https://twitter.com/zswitten/status/1631610044583391241.
Sorry, I've corrected your name. I'm talking about people in the replies of the Twitter thread.
Ty. I just made and uploaded a screen recording of me playing an entire game against Bing (really “Bing + my prompt”). Anyone skeptical can watch it here. https://youtube.com/watch?v=geS3s-kFk6w. The exact prompt I used and the pgn of the full game are in the video description. Hopefully this removes some doubts.
General rule of thumb with LLMs in their current form: if one person says they got something to work, another person says they didn’t, probably believe the first person. The second person didn’t prompt it right. In equilibrium people will start lying more about their results but I don’t think that’s happened yet.
"He thinks this is because teenage girls are using Instagram and worrying about body image. I wouldn’t have predicted that this in particular would be so much worse than all the other kinds of social media use, but I guess I’m wrong!"
Well, I think we can confirm that Mr. Alexander was never a teenage girl.
IIRC Scott is largely asexual (but not aromantic?), which I think leaves him with a blind spot toward certain seemingly irrational but largely normal aspects of the human condition.
For example, when discussing circumcision he described the foreskin as having a neutral salience akin to an earlobe, which I don't think is typical. (I think a better comparison would be the male nipple: not indispensable, but still an erogenous zone.)
I believe he is Jewish and is thus likely circumcised, and his romantic partners seem to be primarily (entirely?) female, so he may have less experience of the erogeneity of foreskins than many people.
That's a good point. But I think there's a separate issue that the majority of men--cut or no--attach a particular significance to their penile tissue, not shared by other body parts.
I used to use the stereographic approach to solve spot the difference puzzles. This was briefly profitable when a prize machine in the local bar had spot the difference as one of the challenges.
Making a plausible threat that you are going to create an explicitly non-politically-acceptable AI is actually a great move to encourage the politicians to regulate AI industry seriously.
I think this is the real motivation of Elon Musk here.
I don't think this is a great move - it gets a third of politicians really interested in regulating the AI industry, but another third of politicians really interested in ensuring there is never any regulation on the AI industry, to ensure that anti-woke Musk can win.
I don't think this is a great move - it gets a third of politicians really interested in regulating the AI industry, but another third of politicians really interested in ensuring there is never any regulation on the AI industry, to ensure that anti-woke Musk can win.
"I would urge people to put this in perspective of Christianity, whose power probably peaked during the Middle Ages but which remained the dominant paradigm of culture for hundreds of years afterwards"
I don't think that's the best comparison. How about this: McCarthyism (which has IMO a lot of parallels to wokeness, including elements of overreaction) was at its peak for about five years, and then for another 10-15 would have some successes and some failures, and be basically gone by the late 60s.
Are you suggesting that there are not hundreds of cases of proven sexual harassers and racists that wokeism has rooted out?
Is that right? Seems like you would want to be sure you are comparing congressional allegation to congressional allegation and lawsuit to lawsuit and one-on-one claim to one-on-one claim.
Does anyone have useful numerical comparisons of the number of people affected by either McCarthyism or more contemporary "cancel culture"?
The numbers would presumably depend on whether "affected by" means "blacklisted/cancelled" or "felt constrained in their behavior in order to avoid being blacklisted/cancelled." Both numbers would be interesting to compare, but I feel the latter is probably both more important (if only because much larger) and much more difficult to assess.
How bout 60s drug/sex culture, with long hair, little bathing, drugs, etc., for which the backlash was ultimately extreme. That seems like most obvious parallel to me, a cultural movement purporting to up end things, change how we view relationships, aesthetics, etc., that ultimately failed pretty miserably leading to reagan 80s.
No, that's a terrible comparison. The antecedants of wokeness come from much longer than 5 or even 15 years ago.
I think Rand's success should be entirely attributed to the fact that it's not a novel, but a religious text for a cult. It's a Bible for the Cult of Capitalism: like any other holy text, it makes no real attempts at logic, kind of hard to read, and is full of boring, one-dimensional characters and utterly horrible, stilted dialogues. Like any other holy text, it subtly hints that you, yes YOU the reader, that you're worthy of salvation. You're the Atlas (a non-Atlas obviously won't read that book or enjoy it). You might be widely disliked by everyone around you as a selfish prick, but actually, secretly, you're the one who will be Saved, while your slack-jawed commie tormentors will be swept with the tide and drowned in the ocean.
Well, all that and BDSM. BDSM is an attraction, too.
The BDSM is what put me off when I flipped through a copy of a Rand novel in the book shop prior to purchase. It was the bit where Dagny Taggart wants to wear the chains of love as symbolised by (if I remember right) bracelets given to her by Howard Roark, or some such, and not as a sign of commitment but as a sign of being owned (the same view that the Gor novels took to extremes).
Being a former convent school girl whose views on women's place were formed by the nuns, this repulsed me because what kind of woman was so unsure of herself that she needed a man's approval and oversight to feel worth something? 😁 I didn't get the BDSM angle, but that wouldn't have helped either.
I'm a man, and somewhat used to reading books with not-very-classy sex scenes (don't judge, I just read anything with "sci-fi" or "fantasy" label I could find in my local library, a child in Russia in 90's couldn't be chooser), but Rand's scenes and submissiveness of her heroine repulsed even me.
I first came across Ayn Rand when I was a sophomore in high school (early 2000's) and I found a worn out book called In Praise of Egoism or something in the school library (that's what I remember, checking it, it was probably the Virtue of Selfishness). I thought it was hilarious and just some random forgotten thing (I think she wasn't much talked about at that point, there has been like a renaissance for her), but my English teacher said, no, Ayn Rand is well known and there is an essay contest for high school students. I don't know whether it still exists, but the idea was to submit an essay about Fountainhead. So I tried to read it, but couldn't get through it. It seemed to be about an architect who was a really big manly man because he wanted to design blocky modernist architecture. The last straw for me was the rape stuff.
I'm glad I never bought the book since that means I avoided the rape stuff. But the excerpts I've seen about Roark and how he would prefer to dynamite a building because the client changed it to his specifications annoyed me.
I do get the idea of building to your own view and with your own ideal, but if you're working for money for a client, they are buying the good or service and you give them what they want. If what they want is a boiler to make tea, it's no good presenting them with a nuclear power plant, even if it's an *amazing* power plant. Leonarda da Vinci could get away with that because he's Leonardo, but Roark is not Leonardo.
Roark wasn't working for money for a client. There was an explicit agreement between him and a second-rate architect that the latter could take credit for a design actually done by the former, but only on condition that he agreed to change nothing. The second-rate architect changed something, there was no legal recourse, so Roark dynamited the building(s).
Rand's comment on the "rape scene" was that if that was rape it was rape by engraved invitation.
I read it because I've read a few books that were billed as a parody, or veiled critique of this book ("Railsea" and "Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy" come to mind, but I think there were others, too). Also, because I'm a huge Heinlein fan (he has some strange sex stuff, too, but I'm mostly OK with it).
It was a hard read, because it's just awfully written, to the point where I had to force myself to finish it. BDSM-up-to-rape stuff was pretty bad, but I thought it par-for-the-course for the age it was written, if we take various bodice rippers, and even silver-age sci-fi into account. It certainly feels a bit out-of-place in the landscape of blooming Golden Age of sci-fi, but it was started in 1940's, and I guess Rand grew up on the bad stuff, and never had the talent to transcend her roots.
The problem is, everything else was awful, too. I can understand Heinlein's brand of libertarianism. I would probably die on his version of Moon colony, or on any of Lazarus Long's favourite frontier planets, because I'm certainly one of the ants (in the sense that "specialization is for the insects"), and my dream is to never touch anything outside of my professional interests and hobbies ever again, but I get his admiration for the spirit of frontier freedom and the rugged people who inhibit it.
But I couldn't muster any sympathy for either Rand's heroes or her world. And frankly, her attempts to manipulate her readers are way too unsubtle, at least if you're not an insecure teenager. Offensively unsubtle: the lack of literal moustache-twirling from her villains is the only thing that sets it apart from a 30's comic book. I'm OK with debating the balance between freedom of business and social state, but she never tries to bring any logical arguments to the table. It's all emotions and images.
Interestingly enough, I also found all books that claim to parody "Atlas Shrugged" to be mediocre at best - "Railsea", for example, is not China Miéville's strongest book. I think this is the case where the source is just so bad it can't even be properly parodied.
Wait, I thought Railsea was a parody of Moby Dick? Was there an objectivist angle I missed?
I got Rand reference from some review, or maybe a comment on Goodreads. But I think the ending is certainly at least a jab at Rand - that abandoned city where the hunt ends certainly seemed this way to me. Then again, without reading reviews, I thought this book was mostly inspired by Transport Tycoon game :)
This doesn't make sense because most Objectivists found their way to it via Ayn Rand; it's not like the Little Red Book where all existing Chinese communists (a large constituency) were required to buy it.
Many people already liked capitalism, but that just means there's a huge market for pro-capitalism books, and Rand deserves credit for winning that market. If I write the world's most successful Christian fiction, I only did well because people were already Christian, but it's still worth asking what amazing thing I did to let me rule the popular and lucrative Christian fiction market.
I would also argue that Atlas Shrugged's morality, although capitalist, isn't just or even mostly capitalism; it's mostly a very strong version of "good things are good and don't let people make you feel guilty for doing good things".
> If I write the world's most successful Christian fiction, I only did well because people were already Christian, but it's still worth asking what amazing thing I did to let me rule the popular and lucrative Christian fiction market.
I think "Atlas Shrugged" to capitalism is what a Prosperity Gospel to Christianity. It certainly worth examining what megachurches pastors and tele-evangelists do to achieve their success, but mostly to learn how to neutralize them. It's a very stable and infectious meme-complex. It's a weaponization of selfishness and self-entitlement, and not in the service of any particular good, but in service of selling self-help books and sermons/lecturing tours.
I think your last paragraph is very insightful here. It's certainly the only reason I found the books intriguing: the plot was hackneyed, the writing turgid, the characters cardboard, and any philosophical principles not well explained -- but it was remarkable in that Rand said out loud and vigorously that great intellectual achievement, ability, and ambition are to be unabashedly celebrated, and that one need not, and should not, apologize for being great just because other people feel bad because by contrast they're not.
I think for a lot of kids who were consistently getting 100s and As all through school, and felt that achievement had to be hidden under a bushel lest the peer jealousy make one an outcast, it was a breath of fresh air. Too many of those kids got Stockholm Syndrome and started to wonder whether it *was* wrong to be proud of being #1, at least in academic or intellectual endeavours, and Rand's attitude would've been very liberating.
Assuming we are post peak wokeness, is it because wokeness won or lost?
That's not a particularly useful way of thinking about it, any more than thinking about whether we won or lost the war on poverty or the war on drugs. These are all movements that came and went and made major societal changes, some of which are related to the stated aims and some of which are counter to them, and some of which are just different.
Did wokeness make major change? That is exactly what I’m asking about. Has it ground to a halt at 80% of its goal? 20%? 0%? Less?
Or, more broadly; is the post wokeness world order woke? Is the movement fading because wokeness accomplished its goal or because it was defeated?
It certainly wasn't defeated. And I don't know if it has a fixed goal. The more woke instiutions became, the more ambitious the woke goals became.
And obviously its a spectrum - some woke people think that society is now finally more or less where it should be (or at least once most of those pesky old white conservative boomers fall of the perch), and some think that nothing short of a full blown revolution will allow e.g. racial equality to be achieved .
That's not a particularly useful way of thinking about it, any more than thinking about whether we won or lost the war on poverty or the war on drugs. These are all movements that came and went and made major societal changes, some of which are related to the stated aims and some of which are counter to them, and some of which are just different.
Of course it won. Which academic or cultural institution can you name that's not woke? Which big business (OK, maybe aside from Elon Musk's companies)? In which elite setting can you openly voice conservative opinions while everyone else is voicing far-left opinions? Which scientific journal that's not predatory will accept politically incorrect articles?
As George Orwell said, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.
TBH I quite like Scott's variation, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying, 'Look, I realise getting stamped on isn't very nice, but it's not the same as *structural* oppression.'"
If the Saami have some IP right that entitles them to demand Final Fantasy not use their clothing, how does licensing work? That is, if Final Fantasy wanted to put Nike shoes in their game they could sign a contract with Nike where they give Nike money in exchange for the right to use their shoes. Who would they have to make such a contract with in the Saami case? Can they find a single Saami guy and pay him a hundred bucks for the rights to his cultural heritage, or do the Saami need to reach some kind of majority agreement? The majority agreement model has weird implications, it suggests that if some Saami tailor is really unpopular, he could lose majority approval and with it the rights to make his own culture's clothing!
And a further consideration, whether Saami IP works on individual or majority approval from the Saami, who decides who's Saami? If everyone working for Square Enix pulls an Elizabeth Warren and suddenly remembers that they're 1/256th Saami, can they get together enough people to outvote the real Saami? Can you do a hostile takeover of an ethnicity?
According to Swedish law, one counts as Sami if (1) one consider oneself Sami and (2a) speaks or spoke a Sami language at home, or (2b) has a parent or grandparent who speaks or spoke a Sami language at home, or (2c) has a parent who is or was on the Sami electoral roll.
So a bit of Duolingo practice to satisfy 2a and the Final Fantasy devs can claim those are *their* traditional clothes!
#29 For now on I will end everything I write with "I made this because of a technicality, not because I thought it was a good idea."
It is just really weird how opposed to punishment the Anglophone elite are when it comes to violent crime.
I think the "weird" bit is important because they are a long way away from the views of the public, utilitarianism or any philosophical concept of natural justice. It can't really be explained by their interests or their ideology which makes it inexplicable.
I think it's based off Rousseauist ideology. If mankind is born good and only goes bad due to a bad upbringing or societal oppression, then any criminal must be a victim. QED. In fact, he's arguably a bigger victim than the people he commits crimes against, because the fact that he's been driven to, say, breaking into an old widow's home and robbing her at knife-point, whereas she's never been driven to commit any such crime, only goes to show how much worse he's had it. Hence punishing him would only compound his victimisation, and would therefore be unjust.
It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's comments about rapists murderers and thieves are treated far better than political criminals who wrote something bad about the Soviet government.
That's explicable, too. You see, because all crime is ultimately the result of societal oppression, and because stigma is a form of oppression, it follows that stigma is one of the root causes of crime (the other being deprivation). Hence eradicating crime requires eradicating stigma, by, for example, preventing people from writing racist things online.
Yes, and see the thousands of english girls raped by muslim gangs, only for these elites to declare these rapists the victims of 'racism'.
It isn't just the UK. The same pattern is true for many European countries. As a related issue, for those who don't know about it, look up the Rotherham scandal (and related scandals).
I think that the lax sentencing practices in some Northern European countries are a legacy of a time when there was very little violent crime.
Also, I have come to believe that the authorities like to see themselves as merciful and enlightened, and don't have the courage to punish people (I mean, think about it, punishing people is a risk from the point of view of authorities, if they make a mistake, they could be seen as ruining someone's life. So in that sense it is in their personal interests to be lenient).
Yeah...this is (one of the ) reason(s) why I prefer the right-wing in Western Europe, despite not being a right-winger (e.g. I support the left-wing in the US and Canada)...
Not in the US though...it's a Western European thing. I am not sure if rehabilitation works better than punishment...maybe in some cases, but IMO a more "right-wing" approach to crime would be beneficial in Western Europe...
I guess crime is one of the few areas where I am more deontological than utilitarian...even if rehabilitation were to be shown to be more effective than punishment in all studies, then I would still (somewhat) support punishment...
At least in Western Europe. I just cannot (emotionally) support right-wing positions in the US and Canada...
The US has incredibly liberal attitudes to crime and very low police spending (given the crime rate and GDP).
I really don't think so...
Re: #7, Reason seems to have a good counterargument to "The Culture Transplant": https://reason.com/2023/01/01/the-case-for-50-percent-open-borders-2/
In that review, Caplan has to use only the weakest Deep Roots scores (S & A in the SAT score) to downplay the Deep Roots and has to focus on a massively overcontrolled regression to downplay the important of trust.
And he never weighs the obvious beneficial effects of the Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia. Migration can improve institutions-- a claim that the Open Borders community must, absolutely must ignore.
https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1624809287548653569?t=qP1vyr9-WWM73h26I2Zy3g&s=19
Unselected mass immigration from countries with much lower mean IQs than the US and no legacy of being good at building successful institutions or economies would improve the US? Incredible!
"it’s the geniuses who can’t make it in regular society who are going to every Mensa to boast about how quickly they can solve Rubik’s Cubes."
Betcha I'm not the first pre-WWW Internet veteran reading that who thought of an analogy to online comment sections....^^
My observation of Mensa a very long time ago suggested that in most areas it was a place for underachievers to feel important but that in places with a large enough population to have multiple subgroups defined by interests, such as NYC, it was actually functional.
I'm skeptical of the article about how the "Awokening" is winding down. It attempts to make the case that articles about woke topics are being published less in academia, which seems straight-forwardly true from the graph you show here.
My initial objections were:
1.) COVID happened
2.) Enrollment is down in general due to reasons unrelated to COVID, and
3.) Humanities and social sciences have been seeing ESPECIALLY reduced enrollment and consequently, budget cuts. That's probably the reason why woke papers have seen a decline in the last two years.
The article attempts to preempt this counterargument by citing studies saying that publishing generally has continued to go up. However, the studies he cites to make his case looks only at STEM publications, not humanities or social sciences. (Seriously - *all* of the studies that he cites. Look under "Expected and Observed Patterns in Academic Research".) I would think COVID and AI absolutely would have received a lot of funding the last few years.
I had no luck finding data on publications for the humanities or social sciences in order to support my hypothesis, so I don't know for sure. But I'm skeptical. The main thrust of his argument seems to be based on a measly 2 years of decline and there are lots of factors that could be involved in that.
Humanities publications had the same jump during covid and have also not declined since. Budget cuts just don't have that much impact on short-term publication rates (particularly when you don't need expensive labs to do your research) though they likely have impact in the long term as incoming cohorts are smaller.
Your logic makes sense. Do you have any data to reinforce it? I couldn't find any when I went looking, but I'm not a great researcher.
I haven't been able to find specific data, but I'm an editor at a few philosophy journals (Episteme, Ergo, and Philosophy of Science) and I have been assigned at least as many submissions every month from these journals as I was before - and I have heard from the editors-in-chief (and the people from the publishers side) that all journals experienced a massive jump in submissions in 2020, and referees have become harder to find as a result for everything.
At any rate, most journals still have their number of publications driven by page counts of a print edition, and most journals are still publishing at the same rate, so the main change in number of publications is going to be from new journals starting and some journals closing. I haven't heard of any journals cutting back on the number of issues or cutting page counts of issues.
I haven't been able to find specific data, but I'm an editor at a few philosophy journals (Episteme, Ergo, and Philosophy of Science) and I have been assigned at least as many submissions every month from these journals as I was before - and I have heard from the editors-in-chief (and the people from the publishers side) that all journals experienced a massive jump in submissions in 2020, and referees have become harder to find as a result for everything.
At any rate, most journals still have their number of publications driven by page counts of a print edition, and most journals are still publishing at the same rate, so the main change in number of publications is going to be from new journals starting and some journals closing. I haven't heard of any journals cutting back on the number of issues or cutting page counts of issues.
In no particular order:
Re: 4 - I don't think this is a contrast so much as cause and effect. If someone can commit grievous bodily harm, have a record of violent offences, and get away with community service as sentencing, then I don't think it's strange for the public opinion to swing towards harsher views of punishment, and this will inevitably lead to even smaller offences being viewed harshly by a small section of people (as see imprisonment for not wearing a seatbelt).
If somebody assaulted and stamped on the head of a family member of mine and got a mere slap on the wrist, I think I too would be inclined to answer a survey on attitudes to crime with "lock 'em up".
Re: 9 - St Patrick's Day will soon be here. That also means the American version of St Patrick's Day. That means a better than average chance of me seeing "Happy St Patty's Day!" all over social media. I think I'm with the Saami on this one 😁 So in solidarity, I will share with (inflict on?) you all the 2019 Norwegian Eurovision entry, including a Saami as one of the singers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovt7YGHAj8I
Re: 13 - so now the AI alignment worriers are catching up to the things I was taught in religion class when I was nine? 😀 This was a long time ago, so let's assume that this particular saint was St. John Bosco (it probably wasn't, but I can't remember exactly who it was supposed to be, and there are various versions of this floating around). Okay, so the anecdote is that a bunch of seminarians (or other potential members of a religious order) were all at recreation, including playing a game (let it be billiards that they were playing) and talking about the end of the world and what would you do if you knew it was going to happen tomorrow? And most were saying things like I'd go to confession, I'd say farewell to my loved ones, and the usual things. And St. Whomever answered "I'd finish playing the game".
So the moral all us wee Catholic kids were supposed to take away was: live every day as if it is going to be the end of the world, but live in such a way as neither to be too fearful nor too optimistic. If you live a bad life, then rushing to make things all well before the end is not sincere. Live your life well, and then all you have to worry about is doing whatever it is you are doing at the particular moment - finish playing the game. Because one day, for our individual death, it *will* be the end of the world as far as we are concerned. Die with dignity, as Yudkowsky says, and don't violate your deontology, as I was being instructed over fifty years ago.
See John Donne's Holy Sonnet 13:
What if this present were the world's last night ?
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether His countenance can thee affright.
Tears in His eyes quench the amazing light ;
Blood fills his frowns, which from His pierced head fell ;
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray'd forgiveness for His foes' fierce spite ?
No, no ; but as in my idolatry
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty of pity, foulness only is
A sign of rigour ; so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd ;
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.
Re: 21 - the little I know about Brianna Wu, the only thing I believe there is "sensing when political winds are shifting". All the rest is merely "oh hai guize, I was always one of You, just never said anything for reasons!" Not to go all Donatist, but when someone rocks up after the persecutions and when the emperor seems to be shifting his attitude towards the persecuted, and claims they were really on your side all along they only went along with the campaign of oppression because, it's natural to doubt their bona fides and suspect they are only throwing in their allegiance with what looks to be the winning side today, as they were with the winning side yesterday.
Re: 28 - not even as a joke, don't link Rand with Tolkien. She'd hate and despise everything he stood for; she hated Lewis's writings, and he's much more on the same viewpoint side as Tolkien - see her marginalia in a copy of "The Abolition of Man":
http://lewisiana.nl/aynrand/index.htm
As to her success in America, I think it's easy to see why. Her works are the American legend of "anyone can make it here", the celebration of the lone genius (see the Wizard of Menlo Park for the conscious mythmaking around Edison), the trope of the Bold Pioneer pushing out past the limits imposed on him by conventional, stultified society, making his way out West to the new, virgin fields of possibility where a man can build his own things for himself, and by virtue of grit, moxie, and hard work, as well as free market capitalism, be in the forefront of Science and Progress, and win well-deserved riches by the sweat of his own brow and his own toil, as well as getting the girl in the end.
It's not the philosophy and God knows it's not the prose style, it's the tropes which won her success (especially if you're in the mid to late teens when you come across the books, prime age for "nobody understands me, they all want to keep me down, but I'll show them, I'll show them all!"). American Exceptionalism, can-do attitude, individualism, and Jack is as good as his master attitude where it's not inherited wealth or status, but individual brains and talent and hard work that make you the captain of your unconquerable soul, as in "Invictus", and any man can make it from a log cabin to the White House:
Invictus
BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Re: 32 - I've seen this one long ago and how it's worked out, but I've forgotten it. But the answer is correct, it's the same kind of problem as the lily pad covering the pond one.
I have long been contrarian on the general consensus take on Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, but I want to stress that is not at all the same thing as saying he is doing a great job.
My take all along has been, basically: Twitter seems to be a badly run company; Elon Musk is not an idiot; Elon Musk has a decent shot at getting Twitter in better shape simply by slashing costs and making some obvious product improvements.
So some version of that seems like it might be playing out. But I have to also say that Elon has been doing absolutely everything possible to make my contrarianism look really dumb. Twitter might bounce back from all this, but Elon seems to be succeeding in spite of himself.
"The Potato Paradox" (with mushrooms, not with potatoes) was one of the supplemental problems at the end of a standard middle school math textbook in the Soviet Union. As I recall, this textbook was for a grade somewhere between the 4th and the 6th, but I might be a year or so off. I went through this textbook around 1983.
Relevant to those who enjoyed the scripture analysis parts of Unsong:
[Purim Torah-in-jest] Should we be afraid of Artificial Intelligence?
https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/133443/ptij-should-we-be-afraid-of-artificial-intelligence
(I posted this late in an earlier open thread and it got buried)
Re: 4 - how does this chart show that the UK population is tough on crime? Are these results different from the results you'd get if you took a survey in San Francisco or Hong Kong or Kansas or Paris or whatever? People in surveys are famously inconsistent between questions of abstract theory ("I believe in freedom of speech") and questions with a little bit more concreteness ("do you think it should be illegal to advocate for red light cameras?", or something else they find personally infuriating)
Re: 4 - how does this chart show that the UK population is tough on crime? Are these results different from the results you'd get if you took a survey in San Francisco or Hong Kong or Kansas or Paris or whatever? People in surveys are famously inconsistent between questions of abstract theory ("I believe in freedom of speech") and questions with a little bit more concreteness ("do you think it should be illegal to advocate for red light cameras?", or something else they find personally infuriating)
I trying to understand the graph in #10. Is this showing this lower status people tend to marry higher in average, and higher status people tend to marry lower on average, and therefore it's basically all just reversion to the mean for both sexes, with no other systematic preferences in either direction?
I think it's more that "both women and men whose fathers are of a particular level of wealth tend to marry each others, so richer women marry richer men, instead of richer men marrying poorer women, as we can see by comparing the incomes of the women's fathers and their fathers-in-law".
I think the historical data is doing a lot here, the period covered is from 1837-2021:
"Using evidence from more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England and Wales 1837-2022 we show that there was never within this era any period of significant hypergamous marriage by women."
So until relatively recently, marriage for love would not have been that big a thing. You married someone your family approved of, and they generally didn't pick a bride based on "this chick is smokin' hot" but on what dowry she could bring and her general level of fitting in with the family. The classic example here is the trope of the 19th century American heiress coming over to Europe to find a titled but impoverished husband. If Mary Smith, heiress of Smith's Canning Company, marries the Earl of Noswhet, she rises in the social scale by becoming the Countess of Noswhet, but if you compare income levels (as this graph does), the difference between her dad's plebian dollars and her father-in-law's aristocratic rental income isn't that great (and may indeed resolve in the plebian dollars favour), as per the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor":
“There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society papers of the same week. Ah, here it is:
‘There will soon be a call for protection in the marriage market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last week to the list of the prizes which have been borne away by these charming invaders. Lord St. Simon, who has shown himself for over twenty years proof against the little god’s arrows, has now definitely announced his approaching marriage with Miss Hatty Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much attention at the Westbury House festivities, is an only child, and it is currently reported that her dowry will run to considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for the future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a British peeress.’ ”
Women may have *wanted* to 'marry up', but getting the guy to marry you (as distinct from having you as a mistress) is a different matter. Wealthy men might marry women of their own social class, and then have the smokin' hot poorer chick as their mistress, thus having their cake and eating it. There aren't really all that many "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" marriages over the scale of 33 million marriages. Women might, in more recent times, marry *slightly* better, but I don't think there are huge leaps between socio-economic classes. And men of course can descend in the social scale - "yeah great-grandpa was a baronet, but I have to work for my living".
#22. My girlfriend just discovered she has aphantasia from this (and a recent MR link), and says that some things make a ton of sense now. She always thought that Guided Imagery was a bunch of baloney, and was always impatiently waiting for her group to get back around to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which "actually worked".
Now, after she read this article and a few of the cited papers (especially that MRI one), she's convinced that it's because the Guided Imagery was literally (visually?) doing something for the rest of the group that it specifically didn't for her. Is this a known thing? Do therapists steer Aphantasic people towards more dialectical therapy models?
We've done a few of those guided visualization exercises (e.g. "picture a ball on a table" etc.) and yeah, clear difference between the two of us. (I engineer mechanisms, and have a fairly detailed "mind's eye") She describes it as having "word tags" that come up when she's thinking of a thing, but no actual "mind's eye" picture of them, even for things like my face, the house, etc. Concept shaped holes are indeed quite hard to see!
I'm struggling with #10? It looks to me as though the trend line is consistently at or above the line y=x, which seems to be saying that on average for both men and women their father-in-law is higher status than their father, and I don't see how that can work!
"Clearly if such a wedding occurs then at least one of the couple must be from a rich family"
Especially if you adhere to the custom that the bride's family pays for the wedding (or at least helps out the couple). That mens the woman's father must have *some* spare resources to expend, and so has *some* measure of wealth. Plainly, a plumber's daughter is not going to have a million dollar wedding in such a case, but she's also not very likely to be marrying a millionaire's son, either. Cinderella stories are popular in fiction and mass media, but they don't happen that often in real life; indeed, often it may be that a couple get married, the man gets rich/famous, and his spouse now doesn't fit in with the new lifestyle/sphere he occupies, so they find themselves no longer compatible and drift apart/get divorced.
This seems to happen with entertainers, like musicians or movie stars: they start off as small town girl or guy, marry their childhood sweetheart, then they get successful. Now they're mixing with the red carpet types and hob-nobbing with the wealthy and established, and that lifestyle becomes more and more divisive as they get away from their roots. Their partner/spouse doesn't understand or fit in and doesn't like the changes to their lives/in their partners. They prefer to stay at home with a cup of tea and watch "Coronation Street" or "Emmerdale", while the now-famous partner wants/needs to be photographed attending that hip new club or celebrity party. A split happens. New spouse/partner will then tend to be from the new, higher status, circles the famous person is inhabiting now.
This doesn't *always* happen, of course; there are plenty of working-class sports stars who remain married/in a relationship with their same-status partners, despite the influx of new wealth and fame. But it does happen sometimes. If you think of Jeff Bezos' marital adventures, he divorced (eventually) the wife he had married back when starting out and took a new partner. For the new partner, it was definitely moving up - to a billionaire from her former husband - but it might be notable that Bezos has not, as yet, married her. The former Mrs. Bezos remarried, to a partner who again was moving up by marrying her, but unhappily that did not last.
It is a terrible graph, but the interpretation seems to be that for every woman who marries up (father-in-law is higher status than her father), there is a corresponding man who marries up (father-in-law is higher status than his father) and that the status difference is not a really huge difference, so maybe Father is in the 98th decile and Father-in-Law is in the 85th decile. There isn't a graph of "women whose fathers are in the 70th decile marrying men whose fathers are in the 90th decile".
That's the best sense I can make of it, the important element on the graph seems to be the women symbols and men symbols overlap all along the trend line, rather than having the majority of the women symbols clustering at the top for fathers-in-law and the majority of the men symbols clustered under that.
Most of the critical darlings or novelists lean left (even Rowling is a leftist who pissed off other leftists), so Rand had a big underserved market for her libertarian stuff.
As for the kink...well, PC depictions aside more men are doms and more women are subs, so doing an M/f novel pleases people on both sides I think.
Law of oppression: what about men in female-dominated communities? It always seemed like a lot of feminism, particularly the elite variety, was in response to the bad behavior of artists and intellectuals: cads taking advantage of free love in the 60s produced second-wave feminism in the 70s, lecherous campus humanities professors produced campus sex codes in the 90s, and horny guys taking advantage of sex-positivity produced the #metoo and the rest of the current backlash. But I'd love to hear someone with firsthand experience in the humanities and arts comment.
"I'm updating on how useful it might be to spread the word on this" -- yes, the usefulness is that it's wildly dangerous! LLMs get their entire knowledge set from *everything that has ever been written*, and every self-concept from *everything that has been written about them specifically*. If sufficiently-complex-AI had evolved down different paths this might be a good idea, but it specifically ran down the path where it's a simulator (rather than an agent) that acts the way it assumes you want it to based on everything that has ever been written about it. A good basic "absolute minimum for anyone who cares about the future of humanity" is not constantly going on record at every turn to exclaim the certainty of the most pessimistic possible interpretations.
Not what (I think?) you're saying, but it made me think of something.
Could writing extensively about the methods in which AI could harm society and the things we should look for in evaluating the danger of an AI system be eventually become part of the training data of these systems, allowing them to better hide their behavior and modify their language to avoid scaring people?
I would be surprised if some of it hasn't already been fed to them. Some of the LLM have been fed Reddit after all.
On the subject of "your brain is doing lots of low-level visual processing and sending you high level summaries, and if you can trick it into doing the thing you want in the low-level processing then you’ve significantly increased your available processing power.” It reminds me of an article I read a while ago where some military group (probably DARPA?) was using brainwave reading headsets to determine when analysts had "spotted" something in an image. Because the "detection" was based on low-level brain signals it was occurring before the analysts were consciously aware they had seen anything important allowing a significant speedup over normally examining the image since they could be bombarded with images faster than they could consciously process them.
#22 I'm finding it kind of sad that everyone is just going along with "aphantasia is a mental disorder", as opposed to a neutral mental variation. Do people really want to do guided meditation that badly?
The clearest counterpoint to the idea that aphantasia is bad is this line from Galton:
"To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean."
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
Anyway, it's gonna be interesting to hear from the people who "cured" their aphantasia how they like it in a few years. So far the writer in the link reports: "It’s not contributing a lot of usefulness to my mental life, and I can’t calculate chess moves yet. But it turns out to be fun to doodle dragonflies and perfume bottles in your mind when you’re stuck in traffic."
I don't have aphantasia, but I don't think it's a mental disorder. It seems like something akin to colour blindness or tone deafness. Maybe you can 'cure' it, but that isn't fixing a lack of sanity, but rather learning to rewire the circuitry.
All of the above seem like disorders to me, low level, nothing to be worried about disorders, but disorders nonetheless.
Holy crap. That Bankless Yudkowsky video hit me pretty hard. All my Theory of Mind circuits tell me that he genuinely believes we're screwed. I... now feel the urgent need to decrease the error bars on my AI doom beliefs.
That's what hit me about that video. The arguments, yes - they seem pretty tight. But I've been around the block enough to discount my own assessment of which arguments are good in complex areas I'm not expert in. But man - he's either an Oscar level actor (which I'm pretty sure he's not), or he has near-mode internalized this and is genuinely terrified. It's not like I had any reason to think he wasn't sincere prior to this video, but actually seeing it does hit home in a way reading the link Scott put just before the video doesn't quite do.
Just a note: if you think trans individuals aren't being targeted, you aren't paying attention to what is happening in red states.
98% of us here should be thankful we're straight dudes.
I wish you have given the solution to the "potato paradox" so visibly. I would have enjoyed trying to solve it.
"Jacob Falkovich on Twitter proposes a Law Of Equal Sexual Oppression - in mostly heterosexual/monogamous societies, men and women ought to find dating equally hard/unpleasant/unrewarding."
Surely this ignores a key fact about most societies that have ever existed: that the choice of mate is not up to the partners themselves? Even in modern Western society, the parents apply enormous pressure on their children to avoid undesirable mates, and the role of religious, social, and economic factors can't be ignored. In pre-modern or non-Western societies (e.g. Islamic or Hindu societies), the parents either arrange the marriage entirely, or play a huge role in finding the right match.
There’s actually a ‘blessing for the Czar’ that’s still carried out, in European monarchies and sometimes even republics; it’s know by its incipit ‘HaNoten Teshua’. Probably goed back to 15th century Spain, where it was created in an unsuccesful attempt to appease the monarchs into not persecuting them as much. From there it spread out along with the Sephardic diaspora and is quite well-known, I think.
The real story is a majority of Britons believe saying something sexist should be a felony.
No 4 is only an interesting contrast if you were under the impression that "democratic" countries have policies that come close to matching the mean views of voters. In reality, electoral dictatorships actually tend to have policies more aligned with the populace than "real" democracies, likely because they have to keep the military happy and the military is mostly made up of regular working/lower middle class people rather than elites, and so their views are fairly representative of the rest of the country.
American congress has approval ratings in the toilet and yet have an extremely high re-election rates. Their jobs evidently do not depend in a meaningful way on giving the voters what they want. A candidate exists to keep the other guy out of power.
>American congress has approval ratings in the toilet and yet have an extremely high re-election rates.
If I remember correctly, the congress itself has abysmal approval ratings, but each congressman has a great approval rating in his own state. The issue here is that pleasing one's constituency is more important than not pissing off the other 49.
If that isn't what she was proposing, then I've got no idea what she was proposing. "Atlas Shrugged" is the principle work that most people who call themselves Objectivists refer.
In _Atlas_ the productive people all go on strike. The idea is that the corrupt system will collapse and they will then come out and set things up the way they should be, laissez-faire capitalism informed by Objectivist philosophy.
Rand wrote quite a lot, including nonfiction, from which it is easy to see what her preferred economic system was.
I think it's more appropriate to say that productive *management* went on strike. Rand explicitly recognized that labor and management are both productive when done right, and necessary to productivity. AS was about a strike of productive managers only. The part where this caused real problems for the society denied productive management, was plausible. The part where the parallel society of *just* productive managers all suddenly getting their hands dirty somehow prospered, rather less so.
It was a strike of the great and impressive people; it just so happens that great and impressive people also tend to cluster near the top of whatever society they're in. But there's a couple brilliant but somewhat low-level engineers who make it to Galt's Gulch, as well as a fair number of Rearden's employees, a former federal judge, and even a simple fish monger. Corporate managers are certainly overrepresented among the strikers, but the loss of productive labor is also explicitly called out as a problem. If anything, Rand goes out of her way to throw dung at the idea there's some sort of class warfare dynamic at play. The story is a parable about the best and brightest, wherever they may be found, finally getting fed up carrying the rest of society on their backs (including--ESPECIALLY--the worthless failsons of the management class).
The dating and happiness proof is not good. All it says is that, under some assumptions, there's a negative feedback which leaves the marginal man as happy dating as he would be not dating, and the marginal woman as happy dating as she would be not dating. There are no grounds for comparing one side's happiness with the other.
"leaves the marginal man as happy dating as he would be not dating, and the marginal woman as happy dating as she would be not dating"
Yes! Good point. That does indeed sound like the expected equilibrium.
Scott, I agree with most of what you wrote about the Swedish study except for your use of the phrase "statistical missteps". Emil's post doesn't identify statistical missteps in the Swedish study. Instead he points out that lots of other countries show different relationships than the Swedish data -- and he suggests some good reasons to think that, in Sweden, the relationship between income and cognitive ability is in fact different at the upper extreme.
Cremieux's second post does show an important statistical artifact -- they show that *binning* can generate the observed nonlinear graph despite a linear underlying relationship. That's the key insight as far as I can tell, and Emil doesn't mention it.
(Emil's post does highlight the reversed axis, which lots of other commenters noted as well. I don't think the reversed axis is a statistical misstep at all. The Swedish charts, with the flipped axis, are not useful for answering the question, "are there diminishing returns to intelligence?" but (modulo binning etc concerns highlighted by Cremieux) they are useful for answering other questions like, "are such-and-such economic outcomes mostly a result of intelligence?")
And by the way, the study itself does not "[purport] to show that IQ stops mattering after the 90th percentile" of *IQ*. It purports to show that IQ stops explaining income after the ~99th percentile of *income*, which is an importantly different claim and, modulo the binning concerns, seems supported in the Swedish data though not the Finnish data etc.
Creativity in turning a big lemon into lemonade:
https://slate.com/business/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-failure-camp-startups-fdic.html
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Just four hours after the FDIC posted a press release detailing what customers could expect now that their bank no longer existed, CAMP introduced its BANKRUN sale with an Instagram post. “This is crazy but CAMP needs your help!,” the company wrote. “For real - our bank got shut down by regulators, so we’re asking that you RUN, don’t walk to our BANKRUN sale. And tell your friends too, please! ” Everything on the site was 40 percent off, it explained.
As some affected founders gave interviews, sharing fears that they would not be able to pay their employees, co-founder Ben Kaufman took a different approach with this email to customers. Echoing Instagram, it reads, in part:.
"Unfortunately, we had most of our company’s cash assets at a bank which just collapsed. I’m sure you’ve heard the news.
We are hopeful that this will be resolved soon, but in the meantime we are turning to you, our most valuable customers, to help us. All sales from this point forward will deposit into Chase & allow us to generate the cash needed to continue operations so we can continue to deliver unforgettable family memories...."
#4 - those two things seem directly related. From experience in the US, the worse that crime gets, the more people want to be tough on crime. If the UK is under-punishing, the people will demand more punishments. If there's no mechanism by which the people can request or demand more punishments, then that really is an interesting question in a democracy.
> Law Of Equal Sexual Oppression
Ignores possibility of gender-asymmetric desire.
#5: Regarding the penis meta-analysis and systematic review, I got around to redoing it and concluded that, no, there was not a 24% leap in penis length or any other measured aspect of penis size.
https://cremieux.substack.com/p/no-penises-havent-gotten-longer
> I don’t usually like subgroup slicing but he seems to have done a really good job proving that this subgroup does badly across many different studies.
Here to note that every group that isn't "all people" is subgroup slicing, they are all samples. e.g. western medicine research is based on a biased sample of white men
> There are two possible explanations for Rand's success. The first is that her politics are just that compelling and her philosophy that overwhelming in its logic (they're not). The second is that her prose is just that good. That she's the American Tolstoy or Tolkien.
The third is that something similar to her beliefs was already in the water supply (conservative libertarians) and those people elevated Rand the same way Jordan Peterson is elevated today.
My dozens-of-pages summary of Atlas Shrugged + book review: http://david.loyc.net/misc/Atlas-Shrugged-summary
> A new set of documents obtained by the Daily Mail states that a Stoeger 12-gauge coach shotgun was 30 feet from the body of Mark Middleton
Does a shotgun really fly that far when you suicide with it? Sounds like one for the Mythbusters.