I mean, that sort of block, with all these auto-oriented businesses, is also fairly reflective of most places outside of an urban core (i.e., first developed after 1950) that aren't zoned 100% residential.
That's also quite typical in the Midwest. I live in Urbana and our usual stopping point for gas and to stretch the legs when we're driving to Chicago is a little town called Bourbonnais.
It still blows my mind that the off-ramps for I-55 in Arkansas force you to cross a lane of oncoming traffic on the frontage road. Next time we go to Louisiana, there will be no stops between the boot heel of Missouri and Memphis.
It is true there are many busy streets in urban areas that are also unwalkable and crammed with restaurants and gas stations. But the story of this picture is fascinating because it is so obviously a rural area, with nothing but trees on the other side of the highway and a large souvenir store as the only non-restaurant, non-gas station.
Why is this the famous picture meant to represent something it clearly doesn't show? Why is a picture of an ugly suburban street-scene not the representative picture? It's even more bizarre that it's of an artificial bottleneck due to a highway gap, because one could take a similar looking picture in thousands of small towns.
As I wrote below, I suspect the photographer mistakenly believed they could capture the peculiar hell that is Breezewood, but of course a picture can't actually capture that. So the reason for the popularity of this particular photo is mysterious, since much better photos could have been taken (although it does have good magic hour lighting.)
It's a very strong composition too - almost a fractal sort of patterning of the signage. (Scott's "he took three days to make it look this bad" irks me a little bit - yes, Burtynsky is a gifted and hard-working photographer! He put a lot of effort into making a great photograph!)
I'd add, too, that much of rural America *does* look like this now - I've driven through so many rural areas that, contra the "small towns and farms" stereotype that still prevails, are really just low-density sprawl zones. I've seen this everywhere from New Hampshire to Kentucky to Washington. The land is still beautiful, but the built environment in rural America has gotten so ugly.
And apparently was the Army's testing ground for a bioagent ultimately intended to reduce Soviet wheat yields. The local population was not told until forty years later, when Senator Bill Nelson was part of a review of chemical testing effects on veterans.
My dad was a civil engineer in Tampa and his company used to meet annually in Yeehaw Junction (as it was central to all the Florida branches). His description from the 80s matches up to the picture.
For point #20, I wonder where professional athlete ranks. It seems like having a parent play in the NBA makes you at least a couple orders of magnitude more likely to grow up to be a pro basketball player.
I'm thinking that so few computer programmers who are old enough to have children that are now employed in professional jobs is part of what's going on with that one too.
Are we measuring P(parent has $JOB | child has $JOB) or vice versa?
This'll have a big impact on cases where base rates have changed within a generation. No substack blogger has a parent who was a substack blogger.
The other thing I can think of is length-biased sampling. No eununch has a parent who was a eununch. The more kids you have, the more likely it is that one of them will follow your line of work. (but there's much less variation in the number of parents that someone has)
We're not just measuring P(parent has $JOB | child has $JOB) - we are looking at P(parent has $JOB | child has $JOB) / P(parent has $JOB). A fun fact equivalent to Bayes' Theorem is that this is the same as P(child has $JOB | parent has $JOB) / P(child has $JOB). (It's just the "correlation coefficient - the ratio of the probability of the conjunction to the product of the probabilities, which is one natural measure of how non-independent the events are.)
Steph Curry's dad Del. but there are a lot more than that. And that is true in other sports as well. Brothers, Nick and Joey Bosa are star defensive linemen in the NFL, and their father played in the league. Barry Bonds' dad Bobby was a very good baseball player, and the Griffeys, pere et fils. What about cross sports. Pat Mahomes father was an MLB baseball player. But, I think the role of genetics there is probably pretty strong. The criteria for making it to a top pro league are so stringent and so hard to fudge that you have to believe it is the genetics not the connections. Incidentally, in all of the aforementioned families the younger generation are better players than their fathers.
I found the same story at a straight sports site too:
"Kentucky and Duke have been mentioned since he was a young kid. Coach Cal and Coach K are believed to have standing scholarship offers out for the son of the NBA legend."
Bronny is not on course to develop his father's physique. he seems to be about 4 inches shorter at the same age. OTOH, He is 6-2 . He will just have to be a 1/2 not a 3/4/ like his father.
Regression to the mean is a thing. I know a man who was a well known High School Basketball Coach. He is about 6-6. His sons played College Basketball in the Big 10. His youngest son was 6-9 and was a first round draft choice in the NBA. His grandson just graduated from high school. The gs is 5'11" and even though he was an all star in his high school., he was only recruited by MAC teams.
There are about 70 people on that list, it looks like. A Google search says that there are about 4000 people who have ever played in the NBA, meaning about 2% of NBA players are the son of another NBA player. The NBA has existed for about the lifetime of a person, and there are about 150,000,000 American men alive today, so the pool of potential NBA players over its existence is, let's say, about 300,000,000 people (since non-Americans are allowed to play, but are much less likely to do so than American men). So the probability of a potential NBA player actually playing the the NBA is about 10^-5. Let's say every NBA player has exactly one son. This means that there are about 4000 sons of NBA players, so the probability of the son of an NBA player playing in the NBA is about 2%, or 2 * 10^-2. So the son of an NBA player is about 2000x more likely to play in the NBA than a random man.
This is fewer than I would have expected, to be honest. Among the top ~15 players of all time, Kobe Bryant and Steph Curry both have fathers who played in the NBA. There is a rumor that LeBron James's real father is actually hall-of-famer Nate Thurmond, too, although I suspect that is false.
The other confounder is height, though. I think it was on this very site that it was pointed out that if you're over a certain height, chances are you play in the NBA.
I probably out myself as a millenial here, but a mayor that is able to google such questions on the fly should be vastly preferable to an mayor who isn't, right?
For #15, I recommend the 5D Chess game if you have an afternoon for it, even though (disappointingly) it only has four playable dimensions. Playing against the computer is a treat, since due to the underdevelopment of the algorithm but the strength of short-range Monte Carlo simulations, you go from "the baby mode AI is beating me every time and I have no idea how anybody can beat this game" to "I can trounce the expert AI" in a matter of a few hours.
As someone who's fairly into chess and variants, I played a few games of it with a friend - my impression was that it's incredibly clever, but found that the massive search space (even on the mini 5x5 board) made it a very difficult game to meaningfully strategize about.
Rather than weighing the merits of a few strategic options, it felt more like a drunken stumble through a myriad of hard-to-evaluate potential options, which severely hindered it from feeling like a really "strategic" game for me.
I'm sure it gets somewhat better if I cared to put more time into mastering it, but I can't help feel I'd have a better time with a less-flashy but more grounded variant.
Yes, it turns out in order to make an interesting game, you need lots of constraints. Games extended into three or more dimensions simply don't have enough constraints a lot of the time to force conflict. This why Go works best on a 19x19 board - it is the ideal size to balance the constraints of the borders with the freedom of the center. Make it smaller, and there isn't enough freedom. Make it larger and there is too much freedom. This is also an argument against us living in a simulation - the stars are too far apart to observe interesting interactions between species evolved under different conditions. Unless the purpose is specifically to observe each species in isolation and without interference. Then again, apparently UFOs are real. So who knows. Ok, this went off tangent, lol.
Perhaps the better analogy would be a Go board on a 19x19 torus, such that there are no longer any edges to build from. Same length of time, but fewer constraints.
I've been told that playing high-strategy games against me feels like a drunken stumble through incomprehensible actions that result in my winning for reasons that have nothing to do with any legitimate strategy on my part.
I can't help but wonder if we would be in complete denial about a superintelligence dominating us simply because we couldn't conceive that the flukes by which it won were perfectly-yet-impossibly coordinated.
I've found the best way to play it is to try to figure some heuristics that mostly improve your overall position, instead of trying to plot out the specific possible courses (which just branch out so much it's hard to keep track)
As a point of comparison, three variants I've played recently that I liked more than 5D chess: (in ascending order of preference)
* Hidden queen - one pawn (randomly at the beginning of the game) on each side is secretly a queen: (you know which of your pawns is a queen, your opponent does not).
Adding hidden information into chess is a bit goofy, but this is pretty clever as timing of figuring out when to reveal your queen is an interesting tradeoff between having your second queen in the open and being able to use it as a queen vs. the threat of having a secret queen somewhere on the board.
* Benedict - pieces cannot capture, instead after a piece is moved, any pieces threatened switch to the player's color. First to put the other king in check (not counting any pieces that just changed color) wins.
This one is brutal and quick - I don't know that I've ever had a game last more than 10-15 moves.
* Teleport - you can "capture" your own pieces and drop them in any open space on the board.
Leads to tons of weirdness like capturing your own king to get it out of check (I like to call this one "get down, Mr. President!") or "counter checks" where you both move your king out of check and put their king in check at the same time. Ideally, your moves should be accomplishing two things at once.
In particular, I think teleport is a great example where it expands the possibility space quite a bit, but not so much that it completely becomes overwhelming like 5D chess.
* (Also, obligatory "Bughouse is amazing", but it's pretty well-known as chess variants go)
As I understand the entire benefit of randomized start position variants is that they "fix" the "problem" that chess has standard openings, and whether you like them basically comes down entirely to whether or not you think that's an actual problem or not.
Personally, the existence of standard openings isn't something that bothers me on the contrary, I think it's actually something I like about the game - I like the balance between the "bookish" aspects and the "improvisational" aspects of the game.
And beyond eliminating standard openings, they still basically "just chess" which doesn't really scratch the itch I'm looking for with variants. I'm not against them, but they just aren't as interesting to me as the other variants out there.
BTW if anyone wants to try these with someone https://vchess.club/#/variants has an astounding list of variants that they've implemented, including the above.
Oh boy, I really want to get stuck into the prophecy link (tempting me in with religion, huh?) but I'm going to be too busy watching the second semi-final for Eurovision.
I haven't seen the movie; Will Ferrell is too old to play the part he did, but some of it is definitely based on Eurovision acts of the past. (The giant human hamster wheel is correct).
And tonight, the Finnish entry had the "Play Ja Ja Ding Dong!" sign up during the 'visit the green room' bits: https://bro-ccooliebra.tumblr.com/
Oh, self-respect has nothing to do with it. "A bottle of Baileys and a box of chocolates" is the attitude to settling down to watch it. It's an excuse for silly fun (though occasionally politics enters; this year, with Israel in the final, the voting will be *very* much watched to see how it goes).
Feels an odd comment to make. You may feel it disrespects yourself to allow yourself to watch Eurovision, although as you aren't providing us any reasoned logic for this you're opening yourself up to accusations of trying to seem sophisticated or cool (probably the wrong forum for that) or even trying to enforce beliefs about what is acceptable discourse. Perhaps you should explain how watching Eurovision is disrespectful to something? I can buy its disrespectful to good music i suppose, but thst would miss the point.
But as a former touring, professional rock musician, Eurovision is anathema to all I once held dear. But since no one actually cares about music as an art form any longer (including me) go ahead and enjoy it. I’ve learned one can’t stop the tide so I moved to the mountains.
For the record, I also hate all awards shows, reality tv contests, half-time performances, anything top 40, npr radio interviews and above all else, medleys. So, of course I also hate Eurovision. It the World Cup of superficial, regurgitated pop music.
Ah, your mistake here id to think the music matters! I too was once like you, till I realised it's about the awfulness really. It's a way of seeing the awfulness of over 30 different cultures at once!
Also if you hate anything top 40, I take it you are more concerned with appearances than music... People buy good music sometimes as well as crap.
Eurovision is definitely a different genre to commercial pop/rock music. The two diverged sometime in the 70s/80s (Abba being the one big act that came out of Eurovision and crossed over to mainstream success) and since then it's pretty much agreed that Eurovision acts are going to be the equivalent of those TV talent show winners.
There have been a couple of successes, like Celine Dion, but that really wasn't on the back of singing in Eurovision. You might send a boyband or an act like Jedward to Eurovision but not U2 (well, back when U2 were still a decent band).
FWIW, I have never met anyone who watched Eurovision un-ironically (and for longer than 5 minutes). I'd be curious to hear what you find so compelling about it.
I don't think anyone watches it unironically. It's one of those things that everyone does ironically, yet with a belief that someone else out there somewhere is watching it unironically.
I dated a Greek woman who watched every video religiously and un-ironically. It was very strange. She’d say, “Seth! Finland has a metal band you will like it!” They made Gwar look like the Chronos Quartet.
It may have had very high-minded intentions back when it first started (that's why the theme song is Charpentier's "Te Deum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMVSsSi4QQ0), but in recent years it is now the one night each year when almost the entire continent settles down for some good, cheesy fun. Some of the songs are better than others, but mostly it's silly spectacle entertainment ("the interval act was the best bit" is a common comment) where you tune in to your local TV or radio hosts making snarky, sarcastic comments (in the UK it used to be the late Terry Wogan, now replaced by Graham Norton. For Ireland we have Marty Whelan covering it) admire (or otherwise) the outfits and the performances. And the real fun is the voting afterwards, where old grudges are not forgotten, you can reliably tell which neighbouring countries are going to vote for each other (if Greece/Cypress make it through to the final, either both of them or one at least, then the Greek maximum vote will go for Cypress and the Cypriot maximum vote will go for Greece), and everyone is keen to know who will be the one ending up with "nul point" at the end.
There's a combination of national juries plus a public vote (by text, phone or app) so you the viewer can also vote for your favourite. That gives everyone a stake in it. Things like going on social media and live-blogging the contest is also great fun.
I didn't see anywhere to play with the Jukebox thing, is it "GPT-3 for music" in the sense of "you peons can watch us play with it and imagine what it would be like"?
They released a ton of pre-generated samples you can listen to and pick from. Jukebox is too compute intensive to easily play with, but they *did* release the model so the challenge is running it yourself. The VRAM use is beyond your typical consumer GPU, but you can load it up on Colab if you get a high-VRAM instance like a V100, IIRC. The downside is that to generate a 2-3min song at full audio-resolution, rather than skeletons at the high level, it takes like a GPU-day. (This is probably a big part of why you have seen so few Jukebox-generated pieces.)
But, as ever, progress marches on, so we will get better models eventually. (The new family of diffusion models in particular seem like they might be able to match Jukebox for audio generation while doing so in a highly parallelizable and much faster way - they're already around SOTA for simpler audio tasks like voice generation and ImageNet image generation.)
That's disappointing, but thanks for the information. I was hoping the pre-generated ones would have some interesting variety in a world music sense, but it seems to be all American (and some British) choices. I'll have to wait for the "eventually" era to try it on music I'm familiar with and have a feel for.
Incidentally, I noticed that in Jukebox's singing it sometimes mispronounces words or phrases or even omits them altogether - e.g., in its performance of "The Universe is a Glitch" (a poem + rendition that I overall liked a lot; at https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3), it pronounces the eponymous line "the universe is a glitch" as [weɪ.wɪs.sa]* **. When I first noticed this I thought it might be a research-paper-worthy subject of inquiry, but now I think this might just be one of those amusing bugs that goes away as neural nets get bigger.
Also, hi gwern! I'm mildly surprised you comment here; I'm a fan of yours.
*I'm not super confident in my ability to give things accurate IPA pronunciations. For reference: phonetically spelled, this is "way-wis-sah", with about equal strength on all three syllables.
**Although, due to the meaning of the title, this might be a feature in this case.
Gwern is right that it's hard to produce a full song without serious computing power but you can generate interesting short samples with a $10/mo Google colab account.
Re: lead-crime hypothesis, Pinker has always been skeptical of this and never even mentioned lead in his scholarly tome on the decline of violence ("The Better Angels of Our Nature").
These are long term levels people maintained for their entire lives. These average levels are considered very high indeed today, children that tested in this range would be placed in a monitoring program and action would be taken. The differences in kinetics in lead excretion and higher absorption in children mean child levels were on average higher than this.
Given that most people in the US were very functional in the postwar period up until the early 80s, lead exposure in this range is not obviously consistent with large negative outcomes. While lead in higher exposures has undeniable negative consequences, its not obvious that exposures below 20 ug/dl have any large clinical significance. This paper is consistent with that interpretation.
A question I always have about these studies -- do they even bother to check other countries that also banned lead? I have never seen it mentioned. Where I live lead in gas was banned in 2003 I think, and the crime rate has not gone down since then
I only read Kevin Drum's popularizations/interpretations, but yes, he compares across countries and says they all have the same time-lagged correlation even though they all banned lead at different times. For instance, when he first started popularizing the claim, he predicted countries that banned lead in the early 2000's would start to see crime go down about now, most notably he specified Middle Eastern terrorism and a decrease in terrorism. He recently claimed on Twitter that he was correct.
That's interesting, considering that the theory I was familiar with was that the effect was immediate, based on the fact that in the US it was banned in the mid-nineties as the crime rate was beginning its decline
Again I'll only bother speaking about Kevin Drum's popularizations but no, his claim is that it's time lagged and relative to blood-lead levels that children are exposed to when their brains are developing (who then commit more decades later). It's not a binary thing -- in America unleaded gasoline wasn't banned until 96 but its use had been in decline for years, which is why Drum claims crime had started dropping before 96 and kept dropping well past then.
As BadAtChess mentioned it was banned in the mid 90s but that was only the end of a long phase-out process that started in the 70s. By the mid 80s average lead levels in gasoline were already down dramatically.
Meh... I'd say that any AI that can pass the conversational Turing Test would qualify as "Strong"; but obviously the test itself has error bars. Currently, no AI even comes close. That said, passing the Turing Test is usually not a useful application of AI, anyway.
> That said, passing the Turing Test is usually not a useful application of AI, anyway.
I'm not sure. I recall reading some experiements where chatting with even basic chatbots has helped people with minor depression and isolation. Just basic conversation might be more helpful than you might expect at first glance.
On one laptop per child, I think the evidence is quite negative, unfortunately. The link (number 7) was surprising in that I wondered -- is this the first positive effect? That would be awesome. But then it was n = 40, and has a couple of unverifiable, CEO-speak anecdotes.
A quick read of the evidence elsewhere:
1. An RCT in Peru:
"This paper presents results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop per Child program, using data collected after 15 months of implementation in 318 primary schools in rural Peru. The program increased the ratio of computers per student from 0.12 to 1.18 in treatment schools. This expansion in access translated into substantial increases in use of computers both at school and at home. No evidence is found of effects on test scores in math and language. There is some evidence, though inconclusive, about positive effects on general cognitive skills."
"This paper provides the first causal estimates of the effect of children’s access to computers and the internet on educational outcomes in early adulthood, such as schooling and choice of major. I exploit cross-cohort variation in access to technology among primary and middle school students in Uruguay, the first country to implement a nationwide one-laptop-per-child program. Despite a notable increase in computer access, educational attainment has not increased; the schooling gap between private and public school students has persisted, despite closing the technology gap. Among college students, those who had been exposed to the program as children were less likely to enroll in science and technology."
"We analyse the impact of a One Laptop per Child program introduced by the Catalan government on student achievement. Using longitudinal population data for students in secondary education during the period 2009–2016, our identification strategy exploits variations across cohorts within schools. Although participation into the program was not random, we control for a number of school characteristics that influenced school participation. The empirical results consistently indicate that this program had a negative impact on student performance in Catalan, Spanish, English and mathematics. Test scores fell by 0.20–0.22 standardised points, which represent 3.8–6.2% of the average test score. This negative effect was stronger among boys than it was among girls (differences ranging from 10% to 42%)."
"The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is one of the world's most popular interventions aiming to reduce the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) digital divide. Costa Rica introduced its first OLPC program in February 2012. In collaboration with the Quirós Tanzi Foundation (Foundation), implementing the program, baseline and post-intervention information was collected from a set of 15 primary schools that were selected to be treated, and from 19 primary schools that served as a comparison group. Using a difference in difference design, this paper estimates the short-term effects of the program on various outcomes of interest, namely: students' computer usage, time allocation and test scores. The results indicate that the program led to an increase in treated students' computer use outside of school of about 5 hours per week. Moreover, the research provides evidence that the treated students used the computer specifically to browse the internet, do homework, read and play. The research also demonstrates that the program led to a decline in the time that treated students spent on homework and outdoor activities. The research does not provide evidence to suggest that the program had an effect on participating students' school performance."
In sum I think the most charitable interpretation is that --
a. Probably a laptop is better than literally nothing, though the cost of the laptop should be measured against, say, hiring/training volunteer tutors in the community (often this is very, very cheap, particularly in rural parts of low-income countries, and has a solid evidence base. See, e.g., https://www.nber.org/papers/w14311)
b. The claim that "typical kids can teach themselves to read via software" is a hard one to find evidence for -- it has, to my knowledge, no empirical basis; the idea that "functionally literate adults can very capably, through phonics-based instruction, teach kids to read" is, on the other hand, empirically robust.
Like anyone else: would LOVE to see progress here. 260 million kids are not in school worldwide, and scalable solutions like this would be great. But I'd assign 98% probability that the "drop off the laptops and come back a year later" strategy does nothing on foundational literacy or numeracy.
Pure anecdote that's slightly relevant to your last two paragraphs - We have 4 children who have all spent a lot of time on the computer and as far as we can tell, they read quite a bit better than most of their peers. My wife and I are both well-educated, but our instruction has mostly consisted of helping the kids sound things out and answering their questions when they get stuck. Our level of involvement is way more than kids teaching themselves to read, for sure, but it's also way less involvement than I'd expect for adults who are actively teaching 4 kids to read.
Basically, the kids have so many words in front of them all the time that are necessary to navigate the world that they want to exist in, that they are highly motivated to learn to read.
I'm sure if our kids only had books and not computers, they'd still be literate, but I'm pretty sure that because of their computer games, they've read a substantial amount more than they would have without computers. And to be clear, they mostly play games that are only incidentally educational.
My own pet theory is that kids will learn to read if they 1) Have words to read and 2) Want to read (assuming a literate adult is hanging around, which obviously is a big assumption in many places). Fun things on the computer that require reading to navigate are *great* for making kids want to read, which I think is an underappreciated part of the puzzle.
It's like Bryan Caplan going on about how his kids are better educated through home schooling. It probably has a lot do with with the hereditary aspects of fluid intelligence.
I actually think he'd agree with you and that he'd claim the main point of home schooling isn't that it's a better learning environment (tho it is), but because it avoids a lot of the downsides of 'traditional schooling'.
Probably true, but my point was that I believe our kids have gotten quite a bit less formal instruction and quite a bit more screen time than the average kid, so anecdotally, screen time by itself, if it involves a lot of words, can lead effectively to literacy. Perhaps that's all overshadowed by the fact that my kids are *so much smarter* than the average kid... but I can't imagine that assumption is a productive one over a lifetime.
Half of the population in poor countries is smarter than average, as well. Smart children are not some crazy outlier thing. I completely agree that it's relevant. I disagree that an intervention that works on smart kids should be ignored because not everyone is smart.
It kind of sounds like this example: a study finds 'Households with a lot of books have children do better in school', therefore we should make sure that everybody has a lot of books in their house. It's confusing correlation with causation -- the greatest predictor of smart kids is smart parents, who are likely to have a lot of books in the house.
The same way, I don't think it's likely that the cause of your kids being smart is their computer use; rather it's the fact that you are smart and have influenced your kids regardless of their computer time
I think the example parents set is very important for reading. Kids hate missing out on things, it is one of the biggest motivators for small children. If they think that the adults have access to something good that they don't, they will want to get it. If parents provide an example that reading is good and praise and support kids efforts to read, I think that is most of the battle.
> Like anyone else: would LOVE to see progress here. 260 million kids are not in school worldwide, and scalable solutions like this would be great. But I'd assign 98% probability that the "drop off the laptops and come back a year later" strategy does nothing on foundational literacy or numeracy.
That sounds like a reasonable take. I'm curious how those results would change if each laptop had audio/video tutorials for reading and other skills. I speculate that successful learning is a lot of mimicry at first, and audio/video clues are helpful in that. You can't mimic something you've never seen done.
Or maybe I just didn't like the results. I want SRS to be the free lunch we've just ignored. Hearing its limited use is discouraging but probably expected.
It's still pretty good for learning new languages and world capitals and things like that. Medical students everywhere in the world use it a lot, of course. I suspect that it would also be very good for chess players who often have to memorize tens of thousands of games and positions. Now that I think about it, a classroom setting is probably not the optimal place to understand the full implications and scope of SRS
#10: Yes, this is Breezewood, PA. I know it well. It's the spot where I-70 and the PA Turnpike intersect, and that's about it. There isn't much of actual town there, just some businesses that predictably cater to long distance travelers and truckers. I guess in some left wing formulation, this is bad, but frankly, if you've been stuck on the PA turnpike the past four hours with no other food/drink options than the effing Sbarro's at the little state-run turnpike plazas that charge airport prices for sub-airport food, Breezewood is a ****ing Godsend. Capitalism wins again. Haters can take the Lincoln Highway.
Yeah, I'm entirely confused by what points anyone is making in any direction regarding #10. I hate cars/freeways etc as much as the next urbanist, and I see nothing horrifying or redeeming in either of those two pictures. As long as you're going to have cars and freeways, having those rest stop gas station/restaurant clusters seems... fine? Ugly, sure. But useful. And it's not like anyone lives there.
The usual sort of point I see made is that streetscapes like the one in these images are just the *default* everywhere other than urban downtowns and rural areas. It probably has a speed limit of 40 mph, which is fast enough to kill any pedestrian that gets hit, but slow enough to really annoy drivers. The entire thing is lined with driveways with cars pulling in and out, so that it has all the complexity of a walkable neighborhood for cars driving through, but none of the actual walkability.
But if this were a real town -- apparently it's not -- the town center would be in a different location further from the highway. It's only the default at highway interfaces, exactly where people would only be interested in buying gas or food.
The only potential pedestrians would be those staying at a nearby motel, and since they drove to get to the motel, they probably don't much mind driving 300 ft to get to a McDonalds. The one exception, the one case in which it is a hell, is if you are staying at a motel on the STROAD and want to have a few drinks with your meal, because then there is no safe option. It's dangerous to walk or drive.
It's a real pain to drive from one parking lot to another, due to the multiple lanes of traffic and short spaced traffic lights. We used to just walk across the borders between places when we were there. You don't need a sidewalk to walk. Crossing to the other side really was an issue, so when I was there a lot as a kid my dad would make us pick which side of the road we were going to stop (preferably the right side so he could turn right to get back out). 1/4 mile later and you're back in farm country with hardly any traffic at all.
Lots of people who use that image to make a point are using the image and the point they're making as a signaling behavior fundamental to broadcasting a subjective preference to other people who share the same subjective preference, thus setting off a respectability cascade.
Someone says something mean about Breezewood and the image of Breezewood in the context of saying something larger about something not Breezewood related to enhance their respectability and others agree and amplify. As the link provided, someone had to work very very hard to produce the image that resulted in the respectability cascade they were looking for.
I've driven through there many a time and stopped to use several of the available establishments. I'm somewhat angry that the mandated non-connection adds several miles and about 15 minutes to my drive. But it's pretty innocuous and occasionally convenient. There's not a lot for a while heading down into Maryland.
Regarding that picture pillorying American car culture - ugh, I knew that was Breezewood. That place sucks. You have to exit one interstate and drive through the crappy town to get on another interstate. Completely nonsensical. And don't get me started on the Lovecraftian feel of the place.
There are quite literally thousands of towns, villages, and major metros in the USA like this. I'm also going to predict you've done this many thousands of times in other places that weren't Breezewood. Did they all suck?
It's interesting to read about Breezewood being a special case, but then that makes the picture all the more confusing. I've never been through Breezewood, so the picture to me looks like a fairly normal, small-town highway intersection, where all the fast-food and gas stations crowd together because that's the obvious place for them to be.
But since it looks like so many other places and the point of the article about STROADs is that they are "dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town and suburb in America", it's weird that the picture happens to be of Breezewood. It's almost as if the photographer thought they could capture the special hell that is Breezewood in the picture even thought that would be impossible, since the picture can't show the highway gap.
Nah. This is a special kind of hell that takes traffic several additional miles over what otherwise would be the fastest path from one freeway to another.
They kinda mostly do, which is the depressing part of it all - it's not that any specific one of them is incredibly terrible, it's just that they're seemingly 90% of the country and are universally almost identical and kind of bad.
They're actually about 0.009% of the country. But maybe 90% of the country is invisible to you except as an inconveniently broad impediment to your travels, and you don't even bother looking at the scenery so the only part you perceive are the logistical depots set up to support your travels? Which, yeah, all look the same down to the uniform branding, which is more colorful than it would be in a less market-oriented economy but only goes so far to cover up the fact that it's a glorified logistics depot.
A very large (and increasing) portion of the American *built* environment looks more or less like Breezewood, PA. And most of our daily experience, of course, occurs in the built environment.
The others are optional. If you're driving down an interstate and you just want to get where you are going, they are maybe thirty seconds of marginal eyesore as you speed past. If you're driving down an interstate and you need fuel or a meal or someone to read the code on that "check engine" light or whatever, they're exactly what you need plus some stuff that other people like you need, all in one small obvious place. If you're not driving down an interstate but actually live in the area, they're an eyesore on the edge of your small town but probably a significant addition to your small town's economy and either you get paid to work there or you don't spend much time there.
Breezewood, you have to spend several minutes crawling through when you'd prefer to spend thirty seconds breezing past in your fast car with the full tank of gas and full stomach. That's the part that sucks.
Second, this is from 2012, I remember the hype at the time, and AFAIK nothing came out of it.
Third, there are RCTs showing even computers in classrooms don't improve instruction unless they're used just right (though this audience might think schools can ruin anything, no matter the positive potential).
Fourth, the tone of this article smells of iconoclastic tech people out of touch with poor country reality, who fervently believe every child has limitless potential irrespective of circumstances, potential that technology will soon unlock. Example: "Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said." I spent a good deal of time in remote villages in Africa around that time, and I can tell you that soft drinks were _everywhere_, as well as many other packages with printed materials.
I'm annoyed at this because I think this is a prime example of the kinds of radical new ideas that we've become good at spotting and ignoring, saying "where's the RCT?". We've matured.
Yeah, I posted it because I found it really surprising. I guess that cuts both ways. I didn't want to discount it, because it seems like a real thing that happened at least according to this reporter, but I agree that because of its surprisingness we should also be more skeptical. I've added a caveat to the link.
#12 was a discussion from 2015. The situation regarding incomplete Chinese periodic tables seems better now, though not all fixed (all 118 elements included, all characters have unicode, but pronunciations are still missing):
The search term to find periodic tables in Chinese is
元素周期表
I think the discussion in on LanguageLog site is missing the perspective of someone who studied Chemistry in both English and Chinese, and I would be curious to hear that. From my perspective as a Mandarin speaker who studied Chemistry in English and occasionally reads articles in Chinese (i.e., NOT an expert), the example given of having one element be pronounced "lǚ" and another be pronounced "lú" doesn't seem like a good example of it being confusing, as these sounds are easily distinguishable by Mandarin speakers.
On the point of it holding back progress, it does sound highly speculative to me -- this is the argument from the commenter:
> About the Chinese chemical names, I think they created a high learning barrier to anyone who
> wants to study chemistry in Chinese. As a high school student, I much preferred studying
> physics rather than chemistry, because I didn't have to confront all these strange Chinese
> characters. A similar reason for not majoring in chemistry may very well explain why Chinese
> chemical and pharmaceutical industries are still backward even today. Such a situation is
> reflected in poor product quality.
I think that argument seems rather speculative, since we don't know if enough people in China shares his preference to make such a big difference. Also, since Taiwan also uses Chinese characters for their chemical elements, wouldn't this hypothesis also predict that Taiwanese chemical and pharmaceutical industries would be backwards, and have poor product quality as well?
Another commenter on the site says:
> This periodic table at the back of my middle/high school chemistry books looked very different
> from the one linked, in which the short-handed spelling and the order number were prominently
> displayed. For all practical purposes it was never required to remember the names of any but
> the two dozen or so most common elements. The Chinese names were just there to
> approximate the pronunciation of the Latin names, and people seem to mostly just ignore them
> in research.
I don't have evidence of it either helping or hindering their research, but it doesn't seem to hinder the education of their top students -- both the Chinese and Taiwanese teams generally do very well on the International Chemistry Olympiad.
It's a silly argument. In any realistic practical application of chemistry, you write using chemical symbols, e.g. CH4 for methane, and the chemical symbols are universal, and then you simply remember the names of the roughly dozen elements that are important in whatever subfield you're going into. Even if the Chinese name for C was written "Cthulu-houyhnhnm" and pronounced "throar-warbler mangrove" it would not passeth the understanding of ye canonical 15-year-old.
A much more relevant fact is that the Chinese oil and gas industry was severely underdeveloped until about 5 minutes ago, and of course the oil and gas industry is the basis for a strong chemical industry. That's while you'll find some pretty sophisticated students of chemistry in the 'stans that used to be part of the USSR, in places where goat-herding might still be a major occupation.
Olympiad success has little to do with the complexity of Chinese characters. International Olympiad participants are typically smart/well trained enough to pass those tests in any language that they're moderately comfortable with.
Progress in research does not really depend on a country having five very smart high school students. It mostly depends on a country having a large number of smart enough researchers and a lot of resources to throw at them so that a non-zero fraction of them produces useful results.
My prior belief is that the use of Chinese characters for chemical element names probably doesn't help or hinder anything. The relationship between the use of Chinese characters for <field> and some measure of success in <field> is so complex (because of the long chain of events and that language use is often entangled with SES, institutions, and culture) that I would be skeptical of most claims of there being a strong causal relationship. The phenomenon of research achievements is even more complex than Olympiad achievements, so I find proximal causes (such as funding and institutions) more believable than distal ones -- simply because they require less evidence.
Sort of seconding this, at least in pre-university education. The commonly used elements are ones you've heard of in the local Chinese language even if you're taking chemistry in English. Organic chemistry doesn't seem harder; you'll have to memorize new rules anyway. All the elements with made up words will never be encountered in high-school chemistry except as a curiosity.
If you really want to see if strange words hinder Chinese chemistry research, maybe compare transuranium or transition metal chemistry rather than chemistry in general.
I follow Bret on twitter but unaccountably hadn't gone through that big thread on bloat. Thanks for sharing it. If you're the sort of person who would enjoy a professional historian going into how you can look at the campaigns in the Lord of the Ring and tell that while Sauruman was a clever amateur the Witch King actually knew what he was doing do consider reading A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. Or you want to know how people used to make iron and what exactly Wootz was.
Those series are great, and yes I have to admit to being pro-Tolkien and so enjoying how he finds the differences between the way Tolkien writes battles and logistics versus Martin's "Game of Thrones" (how much blame should accrue to the TV show writers is another thing), given Martin's somewhat unkind jibes about "so what is the tax base of Gondor?" with the implication that he himself is writing Real True Realistic Historical Based fiction (instead of "more tits, more gore" fantasy).
"more tits, more gore" is uncharitable, his books are way deeper than that. "whats the tax base of Gondor?" is probably a bad question from his part, I mean there is some interesting stuff with the ironbank and vassal-debt going on behind the scenes (in the books), but his economic-systems aren't the main draw of the series.
I interpret his criticism of Tolkien as being more about the "great man theory" and the relative simplicity of his moral struggle. The complex web of character interactions and conflicting social norms are, I would say, more reflective of real world history than Tolkiens story, though it's also way more complicated to write, which is why he will probably never finish it.
Tolkien is *not* about "the Great Man theory"! If we compare the two, who comes out looking like 'the Great Man makes history' - Daenaerys or Cersei, with their ambitions and (on Dany's part) sense of Divine Right to the throne, or Sam Gamgee who goes on this quest out of love?
Maybe Martin's world is more realistic, where backstabbing is a good thing. But if I want that world, I can just open a link to the latest news. I prefer Tolkien's world, where mercy is a good and not weakness, and where it's not a simple world of "all the goodies on this side, all the baddies on that":
From the collected Letters:
"Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable. Some readers he irritates and even infuriates. I can well understand it. All hobbits at times affect me in the same way, though I remain very fond of them. But Sam can be very 'trying'. He is a more representative hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he has consequently a stronger ingredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity — by which I do not mean a mere 'down-to-earthiness' — a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional 'wisdom'. We only meet exceptional hobbits in close companionship – those who had a grace or gift: a vision of beauty, and a reverence for things nobler than themselves, at war with their rustic self-satisfaction. Imagine Sam without his education by Bilbo and his fascination with things Elvish! Not difficult. The Cotton family and the Gaffer, when the 'Travellers' return are a sufficient glimpse.
Sam was cocksure, and deep down a little conceited; but his conceit had been transformed by his devotion to Frodo. He did not think of himself as heroic or even brave, or in any way admirable – except in his service and loyalty to his master. That had an ingredient (probably inevitable) of pride and possessiveness: it is difficult to exclude it from the devotion of those who perform such service. In any case it prevented him from fully understanding the master that he loved, and from following him in his gradual education to the nobility of service to the unlovable and of perception of damaged good in the corrupt. He plainly did not fully understand Frodo's motives or his distress in the incident of the Forbidden Pool. If he had understood better what was going on between Frodo and Gollum, things might have turned out differently in the end. For me perhaps the most tragic moment in the Tale comes in II 323 ff. when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum's tone and aspect. 'Nothing, nothing', said Gollum softly. 'Nice master!'. His repentance is blighted and all Frodo's pity is (in a sense ) wasted. Shelob's lair became inevitable.
This is due of course to the 'logic of the story'. Sam could hardly have acted differently. (He did reach the point of pity at last (III 221-222) ['His mind was hot with wrath..... It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature. .... But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched.'] but for the good of Gollum too late.)"
I couldn't read Martin's work, I tried with the first volume of the series that came out way back when but disliked it intensely, so I don't know: is there any part where he treats one of his wretched, wicked characters with pity?
So Tolkien doesn't take the easy way out of having a tidy, magic miracle solve all the problems in the end, despite what the pop-culture notion of the novel is about (and that kind of notion goes back all the way to Edmund Wilson and "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/AwfulOrcs.pdf where the erudite and tasteful Mr. Wilson prefers 'grown-up' fantasy such as that of James Branch Cabell to "juvenile trash"
"As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of his twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology."
Well, let's have some of that writing for grown-ups, shall we? I've attempted James Branch Cabell, and he writes in an ornamented, arch style that strives for wit (whether or not he attains it, I leave up to you) which is of its time and rather dated nowadays, and likes to hit out at those accusing him of veiled obscenity by putting in strawman characters who claim to have read the double entendres in the text that Mr. Cabell then denies he ever put in:
"With the origin and the occult meaning of the folklore of Poictesme this book at least is in no wise concerned: its unambitious aim has been merely to familiarize English readers with the Jurgen epos for the tale's sake. And this tale of old years is one which, by rare fortune, can be given to English readers almost unabridged, in view of the singular delicacy and pure-mindedness of the Jurgen mythos: in all, not more than a half-dozen deletions have seemed expedient (and have been duly indicated) in order to remove such sparse and unimportant outcroppings of mediæval frankness as might conceivably offend the squeamish."
Good to know there will be nothing to bring a blush to the cheek of a Young Person, isn't it? Let's go on, where Jurgen (the protagonist, because we can't exactly call him the hero, not even Cabell would do that), carried on the back of the Centaur Nessus, visits the Garden where the illusions of old love remain, and where he meets the image of the girl he loved back when he was a boy:
"They parted in September—with what vows it hardly matters now—and the boy went into Gâtinais, to win his spurs under the old Vidame de Soyecourt. And presently—oh, a good while before Christmas!—came the news that Dorothy la Désirée had married rich Heitman Michael."
..."Indeed, the story is very old, and old it was when Methuselah was teething. There is no older and more common story anywhere. As the sequel, it would be heroic to tell you this boy's life was ruined. But I do not think it was. Instead, he had learned all of a sudden that which at twenty-one is heady knowledge. That was the hour which taught him sorrow and rage, and sneering, too, for a redemption. Oh, it was armor that hour brought him, and a humor to use it, because no woman now could hurt him very seriously. No, never any more!"
..."Well, women, as he knew by experience now, were the pleasantest of playfellows. So he began to play. Rampaging through the world he went in the pride of his youth and in the armor of his hurt. And songs he made for the pleasure of kings, and sword-play he made for the pleasure of men, and a whispering he made for the pleasure of women, in places where renown was, and where he trod boldly, giving pleasure to everybody, in those fine days. But the whispering, and all that followed the whispering, was his best game, and the game he played for the longest while, with many brightly colored playmates who took the game more seriously than he did. And their faith in the game's importance, and in him and his high-sounding nonsense, he very often found amusing: and in their other chattels too he took his natural pleasure. Then, when he had played sufficiently, he held a consultation with divers waning appetites; and he married the handsome daughter of an estimable pawnbroker in a fair line of business. And he lived with his wife very much as two people customarily live together. So, all in all, I would not say his life was ruined."
..."Still, human hearts survive the benediction of the priest, as you may perceive any day. This man, at least, inherited his father-in-law's business, and found it, quite as he had anticipated, the fittest of vocations for a cashiered poet. And so, I suppose, he was content. Ah, yes; but after a while Heitman Michael returned from foreign parts, along with his lackeys, and plate, and chest upon chest of merchandise, and his fine horses, and his wife. And he who had been her lover could see her now, after so many years, whenever he liked. She was a handsome stranger. That was all. She was rather stupid. She was nothing remarkable, one way or another. This respectable pawnbroker saw that quite plainly: day by day he writhed under the knowledge. Because, as I must tell you, he could not retain composure in her presence, even now. No, he was never able to do that."
..."My child," says Jurgen, now with a reproving forefinger, "you are an incurable romanticist. The man disliked her and despised her. At any event, he assured himself that he did. Well, even so, this handsome stupid stranger held his eyes, and muddled his thoughts, and put errors into his accounts: and when he touched her hand he did not sleep that night as he was used to sleep. Thus he saw her, day after day. And they whispered that this handsome and stupid stranger had a liking for young men who aided her artfully to deceive her husband: but she never showed any such favor to the respectable pawnbroker. For youth had gone out of him, and it seemed that nothing in particular happened. Well, that was his saga. About her I do not know. And I shall never know! But certainly she got the name of deceiving Heitman Michael with two young men, or with five young men it might be, but never with a respectable pawnbroker."
..."And was that Dorothy whom I loved in youth an imaginary creature?"
"My poor Jurgen, you who were once a poet! she was your masterpiece. For there was only a shallow, stupid and airy, high-nosed and light-haired miss, with no remarkable good looks,—and consider what your ingenuity made from such poor material! You should be proud of yourself."
"No, Centaur, I cannot very well be proud of my folly: yet I do not regret it. I have been befooled by a bright shadow of my own raising, you tell me, and I concede it to be probable. No less, I served a lovely shadow; and my heart will keep the memory of that loveliness until life ends, in a world where other men follow pantingly after shadows which are not even pretty."
"There is something in that, Jurgen: there is also something in an old tale we used to tell in Thessaly, about a fox and certain grapes."
Ah yes, witty cynicism and world-weariness, certainly more adult than the juvenile trash of "I will be parted from my father and my people and give up my immortality to be your wife". I can get that bright, brittle, tinsel wit two for a penny anywhere, it infests modern novels to this day. Maybe I simply have an incurable taste for juvenile trash and am not worthy to tie the laces of the late Mr. Wilson's shoes, but I think neither he nor I would be particularly distressed by that.
You seem to have grievances with Wilson and Cabell. I haven’t read them nor did I mention them anywhere, so forgive me if I don’t respond to those grievances. You seem to project their alleged cynicism on Martin, but you said yourself that you haven’t read asoiaf. I’m not sure criticizing Martin in this context is very fair. I assure you it's not the edgy cynicism nor the mindless tits and gore that you are alleging.
You alleged that in Martins world backstabbing is always a good thing. In one of my earlier comments that you replied to I already talked about how it isn't.
You ask if Martin takes pity on the wicked characters, I would reply that most of his characters are at least a bit wicked and he empathizes with *all* of them (even the “heroes” like Tyrion are complex morally grey characters). The same cannot be said for Tolkien. With Martin there is no BBEG and his disposable minions that need to be destroyed à la Sauron and his orcs, only people with conflicting interests and viewpoints (You might think the Others fill this role, but the books hint that they won’t).
The great man theory of history is not about ambition over love, nor even about nobility, it's about how individual heroes largely shape history instead of the complex interactions of thousands of people. Tolkien undeniably writes "great men" and Martin with his thousands of named characters on top of large social movements (e.g the sparrows) undeniably bends away from that.
"Martin with his thousands of named characters on top of large social movements (e.g the sparrows) undeniably bends away from that."
Do we know or care about the thousands? Do we remember their names? Do they really do or achieve anything, being pulled around by the great lords all scrapping over who will sit on the throne and dragging the thousands into their wars?
Sam might deserve a little more respect than that, though I wouldn't say Tolkien is simply wrong. Sam is *interested* in the world, and it matters.
As for hobbits in general, I've been wondering about the contrast between their actual virtues and the tone in LOTR about them as being ridiculous. Is eating a lot *really* that funny?
He does place Sam as the hero, but he's aware of the deficiencies of the Hobbits (and the other races). He mentions that he's not making Hobbits (or any of them) ideals or Utopian; if the Hobbits are like the English, they share in the vices as well as the virtues: a sort of insularity, an attitude that Foreigners Are Funny, that everything good is found at home, the sort of "Little England" notion as it degenerated from anti-imperialism to a type of xenophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Englander
Hobbits aren't interested in what happens outside their own borders, and carry on their small day-to-day lives. But it happens that in this particular time, there is a lot more going on outside, and their ignorance and safety is an artificial one (as Aragorn says about the work of the Rangers that protects Bree and The Shire). Having a day-to-day routine that revolves around gossip, jockeying for social status, and eating a series of carefully-distinguished meals is not going to protect them when the Bad Things break in, and yet (like us all) they think these small affairs are the most important things in the world.
I think also Tolkien might be poking fun at the snobbery around meals and what time you took them; eating your dinner at mid-day was now common, and people got quite hot under the collar about the distinction between afternoon tea and high tea and was the final meal of the day "supper" or not? Think Hyacinth Bucket on steroids! https://www.thespruceeats.com/afternoon-vs-high-tea-difference-435327
I'm pro-Tolkien all the way, but I'll also defend Martin any day. Martin's books were a lot better than movies (and very visual, in ways one does not always appreciate).
Martin is utterly, depressingly realistic about how the human world works (even if he didn't do his homework on battles and logistics). In his world being honorable is not a survival trait, but just the opposite - something that gets you killed really fast. Same for being heroic. Same for betting on miracles - there are no miracles. I could continue.
Tolkien's stories are fairy tales by design. They run on these things - honor, heroism, miracles - that either are not survival traits, or really don't happen often enough for us to count on them. The fact that he got the battles right will not turn the fairy tale into a historical novel.
If you compare Martin to other fantasy writers, I would say that Martin's claim to realism is not wrong.
I think Martin is actually quite nuanced in his depiction of honor. SPOILERS FOR ASOIAF FROM HERE.
You're probably thinking of Ned, who got killed by the Lannisters thanks to his sense of honor, but he was absolutely beloved by the northerners who are at this moment planning to betray the dishonorable Freys and Lannisters to reinstate the children of Ned. Davos, Barristan and many others gain lots of status and influence thanks to their sense of honor.
But I don't think Martin views honor as an inherently positive thing. It was very honorable for Barristan to attack Duskendale, but it had terrible consequences, while Jaime dishonorably stabbed Aerys in the back, which had good consequences. The hedgeknights that Brienne encountered in Affc were honorable men that insisted they protect her, but that same code of honor enforces patriarchic gender roles that hurt Brienne and others like her. I think Martin views honor as a way to make complex societies function in the long run, even if those societies are unjust.
Would you care to take a crack at the hedge knight stories vs. ASoIaF? I'm not an expert, but my impression is that the Dunc and Egg stories are from a time when there was much less defection.
Dunk and Egg takes place during peacetime, so there is less "defecting" in the war sense. But those stories are also, at least partially, about honor.
In "the hedge knight" Dunk is probably lying when he says he was knighted, but he acts more "knightly" than the princes. Ironically, what makes Dunk knightly is that he is a commoner. Because he has no wealth to lose and because he can empathize with the smallfolk he sticks up for them. His commoner background even allows him to eventually defeat prince Aerion. In the other stories it is the honor-code of the nobility that once again causes conflict since they are honor-bound to their past blood feuds. I think Martin is saying that the concept of honor got corrupted by the class interests of the nobility (both in our world and in his). I think he would want us to strip away everything that the nobility attached to it: family bonds, vassaldom, gender roles, etc, and return to a kind of minimalistic notion of honor that's only about helping others.
"I think he would want us to strip away everything that the nobility attached to it: family bonds, vassaldom, gender roles, etc, and return to a kind of minimalistic notion of honor that's only about helping others."
But that's not "returning to"; the knightly sense of honour that you are talking about there came *after* family bonds, vassaldom, etc. and was a creation of poets and courtly games and the way "gentleman" became not a term denoting particular socio-economic status but "how such a person should behave, regardless of birth or position in society".
What does Martin base his foundation for honour on? If the honourable men like Ned Stark end up dead because in a dishonourable world, honour is stupidity, then why should anyone act out of "helping others" that is not motivated by self-interest?
That's the problem I find with Martin's world: he may say it's realistic, it may be realistic, but it's a Crapsack World and there's no reason it should get better, since anyone who tries not to be crappy ends up dead or having to become crappy to survive.
Yeah, but a world where you pragmatically backstab people, even for "good ends", is one that ends up just as unjust and now you have added "you can't trust anyone's word, you can't turn your back on them" as well, which reinforces tribalism: the only people you can trust are those bound by blood to you (and maybe not even then because brother kills brother to get the power) so you have a tight series of "my blood family first, my further relations second, my village third, my tribe fourth" and so on down, where "and strangers nowhere, they're pigeons to be plucked".
If you want to create a society where you get past "the Ds are for the Ds and will do down the Es when they are in power, and when the Es get into power they do down the Ds and cream off the wealth of the nation to their Swiss bank accounts", then you *do* need a system of honour, a system where your word is your bond, you keep agreements, you do what is right even if it disadvantages you, and you treat strangers equitably.
Maybe Aerys needed to be killed. But Jaime backstabbing him just leaves the principle in place that Jaime too can be backstabbed by someone else when it is convenient for that other person.
Equating "depressing" with "realist" is one of the relatively common criticisms of this genre in general.
Is there even that much trust in miracles in LoTR, anyway? There is lot of perseverance against impossible-appearing odds, hope but also doubt (and most importantly, failures). My reading of its treatment of miracles is more like, you need to do your bit for there to be an opening for a fortuitous happenstance to occur, which may turn into a miracle or not.
I did not mean trust in miracles by characters of the story. From the inside of a fairy tale, the character just does his best and does not know if he will succeed or fail. I meant Tolkien's view of how the most important part of a fairy story is the eucatastrophe, the impossible, happy ending.
"But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy -story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
This is what he himself says is the most important thing in what he wrote. (Maybe I shouldn't have just said "miracles".)
It's been a long time since I last read this essay, and scanning it now I feel like parts of it are a response to the likes of George Martin.
Here is where the division lies for me; one writer was actually in the mud and the mire and the blood of battle, and one never came near it.
The one who experienced most of the friends he was at school with being killed in the Great War is the one writing about "honour and heroism and miracles".
The one who wrote a bad horror/fantasy novel (I've read it, it is bad) that was self-insert 70s fanfiction (that is, fanfiction about the 70s) is the one writing about "utterly, depressingly realistic about how the human world works".
You see my problem here?
Martin may be realistic - God knows, English court politics for one were bloody, back-stabbing affairs; reading about Henry VIII's court and how he, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of France, as well as Henry's first father-in-law Ferdinand of Aragon, constantly made and broke alliances, signed treaties while secretly negotiating with enemies behind allies back and generally carried on, will disillusion anyone about how "the human world works".
But he is *not* 'more realistic' than Tolkien. Martin is still writing a world where the great conduct big, epic wars and plot and scheme for power, while the little people suffer as they must; Tolkien is writing a world where the it is the small, common guy who is the real lynchpin of the plot. It's the gardener who goes out, meets the great, but comes back home to get married and have a house full of kids and live in his little community who is the real hero of the book.
Martin is being, ironically, very conventional in his worldbuilding and black-and-white morality. If he wrote Sam Gamgee, Sam would probably be a hapless commoner drafted into the local lord's army, marched off to war and subjected to the full horrors of that, injured (possibly maimed for life) and if he ever did return home, he'd be disabled and suffering from PTSD (and probably suffering guilt from the rapes and war crimes he participated in to boot).
That's "realism" for a certain value of realism, sure. But lots of people did go off to war and come back, and even if they had been changed (as Tolkien's characters *are* changed), they also had normal lives afterwards. People are heroic and honourable even during terrible times. Does Martin's world have room for an Oskar Schindler, a ne'er-do-well who somehow found the capacity to give a damn even when it was risky for him personally?
Tolkien's world doesn't have easy magic or miracles popping up like a deus ex machina to solve problems for the heroes. Martin's world also does have magic and gods though he deals with it and with them in a different way. The choices Martin makes are authorial choices, and Tolkien's world and story are every bit as realistic about human nature as Martin's choices.
There are heroes, there are villains, there are people caught up in forces beyond their control, there are mixed motives, there are grey areas. There is no one final, overwhelming victory; Galadriel speaks of "fighting the long defeat" and Tolkien knows that even with Aragorn restored to the throne, even with Sauron driven out, that does not solve The Problem Of Evil.
Extract from a letter in 1964 about his unfinished story "The New Shadow":
"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing."
Now, where Martin leaves himself vulnerable to precisely the kind of criticism Devereaux (and in much lesser way, myself) are engaging in, is because of the things he said (maybe an off-the-cuff interview is unfair to take his words, but them's the breaks):
"I look at the end and it says Aragorn is the king and he says, ‘And Aragorn ruled wisely and well for 100 years’ or something. It’s easy to write that sentence. But I want to know what was his tax policy, and what did he do when famine struck the land? And what did he do with all those Orcs? A lot of Orcs left over. They weren’t all killed, they ran away into the mountains. Sauron fell down, but you see all the Orcs running away. Did Aragorn carry out a policy of systematic Orc genocide? Did he send his knights out into the hills to kill all the Orcs? Even the little baby Orcs? Or was there Orc rehabilitation going on. Trying to teach the Orcs to be good citizens. And if the Orcs were the result of Elves… could Orcs and Elves intermarry?”
He's positioning his questions as "Tolkien had all these plot holes" and he's also, in other places, saying he takes his influences from Real History and Real Culture. The implication, whether he does mean to make it or not, is that he has considered these plot holes and patched them up in his own world-building. So he leaves himself open to criticism on the grounds of "actually, you got this badly wrong, mate". If you really do want to know about tax policy and handling famine after bad harvests in a fantasy world, then you have to put up or shut up when it comes to "and how did *you* handle it in your fantasy world?"
And of course, the pervasive influence of grimdark where "gore, sex, darkness" is somehow more 'realistic'. Black exists in our real world, but so does white. Ugliness - and beauty. Good and evil, right and wrong, people being monstrous assholes, people being generous exemplars.
Not disputing your major points, but one place I find GRRM to be more realistic is that he has many countries bumped up against each other rather than Tolkien's relatively separate realms.
Well, different worlds. Tolkien's is one where the human kingdoms have been shattered under the assault of Sauron's forces for centuries upon centuries, so that Arnor in the North first fractured into three kingdoms and then these were over-run and defeated by Sauron's forces, so that small isolated areas like The Shire are all that survive of what is falling back into wilderness. Something like post-Roman Britain after the legions pulled out, the local Romano-British families had been dispersed or killed off by the rebelling local tribes, and in later years the Anglo-Saxons looked at the ruins left behind and thought them the works of giants, not men:
From a letter to W.H. Auden (yes, that Auden):
"Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called 'Treebeard', from Treebeard's first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading some one else's work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I daresay something had been going on in the 'unconscious' for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till 'what really happened' came through. But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon ['eald enta geweorc idlu stodon', 'the old creations of giants [i.e. ancient buildings, erected by a former race] stood desolate], and their connexion with stone. Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war."
I'm a fan of ASoIaF, but this tax policy business is off-putting, because it's exactly the sort of thing that Martin himself doesn't worry about in the story. He never tells us even the basics of how taxes work or how lords make their money.
Again, to defend Tolkien, that is not the kind of story he's writing and he knows it. From letters of 1953 and 1954:
"The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. That the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way – according to their different points of interest or knowledge: i.e. as if it were a report of 'real' times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly in others. Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy."
"Yours is the only comment that I have seen that, besides treating the book as 'literature', at least in intent, and even taking it seriously (and praising or ridiculing it accordingly), also sees it as an elaborate form of the game of inventing a country – an endless one, because even a committee of experts in different branches could not complete the overall picture. I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archaeology and realien [German, 'realities, technical facts'] than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like. Not to mention music and its apparatus. I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the 'mortals' go, Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out: Gondor has sufficient 'townlands' and fiefs with a good water and road approach to provide for its population; and clearly has many industries though these are hardly alluded to. The Shire is placed in a water and mountain situation and a distance from the sea and a latitude that would give it a natural fertility, quite apart from the stated fact that it was a well-tended region when they took it over (no doubt with a good deal of older arts and crafts). The Shire-hobbits have no very great need of metals, but the Dwarfs are agents; and in the east of the Mountains of Lune are some of their mines (as shown in the earlier legends) : no doubt, the reason, or one of them, for their often crossing the Shire. Some of the modernities found among them (I think especially of umbrellas) are probably, I think certainly, a mistake, of the same order as their silly names, and tolerable with them only as a deliberate 'anglicization' to point the contrast between them and other peoples in the most familiar terms. I do not think people of that sort and stage of life and development can be both peaceable and very brave and tough 'at a pinch'. Experience in two wars has confirmed me in that view. But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view. I am not a reformer nor an 'embalmer'! I am not a 'reformer' (by exercise of power) since it seems doomed to Sarumanism. But 'embalming' has its own punishments.
Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs."
You mean we shouldn't take Bilbo's pocket watch as a serious piece of world-building which needs to be accommodated in our understanding of middle earth? Oh, no!
I have to object specifically to the "If Martin wrote Sam Gamgee" bit: there is a character named Sam in ASoIaF whose name is pretty clearly an homage, and his arc is pretty different from what you describe.
I'm very much on Team Aragorn. Aragorn did a lot to prepare himself, and I expect he might have studied tax policy in advance (is it different for humans vs. elves? probably) or certainly would have studied it once he was king, been thoughtful and ethical about it, and made changes if he did something which wasn't working.
#31: What's the evidence that an appendix was harmful in the EEA? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendicitis#Causes) suggests appendicitis is mostly due to a low-fiber Western diet. I've seen claims elsewhere that appendicitis was pretty much unknown in the ancestral environment.
So who is going to add "Rome's secret true name got out" to the Wikipedia page for proposed causes of the fall of the Roman Empire? As to the mechanism for this, I'll propose that Jesus (being God) of course knew the name and passed it to St. Peter, and it was from there passed from Pope to Pope, in case it should ever be needed. But the Popes, being Bishops of Rome, felt Rome was their flock and thus the various persecutions were not reason enough to invoke the Secret Name.
This was all well and good until St. Pontian became the first Pope to abdicate, shortly before his death at Roman hands in 235. In Pontian's view, his abdication relieved him of his responsibility as Bishop of Rome to not invoke the Secret Name, and thus did he invoke that name at the moment of his martyrdom. The Earth did not circle the sun thrice before that doom commenced, for in 238 the Emperor was assassinated and the Year of the Six Emperors began -- the Crisis of the Third Century was in full force and Rome was dealt a mortal blow from which it never fully managed to recover.
The "scholarly/historical speculation" link suggests that, as Supreme Pontiff, the Popes may still know the name. Though I expect it's more likely that they don't, it being a pagan custom and all. The name might survive somewhere in a secret Vatican archive, though:
"The secret name of the deity, which, by the way, would have been the real name of the city itself, would have been known and spoken only by a very few persons, namely those who officiated at the festival of the deity, the college of her priests. The Pontifex Maximus, too, would have known the name, as would, no doubt, the chief Vestal, and, in Imperial times, the head of state, the Princeps or Emperor, who usually assumed the title and functions of the Supreme Pontiff. Nowadays, except for the Supreme Pontiff, who is not likely to worry himself over the name of a pagan deity, all those titular personages are vanished."
And Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome, he effectively baptized it, and gave it a new, Christian name, unknown to Rome's enemies, ending the 3rd century crises?
Related to the AI overhang discussion, when that was posted some asked "why didn't Google do this first? and/or Why isn't Google jumping on this?"
Just this week, Google released preliminary information about two projects: MUM, a powerful multimodal transformer, and LaMDA, a conversational language transformer model. The posts are cursory, but the work is there. They just haven't rolled it out.
I remember hearing on Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's podcast that there was an interesting hypothesis that hunter-gatherer people get appendicitis a lot less than agricultural people, but they get diarrhoeia a lot more, and that what the appendix does is store samples of beneficial gut flora so that you can repopulate quickly after a bout of sudden evacuation.
I've heard that too, but for some reason these anthropological theses always leave out the other major difference in diet and intestinal health between HGs and agri-societies - parasites. Agriculturalism and to a lesser extent pastoralism significantly limit external parasitism simply by limiting access vector: you're limiting the diversity of your food supply, your food supply's food supply, and your food supply's microbiome.
Re #17 (AI overhang), the intro predicts GPT-3 as a trigger for "100x larger projects...with timelines measured in months". But note this was written 10 months ago, so "months" have already elapsed. Have any such projects been completed?
I'm not sympathetic to that post at all. It's not clear to me what sorts of commercial applications of a GPT-4 scaled 100x past GPT-3 would justify a $1 billion upfront cost, especially from companies making most of their money from advertising. I don't see how GPT-N helps in predicting human spending patterns. Much cheaper algorithms are fine for that. It's data extraction, storage, and processing at scale that is needed.
On the other hand, the specifics of the predictions made there, that scaling up GPT-N would happen quickly due to GPU costs dropping drastically when NVIDIA loses a monopoly, didn't happen for a variety of reasons that are perfectly reasonable not to predict, mainly the explosive growth of Ethereum eating up GPU sales and Covid creating a global supply chain shock where neither NVIDIA nor anyone else can make more of anything to satiate the increased demand.
This gets at a weakness of any sort of "explosive growth" prediction, though. They often neglect much more practical bottlenecks to progress than some person or AI simply figuring out how to do something, such as the need to transport large amounts of rare earth elements between continents to actually implement the plan. There are hard limits to how quickly that can happen. Some production processes just don't scale up very easily, no matter the market conditions, but obviously this is especially the case when both factories and shipping channels shut down for a year because of travel restrictions.
It is interesting to see the disconnect between the excitement on LessWrong and the general sentiment I feel in the software industry that another AI winter is right around the corner, largely based on the continued lack of materialization of any commercial application of these technologies. The military is starting to get disillusioned as well after being sold so many false promises.
> largely based on the continued lack of materialization of any commercial application of these technologies.
Which lack of commercial application? Voice assistants like Alexa and self-driving cars are massive businesses already. I'm just a run of the mill SWE and I work on a team that uses BERT to do chat filtering. It's definitely being applied commercially, and getting results.
#31: Bret Weinstein suggested on his podcast a while back that the appendix was not vestigial, but instead contained reservoirs of bacteria that allowed gut flora could be repopulated quickly and effectively after a bout of food poisoning, intestinal flu, or other event that would typically wipe out one's gut bacteria. I think this was largely a logical deduction, though; I don't think he had good empirical evidence for this claim. This was a while ago, so I could of course be wrong.
Jonathan Haidt talks about this as well in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. Specifically he mentions expanding the bureaucracy for student support measures as well as to host prestigious events (eg an expensive guest speaker). Students are increasingly asking for both, and the university admins are happy to oblige.
If I'm remembering Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education correctly, a pure signalling model would suggest that a high price makes the signal stronger. Thus higher tuition prices would make a university more appealing to students, not less. Since he, and I, believe that signalling theory is the dominate explanation for why education is valuable I expect university costs will simply grow to the limit of what students can afford (or what gets them in trouble).
What's the mechanism for that, exactly? Is the higher price just signalling that you come from an upper middle class family, and are likely to possess the same traits that made your parents economically successful? Or is it something else?
A more expensive signal shows a willingness to place a bigger bet on your traits. This would imply that you don't have the bare minimum but instead exceed the minimum by a comfortable amount. If there is a cheap way of getting the signal and an expensive one, the marginal candidates are going to have a stronger preference for the cheap option. This can develop into a reputation for the more expensive option being higher quality. The strong candidates will reinforce the reputation by choosing to pick the more expensive option due to that reputation. Thus higher cost ends up strengthening the signal.
Thanks, that makes sense, but I would imagine that gets watered down by the fact that most students are making a bet with someone else's money, mainly their parent's or some government agency's.
I think a simpler explanation is that the number of college degrees with a given level of prestige is essentially constant in time, while the population of college-age students grows (albeit these days slowly, and with assorted fluctuations).
For example, Harvard has given out about 1,500 degrees a year since the 1950s, while the potential applicant pool has roughly doubled, if we scale by mere population growth, and probably actually grown by a factor of 6, if we include the fact that in 1950 about 8% of HS graduates went to college at all, while now it's closer to 35%.
In any *normal* industry this would be the signal for an entrepreneur to come and build a brand-new Harvard 2.0 on cheap land out west and offer the same thing at 85% of the cost, thus leading to competition and stabilized (or lower) prices.
But unfortunately, you can't do that. I mean, you can certainly build a campus, and you can hire people to staff it who are as good a the faculty at Harvard*, but it wouldn't sell in the marketplace, because it's not a Harvard degree. And there's no way for it to *become* a Harvard degree except by decades to centuries of persistence, reputation, and alumni-network building. Since no venture capitalist is willing to invest $500 million in Harvard 2.0 and wait 120 years for a killer ROI, there we sit.
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* the competition for Harvard *faculty* jobs is far more brutal than the competition for Harvard undergraduate degrees.
Maybe it's also worth adding that it has not always been thus. In the 20-year period of rapid industrialization post-Civil War Harvard roughly doubled its graduating class size.
To th extent any of the nouveau riche (including Thiel) have thought about this, they rightly conclude they cannot duplicate Harvard -- they're not idiots, after all, there's a reason they're rich -- and they have put money into schemes to narrowly focus on what we used to call vo-tech training, the equivalent of correspondence school, cosmetology school, flight school, et cetera -- only aimed at professions which at least in 2021 pay a lot of money, like Javascript programming or network administration certification.
These have had modest and scattered success, in part because they really only suit a fairly narrow consumer niche: people who are certain of what they want to do, and are well-disciplined and logical about working towards it, but who also lack some kind of wherewithawal to just go to college. Very poor? Re-entrant? There's lots of possible reasons, but they don't fit most of middle-class kids turning 18 every year.
Furthermore, the general premise is delusional. The value of a college education may have depended, to some modest extent, on what skills you actually learned over those 4 years somewhere in the 1945-1995 span, but before and after that time, it was mostly just a social credential, an entry ticket to a more aristocratic class who will be automatically considered for better jobs, and the only thing it tends to demonstrate is that you have money, self-discipline, and patience. Those are indeed valuable character traits, but they have zippity-zap to do with whatever is in your textbooks. *In principle* you could demonstrate them much more cheaply by having a solid entry-level job history, or a good military record, et cetera, but the current fashion is to look down upon the latter two for some reason.
Since the value of the college education today in fact has relatively little to do with what you actually learn, it can't be duplicated in the market place by equally effective actual learning. The learning is secondary, it's not the main point. The main point is complex hominid social mythology, so it's that you'd need to duplicate somehow.
There are other ways to go about this. Udacity and edX partnered with Georgia Tech to act as distribution platforms to scale up existing degree programs. Coursera did the same with UIUC. If you can't create an equivalent institution from scratch, you can always try to partner with one that already exists. As far as I understand, going through one of these programs gets you exactly the same degree as an on-campus student but at a drastically lower price.
Maybe part of the point is that a university can't start out being competitive with Harvard. If there are enough universities aiming at excellence, some of them will end up competing with Harvard and there will be more high-level opportunities.
Does anyone know of any resources that discuss price signaling in the vein of consumer sentiment that higher prices = better service? I could see this reflected in the pricing of "luxury brands" (e.g. Bose, Apple), and it would also make sense in the context of prescription apps, where people won't pay $10 for a medical app but assume one that's $899 is the real deal.
Wrong question, since free education does not exist (as you clearly realise). Free for students means government pays, and is therefore a monopoly customer. As government ultimately will not just keep paying higher and higher amounts (for political, ideological or fiscal reasons) then the question with free education is what will universities have to cut.
This is why mainland Europe has so few good universities per capita compared to the US (or even the subsidised-but-expensive UK). It is also why international students who pay full costs are so desirable to universities.
Making college "free" would remove the upward pressure on price that signalling provides. So the usual factors would be in effect for a government provided service.
AOC lying about where she was on January 6 wasn't satire, and neither was Snope's covering for her. That is only nail #43,698 in the coffin of Snope's credibility. Monkeys smoking ganja and threatening randoms in the streets with knives while demanding the truth could produce better "checks of facts".
What should the credibility of Snopes or an alleged false fact-check have to do with my statement? Snopes is a major fact checker, it does routinely fact-check satire content,so "fact-checking" satire is probably not as unusual as it looks at first glance. That shouldn't be dependent on your view of their accuracy, or credibility.
See (A.) below. The "tend to leak into serious belief" you mention isn't true for anyone except snopes and their fanbase who have difficulty with satire because they are precisely the people being satirized. In other words, it is unusual for anyone that still has a sense of humor.
If someone is asking, you need to quietly tell them they asked something embarrassing, like a child asking what a condom is in the middle of a fancy dinner.
For a random person seeing a satirical article, it is unusual if they take it as fact, and you can laugh at everyone who does that for having no sense of humor without deriding a large percentage of the population. But the event of a satirical article being taken for fact by a large number of people is not unusual, nor is (at least Snopes) noting "That claim is labeled satire" so someone trying to find a fact check will find the explanation "that claim was originally labeled as satire" and act accordingly. I don't see any problem with that, honestly, and I still don't see what this policy should have to do with a completely unrelated "classical" fact-check.
I don't see any way to report a comment, so as Driele Persecto has asserted that AOC lied about she was, and refuses to provide any cite, I request that they be suspended.
This caused Facebook to threaten to demonetize Babylon Bee. To their credit, for once, Facebook apologized.
I don't think Snopes' excuse of "because people ask us about them" holds for this one.
On the more general topic of fact-checking, RealClearPolitics has a project called "Fact Check Review" that attempts to quantify what fact-checking is actually worth, in particular how often it sources its verdict from something other than media (or even from something other than the fact-checker itself). It's at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/ , and yes, the data is pretty bad.
I mean, that sort of block, with all these auto-oriented businesses, is also fairly reflective of most places outside of an urban core (i.e., first developed after 1950) that aren't zoned 100% residential.
That's also quite typical in the Midwest. I live in Urbana and our usual stopping point for gas and to stretch the legs when we're driving to Chicago is a little town called Bourbonnais.
It still blows my mind that the off-ramps for I-55 in Arkansas force you to cross a lane of oncoming traffic on the frontage road. Next time we go to Louisiana, there will be no stops between the boot heel of Missouri and Memphis.
I may have overstated this. Looking at Google Maps, most of these junctions seem to be laid out in a sane manner; I just happened to catch this one.
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.368549,-90.2810377,541m/data=!3m1!1e3
It is true there are many busy streets in urban areas that are also unwalkable and crammed with restaurants and gas stations. But the story of this picture is fascinating because it is so obviously a rural area, with nothing but trees on the other side of the highway and a large souvenir store as the only non-restaurant, non-gas station.
Why is this the famous picture meant to represent something it clearly doesn't show? Why is a picture of an ugly suburban street-scene not the representative picture? It's even more bizarre that it's of an artificial bottleneck due to a highway gap, because one could take a similar looking picture in thousands of small towns.
As I wrote below, I suspect the photographer mistakenly believed they could capture the peculiar hell that is Breezewood, but of course a picture can't actually capture that. So the reason for the popularity of this particular photo is mysterious, since much better photos could have been taken (although it does have good magic hour lighting.)
It's a very strong composition too - almost a fractal sort of patterning of the signage. (Scott's "he took three days to make it look this bad" irks me a little bit - yes, Burtynsky is a gifted and hard-working photographer! He put a lot of effort into making a great photograph!)
I'd add, too, that much of rural America *does* look like this now - I've driven through so many rural areas that, contra the "small towns and farms" stereotype that still prevails, are really just low-density sprawl zones. I've seen this everywhere from New Hampshire to Kentucky to Washington. The land is still beautiful, but the built environment in rural America has gotten so ugly.
Of course it's in Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeehaw_Junction,_Florida
And apparently was the Army's testing ground for a bioagent ultimately intended to reduce Soviet wheat yields. The local population was not told until forty years later, when Senator Bill Nelson was part of a review of chemical testing effects on veterans.
My dad was a civil engineer in Tampa and his company used to meet annually in Yeehaw Junction (as it was central to all the Florida branches). His description from the 80s matches up to the picture.
For point #20, I wonder where professional athlete ranks. It seems like having a parent play in the NBA makes you at least a couple orders of magnitude more likely to grow up to be a pro basketball player.
With so few professional athletes I feel like this is open to a lot of noise.
I'm thinking that so few computer programmers who are old enough to have children that are now employed in professional jobs is part of what's going on with that one too.
Are we measuring P(parent has $JOB | child has $JOB) or vice versa?
This'll have a big impact on cases where base rates have changed within a generation. No substack blogger has a parent who was a substack blogger.
The other thing I can think of is length-biased sampling. No eununch has a parent who was a eununch. The more kids you have, the more likely it is that one of them will follow your line of work. (but there's much less variation in the number of parents that someone has)
We're not just measuring P(parent has $JOB | child has $JOB) - we are looking at P(parent has $JOB | child has $JOB) / P(parent has $JOB). A fun fact equivalent to Bayes' Theorem is that this is the same as P(child has $JOB | parent has $JOB) / P(child has $JOB). (It's just the "correlation coefficient - the ratio of the probability of the conjunction to the product of the probabilities, which is one natural measure of how non-independent the events are.)
My grandfather was a computer programmer, as was my Father, but I don't think you can go back farther than that
The Lovelace family would like a word...
OK, there's no living descendents (or of Lord Byron that means), so maybe you have a point.
I personally know three people working in academic computer science whose parents are also in academic computer science.
Steph Curry's dad Del. but there are a lot more than that. And that is true in other sports as well. Brothers, Nick and Joey Bosa are star defensive linemen in the NFL, and their father played in the league. Barry Bonds' dad Bobby was a very good baseball player, and the Griffeys, pere et fils. What about cross sports. Pat Mahomes father was an MLB baseball player. But, I think the role of genetics there is probably pretty strong. The criteria for making it to a top pro league are so stringent and so hard to fudge that you have to believe it is the genetics not the connections. Incidentally, in all of the aforementioned families the younger generation are better players than their fathers.
https://sports.theonion.com/duke-basketball-attempts-to-lure-bronny-james-by-offeri-1846449122
I found the same story at a straight sports site too:
"Kentucky and Duke have been mentioned since he was a young kid. Coach Cal and Coach K are believed to have standing scholarship offers out for the son of the NBA legend."
https://thespun.com/more/top-stories/5-schools-are-getting-mentioned-for-bronny-james-jr
Bronny is not on course to develop his father's physique. he seems to be about 4 inches shorter at the same age. OTOH, He is 6-2 . He will just have to be a 1/2 not a 3/4/ like his father.
Regression to the mean is a thing. I know a man who was a well known High School Basketball Coach. He is about 6-6. His sons played College Basketball in the Big 10. His youngest son was 6-9 and was a first round draft choice in the NBA. His grandson just graduated from high school. The gs is 5'11" and even though he was an all star in his high school., he was only recruited by MAC teams.
Some very rough estimations. This wikipedia article lists second generation NBA players:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_second-generation_National_Basketball_Association_players
There are about 70 people on that list, it looks like. A Google search says that there are about 4000 people who have ever played in the NBA, meaning about 2% of NBA players are the son of another NBA player. The NBA has existed for about the lifetime of a person, and there are about 150,000,000 American men alive today, so the pool of potential NBA players over its existence is, let's say, about 300,000,000 people (since non-Americans are allowed to play, but are much less likely to do so than American men). So the probability of a potential NBA player actually playing the the NBA is about 10^-5. Let's say every NBA player has exactly one son. This means that there are about 4000 sons of NBA players, so the probability of the son of an NBA player playing in the NBA is about 2%, or 2 * 10^-2. So the son of an NBA player is about 2000x more likely to play in the NBA than a random man.
This is fewer than I would have expected, to be honest. Among the top ~15 players of all time, Kobe Bryant and Steph Curry both have fathers who played in the NBA. There is a rumor that LeBron James's real father is actually hall-of-famer Nate Thurmond, too, although I suspect that is false.
The other confounder is height, though. I think it was on this very site that it was pointed out that if you're over a certain height, chances are you play in the NBA.
NHL players tend to have hockey player children. Even if they don't make the NHL, they tend to be closely involved with hockey in some way.
Re: Andrew Yang guessing the questions right, the full story is even better. They asked all the candidates about 5 questions, and Yang was the only one to get all 5 right. Now some of the other mayoral candidates are accusing him of cheating somehow: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/andrew-yangs-rivals-accuse-him-of-cheating-nyt-interview.html
Sorry, 3 questions.
"He who answers the 5 questions..."
"3 questions..."
"3 questions, may cross in safety."
He's the former CEO of a test prep company. Maybe he hasn't forgotten his test-taking skills?
I probably out myself as a millenial here, but a mayor that is able to google such questions on the fly should be vastly preferable to an mayor who isn't, right?
It wasn't an open-book exam.
For #15, I recommend the 5D Chess game if you have an afternoon for it, even though (disappointingly) it only has four playable dimensions. Playing against the computer is a treat, since due to the underdevelopment of the algorithm but the strength of short-range Monte Carlo simulations, you go from "the baby mode AI is beating me every time and I have no idea how anybody can beat this game" to "I can trounce the expert AI" in a matter of a few hours.
As someone who's fairly into chess and variants, I played a few games of it with a friend - my impression was that it's incredibly clever, but found that the massive search space (even on the mini 5x5 board) made it a very difficult game to meaningfully strategize about.
Rather than weighing the merits of a few strategic options, it felt more like a drunken stumble through a myriad of hard-to-evaluate potential options, which severely hindered it from feeling like a really "strategic" game for me.
I'm sure it gets somewhat better if I cared to put more time into mastering it, but I can't help feel I'd have a better time with a less-flashy but more grounded variant.
Yes, it turns out in order to make an interesting game, you need lots of constraints. Games extended into three or more dimensions simply don't have enough constraints a lot of the time to force conflict. This why Go works best on a 19x19 board - it is the ideal size to balance the constraints of the borders with the freedom of the center. Make it smaller, and there isn't enough freedom. Make it larger and there is too much freedom. This is also an argument against us living in a simulation - the stars are too far apart to observe interesting interactions between species evolved under different conditions. Unless the purpose is specifically to observe each species in isolation and without interference. Then again, apparently UFOs are real. So who knows. Ok, this went off tangent, lol.
If you made go boards larger than they are games would also last forever.
Perhaps the better analogy would be a Go board on a 19x19 torus, such that there are no longer any edges to build from. Same length of time, but fewer constraints.
Or the point is to observe a species developing in a universe where they can see stars.
I've been told that playing high-strategy games against me feels like a drunken stumble through incomprehensible actions that result in my winning for reasons that have nothing to do with any legitimate strategy on my part.
I can't help but wonder if we would be in complete denial about a superintelligence dominating us simply because we couldn't conceive that the flukes by which it won were perfectly-yet-impossibly coordinated.
We may not even notice that it wins...
I've found the best way to play it is to try to figure some heuristics that mostly improve your overall position, instead of trying to plot out the specific possible courses (which just branch out so much it's hard to keep track)
As a point of comparison, three variants I've played recently that I liked more than 5D chess: (in ascending order of preference)
* Hidden queen - one pawn (randomly at the beginning of the game) on each side is secretly a queen: (you know which of your pawns is a queen, your opponent does not).
Adding hidden information into chess is a bit goofy, but this is pretty clever as timing of figuring out when to reveal your queen is an interesting tradeoff between having your second queen in the open and being able to use it as a queen vs. the threat of having a secret queen somewhere on the board.
* Benedict - pieces cannot capture, instead after a piece is moved, any pieces threatened switch to the player's color. First to put the other king in check (not counting any pieces that just changed color) wins.
This one is brutal and quick - I don't know that I've ever had a game last more than 10-15 moves.
* Teleport - you can "capture" your own pieces and drop them in any open space on the board.
Leads to tons of weirdness like capturing your own king to get it out of check (I like to call this one "get down, Mr. President!") or "counter checks" where you both move your king out of check and put their king in check at the same time. Ideally, your moves should be accomplishing two things at once.
In particular, I think teleport is a great example where it expands the possibility space quite a bit, but not so much that it completely becomes overwhelming like 5D chess.
* (Also, obligatory "Bughouse is amazing", but it's pretty well-known as chess variants go)
I've never heard of any of those (except Bughouse ofc) but I really like the sound of Hidden queen.
I went through a fog-of-war phase. You say you find hidden information in chess goofy so I guess you're not a fan, but I think it's really fun.
What do you think of the various randomized chess variants?
As I understand the entire benefit of randomized start position variants is that they "fix" the "problem" that chess has standard openings, and whether you like them basically comes down entirely to whether or not you think that's an actual problem or not.
Personally, the existence of standard openings isn't something that bothers me on the contrary, I think it's actually something I like about the game - I like the balance between the "bookish" aspects and the "improvisational" aspects of the game.
And beyond eliminating standard openings, they still basically "just chess" which doesn't really scratch the itch I'm looking for with variants. I'm not against them, but they just aren't as interesting to me as the other variants out there.
BTW if anyone wants to try these with someone https://vchess.club/#/variants has an astounding list of variants that they've implemented, including the above.
Oh boy, I really want to get stuck into the prophecy link (tempting me in with religion, huh?) but I'm going to be too busy watching the second semi-final for Eurovision.
So later, I promise.
For those of you in the US, you can't watch it on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVICcSLIHCM (unless you use a VPN, I suppose) but you can watch it on a subsidiary: Peacock in the US https://eurovision.tv/viewers-guide
Sorry, I have too much self respect to watch Eurovision.
The movie (on Netflix) is also pretty bad
I haven't seen the movie; Will Ferrell is too old to play the part he did, but some of it is definitely based on Eurovision acts of the past. (The giant human hamster wheel is correct).
And tonight, the Finnish entry had the "Play Ja Ja Ding Dong!" sign up during the 'visit the green room' bits: https://bro-ccooliebra.tumblr.com/
And Flo Rida *did* show up to perform with San Marino, so he'll be in the final on Saturday.
America, you are getting closer to performing in Eurovision 😁
Oh, self-respect has nothing to do with it. "A bottle of Baileys and a box of chocolates" is the attitude to settling down to watch it. It's an excuse for silly fun (though occasionally politics enters; this year, with Israel in the final, the voting will be *very* much watched to see how it goes).
Feels an odd comment to make. You may feel it disrespects yourself to allow yourself to watch Eurovision, although as you aren't providing us any reasoned logic for this you're opening yourself up to accusations of trying to seem sophisticated or cool (probably the wrong forum for that) or even trying to enforce beliefs about what is acceptable discourse. Perhaps you should explain how watching Eurovision is disrespectful to something? I can buy its disrespectful to good music i suppose, but thst would miss the point.
Ok, learn to take a joke.
But as a former touring, professional rock musician, Eurovision is anathema to all I once held dear. But since no one actually cares about music as an art form any longer (including me) go ahead and enjoy it. I’ve learned one can’t stop the tide so I moved to the mountains.
For the record, I also hate all awards shows, reality tv contests, half-time performances, anything top 40, npr radio interviews and above all else, medleys. So, of course I also hate Eurovision. It the World Cup of superficial, regurgitated pop music.
Ah, your mistake here id to think the music matters! I too was once like you, till I realised it's about the awfulness really. It's a way of seeing the awfulness of over 30 different cultures at once!
Also if you hate anything top 40, I take it you are more concerned with appearances than music... People buy good music sometimes as well as crap.
Oh, I’m definitely pretentious. There’s nothing worse in the world than having bad taste!
Isn't "npr radio interviews" redundant?
You caught me
Eurovision is definitely a different genre to commercial pop/rock music. The two diverged sometime in the 70s/80s (Abba being the one big act that came out of Eurovision and crossed over to mainstream success) and since then it's pretty much agreed that Eurovision acts are going to be the equivalent of those TV talent show winners.
There have been a couple of successes, like Celine Dion, but that really wasn't on the back of singing in Eurovision. You might send a boyband or an act like Jedward to Eurovision but not U2 (well, back when U2 were still a decent band).
It's a modern variety light entertainment show.
FWIW, I have never met anyone who watched Eurovision un-ironically (and for longer than 5 minutes). I'd be curious to hear what you find so compelling about it.
I don't think anyone watches it unironically. It's one of those things that everyone does ironically, yet with a belief that someone else out there somewhere is watching it unironically.
I dated a Greek woman who watched every video religiously and un-ironically. It was very strange. She’d say, “Seth! Finland has a metal band you will like it!” They made Gwar look like the Chronos Quartet.
Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Hah! You’ll be the first to know if I put one out. For now I’m just your average, everyday internet shlub.
It may have had very high-minded intentions back when it first started (that's why the theme song is Charpentier's "Te Deum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMVSsSi4QQ0), but in recent years it is now the one night each year when almost the entire continent settles down for some good, cheesy fun. Some of the songs are better than others, but mostly it's silly spectacle entertainment ("the interval act was the best bit" is a common comment) where you tune in to your local TV or radio hosts making snarky, sarcastic comments (in the UK it used to be the late Terry Wogan, now replaced by Graham Norton. For Ireland we have Marty Whelan covering it) admire (or otherwise) the outfits and the performances. And the real fun is the voting afterwards, where old grudges are not forgotten, you can reliably tell which neighbouring countries are going to vote for each other (if Greece/Cypress make it through to the final, either both of them or one at least, then the Greek maximum vote will go for Cypress and the Cypriot maximum vote will go for Greece), and everyone is keen to know who will be the one ending up with "nul point" at the end.
There's a combination of national juries plus a public vote (by text, phone or app) so you the viewer can also vote for your favourite. That gives everyone a stake in it. Things like going on social media and live-blogging the contest is also great fun.
List of contestants for Saturday's final:
1. Belgium
2. Serbia
3. Portugual
4. Iceland
5. Greece
6. Albania
7. Switzerland
8. Italy
9. Germany
10. France
11. The Netherlands
12. Norway
13. Azerbaijan
14. Lithuania
15. Sweden
16. Ukraine
17. Bulgaria
18. Moldova
19. San Marino
20. Finland
Ooh, I've got to admit, I've always loved Lithuania; I know nothing about their music, I just like the country. I am rooting for them :-)
I feel Scott should host a virtual Eurovision party, just for the comments...
Whatever about hosting a viewing, I expect all you Americans to be cheering on San Marino for the sake of Flo Rida! 😁
No Australia? Too bad. I was curious how large an online horde the McElroy Brothers are capable of summoning.
Didn't make it out of the voting for the first semi-final, unfortunately.
Thanks for pointing out it is on Peacock. My girlfriend and I are loving watching this.
I didn't see anywhere to play with the Jukebox thing, is it "GPT-3 for music" in the sense of "you peons can watch us play with it and imagine what it would be like"?
They released a ton of pre-generated samples you can listen to and pick from. Jukebox is too compute intensive to easily play with, but they *did* release the model so the challenge is running it yourself. The VRAM use is beyond your typical consumer GPU, but you can load it up on Colab if you get a high-VRAM instance like a V100, IIRC. The downside is that to generate a 2-3min song at full audio-resolution, rather than skeletons at the high level, it takes like a GPU-day. (This is probably a big part of why you have seen so few Jukebox-generated pieces.)
But, as ever, progress marches on, so we will get better models eventually. (The new family of diffusion models in particular seem like they might be able to match Jukebox for audio generation while doing so in a highly parallelizable and much faster way - they're already around SOTA for simpler audio tasks like voice generation and ImageNet image generation.)
That's disappointing, but thanks for the information. I was hoping the pre-generated ones would have some interesting variety in a world music sense, but it seems to be all American (and some British) choices. I'll have to wait for the "eventually" era to try it on music I'm familiar with and have a feel for.
Incidentally, I noticed that in Jukebox's singing it sometimes mispronounces words or phrases or even omits them altogether - e.g., in its performance of "The Universe is a Glitch" (a poem + rendition that I overall liked a lot; at https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3), it pronounces the eponymous line "the universe is a glitch" as [weɪ.wɪs.sa]* **. When I first noticed this I thought it might be a research-paper-worthy subject of inquiry, but now I think this might just be one of those amusing bugs that goes away as neural nets get bigger.
Also, hi gwern! I'm mildly surprised you comment here; I'm a fan of yours.
*I'm not super confident in my ability to give things accurate IPA pronunciations. For reference: phonetically spelled, this is "way-wis-sah", with about equal strength on all three syllables.
**Although, due to the meaning of the title, this might be a feature in this case.
I wrote a basic tutorial for it: https://robertbrucecarter.com/writing/2020/07/a-simple-openai-jukebox-tutorial-for-non-engineers/
Gwern is right that it's hard to produce a full song without serious computing power but you can generate interesting short samples with a $10/mo Google colab account.
Re: lead-crime hypothesis, Pinker has always been skeptical of this and never even mentioned lead in his scholarly tome on the decline of violence ("The Better Angels of Our Nature").
https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime_0.pdf
Average blood lead levels in the US from around 1980 and before were 15 ug/dl and higher.
These are long term levels people maintained for their entire lives. These average levels are considered very high indeed today, children that tested in this range would be placed in a monitoring program and action would be taken. The differences in kinetics in lead excretion and higher absorption in children mean child levels were on average higher than this.
Given that most people in the US were very functional in the postwar period up until the early 80s, lead exposure in this range is not obviously consistent with large negative outcomes. While lead in higher exposures has undeniable negative consequences, its not obvious that exposures below 20 ug/dl have any large clinical significance. This paper is consistent with that interpretation.
A question I always have about these studies -- do they even bother to check other countries that also banned lead? I have never seen it mentioned. Where I live lead in gas was banned in 2003 I think, and the crime rate has not gone down since then
I only read Kevin Drum's popularizations/interpretations, but yes, he compares across countries and says they all have the same time-lagged correlation even though they all banned lead at different times. For instance, when he first started popularizing the claim, he predicted countries that banned lead in the early 2000's would start to see crime go down about now, most notably he specified Middle Eastern terrorism and a decrease in terrorism. He recently claimed on Twitter that he was correct.
That's interesting, considering that the theory I was familiar with was that the effect was immediate, based on the fact that in the US it was banned in the mid-nineties as the crime rate was beginning its decline
Again I'll only bother speaking about Kevin Drum's popularizations but no, his claim is that it's time lagged and relative to blood-lead levels that children are exposed to when their brains are developing (who then commit more decades later). It's not a binary thing -- in America unleaded gasoline wasn't banned until 96 but its use had been in decline for years, which is why Drum claims crime had started dropping before 96 and kept dropping well past then.
Here's one article, but you can google "Kevin Drum lead" or look on his Twitter for more info: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
As BadAtChess mentioned it was banned in the mid 90s but that was only the end of a long phase-out process that started in the 70s. By the mid 80s average lead levels in gasoline were already down dramatically.
for #17, I wonder how many people in the AI space understand that AI/strong AGI is a category mistake?
Meh... I'd say that any AI that can pass the conversational Turing Test would qualify as "Strong"; but obviously the test itself has error bars. Currently, no AI even comes close. That said, passing the Turing Test is usually not a useful application of AI, anyway.
> That said, passing the Turing Test is usually not a useful application of AI, anyway.
I'm not sure. I recall reading some experiements where chatting with even basic chatbots has helped people with minor depression and isolation. Just basic conversation might be more helpful than you might expect at first glance.
Thank you!
On one laptop per child, I think the evidence is quite negative, unfortunately. The link (number 7) was surprising in that I wondered -- is this the first positive effect? That would be awesome. But then it was n = 40, and has a couple of unverifiable, CEO-speak anecdotes.
A quick read of the evidence elsewhere:
1. An RCT in Peru:
"This paper presents results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop per Child program, using data collected after 15 months of implementation in 318 primary schools in rural Peru. The program increased the ratio of computers per student from 0.12 to 1.18 in treatment schools. This expansion in access translated into substantial increases in use of computers both at school and at home. No evidence is found of effects on test scores in math and language. There is some evidence, though inconclusive, about positive effects on general cognitive skills."
Link here:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20150385
2. Another RCT from Uruguay:
"This paper provides the first causal estimates of the effect of children’s access to computers and the internet on educational outcomes in early adulthood, such as schooling and choice of major. I exploit cross-cohort variation in access to technology among primary and middle school students in Uruguay, the first country to implement a nationwide one-laptop-per-child program. Despite a notable increase in computer access, educational attainment has not increased; the schooling gap between private and public school students has persisted, despite closing the technology gap. Among college students, those who had been exposed to the program as children were less likely to enroll in science and technology."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775719302729
3. Observational study from Catalonia:
"We analyse the impact of a One Laptop per Child program introduced by the Catalan government on student achievement. Using longitudinal population data for students in secondary education during the period 2009–2016, our identification strategy exploits variations across cohorts within schools. Although participation into the program was not random, we control for a number of school characteristics that influenced school participation. The empirical results consistently indicate that this program had a negative impact on student performance in Catalan, Spanish, English and mathematics. Test scores fell by 0.20–0.22 standardised points, which represent 3.8–6.2% of the average test score. This negative effect was stronger among boys than it was among girls (differences ranging from 10% to 42%)."
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035518311376
4. From Costa Rica:
"The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is one of the world's most popular interventions aiming to reduce the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) digital divide. Costa Rica introduced its first OLPC program in February 2012. In collaboration with the Quirós Tanzi Foundation (Foundation), implementing the program, baseline and post-intervention information was collected from a set of 15 primary schools that were selected to be treated, and from 19 primary schools that served as a comparison group. Using a difference in difference design, this paper estimates the short-term effects of the program on various outcomes of interest, namely: students' computer usage, time allocation and test scores. The results indicate that the program led to an increase in treated students' computer use outside of school of about 5 hours per week. Moreover, the research provides evidence that the treated students used the computer specifically to browse the internet, do homework, read and play. The research also demonstrates that the program led to a decline in the time that treated students spent on homework and outdoor activities. The research does not provide evidence to suggest that the program had an effect on participating students' school performance."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jid.3267
*
In sum I think the most charitable interpretation is that --
a. Probably a laptop is better than literally nothing, though the cost of the laptop should be measured against, say, hiring/training volunteer tutors in the community (often this is very, very cheap, particularly in rural parts of low-income countries, and has a solid evidence base. See, e.g., https://www.nber.org/papers/w14311)
b. The claim that "typical kids can teach themselves to read via software" is a hard one to find evidence for -- it has, to my knowledge, no empirical basis; the idea that "functionally literate adults can very capably, through phonics-based instruction, teach kids to read" is, on the other hand, empirically robust.
Like anyone else: would LOVE to see progress here. 260 million kids are not in school worldwide, and scalable solutions like this would be great. But I'd assign 98% probability that the "drop off the laptops and come back a year later" strategy does nothing on foundational literacy or numeracy.
Pure anecdote that's slightly relevant to your last two paragraphs - We have 4 children who have all spent a lot of time on the computer and as far as we can tell, they read quite a bit better than most of their peers. My wife and I are both well-educated, but our instruction has mostly consisted of helping the kids sound things out and answering their questions when they get stuck. Our level of involvement is way more than kids teaching themselves to read, for sure, but it's also way less involvement than I'd expect for adults who are actively teaching 4 kids to read.
Basically, the kids have so many words in front of them all the time that are necessary to navigate the world that they want to exist in, that they are highly motivated to learn to read.
I'm sure if our kids only had books and not computers, they'd still be literate, but I'm pretty sure that because of their computer games, they've read a substantial amount more than they would have without computers. And to be clear, they mostly play games that are only incidentally educational.
My own pet theory is that kids will learn to read if they 1) Have words to read and 2) Want to read (assuming a literate adult is hanging around, which obviously is a big assumption in many places). Fun things on the computer that require reading to navigate are *great* for making kids want to read, which I think is an underappreciated part of the puzzle.
You're both smart, so your kids are smart, so they read better than the other less smart kids.
+1
It's like Bryan Caplan going on about how his kids are better educated through home schooling. It probably has a lot do with with the hereditary aspects of fluid intelligence.
I actually think he'd agree with you and that he'd claim the main point of home schooling isn't that it's a better learning environment (tho it is), but because it avoids a lot of the downsides of 'traditional schooling'.
Probably true, but my point was that I believe our kids have gotten quite a bit less formal instruction and quite a bit more screen time than the average kid, so anecdotally, screen time by itself, if it involves a lot of words, can lead effectively to literacy. Perhaps that's all overshadowed by the fact that my kids are *so much smarter* than the average kid... but I can't imagine that assumption is a productive one over a lifetime.
That's really great for your kids. But I think that that is a relevant assumption if you're trying to frame public policy
Half of the population in poor countries is smarter than average, as well. Smart children are not some crazy outlier thing. I completely agree that it's relevant. I disagree that an intervention that works on smart kids should be ignored because not everyone is smart.
It kind of sounds like this example: a study finds 'Households with a lot of books have children do better in school', therefore we should make sure that everybody has a lot of books in their house. It's confusing correlation with causation -- the greatest predictor of smart kids is smart parents, who are likely to have a lot of books in the house.
The same way, I don't think it's likely that the cause of your kids being smart is their computer use; rather it's the fact that you are smart and have influenced your kids regardless of their computer time
I think the example parents set is very important for reading. Kids hate missing out on things, it is one of the biggest motivators for small children. If they think that the adults have access to something good that they don't, they will want to get it. If parents provide an example that reading is good and praise and support kids efforts to read, I think that is most of the battle.
> Like anyone else: would LOVE to see progress here. 260 million kids are not in school worldwide, and scalable solutions like this would be great. But I'd assign 98% probability that the "drop off the laptops and come back a year later" strategy does nothing on foundational literacy or numeracy.
That sounds like a reasonable take. I'm curious how those results would change if each laptop had audio/video tutorials for reading and other skills. I speculate that successful learning is a lot of mimicry at first, and audio/video clues are helpful in that. You can't mimic something you've never seen done.
#26: GPT-2, not GPT-3: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/nb9ifz/p_enigma_gpt2_trained_on_10k_nature_papers_and_an/ https://twitter.com/stefanzukin/status/1392503331231342610 (GPT-3 would be much harder, I can say from generating Arxiv abstracts with it!)
Thanks, corrected.
I was expecting more results from the SRS study.
Or maybe I just didn't like the results. I want SRS to be the free lunch we've just ignored. Hearing its limited use is discouraging but probably expected.
It's still pretty good for learning new languages and world capitals and things like that. Medical students everywhere in the world use it a lot, of course. I suspect that it would also be very good for chess players who often have to memorize tens of thousands of games and positions. Now that I think about it, a classroom setting is probably not the optimal place to understand the full implications and scope of SRS
Very obvious application of SRS also would be for a public speakrs and debaters to come up with right numbers and arguments on the spot.
#10: Yes, this is Breezewood, PA. I know it well. It's the spot where I-70 and the PA Turnpike intersect, and that's about it. There isn't much of actual town there, just some businesses that predictably cater to long distance travelers and truckers. I guess in some left wing formulation, this is bad, but frankly, if you've been stuck on the PA turnpike the past four hours with no other food/drink options than the effing Sbarro's at the little state-run turnpike plazas that charge airport prices for sub-airport food, Breezewood is a ****ing Godsend. Capitalism wins again. Haters can take the Lincoln Highway.
Yeah, I'm entirely confused by what points anyone is making in any direction regarding #10. I hate cars/freeways etc as much as the next urbanist, and I see nothing horrifying or redeeming in either of those two pictures. As long as you're going to have cars and freeways, having those rest stop gas station/restaurant clusters seems... fine? Ugly, sure. But useful. And it's not like anyone lives there.
The usual sort of point I see made is that streetscapes like the one in these images are just the *default* everywhere other than urban downtowns and rural areas. It probably has a speed limit of 40 mph, which is fast enough to kill any pedestrian that gets hit, but slow enough to really annoy drivers. The entire thing is lined with driveways with cars pulling in and out, so that it has all the complexity of a walkable neighborhood for cars driving through, but none of the actual walkability.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter
But if this were a real town -- apparently it's not -- the town center would be in a different location further from the highway. It's only the default at highway interfaces, exactly where people would only be interested in buying gas or food.
The only potential pedestrians would be those staying at a nearby motel, and since they drove to get to the motel, they probably don't much mind driving 300 ft to get to a McDonalds. The one exception, the one case in which it is a hell, is if you are staying at a motel on the STROAD and want to have a few drinks with your meal, because then there is no safe option. It's dangerous to walk or drive.
It's a real pain to drive from one parking lot to another, due to the multiple lanes of traffic and short spaced traffic lights. We used to just walk across the borders between places when we were there. You don't need a sidewalk to walk. Crossing to the other side really was an issue, so when I was there a lot as a kid my dad would make us pick which side of the road we were going to stop (preferably the right side so he could turn right to get back out). 1/4 mile later and you're back in farm country with hardly any traffic at all.
Lots of people who use that image to make a point are using the image and the point they're making as a signaling behavior fundamental to broadcasting a subjective preference to other people who share the same subjective preference, thus setting off a respectability cascade.
Someone says something mean about Breezewood and the image of Breezewood in the context of saying something larger about something not Breezewood related to enhance their respectability and others agree and amplify. As the link provided, someone had to work very very hard to produce the image that resulted in the respectability cascade they were looking for.
Mission accomplished.
I've driven through there many a time and stopped to use several of the available establishments. I'm somewhat angry that the mandated non-connection adds several miles and about 15 minutes to my drive. But it's pretty innocuous and occasionally convenient. There's not a lot for a while heading down into Maryland.
Regarding that picture pillorying American car culture - ugh, I knew that was Breezewood. That place sucks. You have to exit one interstate and drive through the crappy town to get on another interstate. Completely nonsensical. And don't get me started on the Lovecraftian feel of the place.
There are quite literally thousands of towns, villages, and major metros in the USA like this. I'm also going to predict you've done this many thousands of times in other places that weren't Breezewood. Did they all suck?
It's interesting to read about Breezewood being a special case, but then that makes the picture all the more confusing. I've never been through Breezewood, so the picture to me looks like a fairly normal, small-town highway intersection, where all the fast-food and gas stations crowd together because that's the obvious place for them to be.
But since it looks like so many other places and the point of the article about STROADs is that they are "dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town and suburb in America", it's weird that the picture happens to be of Breezewood. It's almost as if the photographer thought they could capture the special hell that is Breezewood in the picture even thought that would be impossible, since the picture can't show the highway gap.
Nah. This is a special kind of hell that takes traffic several additional miles over what otherwise would be the fastest path from one freeway to another.
They kinda mostly do, which is the depressing part of it all - it's not that any specific one of them is incredibly terrible, it's just that they're seemingly 90% of the country and are universally almost identical and kind of bad.
They're actually about 0.009% of the country. But maybe 90% of the country is invisible to you except as an inconveniently broad impediment to your travels, and you don't even bother looking at the scenery so the only part you perceive are the logistical depots set up to support your travels? Which, yeah, all look the same down to the uniform branding, which is more colorful than it would be in a less market-oriented economy but only goes so far to cover up the fact that it's a glorified logistics depot.
A very large (and increasing) portion of the American *built* environment looks more or less like Breezewood, PA. And most of our daily experience, of course, occurs in the built environment.
The others are optional. If you're driving down an interstate and you just want to get where you are going, they are maybe thirty seconds of marginal eyesore as you speed past. If you're driving down an interstate and you need fuel or a meal or someone to read the code on that "check engine" light or whatever, they're exactly what you need plus some stuff that other people like you need, all in one small obvious place. If you're not driving down an interstate but actually live in the area, they're an eyesore on the edge of your small town but probably a significant addition to your small town's economy and either you get paid to work there or you don't spend much time there.
Breezewood, you have to spend several minutes crawling through when you'd prefer to spend thirty seconds breezing past in your fast car with the full tank of gas and full stomach. That's the part that sucks.
If you like that butterfly drawing, the artist, Rafael Araujo (who I also adore) is about to launch a kickstarter campaign for a coloring book. https://www.rafael-araujo.com/the-golden-geometry-coloring-book
On #8 I'm very sceptical.
First, it seems to have N=2 villages.
Second, this is from 2012, I remember the hype at the time, and AFAIK nothing came out of it.
Third, there are RCTs showing even computers in classrooms don't improve instruction unless they're used just right (though this audience might think schools can ruin anything, no matter the positive potential).
Fourth, the tone of this article smells of iconoclastic tech people out of touch with poor country reality, who fervently believe every child has limitless potential irrespective of circumstances, potential that technology will soon unlock. Example: "Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said." I spent a good deal of time in remote villages in Africa around that time, and I can tell you that soft drinks were _everywhere_, as well as many other packages with printed materials.
I'm annoyed at this because I think this is a prime example of the kinds of radical new ideas that we've become good at spotting and ignoring, saying "where's the RCT?". We've matured.
Yeah, I posted it because I found it really surprising. I guess that cuts both ways. I didn't want to discount it, because it seems like a real thing that happened at least according to this reporter, but I agree that because of its surprisingness we should also be more skeptical. I've added a caveat to the link.
#12 was a discussion from 2015. The situation regarding incomplete Chinese periodic tables seems better now, though not all fixed (all 118 elements included, all characters have unicode, but pronunciations are still missing):
https://ptable.com/?lang=zh-hans#%E6%80%A7%E8%B4%A8
The search term to find periodic tables in Chinese is
元素周期表
I think the discussion in on LanguageLog site is missing the perspective of someone who studied Chemistry in both English and Chinese, and I would be curious to hear that. From my perspective as a Mandarin speaker who studied Chemistry in English and occasionally reads articles in Chinese (i.e., NOT an expert), the example given of having one element be pronounced "lǚ" and another be pronounced "lú" doesn't seem like a good example of it being confusing, as these sounds are easily distinguishable by Mandarin speakers.
On the point of it holding back progress, it does sound highly speculative to me -- this is the argument from the commenter:
> About the Chinese chemical names, I think they created a high learning barrier to anyone who
> wants to study chemistry in Chinese. As a high school student, I much preferred studying
> physics rather than chemistry, because I didn't have to confront all these strange Chinese
> characters. A similar reason for not majoring in chemistry may very well explain why Chinese
> chemical and pharmaceutical industries are still backward even today. Such a situation is
> reflected in poor product quality.
I think that argument seems rather speculative, since we don't know if enough people in China shares his preference to make such a big difference. Also, since Taiwan also uses Chinese characters for their chemical elements, wouldn't this hypothesis also predict that Taiwanese chemical and pharmaceutical industries would be backwards, and have poor product quality as well?
Another commenter on the site says:
> This periodic table at the back of my middle/high school chemistry books looked very different
> from the one linked, in which the short-handed spelling and the order number were prominently
> displayed. For all practical purposes it was never required to remember the names of any but
> the two dozen or so most common elements. The Chinese names were just there to
> approximate the pronunciation of the Latin names, and people seem to mostly just ignore them
> in research.
I don't have evidence of it either helping or hindering their research, but it doesn't seem to hinder the education of their top students -- both the Chinese and Taiwanese teams generally do very well on the International Chemistry Olympiad.
IChO 2019 results: https://icho2019.paris/en/resultats/
IChO 2020 results: https://icho2020.tubitak.gov.tr/storage/Results/Results.pdf
It's a silly argument. In any realistic practical application of chemistry, you write using chemical symbols, e.g. CH4 for methane, and the chemical symbols are universal, and then you simply remember the names of the roughly dozen elements that are important in whatever subfield you're going into. Even if the Chinese name for C was written "Cthulu-houyhnhnm" and pronounced "throar-warbler mangrove" it would not passeth the understanding of ye canonical 15-year-old.
A much more relevant fact is that the Chinese oil and gas industry was severely underdeveloped until about 5 minutes ago, and of course the oil and gas industry is the basis for a strong chemical industry. That's while you'll find some pretty sophisticated students of chemistry in the 'stans that used to be part of the USSR, in places where goat-herding might still be a major occupation.
Olympiad success has little to do with the complexity of Chinese characters. International Olympiad participants are typically smart/well trained enough to pass those tests in any language that they're moderately comfortable with.
Progress in research does not really depend on a country having five very smart high school students. It mostly depends on a country having a large number of smart enough researchers and a lot of resources to throw at them so that a non-zero fraction of them produces useful results.
Agreed!
My prior belief is that the use of Chinese characters for chemical element names probably doesn't help or hinder anything. The relationship between the use of Chinese characters for <field> and some measure of success in <field> is so complex (because of the long chain of events and that language use is often entangled with SES, institutions, and culture) that I would be skeptical of most claims of there being a strong causal relationship. The phenomenon of research achievements is even more complex than Olympiad achievements, so I find proximal causes (such as funding and institutions) more believable than distal ones -- simply because they require less evidence.
Sort of seconding this, at least in pre-university education. The commonly used elements are ones you've heard of in the local Chinese language even if you're taking chemistry in English. Organic chemistry doesn't seem harder; you'll have to memorize new rules anyway. All the elements with made up words will never be encountered in high-school chemistry except as a curiosity.
If you really want to see if strange words hinder Chinese chemistry research, maybe compare transuranium or transition metal chemistry rather than chemistry in general.
I follow Bret on twitter but unaccountably hadn't gone through that big thread on bloat. Thanks for sharing it. If you're the sort of person who would enjoy a professional historian going into how you can look at the campaigns in the Lord of the Ring and tell that while Sauruman was a clever amateur the Witch King actually knew what he was doing do consider reading A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. Or you want to know how people used to make iron and what exactly Wootz was.
Those series are great, and yes I have to admit to being pro-Tolkien and so enjoying how he finds the differences between the way Tolkien writes battles and logistics versus Martin's "Game of Thrones" (how much blame should accrue to the TV show writers is another thing), given Martin's somewhat unkind jibes about "so what is the tax base of Gondor?" with the implication that he himself is writing Real True Realistic Historical Based fiction (instead of "more tits, more gore" fantasy).
"more tits, more gore" is uncharitable, his books are way deeper than that. "whats the tax base of Gondor?" is probably a bad question from his part, I mean there is some interesting stuff with the ironbank and vassal-debt going on behind the scenes (in the books), but his economic-systems aren't the main draw of the series.
I interpret his criticism of Tolkien as being more about the "great man theory" and the relative simplicity of his moral struggle. The complex web of character interactions and conflicting social norms are, I would say, more reflective of real world history than Tolkiens story, though it's also way more complicated to write, which is why he will probably never finish it.
Tolkien is *not* about "the Great Man theory"! If we compare the two, who comes out looking like 'the Great Man makes history' - Daenaerys or Cersei, with their ambitions and (on Dany's part) sense of Divine Right to the throne, or Sam Gamgee who goes on this quest out of love?
Maybe Martin's world is more realistic, where backstabbing is a good thing. But if I want that world, I can just open a link to the latest news. I prefer Tolkien's world, where mercy is a good and not weakness, and where it's not a simple world of "all the goodies on this side, all the baddies on that":
From the collected Letters:
"Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable. Some readers he irritates and even infuriates. I can well understand it. All hobbits at times affect me in the same way, though I remain very fond of them. But Sam can be very 'trying'. He is a more representative hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he has consequently a stronger ingredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity — by which I do not mean a mere 'down-to-earthiness' — a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional 'wisdom'. We only meet exceptional hobbits in close companionship – those who had a grace or gift: a vision of beauty, and a reverence for things nobler than themselves, at war with their rustic self-satisfaction. Imagine Sam without his education by Bilbo and his fascination with things Elvish! Not difficult. The Cotton family and the Gaffer, when the 'Travellers' return are a sufficient glimpse.
Sam was cocksure, and deep down a little conceited; but his conceit had been transformed by his devotion to Frodo. He did not think of himself as heroic or even brave, or in any way admirable – except in his service and loyalty to his master. That had an ingredient (probably inevitable) of pride and possessiveness: it is difficult to exclude it from the devotion of those who perform such service. In any case it prevented him from fully understanding the master that he loved, and from following him in his gradual education to the nobility of service to the unlovable and of perception of damaged good in the corrupt. He plainly did not fully understand Frodo's motives or his distress in the incident of the Forbidden Pool. If he had understood better what was going on between Frodo and Gollum, things might have turned out differently in the end. For me perhaps the most tragic moment in the Tale comes in II 323 ff. when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum's tone and aspect. 'Nothing, nothing', said Gollum softly. 'Nice master!'. His repentance is blighted and all Frodo's pity is (in a sense ) wasted. Shelob's lair became inevitable.
This is due of course to the 'logic of the story'. Sam could hardly have acted differently. (He did reach the point of pity at last (III 221-222) ['His mind was hot with wrath..... It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature. .... But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched.'] but for the good of Gollum too late.)"
I couldn't read Martin's work, I tried with the first volume of the series that came out way back when but disliked it intensely, so I don't know: is there any part where he treats one of his wretched, wicked characters with pity?
(1/2)
So Tolkien doesn't take the easy way out of having a tidy, magic miracle solve all the problems in the end, despite what the pop-culture notion of the novel is about (and that kind of notion goes back all the way to Edmund Wilson and "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/AwfulOrcs.pdf where the erudite and tasteful Mr. Wilson prefers 'grown-up' fantasy such as that of James Branch Cabell to "juvenile trash"
"As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of his twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology."
Well, let's have some of that writing for grown-ups, shall we? I've attempted James Branch Cabell, and he writes in an ornamented, arch style that strives for wit (whether or not he attains it, I leave up to you) which is of its time and rather dated nowadays, and likes to hit out at those accusing him of veiled obscenity by putting in strawman characters who claim to have read the double entendres in the text that Mr. Cabell then denies he ever put in:
"With the origin and the occult meaning of the folklore of Poictesme this book at least is in no wise concerned: its unambitious aim has been merely to familiarize English readers with the Jurgen epos for the tale's sake. And this tale of old years is one which, by rare fortune, can be given to English readers almost unabridged, in view of the singular delicacy and pure-mindedness of the Jurgen mythos: in all, not more than a half-dozen deletions have seemed expedient (and have been duly indicated) in order to remove such sparse and unimportant outcroppings of mediæval frankness as might conceivably offend the squeamish."
Good to know there will be nothing to bring a blush to the cheek of a Young Person, isn't it? Let's go on, where Jurgen (the protagonist, because we can't exactly call him the hero, not even Cabell would do that), carried on the back of the Centaur Nessus, visits the Garden where the illusions of old love remain, and where he meets the image of the girl he loved back when he was a boy:
"They parted in September—with what vows it hardly matters now—and the boy went into Gâtinais, to win his spurs under the old Vidame de Soyecourt. And presently—oh, a good while before Christmas!—came the news that Dorothy la Désirée had married rich Heitman Michael."
..."Indeed, the story is very old, and old it was when Methuselah was teething. There is no older and more common story anywhere. As the sequel, it would be heroic to tell you this boy's life was ruined. But I do not think it was. Instead, he had learned all of a sudden that which at twenty-one is heady knowledge. That was the hour which taught him sorrow and rage, and sneering, too, for a redemption. Oh, it was armor that hour brought him, and a humor to use it, because no woman now could hurt him very seriously. No, never any more!"
..."Well, women, as he knew by experience now, were the pleasantest of playfellows. So he began to play. Rampaging through the world he went in the pride of his youth and in the armor of his hurt. And songs he made for the pleasure of kings, and sword-play he made for the pleasure of men, and a whispering he made for the pleasure of women, in places where renown was, and where he trod boldly, giving pleasure to everybody, in those fine days. But the whispering, and all that followed the whispering, was his best game, and the game he played for the longest while, with many brightly colored playmates who took the game more seriously than he did. And their faith in the game's importance, and in him and his high-sounding nonsense, he very often found amusing: and in their other chattels too he took his natural pleasure. Then, when he had played sufficiently, he held a consultation with divers waning appetites; and he married the handsome daughter of an estimable pawnbroker in a fair line of business. And he lived with his wife very much as two people customarily live together. So, all in all, I would not say his life was ruined."
..."Still, human hearts survive the benediction of the priest, as you may perceive any day. This man, at least, inherited his father-in-law's business, and found it, quite as he had anticipated, the fittest of vocations for a cashiered poet. And so, I suppose, he was content. Ah, yes; but after a while Heitman Michael returned from foreign parts, along with his lackeys, and plate, and chest upon chest of merchandise, and his fine horses, and his wife. And he who had been her lover could see her now, after so many years, whenever he liked. She was a handsome stranger. That was all. She was rather stupid. She was nothing remarkable, one way or another. This respectable pawnbroker saw that quite plainly: day by day he writhed under the knowledge. Because, as I must tell you, he could not retain composure in her presence, even now. No, he was never able to do that."
..."My child," says Jurgen, now with a reproving forefinger, "you are an incurable romanticist. The man disliked her and despised her. At any event, he assured himself that he did. Well, even so, this handsome stupid stranger held his eyes, and muddled his thoughts, and put errors into his accounts: and when he touched her hand he did not sleep that night as he was used to sleep. Thus he saw her, day after day. And they whispered that this handsome and stupid stranger had a liking for young men who aided her artfully to deceive her husband: but she never showed any such favor to the respectable pawnbroker. For youth had gone out of him, and it seemed that nothing in particular happened. Well, that was his saga. About her I do not know. And I shall never know! But certainly she got the name of deceiving Heitman Michael with two young men, or with five young men it might be, but never with a respectable pawnbroker."
..."And was that Dorothy whom I loved in youth an imaginary creature?"
"My poor Jurgen, you who were once a poet! she was your masterpiece. For there was only a shallow, stupid and airy, high-nosed and light-haired miss, with no remarkable good looks,—and consider what your ingenuity made from such poor material! You should be proud of yourself."
"No, Centaur, I cannot very well be proud of my folly: yet I do not regret it. I have been befooled by a bright shadow of my own raising, you tell me, and I concede it to be probable. No less, I served a lovely shadow; and my heart will keep the memory of that loveliness until life ends, in a world where other men follow pantingly after shadows which are not even pretty."
"There is something in that, Jurgen: there is also something in an old tale we used to tell in Thessaly, about a fox and certain grapes."
Ah yes, witty cynicism and world-weariness, certainly more adult than the juvenile trash of "I will be parted from my father and my people and give up my immortality to be your wife". I can get that bright, brittle, tinsel wit two for a penny anywhere, it infests modern novels to this day. Maybe I simply have an incurable taste for juvenile trash and am not worthy to tie the laces of the late Mr. Wilson's shoes, but I think neither he nor I would be particularly distressed by that.
(2/2)
You seem to have grievances with Wilson and Cabell. I haven’t read them nor did I mention them anywhere, so forgive me if I don’t respond to those grievances. You seem to project their alleged cynicism on Martin, but you said yourself that you haven’t read asoiaf. I’m not sure criticizing Martin in this context is very fair. I assure you it's not the edgy cynicism nor the mindless tits and gore that you are alleging.
You alleged that in Martins world backstabbing is always a good thing. In one of my earlier comments that you replied to I already talked about how it isn't.
You ask if Martin takes pity on the wicked characters, I would reply that most of his characters are at least a bit wicked and he empathizes with *all* of them (even the “heroes” like Tyrion are complex morally grey characters). The same cannot be said for Tolkien. With Martin there is no BBEG and his disposable minions that need to be destroyed à la Sauron and his orcs, only people with conflicting interests and viewpoints (You might think the Others fill this role, but the books hint that they won’t).
The great man theory of history is not about ambition over love, nor even about nobility, it's about how individual heroes largely shape history instead of the complex interactions of thousands of people. Tolkien undeniably writes "great men" and Martin with his thousands of named characters on top of large social movements (e.g the sparrows) undeniably bends away from that.
"Martin with his thousands of named characters on top of large social movements (e.g the sparrows) undeniably bends away from that."
Do we know or care about the thousands? Do we remember their names? Do they really do or achieve anything, being pulled around by the great lords all scrapping over who will sit on the throne and dragging the thousands into their wars?
Sam might deserve a little more respect than that, though I wouldn't say Tolkien is simply wrong. Sam is *interested* in the world, and it matters.
As for hobbits in general, I've been wondering about the contrast between their actual virtues and the tone in LOTR about them as being ridiculous. Is eating a lot *really* that funny?
He does place Sam as the hero, but he's aware of the deficiencies of the Hobbits (and the other races). He mentions that he's not making Hobbits (or any of them) ideals or Utopian; if the Hobbits are like the English, they share in the vices as well as the virtues: a sort of insularity, an attitude that Foreigners Are Funny, that everything good is found at home, the sort of "Little England" notion as it degenerated from anti-imperialism to a type of xenophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Englander
Hobbits aren't interested in what happens outside their own borders, and carry on their small day-to-day lives. But it happens that in this particular time, there is a lot more going on outside, and their ignorance and safety is an artificial one (as Aragorn says about the work of the Rangers that protects Bree and The Shire). Having a day-to-day routine that revolves around gossip, jockeying for social status, and eating a series of carefully-distinguished meals is not going to protect them when the Bad Things break in, and yet (like us all) they think these small affairs are the most important things in the world.
I think also Tolkien might be poking fun at the snobbery around meals and what time you took them; eating your dinner at mid-day was now common, and people got quite hot under the collar about the distinction between afternoon tea and high tea and was the final meal of the day "supper" or not? Think Hyacinth Bucket on steroids! https://www.thespruceeats.com/afternoon-vs-high-tea-difference-435327
I'm pro-Tolkien all the way, but I'll also defend Martin any day. Martin's books were a lot better than movies (and very visual, in ways one does not always appreciate).
Martin is utterly, depressingly realistic about how the human world works (even if he didn't do his homework on battles and logistics). In his world being honorable is not a survival trait, but just the opposite - something that gets you killed really fast. Same for being heroic. Same for betting on miracles - there are no miracles. I could continue.
Tolkien's stories are fairy tales by design. They run on these things - honor, heroism, miracles - that either are not survival traits, or really don't happen often enough for us to count on them. The fact that he got the battles right will not turn the fairy tale into a historical novel.
If you compare Martin to other fantasy writers, I would say that Martin's claim to realism is not wrong.
I think Martin is actually quite nuanced in his depiction of honor. SPOILERS FOR ASOIAF FROM HERE.
You're probably thinking of Ned, who got killed by the Lannisters thanks to his sense of honor, but he was absolutely beloved by the northerners who are at this moment planning to betray the dishonorable Freys and Lannisters to reinstate the children of Ned. Davos, Barristan and many others gain lots of status and influence thanks to their sense of honor.
But I don't think Martin views honor as an inherently positive thing. It was very honorable for Barristan to attack Duskendale, but it had terrible consequences, while Jaime dishonorably stabbed Aerys in the back, which had good consequences. The hedgeknights that Brienne encountered in Affc were honorable men that insisted they protect her, but that same code of honor enforces patriarchic gender roles that hurt Brienne and others like her. I think Martin views honor as a way to make complex societies function in the long run, even if those societies are unjust.
Would you care to take a crack at the hedge knight stories vs. ASoIaF? I'm not an expert, but my impression is that the Dunc and Egg stories are from a time when there was much less defection.
SPOILERS FOR MATINS WORK.
Dunk and Egg takes place during peacetime, so there is less "defecting" in the war sense. But those stories are also, at least partially, about honor.
In "the hedge knight" Dunk is probably lying when he says he was knighted, but he acts more "knightly" than the princes. Ironically, what makes Dunk knightly is that he is a commoner. Because he has no wealth to lose and because he can empathize with the smallfolk he sticks up for them. His commoner background even allows him to eventually defeat prince Aerion. In the other stories it is the honor-code of the nobility that once again causes conflict since they are honor-bound to their past blood feuds. I think Martin is saying that the concept of honor got corrupted by the class interests of the nobility (both in our world and in his). I think he would want us to strip away everything that the nobility attached to it: family bonds, vassaldom, gender roles, etc, and return to a kind of minimalistic notion of honor that's only about helping others.
I disagree that Dunk is probably lying about his knighthood. I don't think he could pull it off. He's both exceptionally honorable and socially inept.
"I think he would want us to strip away everything that the nobility attached to it: family bonds, vassaldom, gender roles, etc, and return to a kind of minimalistic notion of honor that's only about helping others."
But that's not "returning to"; the knightly sense of honour that you are talking about there came *after* family bonds, vassaldom, etc. and was a creation of poets and courtly games and the way "gentleman" became not a term denoting particular socio-economic status but "how such a person should behave, regardless of birth or position in society".
What does Martin base his foundation for honour on? If the honourable men like Ned Stark end up dead because in a dishonourable world, honour is stupidity, then why should anyone act out of "helping others" that is not motivated by self-interest?
That's the problem I find with Martin's world: he may say it's realistic, it may be realistic, but it's a Crapsack World and there's no reason it should get better, since anyone who tries not to be crappy ends up dead or having to become crappy to survive.
Yeah, but a world where you pragmatically backstab people, even for "good ends", is one that ends up just as unjust and now you have added "you can't trust anyone's word, you can't turn your back on them" as well, which reinforces tribalism: the only people you can trust are those bound by blood to you (and maybe not even then because brother kills brother to get the power) so you have a tight series of "my blood family first, my further relations second, my village third, my tribe fourth" and so on down, where "and strangers nowhere, they're pigeons to be plucked".
If you want to create a society where you get past "the Ds are for the Ds and will do down the Es when they are in power, and when the Es get into power they do down the Ds and cream off the wealth of the nation to their Swiss bank accounts", then you *do* need a system of honour, a system where your word is your bond, you keep agreements, you do what is right even if it disadvantages you, and you treat strangers equitably.
Maybe Aerys needed to be killed. But Jaime backstabbing him just leaves the principle in place that Jaime too can be backstabbed by someone else when it is convenient for that other person.
Read the last sentence again. Martin would basically agree with you, it's just that he thinks honor-codes can end up creating inadequate equilibria.
Equating "depressing" with "realist" is one of the relatively common criticisms of this genre in general.
Is there even that much trust in miracles in LoTR, anyway? There is lot of perseverance against impossible-appearing odds, hope but also doubt (and most importantly, failures). My reading of its treatment of miracles is more like, you need to do your bit for there to be an opening for a fortuitous happenstance to occur, which may turn into a miracle or not.
I did not mean trust in miracles by characters of the story. From the inside of a fairy tale, the character just does his best and does not know if he will succeed or fail. I meant Tolkien's view of how the most important part of a fairy story is the eucatastrophe, the impossible, happy ending.
This is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" (sorry for the lengthy quote - this seems to be in public domain now, here's a random link that goes straight to the pdf: https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf):
"But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy -story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
This is what he himself says is the most important thing in what he wrote. (Maybe I shouldn't have just said "miracles".)
It's been a long time since I last read this essay, and scanning it now I feel like parts of it are a response to the likes of George Martin.
Thanks for the link!
Here is where the division lies for me; one writer was actually in the mud and the mire and the blood of battle, and one never came near it.
The one who experienced most of the friends he was at school with being killed in the Great War is the one writing about "honour and heroism and miracles".
The one who wrote a bad horror/fantasy novel (I've read it, it is bad) that was self-insert 70s fanfiction (that is, fanfiction about the 70s) is the one writing about "utterly, depressingly realistic about how the human world works".
You see my problem here?
Martin may be realistic - God knows, English court politics for one were bloody, back-stabbing affairs; reading about Henry VIII's court and how he, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of France, as well as Henry's first father-in-law Ferdinand of Aragon, constantly made and broke alliances, signed treaties while secretly negotiating with enemies behind allies back and generally carried on, will disillusion anyone about how "the human world works".
But he is *not* 'more realistic' than Tolkien. Martin is still writing a world where the great conduct big, epic wars and plot and scheme for power, while the little people suffer as they must; Tolkien is writing a world where the it is the small, common guy who is the real lynchpin of the plot. It's the gardener who goes out, meets the great, but comes back home to get married and have a house full of kids and live in his little community who is the real hero of the book.
Martin is being, ironically, very conventional in his worldbuilding and black-and-white morality. If he wrote Sam Gamgee, Sam would probably be a hapless commoner drafted into the local lord's army, marched off to war and subjected to the full horrors of that, injured (possibly maimed for life) and if he ever did return home, he'd be disabled and suffering from PTSD (and probably suffering guilt from the rapes and war crimes he participated in to boot).
That's "realism" for a certain value of realism, sure. But lots of people did go off to war and come back, and even if they had been changed (as Tolkien's characters *are* changed), they also had normal lives afterwards. People are heroic and honourable even during terrible times. Does Martin's world have room for an Oskar Schindler, a ne'er-do-well who somehow found the capacity to give a damn even when it was risky for him personally?
Tolkien's world doesn't have easy magic or miracles popping up like a deus ex machina to solve problems for the heroes. Martin's world also does have magic and gods though he deals with it and with them in a different way. The choices Martin makes are authorial choices, and Tolkien's world and story are every bit as realistic about human nature as Martin's choices.
There are heroes, there are villains, there are people caught up in forces beyond their control, there are mixed motives, there are grey areas. There is no one final, overwhelming victory; Galadriel speaks of "fighting the long defeat" and Tolkien knows that even with Aragorn restored to the throne, even with Sauron driven out, that does not solve The Problem Of Evil.
Extract from a letter in 1964 about his unfinished story "The New Shadow":
"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing."
Now, where Martin leaves himself vulnerable to precisely the kind of criticism Devereaux (and in much lesser way, myself) are engaging in, is because of the things he said (maybe an off-the-cuff interview is unfair to take his words, but them's the breaks):
"I look at the end and it says Aragorn is the king and he says, ‘And Aragorn ruled wisely and well for 100 years’ or something. It’s easy to write that sentence. But I want to know what was his tax policy, and what did he do when famine struck the land? And what did he do with all those Orcs? A lot of Orcs left over. They weren’t all killed, they ran away into the mountains. Sauron fell down, but you see all the Orcs running away. Did Aragorn carry out a policy of systematic Orc genocide? Did he send his knights out into the hills to kill all the Orcs? Even the little baby Orcs? Or was there Orc rehabilitation going on. Trying to teach the Orcs to be good citizens. And if the Orcs were the result of Elves… could Orcs and Elves intermarry?”
He's positioning his questions as "Tolkien had all these plot holes" and he's also, in other places, saying he takes his influences from Real History and Real Culture. The implication, whether he does mean to make it or not, is that he has considered these plot holes and patched them up in his own world-building. So he leaves himself open to criticism on the grounds of "actually, you got this badly wrong, mate". If you really do want to know about tax policy and handling famine after bad harvests in a fantasy world, then you have to put up or shut up when it comes to "and how did *you* handle it in your fantasy world?"
And of course, the pervasive influence of grimdark where "gore, sex, darkness" is somehow more 'realistic'. Black exists in our real world, but so does white. Ugliness - and beauty. Good and evil, right and wrong, people being monstrous assholes, people being generous exemplars.
Not disputing your major points, but one place I find GRRM to be more realistic is that he has many countries bumped up against each other rather than Tolkien's relatively separate realms.
Well, different worlds. Tolkien's is one where the human kingdoms have been shattered under the assault of Sauron's forces for centuries upon centuries, so that Arnor in the North first fractured into three kingdoms and then these were over-run and defeated by Sauron's forces, so that small isolated areas like The Shire are all that survive of what is falling back into wilderness. Something like post-Roman Britain after the legions pulled out, the local Romano-British families had been dispersed or killed off by the rebelling local tribes, and in later years the Anglo-Saxons looked at the ruins left behind and thought them the works of giants, not men:
From a letter to W.H. Auden (yes, that Auden):
"Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called 'Treebeard', from Treebeard's first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading some one else's work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I daresay something had been going on in the 'unconscious' for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till 'what really happened' came through. But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon ['eald enta geweorc idlu stodon', 'the old creations of giants [i.e. ancient buildings, erected by a former race] stood desolate], and their connexion with stone. Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war."
I'm very fond of the Ents, and identify with Treebeard's "I'm not on anyone's side because no one is on my side."
I'm a fan of ASoIaF, but this tax policy business is off-putting, because it's exactly the sort of thing that Martin himself doesn't worry about in the story. He never tells us even the basics of how taxes work or how lords make their money.
Again, to defend Tolkien, that is not the kind of story he's writing and he knows it. From letters of 1953 and 1954:
"The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. That the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way – according to their different points of interest or knowledge: i.e. as if it were a report of 'real' times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly in others. Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy."
"Yours is the only comment that I have seen that, besides treating the book as 'literature', at least in intent, and even taking it seriously (and praising or ridiculing it accordingly), also sees it as an elaborate form of the game of inventing a country – an endless one, because even a committee of experts in different branches could not complete the overall picture. I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archaeology and realien [German, 'realities, technical facts'] than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like. Not to mention music and its apparatus. I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the 'mortals' go, Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out: Gondor has sufficient 'townlands' and fiefs with a good water and road approach to provide for its population; and clearly has many industries though these are hardly alluded to. The Shire is placed in a water and mountain situation and a distance from the sea and a latitude that would give it a natural fertility, quite apart from the stated fact that it was a well-tended region when they took it over (no doubt with a good deal of older arts and crafts). The Shire-hobbits have no very great need of metals, but the Dwarfs are agents; and in the east of the Mountains of Lune are some of their mines (as shown in the earlier legends) : no doubt, the reason, or one of them, for their often crossing the Shire. Some of the modernities found among them (I think especially of umbrellas) are probably, I think certainly, a mistake, of the same order as their silly names, and tolerable with them only as a deliberate 'anglicization' to point the contrast between them and other peoples in the most familiar terms. I do not think people of that sort and stage of life and development can be both peaceable and very brave and tough 'at a pinch'. Experience in two wars has confirmed me in that view. But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view. I am not a reformer nor an 'embalmer'! I am not a 'reformer' (by exercise of power) since it seems doomed to Sarumanism. But 'embalming' has its own punishments.
Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs."
You mean we shouldn't take Bilbo's pocket watch as a serious piece of world-building which needs to be accommodated in our understanding of middle earth? Oh, no!
Seriously, thank you for the quotes.
I have to object specifically to the "If Martin wrote Sam Gamgee" bit: there is a character named Sam in ASoIaF whose name is pretty clearly an homage, and his arc is pretty different from what you describe.
I'm very much on Team Aragorn. Aragorn did a lot to prepare himself, and I expect he might have studied tax policy in advance (is it different for humans vs. elves? probably) or certainly would have studied it once he was king, been thoughtful and ethical about it, and made changes if he did something which wasn't working.
#31: What's the evidence that an appendix was harmful in the EEA? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendicitis#Causes) suggests appendicitis is mostly due to a low-fiber Western diet. I've seen claims elsewhere that appendicitis was pretty much unknown in the ancestral environment.
So who is going to add "Rome's secret true name got out" to the Wikipedia page for proposed causes of the fall of the Roman Empire? As to the mechanism for this, I'll propose that Jesus (being God) of course knew the name and passed it to St. Peter, and it was from there passed from Pope to Pope, in case it should ever be needed. But the Popes, being Bishops of Rome, felt Rome was their flock and thus the various persecutions were not reason enough to invoke the Secret Name.
This was all well and good until St. Pontian became the first Pope to abdicate, shortly before his death at Roman hands in 235. In Pontian's view, his abdication relieved him of his responsibility as Bishop of Rome to not invoke the Secret Name, and thus did he invoke that name at the moment of his martyrdom. The Earth did not circle the sun thrice before that doom commenced, for in 238 the Emperor was assassinated and the Year of the Six Emperors began -- the Crisis of the Third Century was in full force and Rome was dealt a mortal blow from which it never fully managed to recover.
The "scholarly/historical speculation" link suggests that, as Supreme Pontiff, the Popes may still know the name. Though I expect it's more likely that they don't, it being a pagan custom and all. The name might survive somewhere in a secret Vatican archive, though:
"The secret name of the deity, which, by the way, would have been the real name of the city itself, would have been known and spoken only by a very few persons, namely those who officiated at the festival of the deity, the college of her priests. The Pontifex Maximus, too, would have known the name, as would, no doubt, the chief Vestal, and, in Imperial times, the head of state, the Princeps or Emperor, who usually assumed the title and functions of the Supreme Pontiff. Nowadays, except for the Supreme Pontiff, who is not likely to worry himself over the name of a pagan deity, all those titular personages are vanished."
*Scribbles campaign notes*
And Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome, he effectively baptized it, and gave it a new, Christian name, unknown to Rome's enemies, ending the 3rd century crises?
Constantine was the first Christian Emperor, but he did not make it the official religion. That happened a bit later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica
The secret name of Rome strikes me as a pure sweet example of a Tim Powers secret history premise.
Related to the AI overhang discussion, when that was posted some asked "why didn't Google do this first? and/or Why isn't Google jumping on this?"
Just this week, Google released preliminary information about two projects: MUM, a powerful multimodal transformer, and LaMDA, a conversational language transformer model. The posts are cursory, but the work is there. They just haven't rolled it out.
https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-mum/
https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/lamda
So the answer is: Google is jumping on this.
Link 25 is basically this meme as an academic paper. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/eshcts/dont_tread_on_me/
I remember hearing on Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's podcast that there was an interesting hypothesis that hunter-gatherer people get appendicitis a lot less than agricultural people, but they get diarrhoeia a lot more, and that what the appendix does is store samples of beneficial gut flora so that you can repopulate quickly after a bout of sudden evacuation.
I've heard that too, but for some reason these anthropological theses always leave out the other major difference in diet and intestinal health between HGs and agri-societies - parasites. Agriculturalism and to a lesser extent pastoralism significantly limit external parasitism simply by limiting access vector: you're limiting the diversity of your food supply, your food supply's food supply, and your food supply's microbiome.
Re #17 (AI overhang), the intro predicts GPT-3 as a trigger for "100x larger projects...with timelines measured in months". But note this was written 10 months ago, so "months" have already elapsed. Have any such projects been completed?
I'm not sympathetic to that post at all. It's not clear to me what sorts of commercial applications of a GPT-4 scaled 100x past GPT-3 would justify a $1 billion upfront cost, especially from companies making most of their money from advertising. I don't see how GPT-N helps in predicting human spending patterns. Much cheaper algorithms are fine for that. It's data extraction, storage, and processing at scale that is needed.
On the other hand, the specifics of the predictions made there, that scaling up GPT-N would happen quickly due to GPU costs dropping drastically when NVIDIA loses a monopoly, didn't happen for a variety of reasons that are perfectly reasonable not to predict, mainly the explosive growth of Ethereum eating up GPU sales and Covid creating a global supply chain shock where neither NVIDIA nor anyone else can make more of anything to satiate the increased demand.
This gets at a weakness of any sort of "explosive growth" prediction, though. They often neglect much more practical bottlenecks to progress than some person or AI simply figuring out how to do something, such as the need to transport large amounts of rare earth elements between continents to actually implement the plan. There are hard limits to how quickly that can happen. Some production processes just don't scale up very easily, no matter the market conditions, but obviously this is especially the case when both factories and shipping channels shut down for a year because of travel restrictions.
It is interesting to see the disconnect between the excitement on LessWrong and the general sentiment I feel in the software industry that another AI winter is right around the corner, largely based on the continued lack of materialization of any commercial application of these technologies. The military is starting to get disillusioned as well after being sold so many false promises.
> largely based on the continued lack of materialization of any commercial application of these technologies.
Which lack of commercial application? Voice assistants like Alexa and self-driving cars are massive businesses already. I'm just a run of the mill SWE and I work on a team that uses BERT to do chat filtering. It's definitely being applied commercially, and getting results.
We don't know their size, but Google has made enough progress on Lambda and MUM that they are at least at the press release stage.
#31: Bret Weinstein suggested on his podcast a while back that the appendix was not vestigial, but instead contained reservoirs of bacteria that allowed gut flora could be repopulated quickly and effectively after a bout of food poisoning, intestinal flu, or other event that would typically wipe out one's gut bacteria. I think this was largely a logical deduction, though; I don't think he had good empirical evidence for this claim. This was a while ago, so I could of course be wrong.
Re 18 (cost disease in universities):
Jonathan Haidt talks about this as well in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. Specifically he mentions expanding the bureaucracy for student support measures as well as to host prestigious events (eg an expensive guest speaker). Students are increasingly asking for both, and the university admins are happy to oblige.
If I'm remembering Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education correctly, a pure signalling model would suggest that a high price makes the signal stronger. Thus higher tuition prices would make a university more appealing to students, not less. Since he, and I, believe that signalling theory is the dominate explanation for why education is valuable I expect university costs will simply grow to the limit of what students can afford (or what gets them in trouble).
What's the mechanism for that, exactly? Is the higher price just signalling that you come from an upper middle class family, and are likely to possess the same traits that made your parents economically successful? Or is it something else?
A more expensive signal shows a willingness to place a bigger bet on your traits. This would imply that you don't have the bare minimum but instead exceed the minimum by a comfortable amount. If there is a cheap way of getting the signal and an expensive one, the marginal candidates are going to have a stronger preference for the cheap option. This can develop into a reputation for the more expensive option being higher quality. The strong candidates will reinforce the reputation by choosing to pick the more expensive option due to that reputation. Thus higher cost ends up strengthening the signal.
Thanks, that makes sense, but I would imagine that gets watered down by the fact that most students are making a bet with someone else's money, mainly their parent's or some government agency's.
I think a simpler explanation is that the number of college degrees with a given level of prestige is essentially constant in time, while the population of college-age students grows (albeit these days slowly, and with assorted fluctuations).
For example, Harvard has given out about 1,500 degrees a year since the 1950s, while the potential applicant pool has roughly doubled, if we scale by mere population growth, and probably actually grown by a factor of 6, if we include the fact that in 1950 about 8% of HS graduates went to college at all, while now it's closer to 35%.
In any *normal* industry this would be the signal for an entrepreneur to come and build a brand-new Harvard 2.0 on cheap land out west and offer the same thing at 85% of the cost, thus leading to competition and stabilized (or lower) prices.
But unfortunately, you can't do that. I mean, you can certainly build a campus, and you can hire people to staff it who are as good a the faculty at Harvard*, but it wouldn't sell in the marketplace, because it's not a Harvard degree. And there's no way for it to *become* a Harvard degree except by decades to centuries of persistence, reputation, and alumni-network building. Since no venture capitalist is willing to invest $500 million in Harvard 2.0 and wait 120 years for a killer ROI, there we sit.
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* the competition for Harvard *faculty* jobs is far more brutal than the competition for Harvard undergraduate degrees.
Maybe it's also worth adding that it has not always been thus. In the 20-year period of rapid industrialization post-Civil War Harvard roughly doubled its graduating class size.
> no venture capitalist is willing to invest $500 million in Harvard 2.0 and wait 120 years for
Paging Peter Thiel.
To th extent any of the nouveau riche (including Thiel) have thought about this, they rightly conclude they cannot duplicate Harvard -- they're not idiots, after all, there's a reason they're rich -- and they have put money into schemes to narrowly focus on what we used to call vo-tech training, the equivalent of correspondence school, cosmetology school, flight school, et cetera -- only aimed at professions which at least in 2021 pay a lot of money, like Javascript programming or network administration certification.
These have had modest and scattered success, in part because they really only suit a fairly narrow consumer niche: people who are certain of what they want to do, and are well-disciplined and logical about working towards it, but who also lack some kind of wherewithawal to just go to college. Very poor? Re-entrant? There's lots of possible reasons, but they don't fit most of middle-class kids turning 18 every year.
Furthermore, the general premise is delusional. The value of a college education may have depended, to some modest extent, on what skills you actually learned over those 4 years somewhere in the 1945-1995 span, but before and after that time, it was mostly just a social credential, an entry ticket to a more aristocratic class who will be automatically considered for better jobs, and the only thing it tends to demonstrate is that you have money, self-discipline, and patience. Those are indeed valuable character traits, but they have zippity-zap to do with whatever is in your textbooks. *In principle* you could demonstrate them much more cheaply by having a solid entry-level job history, or a good military record, et cetera, but the current fashion is to look down upon the latter two for some reason.
Since the value of the college education today in fact has relatively little to do with what you actually learn, it can't be duplicated in the market place by equally effective actual learning. The learning is secondary, it's not the main point. The main point is complex hominid social mythology, so it's that you'd need to duplicate somehow.
There are other ways to go about this. Udacity and edX partnered with Georgia Tech to act as distribution platforms to scale up existing degree programs. Coursera did the same with UIUC. If you can't create an equivalent institution from scratch, you can always try to partner with one that already exists. As far as I understand, going through one of these programs gets you exactly the same degree as an on-campus student but at a drastically lower price.
Two possible examples of Harvard 2.0:
1. Minerva - high quality and selectivity, but obviously no where near the brand value
2. Stanford - took a while (but about one third as long as Harvard had been around at this point) but rivals Harvard in many/most areas.
Maybe part of the point is that a university can't start out being competitive with Harvard. If there are enough universities aiming at excellence, some of them will end up competing with Harvard and there will be more high-level opportunities.
Stanford was my immediate thought as well.
Does anyone know of any resources that discuss price signaling in the vein of consumer sentiment that higher prices = better service? I could see this reflected in the pricing of "luxury brands" (e.g. Bose, Apple), and it would also make sense in the context of prescription apps, where people won't pay $10 for a medical app but assume one that's $899 is the real deal.
Look up Veblen goods
If the US makes college "free," how high will its costs go?
Wrong question, since free education does not exist (as you clearly realise). Free for students means government pays, and is therefore a monopoly customer. As government ultimately will not just keep paying higher and higher amounts (for political, ideological or fiscal reasons) then the question with free education is what will universities have to cut.
This is why mainland Europe has so few good universities per capita compared to the US (or even the subsidised-but-expensive UK). It is also why international students who pay full costs are so desirable to universities.
Making college "free" would remove the upward pressure on price that signalling provides. So the usual factors would be in effect for a government provided service.
I don't know about USA Today, but Snopes routinely fact-checks claims from satire sites, because they tend to leak into serious belief - even if they seem crazy (https://www.snopes.com/notes/why-we-include-humor-and-satire-in-snopes-com). So that's probably not as unusual as it might seem
AOC lying about where she was on January 6 wasn't satire, and neither was Snope's covering for her. That is only nail #43,698 in the coffin of Snope's credibility. Monkeys smoking ganja and threatening randoms in the streets with knives while demanding the truth could produce better "checks of facts".
What should the credibility of Snopes or an alleged false fact-check have to do with my statement? Snopes is a major fact checker, it does routinely fact-check satire content,so "fact-checking" satire is probably not as unusual as it looks at first glance. That shouldn't be dependent on your view of their accuracy, or credibility.
See (A.) below. The "tend to leak into serious belief" you mention isn't true for anyone except snopes and their fanbase who have difficulty with satire because they are precisely the people being satirized. In other words, it is unusual for anyone that still has a sense of humor.
If someone is asking, you need to quietly tell them they asked something embarrassing, like a child asking what a condom is in the middle of a fancy dinner.
For a random person seeing a satirical article, it is unusual if they take it as fact, and you can laugh at everyone who does that for having no sense of humor without deriding a large percentage of the population. But the event of a satirical article being taken for fact by a large number of people is not unusual, nor is (at least Snopes) noting "That claim is labeled satire" so someone trying to find a fact check will find the explanation "that claim was originally labeled as satire" and act accordingly. I don't see any problem with that, honestly, and I still don't see what this policy should have to do with a completely unrelated "classical" fact-check.
Cite for AOC lying, or Snopes being dishonest about it?
I don't see any way to report a comment, so as Driele Persecto has asserted that AOC lied about she was, and refuses to provide any cite, I request that they be suspended.
Snopes fact-checked this, too:
https://babylonbee.com/news/cnn-purchases-industrial-sized-washing-machine-spin-news-publication/
This caused Facebook to threaten to demonetize Babylon Bee. To their credit, for once, Facebook apologized.
I don't think Snopes' excuse of "because people ask us about them" holds for this one.
On the more general topic of fact-checking, RealClearPolitics has a project called "Fact Check Review" that attempts to quantify what fact-checking is actually worth, in particular how often it sources its verdict from something other than media (or even from something other than the fact-checker itself). It's at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/ , and yes, the data is pretty bad.
You can probably argue that it's mostly useless to fact-check puns, I think I agree with that.