Scott, I think you may be confused on point #39. I (typical American Jew) was taught that the *Six Day War* was a spectacular Israeli victory / Arab defeat. The Yom Kippur War (six years later) was very nearly the end of the Jewish state.
If you want to see who won, consider how much of Egyptian territory was occupied by Israel in, say, September 1973, and how much is occupied today. The Egyptians knew that they could not recover the captured territory by a direct assault against Israel, backed by the US. What they settled on was an ingenious plan which was strategically aggressive but tactically defensive. The crossed the canal (a considerable military accomplishment) and dug in, waiting for the Israelis to exhaust themselves in the inevitable counter-attacks. This largely happened as planned, but, according to somewhat I met who was a junior officer at the time, the Egyptians became over-confident and advanced outside their SAM screen, after which the battle started to go the other way. When I visited the Egyptian Staff College some years ago, there was a frieze commemorating the crossing, as the operation which recovered the territory they had lost in 1967.
Only slightly inaccurate. The Egyptians did not become overconfident, the Syrians started losing, and the Egyptians attempted to advance in order to relieve pressure on them. Otherwise I believe you are correct.
Right - if someone presents the Yom Kippur as an unambiguous victory for Israel, (a) I would like to see it, (b) I don't know what propagamda they have been smoking. Egypt achieved its goals, partly militarily and partly diplomatically. Israel succeeded at hanging on and not collapsing. You could say Syria failed.
We know it's a bad thing to win a battle but lose the war, and I think in the Yom Kippur war the same thing happened but one level up: Israel won the war, but lost its reputation of invincibility. Afterwards, Israel and Egypt could sign the Camp David accords and a peace treaty, if not as equals, then at least as states playing in the same league.
In 1967, the Arab armies were full of bravado and proceeded to be summarily defeated. In 1973, Israel was full of bravado and the Egyptians and Syrians managed to surprise Israel and totally overwhelm its first line of defence. Israel won the war in the end, but the Egyptians and Syrians regained their dignity. Moreover, the Israeli victory relied, in part, on emergency weapon shipments from the U.S., allowing the Egyptians to believe that they would have emerged victorious if it were not for the U.S.
In Israel, the memory of the war is complicated. The shock of the initial defeat and the heavy casualties dominate. But there is also pride in snatching victory from the jaws of defeat through some very hard fought battles, involving inspiring displays of bravery and improvisation in extreme circumstances.
Sounds like a reasonable way to remember the war, as collective memories war. However, speaking of an unambiguous Israeli victory and an unambiguous Egyptian defeat can be justified only on some cherry-picked technical definition. Even in purely military terms, the Egyptian army achieved and held onto one of its main objectives (Suez canal); then, at the negotiating table, it got essentially what it wanted. Israel got an expensive draw, paid with the lives of not a few young men, especially in comparison with its population.
#32: My fiancee woke up the other night, we conversed briefly, then she left the room and came back 5-10 minutes later. The next morning she told me she had no memory of it, and asserted that she was therefore unconscious during the time. On the other hand, it seems possible that she was conscious but not forming memories. I have no idea how you would disentangle these two possibilities.
There've been times when I'd get in to a state where I was able to form memories but not conscious - I'd be collapsed in a really uncomfortable position and a couple times people came up and started hitting or kicking me, but I didn't have any internal monologue or opinion on it at the time and didn't move or do anything about it.
It was my first person perspective, but just the raw sensory experience without any commentary. Like, if you ended up in some kind of situation where you couldn't move, your memory of that experience would include thinking about how to get out of that situation, or how you felt about it. In those moments, I had none of that.
I think I read that when you black out drunk you are not unconscious, you stop forming memories. I seem to remember specifically that the conversion from short to long term memories is disrupted somehow. My own experience confirms this in the sense that when I’ve blacked out sometimes I start to uncover some memories of the night later during the day. The memories I recover confirm I was conscious at the time. More obviously: My mom is in her eighties and often forgets things but is not a zombie.
This always fascinated me. In my harder partying youth, there were times I'd think "I wonder if I'm to drunk to remember this tomorrow." And then I'd think, "If I'm thinking this then it must be I'm not that drunk." But what always blew my mind is thinking how many times I'd thought that and not remembered it the next day. Trippy.
Wikipedia says Etizolam is known to cause retrograde amnesia, so that's probably what happened to that guy as well. (Albeit losing a week is more extreme than merely failing to record short-term memories.)
Kind of a boring answer compared to "Blindsight was right", I guess, although there are some interesting philosophical questions in amnesia and continuity of identity.
I remember - or should I say, I don't remember - falling asleep on a bicycle and waking up a few kilometers later, at the other end of a bumpy forest dirt road. And I'm nearly certain I fell asleep and not simply failed to form memories, because I was suffering from what I clearly recognize as symptoms of sleep deprivation at the time, and this made them go away the way they usually do once I manage to take a short nap.
My take is that our brains can really do a lot on an autopilot. Going through an entire workweek? Perhaps not, but I only see it as extremely unlikely rather than inconceivable. Even when we're conscious, a vast majority of our actions are automatic, many of them extremely complex, layering subprocedures over subprocedures. There are entire schools and practices aiming to enhance humans' awareness of what they're perceiving and doing, but most of us only really start consciously noticing things when something goes wrong and our automatic procedures all throw an exception.
My other take is that GPTs of the world are best conceived as this kind of autopilot without consciousness. For this reason, I don't find "GPT may make mistakes, but so do humans" a particularly convincing takedown of the AGI-through-deep-learning-skeptic position that some think it is. Humans make mistakes when the System 1 parts of their brains make them and System 2 fails to intervene. But it's the System 2 parts that we're thinking of when we imagine AGI, and currently it just doesn't seem we're getting any closer to it.
Somewhere in the autobiography of C.S. Lewis, in the section about serving in the Army during World War I, he makes a comment about falling asleep while marching...and waking up while still marching.
At the time I first read it, I did not believe that this was a possible scenario. I thought he was engaging in exaggeration of some sort. It confused me, though. That sequence of stories didn't look like exaggeration: it was about how the military was bad in some ways, and life in school had been bad in other ways. People weren't expected to like life in the military; people were expected to like life in school. Neither the school stories nor the military stories felt like exaggerations.
This one event, falling asleep while marching, stuck out as something very odd.
But seeing stories like yours, I now suspect that Lewis experienced something similar. Sleep deprivation is not surprising among military men during wartime. Either napping-while-marching or losing-ability-to-form-memories-while-marching could have happened.
I saw a young man fall asleep while standing at attention with his eyes open while I was in the army. He was very confused when a sergeant, with some effort, managed to wake him up.
According to my wife I regularly talk in my sleep, and would have full conversations with her. If I speak with her after I go to bed, she ignores me until I prove I am actually awake. Often by quizzing me or just telling me to go back to sleep. I have apparently told her that I was awake and not sleeping during these exchanges, though I do not remember that.
I do this as well. Often it's as I'm falling asleep, and neither of us realizes I'm not conscious until I either say something ridiculous or stop responding altogether.
My partner does this too. He falls asleep next to me on the couch while we're watching YouTube, and if I ask if he's asleep, he says no, but it's clear that he is, because when he's not asleep he will actually say something more contentful, either about the video or that it's time to go to bed or something. When he's asleep, it's just a flat denial that he's asleep and no more behavior.
After I got my wisdom teeth out, I was taking opioids with no apparent effect. No symptoms, but pain didn't go away, either. The sutures in the back of my mouth bothered my tongue. So I pulled them out. It made total sense at the time!!! Then I completely forgot I'd done that. I only remembered that "the doctor will be mad." But I didn't know WHY I expected the doctor to be angry.
Six months later, I watched a medical show. ER doctor told her patient to come back to get the sutures taken out, or else they'd heal like a railroad. The memory of pulling out my sutures came rushing back, along with, "Ohhh, THAT'S why I thought the doctor would be mad!''
This is a thing that happens fairly regularly in the transition zones around sleep. I have had conversations with just woken people who assured me that yes, they were awake, and understood what I had said, and no, they weren't, and no, they didn't.
Seems to be a tradeoff between housework and childcare. That maps to my own childhood, where my mom would plop me in my playpen and go about cleaning the house. My DIL spends far less time cleaning the house and more time focusing on her daughter. And she tells me that you're only supposed to "containerize" your toddler for 10 minutes a day now.
This was my thought too. Modern parents feel compelled by society to fill their kids' time with quality interactions, and pediatricians recommend against bouncy chairs for >30 minutes and so on. Whenever I complain to my Boomer mother about my two toddlers keeping me busy, she tells me to plop them in a playpen and turn the TV on. I expect that a 1965 housewife doing that counted it as 'housework."
Boomer parents put their children into playpens when they're busy, but don't many of today's parents just put their children in front of a smartphone or tablet for the same reasons? Or is that just a stereotype?
There's something to that, but I see two significant differences. One is that a young child in a playpen is physically restrained in a small controlled environment, while a kid sitting on the sofa playing with a tablet is merely engaged in a stimulating activity. The latter requires at least a little more parental alertness, least the child put the tablet down and find something else to get into. In addition, young children playing on tablets will often ask for help or otherwise bid for parents' attention (source: my not-quite-5yo daughter) and current generations of parents tend to be disinclined to ignore them.
The other big difference is that there's a bunch of concern in current parenting culture about kids having "too much screen time", which I don't understand to have a clear counterpart with playpens.
Tangentially, we're mostly not talking about boomer parents with the "plop them in the playpen and ignore them" childcare technique. The earlier year in the chart is 1965, in which it's mostly the children, not the parents, who are boomers. Young parents of newborns in 1965 might be very early boomers (standard boomer birth years are 1946-1964), but most parents of minor children in 1965 would have been Silent or "Greatest" Generation.
This lines up with my anecdotal intergenerational comparison of parenting styles: my wife an I (born on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial) use tablets and stuff to buy time to multitask (or more often, just tag team who's on point for active child care. My parents (Boomers) used TV or Apple II games as distractions for me and my little sister: we had playpens, but they were used to allow parents to multitask (e.g. I remember my mother setting up my sister's playpen in the home office so she could split attention between work and taking care of my sister rather than needing to focus primarily on childcare) rather than as a total substitute for active childcare. My grandparents (Greatest Generation) are the ones who plopped younger kids in their playpens and ignored them, and who sent school-age kids out into the neighborhood to play until dinner.
In 1965, after we got home from school, we "went out to play," returned at dinner-time, and then did homework/watched TV/read until bedtime. Free range children were more the norm.
It's unclear to me (I suspect one of us needs to actually read this book to find out!) whether this is just aggregated across all ages of children or if they just looked at a certain age or what. Childcare for an infant or toddler is a lot different than it is for a 9-year-old, which is why we're here debating using a TV or tablet as a babysitter and time spent driving to soccer practice as all part of this. I'm assuming no parent answering this survey counted "making your 15-year-old help you fix the lawnmower" as childcare, even though it may be functionally similar to "entertaining your toddler while you fold laundry because he keeps poking his brother in the eye otherwise."
I had this same thought, though you could also argue people are more likely to describe these gray areas as "childcare" in surveys today, since a higher expectation is placed on spending lots of time with one's children.
There's something odd in the data, for sure, presumably as a result of question phrasing or averaging. Best case, parents together are spending 3 hours a daybon child care, assuming they're never overlapping? That's completely unreasonable for infants/toddlers, - even if they spend all day at daycare, you likely have an hour with them in the morning and two at night, and then they magically sleep all night, and what about weekends? I really suspect this data, while interesting, may have been collected to answer a very different sort of question and something weird is happening when it answers this one.
I think a lot of the difference in time could easily be explained just by the amount of time it now takes to drive children (and teens!) to the places that they would have gone to by themselves in 1965. This also includes daycare, and sometimes school.
I spent a good deal of time in the late 90s/early 00s being cared for by my grandparents, and they did not care where I was as long as I was back by 5:00.
Wandering around the swamp? Be back by five.
Riding bikes around the quarry? Be back by five.
Heading across the railroad tracks to the abandoned subdivision? Be back by five.
More interestingly, the actual *parents* on that street had similar views, so my cousin and I could reliably round up one or two other kids to go God knows where. Why were they so resistant to helicopter culture?
Whereas when I was a teen in the same time period, I wasn't even allowed to bike in the cul de sac in front of my own home, let alone go anywhere myself. This, even though I grew up literally in the middle of a county park full of hiking trails (at some point the county made the area a park and banned any further house building).
I hitchhiked every day, to and from school and everywhere else from about 11 years old till H.S. graduation. Some great experiences:
Two lesbians took me to a nude beach for the first time (12yrs and had no awareness such a thing existed). One guy and 5 girls took me out to a breakfast my parents never could have afforded (champagne and crab omelette at 14yrs). They proffered this invitation after I tried to bum a smoke and then offered to smoke them out when they were taken aback. (Marin County California)....
Israeli conception of the Yom Kippur War is almost a national trauma - treated as a big failure (mostly intelligence-wise) that nearly led to destruction and we survived only through sheer luck and tenacity. Many lives were needlessly lost. An investigative committee was formed, heads rolled, cultural and political landscapes changed dramatically (in 1977 the socialist Labor party was overturned after 20 years of rule since independence).
OTOH, Egypt, although the invasion eventually failed and was pushed back, treats it as a great military success that led to the eventual return of the Sinai peninsula in the peace treaty several years later (essentially, the war of 1973 was seen as restoring the honor lost in 1967).
I (Israeli) agree with this comment and other comments on the Yom Kippur war. While it is considered an Israeli victory, it is treated as something that almost wiped out the country, and a massive failure in preparation. It is *still* often referenced in various contexts in the army as a lesson we need to learn from.
Also, relatedly, the Yom Kippur attack is considered kind of a dick move, for lack of a better term, from the Arab side, since they chose to attack on Yom Kippur. For anyone that doesn't know, this is a day in which a big part of the population is fasting (a bigger percentage in the more-religious '70s, I imagine.) And on that day, no one is driving. It's like attacking the States on July 4th or December 25th or something, but even worse since the country is effectively shut down on that day.
(Side note, I think rationally the much bigger problem is the "starting a war" part, not the timing of it, but it feels so much worse that they started it on Yom Kippur.)
Famously George Washington made a surprise attack during the American revolutionary war on Christmas day. It was taught to me in school as a turning point in the war and a kind of clever strategic thing to do. I've always been a little surprised I've never seen a Christian (or any) American criticize it.
Setting aside the fact that the Americans weren't fighting for the defense/liberation of a Christian homeland in response to persecution around the world/as an attempt to reclaim an area they once dominated making religion more or less irrelevant in the context of the actual fighting during the Revolution as the primary reason no one squawks about this, had he done it on Easter Sunday, then maybe they might grumble a bit given Easter is the holiest/most important day in the Christian holiday calendar, not Christmas. I could go on about what Christianity/Protestantism/various sects demands versus asks in regards to worship, work, and holidays (a sticky wicket given there are so many ways to slice and dice it), but I think the point about GW's strategy holds, in war doing the unexpected and taking advantage of an enemy's assumptions is the smart move even if the other side thinks it's unfair.
Hence the old meme of the famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, captioned "America: We will kill you in your sleep on Christmas".
I'm probably a bit more aware of the Battle of Trenton than most, though, both from being a history buff and from my personal connection to the battle: I'm probably distantly related to the Hessian commander at that battle, Colonel Johan Rall.
It probably helps that these were hated foreign mercenaries/invaders and the Americans were defending their homeland. If a man breaks into your house on Christmas morning, threatens your family, kicks your dog, then sits down and starts eating your ham, is it rude to come up behind him, club him over the head, and throw him out? Must you let him rise to his feet for a fair fight?
By contrast, if Pearl Harbor had happened on Christmas, it would probably be remembered as even more dastardly.
The Easter Rising in Ireland began on Easter Monday, and I've never heard about anyone in England complaining about the date. Britain itself launched perhaps the worlds first carrier based air raid on German airship bases on Christmas day 1914. No one on either side was bothered by that, either.
Now, if Washington had broken a truce, I'm sure the other side would have been very condemnatory. As it is, his act was just another act of war, no worse than any other act by the rebellious side. The rebels might be accused of treason for rebelling in the first place, not for the date on which this particular act of rebellion occurred.
Egypt didn't choose to start the attack during Yom Kippur. The attack was supposed to start weeks earlier and the delay seriously threatened the secrecy of the operation.
Interestingly, I read an argument that Yom Kippur turned out to be the best possible time for mobilizing reserves, once the initial shock was over - the streets were empty and there were no problems getting in touch with reservists because they were all at their local synagogue.
Yep, an Egyptian Prof. (ex-colleague of mine) was quite angry about my suggestion that Israel had won that war - as it did all the others. I read up on wikipedia, and yeah, it was a kinda mixed result. Still, he refused to compromise; said that war was a national triumph for Egypt. - I travelled the Sinai a bit - sandbox, not much there worth fighting for. Shakespeare eternal:
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
Hamlet. Why, then the Polack never will defend it?! -
> I’m a bit confused here; weren’t many 1965 moms stay-at-home? Don’t many moms use daycare now? How is childcare so much more time-consuming?
Huh, I guess you must really be disconnected from modern parenting trends. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but in the '70s and '80s parents didn't really spend time playing with their kids. We (kids) didn't come home after school until it was dinner time. We went to our friends' houses and wandered around the neighborhood.
That shit *does not happen anymore.* Parents spend massive amounts of time with their children now. Parenting is incredibly intensive. The whole thing is totally insane, but you can't really opt out of it, because there's nowhere for the kids to go.
I wonder if this is different for city vs. country. I remember my sister and her friends taking me to the swamp. Was it ok because it was a small town, or ok because it was the '80s?
The 80s. I live in a small town and never see kids anywhere outside. They all must be somewhere, but I don't know where.
Funny because everyday I walk past a sign that says "drive slow, children at play," but I have yet to see a single child playing anywhere near that sign.
They are inside playing with devices. I'm not saying this to sound like a cranky old man. It's just true.
We had video game systems when I was a kid, starting with the Atari 2600, continuing on through the Nintendo 64, etc. We played them a reasonable amount, but I don't remember playing with them much in high school. They were kids' toys, not "entertainment systems." And even when we were kids, they didn't really replace time spent outside. Of course, there was no internet, no mobile devices, no social networks.
To be clear, I don't think that technology is the root cause here. My daughter is too young for social networks and doesn't have a phone or tablet. She still doesn't leave the house by herself. There are a lot of things going on.
I just got back from several days dogsitting for a friend in a subdivision, which is specifically designed to encourage kids and families to get outside. There are public playgrounds dotted throughout, plus park benches, ponds and streams, and even little exercise stations. And of course you got bike trails connecting everything.
I would say it's a modest success. Often when I take the dog for a walk I see families outside together, but most of the unsupervised kids are teenagers, and I rarely see anyone at the playgrounds.
My own 80s-90s childhood was spent growing up on a property with a pear orchard and horse pasture in a sparse neighborhood. I had a next-door neighbor friend who would go with me down the hill to a small forest with a decent-sized pond and a hawk nest. I guess you could say we were free-range kids since we were allowed to go outside of shouting distance, but our parents knew where we were (which sounds like common sense anyway), and we were never more than about 15-20 minutes away.
It's not just small towns. I grew up in the inner-ring suburbs, so definitely not the city but also not picket fences and cul de sacs. When I was still a pre-teen, I would walk over a mile to the nearest train station and take the train to downtown proper (where the train became the subway). What we did in the city was surprisingly tame (mostly hanging around in food courts), but my parents had no idea where we were, and we could have been absolutely anywhere.
This trend predates the 80s. My mother grew up in Jersey City, long before it was a gentrified outpost of Manhattan. As a teenager she would take a bus into the West Village of Manhattan, long before it was an upscale hipster enclave. She spent her time there smoking cigarettes and mixing it up with degenerates, and then headed back out to JC.
Parents today drive their kids everywhere now and think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe. A huge amount of transportation time suck
>think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe
Is there any evidence that this is (probably correct)? Everything I can find says that crime and child mortality are on the decline across the country.
As far as I can tell this is about *perception* not reality. People think it's more dangerous, despite it not being, so they've stopped doing it. Also something about how you're perceived by neighbors "oh they're the people that don't care for their kids."
I'd say it depends on the reason. Cars are bigger than they used to be, and there are more of them. Probably this risk is overstated by many parents, but I don't think it's totally crazy to be concerned about it.
If the thing you are worried about is child abduction, yeah, that's just bonkers.
I think it's partially unfounded concerns based on anecdotal news reports or rumors, combined with a social perception problem.
"Good" parents care for their children and are highly involved all the time. If you don't do so then you're not a "good" parent and subject to whatever social pressures there are to conform
Cars have way way better brakes than they used to, though, which I expect to dominate. Risk today is far lower than 50 years ago, but risk tolerance seems to have dropped faster than actual risk.
It's unsafe from a walking perspective. Newer suburbs don't have sidewalks and the proliferation of "stroads," four+ lane roads with heavy traffic, makes crossing through neighborhoods dangerous. There are a lot of places where you can't get to the house behind your own without jumping a fence or driving a literal mile.
We're also moving away from cars to trucks with very high grills and poor sightlines, making it especially unsafe for children. Pedestrian deaths have increased dramatically in the US.
There's a denominator problem that's a bit hard to figure out though - overall population has gone up in this time, which suggests that things are even safer now compared to the 70s than these absolute numbers suggest. But walking for transportation has gone down, and if it has gone down enough, even with overall population growth, then it could be that lower absolute numbers translate to higher risk per hour walking.
I was about to bow out of this conversation because anything more I might have to contribute would require digging for sources, but you've arrived with sources and data, so now I'm obsolete :)
My intuition is that the steep decline in pedestrian deaths for children under 13 represents an equivalent retreat away from them walking anyplace. Possibly with the rise of reduction in drunk driving, which would make the rise in overall pedestrian deaths since 2009 make sense: drunk driving goes down, but mobile phone-related accidents go up as smart phones start to proliferate and cars get interactive computer screens.
I’m in Phoenix, and every suburb has sidewalks. Most of them have little parks and playgrounds too. Trend is at least 2 decades old, since that’s the age of my suburb, which is itself not one of the older ones with this feature.
I keep getting the feeling that very few readers of ACX have children...hmmmm.
The cars are not the problem. Blaming this on cars is utter misderected BS. Hyper-zealous safety regulations are the problem.
In Los Angeles, I know that every school of which I am aware (both public and private -- to be clear, I do not have children, just obs of people/friends who do) every school REQUIRES that every child be seen getting into a vehicle driven by a parent or trusted (there is a list) guardian, or an official school bus, and must also arrive that way. All private schools have gates and guards to screen pickup/dropoff vehicles. (One near my work even has a mandatory bomb-scanning stop, just like US Federal Courthouses.)
Children are not allowed to leave school property otherwise, at the penalty of criminal charges, and a child arriving on foot or otherwise without a parent/officer triggers a mandatory report to Family Services and often the Police.
There is no legal possibility of children riding bikes or walking or any independent means, the whole society is deluded into thinking DANGEROUS.
I have a longer more hopeful anecdote regarding this, but that must come later.
I thought further and realized that Yes, there is one private school that does not require this, right down my street. But I live in a very close/old Armenian neihborhood, these kids probably walk at most six blocks home ... I saw twenty of them hanging out at the local Hot Chicken stand this afternoon.
And Public schools are not that strict, I apologize for hyperbole. Still, I will estimate that ~50% of children at public schools are picked up and dropped off, and there is special traffic control and LAPD officers tasked to this every day.
Among the laptop class, both law and withering social pressure, and 99% also the rules of the $$$ private school, require absolute chain-of-custody for all children.
Even in the same country, in the same city, living on a different street can make a huge difference... which you probably only realize after you buy your home.
From my sister's home, you can get to the nearest playground without crossing a road. The playground is visible from a window. So my sister can just tell her child to go to the playground, and once in a while look out from the window to confirm that everything is okay.
From my home, the playground is near, but you need to cross a road, and the playground is behind other houses, so I cannot see it from my window. I do not trust my 4 years old to cross a road safely... she often pays attention to the traffic, but sometimes does not and just runs. So we accompany our kids to the playground. (There I typically just ignore them and read a book while they play.)
Similarly, from my sister's home, you can get to a school by crossing a low-traffic road. From my home, although the school is only 10 minutes of walk away, you need to cross two large high-traffic intersections and a few smaller ones, that is about eight pedestrian crossings, some of them with street lights, some of them without. This feels a bit too much even for a 7 years old.
My experience could be quite different if I bought my home just a few streets away. But at that moment, I did not consider these things.
I have often thought these complex and difficult to make dodecahedrons were used as a note of rank or of an internal order of ranking within the military. They are very commonly found on battlefields and I reckon it was some internal order which needed a way to identify each other, perhaps becoming somewhat ceremonial over time.
Perhaps an internal spy/intelligence order of men mixed in with the other soldiers. Or perhaps as a simple rank insignia. These objects were hard to make and therefore difficult to counterfeit. Perhaps the spies and the scouting teams were mixed along with many of them being promoted over time. The Romans had a long history of various secret orders within their ranks and special rites and such within their military ranks. A perfect place for a curio to appear.
The location of the finds of these objects on battlefields and military caches is rather telling and the knitting thing obviously holds no water as they couldn't/didn't' knit. Though a fishing explanation or survival tool might make sense as a possible, though perhaps not plausible explanation.
While we may think of such objects or practices as something readily exploited, there were very limited games of advanced statecraft in that era. It wasn't as if the more decentralised Celtic peoples, as Julius Caesar called them, were going to be able to manufacture such objects or fit in with the ethnically different Roman soldiers. And even if they could, who would they report to on some long term spying operation...their village head somewhere in rural France or Germany?
33. Do moms feel the need to show greater care for their children relative to dads? Does trying to close the parenting gap just set off an arms race of wasteful signaling?
Probably, in the same way the housework gap is (aside from being working more hours) a product of women being more concerned about cleanliness than men.
Re: 33 (more parenting hours), I'm not a parent and haven't studied this, but it seems likely that cars explain a lot of that. There's a video on Twitter comparing kids coming to school in rural Netherlands and suburban America. All the Dutch kids ride their bikes, all the American kids are driven by parents. As we built increasing pedestrian-hostile spaces, more parents feel they have to drive their kids everywhere. I'm old enough that I walked almost everywhere as a kid (and, living in Chicago, still do). Also, I've worked with people who are certain if their kids don't have activities from the moment they wake up to the second they go to bed, they'll become drug-addicted pedophile love slaves. And that's not entirely exaggeration.
All that mom-ubering and drug-addiction prevention adds up.
(Bias note: I think Americans would be significantly better off if we mandated Netherlands-/Swiss-style infrastructure across the country: the car made us lonely, destroyed our communities, and steals all of our time. )
would be interesting to see data on parenting hours in a place like New York (or DC etc). While I think your car-driving theory is interesting, I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC parents spent as much time parenting as suburban parents.
The comparison video I saw used a North Carolina suburban location for traffic, and the Netherlands has. It wasn't hilly and the autumn weather wasn't severe. It's also worth noting that in countries with extreme weather, if they have good cycling infrastructure (e.g., Finland), people cycle in almost all weather. They plow the bike paths before the roads in some cities! Car dependence is a choice our urban planners and citizens make, not something inherent to our geography.
You were talking about the whole US. Some of it's flat or fairly flat. Some of it's hilly or very hilly. Being able to handle cold weather isn't the same thing as being able to handle hot weather.
Central San Francisco is famously hilly, and would be eminently bikable were it not for the cars. It's just a matter of mindset. The body adapts very quickly.
Not everyone has the potential to adapt, but there are powered bikes these days. On the other hand, what cities are very hilly but actually good for cycling?
Seattle has been a cycling leader for a long time—lots of riders there. There are places in Colorado with very rich cycling cultures.
But it feels like you're trying to defend cars by looking where bikes aren't practical. Bikes are fantastic, but they're not the only alternative to cars that are kid-friendly. Switzerland is bike friendly, but its real transit genius is its trains, which are so good, everybody takes them. Even a city that's borderline too hot for human habitation (like Phoenix is likely to become) could have trains and buses to get around. It might require that we change land use rules (e.g., abandon single family home zoning and parking minimums), but we could do it if we wanted to.
How is that going to work in farmland Nebraska, where it's 1/4 mile to the end of the driveway, a mile to the first neighbor's house, and 10 miles to town (and the school)? It feels like this attitude is informed by living in a dense urban area, without much experience of the large swathes of the United States that aren't that way at all.
I want to say obviously, no solution is going to apply to everyplace. But maybe that isn't obvious. In this case, though, truly rural areas are likely to depend on cars even in the most ideal scenarios. However, both Switzerland and the Netherlands provide robust public transit to their rural areas (which means mountainous areas in Switzerland), so for most Americans, we could do much better.
BTW, I grew up in rural America and I walked to or rode my bike to school. I had to go some distance, but that developed fitness habits I'm very happy to have today. Granted, I wasn't in an area so rural that the closest school was ten miles away, but very few Americans live in areas that sparsely populated.
I don't think either the Netherlands nor Switzerland is an appropriate model for rural America. These are both countries the size of the smallest US states, like Maryland or New Jersey. California has counties that are bigger than either country, and of course a mere rural county has a tiny fraction of the tax base and resources of a wealthy small country like either the Netherlands or Switzerland. The idea of running trains all over the US countryside, the way Switzerland does -- which is certainly marvelous, I've ridden the system and marveled at it -- is just wholly impractical. It would require economies (and tax bases) 10-100 times as large.
I don't know what you mean by "very few" but the USDA says 14% of Americans live in rural counties. 1 out of 7 doesn't exactly strike me as "very few." They are also, of course, a rather essential group of people, since they provide all the food we eat.
Rural counties aren't defined by living 10 miles from the nearest school. That's very low density.
While I hinted at it in my last response, I suppose I should be clear that when I said I would like to see car-centric urban planning abolished, I didn't mean that literally for all of the US. I don't think anybody I know of in urban planning/pedestrian-and-bike advocacy circles wants to make people in low density rural areas give up their cars for bikes-n-buses. But we could have much better transit (and housing) than we do in most areas, and one of the results would be fewer parents engaged in this madness:
America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965. Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I think the specific move from free-range kids to parent control happened as a result of fear of crime; both the very real increase in general crime from 1960-1990, and an exaggerated panic around child kidnapping sometime in the 70s or 80s. I wouldn't have thought that in itself was enough to change the parenting hours the way the graph shows, but it was a pretty big transition.
(Caveat, I'm not an urban historian, so I may be slightly off on my facts, but I feel confident in them)
1) Suburbs were built differently in the 50s and 60s—they were closer in and more urban. That's certainly in evidence in the Chicago metro area where I live. They have sidewalks, corner stores, etc.
2) As state departments of transportation expanded their role into cities and suburbs, they've prioritized cars (to the point where they actively fight against resident wishes). The roads are appreciably less safe, especially as big box retail came to prominence, which creates all sorts of flow problems and congestion.
3) Kids used to take school busses to school. Apparently, not so much anymore. That's a huge timesuck for parents.
4) Demand for "safe" kid activities means driving your kids about. My suburban friends with kids are car moms from 3 pm to 7 pm most days.
5) Yeah, I wouldn't deny fears over crime contributes to this, but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it. I won't claim its cars, although building a "community" where nobody interacts with each other isn't going to create a lot of trust.
6) Most of NYC isn't really anti-car, and while better than many suburban places, relative to places that have emphasized pedestrian and non-motorized or public transit, it is only so-so. People in other countries rightfully feel much safer sending their kids out into the world unaccompanied because you don't need a fully developed brain to deal with the treats. I mean, Japan has a show where they send little kids to do errands. And driving in Amsterdam is better than driving in most American cities because there's less traffic and better flow engineering.
In our city, if you live within 2 miles of your assigned school, there is no bus service. There are also no sidewalks. Thus, we drive our kids the 1.75 miles to and from school each day. Also, its not just DRIVING kids to activities - I can't just drop my kid at soccer practice. I have to sit there in the parking lot for 3 hours a week due to liability concerns if he gets injured while playing, plus another 2 hour game on the weekend. That kind of crap is a massive time suck that you can't get out of unless your kid just doesn't participate in any extracurricular activities.
There's probably a chicken-and-egg issue. More parents are driving their kids to school, which causes less demand for buses, which makes buses more expensive to provide per kid, which causes cuts to buses, which causes more parents to drive their kids.
there is another chicken-and-egg issue in parallel: people don't trust their kids to ride the bike to school because there is so much traffic, but half of the traffic around school at this time is parents driving their kids to school.
I lived a couple blocks from a school when I was in Los Angeles. I would commute to USC on bike, but I learned that even if my work on campus was done at 2:30, I shouldn't head home then, because I would likely be arriving in the most dangerous moment of the day, when parents in cars are looking for their kid, and not likely to see anything else in front of them.
Our kids ride the school bus. When i was a kid, we'd get on the bus right outside our house. The drive let us off by ourselves, and we'd walk in.
Now, the district says you need a parent at the stop when the kids get off.
> but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it?
What if the 'something else' is that people have simply become more fearful and risk averse?
I think that's true—my male friends with kids report going to the park with their kids means being treated as potential sex offenders, and parents who send their kids to school on public transit or let them walk unaccompanied are sometimes investigated by child protection services. However, the why of it baffles me. What made North Americans become so afraid of letting their kids have freedom?
I don't think it's only North Americans. Maybe Americans are ahead of the curve, but I think the trend happens in many places. Definitely also the UK, and maybe delayed or more slowly in other places, but I'd guess it still happens.
I wonder also if part of it is all the extra-curricular activities children seem to be engaged in. Some of it is probably interest on the child's part, and some activities really do help with confidence building and socialisation, but there does seem to be this drive to "you need to do a sport and an instrument and something else to build up your resume when you are applying for college", and that means a lot of driving the kids around to drop them off for activities then pick them up again, as well as making sure they have their sports kit, instrument, whatever else they need for the activity, and then maybe showing up for the school concerts and matches and the rest of it.
That's a good point. My youth was far less structured, and we often had many hours a day of unrestricted free time. With no internet and no ability to drive ourselves, we spent a lot of time wandering the neighborhood and woodland areas near our house.
Well you kind of need to work to get their little fannies out of the house these days, because the computer and the smartphone sing their siren song[1]. When I was a kid, it was impossible to *keep* me in the house. What am I going to do? Stare at the walls? Read, yeah I guess, but not all freaking day. So I'd be out of the house when I got home from school as fast as I could change my clothes, looking for some trouble...er...adventure with my friends.
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[1] It's not even that antisocial: they meet up with their friends online and play games. Heck, I've had siblings sit in adjacent bedrooms and meet online to play games. "Tell your sister it's time for dinner." "OK, I'll just drop a note into the game chat." Say what? She's right next door...? What a strange world the future is going to be.
Also, car-friendly and pedestrian-friendly aren't *necessarily* mutually exclusive. I live in walking distance of (1) a highway, (2) a grocery store, and (3) the local public high school.
Fear of crime wouldn't surprise me as a cause (though it's unlikely to be the *only* cause); the population of Rochester dropped every decade between 1960 and 2010, and the crime rate is still ~4x the national average among cities over 100k. It stabilized in 2020 at 211k (or at least, didn't get worse; there are obvious confounders), but that's still a third of the population evaporating over those sixty years. Over half that exodus happened between 1970 and 1980, which at least sort of matches the causal arrow of the 1964 race riot.
> America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965.
In the relevant sense, this really isn't true. By 1980, a majority of households had 2 or more cars, but in 1960, a majority of households had 1 car, and over 20% had 0 cars. A 1 car household is unlikely to be transporting kids by car while a breadwinner is at work.
It's harder to measure the history of suburban population, since there haven't been good and consistent definitions of "suburban" as contrasted with "urban". But if you look at recent decades, you still see continued increase of suburbanization:
The first Levittown was only built in 1947, and while that first wave of suburbanization was pretty fast, it didn't make up a majority of the population until close to 2000.
> Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I don't think it's fair to describe NYC as a "car-hostile" city. The majority of streets are lined with free parking, and there are only a few pedestrian plazas. It's less car-friendly than much of the rest of the United States, but they haven't even yet started charging people for the use of streets for driving or parking, let alone charging market rates.
Also, I would want some statistical information to judge whether New York is actually worse for child freedom than the suburbs. What percentage of 10 year olds are *actually* allowed to wander more than 10 feet from home without adult supervision in suburbs and in New York? What percentage of 15 year olds?
Potentially relevant: it seems for Americans the rise in child-care time for both fathers and mothers, educated and uneducated, happened pretty suddenly in the 90s[1]. Maybe it was indeed fear of crime.
[1] Ramey, G., & Ramey, V. A. (2009). The rug rat race.
Given the tenor of the comments here, I'm fascinated by the possibility that reactionary American conservatism may actually break AGAINST car dependency.
It is exactly about the car/pedestrian issue for children and how general zoning and architectural decisions factor into this.
Kicker: When asked how pupils come to school, a japanese school director is visibly puzzled about the seemingly idiotic question: How else would they come to school other than walking?
Well, bear in mind education infrastructure has changed, too. It's much less common to have schoolbuses that it used to be. Neighborhood schools, meaning schools within walking distance, are rarer -- schools have become bigger and more complex, with lots of add-on services and professionalization, so they are situated at larger intervals. School start times have drifted earlier, so that in the winter it can sometimes be twilight at the time kids would set off. It's also the case that America in general experiences considerably more variable weather than the Netherlands - snow, sleet, big thunderstorms, very low temps -- and that helps shape American attitudes in general.
Social attitudes have become more critical, too: if you were to allow your kid to bike to school on a day with a 20% chance of rain, and it actually did rain on him on the way home, you might rightfully fear someone calling the police on you -- in the modern Zeitgeist allowing your 8-year-old to ride 6 blocks in the rain is pretty close to child abuse.
Finally, there's a synergistic effect. If most kids are taking the bike or walking to school, then that will encourage others to do it. You'll meet up with your friends, there will be crossing guards and a few parents around, the large numbers will give both the kids and the parents more confidence that they get to school and if there's any weirdness there will be help right there. On the other hand, as the numbers who arrive at school dwindle, at some point *that* becomes self-reinforcing also: the small numbers mean the school doesn't provide crossing guards, there aren't any random parents walking along every now and then, the kids are alone and they are more anxious, and parents are more anxious that if there is some mild weirdness the kid will be completely on his own. Plus people like to fit in, and if everyone or no one is having his kids walk to school, you will feel strange if you buck the trend.
Add me to the chorus of "nos" in this. I was there, and 1960s through early 1970s was Peak Car Culture in the United States. Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor. Which means pretty much every residential neighborhood, urban, suburban, or rural, was laid out to support automobile traffic uber alles.
But kids were walking and riding their bicycles on the same streets, or adjacent sidewalks, and everybody took it for granted that this was normal. Possibly a 21st-century Dutchman would look at a 1960s American suburb and say "that's horribly pedestrian-unfriendly"; actual 1960s Americans were fine with it even for their unattended kids (beyond very young ages, of course).
Fear that the kids will become "drug-addicted pedophile love slaves", yes, we did have a bit of a moral panic about that in the 1980s. Also they might have been sacrificed in some horrible Satanic ritual. I don't think we've ever gotten over those two.
> Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor.
This doesn't seem accurate. As of 1960, a majority of households had a single car, and 20% more had no cars. It doesn't seem plausible that a majority of adults would drive everywhere if nearly 70% of households had fewer cars than adults.
It's true that people were much more bullish on cars then than they are now, because cars were still new, and roads were more over-built and thus less congested, and so having a car to use all the time was much more aspirational and a status symbol than it is now. New neighborhoods were certainly being built around the car at that point.
But given that most neighborhoods at any given time were laid out in the several decades before that time, rather than in the current decade, it would take several decades for most neighborhoods to be built around the car.
How do you think the majority of adults were getting around, then?
Again, I was there. They *weren't* taking the bus, or riding bikes, or walking more than a block or so. They were driving, or they were riding a car driven by someone else, or they were staying home.
They did do more staying home, in part because "I have to drive the kids to school/soccer practice/whatever" wasn't a thing. And because in two-adult households, it was much more likely that only one adult had a job outside the home. They also did a fair bit more riding in cars driven by someone else. And the fact that a household only has one car, doesn't mean that the husband can't use it to drive to work on weekdays while the wife uses it to buy groceries on the weekend, etc. It just means they had to actually plan and schedule for it, which they did.
That still adds up to an awful lot of cars being driven, often poorly and/or drunk, on residential streets that were designed around cars and trucks.
I don't think that's fully accurate. When I was young my family had only one car, but that doesn't mean my parents didn't basically drive everywhere, because they did. What it meant is that stuff had to be scheduled a lot more. You could not assume a car was available any time you needed one. Sometimes mom would drive dad to work, for example, or he would carpool with a friend, so she could have the car while he was at work. Some stuff only got done on weekends, or after work. We didn't go to the store just any time we felt like it, it was something that was planned out a week ahead of time. I remember it was a fizzy occasional when they got a second car, and we stopped referring to "the" car and started talking about "dad's" car and "mom's" car.
Edit: You know, I'll also say work was a little less all-consuming for the typical adult in those days, too. There were no Slack messages at 6pm to which you might need to pay attention. Nobody called you at home. My dad's job ended at 5pm, and then he drove home, arriving about 5.30pm, and that was it. Nothing from his work intruded in our lives until the following morning at 7.30 when he left again. You can get a surprising amount of "home" stuff done if you have every day from 5.30 until bedtime completely free, which he did. And of course, my mother did nothing but home stuff all day.
A sad fact, which has crept up on us so slowly most people don't even realize it exists, is that adults now have to work much harder to afford the middle-class lifestyle their parents (or grand-parents) enjoyed. It takes two adults, normally, and two college degrees, and often times nobody is working as few as 40 hours a week, and people are getting work stuff dumped on them nights and weekends.
When I was a kid an adult man, with a high-school diploma and energy, could land a job out of high school that paid him enough to start saving, and by age 23-25 be earning enough to marry, start a family, and even buy a house with a yard and support that family on just his salary. I know because most of my relatives did just that. This is much harder today.
The US simply isn't very like the Netherlands. And I am very pro biking, and live right in the city. But people in the US move out 30 miles from downtowns because land and houses are cheap and transpo is cheap. That isn't the case in the Netherlands.
Actually, the rural Netherlands is like that. And they have good transit options. They build housing and offices near train stations, and have walkable rural cores. We have a lot we can learn from them if we want to. Same thing with Switzerland, where they've chosen to emphasize train service over cars even for small villages in the mountains.
As far as houses are cheap, it's a policy choice we made to make it illegal to build mutlifamily residences and walkable places. People who want those things often can't afford it because we have such an undersupply of walkable neighborhoods. Parking minimums are hell for walkability.
It is really not. The population density of the "rural Netherlands' is nothing like the population density of the urban farmland that was converted into suburbs. The "rural" Netherlands is a tapestry of towns and villages crammed quite close together.
The whole country (~18M people) is roughly the same size as the Minneapolis Saint Paul MSA (~3.5M people). In the US there are entire states at a population density lower than the lowest district in the Netherlands (20-40 pp/km2). Meanwhile the lowest population districts in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul MSA are basically uninhabited for comparison. Maybe one farmhouse per sq/km.
Neither there or Switzerland is like the US, many more people live in a MUCH smaller area, especially when you are talking "buildable land" which Switzerland is VERY short on. In such areas dense development with lots of transit has natural advantages it simply doesn't have in most of the US.
Its one thing to chastise Americans for preferring housing/development patterns you dislike, but you are holding up examples where those same decisions and choices are simply NOT possible.
>it's a policy choice we made to make it illegal to build mutlifamily residences and walkable places.
Where are you talking about? Because that simply isn't true in 90% of the country? Are you super Bay Area focused or something? Also parking minimums are another thing that has been on their way out for 10-20 years.
You are fighting all the battles people already won ~2005. Everyone knows dense transit oriented development has advantages for efficiency and the environment.
Just like everyone sleeping in coffin apartments in one giant apartment building and only being allowed to telecommute would have even MORE advantages. Except you know, there is that problem of "what is life actually for", and disgusting reality of human preferences. And those human preferences you find so disgusting tend to value cheap housing and good schools and the freedom of cars over transit, particularly in an environment of relatively low land costs where that is easy.
Once again I live in the city and bike, and my wife and I are unlikely to move. But even many of our like minded friends and peers who believe all the same things you do, choose to move out to the suburbs when their kids hit school age, because the benefits of urban living simply don't add up for them.
Honestly the only very unwalkable suburbs are the ones built out between like 1970 and 2000. The older inner ring ones most places tend to still have street grids and be quite walkable, and even those unwalkable ones are mostly being slowly retrofitted as their populations age and they are less family focused.
How does it fall apart? When presented with more options people took advantage of them. They don't have those options in the Netherlands and so couldn't take advantage of them.
And what on earth could you mean by "liked them just fine"? They didn't have a choice. We could also restrict all housing to identical pods in giant rectangular towers 300sqft a piece, and people would "like it just fine" if there were no other options. That presumably isn't the point.
I think you'll find the Dutch also have cars. Also, Americans hate car dependency. It makes them miserable and impoverished in ways they don't understand and can't explain because they're not aware that there are alternatives. As you said, if we restrict housing to one dystopian hellscape, peole would probably invent a bunch of BS post hoc reasons why actually it's American exceptionalism or whatever.
I don't know where you're getting your ideas from, but I get my information primarily from people who work in urban and transit planning, and the story your telling doesn't correspond to the data I've seen. "Everyone" might know that dense transit-oriented development is good, but we're not building much of it, and the vast majority of places in the US outlaw it via parking and plot size minimums plus single-family home only zoning. Where it exists, it tends to be too expensive for most people, because it's in high demand. This is an issue people in the field are trying to grapple with: how do we build this highly desirable environment without it becoming something only available to the rich?
TDOT is shoving an unwanted freeway expansion through Houston despite residents fighting against it because they're of the More Lanes Is Better school.
Parking minimums on their way out? Have you looked at a map of Columbus? Or, for that matter, any American city?
That's downtown Columbus with the parking highlighted.
It's true that we're making progress on all of this, but we're still living in an environment built on the assumption that the best way to go anywhere is the car, and its utility should be prioritized over people.
BTW, I'm not judging people who live in the suburbs. I'm bemoaning the policies ensure cheap housing is on the peripheries and force people to get around by car. I'm sure your friends are fine people who love their children.
>I don't know where you're getting your ideas from, but I get my information primarily from people who work in urban and transit planning, and the story your telling doesn't correspond to the data I've seen.
My wife has a degree in Urban and Regional Planning and has worked in that field for 20 years initially for a suburb, then a regional town, and then a large city. I have an unrelated degree but have done work/consulting in that field for 15 years. Literally you entire screed was the received wisdom in 2005 (or even 10 years earlier). And is what all the major regional planning organizations and entities have been pursuing the whole time.
>"Everyone" might know that dense transit-oriented development is good, but we're not building much of it
This is jsut false, it is a huge element in most developments for the past two decades. It isn't *AS* much as activists would want. But what ever is? Most major metros have significantly more bike lanes, reduced restrictions on density, than 10-20 years ago. Many communities have been adding significant transit. Park and rides are way up.
No we haven't mandated every American metro look like Amsterdam, but umm, that isn't possible politically or financially.
Suburbs and exurbs have focused on more walkable development very heavily since ~2000, and have achieved it in practice. many have much more intentionality around creating a dense walkable core for the elderly and pods arounds schools etc.
No people building developments on 3 acre lots out in exurbia aren't building very walkable communities, but that is literally impossible when that is the development type.
We don't build MORE urban density, because the (paying) demand simply isn't there, and HORROR OF HORRORS the entities that fund transportation and planning are at least a little responsive to the desires of the actual residents and not the dreams of 25 year old graduate student DINKs on bikes.
We have literally spent 20 years fighting battles politically and taking flack from elected officials for "putting our thumb on the scales in favor of transit oriented development at the expense of cars".
And now we have Johnny come lately's like yourself waltzing in saying "durr why is *everything about cars* don't you know it is more efficient to pack them all in like Sardines?"
>and the vast majority of places in the US outlaw it via parking and plot size minimums plus single-family home only zoning.
This just isn't true. Minimum parking restrictions have been crashing pretty everywhere in the past decade+. And single family only zoning always had pretty decent sized pockets of MF development allowed, and there HAS been a lot of loosening on that front as well over the past decade.
>Where it exists, it tends to be too expensive for most people, because it's in high demand. This is an issue people in the field are trying to grapple with: how do we build this highly desirable environment without it becoming something only available to the rich?
Highly desirable to *you*. Look I am on your side, but the market has spoken. And frankly I am not sure if telecommuting isn't going to make it a lot worse. It will help at least in that it will squash some of the need for transit/driving period. But it also squashes a decent amount of the appeal for density (being close to work).
>TDOT is shoving an unwanted freeway expansion through Houston despite residents fighting against it because they're of the More Lanes Is Better school.
More lanes generally is better. The research showing it isn't is mostly pretty garbage.
Most places adding more lanes reduces drive times and takes load off of adjoining roads. What *then* happens is development patterns change and eventually the roads fill back up and reach market equilibrium again. For some reason this is sold to people under the lie that "building roads just creates more traffic". Ignoring the growth that the roads are handling.
No one would hold it against a train line that "if you build it then people just build buildings around it and ride it" as though it was some sign building trains was folly and "didn't help with train overcrowding".
There are a very few small select poorly implemented (and heavily reported/cited) projects where it looks like adding another lane turned out to be counterproductive, but that is about it.
>Parking minimums on their way out? Have you looked at a map of Columbus? Or, for that matter, any American city?
Well you are aware that parking minimums from like 1960 and 2000 might be still having an impact on the landscape of Columbus right? That most of those parking lots are probably not related to parking minimums on new construction?
But, yeah I look at maps of a lot of American cities. Generally the ones with almost any development at all are seeing massive reductions in the amount of total land area devoted to parking in the downtown. But you knew that right?
Where massive parking lots still survive are in rust belt towns in Ohio and Michigan etc. where new development hasn't paved over the old surface lots. Even Houston car capital of the US has seen big reductions in the amount of surface parking downtown.
>It's true that we're making progress on all of this, but we're still living in an environment built on the assumption that the best way to go anywhere is the car, and its utility should be prioritized over people.
1) It is the best way to get most places, and most flexible, that is why people like it. literally when people are thinking about utopian future transit systems, one of the most common ones anti-car people come up with are individual pods that ummm are cars without drivers.
2) It isn't "cars vs people". The cars are people, people are IN the cars! And most people have cars because they want them.
>BTW, I'm not judging people who live in the suburbs. I'm bemoaning the policies ensure cheap housing is on the peripheries and force people to get around by car. I'm sure your friends are fine people who love their children.
The policies don't really have a lot to do with it. It is just cheap land. You can buy a house here for $250,000 in house and $100,000 in land, or you can go 10 miles away and get the same house for $250,000 in house and $10,000 for twice as much land.
Plus your taxes will be lower, there will be less crime, and better schools. On the downside you will need to fight through traffic for an hour each day and use a car to get groceries. many people find that an appealing tradeoff.
Now I am with you in the idea that there are some uncaptured negative externalities to that style of development. And that we *should* be putting our thumb on the scales to counterbalance those and move people into a more dense economically/environmental style of living.
But my point is this whole profession has been VERY aggressively doing thumb on the scale for 10-20 years. Basically as much as the political environment will stand. And meanwhile you sound like you think we are doing nothing.
You do also have the issue of not having responded to my reductio. If urban style living is so amazing and valuable, why don't we go further rand mandate Tokyo style coffin apartments for everyone? We could cram most American metros into one or two giant skyscrapers. That would be SUPER URBAN. Why not do that?
And that answer is of course because it is absurd and people would hate it.
You've just given me the most internet of dilemmas: conflicting experts! Everybody I listen to on these issues is in planning or has recently been in the field and are not reporting this as received wisdom. I'm not in the field, only a passionate supporter (and occasional volunteer for high speed rail). I'll take your word on your credentials. So whose word to listen to without spending more time than it's worth me spending on research…
Re: your hyper Tokyo example, urbanism is street life. Taking the idea to extremes isn't revealing.
Fun glitch: because you can't be a tech company without being obsessed with tracking every action, the links from the link post are unclickable from the email while substack is down.
Granted, not a common failure mode, but still kinda funny.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't you only be able to swap one domain for another, which would have a similar outage risk? You can't provide an alternate link that a browser could fall back to if the primary is down.
You could add alternate links, but that uglies up the interface to mitigate a very low risk event.
No, you can preserve the original link redirect on site outage as a failsafe. Though obviously whatever tracking happens when redirected through your (down) site won't work.
I can't think of any way to do that from within an email. You can't embed Javascript to implement any kind of fallback logic, and <a> tags only support a single reference. How would you do it?
At a guess, the comment might be suggesting protecting a link redirection service from outages in other parts of substack by having a fallback in the link, so that the service doesn't rely on the rest of their system being up.
No idea if this would have helped them today. I also might have misunderstood.
In addition to being a part of the AI safety and EA worlds, Peter was a computer security and privacy researcher and helped start the Let's Encrypt certificate authority and several other projects. And a really great guy.
#39: From a conventional/material (e.g. land conquest) standpoint, it was an Israeli victory and an Arab (Egyptian/Syrian) defeat, as the Israeli forces repulsed the Arab armies' attack, the Arab countries didn't gain a single inch of territory, and at one point the Israeli army was within 60 miles of Cairo. But from a psychological/morale/symbolism/"honor" standpoint, some Arab leaders counted it as a victory because they successfully surprised Israel, achieved some early gains, put up a very hard fight, and nearly destroyed Israel. This was quite different from the Six Day War, when the Arab armies were surprised and quickly defeated, and which left Arab military and political leaders humiliated. So while Israel "won" by conventional measures, it felt like a defeat; and while Egypt and Syria "lost" by conventional measures, they treated it like a victory.
Re 39, Armies of San d had an interesting perspective on it. While it was an Israeli victory in the end on the battlefield, Sadat didn't go in to win the war. He went in to try to get more leverage at the negotiating table, and by that standard it worked quite well. Note that the return of Suez was not long after the end of the war. (This assumes you didn't just confuse it with the Six Day War.)
And every person is named after themselves. This is the cause of the infinite recursion of 'jr's after everyone's name, the stack overflow of which resulted in Noah's flood, when we all agreed the 'jr's would be silent and unwritten like G-d's name itself.
We posit that inconsistencies across findings are partially due to the concept of conspiracy theory itself. A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or circumstance that accuses powerful actors of working in secret for their own benefit, against the common good, and in a way that undermines bedrock societal norms, rules, or laws (Uscinski, 2020).
Conspiracy theories are not likely to be “true”––i.e., no even-handed burden of empirical proof has been satisfied––according to appropriate epistemological authorities (Levy, 2007).
""
I find this definition to be very strange.
Such ideas are deemed 'untrue' because they lack 'appropriate epistemological authorities' to confirm that they are true.
But a key element of various conspiracies is that they involve the leadership of those self-same authorities. This is a catch-22 and rather circular logic. In this way the powerful can simply never be truthfully observed as acting in conspiracy of any organisation which they themselves control.
This is a rather absurd metric and history is full of examples of elites both committing and hiding their own crimes. The more recent and domestic an event, the more likely it will be deemed as 'untrue' by authority figures. They aren't going to police themselves or convict themselves of their own crimes!
I know I'm slightly exaggerating here and one might pretend there is some line between a given president and the FBI or the NY Times, etc. and the 'authority' and gatekeepers of truth are not quite so narrowly defined by the author as I'm making them out to be.
But my point is self-evident that elites have wide ranging powers and influence, more than enough to hide their crimes or abuses of power which are not in the interest of those they nominally represent. From things as simple as a Senator's son not getting a DUI or the same treatment for petty crimes all the way up to lying about the reasons for launching a war. History shows us little other than these sorts of abuses of power by powerful people and them lying, hiding, and denying this while often going unpunished. Were Pinochet's death squads a conspiracy as well?
Then I looked towards the list of conspiracies mentioned and nominally chosen for their 'lack of truth' as defined above along with people of various political backgrounds believing in them.
Here are a few that I picked out as ones I think are quite true and we can find many examples of them being true...yet here in this survey they are used as typical 'wrong' conspiracy theories to ask people about.
Notably missing are several confirmed elite conspiracies which have come to light as 'accepted by authorities' to some degree over time. Such as the lies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Gulf of Tonkin incident, etc. If anything, and across history we see such elite conspiracies and propaganda campaigns are common.
Such as in Soviet Russia where many truths were denied by official bodies, such as the number of people starving to death or that their 5-year plans were working. Or about how globalism is good for all, despite it impoverishing formerly good blue-collar jobs as seen in the Rust Belt.
Back to the paper:
Elite pedophile rings - there are many of these which have come to light over the years. Epstein most recently. About 10 years ago there was a close associate and clergyman whose name I forget in England was also found out for this. Also you know...the Vatican and Catholic Church system....but this is an 'untrue conspiracy theory'?
Epstein murdered - ummm...yea, he was, it was obvious.
Covid threat exaggerated - umm....does anyone disagree with this who doesn't work for big pharma? How in the world is this a conspiracy theory of 'untrue' information.
Deep State - what...that it exists and exerts influence? Sure any specific claim may or may not be true, but any complex nation state will have decisions being made by hidden actors. Are we going to pretend the intelligence agencies around the world do not exist again?
This in itself is a conspiracy of doubt and propaganda to deny the rampant blackmailing and spying which goes on by every powerful nation. Were the Stasi a conspiracy too? If we take off our in-group blinders, we find even the mainstream press and media are very happy to see and describe the bad bad behaviour of the deep state and intelligence actors in OTHER nations.
etc. etc.
Several of these are quiet silly ideas which do not have much backing behind them and are clear power fantasies aimed at prominent figures - many of which I'd never heard of such as Bush breeching the levees..I guess that's a Hurricane Katrina reference? Or Soros controlling the world...these overblown fixations on single actors like Soros or a president or Gates etc. or far flung ideas like flat earthers and such.....are mixed in with unclear or factually true conspiracies.
This muddies the water a bit and if one were to say in/out group fantasies of Obama did this that or the other or Trump did xyz...ok sure, that's true and obvious enough. You don't find a lot of ardent Dems being overly concerned about all the drone strikes killing 90%+ civilians around the middle east which is real or with the wacky 'birther' idea of Obama not being a US Citizen or his birth certificate being fake. Those are weird things to mix together, but it is true far fewer dems would be inclined to think those things.
Overall I think the article makes a fairly obvious and pedestrian point, but is more harmful in casting doubt on very clearly true conspiracies run by elites....with the strange idea that we need those same elites to confirm and 'authorise' the truth of their own crimes to us publicly.
MartyrMade's series of podcasts on Epstein made some comparisons to recent sex trafficking rings that were shocking. Shocking because for how salacious they were, and how our media loves tales sex crimes and corruption, I'd never heard of them.
For example, the Dutroux affair. Marc Dutroux, a Belgian, kidnapped and raped multiple young girls, was caught, convicted, and was jailed just three years. He start committing the same crimes again not long after but managed to escape arrest by virtue of either extreme police incompetence or police cooperation.
Dutroux was on public assistance but managed to own ten houses.
Many witnesses were murdered or died under suspicious circumstances.
Dutroux claimed to be supplying powerful people with child sex slaves. There were witnesses, whose identities were protected, that corroborated those claims.
Dutroux was put away, but the trafficking ring was never investigated.
The most shocking thing about Epstein and Dutroux is that for all these parallels, and for how much the Epstein story was in the headlines, I'd never heard of Dutroux. When people dismiss questions about Epstein's death, there's an at least implicit tinge of "that's too outrageous to be true." But we have plenty of examples of truly outrageous things happening with official corruption and sex trafficking.
Another case featured on the episode was the Kincora Boys' Home. MI5 was letting a group home traffic its residents so that it could obtain kompromat on its patrons.
The Fall River murders may have been what kicked off the Satanic panic. There's a recentish documentary that calls into doubt some of the witnesses, but I'm not familiar with either the murders or the documentary. I've been led astray by enough exoneration documentaries that I don't grant any weight to the mere existence of such a documentary.
I'd also argue that Charles Manson and his followers qualify as a Satanic cult engaged in ritual murder. Technically Manson was murdering in the name of both Satan and Jesus, but I think only one of those two figures would have approved of Manson.
Manson has his own set of conspiracy theories as well. He was likely a target of the Mk Ultra program. He was assigned a parole officer whose only parolee was Manson. He repeatedly committed crimes and was not sent back to prison for parole violation.
That parole officer also ran the Amphetamine Research Project in the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, working with Dr. Jolyon West, known to have worked the Mk Ultra project. Manson's young female followers were patients at the clinic.
The Dutroux case is bad enough on the facts, you don't have to throw in cults.
Like two girls who starved to death because Dutroux was arrested and jailed for four months on unrelated charges, and his wife never took care of them in his absence. Honestly, the details as they came out bit by bit during the time it was all disclosed were so horrible, everyone involved should have been - well, let's say subjected to mediaeval style punishment:
"One of his mistresses was Michelle Martin, whom he later married and had three more children with. ...On 24 June 1995, eight-year-old classmates Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were kidnapped after going for a walk in Grâce-Hollogne, probably by Dutroux, and brought to his house in Marcinelle. Dutroux kept them imprisoned in the dungeon he had created, repeatedly sexually abused them and produced pornographic videos of the abuse. ...On 6 December 1995, Dutroux, having been recognised by Rochow, was arrested for vehicle theft..
According to Dutroux and Martin, Lejeune and Russo were still alive in the house at the time of Dutroux's arrest in December 1995, and Dutroux had ordered Martin to leave new food and water for the girls in the dungeon each time they ran out. Martin neglected to feed them, later claiming she was too afraid to go into the dungeon. Lejeune and Russo eventually starved to death. Dutroux initially stated that they were still alive when he returned home following his release from prison on 20 March 1996; according to him, Lejeune died that day, and Russo followed suit four days later despite his efforts to save her; during his trial, he said they were already dead when he returned from prison. An expert asserted that they would not have been able to survive the entire time Dutroux was in prison on the total amount of food and water they were said to have been given. Dutroux buried Lejeune and Russo's bodies in the garden of the house he owned in Sars-la-Buissière, near to that of Weinstein."
The USA. One thing I forgot to add as more evidence of the notoriety is that a third of people with the Dutroux name changed their name. The whole Dutroux population was only about 60 people, but still, I've never heard of such a thing happening with any notorious criminal who didn't also happen to be dictator of a country.
Has anyone visited KiwiFarms (before it was taken down)?
I never have. But now that it's shut down, I'm curious what it was.
On the one hand, I was almost convinced that it was a terrible place full of terrible people that are there to do terrible things. On the other hand, Twitter mobs can be pretty terrible. And a lot of Jan 6th stuff was (I think) planned on Facebook.
So, like, was it a bad place? Or was it a non-woke place that had some bad actors? Or something else(?)
I poked my head in after one of their targets committed suicide. Speaking as someone who is also suspicious of Twitter mobs and more supportive of broad free speech rights that most: it was unremittingly awful, like the worst 1 percent of 4chan spun off and laser focused on trying to ruin people's lives, ideally by driving them to suicide. I cannot think of another website I would be more happy to get shut down.
+1 from me—I’m very much for broader free speech rights, but Kiwifarms crossed the line into coordinating explicit plans for harm to innocent private individuals, which imo I wouldn’t classify as “speech” so much as just plain old terrorism, which is not a protected activity.
KF had a strict rule about not interacting with the "lolcows" in any way. Bannable offence and highly disapproved of among users. There's no evidence that any co ordinated campaign gainst anyone happened, just a lot of accusations. A lot of people with embarrassing Internet histories have an interest in seeing KF's archive scrubbed, particularly if there's admissions of inappropriate underage interactions or sending minors home brewed medicines.
Theyre a bit like LOTT, in that they reposted people's own posts, unlike LOTT in that they added their own highly unpleasant mocking commentary.
Horrible, if they're your own words that are being mocked but you'd have to seek it out on their forum to be upset by it.
Suicide, in any case, is multifactorial.
KF may be full of unpleasant and bigoted and highly unwoke individuals, but terrorists they were not.
Does "doxx" refer to any mention of a person's non-pseudonym? I thought "doxx" was used for public posting of someone's personal address and/or phone number.
There's currently an issue with "won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest"-style harassment, where someone brings a person to their audience's attention in a negative light, usually doesn't explicitly direct harassment, but then that audience goes and and harasses the person nonetheless, because the audience agrees with the person that this person they've just been told about is bad and needs to be punished. At no point is a command given, but from the moment the person introduced to the audience the outcome is quite certain.
The way I see it, at best that is what Kiwifarms were doing, painting targets for the varying assholes of the internet to go after (some perhaps justified, others much less so). For example, a transmasculine author was chased off Twitter (primarily by a segment of queer Twitter) after KF doxx revealed that they worked at Lockheed Martin and got the job via their parents and people took that info over to Twitter. At worst, the site's users were actively coordinating the harassment (likely on some more private platform).
This makes me feel a lot better about the CloudFlare stuff, then.
I wish that what they were doing was specifically illegal in a way that CloudFlare didn't have to be the one to make the decision to ban them. But it doesn't seem like they had a choice.
For context, here is a description of the incident Dylan is referring to, written by a friend of the person who Kiwi Farms drove to suicide: https://t.co/L5MuTsNGe1
Yep. And I specifically visited the website afterwards, and the related threads was 100% people either celebrating their suicide, or claiming it was fake and this wouldn't stop them. Not a single person going "um guys maybe we went too far?" Honestly the single-grossest thread I have ever encountered on the internet, which is saying something.
I think that the fact that there is a website saying someone is dead is evidence that they're dead. It's not *conclusive* evidence, but it's pretty strong, especially when people who claim to have known the person are running it.
It was a terrible place with terrible people, but I also sort of respect it as the last natural habitat of a certain c. 2010 species of Internet troll, sort of a living fossil.
ED doesn't really capture what Kiwi Farms was. It captures the environment that Kiwi Farms grew out of, but Kiwi Farms was where that vibe curdled into hatred and self-righteousness.
I think what Scott is saying is that they both capture a culture that views sincerity itself with content: everything is to be treated as a source of ironic humor, and anyone who holds any belief or view sincerely is a tool who deserves to get trolled.
The different is that Encyclopedia Dramatic is just a long-winded accounting of all the ways a troll would make fun of a thing, whereas Kiwi Farms was an actual community where people organized and tried to one-up one another in their attempts to troll private individuals, which inevitably led to nonstop harassment campaigns, swatting, and other attempts to genuinly ruin people's lives. A threat that the targets HAVE to take seriously and treat sincerely, which then causes the KF folks to double down ("look how sensitive and pearl-clutching they are!")
"Kiwi Farms was an actual community where people organized and tried to one-up one another in their attempts to troll private individuals, which inevitably led to nonstop harassment campaigns, swatting, and other attempts to genuinly ruin people's lives."
Could you elaborate on which threads you saw this happening in? I have lurked Kiwifarms on and off for a past few years, but I don't have an account, so perhaps you saw this on threads restricted to account-holders?
It's a big forum and I know I barely read a fraction of it, but I would say threads were consistently along the lines of "Look what this nutter posted on social media today, let's point and laugh" (except in very rude terms) and anything resembling a plan to contact or troll the subject was consistently met with mod warnings, deletions, thread bans, and/or their version of downvotes. I definitely wouldn't describe the site as a place where people jockeyed to come up with trolling plans. They had their own slang referring to such as "gay ops" and "weening" with obvious derision.
I visited only once, scrolled through a couple threads, and was disgusted enough that I did not read further. It is entirely possible that those threads were unusually bad and not representative of the larger forum, but I'm honestly skeptical that that's the case. I don't remember the thread titles, so couldn't tell you, sorry. But they sure as heck had not been deleted, and the entire attitude was scorn and derision to the person who killed themselves, and not a single display of compassion or otherwise taking it seriously that I saw (again, I scrolled through, I did not read every single post in the lengthy thread, I was not going to do that to myself).
I've read a few threads over the years and I'd describe it as "celebrity gossip, except instead of celebrities both the gossipers and the people being gossiped about are generally Internet weirdos". And as with celebrity gossip, the allegations that this often rose to the level of stalking and harassment are largely true.
I wouldn't describe what I saw as politically right-wing or even political at all.
When internet users talk of "weaponized autism", Kiwifarms is the ideal they are referencing.
Some of the respondents above me are glad to see the damage done to the place, but from a consequentialist standpoint I think it is ultimately bad, even putting aside any principles of freedom of expression. Though many users of KF were likely bad people, their targets were in most cases much worse.
Notably, the antagonist in their current downfall, Keffals, was consistently exposed for rampant paedophilia by the site. But none of the articles focused on the situation saw fit to mention that, despite featuring Keffals in many of them.
It's up at the .top domain and at uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion on TOR, though you might have to try a couple times due to the DDOS.
Virtually everything you have heard about Kiwifarms is a lie. I was lurking there during all the alleged instances of "driving people to suicide". It didn't happen. The problem is that substantiating this claim with evidence would require reading through thousands of pages of forum threads and won't convince the sort of people who are ideologically invested in shutting KF down.
KF is a place full of fairly normal people who laugh at exhibitionistic internet weirdos on their lunch break and freely express their distaste for current social trends. Interacting with lolcows is strongly discouraged. Most of the "harassment" and "doxing" consists of archiving public social media posts and commenting on them. The userbase is surprisingly diverse. The main thing that unites them, besides having a sense of humor, is the experience of seeing obvious truths become unsayable in their offline communities and on the wider internet.
People claim to be persecuted by KF because it sounds far more noble than the reality of being laughed at for their embarrassing antics or, as is frequently the case, having their criminal behavior documented.
Re the document linked below by Konstantin: There's no evidence that the guy is dead at all.
I had a look a few days ago while it was still available on .ru.
First impression was that it was a fairly ordinary sort of forum. It lacked the look-at-me edginess of the chans, and while there was certainly a lot of jargon going on which made it hard for an outsider to immediately understand, it wasn't as impenetrable as a lot of other forums I've seen.
There were various subforums devoted to things like food and TV where you'd find ordinary sorts of discussions about ordinary sorts of topics like "Which country has the worst cuisine?"
But the meat of the forum seemed to be the "lolcows" section which was filled with massive threads making fun of particular people. Some of these threads were 5+ years old, and had hundreds of pages. A "lolcow" is apparently a person whose behaviour is so consistently terrible that you can keep going back and laughing at their latest activity, milking them for lols.
The lolcows ran the gamut from massive public figures (like Donald Trump) through to a bunch of "internet-famous" people that I knew about (like Brianna Wu or MovieBob Chipman) and a whole bunch of people that I had personally never heard of who tended to fall into categories like "twitch streamer" or "youtuber". Since I mostly looked at the threads of people I'd heard of, I may have got a biased impression of what was going on here. The popular threads seemed to be a constant stream of "look at the latest terrible thing done by this terrible person". I didn't see any signs of anyone being picked on for no reason at all; all the threads I saw started off with some kind of list of bad things done by the person which made them a suitable target for a thread. Certainly "being transsexual" wasn't enough to put someone in the lolcow category, they needed to have done something objectionable.
Much of the ethics here seems to hinge on the difference between making fun of a public figure and a private individual, and here's where I'm a bit lost. I hadn't heard of about 80% of these people, but I've probably never heard of 99% of popular youtubers or twitch streamers who mght be considered household names among people somewhat younger and more-online than I am. It seems acceptable to have a thread filled with constant mockery of (say) Donald Trump, but how far down the celebrity totem pole do you need to be before it crosses the line into "being a jerk to random individuals"? Less than a million twitter followers? Less than a thousand?
If you imagine a "famousness" vs "assholeness" plot then there's some kind of imaginary line on this plot where it's acceptable for random strangers to mock you in certain ways. I'm not sure where that line is, or to what extent kiwifarms tended to target individuals below it.
>If you imagine a "famousness" vs "assholeness" plot then there's some kind of imaginary line on this plot where it's acceptable for random strangers to mock you in certain ways.
I doubt that anybody who finds it worth their time to mock "assholes" has anything like a principled position on this. Clearly the mainstream culture considers it acceptable to mock any particular "nazi" regardless of how famous they are, and going into subculteres I'd expect things to only get worse.
"Has anyone visited KiwiFarms (before it was taken down)?"
It's somewhere I like to lurk on occasion, I think I would describe it as a gossip site with an extremely non-PC atmosphere. Not exactly 4chan-ish but it had similar elements where all speech is permitted, so you end up with some unknown mix of
1. genuine witches
2. people with unremarkable views who are reflexively contrarian (ex- 'I have no desire to say X but if you tell me I'm not allowed, I will make a point of saying it')
3. people who got displaced from their native habitats by Overton Window shrinkage (I recall there were increasing amounts of feminists, radfems and gender-critical non-feminists, and the site owner was always talking about big influxes of new members whenever various subreddits got shut down)
I can't say I saw a big cross section of the site, to give a snapshot the threads I mostly stuck to were: Russel Greer (an astonishingly narcissistic man who keeps suing celebrities to try to make them date him), the Munchausen Syndrome's thread (a fascinating disorder where people pretend or actually make themselves sick for attention), and the Literature sections (there were a few regular posters who shared gossip from inside the publishing industry). I do know there were a lot of threads documenting people who very much appeared to be pedophiles, zoophiles, and other types of abusers but I didn't have the stomach for that kind of thing. I think the majority of threads were were about non-criminal e-celebs doing too-online things.
Descriptions about it being a site for coordinating harassment really don't match up with what I saw there over the years, it had several rules against doing that. However any bad actor could make an account and use the information there to harass others, though they wouldn't be able to talk about it on the site itself (I don't have an account so I was prevented from viewing most of the dox information, the boards for talking about current news, and the "proving grounds" where posters need to prove someone is worth having a thread before they're made viewable to lurkers, I think).
The storyline in doom was that military researchers created a teleporter between earth and mars accidentally lead to the creation of a portal to another dimension,, and then demons came out of the portal. Seems kinda fitting.
I'm a parent, and r.e. 'doing too much stuff', i'm also learning that i'm a better dad when i do 'worse' things like spend time by myself, do what i want, ignore my children's wishes, etc.
At some level i think there's a cultural issue here; we improved things DRAMATICALLY in our house by agreeing on some 'division of labor'. I think i had long resisted this because i wanted to be a good dad and didn't want to go anywhere near something like 'you take care of the kids because you are a woman and that is woman's work.' But where we settled was things like, 'wow, coordination costs _suck_ so much that it's generally better if one of us just owns the situation entirely. I'm ok with whatever you choose, but you have much more fine grained opinions than i do on things like, where should the kids go to school'. So my wife handles a lot of stuff that would fit into the kids/chores/housekeeping bucket. I had tried my best to stay away from this kind of arrangement, in order to be a modern enlightened dad and not some troglodyte wife beater. But it turns out this actually _works_ for us, and my attempts to be the ever-present always helpful dad who did whatever his kids wanted just made me burned out, tired, exhausted, and stressed.
I think there's also a technology level. If technology is 'it lets you do stuff you couldn't do before', and parents have some base prior for 'should i do this thing for my kids', now you can do way more stuff for your kids. It's taken a fair amount of courage to get myself to a point where i'm like, ok, if i'm gonna be a not-great dad, it won't be because i don't do enough with my kids, but more becuase i'm just tired and stressed all the time and this sets a bad example.
So now instead of resolving the squabbles between the 3 and 5 year old, i just say, well you two figure it out or i'll throw the toy away. Not only does this lower my stress levels, but they are learning how to resolve conflicts themselves instead of always escalating. I think part of what it took is trying to _imagine_ responses to conflict that didn't involve a bunch of angry shouting and yelling, which is most of my more salient memories from childhood.
so the TLDR here is that i think it takes a kind of courage + self confidence to do less as a parent, probably moreso than ever because there are more options than ever for stuff to do with your kids, and more cultural expectation that you will.
"So now instead of resolving the squabbles between the 3 and 5 year old, i just say, well you two figure it out or i'll throw the toy away."
That works in the majority of cases, but it has a rare but terrible failure mode (and I'm NOT saying it's true in your family!) of "one of the siblings turns out to be a real a-hole/sociopath/abuser as they grow older." I've read letters to personal advice columnists that said something to the effect of, "My older brother used to beat me/molest me/insert other horrible thing, and our parents were too weak/passive to do anything about it, they were just like, meh, siblings are gonna sibling, let them work it out."
My impression is that with kids this young, you need to provide slightly more structure, because if you let them "figure it out", it usually ends up with one of the kids, usually the older, always getting her way. I think it is better to explicitely teach them basic negotiation skills. "One kid do the dividing and the other gets to pick first" is for example a simple tool that works in many cases.
G.K. Chesterton from an article called "The Real Journalist":
"Playing with children is a glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lighted match."
I suggest (from personal experience) that's not only impossible to fully achieve with more than 3-4 or more kids, for the reasons Mark outlines above -- nobody has that kind of time and energy -- but it actually enhances resilience and grit in the children *not* to do it, because out in the real world, there is no God Emperor who ensures that all conflicts are resolved by Marquess of Queensberry rules.
Sure, you should definitely ensure there isn't actual physical combat, and it's good to be clear on how they *should* do things and enforce it when the opportunity arises and you have the energy, but if you *always* play referee the kids grow up with unrealistic expectations of how things go in reality, and also have atrophied skills when it comes to coping with human nature.
I think setting those kinds of expectations on themselves is one reason couples stop at 1 or at most 2 kids, because it's just freaking exhausting to try to make sure the social environment is ideal at every hour of the day. So I'm against it. It will do the kids no great harm to learn that bigger and strong people always have a certain kind of edge -- because that's reality -- and to learn ways of coping with that, within the safe and low-stakes confines of the family.
And there are ways, I've never yet seen a case, short of pathology, in which the older kid *always* gets his way. Younger kids figure out ways to go around that, develop their own "judo" methods that neutralize the advantages of age and size, and usually you end up with a rough balance of power.
I certainly don't think that parents should always be refereeing between their children throughout their childhood. But at the same time, I think that if the usual way to handle arguments between 3 and 5 year olds is to let them work it out between themselves without any parental intervention, then I think you're relying a little too much on the maturity of the 5 year old! As usual, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Anyway, my point was more like "teach your kids basic negotiation skills, it's very helpful!".
My experience seems to be different from yours, I know several families where the oldest is a bully to the youngest, or the oldest resents having to care for the youngest, or just deal with them. So I don't feel like if you let the kids work it out, things usually end up great, although of course it depends on the personality of the kids.
And in terms of family size, I feel like having a lot of siblings is generally a good thing for adults, or for parents of adult children, but may be ess enjoyable during childhood. It seems to me that B. Caplan made a similar point in his book Selfish reasons to have more kids (although his conclusion is to opt for more kids because childhood is comparatively short, when it doesn't seem so clear to me!) I really do know of several large families (for the current norm, i.e., 3/5 kids) where the kids clearly resented their siblings, usually because they felt their parents didn't have enough time for them.
I'm not relying on the maturity of a 5 year old, I'm relying on his knowing his own interests, and being intelligent enough to figure out a way to get close to them. Pretty much the same aspects of human beings that allow us to figure out how to get along with each other in general, as adults -- which is why it's exceedingly helpful to train kids in them.
What you're saying is akin to those parents who never let their kids play on jungle gyms or ride bikes until they're much older than usual, on the grounds that they might fall and hurt themselves. And guess what? They do! I used to call it "experiments in gravity and force," and they are essential for kids to grow into confident adults who understand their limits, and how to cope with unknown situations with neither excessive fear nor overconfidence. This is entirely what "free range" parenting is about. I'm only saying you need to take it all the way, and not stop your "free range" approach when it comes to social interaction. Understanding and working your way through social interaction is just as important as understanding gravity and acceleration, probably more so. If you don't coddle your kid at the playground, coddling him when it comes to intersibling contests is dumb.
I'm underwhelmed by the anecdata, of course. We can all point to families with dysfunctional children, and how they came to be that way is...complex, in each case. I doubt very much there is any simple answer, like "oh the parents failed to referee as much." If we really wanted to move beyond dueling experience (I have reared 5 children to adulthood via these principles, and they all turned out not only civilized but with robust social skills, one assumes you have similar experience) then we would need to do some very careful measurements where we normalized for all the other ways childhood can go wrong, and took a look at the value, or harm, involved in a level X of parental interference in sibling conflict.
We seem to have quite a different experience of 5 year old kids!
More seriously, I think we probably agree that both extreme parenting styles, monitoring kids all the time until they are adult or never supervising them al all, are not ideal. I am under the impression that 3 and 5 years old kids frequently need help to figure out how to settle disputes, whereas if I understand correctly you think that it is best to let them figure things out by themselves.
May be this is because of a disagreement about the best way to acquire skills. Because I of course totally agree with you that "understanding and working your way through social interaction" is an extremely important skill. But I think that for 3 and 5 year old, this is best done by explicitly teaching them the social skills (the "positive parenting" school has some great tools for that) than by letting them "practice" without guidance.
I of course do not suggest that dysfunctional families arise mostly because parents were not hands on enough for refereeing kids dispute. My point was just that it is not always the case that children let to their own device will settle things in constructive way.
"my attempts to be the ever-present always helpful dad who did whatever his kids wanted"
I realise that as a non-parent myself, it's cheek on my part to be giving advice, but no. You're their father, not their friend. Sometimes it really has to be "No, we can't/we're not going to do that" or "You can't do that" or just "Because I say so!"
Not all the time, you should explain why you make decisions, but sometimes it really does have to be "Go and do your homework now, or else" and then the "or else" has to be enforced so that there are real consequences. No, I don't mean "beat 'em to a pulp" but something like "Okay, I'm taking your phone away or your game console like I said I would if you didn't turn it off and get your homework done. You'll get it back after X period of time".
"doing whatever my kids wanted" was never a _conscious_ goal of mine. But 'say yes to reasonable requests when possible' probably was. And it turns out that even this is a bad idea, in part because of something like a 'denial of service attack'.
Parenthood has been this constant training course in tings like, trusting myself while still being open to being wrong, accepting my limits while still trying to push on them, holding myself to an impossibly high standard without feeling bad for regularly failing, etc.
Did you ever get the little darlings trying the old "Mom says I can't do this, so I'll ask Dad/Dad says I can't do this, so I'll ask Mom" manoeuvre?
Parenting is a hard job, people don't give it enough credit (until kids turn out screwed-up, then they're happy to say 'well the parents are at fault clearly, they should have done better!')
> "I think there's also a technology level. If technology is 'it lets you do stuff you couldn't do before', and parents have some base prior for 'should i do this thing for my kids', now you can do way more stuff for your kids."
Yes, this.
There's a clear parallel with the being-poor and not-being-poor-any-more articles (#9). The demands on your (money/time) that seem reasonable increase with the (money/time) available. When resources are low, you don't do much with them, just because you literally can't. When they are higher, the minimum threshold for what seems reasonable rises with them.
Related... it's much harder to say no to playing with your kids when what you would be doing instead is staring at your phone, even if that's what you'd rather be doing. I often already feel somewhat guilty about wasting my time so saying no to spending time with my kids feels doubly bad.
> But where we settled was things like, 'wow, coordination costs _suck_ so much that it's generally better if one of us just owns the situation entirely.
This is very good advice for handling any household chores, not just childcare. It reduces the mental load and removes the resentment caused by "My partner thinks they handle the grocery shopping but I still have to make the lists for them." The trick is to make sure you *agree* on who owns which task instead of just assuming that the husband/wife will handle certain tasks.
Oh yeah, there’s a ton of back and forth on this. The framework we both use now is that our family has an operating system and that we are constantly iterating on it.
An example of a change is giving myself permission to just let her handle, say, a decision on where the kids will go to school entirely on her own. What I used to do was watch her gather information and _try_ to be involved, but not really contribute much because I felt exhausted by work and everything else, and then feel bad about not helping in this one area.
Another change has been realizing that I saw “get the kids to bed” as “my job”, with her being sort of this auxiliary role. Some nights I’d be so beat I felt like I couldn’t help at all without risk of losing my temper and shouting. She pointed out that some nights we can swap, so that she’s the driver and i am more in an auxiliary role. And man, just having that option has been helpful. Knowing I can “tap out” if I need to makes it easier to keep going.
#39: The Yom Kippur War was a substantial but very costly military victory for Israel. The successful Israeli counterattack was overshadowed by the massive morale and political defeat suffered in the first few days of the war. Although Israel did eventually win by most measures - ending within 100km of Cairo, for example, and making gains on the Syrian and Jordanian fronts - first blow Israel suffered shattered ideas of Israeli invincibility. Israeli outrage at the failure to prepare for Arab coalition's opening attack brought down Israel's government. America and the Soviet Union came close to war.
While Israel's personnel losses for the Yom Kippur War were actually pretty comparable in percentage to the Six Day War (about 1-2% of military forces KIA), the absolute losses were much higher and therefore felt much more keenly by Israel's tiny population. ('Percentage Losses' also masks that Israel frantically called *everyone* up in the YKW, while SDW went more favorably.) Both wars burned through the Israeli tank corp. Additionally, Israel regards airpower as a key advantage and lost a bigger fraction of theirs during the Yom Kippur War; in the SDW Israel lost less than 20% of their combat aircraft, but in the YKW they lost 25%, half of which they lost in three days. In the Yom Kippur War the Israeli forces were notably felt by both sides to have been narrowly saved from total defeat, while in the SDW they were felt to have earned a stunning victory.
Moreover, the loss ratios were less lopsided in the YKW than they had been in the SDW. In the SDW the IDF was outnumbered 5:1 but exacted a 20:1 casualty ratio in their favor. In the YKW Israel was only outnumbered 2-3:1 and only exacted a 10:1 casualty ration in their favor. By this crude measure of military success, Israel was as much as five times more effective in combat in the SDW than in the later YKW. Much of this is due to the Arab Coalition successfully degrading the IDF's tanks and planes with Soviet missiles, instead of Israel wiping out the Egyptian air force in one fell swoop.
And at the end of the YKW, Israel had nothing to show for it. After the SDW Israel had taken a substantial amount of land, seizing Judea and particularly the other half of Jerusalem from Jordan, the strategic Golan Heights from the Syrians, and Gaza and the whole Sinai from Egypt. Suddenly important Jewish sites like the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs were under Jewish control for the first time in two millennia. Jews who had been kicked out by Jordan in 1948 could return to their homes. After the YKW, Israel had no substantial territorial gains and in a few years would go on to give up the Sinai for peace with Egypt, dragging Israeli civilians out of the Sinai kicking and screaming.
In absolute military terms, the YKW was an Israeli victory. But in both Arab and Israeli popular perception, it was a disastrous defeat for Israel's reputation. Arguably the fact that both Egypt and Israel felt they'd in some senses lost the war directly lead to the them making peace a few years later. So of course at least some Egyptians have regarded the YKW as a win; after three decades of failing to wipe out the Jewish State, they finally hit Israel hard enough to bring them to the negotiating table, and then made peace.
Thanks, this comment is great and made me not write a less detailed one. I think it can be summarised as "The war is technically -wrongly perceived as an Israeli loss due to asymmetric expectations, assymetric sensitivity to causalities, the defeat that almost happened, and the influence on diplomacy.". I will add that dictatorships really like winning, and tell their people about their glorious winning whenever it is remotely believable. And that Egypt specifically needed this pride-boost in order to sell a very unpopular peace agreement few years later.
I think your comment about pride has a lot of staying power. During the War of Attrition Israel identified, baited, and ambushed Egypt’s Soviet advisors in their MiGs. Soviet military advisors were famously … hands on, and Israel wanted to send Moscow a message.
It was a fascinating episode for a number of reasons, but one was that reportedly it endeared Israel to the Egyptian Air Force, because the Soviets were finally forced to admit that there was nothing wrong with Egyptian pilots and losing to the IAF could happen to anyone.
I just finished Walter Isaac's biography on Henry Kissinger, who was heavily involved in the diplomacy between Egypt, Syria and Israel during the YKW. Kissinger was famous for trying to sell any agreement as a win for both sides, usually by being honest in a literal sense but misleading everyone involved. But he was so charming that many still fell for it/played along.
One somewhat telling quote:
> „The most significant personal bond he forged was the least predictable: with Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Kissinger often referred to Sadat, in reverential tones, as “a prophet.” No other statesman he dealt with, other than Zhou Enlai, is accorded anything near this respect in Kissinger’s mind, and none elicited the same affection.
As Kissinger left Aswan at the outset of his first shuttle in January 1974, Sadat took Kissinger to a tropical garden by his villa and beneath a mango tree, kissed him. “You are not only my friend,” he said. “You are my brother.” (A rather startled Kissinger subsequently told his press corps that “the reason the Israelis don’t get better treatment is because they don’t kiss me.”)
Kissinger’s relationship with Golda Meir, on the other hand, was far more tormented, like that between a strong-willed Jewish mother and a successful but ungrateful grown son. “Does Golda hate me?” Kissinger would frequently ask Ambassador Dinitz and others. No, they would reassure him, but they agreed that the relationship was stormy.“
That graph on parenting doesn’t reflect how much our domestic lives have changed since 1965. Stay-at-home moms were more common, yes, but kids above a certain age often just *went out* to play with other kids and didn’t come back till dinner. That’s unthinkable now for most parents.
People also lived closer to family, and thus there were simply more people, usually women, available to taken on some of those childcare hours. A lot of professional parents in more recent decades do it all without nearly the same support network. I know it’s true for us.
I am confused about how “childcare” and “housework” are divided. I do a lot of chores *while* caring for my kids. I cook and clean around them all day. I run almost all my errands with them, too. Where did respondents draw the distinction?
I felt confused about that distinction too. Up until a certain age, children need an adult in the house, but as they get older, they don't need 'caring' for as such that whole time, although they need you to be available. Even with toddlers, you cook dinner at the same time as keeping half an eye on them. I'm also wondering does something like playing board games in the evening with my children count as childcare? What about reading to them? Discussing their homework with them? It all feels nebulous to me.
I also do wonder if there was more grandparental help back then, hence the lower hours and also whether there would have been a tendency for one mother to more often look after other people's children? I was also wondering with babies - do you include the hours they wake you up in the night as childcare? I get the impression that babies sleep less well these days due to SIDS advice (babies sleep better on their fronts!), although have no idea if that is actually the case.
I don't feel it is just 'children used to go out and play more and parents are now just paranoid'. My impression round here is that they do that now the same sort of amount as when I was a child in the 80s (although I am in the UK). There are a lot more extracurricular activities now though which is part cultural and part I think an attempt by parents to get children away from computer screens the whole time. But is say sitting reading while your children play tennis childcare?
So the South Africa article, after noting a ton of things wrong with South Africa's ruling party, then notes "Our political system was literally purchased by a wealthy family of Indian businessmen, creating something akin to a shadow government." After everything that had been described so far, I thought that was going to describe an *improvement*, if there were people interested in actually making a profit off of the place! I wish the article went into more detail here (as in a lot of things, really -- and on this point, I wish it was explained what they meant by "purchased")... I guess this Gupta family was also only interested in looting the place...? Or what? (I guess people interested in making long-term profits through productive work and investments don't tend to get into shadowy deals to secretly buy governments, do they...)
Quote: "In 2015, the Guptas' influence on the presidency was described by anti-corruption campaigner and former trades unionist Zwelinzima Vavi as being a "shadow government." Multiple Members of Parliament and ministers have stated that they were offered government positions by, or on behalf of, the Gupta family, in return for beneficial commercial decisions once appointed. In 2017, it was discovered that British PR company Bell Pottinger, acting on behalf of Gupta-owned Oakbay Investments, had deliberately manipulated and inflamed racial tensions, stirred up racial hatred, and made accusations of "white monopoly capital," using a large number of fake Twitter and other accounts online, as part of a campaign to portray Oakbay and those connected to it as victims, apparently intended to deflect corruption claims. Bell Pottinger subsequently collapsed in the wake of the scandal"
Ah, so "bought the government" in the usual corrupt sense where they get it to make decisions favorable to them, rather than like in some interesting neoreactionary sense where they get a share of tax revenue or something and therefore have an incentive to improve things. I guess that's kind of obvious now that I say it explicitly, but disappointing.
23. Interesting stuff, and not surprising. Although I think Argentina should just dollarize completely and drop the peso altogether.
29. The description I read of that book didn't sound promising, but I'll wait and see the likely review from you and (probably) Nathan Robinson.
33. I wonder if this contributes to the lower birth rates, especially among educated class folks (although I suspect that's also later parental age). It doesn't seem like it's a coincidence to me that the lowest birth rates in the world are the ones in East Asian countries heavily influenced by the grinding test regime of Japanese-style secondary schooling (including heavy use of cram school). That just raises the monetary and non-monetary cost of having an extra child enormously.
RE: #33, absolutely! My husband and I are both professionals, and the reason we have only one child is the tremendous amount of time and emotional energy that goes into raising a child (in the modern way, that is, as opposed to letting them run around by themselves as long as they're back home for dinner.)
Couldn't you instead have multiple kids and raise them in a less time intensive manner? I was let run around as long as i was back before dinner as recently as the aughts, as were my three siblings. All of us got into good schools and I happen to think this way was actually benefital to our development.
I mean... I could, but I don't want to? I don't mean to sound offensive, but it's sort of like asking, "Couldn't you marry a man and then have sex with him exactly once every week and otherwise never interact with him?" I could, but it's not the kind of relationship I want to have.
I am an introvert. I prize few, deep relationships over many superficial ones. This does not make me morally superior or inferior to an extrovert; it's just the way I am. When I chose to bring a child into the world, I did it with the understanding that I would have a deep, close relationship with him or her. That wouldn't work if I decided to have multiple kids and were like, "Bye, kids, have fun! I'll see you at dinner!" every day.
All that aside, even if I were a super hands-off parent, hands-off-ness doesn't work with an infant, who has to be nursed and diapered and burped and rocked to sleep with mind-numbing regularity every single day after day after day, or else they'll die.
I don't want to sound offensive either, but...have you considered that spending all day with their parents might be bad for the kids? For most of their lives they'll be spending time with their peers, not their parents. They have a lot more in common with their peers than with adults whose lives they can't possibly understand or relate to.
Raising an infant could be relatively hands-off if you also have an older child and can make her take care of the infant.
I considered co-sleeping with my infant. Then I read the current recommendation by pediatricians, that in order to lower the risk of suffocation/smothering, you must sleep on a firm mattress with absolutely nothing soft or fluffy in your bed: no pillows, covers, blankets of any kind.
Then I considered sleeping on a hard mattress, cover-less and pillow-less, after a full day's work caring for an infant, and I went "HAHAHAHAHA LOL NOPE!"
And that is why my infant and I slept in separate rooms.
That sounds extreme. I wonder if the recommendation actually makes sense.
In any case, I would think that just having the infant's crib adjacent to your bed would mean shorter/less extreme sleep interruptions. Am I missing something?
Yes, I could have put a bassinet in my bedroom. The problem is, this will probably make me sound like a bad mother, but I liked the idea of having a room that was *mine* (and my husband's). I liked the idea that when my husband was on baby duty, I could just go into our bedroom and close my eyes and be left the heck alone for a certain stretch of time. Keeping the baby in the bedroom would have deprived me of that blessed sense of sanctuary.
Also, with the baby sleeping in another room, my husband and I could, hypothetically, still use our bedroom for sex. In practice, the number of times we had sex during the baby's first year of life can be numbered on my fingers, but it was still nice to have that option without being all like, "Shhh, you'll wake the baby! Hurry up, you'll wake the baby!!!!!"
My experience is that it's better to have the crib in the other room. The problem is parents, especially new parents, and especially new mothers in my experience, are so sensitive to the noises of the child that even if the child just wakes very briefly and makes some burble or snort, the parent wakes up, if only very briefly. So you get this sequence of tiny interruptions in your sleep, of which you aren't even aware, that leads to the sleep you do get being unusually unrestorative.
33. I, on the other hand, was wondering whether lower birth rates contribute to this, and I suppose we could just synthesize the answer into "it's a feedback loop". The less children there are in the family, the more catastrophic a loss of or a lasting harm to any of them gets for the parents, and the more protective they get of them. Less children in the society makes the protectiveness level of those parents the expected norm.
This is for sure true. I've seen so many family gatherings where two kids get the same kind of little bump and kid who's number six of eight gets two seconds of care and the kid who's one of one gets five minutes of care. Doesn't seem like the extra time makes a difference in the ends, but who knows.
This is one point I also often make, but it is combined with a general culture of minimizing all kind of risks and maximizing comfort. This was a important strategy for a long time when the risks of life were big, but it gets to a point were less risk isn't better. First because the costs (not even financial) are increasing the more you achieve. Secondly because zero risk isn't possible and nobody wants to live in the famous golden cage. So there have to be chances to learn how to deal with dangerous or uncomfortable situations. I think it's even natural for parents to try to minimize hard and dangerous situations for their kids as much as possible, but as the possible grows it can become too much to get prepared for real life.
By the way this is why i finally got convinced of mandatory, common schooling of some kind: just as a means were kids see and learn to deal with all the kinds of humans in our society and are forced out of the bubble of their parents to have at least an idea and common basis what world they will face as adults.
Dollarization would have to be done by the government of Argentina*, and they presumably would prefer to retain whatever degree of power messing with the peso gives them.
*I couldn't figure out which of "the Argentinian government" or "the Argentine government" (or possibly both!) was correct, so just rephrased.
#33: I would think another element here is when you have more kids, some of the kids themsleves do the childcare for each other. but this isn't possible with 1 child, and less frequent with only 2.
plus, fewer kids a generation ago implies a smaller extended family (mainly aunts and cousins) to help with childcare. I also wonder if people nowadays live on average further from their parents compared to the 60s, it that is so there is way less help with childcare from grandparents
>I also wonder if people nowadays live on average further from their parents compared to the 60s, it that is so there is way less help with childcare from grandparents
I don't think you have to wonder I think this is very true, don't have data on hand but I would bet like $10,000 dollars.
#39- Egyptians regard the YK war as a major victory. Israelis view the YK war as a disaster.
Why? Probably has less to do with territory taken (not much changed there) and more to do with how perceptions of the belligerents changed.
The Israelis were overconfident in this period. Winning the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in six days will do that to a country (the 1967 war). Sadat made several overtures offering something equivalent to the Camp David Accords in the 67-73 period- they were rejected. The Israelis didn't think they had to negotiate with the Egyptians at this point and thought they needed the additional territory for protection.
The war came as a shock to the Israelis- they weren't prepared for the invasion. Meir typically polls at the bottom of PM performance in Israel for this reason. Syrian forces got close to the Galilee. Israel lost a lot of men, tanks and aircraft (remember, in the Six Day War they lost very few aircraft). Part of this has to do with the fact that Israelis see a lost war with an Arab nation in catastrophic terms. They believe an Arab victory would lead to the disassembly of the state and possible mass-murder and expulsion. So, a war where Egypt and Syria got a lot closer to victory rattled them.
Egypt and Syria's invasions were efforts to avenge their poor performance in 67. The body count and loss of war material was much more even in this war. It helped both of these countries save face from the biggest military humiliation in their history. Israel was concerned about their deterrence to the point that they ordered an invasion of Syria and shelling of suburbs near Damascus to reassert an idea of their military dominance.
Once the war was over, Israel was much more open to a Camp David Accords style settlement. The war convinced them that holding that territory against Egyptian aggression was worse than a negotiated peace.
There's a lesson in there- the thing that precedes Israeli peacemaking with armed belligerents is loss or defeat of a certain kind. A situation where they see conciliation as both on offer and preferable to maintaining an aggressive military posture are the magic ingredients for peace. See the First Intifada as an example of this- Israel faced a newly difficult military reality (controlling cities in the West Bank and Gaza), they were given a clear settlement offer, so they moved towards conciliation from the status quo.
Thanks! But people were right that it could have easily been misread, and I super respect you and didn't want you to think I was insulting your intelligence.
Would really love to see some more serious interaction between you and the AI safety community btw—I know you don’t believe it’s a real concern, but I think it’s still worth talking with experts who are worried, simply because, well, we’re all human, and really really big stakes are at play!
As someone who grew up poor, the first article is super relatable. Every bit of it. The second one, less-so. Maybe the first couple years of earning more felt that way, but not anymore.
It can be somewhat tiresome listening to coworkers who have never been poor talk about poor people.
Yeah that asymmetry can be grating. I grew up in public housing and love when people come at me for some not sufficiently Marxist take with "you don't know what it is like to be poor". Then of course when I defend myself I get branded as a "bootstrapper".
As though someone who has both been poor (0-26) and successful (34-41) is somehow a detriment. It is frustrating that rhetorical strategy works so well.
#32 could just be a memory formation issue. It made me think of Clive Wearing, a man who lost the ability to make new episodic memories. Every 30 seconds or so he would report that he had just woken up and hadn’t been conscious previously. He filled notebooks with entries that were pretty much all versions of “9:14: I am now awake. 9:16: I am now actually awake. 9:17: I am now truly, stupendously awake.” He would cross out the entry he just wrote before most of the time, and when asked why would say that he wasn’t awake then.
So it’s possible he had some kind of weird amnesia that either prevented him from forming memories or, perhaps, somehow made him forget all his memories formed since taking the drug until one week later. If so, he would have been conscious the whole time.
Then again, maybe he was a P-Zombie. I sleptwalked a lot as a kid, I definitely did a lot of things without being conscious. But I don’t think I could have operated a crane, everybody could tell I was acting freaky when it happened.
[edit: my point which seemed clearer when I first posted is if we can't tell if p-zombies exist then fade topic. If symptoms are detected then investigate esp. if evidence of brain devouring!]
ACX email: "philosophical debate about whether p-zombies are possible?"
--
above: "I sleptwalked a lot as a kid...everybody could tell I was acting freaky when it happened."
to quote Nolan's WW: "If you can't tell, does it matter?"
I was disappointed in the quality of the last season but the underlying message did seem to support my accepted premise for the beginning a meaningful life: Know Thyself.
Consider Nolan's three Batman movies. Dark Knight was great - both entertaining and insightful. The other two had a couple good scenes. Package deal, I guess. : )
The Nolans' grasp always seems to exceed their reach. They are tremendous for trying to pull off mind blowing amazing virtuoso concept stories which are also well executed and intricate etc. But they never really totally stick the landing.
Better to have people shooting for 99s and getting 91s than the typical shoot for 75 an get a 70. But still frustrating.
Agreed. Still, of 18 movies(per Wikipedia) they did give us Insomnia, Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar which I still refer to at times and another five very solid movies like Dunkirk. It would be interesting to compare their box office success to others...
Oh yeah I think they have a great record. It is just frustrating because they are so close to true transcendence, but always seem to come up a bit short.
I feel like particularly Interstellar and Inception and Tenent were all a few passes away from being amazing.
I honestly don't get why Bryan is so adamant about that exact title. So many people on Twitter tried to explain why it was a bad idea, but he just didn't seem to get it. It will probably be a fine book, but it will be stained over the needlessly controversial title. It'll be the first book of his I won't buy, only because of the title.
My 10-second attempt to produce a cogent argument for this came up with:
"If you think that SJ will soon suffer a massive reversal and you want to ensure that this defeat is capitalised on and culturally locked-in in the aftermath (like how there's now some meme immunity to fascism and communism), writing a bible of Why SJ Sucks might help."
Supposedly, anti-woke people are not going to be feminists anyway, so they are not the target audience. Unless, either
1) The book is a provocative dunk on feminism capitalizing on culture war which only anti-woke people are going to read anyway
or
2) The book goes meta midway, starting highliting the patterns of behaviour anti-woke people assosiate with feminism among anti-woke people themselves, and makes a cause for moral highground for anti woke people.
I don't see how such optimization could be useful.
I agree that in a purely consequentialist framework he should have named it something inoffensive to get more people to read it, but I think there's a principled argument for naming the book directly what he means in order to challenge the norm that you're not allowed to directly say you're against feminism, and instead you have to do some kind of pathetic "feminism is great and I am its biggest supporter but the TRUE feminism is being against all feminist principles".
I see what you mean, but compare "Don't he a feminist" with, say, "Why I disagree with feminism".
The substance is the same, but the latter is a framing more likely to attract people who want a serious, reasoned critique, including maybe some who disagree with him, whereas the former is clearly aimed at attracting people who want to see the libs being owned and will value heat over light.
"Why I disagree" maybe works for a blog post, but is far too weak a title to justify a full book. I read that and assume the following argument will be poorly-thought-out repetitious rambling, equivalent to listening to an old man outside the grocery store.
It certainly works better than "disagree", but would only work for women I think; a guy writing Why I'm Not A Feminist is immediately met with "because you're not female, duh."
What sort of feminism? "Women should not have the vote" don't be a feminist (Chesterton was on this side, I love the man but I disagree with him here) or "Looking at me when we're speaking to each other is a microaggression" don't be a feminist? (I'd be on that side myself).
I have no intention of buying or reading this book, but it does matter if he's only relying on a clickbait title or if he does have something valuable to say.
Don't in practice all loudly-self-proclaimed feminists end up almost always supporting each other, when push comes to shove? I guess with the whole TERF kerfuffle implies that there are some non-trivial disagreements, but when the Patriarchy needs to be denounced I wouldn't expect much dissent.
Most people left of the political center call themselves feminists, and no one has ever accused the broader left of being in any way unified. They can't agree on what the Patriarchy even is.
>no one has ever accused the broader left of being in any way unified.
I have, just now.
>They can't agree on what the Patriarchy even is.
A working definition seems to be, "everything that the right wants plus anything that me and my friends don't like". While the second part of it may be important for any particular leftist, they generally don't let themselves be unduly distracted by disagreements among allies when there are still enemies not sufficiently crushed. Which is a strategically sound approach to be sure, as is being coy about it.
When I went on a Chesterton kick in college (sparked by Gilbert in Sandman, and aided by the university library having a very broad collection of his works), I think that was the first time I ran into a primary source antisuffrage argument.
Kipling, similarly. "The Female of the Species" is often quoted with approval, and I first encountered it as a filksong which dropped some of the stanzas in a way that obscured the theme. So I was struck when I finally read the whole thing and saw that the main thrust is that women are too averse to political compromise and the rule of law to be safely permitted a role in governance.
The problem is that “feminism is great and I am its biggest supporter but the TRUE feminism is being against all feminist principles" still gets you branded as an anti-feminist by the Twitter mobs, turning off any potential reader who is concerned about being seen reading “anti-feminist” literature. Being blunt about it saves a step and at least has the advantage of attracting the attention of readers who would find an anti-feminist book interesting.
Controversy always sells (and gets eyeballs on your message) more than milquetoast hedging.
Caplan has built a career out of being a contrarian. He is maybe hoping for some outrage to generate interest in his book, which is basically trolling.
Sadat's big intention during the Yom Kippur War was to win one impressive battle -- to get across the Suez Canal and hold on, which they did by having two-man infantry units attack the Israeli tanks with wire-guided missiles -- a spectacular revolution in warfare.
They didn't have much of a strategy for conquering Israel and winning the war. (E.g., they had plenty of air defense systems blanketing the Suez Canal to initially protect their infantry and armor one east bank, but not much of a hope of extending that protection across the Sinai and into Israel.
But crossing the Canal succeeded in restoring Egyptian self-esteem, which gave Sadat more political options for the future, including making peace with Israel.
On #14 - I tuned into this exact speedrun at GDQ and was amused by the memory manipulation. Link for those who want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhH-UsSz69M
I have never understood why people are interested in these things. Its like a contest for "how fast can you drive from NY to LA" where someone puts a car on a treadmill in a C-5 Galaxy.
Like sure you won, yay. But who cares? IDK like I can see clicking on the random link, but I don't understand how a whole community has evolved around it.
34. Japanese and Chinese names are usually pretty easy to distinguish in writing. Over 90% of Chinese people have one of the hundred most common surnames, all but two of which consist of a single character. Only a handful of these characters are used in common Japanese surnames.
Japanese surnames, on the other hand, almost always consist of two characters. Since Japanese male given names usually consist of two characters as well, the modal length of a Japanese man's name is four characters. Four-character names are very rare (<0.1%) in Chinese, with about 3/4 having three characters and 1/4 having two.
There are a handful of full names that are plausible in either language (e.g. 林明 could be either Akira Hayashi or Ming Lin), but I'm not a native speaker of either language and am fairly confident that I could distinguish randomly selected Chinese or Japanese names with 90+% accuracy.
In any case, you can see the names of the four Japanese soldiers here, and three of them are very clearly Japanese:
The second from the left (谷寿夫, Hisao Tani) is the only one that I would have had trouble identifying as Japanese, though a Chinese person might have noticed.
Above commenter is right — Chinese names are two and three characters, a surname (1 character usually, aside from a few two-character surnames like 司马) and a 1-2 character given name. Japanese names are often longer and have a distinct Japanese surname. An article in Chinese lists the names: 松井石根、谷寿夫、野田毅、田中军吉、向井敏明, most of which have distinct Japanese surnames (松井=Matsui, 田中=Tanaka, etc.). So the assertion that they went unnoticed because they looked Chinese is false. Hisao Tani (谷寿夫) is hard to identify as 谷 is a possible Chinese surname.
寿夫 (Shoufu) is a plausible Chinese name as well. There's a famous Taiwanese man named 謝壽夫 (壽 being the traditional equivalent of 寿). Taiwan being heavily influenced by Japanese culture, it's possible that this name is actually based on Japanese Hisao and therefore unlikely to be found in mainland China, but I'm not sure. Many Taiwanese place names, like Kaohsiung and Hualien, are Chinese readings of Japanese names given by the colonial government (Takao and Karen, respectively).
Also, apparently the plaques cost several thousand dollars each, which a) adds an extra layer of WTF to this story, and b) strongly suggests that someone was paying attention to these, and not just throwing them up on the wall as part of a batch of two hundred.
An analogy I just thought of is that Chinese names look like Japanese names in the same way that German names look like Italian names, i.e. only if you know nothing about either language.
I agree that Shoufu is a plausible Chinese name. Given names in Chinese don't quite follow English conventions as there degree to which Chinese names have an extensive definition (in the sense of extensional vs intensional) is far less than in English (where names are not just one- to two-character combinations).
The SCMP says that the plaques cost 30-50,000 yuan in this article, although this fact is attributed by the reporter to tourists, so it doesn't seem to have been thoroughly researched:
"Language Models Can Teach Themselves To Program Better"
Hah.
Hahahahahaha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
...ok. I respect that you feel it's important for you to talk about AI. I totally agree that it's important to talk about AI. But this stuff freaks me out and I've been trying to avoid hearing about it. I've been trying to avoid any of your posts about AI, and that's mostly been sufficient. But if you make a few more links post that have a similar amount of alarming AI content to this one, I might just stop reading link posts before I have an anxiety attack.
Obviously you have no obligation to change anything about what you're doing. But this is genuinely how I feel, and it feels worth mentioning, just for the record if nothing else.
33. Worth noting here that, contrary to common complaints about women doing double duty, it seems that on average men do 10 hours per week of housework on top of spending the same 43 hours on paid work that women spend on paid work and housework combined.
I'm sure that some women are doing double duty while their husbands slack off, but in order for this to average out, there must also be men who are doing more paid+housework than their wives by an even wider margin. Curiously, I have never seen one of these men complaining in a national media outlet.
As for the increase in total time spent by parents in child care...what exactly is being measured here? Is the same thing being measured in both time periods? Presumably women doing those 32 hours of housework in 1965 were in some sense supervising their children while doing the work, but the time may have counted as housework and not child care. Maybe they're spending more time actively interacting with their kids since housework doesn't take as much time as it used to. Are kids spending less time unsupervised outdoors? Are parents taking their children to more scheduled activities, and does that count as child care? And so on.
I'm not sure that this is a black pill, as Yglesias describes it. Spending less time on housework and more time with your kids sounds like something most people would consider a win.
Well, consider also some parallel to the Bradley Effect, and that people are influenced to tell strangers (even researchers) what they think they want to hear, and makes them look good according to current social shibboleths. It's quite possible in 2016 the social cachet of doing a bunch of housework and child-care on top of the paying job is much higher than it was in 1965. I can't imagine my mother (or father) wanting to exaggerate how much child-care or housework he or she did, because it didn't occur to either that this was something admirable or difficult. It was like changing the oil on the car or washing the bedclothes weekly -- ordinary stuff that just needed to be done, that everyone was doing, and nothing special.
But I can easily see the young college-educated dual-career power couple of 2016, with a bunch of childless friends, feeling the urge to round up a little.
> there must also be men who are doing more paid+housework than their wives by an even wider margin. Curiously, I have never seen one of these men complaining in a national media outlet.
32. Risking to reveal that I didn't get the joke, but obviously this doesn't prove the possibility of philosophical zombies as they were originally defined.
P-Zombie is a creature that does everything human does for exactly the same physical reasons that human but isn't conscious. Ignoring the fact that what actually happened is probably just amnesia, human brain on drugs doesn't work the same way as human brain without drugs so the example isn't applicable here.
In general, the definition of philosophical zombie is begging the question of whether consciousness is non-physical. It just reframes the question from "Is consciousness non-physical?" to "Is the definition of philosophical zombie non-self-contradicting". It's still the same question, just a little bit more misleading, occasionally tricking people into arguments about the nature of possibility and logic.
if the definition of philosophical zombie is non-self-contradictory, to.someone who knows all the relevant science, then the relevant science does not explain consciousness, because it does not show it to be necessary given the physics. So.The conceivability of p zombies indicates , in a non question begging way, the lack of a solution to the hard problem even if it doesn't refute physicalism.
Im pinning conceivability to non-contradictoriness, that's my criterion. If you have a list of propostiions in your mind representing known physics, and you add on "PM is possible", then a contradiction ensues, so PM isn't conceivable to someone who knows physics ..unless they mentally bracket off their knowledge.
I don't see the point in asserting that something "isn't conceivable" without having a criterion.
"My intuition is that P-zombie would not actually be different from a non-zombie in any way that mattered to anyone, including the P-zombie him/herself, and that the concept is in fact incoherent."
What is your criterion for incoherence? That is doesn't make a difference at all, or that the difference doens't matter?
I find it obvious that everyone cares a lot about qualia. We want to be anaesthetised during surgery. We spend money on pleasant but impractical entertainments. We eat tasty food instead of protein pills.
If Dennett flatly denied that subjectivity exists, he could deny that there is any difference between a zombie and human. But if he did, he would be obviously begging a huge question. So he is actually ambiguous between "makes no difference" and "makes not difference that matters". But he himself prefers drinking the wine to reading the label.
" I have long claimed that this conceivability is only apparent"
"Claim" is the word. Where is his criterion?
": if you believe that consciousness sunders the universe in twain, into those things that have it and those that don't, and you believe this is a fundamental metaphysical distinction, "
Again, the assumption that there is no subjectivity/consciosuness is just as question begging as the assumption that there is,
>How could someone have memories, a functioning perceptual system, episodic memory, ability to express emotions, an ability to react to pain, etc etc etc and all the neural correlates thereof etc etc...
Lack qualia? Qualia aren't objective.and aren't behaviour. The claim that conscious style behaviour is simultaneously present and absent would be contradictory, but that's not claim.
>but it seems clear that it must be self-contradictor
You haven't shown any self contradiction. It's not an aesthetic claim. If something is self contradictory, you should be able to show it amounts to "X and not X".
"Two things can share all their properties, but differ in one of their properties" *is* self contradictory, is X and not X.
But that's not the claim
The claim is "two entities can conceivably share all their *physical* properties, but differ in their qualia*.
>be self-contradictory. Unless there's some magical extra stuff,
That's the whole point!
If physical properties are the only properties , then the there is a contradiction...but the contradiction is between the p-zombie clam and physicalism.
And you can't use physicalism as an argument against p-zombies without begging the question.
And physcalism isn't logically necessary, zombies aren't logically possible.
Your impossibility, incoherence, contradiction, inconceivability, etc...all boil down to."contradicts physicalism".
>. If it's just another way of pointing out the so-called "hard problem", or why does feeling feel like anything, I don't see what it really contributes.
That depends on whether or not you get the hard problem.
Is the truth of the Goldbach conjecture conceivable? Is the falsity of the Goldbach conjecture conceivable? I would ordinarily take both of these to be conceivable, but your definition appears to say that probably one of them isn't.
Ok, but a more liberal definition of conceivability goes against the anti-zombie argument. Merely having enough information to disprove zombies isn't enough to make them inconceivable, you'd need the proof.
The definition being self-contradictory isn't a function of a person knowledge. But yes, the fact that people who know everything about current relevant science still think that p-zombies may be a coherent idea would indicate that current science haven't answered all questions about consciousness.
Feel free to use this definition this way, just be careful not to mistake 1) conceivability-for-me with 2) conceivability-for-a-person-knowing-all-the-current-relevant-science and 3) logical possibility.
The original zombie argument messes things a bit going from "if zombies are logically possible" to "if zombies are conceivable" which is potentially very misleading.
> If zombie-world is possible, it seems to necessarily follow that qualia are epiphenomena.
Yes..if it's *really* possible. However, conceivability isn't the same thing as real possibility. For instance, faster-than-light travel is conceivable.
#19 and AI art: a somewhat-related (and highly recommended) short story by Alexander Wales (who wrote all sorts of rationalist and rationalist-adjacent fiction):
As with nearly everything AW writes, I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed his thoughts on AI art linked in the other comment. However, I just don't agree with the fear. I don't think that AI art will ever become completely divorced from artist interaction. It will, like nearly all productivity gains we have seen in the past, become a tool artists use to do more, write more, faster, and better.
As an example, I can imagine that, for the first humans making cave art in pre-history, the act of making the paints was an integral part of the artistic endeavor. They probably didn't store well and had to be made fresh for every act of painting.
Eventually, we figured out how to make paints (more, better, cheaper, etc) and now artists (the few who don't work digitally these days) just buy their paints. It makes it faster and better, but probably, to a cave painter, an integral part of the process of the art has been lost.
In the same way, the idea of a writer who writes every single word might go away when language models get good enough. Instead, writers will become "editors" (this is just one possibility but it's my guess). They will have an idea for a story with specific characters and plots points and they will use the language models to do the writing, but they will edit, choose between different dialogue options etc. Their output will be better, faster, and more consistent.
I read a _lot_ of internet serialized fiction, and it is almost universally terrible. (90% of everything is crap after all), and almost all of it is abandoned before the author ever completes it, even if it's good. But I, who am not a writer, _do not know what stories I want to read_. Not well enough to come up with anything more than the most vague prompt. The writer of the future is the one who has a story they want to tell and uses an AI to help them tell it faster, and better.
There's not just 'true artists' producing original styles and nobody else. There's vast numbers of working creatives who are producing products for clients. Much of this work will go away. Many of these people will be straight up cut-out of the process, and less of them will be required for whatever diminished role is left for these people. A "faster better" more efficient process is one that requires less artists.
No, it's one that allows for professional art to be used in far more places. The article linked in the comment above mine details a situation in which he _wanted_ to use commissioned art, but it was too expensive. He used an AI generator but was not entirely happy with the results. They were "good enough" but commissioned art would have been better. He and you are both ignoring the middle ground. Where an actual artist, who regularly works with these engines uses the AI model in a far more deft way than someone who just needs it every once in a while. They can produce art _far_ faster than currently, so the price is cheap, and the output is better than some rando just pulling off whatever pops out.
Cameras make creating a decent portrait shot far, _far_ easier than it was 200 years ago, even for a regular person, yet there are probably more professional portrait-art-generating professionals than there were 200 years ago (even though there might be fewer portrait _painters_), because people don't want "this is good enough" they want "the best" and it takes a professional to get the best out of new technology.
Sure, some people will be happy with "good enough" but lots of people want better and I am quite sure that artists of the future will produce better output from these models than general users, but will do it for far cheaper than currently.
#29 made me laugh. I wonder if the final published blurb appeared something like:
"You owe it to...Bryan Caplan...by reading this top...education...book."
/ref “Bryan Caplan committed career suicide by writing this book; you owe it to him to make his sacrifice meaningful by reading it” and “I didn't think Bryan was ever going to be able to top the ‘education is bad’ book, but he definitely did”
The actual cover including the blurb is on the linked page:
"Part primer on the economics of discrimination, part vignettes and reflections from a uniquely honest and straightforward observer of human nature. The book is called Don't Be A Feminist", but it also contains a chapter on how being against open borders is a form of socialism. Bryan continues to defy categorization, expectations, and all applicable social norms".
Honestly, it's an impressively... diplomatic... blurb. It's all fairly complimentary and positive without really endorsing any of the specific contents of the book.
I'm less concerned with creation qua creation, more with the fact that the capability to write superhuman fiction books is strongly adjacent to the capability to write superhuman political essays which is essentially a deadline for alignment/governance.
#28 - I suggest the word "woke" either gets defined or tabooed. Without an explanation of precisely what a poster means by it, it is left as a free placeholder for whatever the reader and writer dislike, which need not be the same things.
In this particular case, the article appears to be about allowing companies to select individuals by race, ostensibly because racial indicators might correlate with performance across populations.
The word "woke" in this case seems to be used as a fig-leaf: "companies can be sued for not enforcing wokeness" sounds on a cursory reading like a problem that needs solving, whether by repealing the relevant laws or otherwise, since most readers will have some things they dislike that might fall under the label "woke"; replacing the neologism with the substance, however, would lead to a statement like "companies can be sued for permitting racial discrimination", which is a state of affairs that seems much less in need of changing.
I suggest that, in the current culture war ridden space, the default assumption when anyone uses the word "woke" without clearly explaining precisely what they mean by it should be that they are using it as a rhetorical fig leaf to slip a concept under the reader's radar.
The problem I have with the stance your linked article takes is that it presupposes some kind of global movement where what exists in actuality is a rag-tag collection of disparate recently formed groups that frequently vehemently disagree not only with far right extremists but also with each other (cf. is radical feminism feminism?).
The problems here are twofold: firstly, the kind of equivocation I have already described; and secondly, incorrectly ascribing the opinions of one group to another entirely unrelated group that happen to also have opinions the speaker dislikes that therefore fall under the "woke" label. The scenario is similar in many ways to media reports on 4chan that attempt to claim that Anonymous is a coherent organisation with shared beliefs and goals. There is no "4chan Anonymous ideology" coherent enough that you can say that combination of words and I will know what you mean by it.
If the intent is to have a coherent discussion about some specific subject, then it should be made completely clear what that subject is. I'd assumed this is where we were at; but sure, if the intent is simply to grumble about modern politics and/or the culture war in general while waving a flag for one's own side, then indeed "woke" is a very reasonable word to use.
I don't think anyone honestly believes it is a global movement (as in it's everywhere), but it's at least one that has a substantial influence in Anglophone (and to a lesser extent, other Western) countries. The fact that it's fractured and full of infighting does not take away from the fact that most of these groups organized around a common principle of righting (real or perceived) wrongs borne out of discrimination against race, sex, sexuality, gender identity and so on.
The problem that you describe definitely exists, and 'wokeness' is able to serve as a stand-in for the reader's worst assumptions. However, the central criticism against 'wokeness' that I relate to (and which I hope is the norm) is not that the principles are wrong, but that the actions people justify with those principles are. This makes it very easy to motte-and-bailey 'wokeness' by saying stuff like "Do you think companies should be able to get away with firing employees because they're black, asian or latino? Are you some kind of racist?" when the actual disagreement is with something like "Companies should be able to get sued if they don't implement and meet stringent hiring quotas for minority employees."
So, the ease with which 'the woke' are able to stand on the strength of their principles, and smuggle in their much less defensible actions with them, is itself detracting from the clarity of the discussion. It would be easier to have this discussion if it was consistently clear which actions are being advocated for and why, but that's usually not the case.
Sounds to me like an argument for being even *more* explicit, not less - not only replace "woke" with the actual thing one has a problem with, but also expand "repeal the law" to clarify exactly what it is you do and don't want repealed, to prevent people assuming the worst.
I do realise this is a recipe for turning brief outbursts into well-reasoned carefully referenced astralcodexten style essays... but, well, I see this as no bad thing, and here we all are in this substack together so I suspect I am not alone in that.
You don't have me with you at any rate. The assumption that you can write exact-ness into bad laws is to make them less bad is incorrect. You would be better off with a repeal and social norms dictating behaviour instead of laws.
I humbly suggest that laws and regulations are what happens when relying on social norms and common sense fails. Scrapping them without an alternative will reintroduce the failure that caused them.
Therefore, you now need to be *even more explicit* - in addition to explaining what you have a problem with and why, and precisely what law it is you want to repeal, you *also* need to explain exactly what problems that law was meant to solve and why you believe repealing it will not reintroduce them.
>that frequently vehemently disagree not only with far right extremists but also with each other (cf. is radical feminism feminism?).
Oh dear. It is very dirty of you to say "they disagree with far right extremists", the implication being that anyone not woke they disagree with is a "far right extremist". This is not even close to true. You can be the most anodyne, limp-wristed centre-right or even centre-left person and they will still find a reason to tear you to pieces.
>The scenario is similar in many ways to media reports on 4chan that attempt to claim that Anonymous is a coherent organisation with shared beliefs and goals. There is no "4chan Anonymous ideology" coherent enough that you can say that combination of words and I will know what you mean by it.
Except there is a crystal clear line we can draw around what "woke" is because its so different from what everyone else believes. The fact that they disagree with each other is immaterial, because only the woke even support radical feminism or radical pro-transgenderism or whatever the sectarian conflict of the day is.
>If the intent is to have a coherent discussion about some specific subject, then it should be made completely clear what that subject is. I'd assumed this is where we were at; but sure, if the intent is simply to grumble about modern politics and/or the culture war in general while waving a flag for one's own side, then indeed "woke" is a very reasonable word to use.
If the intent is to have a coherent discussion about some specific subject, then it should be made completely clear what that subject is. I'd assumed this is where we were at; but sure, if the intent is simply to grumble about modern politics and/or the culture war in general while waving a flag for one's own side, then indeed "racist" is a very reasonable word to use.
This isn't a weak attampt at a gotcha. This is a much, much bigger problem than the use of "woke", and yet I'm alsmost positive you never ever even blink when you hear people call somebody racist or claim "racism" exists.
I think I agree with your diagnosis - there absolutely is an ambiguity here that needs resolving, and that makes "companies can be sued for not enforcing wokeness" terrible communication - but not with your prescription - that the word "woke" it too ambiguous to be useful and needs to be further defined or tabooed. I think that, like most words, it's somewhat ambiguous (Scott's word was "ambijective"), and while it's unambiguous enough to make it fit for plenty of purposes, this isn't one of them.
I think that most of the time the answer to the questions "is this person woke?" and "is this opinion woke?" are pretty clear - not always, but often enough for it to be a useful and legitimate word.
The reason that saying "companies can be sued for not enforcing wokeness" is terrible communication is not that the word "woke" doesn't convey meaningful information, but that it doesn't convey sufficient information. There are lots of different woke behavioural standards companies might or might not enforce; I have no idea which ones are being talked about.
Unless you say all this and MORE when you hear people use the word "racist" or "racism", then its ideologically motivated special pleading on your behalf.
It's not terrible communication. In fact, it's extremely effective communication, like any clever slogan or buzzword, and you can tell that by the fact that the people it targets react with rage, and not with befuddlement. They know exactly what is being implied. The problem is they don't *like* what is being implied, and think that if the discussion were held in different more emotionally cool terms what is being implied could be more successfully attacked.
>#28 - I suggest the word "woke" either gets defined or tabooed. Without an explanation of precisely what a poster means by it, it is left as a free placeholder for whatever the reader and writer dislike, which need not be the same things.
Sure, once you people tell us what the hell "racism" means. And "racism" is much more egregious in this way because it's a much more powerful word that is weilded by the most powerful institutions in society today. And at least woke doesn't have a whole bunch of contradictory usages.
>"companies can be sued for permitting racial discrimination", which is a state of affairs that seems much less in need of changing
Nope, you're inserting your own ideology to create a strawman. "Racial discrimination" is typically understood to mean discrimination on the sole basis of race. But what you're referring to here is actually refers to a situation where hiring people on the basis of merit leads to uneven hiring of people of different races (because people of different races have different average cognitive ability), but you've nonetheless labelled it "racial discrimination" in a way that is extremely misleading.
>I suggest that, in the current culture war ridden space, the default assumption when anyone uses the word "woke" without clearly explaining precisely what they mean by it should be that they are using it as a rhetorical fig leaf to slip a concept under the reader's radar.
I suggest that, in the current culture war ridden space, the default assumption when anyone uses the word "racist" without clearly explaining precisely what they mean by it should be that they are using it as a rhetorical fig leaf to slip a concept under the reader's radar.
And at the very least, "woke" is a label that (at least some of) the people who it is directed at previously used it to identify themselves, whereas "racist" is simply a slur.
[Comment moved to a more appropriate location, and edited.]
It's much easier in these postmodern (post-WW2) times, when the concept of race has been both morally and scientifically discredited : still using race like it is a valid category (rather than ethnicity, which is overwhelmingly cultural) makes you a racist.
One of my beefs with the "wokes" is that they not leftists, but racists (and also often economic liberals, so right-wing) that have been so steeped in the North American structural racism (and consumerist capitalism) that they don't even seem to realize this !
And then some people have the *gall* to blame European thought to be responsible for the "wokes", even when it's the USA that is radiating them all over the planet !
P.S.: This is in resonance with another link : about South Africa :
Context : 1978 revolutionary speech (of Marxist-Leninist bent) by Thabo Mbeki, who went on to become president from 1999 to 2008, excerpt of the Freedom Charter :
"Whenever we stand up and say “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people...,” [21], we always meet with three different reactions.
There are those, naturally who agree with us. There are those who howl in derision: these are the white supremacists who are confident of the everlasting power of the repressive force of apartheid South Africa.
But perhaps more important, there are those, themselves the offspring of the black producers of our country together with their sympathisers, who, in anger, throw at us the epithet, traitor!
Yet this is what a free South Africa will be like. For as the masses themselves long discovered, the antithesis to white supremacy, exclusiveness and arrogance is not a black version of the same practice.
In the physical world, black might indeed be the opposite of white. But in the world of social systems, social theory and practice have as much to do with skin pigmentation as has the birth of children with the stork. To connect the two is to invent a fable with the conscious or unconscious purpose of hiding reality.
The act of negating the theory and practice of white apartheid racism, the revolutionary position, is exactly to take the issue of colour, race, national and sex differentiation out of the sphere of rational human thinking and behaviour, and thereby expose all colour, race, nation and sex prejudice as irrational.
Our own rational practical social activity, rational in the sense of being anti-racist and non-racist, constitutes such a negation; it constitutes the social impetus and guarantee of the withering away of this irrationality."
(Of course, in practice it's very hard to build a society where everyone is treated equally, but it's hopeless if you do NOT start with equality being built into your ideology and statistics...)
>when the concept of race has been both morally and scientifically discredited
I'm not sure it's possible for a *concept* to be morally discredited independently of it being factually discredited. It could be - if there are concepts that are factually true, but which nonetheless cause those who believe them to behave immorally (i.e. questions on which, in order to be a good person, you would have to believe a falsehood), then this could be one of them, but I'm not convinced.
But as fas as scientifically discredited goes, I think you may be conflating a strawman with the more nuanced view. Approximately no one believes that there are five or six discrete racial boxes, each genetically homoenous within themselves, into which everyone fits unambiguously into exactly one; we are perfectly aware that human genetic and phenotypic variation is clinal. Rather, wherever there are barriers to gene flow (such as oceans, mountain ranges, impassable deserts), people will tend to be more likely to interbreed with each other on the near side of such obstacles, such that, although the geographical distance between, say, a point in the middle of Africa and a point in North Africa may be the same as between that same starting point and a point in southern Africa, because it was so hard to cross the Sahara for so many thousands of years, we can group people by genetic relatedness more parsimoniously if we cluster them into 'Sub-Saharan Africans' and 'North Africans, Europeans and Middle Easterners' than if we tried to cluster them into 'Africans' and Europeans and Middle Easterners - check out 'genetic cluster analysis' or 'human genetic clustering' for more details, but basically, if you feed a bunch of genomes from around the world into an algorithm, and tell it to divide the genomes into K number of clusters, maximizing the genetic homogeneity within each cluster, then at K=2 you will reliably get 'Sub-Saharan Africans' and 'Everyone Else', and at about 5 or 6 clusters, you will get something that maps reasonably well onto the sort of racial categorization scheme that old-timey pith-helmet-wearing gentleman scholars tended to come up with based simply on visible physical differences between populations... Though it doesn't map very well onto US census groups categories - 'Asian' is not a plausible cluster (South Asians being closer to Europeans than they are to North-East Asians), and 'Hispanic' is a non-starter.
And yes, of course, at the borders of these clusters you get people who are genetically intermediate - the people of the Horn of Africa tend to have a substantial degree of Middle Eastern admixture, and South-East Asians have substantial genetic affinity with both South Asians and North-East Asians; Uyghurs are a hybrid North-East Asian / West Eurasian population, and you can keep adding clusters as much as you like to pick out smaller and smaller groups. But the point is that, as a first approximation, most people can be assigned to one or other of five or six continent-scale clusters that roughly coincide with what we call 'races', and knowing that about a person will give you greater than zero information about the probability of them having certain phenotypic characteristics (even though you could get greater precision of you could narrow it down to 'ethnicity', and yet more by narrowing it down to 'tribe', 'clan', 'family' or ultimately 'individual'
If the word "woke" is going to be tabooed and require an explanation, I'm going to set up a hotkey for "people who don't have anything better to do than LARP as 1960s civil rights activists, and insist on causing real harm to anyone who won't indulge their pathetic fantasies". I'm guessing there won't be much confusion as to who I am talking about, among anyone whose opinion I care about.
Otherwise, as others have already noted, "woke" is much better defined, more clearly understood, and less harmful than "racist" or "sexist". So when you've tabooed "racist" and "sexist" and gotten everybody to define what they really mean when they say them, *then* we can talk about "woke". But if you can pull that off, we probably won't need to.
Well, this might be a case of being hoist by your own petard, since what the "woke" people do that others find so annoying is slip concepts like disparate outcomes for any number of innocent reasons under the reader's radar by using highly charged words like "sexism" to mean "it turns out requiring firefighters to be able to hump a heavy canvas hose 100 yards in full protective gear means only 30% of female applicants to fire school graduate, whereas 70% of the men do" and potent words like "racism" to mean "putting a black murderer away for 20-to-life, the sentence mandated by law and handed down for a white defendant last week, because the judge refused to take into account the black defendant's childhood of grinding poverty and being called a n***** by some bullies in the 6th grade."
I'm all for being precise in communication, so in principle I support what you're saying, but I can well understand people who have experienced the so-called "woke" community, when they hear this, saying ha ha you first 'cause you started it.
Re childcare hours expanding—I don't find this strange at all. I was born in 1958 in rural England. I can't speak to direct care when I was a baby, except to say that child psychiatrists are well aware that the 'self-calming child' no longer exists. That was an age when it was not a crime to let a baby cry if you knew the babe was dry, fed and safe, and the cry was one of rage about being left alone rather than one representing the first three conditions not being met. Mothers are good at that! As a pre-school toddler I was let into the back garden and told to 'play'. Excellent for the immune system, getting muddy and possibly eating worms. At five I started walking to school in the morning, home for lunch, back for the afternoon and then home again. Probably only 500m each trip, but makes over a mile a day for a five year old. School uniform involved shorts, and it wasn't pleasant in the winter with sleet stinging bare legs. (Of course, girls had skirts so they knew all about bare legs!) By the age of eight I could ride a bike, and after tea (family was middle class but only first generation out of working class, so hot meal at midday, and tea instead of dinner) I was let loose on the village with my playmates and had to be home by dusk. By the time I was off to the local comprehensive at 11, my mother had herself a job, and I had a house key, and when I got home, I made myself tea, and did homework unsupervised. Independence and self-reliance was built in to the method of child care (which would probably be called neglect these days). At eighteen I got on a train with a trunk, went to medical school, and came home at the end of the year. I never lived at home again after that; it just wasn't expected or done. Very different world, and I suspect we were the better for it in terms of minimised suffering on leaving home. I don't feel my parents were in the least bit neglectful or uncaring (although I think that most of my mother's time in direct child care was spent in caning me for some infraction or other.) Let's just say I always had a close and loving relationship with my father for the rest of his days!
RE #33: two non-exclusive explanations that come to mind are labor-saving devices and services and fear of kidnapping/predation. The first is simple enough, having a mechanical washing machine means far less time doing laundry, we eat out/nuke something in the microwave instead of cooking regularly (saves cleanup too), vacuuming instead of beating rugs, etc.
As for the second whether or not the situation with children being kidnapped or molested is actually worse than it was in 1965 the perception is that it is. Also our attitudes towards tragedies with children have changed, the tacit? cultural expectation is that you never ever let your kids out of your site unless they are in a safe (usually literally locked down) school or other location or with trusted adults who will keep tabs on them. If you fail to exert this level of diligence then you are held to be a bad parent and deserving of whatever tragedy befalls. I wasn't alive in 1965 but have been assured by people that were that such was not the case.
So instead of leaving the kids to their own devices while the stay-at-home-mom does her full time job's worth of household chores, we now burn the candle at both ends with both parents working and doing childcare and doing what remains of the housework. Race to the bottom?
It used to be that childcare was pretty much only for very small children who could not tend to themselves. Older children (and I think that would be like, six or younger) would go off and play all day outside or hang out with other kids. The idea that we need to watch kids as old as 12 or more is definitely new. 12-year-olds used to regularly babysit stranger's kids for money.
I think the only reason the mom's number of hours is so high is because family sizes were larger and each kid needed their own time with mom.
"Woke" is further than workplace law requires, but it's definitely on the same trajectory. Once you train an organization to avoid even the appearance of anti-minority and anti-female discrimination, you've trained them to look for woke-adjacent problems in the workplace. Major corporations with tens of thousands of employees can't afford to have much of a failure rate on training, so they have a strong incentive to over-train avoidance. If you add in a supportive media environment, it's not much of a jump to going fully "woke" and angling for PR benefits to what you are mostly doing anyway.
AI mediocrity: this has been my main AI concern since about when GPT-2 came out.
You know how frustrating it is when you have to talk to someone in a call centre, and they have a script to follow, or they don't understand your query and keep trying to answer a simpler query that has some superficial similarities? At least there is a human there, and if you're lucky you might get through to them. But in the same way that corporations offshored their call centres because it was cheaper, very soon they'll replace them with AIs for the same reason. The AI will be very good at answering the most common questions, and even at producing words that sound relevant to the more obscure queries, but it probably won't understand your attempts to disambiguate between your problem and the more common problem, and it probably won't have the long-term coherence to keep in mind the nuance you explained to it earlier.
Copy-writing and journalism, except at the highest levels, will be done by AI. Hardly anyone will notice the errors because they'll mostly be skim-reading anyway, but those errors will be copied into Wikipedia and into respected papers and books, and become accepted as fact.
I don't know what will happen to assessment in schools and universities (especially for essay subjects, but also even for maths and programming). Maybe coursework will eventually be abolished and everything will be assessed under exam conditions, but it will be several years before the bureaucracy catches up enough to make that change. AI-generated essays are already better than those of mediocre students, and not easily detectable by plagiarism detectors. The temptation even for good students to just submit a generated essay will increase as the language models improve, and the cost/benefit ratio of actually putting in the work yourself will decrease.
>Copy-writing and journalism, except at the highest levels, will be done by AI. Hardly anyone will notice the errors because they'll mostly be skim-reading anyway, but those errors will be copied into Wikipedia and into respected papers and books, and become accepted as fact.
While I agree this would be a bad state of affairs, I think we got there with incompetent humans long ago. The number of major factual and typographical errors in major newspapers of repute is pretty shockingly high, and IMO would be *lower* with any AI good enough to warrant the backlash of firing humans (much as in any industry, inertia means that the new method usually has to be *obviously superior* in quality, not merely comparable)
#22: Jumping to conclusions and not fully analyzing the evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. People with schizophrenia have numerous early visual processing deficits, most likely centered around magnocellular pathway dysfunction. This alone doesn’t explain the cortical blindness hypothesis, but it surely is something to consider before rejecting the null.
When you say “null hypothesis”, and “cortical blindness hypothesis”, I believe you’re referring in BOTH cases to “the hypothesis that cortically-blind people never get schizophrenia”. Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding.
When you say that my post was “not fully analyzing the evidence”, I believe you’re referring to the INDIRECT evidence (evidence concerning nuts-and-bolts theories about how schizophrenia works in the brain, and these theories then do or don’t imply that cortical blindness is or isn’t incompatible with schizophrenia), NOT the direct evidence (evidence where you try to count how many cortically-blind schizophrenic people there are, and compare that to expectations). Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding.
I mentioned in the second paragraph of my post that I didn’t find the “indirect evidence” convincing. Quite the contrary, I found the “indirect evidence” strongly pointing in the opposite direction, i.e. that cortical blindness should NOT prevent schizophrenia. But I didn't explain why I thought that. It was outside the scope of the post. My post was just about the direct evidence.
I discussed the direct evidence that I was able to find, in the limited time that I spent looking at it. If I missed direct evidence, I’m interested to hear it, and I would update the post in response.
Back to the indirect evidence, again I didn’t talk about it in the post, but for the record, I had indeed spent some time looking at the literature on visual processing differences in schizophrenia. (Not much time though.) My assessment was basically “schizophrenia causes visual processing differences”, as opposed to “visual processing differences cause schizophrenia”. So on my thinking, if an exogenous factor caused occipital lobe dysfunction, I didn’t see how that would make schizophrenia any more or less likely. (Again, to be clear, I’m just stating this opinion without justifying it.)
I agree that the only way to truly refute the null (Cortical blindness is a protective factor in schizophrenia) is through direct observation. I disagree that early visual processing deficits findings work against the cortical blindness hypothesis. Somewhere between 30-50% of the cortex is involved in visual processing and this system undergoes rapid changes in early life. If schizophrenia is a developmental disorder (which many researchers believe) that affects white matter integrity, dopamine, glutamate, and GABA function, you would expect the visual system to play a significant role in the disease process. If the striate cortex is not being used from birth this would likely affect the system as a whole and perhaps strengthen other perceptual areas (I.e., auditory), decreasing the likelihood of positive symptom development. The brain functions as a system, not a group of distinct areas. What changes in one area or is deficient in another at birth will have significant downstream effects in seemingly unconnected areas. There’s a developing literature looking at early perceptual training that thus far has shown gains in lower leveling function (I.e., contrast sensitivity) can actually improve global cognition/functioning that is not directly related to vision or hearing. Would be happy to share a systematic review on this topic if you’re interested, though, the field is at its infancy.
#23: convenience over decentralization: To make that sounds more like the owner of the cueva can either trust Binance or the 17-year-old crypto kid in the back offfice. And he chooses the former.
The counterargument that technology is not going to stop people to make art seems a bit disingenuous to me. Take photography. True, it didn't destroy art as a whole, but it did make figurative, didascalic, realistic art completely redundant. And as a result the people like Picasso that could paint like Raffaello started painting like Picasso instead. And it's not that i dislike Picasso either, but we have relegated a certain form of figurative art to the outskirts of the art world.
I'd say that the more apt comparison is that Raphaels of today are the most famous photographers. Yes, the camera empowered the average Joe to make vastly better realistic pictures than he could before, but the best photographers can still achive much better results than that, and their job also includes sophisticated post-processing.
There are many realistic-style pictures you can make where a photo would not replace you. For example, paint a historical person (no longer alive), paint someone walking on a Moon, or paint a "realistic" fantasy character or animal (elf, dragon).
Perhaps "paint a photo" was an important source of income for artists in the past, and then it was replaced by actual photos, so artists lost some of their motivation to improve their skill at realistic painting?
Is there really a lack of skillful artists in this style, so that a customer would have trouble getting a high-quality product commissioned? I suspect that what truly changed is the relative status of the best of them, whereas previously they were admired as paragons of artistic merit, now they are merely highly competent craftsmen. Status games of this sort can't escape their zero-sum nature, there's only so many household names that culture can keep in it collective memory, and technological progress is only one of the inputs into this process.
I never tried to hire an artist. Here are two anecdotes, but I have no idea whether they only apply to artists in my city or whether it is a general trend.
1) Once I talked to Martina Pilcerová https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20024224/one-womans-fantasy-success.html (she designed some Magic the Gathering cards) and she told me that when she studied art, she was actively discouraged by her teachers from painting realistically, because it was considered low-status. She was stubborn and resisted the pressure, but her other classmates have internalized the message.
2) My friend was making a mobile phone application, and there was an artistic school next to his home, so he was like "instead of hiring on internet, I could support a local artist" and he talked to some of the students. He basically just wanted some nice picture on the application main screen... but all the students seemingly could do was take a brush and produce an art on canvas (the kind that teachers would approve, presumably). When he gave them technical specification like "I need the picture to be low on detail and have thick lines, because it will be displayed on a 500 pixel wide screen", this was already way outside their comfort zone. (So ultimately he hired some foreigner online.)
So, not sure whether this is true in general, or it was just two specific crappy schools, but my impression is that artist schools seem to be status-oriented, and craft is considered low-status. The paintings are produced to be admired (by experts on art), not to be used for some mundane purpose.
Sure, all this is very plausible. With the blurry art/craft distinction, it's to be expected that status games are especially impactful here, with readily available examples of "avant-garde" artists hitting it big with sales north of hundred millions. The contrast with music is interesting, in that there popular appeal is strongly correlated with making a killing financially, while academics are doing their thing in a relatively irrelevant and non-lucrative niche.
Is there actually less figurative, didascalic, realistic art being produced today than in, say, 1800? It no longer has the same cultural cachet, but some people still enjoy it as a hobby.
#17 autoplay: maybe it is just me, but I am already badly annoyed by animated gifs repeating in discord. In the unlikely event I actually came to the website to watch a video, I can damn well click on the play button, thank-you-very-much. IMHO, autoplay belongs to the same heap of horrible UI ideas as the blink tag, automatic web site background music in the late 90s and these horrible EU cookie prompts. "Our company producing vacuum pumps produced a great PR video. Strangely, most people visiting our website do not seem to click on it, probably because they can not figure out how to play it. Let's just play it automatically so everyone can enjoy it." Anyone cares to steelman autoplay?
#19 (AI is demoralizing)
TIL people actually use autocorrect. I hated it in the 1990s in MS Word when I was a kid and still disable it on my mobile to this day. Red underlining is ok, but I would rather fix five mistakes manually than have to undo an automatic correction once. With regard to writing code, my favorite "IDE" (GNU emacs) is not supported by github co-pilot, not that I care. IMHO, if you do notice that you need ten similar lines of code, the correct way to handle this is to increase your level of abstraction and use a loop + general statement. I think the ability to copy-paste big chunks of code (without understanding) is already ruining code quality in a project I am involved with.
I think visual artists and film actors are most threatened by AI. With regard to writing, I totally can't see ACX being replaced by a weak AI. Except perhaps for "links for $month"? And if ML can do data analysis and coding on their own, I guess I will just wait a bit for AI to take over AI research and then either end up in an Ellisonian nightmare, some utopia or something in between. Still, I can totally see DALL-E being annoying to artists.
I think relating the total number of prisoners to the number of homicides is unreasonable. First, I don't understand why the axes are dimensionless. I would expect homicides to be measured as a rate (in units of 1/year). Prisoners and Police, however, are more typically measured as a population. Thus, the axis should be of time dimension (e.g. years), with the interpretation: "The average Japanese police is head investigator in a murder investigation every every 700 years" and "If murder was the only crime for which people are arrested, to maintain the current prison population in Japan, the average murder case would have to result in an cumulative effective prison sentence of 160 years".
Given these numbers, either the prisoners in Japan are sentenced for being part of vast conspiracies of murderers or they are simply there for a crime not related at all to homicides, but perhaps tax fraud. OTOH, Finland probably mostly puts serious offenders in prison and prefers to deal with non-violent crime differently.
For the US, it is unclear to me if most prisoners are convicted of offenses strongly correlated with homicides (e.g. armed robberies, street corner drug dealing?) and what fraction of homicides is committed by people involved in criminal business models?
Also, from figure 2, Japan has around 700 (unknown unit) Police per homicide, while from figure 5, it is clearly below 500 (unknown unit)?
Finally, I did not realize that the "clearance rate" (here measured by homicide arrests instead of judicial outcomes, which I find confusing: solving all double homicides would get you to a rate of 0.5, while solving all homicides committed by pairs of killers would get you to 2? Not sure how large these effects are.) of the US is below 0.6. I think this is possibly related to the murder rate: in Europe, common wisdom is that while you *may* get away with all sorts of lesser crimes, homicides will get solved. Thus, mostly people who expect to be caught as well as the statistical illiterate and the ones who think themselves clever will try to kill people.
#9 (statue) seems to have a great CW potential. Let me just say I hope India will not get into a religious statue race with Pakistan. :-P
Aren't horrible EU cookie prompts legally required? EU digital privacy laws are pretty good in many respects, but this particular overreach does seem pointless.
Basically, the EU originally passed a law saying all websites had to offer an opt-out from all cookies. This was a good decision, but had an obvious problem, in that if a user opts out of all cookies on your website, you can't place a cookie in his browser saying that he's opted out...
Anyway, this then ended up not mattering as businesses ratfucked the law in court, getting the court to decree (against the obvious intent of the law) that it was sufficient to merely *warn* the user that an unspecified number of cookies would be set, on first visiting the site, and that opting out could consist of just not using the site once warned. Thus it is now a legal requirement to be annoying for no reason. Really shows the flaws of a judicial system with any kind of leeway to interpret the law, but it does seem like an unfixable problem, unfortunately.
But under the intended interpretation of the law the prompt would have to appear every time, which is orders of magnitude worse? I'd say that the flaw here lies primarily in clueless and unresponsive legislature, rather than the judiciary which did the best it could with an obviously bad piece of legislation.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Had the EU not intervened in the first place, I would say it's a pretty reasonable expectation that browser makers (or add-on authors) would have come up with something similar (but much more customizable for the user) on the client side, in the same way people came up with ad blockers and script disablers and pop-up blockers -- for the simple reason that browser makers (and add-on builders) are serving the clients, not the businesses, and so their interests align naturally. We can expect responsiveness, especially if people are sufficiently annoyed with it that they'll pay actual money for a solution.
But the interests of the businesses running the servers naturally conflict with the users, so expecting anything *other* than minimal compliance and efforts to end-run or get technical with the law, or work the system levers, is exactly what a rational person would expect. Asking them to faithfully and honestly implement a proposal which directly contradicts their interests is asking men to have the temperament of angels. Not super likely to work out the way you hope.
The major risk in *any* legislative top-down solution to a social problem is that you short-circuit the possibility of a bottom-up grassroots solution, which as a rule are far more responsive to the people who are actually experiencing the problem.
Browser makers had a long time to come up with a solution. I am guessing that they didn't because they are now mostly Google (or Google-funded), whose business model is based on ads and tracking.
#39: My anecdotal experience from talking to immigrant high school students from muslim countries is that it's taught as something that was just about to be a glorious victory when the evil U.S. stepped in to stop it and save Israel by forcing a peace at gunpoint.
This is obviously grossly untrue - it was Israel who did their best to keep the war going once victory was assured - but seems to be the kind of myth-building that would support this kind of naming.
Regarding #1 and #14, that knitting was an amazingly late invention and that speed runners are crazy good at finding exploits.
It seems that these ideas are completely at odds. Left with a SNES and a couple years humans will apparently completely disassemble the virtual world and invent incredible, unforeseeable methods of achieving their goals. Left with thread and sticks for literally a hundred thousand years anatomically identical humans failed to produce knitting until the last millennium. It seems that producing flexible, warm clothing was significantly more valuable than getting to the Mario credits sooner, but it takes mere months to find new speedrunning exploits compared to centuries to develop knitting.
So, what's the difference? Humanity physically seems unchanged in the last hundred thousand years so we can't just say that we evolved to become better problem solvers. I can see the argument that knitting is harder to develop ex-nilo, but 100,000x more difficult seems implausible. It could be that we're as good as ever but the sheer amount of information availability in the modern era allows us to be significantly more effective when it comes to problem solving. But I could see arguments in favour of a cultural change, we have invented structures in society which make us significantly more able to be inventors going forwards. Or maybe it's just that five to ten percent of all humans who have ever lived are alive today so of course we're going to be accomplishing more.
In the immortal words of poet laureate sweet brown - 'Ain't nobody got time for that' is the explanation you're looking for. Leisure and the ability to focus on solving problems not immediately connected to survival are modern gifts
This resonates with a bit I remember out of Women's Work: The First 30,000 Years, which is a book about textile production. The question was "why didn't women, who all did spinning constantly, invent the wheel/spinning jenny/etc?" (Spinning is by far the most labor-intensive part of making fabric and the usual solution was to train kids to spin as soon as they could hold the tools, then make them do it whenever they weren't doing something more valuable with their hands)
The answer the author theorized is that there was simply no time to experiment. If a spinner stopped her usual methods to try new ones, it was entirely possible her family would not have warm clothes in the winter. Or they wouldn't have blankets, bags, and other useful household items. Or even they wouldn't have the extra cushion her making luxury trade goods offered. The spinner could not stop to play around with her methods, because that would mean she ran the risk of losing production, and that loss could be catastrophic.
You can extend this to other parts of textile production. Once you have weaving, it's best to just keep weaving and figure out how to do things with woven cloth over wasting thread experimenting. Once you have naalbinding, just keep doing that. Keep doing what works, because if you don't you won't have the textiles you need. Experimentation happens on the margins, from those with the leisure time and survival margin to handle failure.
I think it's a great question, why we innovated so slowly in the past and do it so quickly now.
The best I can come up with is that we've become culturally much better problem solvers. Modern western culture puts a great value on coming up with better ways to do things, whereas most cultures at most times in the past have frowned on it.
Communication tech and culture is likely a big part of this. Nowadays, Paper Mario speedrunners can and do get together online and share ideas and techniques across time and space. Whereas with knitting in a pre-literate society with minimal long-distance communication, you can only build on ideas and techniques that have been mastered by people you know personally. And if you come up with innovations, these are likely to die with you unless those innovations consistently catch someone else's interest enough to propagate down the generations.
Maybe no more complex than lower population? Let's assume the Roman Empire contained 60 million people in AD 150, and that 30% were slaves and 25% were children, that gives us 31.5 million free adults. The odds of an individual having IQ over 150, a very smart person but not a genius, like Thomas Edison, are about 0.048%, so we would have had 150,000 very smart people in the entire Empire, which had an area of ~3.4 million km^2, giving a mean distance between very smart people of ~6 km. In the typical small town, an IQ 150 person would've found zero peers within normal travel distance, no one from whom to learn or with whom to talk, or to convey his ideas.
Even in Rome itself, with a gross population at its height of 1 million, there would've been only 2,500 very smart people, and if we subtract those that were too poor, or too busy being politicians or generals, it's not hard to see a very small cadre of inventor-class people.
If we zoom up to Newton's level, IQ 190, a genuine genius, then the probability become so low (1 in 1 billion) that there's a decent chance no such person was born in Rome from the time of its founding right up to the fall of the Emprie.
Conversely today there are probably 35,000 IQ 150 people in New York City alone, and 1.4 million in the entire United States. More than enough to fill all the brilliant leadership and captains of industry roles, and still have a bunch of inventor-class people with time on their hands -- and the ready ability to talk to others like them. The odds are that there are 5-10 people as smart as Newton alive somewhere in the world today.
Do you really think it took IQ 150 to invent knitting, a process you can learn on youtube in about 15 minutes? Especially if a large fraction of them spent a lot of their time turning yarn into clothing? I am suspicious that it is more cultural, and that through most of history it would never occur to people that they might be able to come up with a better option than the standard practice. Even if you were fiddling around with a piece of yarn and did some knitting (the word literally comes from "knotting" the yarn repeatedly) you wouldn't conceive of it as an idea worth repeating or spreading.
Knitting is a very slow way to make wearables, if it's done by hand. The only people who could afford to invest that kind of time and effort would be the rich, and I would hazard they would rather spend the time (of their menials) making a good coat of mail than a knit shirt.
I'm not sure what to make of the chart in #36. At first glance, I thought it meant when a homicide occurs in the US, 20 cops go to work and put 120 people in prison. So US police are far more efficient compared to their international counterparts.
In fact, the plot is nigh incomprehensible. The author should consider reviewing "How to Display Data Badly" by Howard Wainer (American Statistician, May 1984) before publishing any further work.
Following the link for more context where there are multiple charts shown (Scott only puts the second chart inline), I think the point is that there's a linear correlation between policing rates and incarceration rates which persists whether you calculate the rates based on overall population or homicide rate, and the US is an outlier in both charts.
In the "per 100k population" chart, the US appears to be about 30th percentile among the dataset (looks like OECD members or some similar proxy for first world countries) in terms of policing rates but is off the chart (something like 3.5x the next highest country) in terms of incarceration rates. The takeaway from this is that number of police relative to population doesn't explain American incarceration rates.
In the "per homicide" chart, the data is renormalized to reflect the hypothesis that policing and incarceration rates are driven by rates of serious crime (murder/manslaughter being used as a proxy for this), there continues to be a correlation between policing rates and incarceration rates (confirming the intuition that in general, more police mean more crimes get cleared), but again the US is an outlier from the trendline, which again implies that the police -> incarceration relationship does not explain the American incarceration rate. Per this chart, the US has the lowest policing rate relative to crime rate among countries in the dataset, but our incarceration rate relative to crime rate is middle of the pack (US appears to be precisely the median on the prisoners-per-homicide axis).
At face value, the likely takeaways are that the US is underpoliced both relative to crime rate and incarceration rate, and that our extremely high incarceration rate is fully explained by our extremely high crime rate.
This could suggest two contradictory policy directions. If we suppose that our low policing rate causes our high crime rate, then more police could reduce the crime rate and thus counterintuitively reduce our incarceration rate in the long run. However, the dataset does (despite the US's outlier status) suggest a positive linear correlation between policing and incarceration, so more policing in the US might increase incarceration rates after all.
In addition, I'd be very careful about taking the results at face value, as there are a ton of other considerations to take into account. One is that the directions of cause and effect between crime rates, policing, and incarceration are complex and unclear in ways that cause analysis issues similar to Scott Sumner's "never reason from a price change" mantra.
And then there's the validity of using homicide as a proxy for crime rates or even for serious/violent crime rates. Another way the US is an outlier among the countries in the data set is availability of good weapons, both legal and on black or grey markets. Otherwise-similar circumstances might often be murder or manslaughter if the perpetrator has a gun, but attempted murder or aggravated assault if the perpetrator has a knife or a club. Likewise, differences in emergency trauma medicine (perhaps US emergency rooms are more overburdened with frequent fliers than their counterparts in other countries) could also contribute to whether an incident turns out to be murder or assault.
US trauma medicine is about the best in the world. We are in a sweet spot of urban firearm homicides, high speed autos, and rapid emergency transport that brings a large percentage of a high n trauma victims to expert medical care in time to keep them breathing. There is evidence that this makes the current murder rates look better than they should.
> 19: Reddit: The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing. A new concern I’ve never seen before, aside from the superintelligence family of concerns or the implicit bias family. AI is slowly eating all creative work. If AI remains slightly worse than humans, it could still take over because it’s so much cheaper and more scaleable, resulting in all our art getting slightly worse. If it becomes better than humans, a world where you (as a human) can never create truly world-class art also sounds pretty depressing.
I think this is broadly correct, but I'm not convinced this is a bad tradeoff versus the benefit of unlimited customized creative work. I'm predicting that as AI-generated work becomes better, we'll see both a dramatic decrease for specifically human-generated work at the same time we get a dramatic increase in the *total* demand that's ambivalent about the origin. That new met demand is a benefit, just not to clearly identified existing interests.
More concretely: I've commissioned art for TTRPGs before (and written a small amount of music personally). I don't see myself *ever* doing that again... and yet I'll have more material than ever before. An analysis that doesn't account for the benefit to my players is missing half the picture.
I think the game-changer will be the release of an AI that *isn't* intentionally crippled so it can't make porn. Once Rule 34 has been automated, all bets are off.
I can confirm that there is at least one NSFW build of Stable Diffusion that is already being used for those purposes. It's not quite good enough to reliably hit content niches that have disproportionate profitability†, but it's definitely getting there.
† Not a euphemism for furry art. Well, not *exclusively* at least.
On the topic of mom/dad quantities of childcare, I wonder if definitions of "childcare" have changed over the years. It's possible that in 1965, moms didn't consider doing housework while the kids play outside as "childcare" (obviously 100% speculative). And now, as a parent of multiple kids, I am fairly sure that most everyone seems to count every moment spent nominally responsible for the kids as childcare.
On the topic of the future of AI/ML art, I'm totally on board with the idea that lots of people could be worse at lots of things and not know it due to AI, but I'm not sure that it follows that you can't tell your children "with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music." I guess I feel like art that can be done by almost anyone should be automated, and otherwise art is about creating meaning. Art evokes a feeling in us because we know that someone created a thing with an intention to make us feel something, and that feeling *can* happen because the art is incredibly beautiful, and AI art may be able to create enough beauty to evoke that feeling (though I still think people will value knowing that a human created that beauty, the same way we still pay way more for all sorts of handmade things), likewise, the fact the a person *used* the AI to make art doesn't erase the meaning. But there's also all sorts of art that *isn't* beautiful in the conventional sense, but is meaningful nonetheless. I think there will be artists who create that art that is imbued with meaning and people will see it and think it is meaningful and love it, and other artists will create things and people will think "Why did someone ask an AI to do that?" and if the artist can't convince people that it's meaningful, then nothing really has been lost.
"Art evokes a feeling in us because we know that someone created a thing with an intention to make us feel something"
Most art is not the kind of fine art where popular people with big personas bluster on about intentionality. Most digital art that could plausibly be computer generated is advertisements, book covers, game art, character art, appearing on web pages and at the tops of articles, along roadsides (though it would be technically difficult to automate mosaics), in animation and graphic novels, that kind of thing. In short, illustrations.
For a while the art being produced in Paris and New York was culturally important and relevant, but I'm not sure that's true anymore outside of those spheres. That could only support an handful of artists at any given time anyway. I'm in an art related field and go to meetings with artistic people, and when they talk about contemporary artists, it's personal and usually local -- a beader or potter from the local tribe, an iconographer who did work on a church they like, someone who's studio or show they visited, someone they're related to. I have trouble getting any impression of the broader art world over the past 20 years or so, other than in those illustrative fields mentioned above. I went to a museum the other day, and there was a beautifully lit display of glasswork showing traditional motifs. They were beautifully made from within a challenging craft tradition, and that's still valued. But there isn't as much space there as in commercial art, unless the artist becomes known and valued in rather niche communities.
Art doesn't have to be world-class popular to create beauty and meaning ?
And if anything, it is not so much the AI that causes issues for the artists, but the easy ways to make copies of their art like the printing press, photography, vinyl disks and radio : only allowing a few of them to make lots of money.
#9 Resident Contrarian is obviously intelligent. I simply don't understand why he makes $50k a year. I hire people all the time into >$100k/yr positions where the person is clearly less intelligent than this fellow. Is it only credentialism that stands in his way?
I don't know about RC, but I have relatives who are like this -- excellent writers, college educated, curious and smart, who keep getting terrible jobs, like getting fired from a salad buffet for not fitting in with illegal workers well enough. In those cases, it's a blend of class markers, not knowing what to look for (terrible job advice at formative ages), rather chaotic organizational skills, and networking/social skills deficits.
Aella's post on going to networking parties conveys some of this -- the complete lack of even knowing where to start getting into a field.
(I often suffer from this myself -- I have no idea if there are jobs that I might be qualified for with a bit of search and training, or how to go about finding them)
So there's a few things happening here, but first, for some context, I make about 100k now. I think the most I ever made before this job was 50k, with 30-38k being the usual pay range you would have found me in for most of my adult life. When this article took off, I got a job offer at 60k, and then through a series of weird events that involved the word "matching" got a substantial raise past that.
But in terms of how this was *ever* possible, there's a couple of things going on:
1. As you guessed, credentialism plays really heavily here. Usually when I get interviews, I get jobs. I'm personable. But getting interviews can be incredibly difficult; a lot of (most) places have more applications than they actually have time to talk to people; they throw out some percentage of "worst" applications without a single word being exchanged. This is rational - you are maximizing your chances of a good hire - but would stop me at the door most places.
2. If you are taking crappy "I guess this will do for now" necessity jobs based on $1 an hour pay differences (say, $19 an hour instead of $18) you eventually end up with a really messy, bizarre CV. This works synergistically with not having a degree - first you don't have conventional qualifications, and then you are provoking "Well, I guess he's a pest control guy who... is also a secretary? What even is this?" reactions.
Those are what I feel the main factors are here. But also consider:
1. I'm never entirely sure if I'm actually good at anything besides writing. I'm reasonably bright, yes. But that's engine horsepower - there's a lot of other factors that go into drivetrain efficiency, and I often wonder if my transmission is just incredibly inefficient or something.
In terms of what you said, think of it like this: say you hire a very bright young data analyst with all the credentials you could want; they are attractive/confident/obviously smart, and they went to caltech or something. I think you probably know from experience that those guys don't always work out - maybe they aren't suited for the job, or maybe they aren't suited for *jobs*.
I've only ever been truly fired from one job (beginning of covid) and lost another when a project ended (terrible temp job with horrifying evil-aligned-Canadians). But technically the COVID-firing place kept at least some of its employees - what was the difference with me? And I'm not completely sure there wasn't some level of performance at Canadians-of-temporary-doom job that wouldn't have got me a permanent position of some kind.
2. I think 1 sort of leads into this one: Maybe I'm not honest with myself. Bear in mind I *THINK* that I am. I don't think I'm misleading you about who I am or how smart I might be, or giving myself an inaccurately positive PR makeover. But I think both of us have probably seen people who do that - nothing is ever their fault, and they never, ever admit they might have caused any of their own problems.
Even though I don't think this is true of me, I think you should be suspicious of people who say things like I say - it's just too easy and too comforting to make up lies that cover up for personal failings.
All that combines in a weird way in my head. I make 100k, but internally I'm absolutely sure I couldn't replace the job I currently have if I lost it; I'd take a massive paycut, maybe all the way back down to 35k, and there's nothing anyone can do to convince me otherwise. It's the irrationality of trauma, or something. So my life is much, much better than it used to be, but I also still live in a sort of omnipresent low-level fear that I'm going to fuck everything up and "go back to basics", as it were.
So I was working for a company that was basically administrating a lawsuit settlement - they were the settlement administration arm of a much larger company. Said arm was Canadian, and was administrating a Canadian lawsuit at the time.
I have, as racists sometimes say, some Canadian friends; I generally speaking am at least neutral on them as a chilly people group. But these particular Canadians were BAD CANADIANS, and FROM TORONTO, which I learned (possibly in error) was Canada's attempt at commanding the meanness and general badness of LA.
There's some more details on all this as a footnote in this article (https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/what-does-shitty-job-mean-in-the). But basically it just boils down to elites hating people who weren't like them, not being super great bosses, and making decisions in ways that both broke promises and were near-maximally harmful for their employees.
A large portion of my current team is from Toronto! As best I can tell, they are nice people. Maybe they're torturing kittens just offscreen, I've only ever met one of them in person. But I don't think that Toronto is uniformly part of hell.
I think in the original piece the way I put it is something like "I am inclined to initially dislike canadians, but I do my best to be aware of that and adjust". It's that thing where you aren't around a lot of Canadians and then you meet several garbage ones and you have to fight all your pattern recognition, but it's not like... like, you basically are obligated to do that I think.
Large company, based in Toronto, dedicated to having lots of temp workers? They'll be awful. There are plenty of awful Canadians. Personally, I think they become more awful as they become more stereotypically American in their views of employment. But I would think that.
It also should be noted that in the 80s LA was the third-largest Canadian city.
I can't speak for RC, but some people, and I count myself among them, are just not good at the hiring game, or the self-promotion game once you actually have a job. In my experience, a lot of office "work", starting from the job-seeking, is actually really just a tribal status contest, or a sort of high-end social game. Those who aren't interested in that tend to not do as well, and this affects their salary over time since they tend to have fewer promotions and thus get paid less.
Government contracts(admin or project management), small business office manager/general manager, personal researcher.
RC might be well served by getting a PMP cert(faster than a degree), which would get him credentialed enough to get many project management jobs, esp if they see his body of written work.
Police make something like 60k with a couple weeks of training, no degree required.
This is credentialed, but BS engineers are pulling 100k starting salaries at oil companies in texas--these guys can barely do algebra, and probably 5% of them write as well as RC. Just gotta get his foot in the door.
Almost all police jobs in the US require, either de facto or de jure, at least a two-year college degree or equivalent military experience. A lot of people make a lot of arguments about how there isn't a federal law that absolutely positively prohibits a police chief from just giving his idiot nephew a badge and a gun, therefore US police are dangerously undertrained. But really, they almost all have years of training, and "you seem up for it, just walk into your local police department and ask them to hire you" is not effective career advice. Unless maybe you are the police chief's idiot nephew.
Required by *who*, exactly? Because the people who *actually hire police officers* in Texas, almost always require a two-year college degree or equivalent military service. Quick google confirms this of the Dallas PD, the Houston PD, the Texas DPS (state police), and the Texas Rangers seem to require four years.
I think that you are confused because there isn't literally a state law that explicitly says "Hey, every local police chief and sheriff, we'll throw you in jail if you give a badge and gun to some idiot who's only got a few weeks training". There doesn't need to be such a law, because there aren't enough people doing that to be a problem. If you walk into a police department in Texas with your shiny high school diploma and say "where are the job application forms?", then unless you're the police chief's nephew or something like that, the job you're going to be applying for is janitor.
Does anybody here have experience with both knitting and nålbinding? Was the latter Good Enough for 5 millenia of textile production? Was the former less practical before advances in spinning technology? Is knitting fragile and nålbinding antifragile?
I found this article on nålbinding (https://spinoffmagazine.com/nalbinding-a-short-history-of-an-ancient-craft/), which has this quote: "In addition to the interesting history of this ancient technique, nålbinding and looping techniques have some advantages over knitting: the fabric doesn’t ladder (as for a dropped stitch) and can be harder-wearing, thicker, and warmer than knitted fabric."
So it sounds like yes, nålbinding is somewhat less fragile than knitting. It's also that knitting wasn't just competing with nålbinding but also weaving, which is much less fragile and also much quicker to make.
For what it's worth, naalbinding is old but also wasn't particularly widespread. Woven fabric is more common, and for cold weather, things like animal fur are hard to beat.
I thought about advanced in spinning technology as a factor, but as far as I can tell, there's not a big difference between [knitting vs. naalbinding] with, say, [drop-spindle-spun yarn versus machine yarn (or wheel-spun yarn, whatever.)] The yarn works about the same. (This is my impression, at least - hobbyists still spin yarn with drop spindles and wheels, so there are definitely people out there who are better-equipped to notice a difference.)
I used to do a bit of knitting and I also tried naalbinding at one point after reading about it. It does have the advantage of not unraveling easily (it's closer to just repeatedly tying big knots through each other). But the fabric is bulkier and less stretchy, and most importantly, it seems to take a lot longer. Each stitch is sort of a multi-step tie-off, whereas knitting lets you get into a rhythm of a stitch every couple seconds. I assume naalbinding would also be much harder to design a machine for.
#32: how would one observationally distinguish "I lost consciousness for a full week" and "my memories from the last week were erased"? (Do I need to reread the Consciousness and the Brain review?)
No, your intuition is right, you can't distinguish between them in principle. But the fact this person was able to do their job normally for a week makes it vastly more likely they just have amnesia.
Are there things that you can only do when you are conscious... and then you could place visible reminders to do those things and to record yourself while doing them... and then review the records?
(Not sure what would be a good example of a conscious-only activity.)
#33: "housework" and "child care" are co-located and not mutually exclusive. You can be present and keeping kids out of trouble without thinking of that as your primary activity.
I'm sure there are other effects here (helicopter parenting etc) but wouldn't be surprised if that was the main one quantitatively.
#26: the "Named after two animals" section of the same page is even funnier. Giraffe seahorse! Crocodile snake eel! Leopard catshark! Raccoon butterflyfish!
#1. That's funny-- I've thought for a long time that knitting was an amazing invention while crocheting was more obvious, but crocheting was invented much later. It seems simpler to put one loop through another loop or loops than to think of somehow stabilizing a whole row of loops so you can put another row of loops through it.
Possibly it was enough harder to make a crochet hook than to make knitting needles. Or possibly it was chance.
I've seen a claim that the ancient Egyptians could have had gliders if they'd though to them. Plausible?
And there's the classic that people could have had a little magnification from drops of water if they'd noticed.
I believe without evidence that there are many cool things that our descendants will sneer at us for failing to invent, and some of them might be pretty simple.
As for alphabetizing, whether by the first or second letter, sometimes the remarkable part is noticing that you have a problem you might be able to address. Coming up with a usable solution is a different sort of challenge.
>I've seen a claim that the ancient Egyptians could have had gliders if they'd though to them. Plausible?
It's plausible to the extent that they probably could have handled materials and assembly if a time traveller provided them with plans for a working glider. Early gliders as well as powered airplanes were generally made of sailcloth stretched over a wooden frame, and the ancient Egyptians were capable of making and assembling both wood and sailcloth. I don't know the details of how the wooden frames were assembled, but I would be surprised if it were completely outside of ancient capabilities to assemble something functionally similar. Control surfaces are probably the hardest part: the Wright Brothers' prototypes used a rope-and-pulley mechanism to twist the wingtips. The earliest known pulley mechanism dates from 12th Dynasty Egypt (~2000 BC - 1800 BC, during the Middle Kingdom period), so that's probably the earliest you could assemble a workable glider.
Actually designing it is much harder, since they were several steps short of the physics to design a stable glider and the necessary control surfaces, and flying machines can be a bit unforgiving of attempt to iterate empirically on the question of getting them flying in the first place.
The classical Greeks wrote about magnifying glasses. Here's a lens from 700BC Mesopotamia. There are claims about Chinese and Egyptian lenses thousands of years earlier, but I haven't seen pictures.
Over the weekend I attended a rationality meetup in Chicago. The host there noted that we are weird among rationalists for inclining more toward Hanson than Yudkowsky in the AI foom debate. Lifland's review expressed concern that people will feel bait-and-switched if they read McAskill as their intro to EA and then discover everyone is focused on AI. Such people should just move to Chicago!
I don't think leaning toward Hanson in many ways is mutually exclusive with being very worried about AI; e.g. I think Paul Christiano agrees more with Hanson than Eliezer on some axes, but overall is still very worried. He wrote up his agreements and disagreements with Eliezer at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer
Regarding #33, I was 12 in 1965, and childcare consisted of being told "go outside and play, and don't come home until the street lights come on." Ten hours per week from Mom seems about right, and two hours from Dad seems about double in my memory. Mom had time to meet friends and play Bridge almost everyday, and Dad worked two jobs to support the family. We walked the three miles to school (up hill both ways). The world was a safer place back then, and we didn't need so much supervision.
I wonder how much of that is that the world was safer back then and how much is that we were less scared of the world. I’d have felt a lot safer as a kid if I had a cell phone by which to contact my parents at any moment for help. That alone seems huge.
The world was a lot more dangerous back then measured by child mortality, which was more than four times what it is now in the US. But in my experience most people (and certainly most parents) perceive the world as much more dangerous now than it was when they were kids.
It's true that mortality dropped, but this could be due to factors not related to supervising children, like illnesses, complications after birth, etc.
#36. We need to pay to have 'the best' police. I'm good with paying more for police... more training time and such. (I'm thinking Jocko Willink, level of training.)
Any particular evidence for this, or is it just intuition? Do you have data showing a lack of training is the big problem police have right now (rather than lack of people)?
And Jocko Wilink has no law enforcement experience. In his career he was free to shoot people who had guns and nobody was going to riot or enact anti-navy policies in response.
But if you actually click through the charts, the problem we're talking about is mainly a lack of clearance rates, not police using too much force against people.
Done fairly high doses of Xanax before and had similar experiences—a day or two of acting and talking without making much memory, or none at all. Your frontal cortex is mostly off. Executive function non existent. You become a complete hedonist. (by "you" I mean me, you might have a completely different reaction lol). It can feel like you're waking up when you come off it, but in fact there was a "you" the whole time. Not a p-zombie I don't think, though I have the benzo p-zombie debate with myself in the shower more than a normal person would.
Relatedly, eti is actually supposed to be safer than benzos? iirc it's not a benzo, but something else. allegedly less addiction potential, and anxiolytic effects are supposed to continue with less tolerance build up. wonder why it's not used widely?
There's some dishonesty going on in the introductory claim:
> The fun thing about speedrunning is that you can respond to literally any piece of information about a video game in any context whatsoever with “implications for the speedrun?” and there’s a non-zero chance that’s actually a cogent question.
The problem here is that the other example explicitly identifies as "speedrunning" a mode in which you are scored based on how many items you collect (more is worse), and your time is ignored. Obviously, if "speedrunning" covers every possible way to play a game, then it is of no interest that absolutely any phenomenon might have implications for "the speedrun". That's just the claim that every phenomenon has implications for "something".
There are different categories of speedruns, any % completion, all achievements, minimum items, etc. So everything does have am implication for a or multiples speedruns, otherwise called, speedrunning. If curious, search the lowestpercent channel on youtube. If not, well, there you go.
There are different goals you can try to achieve. But you would expect the goal of a "speedrun" to be related to speed. lowestpercent sounds more like a "minimum completion run".
Think of the goals as conditions that must be met for the run's time to count.
A marathon is a race, and a triathalon is also a race. Even though you can't count a run without cycling and swimming as a triathalon, they're both speed based events, in that assuming the performances were within the rules, best time (overall speed) wins.
> As “texting your drug dealer” replaced “finding your drug dealer on a street corner”, control of territory became less important, and violent drug gangs were replaced by less violent ordinary people.
I don't think this makes sense. Control of _geographic_ territory became less important. But control of territory became more important. Street corners aren't the only kind of territory there is. The kind that's relevant here is the customer base.
If I head an organized crime syndicate selling heroin in Nashville, and you arrive in Nashville and start selling heroin, I'm going to have some opinions. The fact that you interact with your customers over the phone won't protect you - to be a drug dealer, you still need people to know that you're a drug dealer, and I'm going to know it too.
It's not like it's unheard of for organized crime to emphasize controlling "anyone working in our industry, wherever their office might happen to be located" over "anyone whose office is located at 2630 Elm Hill Pike, whatever business they might be in".
But there's probably still fewer drug dealers in Nashville by sheer headcount. Sure, the rival gangs would still engage in their customary shenanigans, but when you don't need to have a goon on every corner the wars end up being less bloody?
But that wasn't the claim. The claim is that "violent drug gangs were replaced by less violent ordinary people".
My counterproposal is that it's _the same people_ (modulo staff turnover) dealing drugs, and they're just as willing to use violence as ever, but the need to use violence has gone down.
Also, the twitter "thread" (it's a single tweet) specifically states that the mechanism for violence going down is a huge increase in the number of drug dealers, not a decrease.
"Twitter thread claiming that cell phones help explain the secular decline in crime since 1990. As “texting your drug dealer” replaced “finding your drug dealer on a street corner”, control of territory became less important, and violent drug gangs were replaced by less violent ordinary people."
Somebody tell the Kinahans they don't have to be shooting people left, right and centre, they can just use mobile phones instead!
> He did end up including something by me on the back cover. I must admit I was kind of hoping it would be hidden among many other reviewer blurbs so that my name wasn’t too prominent, but I guess all those other potential reviewers chickened out, like I almost did.
> I notice that, no matter how many long rants against feminism I write, everyone continues to assume I am a feminist. It’s like, “He doesn’t make too many spelling errors, his writing isn’t peppered with racial slurs – he’s got to be a feminist. He probably just forgot the word ‘not’ in each of his last 228 sentences.”
Why wouldn't you want to write a blurb for "Don't be a Feminist"?
Yes, there's a ton of disagreement about what "feminist" means. Let's call the two definitions Feminist-1 and Feminist-2.
Feminist-1: I believe that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities, and that a woman must never be told she cannot do xyz just because she's a woman (other than biologically impossible things, like producing sperm). I am a Feminist-1, and I'm pretty sure Scott is too. Basically, you are a bad person if you are not a Feminist-1 in the 21st century.
Feminist-2: I believe that society is fundamentally sexist, all men are potential rapists, women are oppressed and downtrodden and must constantly be on the lookout for all the evil sexists out to abuse/oppress/commit microaggressions against them. I am not a Feminist-2.
What's unclear to me is whether Caplan means "Don't Be a Feminist-1" or "Don't Be a Feminist-2."
I think Caplan is likely to be Feminist-1 but also to write his book in ways that sound like "Don't be a Feminist-1", and if challenged on it, would then claim "that's not feminism, that's just common sense/sound economic principles" or summat.
His wife is a corporate lawyer and he seems happy enough that she went off to college and got an education (despite a book about how higher education is basically useless) and then a job, rather than staying at home being a full-time wife and mother (granted, he also has a book about free-range parenting so probably not on the side of full-time stay at home wife and mother).
I realise I am making a ton of assumptions about the book and about what Caplan believes, and I also realise it's mainly because I don't like the guy - or rather, the views of his that I've read. So yeah, bias galore here. But an awful lot of people today *do* tend towards "That's not feminism, that's just basic [whatever]" because they have forgotten, or never known, that getting to the stage we now enjoy required a lot of fighting for women's rights, it didn't just fall out of the sky.
For instance, I'm currently reading a lot of older fiction - from the 40s-60s - and it is now noticeable to me how the generally male authors portray their female characters; they're pretty, and that's about the extent of it. They exist to be love interests/damsel in distress for the male lead, who gets a personality and job and interests, while the women - if middle-class/ladies - are just there to be admired, wooed and won. Lower-class women do work, but they're servants, shop assistants, waitresses and the like, only there to do spear-carrier parts and of no account else.
You don't have to be a raving feminist to ask for something more about Susan Saintly than if she was blonde or red-haired, tall or petite, as a secondary character in a story. You've told us about Marcus Laffert, our hero, and his interest in collecting match-boxes since a boy (which will come in handy when a match-box is a vital clue five chapters later), but Susan is a dressmaker's dummy, only animated when she needs Marcus to save her or when he's crushing her in his embrace and kissing her madly after he proposes. Men exist in a rounded world, the world we see all around us as well as their interior life, but women are - well, who knows what the ladies are off doing, when they're not there being the love-interest in Marcus' arms?
Not totally a counter argument, but some of this is just the degree to which many many books basically have a protagonist and a bunch of paper plates. So if your protagonist isn’t a woman, the women are all going to be paper plates.
I agree with you that most of the gains of feminism up through IDK 1960-1990 or somewhere in there should be protected and cherished.
But once they got onto issues like the “pay gap” and turning normal human courtship into sexual assault if the woman so chooses……..well it went a bit off the rails.
>I agree with you that most of the gains of feminism up through IDK 1960-1990 or somewhere in there should be protected and cherished.
Why? It empirically hasn't done women any good. Of course, reversing course would probably make them unhappier still, but just so we're all on the same page, these changes have coincided with women becoming much less happy.
I notice this very interesting disclaimer in the image:
> Note: Paid work includes commute time
This immediately suggests to me that we are comparing unlike things. If paid work includes commute time, childcare should include almost all time, certainly all time when you and the child are both at home. Instead, childcare is limited, in the "childcare-heavy" year of 2016, to 22 hours _a week_ between both parents.
Something is fishy in the definition of "childcare". It's very possible that the change in reported hours shown in the graph has more to do with different classification of the same activities than with different amounts of childcare being done.
> Japanese names rendered in Chinese look Chinese, basically, and while these are known war criminals, they're not, like, Hitler level famous.
This is a staggering claim. Japanese names do not resemble Chinese names. It's not at all difficult to tell the difference; it would have been obvious to most people looking at the names that they were (1) not Chinese, and (2) almost certainly Japanese. (With an exception for Tani Hisao; he was one of the people listed and his name could probably pass for Chinese. But he's there in the middle of a bunch of obviously Japanese names. The guy on the tablet to his left is surnamed 田中！)
The idea that nobody recognized the particular individuals named is enough for the story. It makes sense. Why did it need to be embellished?
I'm writing this in reply to all the comments above about children walking/riding to school, and the general level of mandatory suoervision today vs. previous generations. I'm breaking this out as a seperate thread because I think it's important, It certainly informed my feelings about this.
--NOTE: I do not remember the source of this story and I am recalling it just from memory, but I did read about this. (No, I swear! This hapened!) I will try to track down the original again ASAP. --
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So,
In the mid-70's a couple Psych grad students in Michigan (U. Mich or Mich. State) needed a grant proposal for the summer. One thought, "Hey! my Aunt. M_ says all the neighborhood kids kinda congregate at her house, maybe we could just, like, follow my nephew and his friends around and film them all summer...?"
In 1975, this was just fine, so two ~23-y male grad students got stipends, film equipment, a van, and permission from a dozen or more sets of parents, to follow 5-12 year old children around all summer and film them for months.
The kids hated it and were totally uncooperative...for about an hour, and then totally forgot about these guys and ignored them (even though they knew, and even helped them out, "Oh, we're going to the park now, maybe just meet us there.") The kids completely forgot about the camera(s). Seriously. (*)
The result was hundreds of hours of completely naive footage of kids being kids, essentially with no adults present. They really did usually kinda gather at Aunt M_'s house, which was central, around 9-10am, then whatever group would just go down to the creek or ride bikes around or go to the HS field and play. No plan, no leader, boys, girls, usually a core group of 4-5 kids but maybe a dozen, from ~6 to max of 11. They would invent games, have battles, argue, fight, make up, help each other, dissapear for a week angry but come back, the whole gamut of social stuff (pre-puberty and adult problems.)
Well, the footage was archived and theses written and was ignored for ~30 years. Then the grad students got back together and decided to do a "7-up" kinda thing and connect with the original kids who had been their subjects.
This is where it gets emotional.
When they interviewed a woman, 8 years old at the time, now (**) a mother with children near the same age, she wept seeing the footage of her childhood self, unconcerned, playing, being a kid. But when the researchers asked her,
-- "Do your kids play in the neighborhood with their friends? Would you let your own kids be in a study like this?", she was adamant:
-- "Oh, no! I couldn't, I'd be so afraid for them, it's too dangerous."
And then she started crying again.
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What else to say about this...? I will try to track down the original source. Maybe it came through Lenore Skenazy, but if anybody recalls reading this story please clarify, not just the source but any mis-remembrances I have made.
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* -- Stop and try to imagine a modern child being totally un-image-conscious and not even thinking about a camera being present unless it was a forced, awkward "photo-op" like a mandatory school portrait or a holiday with relatives and grandparents. Imagine a world where taking your picture was a distinct, formal event, that had to be arranged beforehand, and suffered at the time, and except for those weird occasions, nobody was watching you. Ever. Try to imagine this.
** -- This interview was IIRC 10+ years ago, the woman would have been ~40 then, probably.
Interesting...yes, a similar subject. TAL will not reveal the date of that episode, but it's not what I was remembering.
The crux of the story I remember was the interview with the mother, who wished children still had such freedom, but would never, ever, allow her own children to be alone or independant. How she cried at the contradiction but was still so afraid.
19 - AI art generation may put some number of artists out of work in the same way that photography put some number of portraitists out of business. But a lot more people are now able to hang pictures of their families on the wall.
I think some amount of this concern simply misunderstands the motivation for art (both consumption and generation). From signaling (look at this one of a kind thing I own!) to ideation (the brilliance of The Persistence of Memory has almost nothing to do with the technical prowess of Dali).
Stuff like AI art generation is going have a huge impact on art, but worrying that its going to 'eat creative work' seems wildly off the mark to me.
It will have little impact on actual "artists" who create original styles and so on. But for rank and file creative workers, a great many have been rendered obsolete.
#2: The idea that one of the bombings or the other might not have been justified reeks of historical hindsight. And I am not even one who buys into in the whole line about a Japanese invasion otherwise being necessary. It was a long war, tons of people were killed and tons of cities destroyed, these were experimental weapons, and did not cause damage out of scale with other activities both sides were undertaking during the war.
It is interesting (and maybe unsurprising) that Truman distanced himself at the time, and then later "bigged up" his involvement.
Justified is a strange word, but we could have just accepted a conditional surrender. The argument against this was that we needed to prosecute the emperor...and yet he wasn't prosecuted and even stayed on as a figurehead. People change their minds, sure, but it's bizarre that punishing the emperor was supposedly considered so important that the government were willing to have untold thousands of US soldiers killed in an invasion of Japan, but not so important that there was any kind of follow through on this. Which lends weight to all of this being unnecessary and just an excuse to demonstrate the power of American weapons to the world (mostly, to the USSR).
Well, the argument goes that the Japanese war government was not that impressed with the weapons qua weapons -- they'd already seen much worse in the firebombing of Tokyo, for example, and that they were far more concerned about the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, perhaps because of the very plausible expectation that this would result in permanent territorial loss to the USSR. And that the Japanese government actually used the atomic bombings as a way to "sell" a surrender to the Japanese people. From a certain point of view, they might be seen as weirdly grateful for the atomic bombs, because it gave Hirohito a way to ask his people to "bear the unbearable," which he might not've had the guts to do if they hadn't happened (or had just been dropped in Tokyo Bay as a demo).
As for the USSR: they already knew very well the power of atomic bombs, thanks to their effective atomic espionage and the somewhat surprising willingness of a certain class of American intellectual to sell out his country via a rose-colored view of Stalin's Soviet Union that was, by 1944, certainly almost willinglly delusional. Joe 1 was detonated a mere 4 years after Hiroshima. There was nothing about Hiroshima or Nagasaki that would've been a surprise to Stalin.
Perhaps, but it's absolutely not the official nor standard justification given. And the jewish communists working on or connected to the manhattan project had already leaked all the information about the bomb to the soviets. If we were really that worried about the soviets to this degree, we should have bombed *the soviets*, not the Japanese.
The really big brained move would have been to provide no help to the soviets against the invading germans and covertly provide support to the germans on the eastern front to help prolong the fighting long enough to develop the bomb, then nuke moscow, launch invasions of europe and defeat both powers in one fell swoop. Though of course now we're truly in hindsight territory.
Instead of "prosecute the emperor" I would say "dismantle the imperial system", which was amply accomplished. Japan's conditional surrender offer (which only came *after* Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the choice was never "conditional surrender or land invasion") seems to have essentially been conditional on still being an empire.
And, yeah, I think 20th century history might have played out very different if the Empire of Japan continued existing past WWII. Something like post-WWI Germany where the government gets taken over by extremists (again) doesn't seem off-the-table.
>Instead of "prosecute the emperor" I would say "dismantle the imperial system"
He stayed on as emperor. That was the main thing the Japanese wanted, the emperor himself. And that happened.
>Japan's conditional surrender offer (which only came *after* Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the choice was never "conditional surrender or land invasion") seems to have essentially been conditional on still being an empire.
No *official* offer was made, but we now know the US government/military knew that the emperor was interested in conditional surrender before the bombings were carried out and did not pursue it because they didn't want him staying on as emperor.
And guess what happened....he ended up staying on as emperor.
And even if you think this would never have happened without the bombings, it's absolutely insane that the US didn't even try to pursue a conditional surrender.
>And, yeah, I think 20th century history might have played out very different if the Empire of Japan continued existing past WWII. Something like post-WWI Germany where the government gets taken over by extremists (again) doesn't seem off-the-table.
The empire of Japan wouldn't have continued existing. There's no reason to think that we couldn't have gotten *the actual system that we ended up getting* with Japan without the bombings or invasion, and again, at the very least, it's indefensible to not even try. If you think there is some definite, iron-clad raeson this couldn't have worked...now you're the one guilty of hindsight bias.
Removing the emperor and charging him with war crimes would have if anything made it much more likely that extremists would have taken over.
> No *official* offer was made, but we now know the US government/military knew that the emperor was interested in conditional surrender before the bombings were carried out and did not pursue it…
Because they were very concerned about what the impact on baseball might be. Very farsighted.
I don't think that's really Wellerstein's point here. I've read him for a while, and my impression is that while I think there's a good chance he would *like* to find a good reason for the use of atomic bombs to be something one can just reject wholesale, as a barbaric act, he's too good and honest enough of historian not to recognize that the plain facts don't lend themselves to any such easy interpretation. He definitely asks the hard questions: *does* this theory of why it was necessary hold up? and often times the answer is "not really," but (1) that's not too surprising, that any simplistic theory of history is usually wrong (or at least insufficiently nuanced), and (2) he's usually aware that simplistic post-hoc rationalization either way is not any great indication of what it was like to actually make the real decision, in real time, while history was unfolding, and (3) those hard questions *should* be asked, so that even if the answer is "yeah it was the right call"[1] we have genuinely thought through why we think that way.
In this particular thread, I think what he's exploring is Truman's evolving attitude towards the bomb, and how that influenced -- in perhaps surprisingly long-lived ways -- the nature of command and control of nuclear weapons during the subsequent decades. We know very well that FDR kept Truman completely in the dark about the project, so Truman had to come up to speed very fast in April of 1945, and we can also suspect that Truman didn't really want to know, he kind of wanted to leave the warmaking to the generals, he didn't see himself in the same messianic/Big Brains Of The Outfit way that FDR did. So it's a very interesting story that Truman apparently was shocked enough by the sequence of events to reverse his attitude and assert authority.
It's an interesting question what might have happened if Senator Taft -- a civilian who'd never served, and one of the last non-interventionists -- had prevailed over Eisenhower in 1952. In Eisenhower it was no great conflict to have nukes in his personal hands, as people by and large still thought of him as "the general" and he probably thought of himself that way. So it was perhaps a mere polite fiction that there was a strict "civilian" control of nukes, far from the military side. And then by the time we get all the way to JFK, things are a lot more fixed.
But what if Taft had prevailed? Would there have been a lot more tension over the issue of where control of nuclear weapons rested? The pros might well have resented Taft, as someone without any military record at all, a guy in some sense on the wrong side of history in terms of the Second World War, and someone who didn't want to extend any kind of nuclear umbrella over anyone. Maybe that would've been a deeply unpopular position he couldn't make stick. On the other hand...the President has a lot of power, bully pulpit included, and attitudes about the correct stewardship of nukes had not settled. Maybe Taft's ideas (whatever they were) would've been very influential. Maybe there would never have been much of a nuclear umbrella, maybe the Cold War would've accelerated much slower (assuming Stalin dies on schedule). What a change that would have made.
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[1] And I fall in that camp. I would have used both bombs, and on real cities, not in demonstrations, just the way it happened. It would've been a hard choice, and I wouldn't want to be Truman at night alone in bed, once he saw the photos from Hiroshima, but I think it was the best choice anyone could've made at the time.
I'm also a little dubious of using the Cabinet's deliberations as.conclusive evidence of the reasons for surrender, as my understanding is that Hirohito has to essentially order the cabinet to ratify his decision to surrender on the Allies' offered term, and even then there was a coup attempt afterwards with the aim of preventing the surrender broadcast.
Apart from the surrender broadcast itself, which can be read as a political/propoganda message, did Hirohito ever talk about his reasons for ordering the surrender?
#21 The birth order thing has always been really interesting to me. My anecdata was that in highschool the top 10% of the class or so was like 27 firstborns and 3 others. kind of a hard pattern to miss.
Ditto in college where the TAs and people in the departments "academic" focused crowd was once again almost entirely first borns. Interestingly the professors were not, with many whose older siblings were like judges/engineers/doctors. A real "second son goes to the church" type of vibe.
Anyway, I see with my own children the cause I always suspected. Older child is victim of parents more rigorous and paranoid expectations for first child. by second child they have chilled a bit. Also benefits from spending more time with adults compared to second child. Also benefits from being tasked with helping raise second child (and second child suffers from this).
My first son is much more serious/academic and less "class clown/artsy" than second.
Anyway easy to see how that would translate into reading wordy blogs.
Fun Fact: North Korea's Hwasong-6 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a 770kg warhead to the entirety of South Korea and parts of Japan is derived from the Soviet R-17 Elbrus, better known as the Scud.
The soviet-built missile that was reverse-engineered in the DPRK was given to them not by the USSR, but by Egypt, in return for sending 20 Korean pilots to fight against Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
The etizolam story is disturbing and fascinating, and what I find the most concerning question is left unasked: was the author of the post conscious when he wrote the post?
On a personal note, I've been dealing with long covid for the past few years (pre-vaccine), and one of the frustrating effects is a sometimes loss of penetrating insight into my own thoughts. I've gotten fairly good at having apparently convincing technical conversations without feeling like I'm generating the thoughts myself or being able to remember details later. Guess I'll continue to stay away from etizolam
#19. It seems to be the same with movies - one can watch movies for free or almost free for whole lifetime and still not run out. Still, somehow new movies make many millions. And it's not because they're good - almost all of them are utter trash, especially compared to the best of old ones. But somehow this works, as an ongoing business. I wonder what's the difference?
> If you came from a family that did pretty well financially, went to college and then immediately started to do pretty well yourself, it’s hard to get any kind of context for what life is like at lower income levels. This isn’t a matter of the relatively-wealthy being dumb or insensitive; it’s just legitimately difficult to get a handle on what it’s like in a life you’ve never lived, and often being legitimately confused as to why anyone would opt to make less money instead of improving their lot with training and education.
I don't understand this. I came from a wealthy family and started making a lot of money right out of college, and it was always clear to me . The actual incomes and (some of) costs that the poor or even middle-class are faced with are readily available! More than that, they're almost unavoidable! Even those living in the richest neighborhoods in the world have _some_ exposure to businesses that serve the non-rich.
Is this just as simple as "I'm the type of person who ended up rationalist-adjacent so I overthink things"? If so, "dumb" still feels like a good description of this ignorance. Note that we're not talking about some upper-crust 0.1%ers here; the couple the excerpt is referring to has a _combined_ income of $200k.
This is a frustrating thing to bring up, because it sounds like a childish boast that I noticed something that the subject of this article didn't. I don't care about that; I truly feel like I'm missing something.
Re #33: there are 26% of households that are single family compared to 9% in 1960 (latest data that I found was 2014 https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/), so that adds a little bit to the mom's childcare number from today and makes the difference between moms and dads childcare a little bit less for the households with two parents
#33, about the childcare thing: can I venture the hypothesis that dads are so abysmal at it that each hour they do creates an extra 45mn of work for moms?
#33: I'm very interested in why parental investment has increased over time, and hope to write something about it soon. If anyone has any good sources that document the increase in sub-populations, or put forward hypotheses and evidence for why this occurred, I'd be happy if you share it here. (Or if you're also interested and want to chat about it, reply and we'll coordinate.)
#1: Valued dice-like objects found in association with soldiers and coins? Call me crazy but for their function, I'm going to go with gambling. With the undercut nodules doing the double duty of 1. holding interchangeable pentagonal pieces of card (did the Romans have playing cards?) or leather/vellum, and 2. helping to resolve the results of ambiguous rolls on uneven/non-flat surfaces. The holes could compensate for -- or induce -- bias, as in 'loaded' dice.
Prediction: the 'soles' of the nodules should show signs of wear (or light hammering) as a result of being repeatedly rolled and bumped against hard surfaces.
Either that or they're spoke nipple key multi-tools for the various configurations of bicycle used by the Roman military.
As for 38 (the negative utilitarian assassin) - this is particularly funny to me because I really wanted to use this view as an example to why caring about "potential people" easily leads to absurdity, when reading your review of What We Owe The Future. In my view, it is pretty easy to see that if you don't hold these beliefs (in that order, but I can't say anything definite about the relative weights):
1. human suffering should be minimised (for existing humans)
2. human happiness should be maximised (for existing humans)
then you get all sorts of bizarre results. If you drop the 'for existing humans' bit, you can get the aforementioned negative utilitarian view. If you switch the order of 1 and 2, you can get that it's ok for a sociopath (or whatever) to tortue someone as long as his happiness from doing it is greater than the victim’s suffering. If you drop 2, you can again get the neg-utilitarian view again, or some variations on a happiness malthusian trap.
I’m not saying this solves everything or even a lot of interesting problems in metaethics or population ethics or whatever, just that reading the quotes from What We Owe The Future made it pretty clear the author kind of got his assumptions mixed up.
Some people would find it intuitive to add “3. The human race needs to keep existing” as another axiom (I personally don’t), but it doesn’t work if it's not an explicit assumption. If you try to derive it from 1 or 2 you get strange stuff.
As for 39 (Yom Kippur and Egypt, just for general knowledge) - I’m not Egyptian, but I am Israeli, and I can tell you that here the general attitude towards the Yom Kippur war, including what they teach us in schools and so on, is mainly focused on it being an intelligence debacle, even born of hubris in some interpretations, where a lot of casualties and being surprised by the enemy could have been avoided. Interestingly, there are two dedicated Wikipedia entries in Hebrew, that haven’t been translated to English, about the wrongful attitude of Israeli intelligence agencies at the time.
Anyway, according to wiki, it doesn’t seem the Egyptians treated that war as a great success either, so yeah, interesting.
"Potential people" is a straw man. If a couple is planning to start trying to get pregnant soon, so they begin saving up money for their planned baby, would you criticize this as illogical? Or at least equally as illogical as planning for 10,000 years in the future?
Of course not. Because they are not "doing things to benefit potential people, who don't even exist" (no one does that), they are doing things so that when the time comes that the potential people are actual people, they will be in a better situation than the conterfactual world where they didn't prepare.
That... really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Have you read the book review? A, it literally talks about "potential people", B, it says that a decision that also makes less human exist in the future is worse than one that doesn't, cause its like killing them. Which leads to all sorts of absurdities (for example, every couple deciding to NOT have a child is responsible for the loss of life of that child and all their potential descendants).
Saving up for a child, even if they are not born yet, has... well... nothing to do with those arguments. Its great to plan for a long time ahead if we can, even 10k years, and I'm in no way against that. But planning ahead =/= the moral arguments used in What We Owe the Future. The (wrong) framework for ethics he offers there creates more problems than it solves, regardless of whether or not planning ahead is generally a good thing.
I recently finished reading "Truman", the Truman biography. It went into a lot of detail about Truman's atomic bomb decisions. One thing that struck me was how all the tricky moral arguments I have ever heard regarding if and how the atom bombs should be dropped seemed to have been voiced to Truman in meetings before he decided to move forward with it.
That doesn't exactly contradict the claim that Truman was not aware of the atomic bomb plans, but it is strange that he would give so much thought and attention to how the bombings should go, and then somehow not be up to date with how the army was actually deploying it.
>Was this person a p-zombie? If so, have we resolved the philosophical debate about whether p-zombies are possible?
A with sleep, twilight drugs, and most other forms of 'unconsciousness', I find it far more likely that people in this state are conscious and just not recording long-term memories of their conscious experiences, than that they were actually not conscious at the time.
(where 'conscious' = producing qualia in some way, not necessarily in their normal state of mind.)
#4: Concerning that all signs are starting to point towards the Ohio agenda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3fD5FPQBtI
Glad to see that someone else thought of the astronaut meme
The etizolam original post appears to be https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/comments/hftagw/etizolam_memory_loss_update/ FWIW.
> Doses of 4 mg or more may cause anterograde amnesia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etizolam
Scott, I think you may be confused on point #39. I (typical American Jew) was taught that the *Six Day War* was a spectacular Israeli victory / Arab defeat. The Yom Kippur War (six years later) was very nearly the end of the Jewish state.
If you want to see who won, consider how much of Egyptian territory was occupied by Israel in, say, September 1973, and how much is occupied today. The Egyptians knew that they could not recover the captured territory by a direct assault against Israel, backed by the US. What they settled on was an ingenious plan which was strategically aggressive but tactically defensive. The crossed the canal (a considerable military accomplishment) and dug in, waiting for the Israelis to exhaust themselves in the inevitable counter-attacks. This largely happened as planned, but, according to somewhat I met who was a junior officer at the time, the Egyptians became over-confident and advanced outside their SAM screen, after which the battle started to go the other way. When I visited the Egyptian Staff College some years ago, there was a frieze commemorating the crossing, as the operation which recovered the territory they had lost in 1967.
Only slightly inaccurate. The Egyptians did not become overconfident, the Syrians started losing, and the Egyptians attempted to advance in order to relieve pressure on them. Otherwise I believe you are correct.
That's another story I've heard, though not from a participant.
Right - if someone presents the Yom Kippur as an unambiguous victory for Israel, (a) I would like to see it, (b) I don't know what propagamda they have been smoking. Egypt achieved its goals, partly militarily and partly diplomatically. Israel succeeded at hanging on and not collapsing. You could say Syria failed.
We know it's a bad thing to win a battle but lose the war, and I think in the Yom Kippur war the same thing happened but one level up: Israel won the war, but lost its reputation of invincibility. Afterwards, Israel and Egypt could sign the Camp David accords and a peace treaty, if not as equals, then at least as states playing in the same league.
In 1967, the Arab armies were full of bravado and proceeded to be summarily defeated. In 1973, Israel was full of bravado and the Egyptians and Syrians managed to surprise Israel and totally overwhelm its first line of defence. Israel won the war in the end, but the Egyptians and Syrians regained their dignity. Moreover, the Israeli victory relied, in part, on emergency weapon shipments from the U.S., allowing the Egyptians to believe that they would have emerged victorious if it were not for the U.S.
In Israel, the memory of the war is complicated. The shock of the initial defeat and the heavy casualties dominate. But there is also pride in snatching victory from the jaws of defeat through some very hard fought battles, involving inspiring displays of bravery and improvisation in extreme circumstances.
Sounds like a reasonable way to remember the war, as collective memories war. However, speaking of an unambiguous Israeli victory and an unambiguous Egyptian defeat can be justified only on some cherry-picked technical definition. Even in purely military terms, the Egyptian army achieved and held onto one of its main objectives (Suez canal); then, at the negotiating table, it got essentially what it wanted. Israel got an expensive draw, paid with the lives of not a few young men, especially in comparison with its population.
#32: My fiancee woke up the other night, we conversed briefly, then she left the room and came back 5-10 minutes later. The next morning she told me she had no memory of it, and asserted that she was therefore unconscious during the time. On the other hand, it seems possible that she was conscious but not forming memories. I have no idea how you would disentangle these two possibilities.
There've been times when I'd get in to a state where I was able to form memories but not conscious - I'd be collapsed in a really uncomfortable position and a couple times people came up and started hitting or kicking me, but I didn't have any internal monologue or opinion on it at the time and didn't move or do anything about it.
That's very hard to wrap my head around. What can you have memories of if not your first person perspective?
It was my first person perspective, but just the raw sensory experience without any commentary. Like, if you ended up in some kind of situation where you couldn't move, your memory of that experience would include thinking about how to get out of that situation, or how you felt about it. In those moments, I had none of that.
Wow that's extremely interesting, thanks for sharing.
I think I read that when you black out drunk you are not unconscious, you stop forming memories. I seem to remember specifically that the conversion from short to long term memories is disrupted somehow. My own experience confirms this in the sense that when I’ve blacked out sometimes I start to uncover some memories of the night later during the day. The memories I recover confirm I was conscious at the time. More obviously: My mom is in her eighties and often forgets things but is not a zombie.
That’s indeed what “blacked out” means, as opposed to “passed out.” People aren’t very consistent about how they use the term, though.
This always fascinated me. In my harder partying youth, there were times I'd think "I wonder if I'm to drunk to remember this tomorrow." And then I'd think, "If I'm thinking this then it must be I'm not that drunk." But what always blew my mind is thinking how many times I'd thought that and not remembered it the next day. Trippy.
How do remember what you can't remember?
Wikipedia says Etizolam is known to cause retrograde amnesia, so that's probably what happened to that guy as well. (Albeit losing a week is more extreme than merely failing to record short-term memories.)
Kind of a boring answer compared to "Blindsight was right", I guess, although there are some interesting philosophical questions in amnesia and continuity of identity.
I remember - or should I say, I don't remember - falling asleep on a bicycle and waking up a few kilometers later, at the other end of a bumpy forest dirt road. And I'm nearly certain I fell asleep and not simply failed to form memories, because I was suffering from what I clearly recognize as symptoms of sleep deprivation at the time, and this made them go away the way they usually do once I manage to take a short nap.
My take is that our brains can really do a lot on an autopilot. Going through an entire workweek? Perhaps not, but I only see it as extremely unlikely rather than inconceivable. Even when we're conscious, a vast majority of our actions are automatic, many of them extremely complex, layering subprocedures over subprocedures. There are entire schools and practices aiming to enhance humans' awareness of what they're perceiving and doing, but most of us only really start consciously noticing things when something goes wrong and our automatic procedures all throw an exception.
My other take is that GPTs of the world are best conceived as this kind of autopilot without consciousness. For this reason, I don't find "GPT may make mistakes, but so do humans" a particularly convincing takedown of the AGI-through-deep-learning-skeptic position that some think it is. Humans make mistakes when the System 1 parts of their brains make them and System 2 fails to intervene. But it's the System 2 parts that we're thinking of when we imagine AGI, and currently it just doesn't seem we're getting any closer to it.
This reminds me of something I read.
Somewhere in the autobiography of C.S. Lewis, in the section about serving in the Army during World War I, he makes a comment about falling asleep while marching...and waking up while still marching.
At the time I first read it, I did not believe that this was a possible scenario. I thought he was engaging in exaggeration of some sort. It confused me, though. That sequence of stories didn't look like exaggeration: it was about how the military was bad in some ways, and life in school had been bad in other ways. People weren't expected to like life in the military; people were expected to like life in school. Neither the school stories nor the military stories felt like exaggerations.
This one event, falling asleep while marching, stuck out as something very odd.
But seeing stories like yours, I now suspect that Lewis experienced something similar. Sleep deprivation is not surprising among military men during wartime. Either napping-while-marching or losing-ability-to-form-memories-while-marching could have happened.
I saw a young man fall asleep while standing at attention with his eyes open while I was in the army. He was very confused when a sergeant, with some effort, managed to wake him up.
According to my wife I regularly talk in my sleep, and would have full conversations with her. If I speak with her after I go to bed, she ignores me until I prove I am actually awake. Often by quizzing me or just telling me to go back to sleep. I have apparently told her that I was awake and not sleeping during these exchanges, though I do not remember that.
I do this as well. Often it's as I'm falling asleep, and neither of us realizes I'm not conscious until I either say something ridiculous or stop responding altogether.
I usually start suddenly talking about food when I’m drifting off to sleep during a conversation with my wife.
I have been told that when I sleep-talk, I am aware that I am asleep and sometimes correct people who think I am awake.
I wish I could do that. My self-awareness isn't always that good even when I am awake.
My partner does this too. He falls asleep next to me on the couch while we're watching YouTube, and if I ask if he's asleep, he says no, but it's clear that he is, because when he's not asleep he will actually say something more contentful, either about the video or that it's time to go to bed or something. When he's asleep, it's just a flat denial that he's asleep and no more behavior.
What if you did form memories, but couldn't remember them? But later you did...
After I got my wisdom teeth out, I was taking opioids with no apparent effect. No symptoms, but pain didn't go away, either. The sutures in the back of my mouth bothered my tongue. So I pulled them out. It made total sense at the time!!! Then I completely forgot I'd done that. I only remembered that "the doctor will be mad." But I didn't know WHY I expected the doctor to be angry.
Six months later, I watched a medical show. ER doctor told her patient to come back to get the sutures taken out, or else they'd heal like a railroad. The memory of pulling out my sutures came rushing back, along with, "Ohhh, THAT'S why I thought the doctor would be mad!''
This is a thing that happens fairly regularly in the transition zones around sleep. I have had conversations with just woken people who assured me that yes, they were awake, and understood what I had said, and no, they weren't, and no, they didn't.
Seems to be a tradeoff between housework and childcare. That maps to my own childhood, where my mom would plop me in my playpen and go about cleaning the house. My DIL spends far less time cleaning the house and more time focusing on her daughter. And she tells me that you're only supposed to "containerize" your toddler for 10 minutes a day now.
This was my thought too. Modern parents feel compelled by society to fill their kids' time with quality interactions, and pediatricians recommend against bouncy chairs for >30 minutes and so on. Whenever I complain to my Boomer mother about my two toddlers keeping me busy, she tells me to plop them in a playpen and turn the TV on. I expect that a 1965 housewife doing that counted it as 'housework."
Boomer parents put their children into playpens when they're busy, but don't many of today's parents just put their children in front of a smartphone or tablet for the same reasons? Or is that just a stereotype?
There's something to that, but I see two significant differences. One is that a young child in a playpen is physically restrained in a small controlled environment, while a kid sitting on the sofa playing with a tablet is merely engaged in a stimulating activity. The latter requires at least a little more parental alertness, least the child put the tablet down and find something else to get into. In addition, young children playing on tablets will often ask for help or otherwise bid for parents' attention (source: my not-quite-5yo daughter) and current generations of parents tend to be disinclined to ignore them.
The other big difference is that there's a bunch of concern in current parenting culture about kids having "too much screen time", which I don't understand to have a clear counterpart with playpens.
Tangentially, we're mostly not talking about boomer parents with the "plop them in the playpen and ignore them" childcare technique. The earlier year in the chart is 1965, in which it's mostly the children, not the parents, who are boomers. Young parents of newborns in 1965 might be very early boomers (standard boomer birth years are 1946-1964), but most parents of minor children in 1965 would have been Silent or "Greatest" Generation.
This lines up with my anecdotal intergenerational comparison of parenting styles: my wife an I (born on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial) use tablets and stuff to buy time to multitask (or more often, just tag team who's on point for active child care. My parents (Boomers) used TV or Apple II games as distractions for me and my little sister: we had playpens, but they were used to allow parents to multitask (e.g. I remember my mother setting up my sister's playpen in the home office so she could split attention between work and taking care of my sister rather than needing to focus primarily on childcare) rather than as a total substitute for active childcare. My grandparents (Greatest Generation) are the ones who plopped younger kids in their playpens and ignored them, and who sent school-age kids out into the neighborhood to play until dinner.
In 1965, after we got home from school, we "went out to play," returned at dinner-time, and then did homework/watched TV/read until bedtime. Free range children were more the norm.
It's unclear to me (I suspect one of us needs to actually read this book to find out!) whether this is just aggregated across all ages of children or if they just looked at a certain age or what. Childcare for an infant or toddler is a lot different than it is for a 9-year-old, which is why we're here debating using a TV or tablet as a babysitter and time spent driving to soccer practice as all part of this. I'm assuming no parent answering this survey counted "making your 15-year-old help you fix the lawnmower" as childcare, even though it may be functionally similar to "entertaining your toddler while you fold laundry because he keeps poking his brother in the eye otherwise."
I had this same thought, though you could also argue people are more likely to describe these gray areas as "childcare" in surveys today, since a higher expectation is placed on spending lots of time with one's children.
There's something odd in the data, for sure, presumably as a result of question phrasing or averaging. Best case, parents together are spending 3 hours a daybon child care, assuming they're never overlapping? That's completely unreasonable for infants/toddlers, - even if they spend all day at daycare, you likely have an hour with them in the morning and two at night, and then they magically sleep all night, and what about weekends? I really suspect this data, while interesting, may have been collected to answer a very different sort of question and something weird is happening when it answers this one.
I think a lot of the difference in time could easily be explained just by the amount of time it now takes to drive children (and teens!) to the places that they would have gone to by themselves in 1965. This also includes daycare, and sometimes school.
I spent a good deal of time in the late 90s/early 00s being cared for by my grandparents, and they did not care where I was as long as I was back by 5:00.
Wandering around the swamp? Be back by five.
Riding bikes around the quarry? Be back by five.
Heading across the railroad tracks to the abandoned subdivision? Be back by five.
More interestingly, the actual *parents* on that street had similar views, so my cousin and I could reliably round up one or two other kids to go God knows where. Why were they so resistant to helicopter culture?
Whereas when I was a teen in the same time period, I wasn't even allowed to bike in the cul de sac in front of my own home, let alone go anywhere myself. This, even though I grew up literally in the middle of a county park full of hiking trails (at some point the county made the area a park and banned any further house building).
I hitchhiked every day, to and from school and everywhere else from about 11 years old till H.S. graduation. Some great experiences:
Two lesbians took me to a nude beach for the first time (12yrs and had no awareness such a thing existed). One guy and 5 girls took me out to a breakfast my parents never could have afforded (champagne and crab omelette at 14yrs). They proffered this invitation after I tried to bum a smoke and then offered to smoke them out when they were taken aback. (Marin County California)....
Israeli conception of the Yom Kippur War is almost a national trauma - treated as a big failure (mostly intelligence-wise) that nearly led to destruction and we survived only through sheer luck and tenacity. Many lives were needlessly lost. An investigative committee was formed, heads rolled, cultural and political landscapes changed dramatically (in 1977 the socialist Labor party was overturned after 20 years of rule since independence).
OTOH, Egypt, although the invasion eventually failed and was pushed back, treats it as a great military success that led to the eventual return of the Sinai peninsula in the peace treaty several years later (essentially, the war of 1973 was seen as restoring the honor lost in 1967).
I (Israeli) agree with this comment and other comments on the Yom Kippur war. While it is considered an Israeli victory, it is treated as something that almost wiped out the country, and a massive failure in preparation. It is *still* often referenced in various contexts in the army as a lesson we need to learn from.
Also, relatedly, the Yom Kippur attack is considered kind of a dick move, for lack of a better term, from the Arab side, since they chose to attack on Yom Kippur. For anyone that doesn't know, this is a day in which a big part of the population is fasting (a bigger percentage in the more-religious '70s, I imagine.) And on that day, no one is driving. It's like attacking the States on July 4th or December 25th or something, but even worse since the country is effectively shut down on that day.
(Side note, I think rationally the much bigger problem is the "starting a war" part, not the timing of it, but it feels so much worse that they started it on Yom Kippur.)
Famously George Washington made a surprise attack during the American revolutionary war on Christmas day. It was taught to me in school as a turning point in the war and a kind of clever strategic thing to do. I've always been a little surprised I've never seen a Christian (or any) American criticize it.
Setting aside the fact that the Americans weren't fighting for the defense/liberation of a Christian homeland in response to persecution around the world/as an attempt to reclaim an area they once dominated making religion more or less irrelevant in the context of the actual fighting during the Revolution as the primary reason no one squawks about this, had he done it on Easter Sunday, then maybe they might grumble a bit given Easter is the holiest/most important day in the Christian holiday calendar, not Christmas. I could go on about what Christianity/Protestantism/various sects demands versus asks in regards to worship, work, and holidays (a sticky wicket given there are so many ways to slice and dice it), but I think the point about GW's strategy holds, in war doing the unexpected and taking advantage of an enemy's assumptions is the smart move even if the other side thinks it's unfair.
Hence the old meme of the famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, captioned "America: We will kill you in your sleep on Christmas".
I'm probably a bit more aware of the Battle of Trenton than most, though, both from being a history buff and from my personal connection to the battle: I'm probably distantly related to the Hessian commander at that battle, Colonel Johan Rall.
It probably helps that these were hated foreign mercenaries/invaders and the Americans were defending their homeland. If a man breaks into your house on Christmas morning, threatens your family, kicks your dog, then sits down and starts eating your ham, is it rude to come up behind him, club him over the head, and throw him out? Must you let him rise to his feet for a fair fight?
By contrast, if Pearl Harbor had happened on Christmas, it would probably be remembered as even more dastardly.
The Easter Rising in Ireland began on Easter Monday, and I've never heard about anyone in England complaining about the date. Britain itself launched perhaps the worlds first carrier based air raid on German airship bases on Christmas day 1914. No one on either side was bothered by that, either.
Now, if Washington had broken a truce, I'm sure the other side would have been very condemnatory. As it is, his act was just another act of war, no worse than any other act by the rebellious side. The rebels might be accused of treason for rebelling in the first place, not for the date on which this particular act of rebellion occurred.
Egypt didn't choose to start the attack during Yom Kippur. The attack was supposed to start weeks earlier and the delay seriously threatened the secrecy of the operation.
Interestingly, I read an argument that Yom Kippur turned out to be the best possible time for mobilizing reserves, once the initial shock was over - the streets were empty and there were no problems getting in touch with reservists because they were all at their local synagogue.
Yep, an Egyptian Prof. (ex-colleague of mine) was quite angry about my suggestion that Israel had won that war - as it did all the others. I read up on wikipedia, and yeah, it was a kinda mixed result. Still, he refused to compromise; said that war was a national triumph for Egypt. - I travelled the Sinai a bit - sandbox, not much there worth fighting for. Shakespeare eternal:
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
Hamlet. Why, then the Polack never will defend it?! -
Norwegian Captain. Yes, it is already garrison'd!
> I’m a bit confused here; weren’t many 1965 moms stay-at-home? Don’t many moms use daycare now? How is childcare so much more time-consuming?
Huh, I guess you must really be disconnected from modern parenting trends. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but in the '70s and '80s parents didn't really spend time playing with their kids. We (kids) didn't come home after school until it was dinner time. We went to our friends' houses and wandered around the neighborhood.
That shit *does not happen anymore.* Parents spend massive amounts of time with their children now. Parenting is incredibly intensive. The whole thing is totally insane, but you can't really opt out of it, because there's nowhere for the kids to go.
> because there's nowhere for the kids to go.
I wonder if this is different for city vs. country. I remember my sister and her friends taking me to the swamp. Was it ok because it was a small town, or ok because it was the '80s?
The 80s. I live in a small town and never see kids anywhere outside. They all must be somewhere, but I don't know where.
Funny because everyday I walk past a sign that says "drive slow, children at play," but I have yet to see a single child playing anywhere near that sign.
They are inside playing with devices. I'm not saying this to sound like a cranky old man. It's just true.
We had video game systems when I was a kid, starting with the Atari 2600, continuing on through the Nintendo 64, etc. We played them a reasonable amount, but I don't remember playing with them much in high school. They were kids' toys, not "entertainment systems." And even when we were kids, they didn't really replace time spent outside. Of course, there was no internet, no mobile devices, no social networks.
To be clear, I don't think that technology is the root cause here. My daughter is too young for social networks and doesn't have a phone or tablet. She still doesn't leave the house by herself. There are a lot of things going on.
I was in Montclair NJ this summer and daily saw groups of kids riding bicycles around town unsupervised. Fantastic, felt like I had gone back in time.
I just got back from several days dogsitting for a friend in a subdivision, which is specifically designed to encourage kids and families to get outside. There are public playgrounds dotted throughout, plus park benches, ponds and streams, and even little exercise stations. And of course you got bike trails connecting everything.
I would say it's a modest success. Often when I take the dog for a walk I see families outside together, but most of the unsupervised kids are teenagers, and I rarely see anyone at the playgrounds.
My own 80s-90s childhood was spent growing up on a property with a pear orchard and horse pasture in a sparse neighborhood. I had a next-door neighbor friend who would go with me down the hill to a small forest with a decent-sized pond and a hawk nest. I guess you could say we were free-range kids since we were allowed to go outside of shouting distance, but our parents knew where we were (which sounds like common sense anyway), and we were never more than about 15-20 minutes away.
It's not just small towns. I grew up in the inner-ring suburbs, so definitely not the city but also not picket fences and cul de sacs. When I was still a pre-teen, I would walk over a mile to the nearest train station and take the train to downtown proper (where the train became the subway). What we did in the city was surprisingly tame (mostly hanging around in food courts), but my parents had no idea where we were, and we could have been absolutely anywhere.
This trend predates the 80s. My mother grew up in Jersey City, long before it was a gentrified outpost of Manhattan. As a teenager she would take a bus into the West Village of Manhattan, long before it was an upscale hipster enclave. She spent her time there smoking cigarettes and mixing it up with degenerates, and then headed back out to JC.
Parents today drive their kids everywhere now and think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe. A huge amount of transportation time suck
>think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe
Is there any evidence that this is (probably correct)? Everything I can find says that crime and child mortality are on the decline across the country.
As far as I can tell this is about *perception* not reality. People think it's more dangerous, despite it not being, so they've stopped doing it. Also something about how you're perceived by neighbors "oh they're the people that don't care for their kids."
I'd say it depends on the reason. Cars are bigger than they used to be, and there are more of them. Probably this risk is overstated by many parents, but I don't think it's totally crazy to be concerned about it.
If the thing you are worried about is child abduction, yeah, that's just bonkers.
I think it's partially unfounded concerns based on anecdotal news reports or rumors, combined with a social perception problem.
"Good" parents care for their children and are highly involved all the time. If you don't do so then you're not a "good" parent and subject to whatever social pressures there are to conform
Cars have way way better brakes than they used to, though, which I expect to dominate. Risk today is far lower than 50 years ago, but risk tolerance seems to have dropped faster than actual risk.
Relevant video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
It's unsafe from a walking perspective. Newer suburbs don't have sidewalks and the proliferation of "stroads," four+ lane roads with heavy traffic, makes crossing through neighborhoods dangerous. There are a lot of places where you can't get to the house behind your own without jumping a fence or driving a literal mile.
We're also moving away from cars to trucks with very high grills and poor sightlines, making it especially unsafe for children. Pedestrian deaths have increased dramatically in the US.
Pedestrian deaths have increased dramatically since their 2009 low point, but they're still lower than at any time from 1975-1990 (and this chart just doesn't have data before 1975): https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians
There's a denominator problem that's a bit hard to figure out though - overall population has gone up in this time, which suggests that things are even safer now compared to the 70s than these absolute numbers suggest. But walking for transportation has gone down, and if it has gone down enough, even with overall population growth, then it could be that lower absolute numbers translate to higher risk per hour walking.
I was about to bow out of this conversation because anything more I might have to contribute would require digging for sources, but you've arrived with sources and data, so now I'm obsolete :)
My intuition is that the steep decline in pedestrian deaths for children under 13 represents an equivalent retreat away from them walking anyplace. Possibly with the rise of reduction in drunk driving, which would make the rise in overall pedestrian deaths since 2009 make sense: drunk driving goes down, but mobile phone-related accidents go up as smart phones start to proliferate and cars get interactive computer screens.
I think you are wrong about newer suburbs, that trend turned around a decade or two ago.
I’m in Phoenix, and every suburb has sidewalks. Most of them have little parks and playgrounds too. Trend is at least 2 decades old, since that’s the age of my suburb, which is itself not one of the older ones with this feature.
I keep getting the feeling that very few readers of ACX have children...hmmmm.
The cars are not the problem. Blaming this on cars is utter misderected BS. Hyper-zealous safety regulations are the problem.
In Los Angeles, I know that every school of which I am aware (both public and private -- to be clear, I do not have children, just obs of people/friends who do) every school REQUIRES that every child be seen getting into a vehicle driven by a parent or trusted (there is a list) guardian, or an official school bus, and must also arrive that way. All private schools have gates and guards to screen pickup/dropoff vehicles. (One near my work even has a mandatory bomb-scanning stop, just like US Federal Courthouses.)
Children are not allowed to leave school property otherwise, at the penalty of criminal charges, and a child arriving on foot or otherwise without a parent/officer triggers a mandatory report to Family Services and often the Police.
There is no legal possibility of children riding bikes or walking or any independent means, the whole society is deluded into thinking DANGEROUS.
I have a longer more hopeful anecdote regarding this, but that must come later.
EDIT/Update:
I thought further and realized that Yes, there is one private school that does not require this, right down my street. But I live in a very close/old Armenian neihborhood, these kids probably walk at most six blocks home ... I saw twenty of them hanging out at the local Hot Chicken stand this afternoon.
And Public schools are not that strict, I apologize for hyperbole. Still, I will estimate that ~50% of children at public schools are picked up and dropped off, and there is special traffic control and LAPD officers tasked to this every day.
Among the laptop class, both law and withering social pressure, and 99% also the rules of the $$$ private school, require absolute chain-of-custody for all children.
BR
Yikes, this is not my personal experience, but I live in MN and maybe the rules are more lax?
My 9 year old walks to school every day with a group of neighborhood kids. But I do think that's atypical for many parents these days.
Even in the same country, in the same city, living on a different street can make a huge difference... which you probably only realize after you buy your home.
From my sister's home, you can get to the nearest playground without crossing a road. The playground is visible from a window. So my sister can just tell her child to go to the playground, and once in a while look out from the window to confirm that everything is okay.
From my home, the playground is near, but you need to cross a road, and the playground is behind other houses, so I cannot see it from my window. I do not trust my 4 years old to cross a road safely... she often pays attention to the traffic, but sometimes does not and just runs. So we accompany our kids to the playground. (There I typically just ignore them and read a book while they play.)
Similarly, from my sister's home, you can get to a school by crossing a low-traffic road. From my home, although the school is only 10 minutes of walk away, you need to cross two large high-traffic intersections and a few smaller ones, that is about eight pedestrian crossings, some of them with street lights, some of them without. This feels a bit too much even for a 7 years old.
My experience could be quite different if I bought my home just a few streets away. But at that moment, I did not consider these things.
That makes complete sense, both from the experience for looking after your kids, and not thinking about it when buying a house.
#1:
I have often thought these complex and difficult to make dodecahedrons were used as a note of rank or of an internal order of ranking within the military. They are very commonly found on battlefields and I reckon it was some internal order which needed a way to identify each other, perhaps becoming somewhat ceremonial over time.
Perhaps an internal spy/intelligence order of men mixed in with the other soldiers. Or perhaps as a simple rank insignia. These objects were hard to make and therefore difficult to counterfeit. Perhaps the spies and the scouting teams were mixed along with many of them being promoted over time. The Romans had a long history of various secret orders within their ranks and special rites and such within their military ranks. A perfect place for a curio to appear.
The location of the finds of these objects on battlefields and military caches is rather telling and the knitting thing obviously holds no water as they couldn't/didn't' knit. Though a fishing explanation or survival tool might make sense as a possible, though perhaps not plausible explanation.
While we may think of such objects or practices as something readily exploited, there were very limited games of advanced statecraft in that era. It wasn't as if the more decentralised Celtic peoples, as Julius Caesar called them, were going to be able to manufacture such objects or fit in with the ethnically different Roman soldiers. And even if they could, who would they report to on some long term spying operation...their village head somewhere in rural France or Germany?
I'd expect a military insignia to be flat so you can wear it more easily. These things seem like they would be kind of awkward to wear.
Might be less of an insignia and more akin to challenge coins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin
33. Do moms feel the need to show greater care for their children relative to dads? Does trying to close the parenting gap just set off an arms race of wasteful signaling?
Parents do so much today as they feel kids need to be attended to all the time. Plus driving (I rant about that in the post below this one).
Probably, in the same way the housework gap is (aside from being working more hours) a product of women being more concerned about cleanliness than men.
Re: 33 (more parenting hours), I'm not a parent and haven't studied this, but it seems likely that cars explain a lot of that. There's a video on Twitter comparing kids coming to school in rural Netherlands and suburban America. All the Dutch kids ride their bikes, all the American kids are driven by parents. As we built increasing pedestrian-hostile spaces, more parents feel they have to drive their kids everywhere. I'm old enough that I walked almost everywhere as a kid (and, living in Chicago, still do). Also, I've worked with people who are certain if their kids don't have activities from the moment they wake up to the second they go to bed, they'll become drug-addicted pedophile love slaves. And that's not entirely exaggeration.
All that mom-ubering and drug-addiction prevention adds up.
(Bias note: I think Americans would be significantly better off if we mandated Netherlands-/Swiss-style infrastructure across the country: the car made us lonely, destroyed our communities, and steals all of our time. )
would be interesting to see data on parenting hours in a place like New York (or DC etc). While I think your car-driving theory is interesting, I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC parents spent as much time parenting as suburban parents.
The Netherlands is flatter than a lot of the US, and has a more moderate climate.
The comparison video I saw used a North Carolina suburban location for traffic, and the Netherlands has. It wasn't hilly and the autumn weather wasn't severe. It's also worth noting that in countries with extreme weather, if they have good cycling infrastructure (e.g., Finland), people cycle in almost all weather. They plow the bike paths before the roads in some cities! Car dependence is a choice our urban planners and citizens make, not something inherent to our geography.
You were talking about the whole US. Some of it's flat or fairly flat. Some of it's hilly or very hilly. Being able to handle cold weather isn't the same thing as being able to handle hot weather.
Central San Francisco is famously hilly, and would be eminently bikable were it not for the cars. It's just a matter of mindset. The body adapts very quickly.
Not everyone has the potential to adapt, but there are powered bikes these days. On the other hand, what cities are very hilly but actually good for cycling?
Seattle has been a cycling leader for a long time—lots of riders there. There are places in Colorado with very rich cycling cultures.
But it feels like you're trying to defend cars by looking where bikes aren't practical. Bikes are fantastic, but they're not the only alternative to cars that are kid-friendly. Switzerland is bike friendly, but its real transit genius is its trains, which are so good, everybody takes them. Even a city that's borderline too hot for human habitation (like Phoenix is likely to become) could have trains and buses to get around. It might require that we change land use rules (e.g., abandon single family home zoning and parking minimums), but we could do it if we wanted to.
How is that going to work in farmland Nebraska, where it's 1/4 mile to the end of the driveway, a mile to the first neighbor's house, and 10 miles to town (and the school)? It feels like this attitude is informed by living in a dense urban area, without much experience of the large swathes of the United States that aren't that way at all.
I want to say obviously, no solution is going to apply to everyplace. But maybe that isn't obvious. In this case, though, truly rural areas are likely to depend on cars even in the most ideal scenarios. However, both Switzerland and the Netherlands provide robust public transit to their rural areas (which means mountainous areas in Switzerland), so for most Americans, we could do much better.
BTW, I grew up in rural America and I walked to or rode my bike to school. I had to go some distance, but that developed fitness habits I'm very happy to have today. Granted, I wasn't in an area so rural that the closest school was ten miles away, but very few Americans live in areas that sparsely populated.
I don't think either the Netherlands nor Switzerland is an appropriate model for rural America. These are both countries the size of the smallest US states, like Maryland or New Jersey. California has counties that are bigger than either country, and of course a mere rural county has a tiny fraction of the tax base and resources of a wealthy small country like either the Netherlands or Switzerland. The idea of running trains all over the US countryside, the way Switzerland does -- which is certainly marvelous, I've ridden the system and marveled at it -- is just wholly impractical. It would require economies (and tax bases) 10-100 times as large.
I don't know what you mean by "very few" but the USDA says 14% of Americans live in rural counties. 1 out of 7 doesn't exactly strike me as "very few." They are also, of course, a rather essential group of people, since they provide all the food we eat.
Rural counties aren't defined by living 10 miles from the nearest school. That's very low density.
While I hinted at it in my last response, I suppose I should be clear that when I said I would like to see car-centric urban planning abolished, I didn't mean that literally for all of the US. I don't think anybody I know of in urban planning/pedestrian-and-bike advocacy circles wants to make people in low density rural areas give up their cars for bikes-n-buses. But we could have much better transit (and housing) than we do in most areas, and one of the results would be fewer parents engaged in this madness:
https://twitter.com/grescoe/status/1564249783325364224?s=20&t=pASyNwBAGqbKJV9BAt2K-g
This is true. But 2020s US is no less flat than 1960s US.
Strong disagree.
America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965. Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I think the specific move from free-range kids to parent control happened as a result of fear of crime; both the very real increase in general crime from 1960-1990, and an exaggerated panic around child kidnapping sometime in the 70s or 80s. I wouldn't have thought that in itself was enough to change the parenting hours the way the graph shows, but it was a pretty big transition.
(Caveat, I'm not an urban historian, so I may be slightly off on my facts, but I feel confident in them)
1) Suburbs were built differently in the 50s and 60s—they were closer in and more urban. That's certainly in evidence in the Chicago metro area where I live. They have sidewalks, corner stores, etc.
2) As state departments of transportation expanded their role into cities and suburbs, they've prioritized cars (to the point where they actively fight against resident wishes). The roads are appreciably less safe, especially as big box retail came to prominence, which creates all sorts of flow problems and congestion.
3) Kids used to take school busses to school. Apparently, not so much anymore. That's a huge timesuck for parents.
4) Demand for "safe" kid activities means driving your kids about. My suburban friends with kids are car moms from 3 pm to 7 pm most days.
5) Yeah, I wouldn't deny fears over crime contributes to this, but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it. I won't claim its cars, although building a "community" where nobody interacts with each other isn't going to create a lot of trust.
6) Most of NYC isn't really anti-car, and while better than many suburban places, relative to places that have emphasized pedestrian and non-motorized or public transit, it is only so-so. People in other countries rightfully feel much safer sending their kids out into the world unaccompanied because you don't need a fully developed brain to deal with the treats. I mean, Japan has a show where they send little kids to do errands. And driving in Amsterdam is better than driving in most American cities because there's less traffic and better flow engineering.
School buses are declining? That's news to me; any idea why?
Cost. Labor, mostly.
Also because your kids are trapped on the bus with assholes.
In our city, if you live within 2 miles of your assigned school, there is no bus service. There are also no sidewalks. Thus, we drive our kids the 1.75 miles to and from school each day. Also, its not just DRIVING kids to activities - I can't just drop my kid at soccer practice. I have to sit there in the parking lot for 3 hours a week due to liability concerns if he gets injured while playing, plus another 2 hour game on the weekend. That kind of crap is a massive time suck that you can't get out of unless your kid just doesn't participate in any extracurricular activities.
That sounds very stupid and yet it does not surprise me.
There's probably a chicken-and-egg issue. More parents are driving their kids to school, which causes less demand for buses, which makes buses more expensive to provide per kid, which causes cuts to buses, which causes more parents to drive their kids.
there is another chicken-and-egg issue in parallel: people don't trust their kids to ride the bike to school because there is so much traffic, but half of the traffic around school at this time is parents driving their kids to school.
I lived a couple blocks from a school when I was in Los Angeles. I would commute to USC on bike, but I learned that even if my work on campus was done at 2:30, I shouldn't head home then, because I would likely be arriving in the most dangerous moment of the day, when parents in cars are looking for their kid, and not likely to see anything else in front of them.
Our kids ride the school bus. When i was a kid, we'd get on the bus right outside our house. The drive let us off by ourselves, and we'd walk in.
Now, the district says you need a parent at the stop when the kids get off.
> but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it?
What if the 'something else' is that people have simply become more fearful and risk averse?
I think that's true—my male friends with kids report going to the park with their kids means being treated as potential sex offenders, and parents who send their kids to school on public transit or let them walk unaccompanied are sometimes investigated by child protection services. However, the why of it baffles me. What made North Americans become so afraid of letting their kids have freedom?
I don't think it's only North Americans. Maybe Americans are ahead of the curve, but I think the trend happens in many places. Definitely also the UK, and maybe delayed or more slowly in other places, but I'd guess it still happens.
I wonder also if part of it is all the extra-curricular activities children seem to be engaged in. Some of it is probably interest on the child's part, and some activities really do help with confidence building and socialisation, but there does seem to be this drive to "you need to do a sport and an instrument and something else to build up your resume when you are applying for college", and that means a lot of driving the kids around to drop them off for activities then pick them up again, as well as making sure they have their sports kit, instrument, whatever else they need for the activity, and then maybe showing up for the school concerts and matches and the rest of it.
That's a good point. My youth was far less structured, and we often had many hours a day of unrestricted free time. With no internet and no ability to drive ourselves, we spent a lot of time wandering the neighborhood and woodland areas near our house.
Well you kind of need to work to get their little fannies out of the house these days, because the computer and the smartphone sing their siren song[1]. When I was a kid, it was impossible to *keep* me in the house. What am I going to do? Stare at the walls? Read, yeah I guess, but not all freaking day. So I'd be out of the house when I got home from school as fast as I could change my clothes, looking for some trouble...er...adventure with my friends.
-----------------
[1] It's not even that antisocial: they meet up with their friends online and play games. Heck, I've had siblings sit in adjacent bedrooms and meet online to play games. "Tell your sister it's time for dinner." "OK, I'll just drop a note into the game chat." Say what? She's right next door...? What a strange world the future is going to be.
You seem like 20 years behind the times. State DoTs have been pretty anti-car for a good 10-20 years.
Also, car-friendly and pedestrian-friendly aren't *necessarily* mutually exclusive. I live in walking distance of (1) a highway, (2) a grocery store, and (3) the local public high school.
Fear of crime wouldn't surprise me as a cause (though it's unlikely to be the *only* cause); the population of Rochester dropped every decade between 1960 and 2010, and the crime rate is still ~4x the national average among cities over 100k. It stabilized in 2020 at 211k (or at least, didn't get worse; there are obvious confounders), but that's still a third of the population evaporating over those sixty years. Over half that exodus happened between 1970 and 1980, which at least sort of matches the causal arrow of the 1964 race riot.
It's all fear. And laws and regulations encoding and enforcing the fear.
> America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965.
In the relevant sense, this really isn't true. By 1980, a majority of households had 2 or more cars, but in 1960, a majority of households had 1 car, and over 20% had 0 cars. A 1 car household is unlikely to be transporting kids by car while a breadwinner is at work.
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/
It's harder to measure the history of suburban population, since there haven't been good and consistent definitions of "suburban" as contrasted with "urban". But if you look at recent decades, you still see continued increase of suburbanization:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/
And in 1960, the US was still 40% *rural*, which was down to 20% by 2010, so the suburban population must have been substantially smaller in 1960:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
The first Levittown was only built in 1947, and while that first wave of suburbanization was pretty fast, it didn't make up a majority of the population until close to 2000.
> Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I don't think it's fair to describe NYC as a "car-hostile" city. The majority of streets are lined with free parking, and there are only a few pedestrian plazas. It's less car-friendly than much of the rest of the United States, but they haven't even yet started charging people for the use of streets for driving or parking, let alone charging market rates.
Also, I would want some statistical information to judge whether New York is actually worse for child freedom than the suburbs. What percentage of 10 year olds are *actually* allowed to wander more than 10 feet from home without adult supervision in suburbs and in New York? What percentage of 15 year olds?
Potentially relevant: it seems for Americans the rise in child-care time for both fathers and mothers, educated and uneducated, happened pretty suddenly in the 90s[1]. Maybe it was indeed fear of crime.
[1] Ramey, G., & Ramey, V. A. (2009). The rug rat race.
Given the tenor of the comments here, I'm fascinated by the possibility that reactionary American conservatism may actually break AGAINST car dependency.
RETVRN TO WALKABILITY
I broke reactionary and against car dependency a long time ago, so there's at least one datum!
Listen to this 99% Invisible Podcast episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
It is exactly about the car/pedestrian issue for children and how general zoning and architectural decisions factor into this.
Kicker: When asked how pupils come to school, a japanese school director is visibly puzzled about the seemingly idiotic question: How else would they come to school other than walking?
Well, bear in mind education infrastructure has changed, too. It's much less common to have schoolbuses that it used to be. Neighborhood schools, meaning schools within walking distance, are rarer -- schools have become bigger and more complex, with lots of add-on services and professionalization, so they are situated at larger intervals. School start times have drifted earlier, so that in the winter it can sometimes be twilight at the time kids would set off. It's also the case that America in general experiences considerably more variable weather than the Netherlands - snow, sleet, big thunderstorms, very low temps -- and that helps shape American attitudes in general.
Social attitudes have become more critical, too: if you were to allow your kid to bike to school on a day with a 20% chance of rain, and it actually did rain on him on the way home, you might rightfully fear someone calling the police on you -- in the modern Zeitgeist allowing your 8-year-old to ride 6 blocks in the rain is pretty close to child abuse.
Finally, there's a synergistic effect. If most kids are taking the bike or walking to school, then that will encourage others to do it. You'll meet up with your friends, there will be crossing guards and a few parents around, the large numbers will give both the kids and the parents more confidence that they get to school and if there's any weirdness there will be help right there. On the other hand, as the numbers who arrive at school dwindle, at some point *that* becomes self-reinforcing also: the small numbers mean the school doesn't provide crossing guards, there aren't any random parents walking along every now and then, the kids are alone and they are more anxious, and parents are more anxious that if there is some mild weirdness the kid will be completely on his own. Plus people like to fit in, and if everyone or no one is having his kids walk to school, you will feel strange if you buck the trend.
Add me to the chorus of "nos" in this. I was there, and 1960s through early 1970s was Peak Car Culture in the United States. Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor. Which means pretty much every residential neighborhood, urban, suburban, or rural, was laid out to support automobile traffic uber alles.
But kids were walking and riding their bicycles on the same streets, or adjacent sidewalks, and everybody took it for granted that this was normal. Possibly a 21st-century Dutchman would look at a 1960s American suburb and say "that's horribly pedestrian-unfriendly"; actual 1960s Americans were fine with it even for their unattended kids (beyond very young ages, of course).
Fear that the kids will become "drug-addicted pedophile love slaves", yes, we did have a bit of a moral panic about that in the 1980s. Also they might have been sacrificed in some horrible Satanic ritual. I don't think we've ever gotten over those two.
But the cars weren't the problem.
> Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor.
This doesn't seem accurate. As of 1960, a majority of households had a single car, and 20% more had no cars. It doesn't seem plausible that a majority of adults would drive everywhere if nearly 70% of households had fewer cars than adults.
It's true that people were much more bullish on cars then than they are now, because cars were still new, and roads were more over-built and thus less congested, and so having a car to use all the time was much more aspirational and a status symbol than it is now. New neighborhoods were certainly being built around the car at that point.
But given that most neighborhoods at any given time were laid out in the several decades before that time, rather than in the current decade, it would take several decades for most neighborhoods to be built around the car.
How do you think the majority of adults were getting around, then?
Again, I was there. They *weren't* taking the bus, or riding bikes, or walking more than a block or so. They were driving, or they were riding a car driven by someone else, or they were staying home.
They did do more staying home, in part because "I have to drive the kids to school/soccer practice/whatever" wasn't a thing. And because in two-adult households, it was much more likely that only one adult had a job outside the home. They also did a fair bit more riding in cars driven by someone else. And the fact that a household only has one car, doesn't mean that the husband can't use it to drive to work on weekdays while the wife uses it to buy groceries on the weekend, etc. It just means they had to actually plan and schedule for it, which they did.
That still adds up to an awful lot of cars being driven, often poorly and/or drunk, on residential streets that were designed around cars and trucks.
I don't think that's fully accurate. When I was young my family had only one car, but that doesn't mean my parents didn't basically drive everywhere, because they did. What it meant is that stuff had to be scheduled a lot more. You could not assume a car was available any time you needed one. Sometimes mom would drive dad to work, for example, or he would carpool with a friend, so she could have the car while he was at work. Some stuff only got done on weekends, or after work. We didn't go to the store just any time we felt like it, it was something that was planned out a week ahead of time. I remember it was a fizzy occasional when they got a second car, and we stopped referring to "the" car and started talking about "dad's" car and "mom's" car.
Edit: You know, I'll also say work was a little less all-consuming for the typical adult in those days, too. There were no Slack messages at 6pm to which you might need to pay attention. Nobody called you at home. My dad's job ended at 5pm, and then he drove home, arriving about 5.30pm, and that was it. Nothing from his work intruded in our lives until the following morning at 7.30 when he left again. You can get a surprising amount of "home" stuff done if you have every day from 5.30 until bedtime completely free, which he did. And of course, my mother did nothing but home stuff all day.
A sad fact, which has crept up on us so slowly most people don't even realize it exists, is that adults now have to work much harder to afford the middle-class lifestyle their parents (or grand-parents) enjoyed. It takes two adults, normally, and two college degrees, and often times nobody is working as few as 40 hours a week, and people are getting work stuff dumped on them nights and weekends.
When I was a kid an adult man, with a high-school diploma and energy, could land a job out of high school that paid him enough to start saving, and by age 23-25 be earning enough to marry, start a family, and even buy a house with a yard and support that family on just his salary. I know because most of my relatives did just that. This is much harder today.
The US simply isn't very like the Netherlands. And I am very pro biking, and live right in the city. But people in the US move out 30 miles from downtowns because land and houses are cheap and transpo is cheap. That isn't the case in the Netherlands.
Actually, the rural Netherlands is like that. And they have good transit options. They build housing and offices near train stations, and have walkable rural cores. We have a lot we can learn from them if we want to. Same thing with Switzerland, where they've chosen to emphasize train service over cars even for small villages in the mountains.
As far as houses are cheap, it's a policy choice we made to make it illegal to build mutlifamily residences and walkable places. People who want those things often can't afford it because we have such an undersupply of walkable neighborhoods. Parking minimums are hell for walkability.
It is really not. The population density of the "rural Netherlands' is nothing like the population density of the urban farmland that was converted into suburbs. The "rural" Netherlands is a tapestry of towns and villages crammed quite close together.
The whole country (~18M people) is roughly the same size as the Minneapolis Saint Paul MSA (~3.5M people). In the US there are entire states at a population density lower than the lowest district in the Netherlands (20-40 pp/km2). Meanwhile the lowest population districts in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul MSA are basically uninhabited for comparison. Maybe one farmhouse per sq/km.
Neither there or Switzerland is like the US, many more people live in a MUCH smaller area, especially when you are talking "buildable land" which Switzerland is VERY short on. In such areas dense development with lots of transit has natural advantages it simply doesn't have in most of the US.
Its one thing to chastise Americans for preferring housing/development patterns you dislike, but you are holding up examples where those same decisions and choices are simply NOT possible.
>it's a policy choice we made to make it illegal to build mutlifamily residences and walkable places.
Where are you talking about? Because that simply isn't true in 90% of the country? Are you super Bay Area focused or something? Also parking minimums are another thing that has been on their way out for 10-20 years.
You are fighting all the battles people already won ~2005. Everyone knows dense transit oriented development has advantages for efficiency and the environment.
Just like everyone sleeping in coffin apartments in one giant apartment building and only being allowed to telecommute would have even MORE advantages. Except you know, there is that problem of "what is life actually for", and disgusting reality of human preferences. And those human preferences you find so disgusting tend to value cheap housing and good schools and the freedom of cars over transit, particularly in an environment of relatively low land costs where that is easy.
Once again I live in the city and bike, and my wife and I are unlikely to move. But even many of our like minded friends and peers who believe all the same things you do, choose to move out to the suburbs when their kids hit school age, because the benefits of urban living simply don't add up for them.
Honestly the only very unwalkable suburbs are the ones built out between like 1970 and 2000. The older inner ring ones most places tend to still have street grids and be quite walkable, and even those unwalkable ones are mostly being slowly retrofitted as their populations age and they are less family focused.
Where this argument falls completely apart is that before the car, Americans built their cities exactly like the Dutch and liked it just fine.
How does it fall apart? When presented with more options people took advantage of them. They don't have those options in the Netherlands and so couldn't take advantage of them.
And what on earth could you mean by "liked them just fine"? They didn't have a choice. We could also restrict all housing to identical pods in giant rectangular towers 300sqft a piece, and people would "like it just fine" if there were no other options. That presumably isn't the point.
I think you'll find the Dutch also have cars. Also, Americans hate car dependency. It makes them miserable and impoverished in ways they don't understand and can't explain because they're not aware that there are alternatives. As you said, if we restrict housing to one dystopian hellscape, peole would probably invent a bunch of BS post hoc reasons why actually it's American exceptionalism or whatever.
I don't know where you're getting your ideas from, but I get my information primarily from people who work in urban and transit planning, and the story your telling doesn't correspond to the data I've seen. "Everyone" might know that dense transit-oriented development is good, but we're not building much of it, and the vast majority of places in the US outlaw it via parking and plot size minimums plus single-family home only zoning. Where it exists, it tends to be too expensive for most people, because it's in high demand. This is an issue people in the field are trying to grapple with: how do we build this highly desirable environment without it becoming something only available to the rich?
TDOT is shoving an unwanted freeway expansion through Houston despite residents fighting against it because they're of the More Lanes Is Better school.
Parking minimums on their way out? Have you looked at a map of Columbus? Or, for that matter, any American city?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBw5qVXgAEjAl_?format=jpg&name=medium
That's downtown Columbus with the parking highlighted.
It's true that we're making progress on all of this, but we're still living in an environment built on the assumption that the best way to go anywhere is the car, and its utility should be prioritized over people.
BTW, I'm not judging people who live in the suburbs. I'm bemoaning the policies ensure cheap housing is on the peripheries and force people to get around by car. I'm sure your friends are fine people who love their children.
>I don't know where you're getting your ideas from, but I get my information primarily from people who work in urban and transit planning, and the story your telling doesn't correspond to the data I've seen.
My wife has a degree in Urban and Regional Planning and has worked in that field for 20 years initially for a suburb, then a regional town, and then a large city. I have an unrelated degree but have done work/consulting in that field for 15 years. Literally you entire screed was the received wisdom in 2005 (or even 10 years earlier). And is what all the major regional planning organizations and entities have been pursuing the whole time.
>"Everyone" might know that dense transit-oriented development is good, but we're not building much of it
This is jsut false, it is a huge element in most developments for the past two decades. It isn't *AS* much as activists would want. But what ever is? Most major metros have significantly more bike lanes, reduced restrictions on density, than 10-20 years ago. Many communities have been adding significant transit. Park and rides are way up.
No we haven't mandated every American metro look like Amsterdam, but umm, that isn't possible politically or financially.
Suburbs and exurbs have focused on more walkable development very heavily since ~2000, and have achieved it in practice. many have much more intentionality around creating a dense walkable core for the elderly and pods arounds schools etc.
No people building developments on 3 acre lots out in exurbia aren't building very walkable communities, but that is literally impossible when that is the development type.
We don't build MORE urban density, because the (paying) demand simply isn't there, and HORROR OF HORRORS the entities that fund transportation and planning are at least a little responsive to the desires of the actual residents and not the dreams of 25 year old graduate student DINKs on bikes.
We have literally spent 20 years fighting battles politically and taking flack from elected officials for "putting our thumb on the scales in favor of transit oriented development at the expense of cars".
And now we have Johnny come lately's like yourself waltzing in saying "durr why is *everything about cars* don't you know it is more efficient to pack them all in like Sardines?"
>and the vast majority of places in the US outlaw it via parking and plot size minimums plus single-family home only zoning.
This just isn't true. Minimum parking restrictions have been crashing pretty everywhere in the past decade+. And single family only zoning always had pretty decent sized pockets of MF development allowed, and there HAS been a lot of loosening on that front as well over the past decade.
>Where it exists, it tends to be too expensive for most people, because it's in high demand. This is an issue people in the field are trying to grapple with: how do we build this highly desirable environment without it becoming something only available to the rich?
Highly desirable to *you*. Look I am on your side, but the market has spoken. And frankly I am not sure if telecommuting isn't going to make it a lot worse. It will help at least in that it will squash some of the need for transit/driving period. But it also squashes a decent amount of the appeal for density (being close to work).
>TDOT is shoving an unwanted freeway expansion through Houston despite residents fighting against it because they're of the More Lanes Is Better school.
More lanes generally is better. The research showing it isn't is mostly pretty garbage.
Most places adding more lanes reduces drive times and takes load off of adjoining roads. What *then* happens is development patterns change and eventually the roads fill back up and reach market equilibrium again. For some reason this is sold to people under the lie that "building roads just creates more traffic". Ignoring the growth that the roads are handling.
No one would hold it against a train line that "if you build it then people just build buildings around it and ride it" as though it was some sign building trains was folly and "didn't help with train overcrowding".
There are a very few small select poorly implemented (and heavily reported/cited) projects where it looks like adding another lane turned out to be counterproductive, but that is about it.
>Parking minimums on their way out? Have you looked at a map of Columbus? Or, for that matter, any American city?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBw5qVXgAEjAl_?format=jpg&name=medium
Well you are aware that parking minimums from like 1960 and 2000 might be still having an impact on the landscape of Columbus right? That most of those parking lots are probably not related to parking minimums on new construction?
But, yeah I look at maps of a lot of American cities. Generally the ones with almost any development at all are seeing massive reductions in the amount of total land area devoted to parking in the downtown. But you knew that right?
Where massive parking lots still survive are in rust belt towns in Ohio and Michigan etc. where new development hasn't paved over the old surface lots. Even Houston car capital of the US has seen big reductions in the amount of surface parking downtown.
>It's true that we're making progress on all of this, but we're still living in an environment built on the assumption that the best way to go anywhere is the car, and its utility should be prioritized over people.
1) It is the best way to get most places, and most flexible, that is why people like it. literally when people are thinking about utopian future transit systems, one of the most common ones anti-car people come up with are individual pods that ummm are cars without drivers.
2) It isn't "cars vs people". The cars are people, people are IN the cars! And most people have cars because they want them.
>BTW, I'm not judging people who live in the suburbs. I'm bemoaning the policies ensure cheap housing is on the peripheries and force people to get around by car. I'm sure your friends are fine people who love their children.
The policies don't really have a lot to do with it. It is just cheap land. You can buy a house here for $250,000 in house and $100,000 in land, or you can go 10 miles away and get the same house for $250,000 in house and $10,000 for twice as much land.
Plus your taxes will be lower, there will be less crime, and better schools. On the downside you will need to fight through traffic for an hour each day and use a car to get groceries. many people find that an appealing tradeoff.
Now I am with you in the idea that there are some uncaptured negative externalities to that style of development. And that we *should* be putting our thumb on the scales to counterbalance those and move people into a more dense economically/environmental style of living.
But my point is this whole profession has been VERY aggressively doing thumb on the scale for 10-20 years. Basically as much as the political environment will stand. And meanwhile you sound like you think we are doing nothing.
You do also have the issue of not having responded to my reductio. If urban style living is so amazing and valuable, why don't we go further rand mandate Tokyo style coffin apartments for everyone? We could cram most American metros into one or two giant skyscrapers. That would be SUPER URBAN. Why not do that?
And that answer is of course because it is absurd and people would hate it.
You've just given me the most internet of dilemmas: conflicting experts! Everybody I listen to on these issues is in planning or has recently been in the field and are not reporting this as received wisdom. I'm not in the field, only a passionate supporter (and occasional volunteer for high speed rail). I'll take your word on your credentials. So whose word to listen to without spending more time than it's worth me spending on research…
Re: your hyper Tokyo example, urbanism is street life. Taking the idea to extremes isn't revealing.
Fun glitch: because you can't be a tech company without being obsessed with tracking every action, the links from the link post are unclickable from the email while substack is down.
Granted, not a common failure mode, but still kinda funny.
Really? That's a rather easy failure mode to fix. Combined with their more general slowdowns I wonder if they're underinvested in engineering.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't you only be able to swap one domain for another, which would have a similar outage risk? You can't provide an alternate link that a browser could fall back to if the primary is down.
You could add alternate links, but that uglies up the interface to mitigate a very low risk event.
No, you can preserve the original link redirect on site outage as a failsafe. Though obviously whatever tracking happens when redirected through your (down) site won't work.
I can't think of any way to do that from within an email. You can't embed Javascript to implement any kind of fallback logic, and <a> tags only support a single reference. How would you do it?
At a guess, the comment might be suggesting protecting a link redirection service from outages in other parts of substack by having a fallback in the link, so that the service doesn't rely on the rest of their system being up.
No idea if this would have helped them today. I also might have misunderstood.
I wrote something about Peter Eckersley at https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/peter-eckersley-may-his-memory-be-a-blessing/183854 and a Wikipedia page for him was created at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eckersley_(computer_scientist) .
In addition to being a part of the AI safety and EA worlds, Peter was a computer security and privacy researcher and helped start the Let's Encrypt certificate authority and several other projects. And a really great guy.
#39: From a conventional/material (e.g. land conquest) standpoint, it was an Israeli victory and an Arab (Egyptian/Syrian) defeat, as the Israeli forces repulsed the Arab armies' attack, the Arab countries didn't gain a single inch of territory, and at one point the Israeli army was within 60 miles of Cairo. But from a psychological/morale/symbolism/"honor" standpoint, some Arab leaders counted it as a victory because they successfully surprised Israel, achieved some early gains, put up a very hard fight, and nearly destroyed Israel. This was quite different from the Six Day War, when the Arab armies were surprised and quickly defeated, and which left Arab military and political leaders humiliated. So while Israel "won" by conventional measures, it felt like a defeat; and while Egypt and Syria "lost" by conventional measures, they treated it like a victory.
Re 39, Armies of San d had an interesting perspective on it. While it was an Israeli victory in the end on the battlefield, Sadat didn't go in to win the war. He went in to try to get more leverage at the negotiating table, and by that standard it worked quite well. Note that the return of Suez was not long after the end of the war. (This assumes you didn't just confuse it with the Six Day War.)
Shouldn't the list of fish named after fish include every fish?
No
And every person is named after themselves. This is the cause of the infinite recursion of 'jr's after everyone's name, the stack overflow of which resulted in Noah's flood, when we all agreed the 'jr's would be silent and unwritten like G-d's name itself.
No, that'd be the list of fish named simultaneously with fish.
#18
Quoting from the paper
""
We posit that inconsistencies across findings are partially due to the concept of conspiracy theory itself. A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or circumstance that accuses powerful actors of working in secret for their own benefit, against the common good, and in a way that undermines bedrock societal norms, rules, or laws (Uscinski, 2020).
Conspiracy theories are not likely to be “true”––i.e., no even-handed burden of empirical proof has been satisfied––according to appropriate epistemological authorities (Levy, 2007).
""
I find this definition to be very strange.
Such ideas are deemed 'untrue' because they lack 'appropriate epistemological authorities' to confirm that they are true.
But a key element of various conspiracies is that they involve the leadership of those self-same authorities. This is a catch-22 and rather circular logic. In this way the powerful can simply never be truthfully observed as acting in conspiracy of any organisation which they themselves control.
This is a rather absurd metric and history is full of examples of elites both committing and hiding their own crimes. The more recent and domestic an event, the more likely it will be deemed as 'untrue' by authority figures. They aren't going to police themselves or convict themselves of their own crimes!
I know I'm slightly exaggerating here and one might pretend there is some line between a given president and the FBI or the NY Times, etc. and the 'authority' and gatekeepers of truth are not quite so narrowly defined by the author as I'm making them out to be.
But my point is self-evident that elites have wide ranging powers and influence, more than enough to hide their crimes or abuses of power which are not in the interest of those they nominally represent. From things as simple as a Senator's son not getting a DUI or the same treatment for petty crimes all the way up to lying about the reasons for launching a war. History shows us little other than these sorts of abuses of power by powerful people and them lying, hiding, and denying this while often going unpunished. Were Pinochet's death squads a conspiracy as well?
Then I looked towards the list of conspiracies mentioned and nominally chosen for their 'lack of truth' as defined above along with people of various political backgrounds believing in them.
Here are a few that I picked out as ones I think are quite true and we can find many examples of them being true...yet here in this survey they are used as typical 'wrong' conspiracy theories to ask people about.
Notably missing are several confirmed elite conspiracies which have come to light as 'accepted by authorities' to some degree over time. Such as the lies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Gulf of Tonkin incident, etc. If anything, and across history we see such elite conspiracies and propaganda campaigns are common.
Such as in Soviet Russia where many truths were denied by official bodies, such as the number of people starving to death or that their 5-year plans were working. Or about how globalism is good for all, despite it impoverishing formerly good blue-collar jobs as seen in the Rust Belt.
Back to the paper:
Elite pedophile rings - there are many of these which have come to light over the years. Epstein most recently. About 10 years ago there was a close associate and clergyman whose name I forget in England was also found out for this. Also you know...the Vatican and Catholic Church system....but this is an 'untrue conspiracy theory'?
Epstein murdered - ummm...yea, he was, it was obvious.
Covid threat exaggerated - umm....does anyone disagree with this who doesn't work for big pharma? How in the world is this a conspiracy theory of 'untrue' information.
Deep State - what...that it exists and exerts influence? Sure any specific claim may or may not be true, but any complex nation state will have decisions being made by hidden actors. Are we going to pretend the intelligence agencies around the world do not exist again?
This in itself is a conspiracy of doubt and propaganda to deny the rampant blackmailing and spying which goes on by every powerful nation. Were the Stasi a conspiracy too? If we take off our in-group blinders, we find even the mainstream press and media are very happy to see and describe the bad bad behaviour of the deep state and intelligence actors in OTHER nations.
etc. etc.
Several of these are quiet silly ideas which do not have much backing behind them and are clear power fantasies aimed at prominent figures - many of which I'd never heard of such as Bush breeching the levees..I guess that's a Hurricane Katrina reference? Or Soros controlling the world...these overblown fixations on single actors like Soros or a president or Gates etc. or far flung ideas like flat earthers and such.....are mixed in with unclear or factually true conspiracies.
This muddies the water a bit and if one were to say in/out group fantasies of Obama did this that or the other or Trump did xyz...ok sure, that's true and obvious enough. You don't find a lot of ardent Dems being overly concerned about all the drone strikes killing 90%+ civilians around the middle east which is real or with the wacky 'birther' idea of Obama not being a US Citizen or his birth certificate being fake. Those are weird things to mix together, but it is true far fewer dems would be inclined to think those things.
Overall I think the article makes a fairly obvious and pedestrian point, but is more harmful in casting doubt on very clearly true conspiracies run by elites....with the strange idea that we need those same elites to confirm and 'authorise' the truth of their own crimes to us publicly.
MartyrMade's series of podcasts on Epstein made some comparisons to recent sex trafficking rings that were shocking. Shocking because for how salacious they were, and how our media loves tales sex crimes and corruption, I'd never heard of them.
For example, the Dutroux affair. Marc Dutroux, a Belgian, kidnapped and raped multiple young girls, was caught, convicted, and was jailed just three years. He start committing the same crimes again not long after but managed to escape arrest by virtue of either extreme police incompetence or police cooperation.
Dutroux was on public assistance but managed to own ten houses.
Many witnesses were murdered or died under suspicious circumstances.
Dutroux claimed to be supplying powerful people with child sex slaves. There were witnesses, whose identities were protected, that corroborated those claims.
Dutroux was put away, but the trafficking ring was never investigated.
There are dozens of more details on the wiki page, and on MartyrMade's episode, which includes other instances from the past century of pedophile rings and cover-ups: https://martyrmade.substack.com/p/epstein-pt-2-other-cases
The most shocking thing about Epstein and Dutroux is that for all these parallels, and for how much the Epstein story was in the headlines, I'd never heard of Dutroux. When people dismiss questions about Epstein's death, there's an at least implicit tinge of "that's too outrageous to be true." But we have plenty of examples of truly outrageous things happening with official corruption and sex trafficking.
Another case featured on the episode was the Kincora Boys' Home. MI5 was letting a group home traffic its residents so that it could obtain kompromat on its patrons.
I vaguely remember about Dutroux from coverage in German media at the time.
One horrible detail of the Dutroux case: at one point, his house was searched in a very cursory manner by police.
2 girls were in the house at the time, and died (by starvation iirc) later.
"MI5 was letting a group home traffic its residents so that it could obtain kompromat on its patrons"
IIRC the whole thing is a lot less lot clear-cut than that.
Also regarding Dutroux, I start getting skeptical when claims of stuff like satanic cults get thrown into the mix...
Why not? You don't have to believe, it only matters that the practitioners do.
There's ample evidence of people believing all sorts of nonsense.
I don't think it's far fetched at all, that there exists pockets of evil doers who also believe bonkers stuff
Because I've never heard of a convincing case of genuine satanism.
Begs the question- what is genuine Satanism.
I see your point though
The Fall River murders may have been what kicked off the Satanic panic. There's a recentish documentary that calls into doubt some of the witnesses, but I'm not familiar with either the murders or the documentary. I've been led astray by enough exoneration documentaries that I don't grant any weight to the mere existence of such a documentary.
I'd also argue that Charles Manson and his followers qualify as a Satanic cult engaged in ritual murder. Technically Manson was murdering in the name of both Satan and Jesus, but I think only one of those two figures would have approved of Manson.
Manson has his own set of conspiracy theories as well. He was likely a target of the Mk Ultra program. He was assigned a parole officer whose only parolee was Manson. He repeatedly committed crimes and was not sent back to prison for parole violation.
That parole officer also ran the Amphetamine Research Project in the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, working with Dr. Jolyon West, known to have worked the Mk Ultra project. Manson's young female followers were patients at the clinic.
I would say Manson and his followers do not qualify as a Satanic cult and did not commit ritual murder.
The Dutroux case is bad enough on the facts, you don't have to throw in cults.
Like two girls who starved to death because Dutroux was arrested and jailed for four months on unrelated charges, and his wife never took care of them in his absence. Honestly, the details as they came out bit by bit during the time it was all disclosed were so horrible, everyone involved should have been - well, let's say subjected to mediaeval style punishment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux
"One of his mistresses was Michelle Martin, whom he later married and had three more children with. ...On 24 June 1995, eight-year-old classmates Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were kidnapped after going for a walk in Grâce-Hollogne, probably by Dutroux, and brought to his house in Marcinelle. Dutroux kept them imprisoned in the dungeon he had created, repeatedly sexually abused them and produced pornographic videos of the abuse. ...On 6 December 1995, Dutroux, having been recognised by Rochow, was arrested for vehicle theft..
According to Dutroux and Martin, Lejeune and Russo were still alive in the house at the time of Dutroux's arrest in December 1995, and Dutroux had ordered Martin to leave new food and water for the girls in the dungeon each time they ran out. Martin neglected to feed them, later claiming she was too afraid to go into the dungeon. Lejeune and Russo eventually starved to death. Dutroux initially stated that they were still alive when he returned home following his release from prison on 20 March 1996; according to him, Lejeune died that day, and Russo followed suit four days later despite his efforts to save her; during his trial, he said they were already dead when he returned from prison. An expert asserted that they would not have been able to survive the entire time Dutroux was in prison on the total amount of food and water they were said to have been given. Dutroux buried Lejeune and Russo's bodies in the garden of the house he owned in Sars-la-Buissière, near to that of Weinstein."
I'm not 'throwing in' cults, I'm responding to someone who says they get skeptical when they hear mention of them.
It's plausible to me that evil murderers can be motivated by weird unfathomable beliefs, so I don't write it off immediately.
I don't know if it was anything to do with this case, and am not suggesting that - just, the general principle.
Are you in the USA or in Europe? Because I remember the Dutroux case, it made a lot of waves and was a big story throughout Europe.
Europe, but was a bit young to be following the case at the time
The USA. One thing I forgot to add as more evidence of the notoriety is that a third of people with the Dutroux name changed their name. The whole Dutroux population was only about 60 people, but still, I've never heard of such a thing happening with any notorious criminal who didn't also happen to be dictator of a country.
Has anyone visited KiwiFarms (before it was taken down)?
I never have. But now that it's shut down, I'm curious what it was.
On the one hand, I was almost convinced that it was a terrible place full of terrible people that are there to do terrible things. On the other hand, Twitter mobs can be pretty terrible. And a lot of Jan 6th stuff was (I think) planned on Facebook.
So, like, was it a bad place? Or was it a non-woke place that had some bad actors? Or something else(?)
I poked my head in after one of their targets committed suicide. Speaking as someone who is also suspicious of Twitter mobs and more supportive of broad free speech rights that most: it was unremittingly awful, like the worst 1 percent of 4chan spun off and laser focused on trying to ruin people's lives, ideally by driving them to suicide. I cannot think of another website I would be more happy to get shut down.
+1 from me—I’m very much for broader free speech rights, but Kiwifarms crossed the line into coordinating explicit plans for harm to innocent private individuals, which imo I wouldn’t classify as “speech” so much as just plain old terrorism, which is not a protected activity.
KF had a strict rule about not interacting with the "lolcows" in any way. Bannable offence and highly disapproved of among users. There's no evidence that any co ordinated campaign gainst anyone happened, just a lot of accusations. A lot of people with embarrassing Internet histories have an interest in seeing KF's archive scrubbed, particularly if there's admissions of inappropriate underage interactions or sending minors home brewed medicines.
Theyre a bit like LOTT, in that they reposted people's own posts, unlike LOTT in that they added their own highly unpleasant mocking commentary.
Horrible, if they're your own words that are being mocked but you'd have to seek it out on their forum to be upset by it.
Suicide, in any case, is multifactorial.
KF may be full of unpleasant and bigoted and highly unwoke individuals, but terrorists they were not.
Depends whether you consider doxxing to be harassment, methinks. I internet-know someone who got doxxed by KF.
...I mean, everyone here internet-knows a person who got doxxed by mainstream media and ended up changing his job because of it...
Does "doxx" refer to any mention of a person's non-pseudonym? I thought "doxx" was used for public posting of someone's personal address and/or phone number.
There's currently an issue with "won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest"-style harassment, where someone brings a person to their audience's attention in a negative light, usually doesn't explicitly direct harassment, but then that audience goes and and harasses the person nonetheless, because the audience agrees with the person that this person they've just been told about is bad and needs to be punished. At no point is a command given, but from the moment the person introduced to the audience the outcome is quite certain.
The way I see it, at best that is what Kiwifarms were doing, painting targets for the varying assholes of the internet to go after (some perhaps justified, others much less so). For example, a transmasculine author was chased off Twitter (primarily by a segment of queer Twitter) after KF doxx revealed that they worked at Lockheed Martin and got the job via their parents and people took that info over to Twitter. At worst, the site's users were actively coordinating the harassment (likely on some more private platform).
This makes me feel a lot better about the CloudFlare stuff, then.
I wish that what they were doing was specifically illegal in a way that CloudFlare didn't have to be the one to make the decision to ban them. But it doesn't seem like they had a choice.
Thanks for the info.
For context, here is a description of the incident Dylan is referring to, written by a friend of the person who Kiwi Farms drove to suicide: https://t.co/L5MuTsNGe1
Yep. And I specifically visited the website afterwards, and the related threads was 100% people either celebrating their suicide, or claiming it was fake and this wouldn't stop them. Not a single person going "um guys maybe we went too far?" Honestly the single-grossest thread I have ever encountered on the internet, which is saying something.
Literally someone in this thread claiming "there is no evidence that they're dead."
Is there any evidence that they're dead?
I think that the fact that there is a website saying someone is dead is evidence that they're dead. It's not *conclusive* evidence, but it's pretty strong, especially when people who claim to have known the person are running it.
For further context here is the actual thread about this person https://archive.ph/MfUhq
I think https://encyclopediadramatica.online is still up and captures some of the vibe, although it's a wiki and not a forum.
It was a terrible place with terrible people, but I also sort of respect it as the last natural habitat of a certain c. 2010 species of Internet troll, sort of a living fossil.
ED doesn't really capture what Kiwi Farms was. It captures the environment that Kiwi Farms grew out of, but Kiwi Farms was where that vibe curdled into hatred and self-righteousness.
I think what Scott is saying is that they both capture a culture that views sincerity itself with content: everything is to be treated as a source of ironic humor, and anyone who holds any belief or view sincerely is a tool who deserves to get trolled.
The different is that Encyclopedia Dramatic is just a long-winded accounting of all the ways a troll would make fun of a thing, whereas Kiwi Farms was an actual community where people organized and tried to one-up one another in their attempts to troll private individuals, which inevitably led to nonstop harassment campaigns, swatting, and other attempts to genuinly ruin people's lives. A threat that the targets HAVE to take seriously and treat sincerely, which then causes the KF folks to double down ("look how sensitive and pearl-clutching they are!")
*views sincerity itself with contempt
There's an edit function hidden in the ellipsis menu
Thank you! Handy to know for the future. [Insert rant about mobile-first web design here].
But my point was that Kiwi Farms absolutely *wasn't* that. There was lots of sincere belief-holding on Kiwi Farms.
"Kiwi Farms was an actual community where people organized and tried to one-up one another in their attempts to troll private individuals, which inevitably led to nonstop harassment campaigns, swatting, and other attempts to genuinly ruin people's lives."
Could you elaborate on which threads you saw this happening in? I have lurked Kiwifarms on and off for a past few years, but I don't have an account, so perhaps you saw this on threads restricted to account-holders?
It's a big forum and I know I barely read a fraction of it, but I would say threads were consistently along the lines of "Look what this nutter posted on social media today, let's point and laugh" (except in very rude terms) and anything resembling a plan to contact or troll the subject was consistently met with mod warnings, deletions, thread bans, and/or their version of downvotes. I definitely wouldn't describe the site as a place where people jockeyed to come up with trolling plans. They had their own slang referring to such as "gay ops" and "weening" with obvious derision.
I visited only once, scrolled through a couple threads, and was disgusted enough that I did not read further. It is entirely possible that those threads were unusually bad and not representative of the larger forum, but I'm honestly skeptical that that's the case. I don't remember the thread titles, so couldn't tell you, sorry. But they sure as heck had not been deleted, and the entire attitude was scorn and derision to the person who killed themselves, and not a single display of compassion or otherwise taking it seriously that I saw (again, I scrolled through, I did not read every single post in the lengthy thread, I was not going to do that to myself).
Just a bad place. Not as political as you might be expecting, just a forum for people with an extremely unhealthy obsession for random internet people
I've read a few threads over the years and I'd describe it as "celebrity gossip, except instead of celebrities both the gossipers and the people being gossiped about are generally Internet weirdos". And as with celebrity gossip, the allegations that this often rose to the level of stalking and harassment are largely true.
I wouldn't describe what I saw as politically right-wing or even political at all.
When internet users talk of "weaponized autism", Kiwifarms is the ideal they are referencing.
Some of the respondents above me are glad to see the damage done to the place, but from a consequentialist standpoint I think it is ultimately bad, even putting aside any principles of freedom of expression. Though many users of KF were likely bad people, their targets were in most cases much worse.
Notably, the antagonist in their current downfall, Keffals, was consistently exposed for rampant paedophilia by the site. But none of the articles focused on the situation saw fit to mention that, despite featuring Keffals in many of them.
It's up at the .top domain and at uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion on TOR, though you might have to try a couple times due to the DDOS.
Virtually everything you have heard about Kiwifarms is a lie. I was lurking there during all the alleged instances of "driving people to suicide". It didn't happen. The problem is that substantiating this claim with evidence would require reading through thousands of pages of forum threads and won't convince the sort of people who are ideologically invested in shutting KF down.
KF is a place full of fairly normal people who laugh at exhibitionistic internet weirdos on their lunch break and freely express their distaste for current social trends. Interacting with lolcows is strongly discouraged. Most of the "harassment" and "doxing" consists of archiving public social media posts and commenting on them. The userbase is surprisingly diverse. The main thing that unites them, besides having a sense of humor, is the experience of seeing obvious truths become unsayable in their offline communities and on the wider internet.
People claim to be persecuted by KF because it sounds far more noble than the reality of being laughed at for their embarrassing antics or, as is frequently the case, having their criminal behavior documented.
Re the document linked below by Konstantin: There's no evidence that the guy is dead at all.
Isn't it available on archive. Org?
Nope, it's been taken down from there as well.
I had a look a few days ago while it was still available on .ru.
First impression was that it was a fairly ordinary sort of forum. It lacked the look-at-me edginess of the chans, and while there was certainly a lot of jargon going on which made it hard for an outsider to immediately understand, it wasn't as impenetrable as a lot of other forums I've seen.
There were various subforums devoted to things like food and TV where you'd find ordinary sorts of discussions about ordinary sorts of topics like "Which country has the worst cuisine?"
But the meat of the forum seemed to be the "lolcows" section which was filled with massive threads making fun of particular people. Some of these threads were 5+ years old, and had hundreds of pages. A "lolcow" is apparently a person whose behaviour is so consistently terrible that you can keep going back and laughing at their latest activity, milking them for lols.
The lolcows ran the gamut from massive public figures (like Donald Trump) through to a bunch of "internet-famous" people that I knew about (like Brianna Wu or MovieBob Chipman) and a whole bunch of people that I had personally never heard of who tended to fall into categories like "twitch streamer" or "youtuber". Since I mostly looked at the threads of people I'd heard of, I may have got a biased impression of what was going on here. The popular threads seemed to be a constant stream of "look at the latest terrible thing done by this terrible person". I didn't see any signs of anyone being picked on for no reason at all; all the threads I saw started off with some kind of list of bad things done by the person which made them a suitable target for a thread. Certainly "being transsexual" wasn't enough to put someone in the lolcow category, they needed to have done something objectionable.
Much of the ethics here seems to hinge on the difference between making fun of a public figure and a private individual, and here's where I'm a bit lost. I hadn't heard of about 80% of these people, but I've probably never heard of 99% of popular youtubers or twitch streamers who mght be considered household names among people somewhat younger and more-online than I am. It seems acceptable to have a thread filled with constant mockery of (say) Donald Trump, but how far down the celebrity totem pole do you need to be before it crosses the line into "being a jerk to random individuals"? Less than a million twitter followers? Less than a thousand?
If you imagine a "famousness" vs "assholeness" plot then there's some kind of imaginary line on this plot where it's acceptable for random strangers to mock you in certain ways. I'm not sure where that line is, or to what extent kiwifarms tended to target individuals below it.
>If you imagine a "famousness" vs "assholeness" plot then there's some kind of imaginary line on this plot where it's acceptable for random strangers to mock you in certain ways.
I doubt that anybody who finds it worth their time to mock "assholes" has anything like a principled position on this. Clearly the mainstream culture considers it acceptable to mock any particular "nazi" regardless of how famous they are, and going into subculteres I'd expect things to only get worse.
"Has anyone visited KiwiFarms (before it was taken down)?"
It's somewhere I like to lurk on occasion, I think I would describe it as a gossip site with an extremely non-PC atmosphere. Not exactly 4chan-ish but it had similar elements where all speech is permitted, so you end up with some unknown mix of
1. genuine witches
2. people with unremarkable views who are reflexively contrarian (ex- 'I have no desire to say X but if you tell me I'm not allowed, I will make a point of saying it')
3. people who got displaced from their native habitats by Overton Window shrinkage (I recall there were increasing amounts of feminists, radfems and gender-critical non-feminists, and the site owner was always talking about big influxes of new members whenever various subreddits got shut down)
I can't say I saw a big cross section of the site, to give a snapshot the threads I mostly stuck to were: Russel Greer (an astonishingly narcissistic man who keeps suing celebrities to try to make them date him), the Munchausen Syndrome's thread (a fascinating disorder where people pretend or actually make themselves sick for attention), and the Literature sections (there were a few regular posters who shared gossip from inside the publishing industry). I do know there were a lot of threads documenting people who very much appeared to be pedophiles, zoophiles, and other types of abusers but I didn't have the stomach for that kind of thing. I think the majority of threads were were about non-criminal e-celebs doing too-online things.
Descriptions about it being a site for coordinating harassment really don't match up with what I saw there over the years, it had several rules against doing that. However any bad actor could make an account and use the information there to harass others, though they wouldn't be able to talk about it on the site itself (I don't have an account so I was prevented from viewing most of the dox information, the boards for talking about current news, and the "proving grounds" where posters need to prove someone is worth having a thread before they're made viewable to lurkers, I think).
The storyline in doom was that military researchers created a teleporter between earth and mars accidentally lead to the creation of a portal to another dimension,, and then demons came out of the portal. Seems kinda fitting.
I'm a parent, and r.e. 'doing too much stuff', i'm also learning that i'm a better dad when i do 'worse' things like spend time by myself, do what i want, ignore my children's wishes, etc.
At some level i think there's a cultural issue here; we improved things DRAMATICALLY in our house by agreeing on some 'division of labor'. I think i had long resisted this because i wanted to be a good dad and didn't want to go anywhere near something like 'you take care of the kids because you are a woman and that is woman's work.' But where we settled was things like, 'wow, coordination costs _suck_ so much that it's generally better if one of us just owns the situation entirely. I'm ok with whatever you choose, but you have much more fine grained opinions than i do on things like, where should the kids go to school'. So my wife handles a lot of stuff that would fit into the kids/chores/housekeeping bucket. I had tried my best to stay away from this kind of arrangement, in order to be a modern enlightened dad and not some troglodyte wife beater. But it turns out this actually _works_ for us, and my attempts to be the ever-present always helpful dad who did whatever his kids wanted just made me burned out, tired, exhausted, and stressed.
I think there's also a technology level. If technology is 'it lets you do stuff you couldn't do before', and parents have some base prior for 'should i do this thing for my kids', now you can do way more stuff for your kids. It's taken a fair amount of courage to get myself to a point where i'm like, ok, if i'm gonna be a not-great dad, it won't be because i don't do enough with my kids, but more becuase i'm just tired and stressed all the time and this sets a bad example.
So now instead of resolving the squabbles between the 3 and 5 year old, i just say, well you two figure it out or i'll throw the toy away. Not only does this lower my stress levels, but they are learning how to resolve conflicts themselves instead of always escalating. I think part of what it took is trying to _imagine_ responses to conflict that didn't involve a bunch of angry shouting and yelling, which is most of my more salient memories from childhood.
so the TLDR here is that i think it takes a kind of courage + self confidence to do less as a parent, probably moreso than ever because there are more options than ever for stuff to do with your kids, and more cultural expectation that you will.
"So now instead of resolving the squabbles between the 3 and 5 year old, i just say, well you two figure it out or i'll throw the toy away."
That works in the majority of cases, but it has a rare but terrible failure mode (and I'm NOT saying it's true in your family!) of "one of the siblings turns out to be a real a-hole/sociopath/abuser as they grow older." I've read letters to personal advice columnists that said something to the effect of, "My older brother used to beat me/molest me/insert other horrible thing, and our parents were too weak/passive to do anything about it, they were just like, meh, siblings are gonna sibling, let them work it out."
My impression is that with kids this young, you need to provide slightly more structure, because if you let them "figure it out", it usually ends up with one of the kids, usually the older, always getting her way. I think it is better to explicitely teach them basic negotiation skills. "One kid do the dividing and the other gets to pick first" is for example a simple tool that works in many cases.
G.K. Chesterton from an article called "The Real Journalist":
"Playing with children is a glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lighted match."
Wonderful description, hilarious and so well written, thanks!
I suggest (from personal experience) that's not only impossible to fully achieve with more than 3-4 or more kids, for the reasons Mark outlines above -- nobody has that kind of time and energy -- but it actually enhances resilience and grit in the children *not* to do it, because out in the real world, there is no God Emperor who ensures that all conflicts are resolved by Marquess of Queensberry rules.
Sure, you should definitely ensure there isn't actual physical combat, and it's good to be clear on how they *should* do things and enforce it when the opportunity arises and you have the energy, but if you *always* play referee the kids grow up with unrealistic expectations of how things go in reality, and also have atrophied skills when it comes to coping with human nature.
I think setting those kinds of expectations on themselves is one reason couples stop at 1 or at most 2 kids, because it's just freaking exhausting to try to make sure the social environment is ideal at every hour of the day. So I'm against it. It will do the kids no great harm to learn that bigger and strong people always have a certain kind of edge -- because that's reality -- and to learn ways of coping with that, within the safe and low-stakes confines of the family.
And there are ways, I've never yet seen a case, short of pathology, in which the older kid *always* gets his way. Younger kids figure out ways to go around that, develop their own "judo" methods that neutralize the advantages of age and size, and usually you end up with a rough balance of power.
I certainly don't think that parents should always be refereeing between their children throughout their childhood. But at the same time, I think that if the usual way to handle arguments between 3 and 5 year olds is to let them work it out between themselves without any parental intervention, then I think you're relying a little too much on the maturity of the 5 year old! As usual, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Anyway, my point was more like "teach your kids basic negotiation skills, it's very helpful!".
My experience seems to be different from yours, I know several families where the oldest is a bully to the youngest, or the oldest resents having to care for the youngest, or just deal with them. So I don't feel like if you let the kids work it out, things usually end up great, although of course it depends on the personality of the kids.
And in terms of family size, I feel like having a lot of siblings is generally a good thing for adults, or for parents of adult children, but may be ess enjoyable during childhood. It seems to me that B. Caplan made a similar point in his book Selfish reasons to have more kids (although his conclusion is to opt for more kids because childhood is comparatively short, when it doesn't seem so clear to me!) I really do know of several large families (for the current norm, i.e., 3/5 kids) where the kids clearly resented their siblings, usually because they felt their parents didn't have enough time for them.
I'm not relying on the maturity of a 5 year old, I'm relying on his knowing his own interests, and being intelligent enough to figure out a way to get close to them. Pretty much the same aspects of human beings that allow us to figure out how to get along with each other in general, as adults -- which is why it's exceedingly helpful to train kids in them.
What you're saying is akin to those parents who never let their kids play on jungle gyms or ride bikes until they're much older than usual, on the grounds that they might fall and hurt themselves. And guess what? They do! I used to call it "experiments in gravity and force," and they are essential for kids to grow into confident adults who understand their limits, and how to cope with unknown situations with neither excessive fear nor overconfidence. This is entirely what "free range" parenting is about. I'm only saying you need to take it all the way, and not stop your "free range" approach when it comes to social interaction. Understanding and working your way through social interaction is just as important as understanding gravity and acceleration, probably more so. If you don't coddle your kid at the playground, coddling him when it comes to intersibling contests is dumb.
I'm underwhelmed by the anecdata, of course. We can all point to families with dysfunctional children, and how they came to be that way is...complex, in each case. I doubt very much there is any simple answer, like "oh the parents failed to referee as much." If we really wanted to move beyond dueling experience (I have reared 5 children to adulthood via these principles, and they all turned out not only civilized but with robust social skills, one assumes you have similar experience) then we would need to do some very careful measurements where we normalized for all the other ways childhood can go wrong, and took a look at the value, or harm, involved in a level X of parental interference in sibling conflict.
We seem to have quite a different experience of 5 year old kids!
More seriously, I think we probably agree that both extreme parenting styles, monitoring kids all the time until they are adult or never supervising them al all, are not ideal. I am under the impression that 3 and 5 years old kids frequently need help to figure out how to settle disputes, whereas if I understand correctly you think that it is best to let them figure things out by themselves.
May be this is because of a disagreement about the best way to acquire skills. Because I of course totally agree with you that "understanding and working your way through social interaction" is an extremely important skill. But I think that for 3 and 5 year old, this is best done by explicitly teaching them the social skills (the "positive parenting" school has some great tools for that) than by letting them "practice" without guidance.
I of course do not suggest that dysfunctional families arise mostly because parents were not hands on enough for refereeing kids dispute. My point was just that it is not always the case that children let to their own device will settle things in constructive way.
"my attempts to be the ever-present always helpful dad who did whatever his kids wanted"
I realise that as a non-parent myself, it's cheek on my part to be giving advice, but no. You're their father, not their friend. Sometimes it really has to be "No, we can't/we're not going to do that" or "You can't do that" or just "Because I say so!"
Not all the time, you should explain why you make decisions, but sometimes it really does have to be "Go and do your homework now, or else" and then the "or else" has to be enforced so that there are real consequences. No, I don't mean "beat 'em to a pulp" but something like "Okay, I'm taking your phone away or your game console like I said I would if you didn't turn it off and get your homework done. You'll get it back after X period of time".
"doing whatever my kids wanted" was never a _conscious_ goal of mine. But 'say yes to reasonable requests when possible' probably was. And it turns out that even this is a bad idea, in part because of something like a 'denial of service attack'.
Parenthood has been this constant training course in tings like, trusting myself while still being open to being wrong, accepting my limits while still trying to push on them, holding myself to an impossibly high standard without feeling bad for regularly failing, etc.
A++ personal growth, would recommend.
Did you ever get the little darlings trying the old "Mom says I can't do this, so I'll ask Dad/Dad says I can't do this, so I'll ask Mom" manoeuvre?
Parenting is a hard job, people don't give it enough credit (until kids turn out screwed-up, then they're happy to say 'well the parents are at fault clearly, they should have done better!')
> "I think there's also a technology level. If technology is 'it lets you do stuff you couldn't do before', and parents have some base prior for 'should i do this thing for my kids', now you can do way more stuff for your kids."
Yes, this.
There's a clear parallel with the being-poor and not-being-poor-any-more articles (#9). The demands on your (money/time) that seem reasonable increase with the (money/time) available. When resources are low, you don't do much with them, just because you literally can't. When they are higher, the minimum threshold for what seems reasonable rises with them.
Related... it's much harder to say no to playing with your kids when what you would be doing instead is staring at your phone, even if that's what you'd rather be doing. I often already feel somewhat guilty about wasting my time so saying no to spending time with my kids feels doubly bad.
> But where we settled was things like, 'wow, coordination costs _suck_ so much that it's generally better if one of us just owns the situation entirely.
This is very good advice for handling any household chores, not just childcare. It reduces the mental load and removes the resentment caused by "My partner thinks they handle the grocery shopping but I still have to make the lists for them." The trick is to make sure you *agree* on who owns which task instead of just assuming that the husband/wife will handle certain tasks.
Oh yeah, there’s a ton of back and forth on this. The framework we both use now is that our family has an operating system and that we are constantly iterating on it.
An example of a change is giving myself permission to just let her handle, say, a decision on where the kids will go to school entirely on her own. What I used to do was watch her gather information and _try_ to be involved, but not really contribute much because I felt exhausted by work and everything else, and then feel bad about not helping in this one area.
Another change has been realizing that I saw “get the kids to bed” as “my job”, with her being sort of this auxiliary role. Some nights I’d be so beat I felt like I couldn’t help at all without risk of losing my temper and shouting. She pointed out that some nights we can swap, so that she’s the driver and i am more in an auxiliary role. And man, just having that option has been helpful. Knowing I can “tap out” if I need to makes it easier to keep going.
#39: The Yom Kippur War was a substantial but very costly military victory for Israel. The successful Israeli counterattack was overshadowed by the massive morale and political defeat suffered in the first few days of the war. Although Israel did eventually win by most measures - ending within 100km of Cairo, for example, and making gains on the Syrian and Jordanian fronts - first blow Israel suffered shattered ideas of Israeli invincibility. Israeli outrage at the failure to prepare for Arab coalition's opening attack brought down Israel's government. America and the Soviet Union came close to war.
While Israel's personnel losses for the Yom Kippur War were actually pretty comparable in percentage to the Six Day War (about 1-2% of military forces KIA), the absolute losses were much higher and therefore felt much more keenly by Israel's tiny population. ('Percentage Losses' also masks that Israel frantically called *everyone* up in the YKW, while SDW went more favorably.) Both wars burned through the Israeli tank corp. Additionally, Israel regards airpower as a key advantage and lost a bigger fraction of theirs during the Yom Kippur War; in the SDW Israel lost less than 20% of their combat aircraft, but in the YKW they lost 25%, half of which they lost in three days. In the Yom Kippur War the Israeli forces were notably felt by both sides to have been narrowly saved from total defeat, while in the SDW they were felt to have earned a stunning victory.
Moreover, the loss ratios were less lopsided in the YKW than they had been in the SDW. In the SDW the IDF was outnumbered 5:1 but exacted a 20:1 casualty ratio in their favor. In the YKW Israel was only outnumbered 2-3:1 and only exacted a 10:1 casualty ration in their favor. By this crude measure of military success, Israel was as much as five times more effective in combat in the SDW than in the later YKW. Much of this is due to the Arab Coalition successfully degrading the IDF's tanks and planes with Soviet missiles, instead of Israel wiping out the Egyptian air force in one fell swoop.
And at the end of the YKW, Israel had nothing to show for it. After the SDW Israel had taken a substantial amount of land, seizing Judea and particularly the other half of Jerusalem from Jordan, the strategic Golan Heights from the Syrians, and Gaza and the whole Sinai from Egypt. Suddenly important Jewish sites like the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs were under Jewish control for the first time in two millennia. Jews who had been kicked out by Jordan in 1948 could return to their homes. After the YKW, Israel had no substantial territorial gains and in a few years would go on to give up the Sinai for peace with Egypt, dragging Israeli civilians out of the Sinai kicking and screaming.
In absolute military terms, the YKW was an Israeli victory. But in both Arab and Israeli popular perception, it was a disastrous defeat for Israel's reputation. Arguably the fact that both Egypt and Israel felt they'd in some senses lost the war directly lead to the them making peace a few years later. So of course at least some Egyptians have regarded the YKW as a win; after three decades of failing to wipe out the Jewish State, they finally hit Israel hard enough to bring them to the negotiating table, and then made peace.
Thanks, this comment is great and made me not write a less detailed one. I think it can be summarised as "The war is technically -wrongly perceived as an Israeli loss due to asymmetric expectations, assymetric sensitivity to causalities, the defeat that almost happened, and the influence on diplomacy.". I will add that dictatorships really like winning, and tell their people about their glorious winning whenever it is remotely believable. And that Egypt specifically needed this pride-boost in order to sell a very unpopular peace agreement few years later.
Well put!
I think your comment about pride has a lot of staying power. During the War of Attrition Israel identified, baited, and ambushed Egypt’s Soviet advisors in their MiGs. Soviet military advisors were famously … hands on, and Israel wanted to send Moscow a message.
It was a fascinating episode for a number of reasons, but one was that reportedly it endeared Israel to the Egyptian Air Force, because the Soviets were finally forced to admit that there was nothing wrong with Egyptian pilots and losing to the IAF could happen to anyone.
I just finished Walter Isaac's biography on Henry Kissinger, who was heavily involved in the diplomacy between Egypt, Syria and Israel during the YKW. Kissinger was famous for trying to sell any agreement as a win for both sides, usually by being honest in a literal sense but misleading everyone involved. But he was so charming that many still fell for it/played along.
One somewhat telling quote:
> „The most significant personal bond he forged was the least predictable: with Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Kissinger often referred to Sadat, in reverential tones, as “a prophet.” No other statesman he dealt with, other than Zhou Enlai, is accorded anything near this respect in Kissinger’s mind, and none elicited the same affection.
As Kissinger left Aswan at the outset of his first shuttle in January 1974, Sadat took Kissinger to a tropical garden by his villa and beneath a mango tree, kissed him. “You are not only my friend,” he said. “You are my brother.” (A rather startled Kissinger subsequently told his press corps that “the reason the Israelis don’t get better treatment is because they don’t kiss me.”)
Kissinger’s relationship with Golda Meir, on the other hand, was far more tormented, like that between a strong-willed Jewish mother and a successful but ungrateful grown son. “Does Golda hate me?” Kissinger would frequently ask Ambassador Dinitz and others. No, they would reassure him, but they agreed that the relationship was stormy.“
That graph on parenting doesn’t reflect how much our domestic lives have changed since 1965. Stay-at-home moms were more common, yes, but kids above a certain age often just *went out* to play with other kids and didn’t come back till dinner. That’s unthinkable now for most parents.
People also lived closer to family, and thus there were simply more people, usually women, available to taken on some of those childcare hours. A lot of professional parents in more recent decades do it all without nearly the same support network. I know it’s true for us.
I am confused about how “childcare” and “housework” are divided. I do a lot of chores *while* caring for my kids. I cook and clean around them all day. I run almost all my errands with them, too. Where did respondents draw the distinction?
I felt confused about that distinction too. Up until a certain age, children need an adult in the house, but as they get older, they don't need 'caring' for as such that whole time, although they need you to be available. Even with toddlers, you cook dinner at the same time as keeping half an eye on them. I'm also wondering does something like playing board games in the evening with my children count as childcare? What about reading to them? Discussing their homework with them? It all feels nebulous to me.
I also do wonder if there was more grandparental help back then, hence the lower hours and also whether there would have been a tendency for one mother to more often look after other people's children? I was also wondering with babies - do you include the hours they wake you up in the night as childcare? I get the impression that babies sleep less well these days due to SIDS advice (babies sleep better on their fronts!), although have no idea if that is actually the case.
I don't feel it is just 'children used to go out and play more and parents are now just paranoid'. My impression round here is that they do that now the same sort of amount as when I was a child in the 80s (although I am in the UK). There are a lot more extracurricular activities now though which is part cultural and part I think an attempt by parents to get children away from computer screens the whole time. But is say sitting reading while your children play tennis childcare?
I'm guessing that at least in part, it's a change in whether people are reporting some tasks as "childcare" or "housework" or "leisure".
So the South Africa article, after noting a ton of things wrong with South Africa's ruling party, then notes "Our political system was literally purchased by a wealthy family of Indian businessmen, creating something akin to a shadow government." After everything that had been described so far, I thought that was going to describe an *improvement*, if there were people interested in actually making a profit off of the place! I wish the article went into more detail here (as in a lot of things, really -- and on this point, I wish it was explained what they meant by "purchased")... I guess this Gupta family was also only interested in looting the place...? Or what? (I guess people interested in making long-term profits through productive work and investments don't tend to get into shadowy deals to secretly buy governments, do they...)
Fair point. I had to gloss over a bunch of stuff to keep the post to a readable length.
The introduction to the wikipedia article does a good enough job of summarising the topic if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gupta_family
Quote: "In 2015, the Guptas' influence on the presidency was described by anti-corruption campaigner and former trades unionist Zwelinzima Vavi as being a "shadow government." Multiple Members of Parliament and ministers have stated that they were offered government positions by, or on behalf of, the Gupta family, in return for beneficial commercial decisions once appointed. In 2017, it was discovered that British PR company Bell Pottinger, acting on behalf of Gupta-owned Oakbay Investments, had deliberately manipulated and inflamed racial tensions, stirred up racial hatred, and made accusations of "white monopoly capital," using a large number of fake Twitter and other accounts online, as part of a campaign to portray Oakbay and those connected to it as victims, apparently intended to deflect corruption claims. Bell Pottinger subsequently collapsed in the wake of the scandal"
Ah, so "bought the government" in the usual corrupt sense where they get it to make decisions favorable to them, rather than like in some interesting neoreactionary sense where they get a share of tax revenue or something and therefore have an incentive to improve things. I guess that's kind of obvious now that I say it explicitly, but disappointing.
23. Interesting stuff, and not surprising. Although I think Argentina should just dollarize completely and drop the peso altogether.
29. The description I read of that book didn't sound promising, but I'll wait and see the likely review from you and (probably) Nathan Robinson.
33. I wonder if this contributes to the lower birth rates, especially among educated class folks (although I suspect that's also later parental age). It doesn't seem like it's a coincidence to me that the lowest birth rates in the world are the ones in East Asian countries heavily influenced by the grinding test regime of Japanese-style secondary schooling (including heavy use of cram school). That just raises the monetary and non-monetary cost of having an extra child enormously.
RE: #33, absolutely! My husband and I are both professionals, and the reason we have only one child is the tremendous amount of time and emotional energy that goes into raising a child (in the modern way, that is, as opposed to letting them run around by themselves as long as they're back home for dinner.)
Well, that and the sleep deprivation. Gods, the sleep deprivation when you have an infant is *brutal,* regardless of what time period you live in.
Couldn't you instead have multiple kids and raise them in a less time intensive manner? I was let run around as long as i was back before dinner as recently as the aughts, as were my three siblings. All of us got into good schools and I happen to think this way was actually benefital to our development.
I mean... I could, but I don't want to? I don't mean to sound offensive, but it's sort of like asking, "Couldn't you marry a man and then have sex with him exactly once every week and otherwise never interact with him?" I could, but it's not the kind of relationship I want to have.
I am an introvert. I prize few, deep relationships over many superficial ones. This does not make me morally superior or inferior to an extrovert; it's just the way I am. When I chose to bring a child into the world, I did it with the understanding that I would have a deep, close relationship with him or her. That wouldn't work if I decided to have multiple kids and were like, "Bye, kids, have fun! I'll see you at dinner!" every day.
All that aside, even if I were a super hands-off parent, hands-off-ness doesn't work with an infant, who has to be nursed and diapered and burped and rocked to sleep with mind-numbing regularity every single day after day after day, or else they'll die.
I don't want to sound offensive either, but...have you considered that spending all day with their parents might be bad for the kids? For most of their lives they'll be spending time with their peers, not their parents. They have a lot more in common with their peers than with adults whose lives they can't possibly understand or relate to.
Raising an infant could be relatively hands-off if you also have an older child and can make her take care of the infant.
I expect it makes a difference if parents sleeping with infants is considered normal.
I considered co-sleeping with my infant. Then I read the current recommendation by pediatricians, that in order to lower the risk of suffocation/smothering, you must sleep on a firm mattress with absolutely nothing soft or fluffy in your bed: no pillows, covers, blankets of any kind.
Then I considered sleeping on a hard mattress, cover-less and pillow-less, after a full day's work caring for an infant, and I went "HAHAHAHAHA LOL NOPE!"
And that is why my infant and I slept in separate rooms.
That sounds extreme. I wonder if the recommendation actually makes sense.
In any case, I would think that just having the infant's crib adjacent to your bed would mean shorter/less extreme sleep interruptions. Am I missing something?
Well...
Yes, I could have put a bassinet in my bedroom. The problem is, this will probably make me sound like a bad mother, but I liked the idea of having a room that was *mine* (and my husband's). I liked the idea that when my husband was on baby duty, I could just go into our bedroom and close my eyes and be left the heck alone for a certain stretch of time. Keeping the baby in the bedroom would have deprived me of that blessed sense of sanctuary.
Also, with the baby sleeping in another room, my husband and I could, hypothetically, still use our bedroom for sex. In practice, the number of times we had sex during the baby's first year of life can be numbered on my fingers, but it was still nice to have that option without being all like, "Shhh, you'll wake the baby! Hurry up, you'll wake the baby!!!!!"
My experience is that it's better to have the crib in the other room. The problem is parents, especially new parents, and especially new mothers in my experience, are so sensitive to the noises of the child that even if the child just wakes very briefly and makes some burble or snort, the parent wakes up, if only very briefly. So you get this sequence of tiny interruptions in your sleep, of which you aren't even aware, that leads to the sleep you do get being unusually unrestorative.
33. I, on the other hand, was wondering whether lower birth rates contribute to this, and I suppose we could just synthesize the answer into "it's a feedback loop". The less children there are in the family, the more catastrophic a loss of or a lasting harm to any of them gets for the parents, and the more protective they get of them. Less children in the society makes the protectiveness level of those parents the expected norm.
This is for sure true. I've seen so many family gatherings where two kids get the same kind of little bump and kid who's number six of eight gets two seconds of care and the kid who's one of one gets five minutes of care. Doesn't seem like the extra time makes a difference in the ends, but who knows.
This is one point I also often make, but it is combined with a general culture of minimizing all kind of risks and maximizing comfort. This was a important strategy for a long time when the risks of life were big, but it gets to a point were less risk isn't better. First because the costs (not even financial) are increasing the more you achieve. Secondly because zero risk isn't possible and nobody wants to live in the famous golden cage. So there have to be chances to learn how to deal with dangerous or uncomfortable situations. I think it's even natural for parents to try to minimize hard and dangerous situations for their kids as much as possible, but as the possible grows it can become too much to get prepared for real life.
By the way this is why i finally got convinced of mandatory, common schooling of some kind: just as a means were kids see and learn to deal with all the kinds of humans in our society and are forced out of the bubble of their parents to have at least an idea and common basis what world they will face as adults.
Dollarization would have to be done by the government of Argentina*, and they presumably would prefer to retain whatever degree of power messing with the peso gives them.
*I couldn't figure out which of "the Argentinian government" or "the Argentine government" (or possibly both!) was correct, so just rephrased.
#33: I would think another element here is when you have more kids, some of the kids themsleves do the childcare for each other. but this isn't possible with 1 child, and less frequent with only 2.
plus, fewer kids a generation ago implies a smaller extended family (mainly aunts and cousins) to help with childcare. I also wonder if people nowadays live on average further from their parents compared to the 60s, it that is so there is way less help with childcare from grandparents
>I also wonder if people nowadays live on average further from their parents compared to the 60s, it that is so there is way less help with childcare from grandparents
I don't think you have to wonder I think this is very true, don't have data on hand but I would bet like $10,000 dollars.
#39- Egyptians regard the YK war as a major victory. Israelis view the YK war as a disaster.
Why? Probably has less to do with territory taken (not much changed there) and more to do with how perceptions of the belligerents changed.
The Israelis were overconfident in this period. Winning the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in six days will do that to a country (the 1967 war). Sadat made several overtures offering something equivalent to the Camp David Accords in the 67-73 period- they were rejected. The Israelis didn't think they had to negotiate with the Egyptians at this point and thought they needed the additional territory for protection.
The war came as a shock to the Israelis- they weren't prepared for the invasion. Meir typically polls at the bottom of PM performance in Israel for this reason. Syrian forces got close to the Galilee. Israel lost a lot of men, tanks and aircraft (remember, in the Six Day War they lost very few aircraft). Part of this has to do with the fact that Israelis see a lost war with an Arab nation in catastrophic terms. They believe an Arab victory would lead to the disassembly of the state and possible mass-murder and expulsion. So, a war where Egypt and Syria got a lot closer to victory rattled them.
Egypt and Syria's invasions were efforts to avenge their poor performance in 67. The body count and loss of war material was much more even in this war. It helped both of these countries save face from the biggest military humiliation in their history. Israel was concerned about their deterrence to the point that they ordered an invasion of Syria and shelling of suburbs near Damascus to reassert an idea of their military dominance.
Once the war was over, Israel was much more open to a Camp David Accords style settlement. The war convinced them that holding that territory against Egyptian aggression was worse than a negotiated peace.
There's a lesson in there- the thing that precedes Israeli peacemaking with armed belligerents is loss or defeat of a certain kind. A situation where they see conciliation as both on offer and preferable to maintaining an aggressive military posture are the magic ingredients for peace. See the First Intifada as an example of this- Israel faced a newly difficult military reality (controlling cities in the West Bank and Gaza), they were given a clear settlement offer, so they moved towards conciliation from the status quo.
I thought the Doom tweet was fine!
Thanks! But people were right that it could have easily been misread, and I super respect you and didn't want you to think I was insulting your intelligence.
FWIW, I thought it was fine. It was witty.
Would really love to see some more serious interaction between you and the AI safety community btw—I know you don’t believe it’s a real concern, but I think it’s still worth talking with experts who are worried, simply because, well, we’re all human, and really really big stakes are at play!
I replied in the “hot takes” Twitter thread that was also mentioned in the article. I was a little surprised that nobody engaged. https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1557736684187312134?s=46&t=8Y6zNayshhHaz9EWdbe9Vw
Some more links for your reading list
A literature review (from 2018, might be a bit dated): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.01109.pdf
For something newer, MIRI is among the most pessimistic of the groups working on alignment -- here are some of their recent writings: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/v55BhXbpJuaExkpcD This one especially seems worth a look: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
9: Resident Contrarian / being poor
As someone who grew up poor, the first article is super relatable. Every bit of it. The second one, less-so. Maybe the first couple years of earning more felt that way, but not anymore.
It can be somewhat tiresome listening to coworkers who have never been poor talk about poor people.
Yeah that asymmetry can be grating. I grew up in public housing and love when people come at me for some not sufficiently Marxist take with "you don't know what it is like to be poor". Then of course when I defend myself I get branded as a "bootstrapper".
As though someone who has both been poor (0-26) and successful (34-41) is somehow a detriment. It is frustrating that rhetorical strategy works so well.
#32 could just be a memory formation issue. It made me think of Clive Wearing, a man who lost the ability to make new episodic memories. Every 30 seconds or so he would report that he had just woken up and hadn’t been conscious previously. He filled notebooks with entries that were pretty much all versions of “9:14: I am now awake. 9:16: I am now actually awake. 9:17: I am now truly, stupendously awake.” He would cross out the entry he just wrote before most of the time, and when asked why would say that he wasn’t awake then.
So it’s possible he had some kind of weird amnesia that either prevented him from forming memories or, perhaps, somehow made him forget all his memories formed since taking the drug until one week later. If so, he would have been conscious the whole time.
Then again, maybe he was a P-Zombie. I sleptwalked a lot as a kid, I definitely did a lot of things without being conscious. But I don’t think I could have operated a crane, everybody could tell I was acting freaky when it happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing
[edit: my point which seemed clearer when I first posted is if we can't tell if p-zombies exist then fade topic. If symptoms are detected then investigate esp. if evidence of brain devouring!]
ACX email: "philosophical debate about whether p-zombies are possible?"
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above: "I sleptwalked a lot as a kid...everybody could tell I was acting freaky when it happened."
to quote Nolan's WW: "If you can't tell, does it matter?"
You may find this link interesting: https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2556-i-have-sex-while-im-sleeping-i-cant-control-it.html
I'm still annoyed that after the great first season of Westworld it turned out that they had no idea what to do with it. What a waste.
I was disappointed in the quality of the last season but the underlying message did seem to support my accepted premise for the beginning a meaningful life: Know Thyself.
Consider Nolan's three Batman movies. Dark Knight was great - both entertaining and insightful. The other two had a couple good scenes. Package deal, I guess. : )
The Nolans' grasp always seems to exceed their reach. They are tremendous for trying to pull off mind blowing amazing virtuoso concept stories which are also well executed and intricate etc. But they never really totally stick the landing.
Better to have people shooting for 99s and getting 91s than the typical shoot for 75 an get a 70. But still frustrating.
"frustrating"
--
Agreed. Still, of 18 movies(per Wikipedia) they did give us Insomnia, Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar which I still refer to at times and another five very solid movies like Dunkirk. It would be interesting to compare their box office success to others...
Oh yeah I think they have a great record. It is just frustrating because they are so close to true transcendence, but always seem to come up a bit short.
I feel like particularly Interstellar and Inception and Tenent were all a few passes away from being amazing.
You, sir, have very high standards. : )
It could be a limitation of the media and/or all that goes into making a movie inc. stakeholder opinions and audience expectations.
Benzodiazepines act on GABA much as alcohol does. That it (and others) prohibit the formation of memories is unsurprising.
29: Caplan / Don't Be A Feminist
I honestly don't get why Bryan is so adamant about that exact title. So many people on Twitter tried to explain why it was a bad idea, but he just didn't seem to get it. It will probably be a fine book, but it will be stained over the needlessly controversial title. It'll be the first book of his I won't buy, only because of the title.
Optimizing for anti woke people buying your book it’s a fantastic title though.
True, I guess, but it seems a little silly to be *inflaming* culture war sensibilities given everything already going on.
My 10-second attempt to produce a cogent argument for this came up with:
"If you think that SJ will soon suffer a massive reversal and you want to ensure that this defeat is capitalised on and culturally locked-in in the aftermath (like how there's now some meme immunity to fascism and communism), writing a bible of Why SJ Sucks might help."
(This is a steelman, not really my own opinion.)
Supposedly, anti-woke people are not going to be feminists anyway, so they are not the target audience. Unless, either
1) The book is a provocative dunk on feminism capitalizing on culture war which only anti-woke people are going to read anyway
or
2) The book goes meta midway, starting highliting the patterns of behaviour anti-woke people assosiate with feminism among anti-woke people themselves, and makes a cause for moral highground for anti woke people.
I don't see how such optimization could be useful.
I agree that in a purely consequentialist framework he should have named it something inoffensive to get more people to read it, but I think there's a principled argument for naming the book directly what he means in order to challenge the norm that you're not allowed to directly say you're against feminism, and instead you have to do some kind of pathetic "feminism is great and I am its biggest supporter but the TRUE feminism is being against all feminist principles".
I see what you mean, but compare "Don't he a feminist" with, say, "Why I disagree with feminism".
The substance is the same, but the latter is a framing more likely to attract people who want a serious, reasoned critique, including maybe some who disagree with him, whereas the former is clearly aimed at attracting people who want to see the libs being owned and will value heat over light.
"Why I disagree" maybe works for a blog post, but is far too weak a title to justify a full book. I read that and assume the following argument will be poorly-thought-out repetitious rambling, equivalent to listening to an old man outside the grocery store.
"Why I am not a Feminist" would be a perfectly good title for a book, and a reference to many classics, starting at least with Bertrand Russell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_I_Am_Not_a_Christian
It certainly works better than "disagree", but would only work for women I think; a guy writing Why I'm Not A Feminist is immediately met with "because you're not female, duh."
His framing is as a message to his daughter.
Nobody is buying a book called "Why I disagree with feminism" unless its being written by a widely respected ultra-mainstream author
What sort of feminism? "Women should not have the vote" don't be a feminist (Chesterton was on this side, I love the man but I disagree with him here) or "Looking at me when we're speaking to each other is a microaggression" don't be a feminist? (I'd be on that side myself).
I have no intention of buying or reading this book, but it does matter if he's only relying on a clickbait title or if he does have something valuable to say.
Don't in practice all loudly-self-proclaimed feminists end up almost always supporting each other, when push comes to shove? I guess with the whole TERF kerfuffle implies that there are some non-trivial disagreements, but when the Patriarchy needs to be denounced I wouldn't expect much dissent.
Supporting each other, not supporting *women*, which makes it less a set of principles and more just another political tribe.
Most people left of the political center call themselves feminists, and no one has ever accused the broader left of being in any way unified. They can't agree on what the Patriarchy even is.
>no one has ever accused the broader left of being in any way unified.
I have, just now.
>They can't agree on what the Patriarchy even is.
A working definition seems to be, "everything that the right wants plus anything that me and my friends don't like". While the second part of it may be important for any particular leftist, they generally don't let themselves be unduly distracted by disagreements among allies when there are still enemies not sufficiently crushed. Which is a strategically sound approach to be sure, as is being coy about it.
When I went on a Chesterton kick in college (sparked by Gilbert in Sandman, and aided by the university library having a very broad collection of his works), I think that was the first time I ran into a primary source antisuffrage argument.
Kipling, similarly. "The Female of the Species" is often quoted with approval, and I first encountered it as a filksong which dropped some of the stanzas in a way that obscured the theme. So I was struck when I finally read the whole thing and saw that the main thrust is that women are too averse to political compromise and the rule of law to be safely permitted a role in governance.
As much as I can see the point you are going for, it’s a title that makes me afraid to own the book. Bryan himself explains why here: https://www.econlib.org/social-anxiety-metoo-and-disaster/
Likewise if he goes ahead with this title, can I even recommend his other work anymore? If they look into what else he has written..
You don't think you could even recommend his other work? Seems like sensitive friends.
The problem is that “feminism is great and I am its biggest supporter but the TRUE feminism is being against all feminist principles" still gets you branded as an anti-feminist by the Twitter mobs, turning off any potential reader who is concerned about being seen reading “anti-feminist” literature. Being blunt about it saves a step and at least has the advantage of attracting the attention of readers who would find an anti-feminist book interesting.
Controversy always sells (and gets eyeballs on your message) more than milquetoast hedging.
Forget it Scott, it’s toxoplasma-town.
It's not aimed at people offended by the title to the point of not buying it. Most such people would never buy it anyway.
People don’t exist isolation. I may not be offended by the name, but most people around me will be.
Caplan has built a career out of being a contrarian. He is maybe hoping for some outrage to generate interest in his book, which is basically trolling.
Sadat's big intention during the Yom Kippur War was to win one impressive battle -- to get across the Suez Canal and hold on, which they did by having two-man infantry units attack the Israeli tanks with wire-guided missiles -- a spectacular revolution in warfare.
They didn't have much of a strategy for conquering Israel and winning the war. (E.g., they had plenty of air defense systems blanketing the Suez Canal to initially protect their infantry and armor one east bank, but not much of a hope of extending that protection across the Sinai and into Israel.
But crossing the Canal succeeded in restoring Egyptian self-esteem, which gave Sadat more political options for the future, including making peace with Israel.
).
Sorry, hanging parentheses drive me nuts.
On #14 - I tuned into this exact speedrun at GDQ and was amused by the memory manipulation. Link for those who want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhH-UsSz69M
I have never understood why people are interested in these things. Its like a contest for "how fast can you drive from NY to LA" where someone puts a car on a treadmill in a C-5 Galaxy.
Like sure you won, yay. But who cares? IDK like I can see clicking on the random link, but I don't understand how a whole community has evolved around it.
34. Japanese and Chinese names are usually pretty easy to distinguish in writing. Over 90% of Chinese people have one of the hundred most common surnames, all but two of which consist of a single character. Only a handful of these characters are used in common Japanese surnames.
Japanese surnames, on the other hand, almost always consist of two characters. Since Japanese male given names usually consist of two characters as well, the modal length of a Japanese man's name is four characters. Four-character names are very rare (<0.1%) in Chinese, with about 3/4 having three characters and 1/4 having two.
There are a handful of full names that are plausible in either language (e.g. 林明 could be either Akira Hayashi or Ming Lin), but I'm not a native speaker of either language and am fairly confident that I could distinguish randomly selected Chinese or Japanese names with 90+% accuracy.
In any case, you can see the names of the four Japanese soldiers here, and three of them are very clearly Japanese:
https://news.yahoo.com/chinese-woman-arrested-honoring-nanjing-164153500.html
The second from the left (谷寿夫, Hisao Tani) is the only one that I would have had trouble identifying as Japanese, though a Chinese person might have noticed.
Above commenter is right — Chinese names are two and three characters, a surname (1 character usually, aside from a few two-character surnames like 司马) and a 1-2 character given name. Japanese names are often longer and have a distinct Japanese surname. An article in Chinese lists the names: 松井石根、谷寿夫、野田毅、田中军吉、向井敏明, most of which have distinct Japanese surnames (松井=Matsui, 田中=Tanaka, etc.). So the assertion that they went unnoticed because they looked Chinese is false. Hisao Tani (谷寿夫) is hard to identify as 谷 is a possible Chinese surname.
寿夫 (Shoufu) is a plausible Chinese name as well. There's a famous Taiwanese man named 謝壽夫 (壽 being the traditional equivalent of 寿). Taiwan being heavily influenced by Japanese culture, it's possible that this name is actually based on Japanese Hisao and therefore unlikely to be found in mainland China, but I'm not sure. Many Taiwanese place names, like Kaohsiung and Hualien, are Chinese readings of Japanese names given by the colonial government (Takao and Karen, respectively).
Also, apparently the plaques cost several thousand dollars each, which a) adds an extra layer of WTF to this story, and b) strongly suggests that someone was paying attention to these, and not just throwing them up on the wall as part of a batch of two hundred.
An analogy I just thought of is that Chinese names look like Japanese names in the same way that German names look like Italian names, i.e. only if you know nothing about either language.
I agree that Shoufu is a plausible Chinese name. Given names in Chinese don't quite follow English conventions as there degree to which Chinese names have an extensive definition (in the sense of extensional vs intensional) is far less than in English (where names are not just one- to two-character combinations).
Source on the cost of the plaques?
I think your analogy is correct.
The SCMP says that the plaques cost 30-50,000 yuan in this article, although this fact is attributed by the reporter to tourists, so it doesn't seem to have been thoroughly researched:
https://archive.ph/3TCz4
#38 begs the question of how humanity is distributed along the scale from antinatalism to repugnant conclusion.
"Language Models Can Teach Themselves To Program Better"
Hah.
Hahahahahaha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
...ok. I respect that you feel it's important for you to talk about AI. I totally agree that it's important to talk about AI. But this stuff freaks me out and I've been trying to avoid hearing about it. I've been trying to avoid any of your posts about AI, and that's mostly been sufficient. But if you make a few more links post that have a similar amount of alarming AI content to this one, I might just stop reading link posts before I have an anxiety attack.
Obviously you have no obligation to change anything about what you're doing. But this is genuinely how I feel, and it feels worth mentioning, just for the record if nothing else.
33. Worth noting here that, contrary to common complaints about women doing double duty, it seems that on average men do 10 hours per week of housework on top of spending the same 43 hours on paid work that women spend on paid work and housework combined.
I'm sure that some women are doing double duty while their husbands slack off, but in order for this to average out, there must also be men who are doing more paid+housework than their wives by an even wider margin. Curiously, I have never seen one of these men complaining in a national media outlet.
As for the increase in total time spent by parents in child care...what exactly is being measured here? Is the same thing being measured in both time periods? Presumably women doing those 32 hours of housework in 1965 were in some sense supervising their children while doing the work, but the time may have counted as housework and not child care. Maybe they're spending more time actively interacting with their kids since housework doesn't take as much time as it used to. Are kids spending less time unsupervised outdoors? Are parents taking their children to more scheduled activities, and does that count as child care? And so on.
I'm not sure that this is a black pill, as Yglesias describes it. Spending less time on housework and more time with your kids sounds like something most people would consider a win.
Doesn't seem to be doing the kids any particular good
Well, consider also some parallel to the Bradley Effect, and that people are influenced to tell strangers (even researchers) what they think they want to hear, and makes them look good according to current social shibboleths. It's quite possible in 2016 the social cachet of doing a bunch of housework and child-care on top of the paying job is much higher than it was in 1965. I can't imagine my mother (or father) wanting to exaggerate how much child-care or housework he or she did, because it didn't occur to either that this was something admirable or difficult. It was like changing the oil on the car or washing the bedclothes weekly -- ordinary stuff that just needed to be done, that everyone was doing, and nothing special.
But I can easily see the young college-educated dual-career power couple of 2016, with a bunch of childless friends, feeling the urge to round up a little.
> there must also be men who are doing more paid+housework than their wives by an even wider margin. Curiously, I have never seen one of these men complaining in a national media outlet.
Maybe they are too busy to do that? :D
32. Risking to reveal that I didn't get the joke, but obviously this doesn't prove the possibility of philosophical zombies as they were originally defined.
P-Zombie is a creature that does everything human does for exactly the same physical reasons that human but isn't conscious. Ignoring the fact that what actually happened is probably just amnesia, human brain on drugs doesn't work the same way as human brain without drugs so the example isn't applicable here.
In general, the definition of philosophical zombie is begging the question of whether consciousness is non-physical. It just reframes the question from "Is consciousness non-physical?" to "Is the definition of philosophical zombie non-self-contradicting". It's still the same question, just a little bit more misleading, occasionally tricking people into arguments about the nature of possibility and logic.
if the definition of philosophical zombie is non-self-contradictory, to.someone who knows all the relevant science, then the relevant science does not explain consciousness, because it does not show it to be necessary given the physics. So.The conceivability of p zombies indicates , in a non question begging way, the lack of a solution to the hard problem even if it doesn't refute physicalism.
Im pinning conceivability to non-contradictoriness, that's my criterion. If you have a list of propostiions in your mind representing known physics, and you add on "PM is possible", then a contradiction ensues, so PM isn't conceivable to someone who knows physics ..unless they mentally bracket off their knowledge.
I don't see the point in asserting that something "isn't conceivable" without having a criterion.
"My intuition is that P-zombie would not actually be different from a non-zombie in any way that mattered to anyone, including the P-zombie him/herself, and that the concept is in fact incoherent."
What is your criterion for incoherence? That is doesn't make a difference at all, or that the difference doens't matter?
I find it obvious that everyone cares a lot about qualia. We want to be anaesthetised during surgery. We spend money on pleasant but impractical entertainments. We eat tasty food instead of protein pills.
If Dennett flatly denied that subjectivity exists, he could deny that there is any difference between a zombie and human. But if he did, he would be obviously begging a huge question. So he is actually ambiguous between "makes no difference" and "makes not difference that matters". But he himself prefers drinking the wine to reading the label.
" I have long claimed that this conceivability is only apparent"
"Claim" is the word. Where is his criterion?
": if you believe that consciousness sunders the universe in twain, into those things that have it and those that don't, and you believe this is a fundamental metaphysical distinction, "
Again, the assumption that there is no subjectivity/consciosuness is just as question begging as the assumption that there is,
>How could someone have memories, a functioning perceptual system, episodic memory, ability to express emotions, an ability to react to pain, etc etc etc and all the neural correlates thereof etc etc...
Lack qualia? Qualia aren't objective.and aren't behaviour. The claim that conscious style behaviour is simultaneously present and absent would be contradictory, but that's not claim.
>but it seems clear that it must be self-contradictor
You haven't shown any self contradiction. It's not an aesthetic claim. If something is self contradictory, you should be able to show it amounts to "X and not X".
"Two things can share all their properties, but differ in one of their properties" *is* self contradictory, is X and not X.
But that's not the claim
The claim is "two entities can conceivably share all their *physical* properties, but differ in their qualia*.
>be self-contradictory. Unless there's some magical extra stuff,
That's the whole point!
If physical properties are the only properties , then the there is a contradiction...but the contradiction is between the p-zombie clam and physicalism.
And you can't use physicalism as an argument against p-zombies without begging the question.
And physcalism isn't logically necessary, zombies aren't logically possible.
Your impossibility, incoherence, contradiction, inconceivability, etc...all boil down to."contradicts physicalism".
>. If it's just another way of pointing out the so-called "hard problem", or why does feeling feel like anything, I don't see what it really contributes.
That depends on whether or not you get the hard problem.
Is the truth of the Goldbach conjecture conceivable? Is the falsity of the Goldbach conjecture conceivable? I would ordinarily take both of these to be conceivable, but your definition appears to say that probably one of them isn't.
Ok, but a more liberal definition of conceivability goes against the anti-zombie argument. Merely having enough information to disprove zombies isn't enough to make them inconceivable, you'd need the proof.
The definition being self-contradictory isn't a function of a person knowledge. But yes, the fact that people who know everything about current relevant science still think that p-zombies may be a coherent idea would indicate that current science haven't answered all questions about consciousness.
Thats what I was saying.
And that's what I agreed with
"The definition being self-contradictory isn't a function of a person knowledge."
The definition of conceivability-for-a-person I am using depends on something being non-contradictory to a person's knowledge.
Feel free to use this definition this way, just be careful not to mistake 1) conceivability-for-me with 2) conceivability-for-a-person-knowing-all-the-current-relevant-science and 3) logical possibility.
The original zombie argument messes things a bit going from "if zombies are logically possible" to "if zombies are conceivable" which is potentially very misleading.
There's quite a large debate on whether p-zombies really are conceivable. (I myself come down on the "inconceivable" side.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/#ZombConc
> If zombie-world is possible, it seems to necessarily follow that qualia are epiphenomena.
Yes..if it's *really* possible. However, conceivability isn't the same thing as real possibility. For instance, faster-than-light travel is conceivable.
#19 and AI art: a somewhat-related (and highly recommended) short story by Alexander Wales (who wrote all sorts of rationalist and rationalist-adjacent fiction):
https://archiveofourown.org/works/41112099
I second that recommendation, and I'll note that it's essentially a companion piece to this: https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/
It is strange to be in the timeline where the Butlerian Jihad is initiated by art school graduates.
As with nearly everything AW writes, I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed his thoughts on AI art linked in the other comment. However, I just don't agree with the fear. I don't think that AI art will ever become completely divorced from artist interaction. It will, like nearly all productivity gains we have seen in the past, become a tool artists use to do more, write more, faster, and better.
As an example, I can imagine that, for the first humans making cave art in pre-history, the act of making the paints was an integral part of the artistic endeavor. They probably didn't store well and had to be made fresh for every act of painting.
Eventually, we figured out how to make paints (more, better, cheaper, etc) and now artists (the few who don't work digitally these days) just buy their paints. It makes it faster and better, but probably, to a cave painter, an integral part of the process of the art has been lost.
In the same way, the idea of a writer who writes every single word might go away when language models get good enough. Instead, writers will become "editors" (this is just one possibility but it's my guess). They will have an idea for a story with specific characters and plots points and they will use the language models to do the writing, but they will edit, choose between different dialogue options etc. Their output will be better, faster, and more consistent.
I read a _lot_ of internet serialized fiction, and it is almost universally terrible. (90% of everything is crap after all), and almost all of it is abandoned before the author ever completes it, even if it's good. But I, who am not a writer, _do not know what stories I want to read_. Not well enough to come up with anything more than the most vague prompt. The writer of the future is the one who has a story they want to tell and uses an AI to help them tell it faster, and better.
There's not just 'true artists' producing original styles and nobody else. There's vast numbers of working creatives who are producing products for clients. Much of this work will go away. Many of these people will be straight up cut-out of the process, and less of them will be required for whatever diminished role is left for these people. A "faster better" more efficient process is one that requires less artists.
No, it's one that allows for professional art to be used in far more places. The article linked in the comment above mine details a situation in which he _wanted_ to use commissioned art, but it was too expensive. He used an AI generator but was not entirely happy with the results. They were "good enough" but commissioned art would have been better. He and you are both ignoring the middle ground. Where an actual artist, who regularly works with these engines uses the AI model in a far more deft way than someone who just needs it every once in a while. They can produce art _far_ faster than currently, so the price is cheap, and the output is better than some rando just pulling off whatever pops out.
Cameras make creating a decent portrait shot far, _far_ easier than it was 200 years ago, even for a regular person, yet there are probably more professional portrait-art-generating professionals than there were 200 years ago (even though there might be fewer portrait _painters_), because people don't want "this is good enough" they want "the best" and it takes a professional to get the best out of new technology.
Sure, some people will be happy with "good enough" but lots of people want better and I am quite sure that artists of the future will produce better output from these models than general users, but will do it for far cheaper than currently.
This comic, with all the art generated by Midjourney shows the potential https://m.webtoons.com/en/challenge/goats/the-dream/viewer?title_no=798665&episode_no=1&webtoon-platform-redirect=true
It hasn't quite mastered goat anatomy though.
#29 made me laugh. I wonder if the final published blurb appeared something like:
"You owe it to...Bryan Caplan...by reading this top...education...book."
/ref “Bryan Caplan committed career suicide by writing this book; you owe it to him to make his sacrifice meaningful by reading it” and “I didn't think Bryan was ever going to be able to top the ‘education is bad’ book, but he definitely did”
There's no "this" between "reading" and "top".
Oops
The actual cover including the blurb is on the linked page:
"Part primer on the economics of discrimination, part vignettes and reflections from a uniquely honest and straightforward observer of human nature. The book is called Don't Be A Feminist", but it also contains a chapter on how being against open borders is a form of socialism. Bryan continues to defy categorization, expectations, and all applicable social norms".
Honestly, it's an impressively... diplomatic... blurb. It's all fairly complimentary and positive without really endorsing any of the specific contents of the book.
Almost masterful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_of_October_Panorama
Re #19: Erik Hoel's piece last year (https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/we-need-a-butlerian-jihad-against) mentioned this.
I'm less concerned with creation qua creation, more with the fact that the capability to write superhuman fiction books is strongly adjacent to the capability to write superhuman political essays which is essentially a deadline for alignment/governance.
#28 - I suggest the word "woke" either gets defined or tabooed. Without an explanation of precisely what a poster means by it, it is left as a free placeholder for whatever the reader and writer dislike, which need not be the same things.
In this particular case, the article appears to be about allowing companies to select individuals by race, ostensibly because racial indicators might correlate with performance across populations.
The word "woke" in this case seems to be used as a fig-leaf: "companies can be sued for not enforcing wokeness" sounds on a cursory reading like a problem that needs solving, whether by repealing the relevant laws or otherwise, since most readers will have some things they dislike that might fall under the label "woke"; replacing the neologism with the substance, however, would lead to a statement like "companies can be sued for permitting racial discrimination", which is a state of affairs that seems much less in need of changing.
I suggest that, in the current culture war ridden space, the default assumption when anyone uses the word "woke" without clearly explaining precisely what they mean by it should be that they are using it as a rhetorical fig leaf to slip a concept under the reader's radar.
Counterpoint: specifically avoiding referring to the movement/ideology with any word is equally insidious. See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
The problem I have with the stance your linked article takes is that it presupposes some kind of global movement where what exists in actuality is a rag-tag collection of disparate recently formed groups that frequently vehemently disagree not only with far right extremists but also with each other (cf. is radical feminism feminism?).
The problems here are twofold: firstly, the kind of equivocation I have already described; and secondly, incorrectly ascribing the opinions of one group to another entirely unrelated group that happen to also have opinions the speaker dislikes that therefore fall under the "woke" label. The scenario is similar in many ways to media reports on 4chan that attempt to claim that Anonymous is a coherent organisation with shared beliefs and goals. There is no "4chan Anonymous ideology" coherent enough that you can say that combination of words and I will know what you mean by it.
If the intent is to have a coherent discussion about some specific subject, then it should be made completely clear what that subject is. I'd assumed this is where we were at; but sure, if the intent is simply to grumble about modern politics and/or the culture war in general while waving a flag for one's own side, then indeed "woke" is a very reasonable word to use.
I don't think anyone honestly believes it is a global movement (as in it's everywhere), but it's at least one that has a substantial influence in Anglophone (and to a lesser extent, other Western) countries. The fact that it's fractured and full of infighting does not take away from the fact that most of these groups organized around a common principle of righting (real or perceived) wrongs borne out of discrimination against race, sex, sexuality, gender identity and so on.
The problem that you describe definitely exists, and 'wokeness' is able to serve as a stand-in for the reader's worst assumptions. However, the central criticism against 'wokeness' that I relate to (and which I hope is the norm) is not that the principles are wrong, but that the actions people justify with those principles are. This makes it very easy to motte-and-bailey 'wokeness' by saying stuff like "Do you think companies should be able to get away with firing employees because they're black, asian or latino? Are you some kind of racist?" when the actual disagreement is with something like "Companies should be able to get sued if they don't implement and meet stringent hiring quotas for minority employees."
So, the ease with which 'the woke' are able to stand on the strength of their principles, and smuggle in their much less defensible actions with them, is itself detracting from the clarity of the discussion. It would be easier to have this discussion if it was consistently clear which actions are being advocated for and why, but that's usually not the case.
Sounds to me like an argument for being even *more* explicit, not less - not only replace "woke" with the actual thing one has a problem with, but also expand "repeal the law" to clarify exactly what it is you do and don't want repealed, to prevent people assuming the worst.
I do realise this is a recipe for turning brief outbursts into well-reasoned carefully referenced astralcodexten style essays... but, well, I see this as no bad thing, and here we all are in this substack together so I suspect I am not alone in that.
You don't have me with you at any rate. The assumption that you can write exact-ness into bad laws is to make them less bad is incorrect. You would be better off with a repeal and social norms dictating behaviour instead of laws.
I humbly suggest that laws and regulations are what happens when relying on social norms and common sense fails. Scrapping them without an alternative will reintroduce the failure that caused them.
Therefore, you now need to be *even more explicit* - in addition to explaining what you have a problem with and why, and precisely what law it is you want to repeal, you *also* need to explain exactly what problems that law was meant to solve and why you believe repealing it will not reintroduce them.
Again, since you keep ignoring it: Why do you think this should apply to "woke" but not to "racist/racism"?
>that frequently vehemently disagree not only with far right extremists but also with each other (cf. is radical feminism feminism?).
Oh dear. It is very dirty of you to say "they disagree with far right extremists", the implication being that anyone not woke they disagree with is a "far right extremist". This is not even close to true. You can be the most anodyne, limp-wristed centre-right or even centre-left person and they will still find a reason to tear you to pieces.
>The scenario is similar in many ways to media reports on 4chan that attempt to claim that Anonymous is a coherent organisation with shared beliefs and goals. There is no "4chan Anonymous ideology" coherent enough that you can say that combination of words and I will know what you mean by it.
Except there is a crystal clear line we can draw around what "woke" is because its so different from what everyone else believes. The fact that they disagree with each other is immaterial, because only the woke even support radical feminism or radical pro-transgenderism or whatever the sectarian conflict of the day is.
>If the intent is to have a coherent discussion about some specific subject, then it should be made completely clear what that subject is. I'd assumed this is where we were at; but sure, if the intent is simply to grumble about modern politics and/or the culture war in general while waving a flag for one's own side, then indeed "woke" is a very reasonable word to use.
If the intent is to have a coherent discussion about some specific subject, then it should be made completely clear what that subject is. I'd assumed this is where we were at; but sure, if the intent is simply to grumble about modern politics and/or the culture war in general while waving a flag for one's own side, then indeed "racist" is a very reasonable word to use.
This isn't a weak attampt at a gotcha. This is a much, much bigger problem than the use of "woke", and yet I'm alsmost positive you never ever even blink when you hear people call somebody racist or claim "racism" exists.
I think I agree with your diagnosis - there absolutely is an ambiguity here that needs resolving, and that makes "companies can be sued for not enforcing wokeness" terrible communication - but not with your prescription - that the word "woke" it too ambiguous to be useful and needs to be further defined or tabooed. I think that, like most words, it's somewhat ambiguous (Scott's word was "ambijective"), and while it's unambiguous enough to make it fit for plenty of purposes, this isn't one of them.
I think that most of the time the answer to the questions "is this person woke?" and "is this opinion woke?" are pretty clear - not always, but often enough for it to be a useful and legitimate word.
The reason that saying "companies can be sued for not enforcing wokeness" is terrible communication is not that the word "woke" doesn't convey meaningful information, but that it doesn't convey sufficient information. There are lots of different woke behavioural standards companies might or might not enforce; I have no idea which ones are being talked about.
Unless you say all this and MORE when you hear people use the word "racist" or "racism", then its ideologically motivated special pleading on your behalf.
It's not terrible communication. In fact, it's extremely effective communication, like any clever slogan or buzzword, and you can tell that by the fact that the people it targets react with rage, and not with befuddlement. They know exactly what is being implied. The problem is they don't *like* what is being implied, and think that if the discussion were held in different more emotionally cool terms what is being implied could be more successfully attacked.
>#28 - I suggest the word "woke" either gets defined or tabooed. Without an explanation of precisely what a poster means by it, it is left as a free placeholder for whatever the reader and writer dislike, which need not be the same things.
Sure, once you people tell us what the hell "racism" means. And "racism" is much more egregious in this way because it's a much more powerful word that is weilded by the most powerful institutions in society today. And at least woke doesn't have a whole bunch of contradictory usages.
>"companies can be sued for permitting racial discrimination", which is a state of affairs that seems much less in need of changing
Nope, you're inserting your own ideology to create a strawman. "Racial discrimination" is typically understood to mean discrimination on the sole basis of race. But what you're referring to here is actually refers to a situation where hiring people on the basis of merit leads to uneven hiring of people of different races (because people of different races have different average cognitive ability), but you've nonetheless labelled it "racial discrimination" in a way that is extremely misleading.
>I suggest that, in the current culture war ridden space, the default assumption when anyone uses the word "woke" without clearly explaining precisely what they mean by it should be that they are using it as a rhetorical fig leaf to slip a concept under the reader's radar.
I suggest that, in the current culture war ridden space, the default assumption when anyone uses the word "racist" without clearly explaining precisely what they mean by it should be that they are using it as a rhetorical fig leaf to slip a concept under the reader's radar.
And at the very least, "woke" is a label that (at least some of) the people who it is directed at previously used it to identify themselves, whereas "racist" is simply a slur.
Just jumping on this to agree wholeheartedly. The person in the OP is really doing a big disservice to communication here.
To be scrupulously fair, some people will unapologetically call themselves racists. The first name I can think of who is likely to be familiar to people round these parts is Zero HP Lovecraft - https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/marooned-in-the-deepest-darkness-f47#details
"But I would never tell you that dems are the real racists. Don’t let anyone tell you that. WE are the real racists, because we are the best racists"
[Comment moved to a more appropriate location, and edited.]
It's much easier in these postmodern (post-WW2) times, when the concept of race has been both morally and scientifically discredited : still using race like it is a valid category (rather than ethnicity, which is overwhelmingly cultural) makes you a racist.
One of my beefs with the "wokes" is that they not leftists, but racists (and also often economic liberals, so right-wing) that have been so steeped in the North American structural racism (and consumerist capitalism) that they don't even seem to realize this !
And then some people have the *gall* to blame European thought to be responsible for the "wokes", even when it's the USA that is radiating them all over the planet !
P.S.: This is in resonance with another link : about South Africa :
Context : 1978 revolutionary speech (of Marxist-Leninist bent) by Thabo Mbeki, who went on to become president from 1999 to 2008, excerpt of the Freedom Charter :
"Whenever we stand up and say “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people...,” [21], we always meet with three different reactions.
There are those, naturally who agree with us. There are those who howl in derision: these are the white supremacists who are confident of the everlasting power of the repressive force of apartheid South Africa.
But perhaps more important, there are those, themselves the offspring of the black producers of our country together with their sympathisers, who, in anger, throw at us the epithet, traitor!
Yet this is what a free South Africa will be like. For as the masses themselves long discovered, the antithesis to white supremacy, exclusiveness and arrogance is not a black version of the same practice.
In the physical world, black might indeed be the opposite of white. But in the world of social systems, social theory and practice have as much to do with skin pigmentation as has the birth of children with the stork. To connect the two is to invent a fable with the conscious or unconscious purpose of hiding reality.
The act of negating the theory and practice of white apartheid racism, the revolutionary position, is exactly to take the issue of colour, race, national and sex differentiation out of the sphere of rational human thinking and behaviour, and thereby expose all colour, race, nation and sex prejudice as irrational.
Our own rational practical social activity, rational in the sense of being anti-racist and non-racist, constitutes such a negation; it constitutes the social impetus and guarantee of the withering away of this irrationality."
(Of course, in practice it's very hard to build a society where everyone is treated equally, but it's hopeless if you do NOT start with equality being built into your ideology and statistics...)
>when the concept of race has been both morally and scientifically discredited
I'm not sure it's possible for a *concept* to be morally discredited independently of it being factually discredited. It could be - if there are concepts that are factually true, but which nonetheless cause those who believe them to behave immorally (i.e. questions on which, in order to be a good person, you would have to believe a falsehood), then this could be one of them, but I'm not convinced.
But as fas as scientifically discredited goes, I think you may be conflating a strawman with the more nuanced view. Approximately no one believes that there are five or six discrete racial boxes, each genetically homoenous within themselves, into which everyone fits unambiguously into exactly one; we are perfectly aware that human genetic and phenotypic variation is clinal. Rather, wherever there are barriers to gene flow (such as oceans, mountain ranges, impassable deserts), people will tend to be more likely to interbreed with each other on the near side of such obstacles, such that, although the geographical distance between, say, a point in the middle of Africa and a point in North Africa may be the same as between that same starting point and a point in southern Africa, because it was so hard to cross the Sahara for so many thousands of years, we can group people by genetic relatedness more parsimoniously if we cluster them into 'Sub-Saharan Africans' and 'North Africans, Europeans and Middle Easterners' than if we tried to cluster them into 'Africans' and Europeans and Middle Easterners - check out 'genetic cluster analysis' or 'human genetic clustering' for more details, but basically, if you feed a bunch of genomes from around the world into an algorithm, and tell it to divide the genomes into K number of clusters, maximizing the genetic homogeneity within each cluster, then at K=2 you will reliably get 'Sub-Saharan Africans' and 'Everyone Else', and at about 5 or 6 clusters, you will get something that maps reasonably well onto the sort of racial categorization scheme that old-timey pith-helmet-wearing gentleman scholars tended to come up with based simply on visible physical differences between populations... Though it doesn't map very well onto US census groups categories - 'Asian' is not a plausible cluster (South Asians being closer to Europeans than they are to North-East Asians), and 'Hispanic' is a non-starter.
And yes, of course, at the borders of these clusters you get people who are genetically intermediate - the people of the Horn of Africa tend to have a substantial degree of Middle Eastern admixture, and South-East Asians have substantial genetic affinity with both South Asians and North-East Asians; Uyghurs are a hybrid North-East Asian / West Eurasian population, and you can keep adding clusters as much as you like to pick out smaller and smaller groups. But the point is that, as a first approximation, most people can be assigned to one or other of five or six continent-scale clusters that roughly coincide with what we call 'races', and knowing that about a person will give you greater than zero information about the probability of them having certain phenotypic characteristics (even though you could get greater precision of you could narrow it down to 'ethnicity', and yet more by narrowing it down to 'tribe', 'clan', 'family' or ultimately 'individual'
If the word "woke" is going to be tabooed and require an explanation, I'm going to set up a hotkey for "people who don't have anything better to do than LARP as 1960s civil rights activists, and insist on causing real harm to anyone who won't indulge their pathetic fantasies". I'm guessing there won't be much confusion as to who I am talking about, among anyone whose opinion I care about.
Otherwise, as others have already noted, "woke" is much better defined, more clearly understood, and less harmful than "racist" or "sexist". So when you've tabooed "racist" and "sexist" and gotten everybody to define what they really mean when they say them, *then* we can talk about "woke". But if you can pull that off, we probably won't need to.
Well, this might be a case of being hoist by your own petard, since what the "woke" people do that others find so annoying is slip concepts like disparate outcomes for any number of innocent reasons under the reader's radar by using highly charged words like "sexism" to mean "it turns out requiring firefighters to be able to hump a heavy canvas hose 100 yards in full protective gear means only 30% of female applicants to fire school graduate, whereas 70% of the men do" and potent words like "racism" to mean "putting a black murderer away for 20-to-life, the sentence mandated by law and handed down for a white defendant last week, because the judge refused to take into account the black defendant's childhood of grinding poverty and being called a n***** by some bullies in the 6th grade."
I'm all for being precise in communication, so in principle I support what you're saying, but I can well understand people who have experienced the so-called "woke" community, when they hear this, saying ha ha you first 'cause you started it.
>companies can be sued for permitting racial discrimination
Do you think that an IQ test is racial discrimination? If yes, then "enforcing wokeness" in these matters seems to be inevitable.
Re childcare hours expanding—I don't find this strange at all. I was born in 1958 in rural England. I can't speak to direct care when I was a baby, except to say that child psychiatrists are well aware that the 'self-calming child' no longer exists. That was an age when it was not a crime to let a baby cry if you knew the babe was dry, fed and safe, and the cry was one of rage about being left alone rather than one representing the first three conditions not being met. Mothers are good at that! As a pre-school toddler I was let into the back garden and told to 'play'. Excellent for the immune system, getting muddy and possibly eating worms. At five I started walking to school in the morning, home for lunch, back for the afternoon and then home again. Probably only 500m each trip, but makes over a mile a day for a five year old. School uniform involved shorts, and it wasn't pleasant in the winter with sleet stinging bare legs. (Of course, girls had skirts so they knew all about bare legs!) By the age of eight I could ride a bike, and after tea (family was middle class but only first generation out of working class, so hot meal at midday, and tea instead of dinner) I was let loose on the village with my playmates and had to be home by dusk. By the time I was off to the local comprehensive at 11, my mother had herself a job, and I had a house key, and when I got home, I made myself tea, and did homework unsupervised. Independence and self-reliance was built in to the method of child care (which would probably be called neglect these days). At eighteen I got on a train with a trunk, went to medical school, and came home at the end of the year. I never lived at home again after that; it just wasn't expected or done. Very different world, and I suspect we were the better for it in terms of minimised suffering on leaving home. I don't feel my parents were in the least bit neglectful or uncaring (although I think that most of my mother's time in direct child care was spent in caning me for some infraction or other.) Let's just say I always had a close and loving relationship with my father for the rest of his days!
"Probably only 500m each trip, but makes over a mile a day for a five year old."
Are you saying small children intrinsically use the imperial system?
Or that small children can't walk in a straight line? (1 mile = 1600 m)
Four trips of 500m totals 2000m, which is over a mile. One of the things I was taught there was arithmetic!
#1 This guy has a 3 part series where he argues (convincingly imo) that the dodecahedra, and occasional icosahedra, were used as calendars:
https://tinkerings.org/2020/06/17/roman-dodecahedrons-part-i/
https://tinkerings.org/2020/06/17/roman-dodecahedrons-part-ii/
https://tinkerings.org/2020/12/25/roman-dodecahedrons-part-iii/
In response to the question in #1, I would like to submit link #14
RE #33: two non-exclusive explanations that come to mind are labor-saving devices and services and fear of kidnapping/predation. The first is simple enough, having a mechanical washing machine means far less time doing laundry, we eat out/nuke something in the microwave instead of cooking regularly (saves cleanup too), vacuuming instead of beating rugs, etc.
As for the second whether or not the situation with children being kidnapped or molested is actually worse than it was in 1965 the perception is that it is. Also our attitudes towards tragedies with children have changed, the tacit? cultural expectation is that you never ever let your kids out of your site unless they are in a safe (usually literally locked down) school or other location or with trusted adults who will keep tabs on them. If you fail to exert this level of diligence then you are held to be a bad parent and deserving of whatever tragedy befalls. I wasn't alive in 1965 but have been assured by people that were that such was not the case.
So instead of leaving the kids to their own devices while the stay-at-home-mom does her full time job's worth of household chores, we now burn the candle at both ends with both parents working and doing childcare and doing what remains of the housework. Race to the bottom?
On #33 - Childcare
It used to be that childcare was pretty much only for very small children who could not tend to themselves. Older children (and I think that would be like, six or younger) would go off and play all day outside or hang out with other kids. The idea that we need to watch kids as old as 12 or more is definitely new. 12-year-olds used to regularly babysit stranger's kids for money.
I think the only reason the mom's number of hours is so high is because family sizes were larger and each kid needed their own time with mom.
#28 - woke workplaces
"Woke" is further than workplace law requires, but it's definitely on the same trajectory. Once you train an organization to avoid even the appearance of anti-minority and anti-female discrimination, you've trained them to look for woke-adjacent problems in the workplace. Major corporations with tens of thousands of employees can't afford to have much of a failure rate on training, so they have a strong incentive to over-train avoidance. If you add in a supportive media environment, it's not much of a jump to going fully "woke" and angling for PR benefits to what you are mostly doing anyway.
AI mediocrity: this has been my main AI concern since about when GPT-2 came out.
You know how frustrating it is when you have to talk to someone in a call centre, and they have a script to follow, or they don't understand your query and keep trying to answer a simpler query that has some superficial similarities? At least there is a human there, and if you're lucky you might get through to them. But in the same way that corporations offshored their call centres because it was cheaper, very soon they'll replace them with AIs for the same reason. The AI will be very good at answering the most common questions, and even at producing words that sound relevant to the more obscure queries, but it probably won't understand your attempts to disambiguate between your problem and the more common problem, and it probably won't have the long-term coherence to keep in mind the nuance you explained to it earlier.
Copy-writing and journalism, except at the highest levels, will be done by AI. Hardly anyone will notice the errors because they'll mostly be skim-reading anyway, but those errors will be copied into Wikipedia and into respected papers and books, and become accepted as fact.
I don't know what will happen to assessment in schools and universities (especially for essay subjects, but also even for maths and programming). Maybe coursework will eventually be abolished and everything will be assessed under exam conditions, but it will be several years before the bureaucracy catches up enough to make that change. AI-generated essays are already better than those of mediocre students, and not easily detectable by plagiarism detectors. The temptation even for good students to just submit a generated essay will increase as the language models improve, and the cost/benefit ratio of actually putting in the work yourself will decrease.
>Copy-writing and journalism, except at the highest levels, will be done by AI. Hardly anyone will notice the errors because they'll mostly be skim-reading anyway, but those errors will be copied into Wikipedia and into respected papers and books, and become accepted as fact.
While I agree this would be a bad state of affairs, I think we got there with incompetent humans long ago. The number of major factual and typographical errors in major newspapers of repute is pretty shockingly high, and IMO would be *lower* with any AI good enough to warrant the backlash of firing humans (much as in any industry, inertia means that the new method usually has to be *obviously superior* in quality, not merely comparable)
#22: Jumping to conclusions and not fully analyzing the evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. People with schizophrenia have numerous early visual processing deficits, most likely centered around magnocellular pathway dysfunction. This alone doesn’t explain the cortical blindness hypothesis, but it surely is something to consider before rejecting the null.
When you say “null hypothesis”, and “cortical blindness hypothesis”, I believe you’re referring in BOTH cases to “the hypothesis that cortically-blind people never get schizophrenia”. Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding.
When you say that my post was “not fully analyzing the evidence”, I believe you’re referring to the INDIRECT evidence (evidence concerning nuts-and-bolts theories about how schizophrenia works in the brain, and these theories then do or don’t imply that cortical blindness is or isn’t incompatible with schizophrenia), NOT the direct evidence (evidence where you try to count how many cortically-blind schizophrenic people there are, and compare that to expectations). Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding.
I mentioned in the second paragraph of my post that I didn’t find the “indirect evidence” convincing. Quite the contrary, I found the “indirect evidence” strongly pointing in the opposite direction, i.e. that cortical blindness should NOT prevent schizophrenia. But I didn't explain why I thought that. It was outside the scope of the post. My post was just about the direct evidence.
I discussed the direct evidence that I was able to find, in the limited time that I spent looking at it. If I missed direct evidence, I’m interested to hear it, and I would update the post in response.
Back to the indirect evidence, again I didn’t talk about it in the post, but for the record, I had indeed spent some time looking at the literature on visual processing differences in schizophrenia. (Not much time though.) My assessment was basically “schizophrenia causes visual processing differences”, as opposed to “visual processing differences cause schizophrenia”. So on my thinking, if an exogenous factor caused occipital lobe dysfunction, I didn’t see how that would make schizophrenia any more or less likely. (Again, to be clear, I’m just stating this opinion without justifying it.)
I agree that the only way to truly refute the null (Cortical blindness is a protective factor in schizophrenia) is through direct observation. I disagree that early visual processing deficits findings work against the cortical blindness hypothesis. Somewhere between 30-50% of the cortex is involved in visual processing and this system undergoes rapid changes in early life. If schizophrenia is a developmental disorder (which many researchers believe) that affects white matter integrity, dopamine, glutamate, and GABA function, you would expect the visual system to play a significant role in the disease process. If the striate cortex is not being used from birth this would likely affect the system as a whole and perhaps strengthen other perceptual areas (I.e., auditory), decreasing the likelihood of positive symptom development. The brain functions as a system, not a group of distinct areas. What changes in one area or is deficient in another at birth will have significant downstream effects in seemingly unconnected areas. There’s a developing literature looking at early perceptual training that thus far has shown gains in lower leveling function (I.e., contrast sensitivity) can actually improve global cognition/functioning that is not directly related to vision or hearing. Would be happy to share a systematic review on this topic if you’re interested, though, the field is at its infancy.
#23: convenience over decentralization: To make that sounds more like the owner of the cueva can either trust Binance or the 17-year-old crypto kid in the back offfice. And he chooses the former.
19. is great. I agree wholeheartedly with it.
The counterargument that technology is not going to stop people to make art seems a bit disingenuous to me. Take photography. True, it didn't destroy art as a whole, but it did make figurative, didascalic, realistic art completely redundant. And as a result the people like Picasso that could paint like Raffaello started painting like Picasso instead. And it's not that i dislike Picasso either, but we have relegated a certain form of figurative art to the outskirts of the art world.
You're saying will change art, they're saying won't end art. Not seeing a need to bring disingenuous-ness into it
I'd say that the more apt comparison is that Raphaels of today are the most famous photographers. Yes, the camera empowered the average Joe to make vastly better realistic pictures than he could before, but the best photographers can still achive much better results than that, and their job also includes sophisticated post-processing.
There are many realistic-style pictures you can make where a photo would not replace you. For example, paint a historical person (no longer alive), paint someone walking on a Moon, or paint a "realistic" fantasy character or animal (elf, dragon).
Perhaps "paint a photo" was an important source of income for artists in the past, and then it was replaced by actual photos, so artists lost some of their motivation to improve their skill at realistic painting?
Is there really a lack of skillful artists in this style, so that a customer would have trouble getting a high-quality product commissioned? I suspect that what truly changed is the relative status of the best of them, whereas previously they were admired as paragons of artistic merit, now they are merely highly competent craftsmen. Status games of this sort can't escape their zero-sum nature, there's only so many household names that culture can keep in it collective memory, and technological progress is only one of the inputs into this process.
I never tried to hire an artist. Here are two anecdotes, but I have no idea whether they only apply to artists in my city or whether it is a general trend.
1) Once I talked to Martina Pilcerová https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20024224/one-womans-fantasy-success.html (she designed some Magic the Gathering cards) and she told me that when she studied art, she was actively discouraged by her teachers from painting realistically, because it was considered low-status. She was stubborn and resisted the pressure, but her other classmates have internalized the message.
2) My friend was making a mobile phone application, and there was an artistic school next to his home, so he was like "instead of hiring on internet, I could support a local artist" and he talked to some of the students. He basically just wanted some nice picture on the application main screen... but all the students seemingly could do was take a brush and produce an art on canvas (the kind that teachers would approve, presumably). When he gave them technical specification like "I need the picture to be low on detail and have thick lines, because it will be displayed on a 500 pixel wide screen", this was already way outside their comfort zone. (So ultimately he hired some foreigner online.)
So, not sure whether this is true in general, or it was just two specific crappy schools, but my impression is that artist schools seem to be status-oriented, and craft is considered low-status. The paintings are produced to be admired (by experts on art), not to be used for some mundane purpose.
Sure, all this is very plausible. With the blurry art/craft distinction, it's to be expected that status games are especially impactful here, with readily available examples of "avant-garde" artists hitting it big with sales north of hundred millions. The contrast with music is interesting, in that there popular appeal is strongly correlated with making a killing financially, while academics are doing their thing in a relatively irrelevant and non-lucrative niche.
Is there actually less figurative, didascalic, realistic art being produced today than in, say, 1800? It no longer has the same cultural cachet, but some people still enjoy it as a hobby.
#17 autoplay: maybe it is just me, but I am already badly annoyed by animated gifs repeating in discord. In the unlikely event I actually came to the website to watch a video, I can damn well click on the play button, thank-you-very-much. IMHO, autoplay belongs to the same heap of horrible UI ideas as the blink tag, automatic web site background music in the late 90s and these horrible EU cookie prompts. "Our company producing vacuum pumps produced a great PR video. Strangely, most people visiting our website do not seem to click on it, probably because they can not figure out how to play it. Let's just play it automatically so everyone can enjoy it." Anyone cares to steelman autoplay?
#19 (AI is demoralizing)
TIL people actually use autocorrect. I hated it in the 1990s in MS Word when I was a kid and still disable it on my mobile to this day. Red underlining is ok, but I would rather fix five mistakes manually than have to undo an automatic correction once. With regard to writing code, my favorite "IDE" (GNU emacs) is not supported by github co-pilot, not that I care. IMHO, if you do notice that you need ten similar lines of code, the correct way to handle this is to increase your level of abstraction and use a loop + general statement. I think the ability to copy-paste big chunks of code (without understanding) is already ruining code quality in a project I am involved with.
I think visual artists and film actors are most threatened by AI. With regard to writing, I totally can't see ACX being replaced by a weak AI. Except perhaps for "links for $month"? And if ML can do data analysis and coding on their own, I guess I will just wait a bit for AI to take over AI research and then either end up in an Ellisonian nightmare, some utopia or something in between. Still, I can totally see DALL-E being annoying to artists.
#36 (Prisoners/Police per homicide)
Full paper: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647
Twitter preview cuts of the x axis.
I think relating the total number of prisoners to the number of homicides is unreasonable. First, I don't understand why the axes are dimensionless. I would expect homicides to be measured as a rate (in units of 1/year). Prisoners and Police, however, are more typically measured as a population. Thus, the axis should be of time dimension (e.g. years), with the interpretation: "The average Japanese police is head investigator in a murder investigation every every 700 years" and "If murder was the only crime for which people are arrested, to maintain the current prison population in Japan, the average murder case would have to result in an cumulative effective prison sentence of 160 years".
Given these numbers, either the prisoners in Japan are sentenced for being part of vast conspiracies of murderers or they are simply there for a crime not related at all to homicides, but perhaps tax fraud. OTOH, Finland probably mostly puts serious offenders in prison and prefers to deal with non-violent crime differently.
For the US, it is unclear to me if most prisoners are convicted of offenses strongly correlated with homicides (e.g. armed robberies, street corner drug dealing?) and what fraction of homicides is committed by people involved in criminal business models?
Also, from figure 2, Japan has around 700 (unknown unit) Police per homicide, while from figure 5, it is clearly below 500 (unknown unit)?
Finally, I did not realize that the "clearance rate" (here measured by homicide arrests instead of judicial outcomes, which I find confusing: solving all double homicides would get you to a rate of 0.5, while solving all homicides committed by pairs of killers would get you to 2? Not sure how large these effects are.) of the US is below 0.6. I think this is possibly related to the murder rate: in Europe, common wisdom is that while you *may* get away with all sorts of lesser crimes, homicides will get solved. Thus, mostly people who expect to be caught as well as the statistical illiterate and the ones who think themselves clever will try to kill people.
#9 (statue) seems to have a great CW potential. Let me just say I hope India will not get into a religious statue race with Pakistan. :-P
“Anyone cares to steelman autoplay?”
Lemmings 2 animations are awesome.
I agree that the “sticky” css position needs to die however.
Not officially supported. https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el
Aren't horrible EU cookie prompts legally required? EU digital privacy laws are pretty good in many respects, but this particular overreach does seem pointless.
Basically, the EU originally passed a law saying all websites had to offer an opt-out from all cookies. This was a good decision, but had an obvious problem, in that if a user opts out of all cookies on your website, you can't place a cookie in his browser saying that he's opted out...
Anyway, this then ended up not mattering as businesses ratfucked the law in court, getting the court to decree (against the obvious intent of the law) that it was sufficient to merely *warn* the user that an unspecified number of cookies would be set, on first visiting the site, and that opting out could consist of just not using the site once warned. Thus it is now a legal requirement to be annoying for no reason. Really shows the flaws of a judicial system with any kind of leeway to interpret the law, but it does seem like an unfixable problem, unfortunately.
But under the intended interpretation of the law the prompt would have to appear every time, which is orders of magnitude worse? I'd say that the flaw here lies primarily in clueless and unresponsive legislature, rather than the judiciary which did the best it could with an obviously bad piece of legislation.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Had the EU not intervened in the first place, I would say it's a pretty reasonable expectation that browser makers (or add-on authors) would have come up with something similar (but much more customizable for the user) on the client side, in the same way people came up with ad blockers and script disablers and pop-up blockers -- for the simple reason that browser makers (and add-on builders) are serving the clients, not the businesses, and so their interests align naturally. We can expect responsiveness, especially if people are sufficiently annoyed with it that they'll pay actual money for a solution.
But the interests of the businesses running the servers naturally conflict with the users, so expecting anything *other* than minimal compliance and efforts to end-run or get technical with the law, or work the system levers, is exactly what a rational person would expect. Asking them to faithfully and honestly implement a proposal which directly contradicts their interests is asking men to have the temperament of angels. Not super likely to work out the way you hope.
The major risk in *any* legislative top-down solution to a social problem is that you short-circuit the possibility of a bottom-up grassroots solution, which as a rule are far more responsive to the people who are actually experiencing the problem.
Browser makers had a long time to come up with a solution. I am guessing that they didn't because they are now mostly Google (or Google-funded), whose business model is based on ads and tracking.
#39: My anecdotal experience from talking to immigrant high school students from muslim countries is that it's taught as something that was just about to be a glorious victory when the evil U.S. stepped in to stop it and save Israel by forcing a peace at gunpoint.
This is obviously grossly untrue - it was Israel who did their best to keep the war going once victory was assured - but seems to be the kind of myth-building that would support this kind of naming.
Regarding #1 and #14, that knitting was an amazingly late invention and that speed runners are crazy good at finding exploits.
It seems that these ideas are completely at odds. Left with a SNES and a couple years humans will apparently completely disassemble the virtual world and invent incredible, unforeseeable methods of achieving their goals. Left with thread and sticks for literally a hundred thousand years anatomically identical humans failed to produce knitting until the last millennium. It seems that producing flexible, warm clothing was significantly more valuable than getting to the Mario credits sooner, but it takes mere months to find new speedrunning exploits compared to centuries to develop knitting.
So, what's the difference? Humanity physically seems unchanged in the last hundred thousand years so we can't just say that we evolved to become better problem solvers. I can see the argument that knitting is harder to develop ex-nilo, but 100,000x more difficult seems implausible. It could be that we're as good as ever but the sheer amount of information availability in the modern era allows us to be significantly more effective when it comes to problem solving. But I could see arguments in favour of a cultural change, we have invented structures in society which make us significantly more able to be inventors going forwards. Or maybe it's just that five to ten percent of all humans who have ever lived are alive today so of course we're going to be accomplishing more.
In the immortal words of poet laureate sweet brown - 'Ain't nobody got time for that' is the explanation you're looking for. Leisure and the ability to focus on solving problems not immediately connected to survival are modern gifts
This resonates with a bit I remember out of Women's Work: The First 30,000 Years, which is a book about textile production. The question was "why didn't women, who all did spinning constantly, invent the wheel/spinning jenny/etc?" (Spinning is by far the most labor-intensive part of making fabric and the usual solution was to train kids to spin as soon as they could hold the tools, then make them do it whenever they weren't doing something more valuable with their hands)
The answer the author theorized is that there was simply no time to experiment. If a spinner stopped her usual methods to try new ones, it was entirely possible her family would not have warm clothes in the winter. Or they wouldn't have blankets, bags, and other useful household items. Or even they wouldn't have the extra cushion her making luxury trade goods offered. The spinner could not stop to play around with her methods, because that would mean she ran the risk of losing production, and that loss could be catastrophic.
You can extend this to other parts of textile production. Once you have weaving, it's best to just keep weaving and figure out how to do things with woven cloth over wasting thread experimenting. Once you have naalbinding, just keep doing that. Keep doing what works, because if you don't you won't have the textiles you need. Experimentation happens on the margins, from those with the leisure time and survival margin to handle failure.
Or as you said, "Ain't nobody got time for that."
I think it's a great question, why we innovated so slowly in the past and do it so quickly now.
The best I can come up with is that we've become culturally much better problem solvers. Modern western culture puts a great value on coming up with better ways to do things, whereas most cultures at most times in the past have frowned on it.
Communication tech and culture is likely a big part of this. Nowadays, Paper Mario speedrunners can and do get together online and share ideas and techniques across time and space. Whereas with knitting in a pre-literate society with minimal long-distance communication, you can only build on ideas and techniques that have been mastered by people you know personally. And if you come up with innovations, these are likely to die with you unless those innovations consistently catch someone else's interest enough to propagate down the generations.
Maybe no more complex than lower population? Let's assume the Roman Empire contained 60 million people in AD 150, and that 30% were slaves and 25% were children, that gives us 31.5 million free adults. The odds of an individual having IQ over 150, a very smart person but not a genius, like Thomas Edison, are about 0.048%, so we would have had 150,000 very smart people in the entire Empire, which had an area of ~3.4 million km^2, giving a mean distance between very smart people of ~6 km. In the typical small town, an IQ 150 person would've found zero peers within normal travel distance, no one from whom to learn or with whom to talk, or to convey his ideas.
Even in Rome itself, with a gross population at its height of 1 million, there would've been only 2,500 very smart people, and if we subtract those that were too poor, or too busy being politicians or generals, it's not hard to see a very small cadre of inventor-class people.
If we zoom up to Newton's level, IQ 190, a genuine genius, then the probability become so low (1 in 1 billion) that there's a decent chance no such person was born in Rome from the time of its founding right up to the fall of the Emprie.
Conversely today there are probably 35,000 IQ 150 people in New York City alone, and 1.4 million in the entire United States. More than enough to fill all the brilliant leadership and captains of industry roles, and still have a bunch of inventor-class people with time on their hands -- and the ready ability to talk to others like them. The odds are that there are 5-10 people as smart as Newton alive somewhere in the world today.
Do you really think it took IQ 150 to invent knitting, a process you can learn on youtube in about 15 minutes? Especially if a large fraction of them spent a lot of their time turning yarn into clothing? I am suspicious that it is more cultural, and that through most of history it would never occur to people that they might be able to come up with a better option than the standard practice. Even if you were fiddling around with a piece of yarn and did some knitting (the word literally comes from "knotting" the yarn repeatedly) you wouldn't conceive of it as an idea worth repeating or spreading.
The lowest estimates put the pre-historical world population at around 100k, so 70,000 times less people than today.
Knitting is a very slow way to make wearables, if it's done by hand. The only people who could afford to invest that kind of time and effort would be the rich, and I would hazard they would rather spend the time (of their menials) making a good coat of mail than a knit shirt.
I'm not sure what to make of the chart in #36. At first glance, I thought it meant when a homicide occurs in the US, 20 cops go to work and put 120 people in prison. So US police are far more efficient compared to their international counterparts.
In fact, the plot is nigh incomprehensible. The author should consider reviewing "How to Display Data Badly" by Howard Wainer (American Statistician, May 1984) before publishing any further work.
Following the link for more context where there are multiple charts shown (Scott only puts the second chart inline), I think the point is that there's a linear correlation between policing rates and incarceration rates which persists whether you calculate the rates based on overall population or homicide rate, and the US is an outlier in both charts.
In the "per 100k population" chart, the US appears to be about 30th percentile among the dataset (looks like OECD members or some similar proxy for first world countries) in terms of policing rates but is off the chart (something like 3.5x the next highest country) in terms of incarceration rates. The takeaway from this is that number of police relative to population doesn't explain American incarceration rates.
In the "per homicide" chart, the data is renormalized to reflect the hypothesis that policing and incarceration rates are driven by rates of serious crime (murder/manslaughter being used as a proxy for this), there continues to be a correlation between policing rates and incarceration rates (confirming the intuition that in general, more police mean more crimes get cleared), but again the US is an outlier from the trendline, which again implies that the police -> incarceration relationship does not explain the American incarceration rate. Per this chart, the US has the lowest policing rate relative to crime rate among countries in the dataset, but our incarceration rate relative to crime rate is middle of the pack (US appears to be precisely the median on the prisoners-per-homicide axis).
At face value, the likely takeaways are that the US is underpoliced both relative to crime rate and incarceration rate, and that our extremely high incarceration rate is fully explained by our extremely high crime rate.
This could suggest two contradictory policy directions. If we suppose that our low policing rate causes our high crime rate, then more police could reduce the crime rate and thus counterintuitively reduce our incarceration rate in the long run. However, the dataset does (despite the US's outlier status) suggest a positive linear correlation between policing and incarceration, so more policing in the US might increase incarceration rates after all.
In addition, I'd be very careful about taking the results at face value, as there are a ton of other considerations to take into account. One is that the directions of cause and effect between crime rates, policing, and incarceration are complex and unclear in ways that cause analysis issues similar to Scott Sumner's "never reason from a price change" mantra.
And then there's the validity of using homicide as a proxy for crime rates or even for serious/violent crime rates. Another way the US is an outlier among the countries in the data set is availability of good weapons, both legal and on black or grey markets. Otherwise-similar circumstances might often be murder or manslaughter if the perpetrator has a gun, but attempted murder or aggravated assault if the perpetrator has a knife or a club. Likewise, differences in emergency trauma medicine (perhaps US emergency rooms are more overburdened with frequent fliers than their counterparts in other countries) could also contribute to whether an incident turns out to be murder or assault.
US trauma medicine is about the best in the world. We are in a sweet spot of urban firearm homicides, high speed autos, and rapid emergency transport that brings a large percentage of a high n trauma victims to expert medical care in time to keep them breathing. There is evidence that this makes the current murder rates look better than they should.
> 19: Reddit: The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing. A new concern I’ve never seen before, aside from the superintelligence family of concerns or the implicit bias family. AI is slowly eating all creative work. If AI remains slightly worse than humans, it could still take over because it’s so much cheaper and more scaleable, resulting in all our art getting slightly worse. If it becomes better than humans, a world where you (as a human) can never create truly world-class art also sounds pretty depressing.
I think this is broadly correct, but I'm not convinced this is a bad tradeoff versus the benefit of unlimited customized creative work. I'm predicting that as AI-generated work becomes better, we'll see both a dramatic decrease for specifically human-generated work at the same time we get a dramatic increase in the *total* demand that's ambivalent about the origin. That new met demand is a benefit, just not to clearly identified existing interests.
More concretely: I've commissioned art for TTRPGs before (and written a small amount of music personally). I don't see myself *ever* doing that again... and yet I'll have more material than ever before. An analysis that doesn't account for the benefit to my players is missing half the picture.
I think the game-changer will be the release of an AI that *isn't* intentionally crippled so it can't make porn. Once Rule 34 has been automated, all bets are off.
I can confirm that there is at least one NSFW build of Stable Diffusion that is already being used for those purposes. It's not quite good enough to reliably hit content niches that have disproportionate profitability†, but it's definitely getting there.
† Not a euphemism for furry art. Well, not *exclusively* at least.
"Wait, it's all Maryland?"
"Always has been."
On the topic of mom/dad quantities of childcare, I wonder if definitions of "childcare" have changed over the years. It's possible that in 1965, moms didn't consider doing housework while the kids play outside as "childcare" (obviously 100% speculative). And now, as a parent of multiple kids, I am fairly sure that most everyone seems to count every moment spent nominally responsible for the kids as childcare.
On the topic of the future of AI/ML art, I'm totally on board with the idea that lots of people could be worse at lots of things and not know it due to AI, but I'm not sure that it follows that you can't tell your children "with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music." I guess I feel like art that can be done by almost anyone should be automated, and otherwise art is about creating meaning. Art evokes a feeling in us because we know that someone created a thing with an intention to make us feel something, and that feeling *can* happen because the art is incredibly beautiful, and AI art may be able to create enough beauty to evoke that feeling (though I still think people will value knowing that a human created that beauty, the same way we still pay way more for all sorts of handmade things), likewise, the fact the a person *used* the AI to make art doesn't erase the meaning. But there's also all sorts of art that *isn't* beautiful in the conventional sense, but is meaningful nonetheless. I think there will be artists who create that art that is imbued with meaning and people will see it and think it is meaningful and love it, and other artists will create things and people will think "Why did someone ask an AI to do that?" and if the artist can't convince people that it's meaningful, then nothing really has been lost.
"Art evokes a feeling in us because we know that someone created a thing with an intention to make us feel something"
Most art is not the kind of fine art where popular people with big personas bluster on about intentionality. Most digital art that could plausibly be computer generated is advertisements, book covers, game art, character art, appearing on web pages and at the tops of articles, along roadsides (though it would be technically difficult to automate mosaics), in animation and graphic novels, that kind of thing. In short, illustrations.
For a while the art being produced in Paris and New York was culturally important and relevant, but I'm not sure that's true anymore outside of those spheres. That could only support an handful of artists at any given time anyway. I'm in an art related field and go to meetings with artistic people, and when they talk about contemporary artists, it's personal and usually local -- a beader or potter from the local tribe, an iconographer who did work on a church they like, someone who's studio or show they visited, someone they're related to. I have trouble getting any impression of the broader art world over the past 20 years or so, other than in those illustrative fields mentioned above. I went to a museum the other day, and there was a beautifully lit display of glasswork showing traditional motifs. They were beautifully made from within a challenging craft tradition, and that's still valued. But there isn't as much space there as in commercial art, unless the artist becomes known and valued in rather niche communities.
I appreciate the insight from a person near the field such as yourself!
Art doesn't have to be world-class popular to create beauty and meaning ?
And if anything, it is not so much the AI that causes issues for the artists, but the easy ways to make copies of their art like the printing press, photography, vinyl disks and radio : only allowing a few of them to make lots of money.
Just guessing re #33: Sports and homework are insanely time consuming now.
"Was this person a p-zombie? If so, have we resolved the philosophical debate about whether p-zombies are possible?"
It's more likely a week's worth of memories were erased and he experienced that as "regaining consciousness".
#9 Resident Contrarian is obviously intelligent. I simply don't understand why he makes $50k a year. I hire people all the time into >$100k/yr positions where the person is clearly less intelligent than this fellow. Is it only credentialism that stands in his way?
I don't know about RC, but I have relatives who are like this -- excellent writers, college educated, curious and smart, who keep getting terrible jobs, like getting fired from a salad buffet for not fitting in with illegal workers well enough. In those cases, it's a blend of class markers, not knowing what to look for (terrible job advice at formative ages), rather chaotic organizational skills, and networking/social skills deficits.
Aella's post on going to networking parties conveys some of this -- the complete lack of even knowing where to start getting into a field.
(I often suffer from this myself -- I have no idea if there are jobs that I might be qualified for with a bit of search and training, or how to go about finding them)
Do you have a link to Aella's post?
https://aella.substack.com/p/learning-the-elite-class
So there's a few things happening here, but first, for some context, I make about 100k now. I think the most I ever made before this job was 50k, with 30-38k being the usual pay range you would have found me in for most of my adult life. When this article took off, I got a job offer at 60k, and then through a series of weird events that involved the word "matching" got a substantial raise past that.
But in terms of how this was *ever* possible, there's a couple of things going on:
1. As you guessed, credentialism plays really heavily here. Usually when I get interviews, I get jobs. I'm personable. But getting interviews can be incredibly difficult; a lot of (most) places have more applications than they actually have time to talk to people; they throw out some percentage of "worst" applications without a single word being exchanged. This is rational - you are maximizing your chances of a good hire - but would stop me at the door most places.
2. If you are taking crappy "I guess this will do for now" necessity jobs based on $1 an hour pay differences (say, $19 an hour instead of $18) you eventually end up with a really messy, bizarre CV. This works synergistically with not having a degree - first you don't have conventional qualifications, and then you are provoking "Well, I guess he's a pest control guy who... is also a secretary? What even is this?" reactions.
Those are what I feel the main factors are here. But also consider:
1. I'm never entirely sure if I'm actually good at anything besides writing. I'm reasonably bright, yes. But that's engine horsepower - there's a lot of other factors that go into drivetrain efficiency, and I often wonder if my transmission is just incredibly inefficient or something.
In terms of what you said, think of it like this: say you hire a very bright young data analyst with all the credentials you could want; they are attractive/confident/obviously smart, and they went to caltech or something. I think you probably know from experience that those guys don't always work out - maybe they aren't suited for the job, or maybe they aren't suited for *jobs*.
I've only ever been truly fired from one job (beginning of covid) and lost another when a project ended (terrible temp job with horrifying evil-aligned-Canadians). But technically the COVID-firing place kept at least some of its employees - what was the difference with me? And I'm not completely sure there wasn't some level of performance at Canadians-of-temporary-doom job that wouldn't have got me a permanent position of some kind.
2. I think 1 sort of leads into this one: Maybe I'm not honest with myself. Bear in mind I *THINK* that I am. I don't think I'm misleading you about who I am or how smart I might be, or giving myself an inaccurately positive PR makeover. But I think both of us have probably seen people who do that - nothing is ever their fault, and they never, ever admit they might have caused any of their own problems.
Even though I don't think this is true of me, I think you should be suspicious of people who say things like I say - it's just too easy and too comforting to make up lies that cover up for personal failings.
All that combines in a weird way in my head. I make 100k, but internally I'm absolutely sure I couldn't replace the job I currently have if I lost it; I'd take a massive paycut, maybe all the way back down to 35k, and there's nothing anyone can do to convince me otherwise. It's the irrationality of trauma, or something. So my life is much, much better than it used to be, but I also still live in a sort of omnipresent low-level fear that I'm going to fuck everything up and "go back to basics", as it were.
Can you elaborate on the evil Canadians (or point to somewhere you already have)? That sounds like a fascinating situation.
So I was working for a company that was basically administrating a lawsuit settlement - they were the settlement administration arm of a much larger company. Said arm was Canadian, and was administrating a Canadian lawsuit at the time.
I have, as racists sometimes say, some Canadian friends; I generally speaking am at least neutral on them as a chilly people group. But these particular Canadians were BAD CANADIANS, and FROM TORONTO, which I learned (possibly in error) was Canada's attempt at commanding the meanness and general badness of LA.
There's some more details on all this as a footnote in this article (https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/what-does-shitty-job-mean-in-the). But basically it just boils down to elites hating people who weren't like them, not being super great bosses, and making decisions in ways that both broke promises and were near-maximally harmful for their employees.
A large portion of my current team is from Toronto! As best I can tell, they are nice people. Maybe they're torturing kittens just offscreen, I've only ever met one of them in person. But I don't think that Toronto is uniformly part of hell.
I think in the original piece the way I put it is something like "I am inclined to initially dislike canadians, but I do my best to be aware of that and adjust". It's that thing where you aren't around a lot of Canadians and then you meet several garbage ones and you have to fight all your pattern recognition, but it's not like... like, you basically are obligated to do that I think.
Large company, based in Toronto, dedicated to having lots of temp workers? They'll be awful. There are plenty of awful Canadians. Personally, I think they become more awful as they become more stereotypically American in their views of employment. But I would think that.
It also should be noted that in the 80s LA was the third-largest Canadian city.
In short, there are many awful Canadians.
I can't speak for RC, but some people, and I count myself among them, are just not good at the hiring game, or the self-promotion game once you actually have a job. In my experience, a lot of office "work", starting from the job-seeking, is actually really just a tribal status contest, or a sort of high-end social game. Those who aren't interested in that tend to not do as well, and this affects their salary over time since they tend to have fewer promotions and thus get paid less.
What kind of 100K positions can you get with only intelligence (of the kind RC displays) and nothing else?
Government contracts(admin or project management), small business office manager/general manager, personal researcher.
RC might be well served by getting a PMP cert(faster than a degree), which would get him credentialed enough to get many project management jobs, esp if they see his body of written work.
Police make something like 60k with a couple weeks of training, no degree required.
This is credentialed, but BS engineers are pulling 100k starting salaries at oil companies in texas--these guys can barely do algebra, and probably 5% of them write as well as RC. Just gotta get his foot in the door.
Almost all police jobs in the US require, either de facto or de jure, at least a two-year college degree or equivalent military experience. A lot of people make a lot of arguments about how there isn't a federal law that absolutely positively prohibits a police chief from just giving his idiot nephew a badge and a gun, therefore US police are dangerously undertrained. But really, they almost all have years of training, and "you seem up for it, just walk into your local police department and ask them to hire you" is not effective career advice. Unless maybe you are the police chief's idiot nephew.
In Texas, only a GED or high school degree is required. Not sure about other states.
Required by *who*, exactly? Because the people who *actually hire police officers* in Texas, almost always require a two-year college degree or equivalent military service. Quick google confirms this of the Dallas PD, the Houston PD, the Texas DPS (state police), and the Texas Rangers seem to require four years.
I think that you are confused because there isn't literally a state law that explicitly says "Hey, every local police chief and sheriff, we'll throw you in jail if you give a badge and gun to some idiot who's only got a few weeks training". There doesn't need to be such a law, because there aren't enough people doing that to be a problem. If you walk into a police department in Texas with your shiny high school diploma and say "where are the job application forms?", then unless you're the police chief's nephew or something like that, the job you're going to be applying for is janitor.
Does anybody here have experience with both knitting and nålbinding? Was the latter Good Enough for 5 millenia of textile production? Was the former less practical before advances in spinning technology? Is knitting fragile and nålbinding antifragile?
I found this article on nålbinding (https://spinoffmagazine.com/nalbinding-a-short-history-of-an-ancient-craft/), which has this quote: "In addition to the interesting history of this ancient technique, nålbinding and looping techniques have some advantages over knitting: the fabric doesn’t ladder (as for a dropped stitch) and can be harder-wearing, thicker, and warmer than knitted fabric."
So it sounds like yes, nålbinding is somewhat less fragile than knitting. It's also that knitting wasn't just competing with nålbinding but also weaving, which is much less fragile and also much quicker to make.
For what it's worth, naalbinding is old but also wasn't particularly widespread. Woven fabric is more common, and for cold weather, things like animal fur are hard to beat.
I thought about advanced in spinning technology as a factor, but as far as I can tell, there's not a big difference between [knitting vs. naalbinding] with, say, [drop-spindle-spun yarn versus machine yarn (or wheel-spun yarn, whatever.)] The yarn works about the same. (This is my impression, at least - hobbyists still spin yarn with drop spindles and wheels, so there are definitely people out there who are better-equipped to notice a difference.)
I used to do a bit of knitting and I also tried naalbinding at one point after reading about it. It does have the advantage of not unraveling easily (it's closer to just repeatedly tying big knots through each other). But the fabric is bulkier and less stretchy, and most importantly, it seems to take a lot longer. Each stitch is sort of a multi-step tie-off, whereas knitting lets you get into a rhythm of a stitch every couple seconds. I assume naalbinding would also be much harder to design a machine for.
Scott, thanks at least for the post photo.
#32: how would one observationally distinguish "I lost consciousness for a full week" and "my memories from the last week were erased"? (Do I need to reread the Consciousness and the Brain review?)
No, your intuition is right, you can't distinguish between them in principle. But the fact this person was able to do their job normally for a week makes it vastly more likely they just have amnesia.
Are there things that you can only do when you are conscious... and then you could place visible reminders to do those things and to record yourself while doing them... and then review the records?
(Not sure what would be a good example of a conscious-only activity.)
#33: "housework" and "child care" are co-located and not mutually exclusive. You can be present and keeping kids out of trouble without thinking of that as your primary activity.
I'm sure there are other effects here (helicopter parenting etc) but wouldn't be surprised if that was the main one quantitatively.
#26: the "Named after two animals" section of the same page is even funnier. Giraffe seahorse! Crocodile snake eel! Leopard catshark! Raccoon butterflyfish!
#1. That's funny-- I've thought for a long time that knitting was an amazing invention while crocheting was more obvious, but crocheting was invented much later. It seems simpler to put one loop through another loop or loops than to think of somehow stabilizing a whole row of loops so you can put another row of loops through it.
Possibly it was enough harder to make a crochet hook than to make knitting needles. Or possibly it was chance.
I've seen a claim that the ancient Egyptians could have had gliders if they'd though to them. Plausible?
And there's the classic that people could have had a little magnification from drops of water if they'd noticed.
I believe without evidence that there are many cool things that our descendants will sneer at us for failing to invent, and some of them might be pretty simple.
As for alphabetizing, whether by the first or second letter, sometimes the remarkable part is noticing that you have a problem you might be able to address. Coming up with a usable solution is a different sort of challenge.
>I've seen a claim that the ancient Egyptians could have had gliders if they'd though to them. Plausible?
It's plausible to the extent that they probably could have handled materials and assembly if a time traveller provided them with plans for a working glider. Early gliders as well as powered airplanes were generally made of sailcloth stretched over a wooden frame, and the ancient Egyptians were capable of making and assembling both wood and sailcloth. I don't know the details of how the wooden frames were assembled, but I would be surprised if it were completely outside of ancient capabilities to assemble something functionally similar. Control surfaces are probably the hardest part: the Wright Brothers' prototypes used a rope-and-pulley mechanism to twist the wingtips. The earliest known pulley mechanism dates from 12th Dynasty Egypt (~2000 BC - 1800 BC, during the Middle Kingdom period), so that's probably the earliest you could assemble a workable glider.
Actually designing it is much harder, since they were several steps short of the physics to design a stable glider and the necessary control surfaces, and flying machines can be a bit unforgiving of attempt to iterate empirically on the question of getting them flying in the first place.
The classical Greeks wrote about magnifying glasses. Here's a lens from 700BC Mesopotamia. There are claims about Chinese and Egyptian lenses thousands of years earlier, but I haven't seen pictures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud_lens
Over the weekend I attended a rationality meetup in Chicago. The host there noted that we are weird among rationalists for inclining more toward Hanson than Yudkowsky in the AI foom debate. Lifland's review expressed concern that people will feel bait-and-switched if they read McAskill as their intro to EA and then discover everyone is focused on AI. Such people should just move to Chicago!
I don't think leaning toward Hanson in many ways is mutually exclusive with being very worried about AI; e.g. I think Paul Christiano agrees more with Hanson than Eliezer on some axes, but overall is still very worried. He wrote up his agreements and disagreements with Eliezer at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer
Regarding #33, I was 12 in 1965, and childcare consisted of being told "go outside and play, and don't come home until the street lights come on." Ten hours per week from Mom seems about right, and two hours from Dad seems about double in my memory. Mom had time to meet friends and play Bridge almost everyday, and Dad worked two jobs to support the family. We walked the three miles to school (up hill both ways). The world was a safer place back then, and we didn't need so much supervision.
I wonder how much of that is that the world was safer back then and how much is that we were less scared of the world. I’d have felt a lot safer as a kid if I had a cell phone by which to contact my parents at any moment for help. That alone seems huge.
The world was a lot more dangerous back then measured by child mortality, which was more than four times what it is now in the US. But in my experience most people (and certainly most parents) perceive the world as much more dangerous now than it was when they were kids.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
It's true that mortality dropped, but this could be due to factors not related to supervising children, like illnesses, complications after birth, etc.
Is there a metric that does show that children are in greater danger now?
#36. We need to pay to have 'the best' police. I'm good with paying more for police... more training time and such. (I'm thinking Jocko Willink, level of training.)
Any particular evidence for this, or is it just intuition? Do you have data showing a lack of training is the big problem police have right now (rather than lack of people)?
And Jocko Wilink has no law enforcement experience. In his career he was free to shoot people who had guns and nobody was going to riot or enact anti-navy policies in response.
But if you actually click through the charts, the problem we're talking about is mainly a lack of clearance rates, not police using too much force against people.
#33 Housework was MUCH worse in the past, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
Done fairly high doses of Xanax before and had similar experiences—a day or two of acting and talking without making much memory, or none at all. Your frontal cortex is mostly off. Executive function non existent. You become a complete hedonist. (by "you" I mean me, you might have a completely different reaction lol). It can feel like you're waking up when you come off it, but in fact there was a "you" the whole time. Not a p-zombie I don't think, though I have the benzo p-zombie debate with myself in the shower more than a normal person would.
Relatedly, eti is actually supposed to be safer than benzos? iirc it's not a benzo, but something else. allegedly less addiction potential, and anxiolytic effects are supposed to continue with less tolerance build up. wonder why it's not used widely?
#14:
There's some dishonesty going on in the introductory claim:
> The fun thing about speedrunning is that you can respond to literally any piece of information about a video game in any context whatsoever with “implications for the speedrun?” and there’s a non-zero chance that’s actually a cogent question.
The problem here is that the other example explicitly identifies as "speedrunning" a mode in which you are scored based on how many items you collect (more is worse), and your time is ignored. Obviously, if "speedrunning" covers every possible way to play a game, then it is of no interest that absolutely any phenomenon might have implications for "the speedrun". That's just the claim that every phenomenon has implications for "something".
There are different categories of speedruns, any % completion, all achievements, minimum items, etc. So everything does have am implication for a or multiples speedruns, otherwise called, speedrunning. If curious, search the lowestpercent channel on youtube. If not, well, there you go.
There are different goals you can try to achieve. But you would expect the goal of a "speedrun" to be related to speed. lowestpercent sounds more like a "minimum completion run".
Think of the goals as conditions that must be met for the run's time to count.
A marathon is a race, and a triathalon is also a race. Even though you can't count a run without cycling and swimming as a triathalon, they're both speed based events, in that assuming the performances were within the rules, best time (overall speed) wins.
Take lowest percent, the fastest run of the lowest percent "wins"
Try giving me some examples of other events that are named after their tiebreaker rule.
Potato potato
#24:
> As “texting your drug dealer” replaced “finding your drug dealer on a street corner”, control of territory became less important, and violent drug gangs were replaced by less violent ordinary people.
I don't think this makes sense. Control of _geographic_ territory became less important. But control of territory became more important. Street corners aren't the only kind of territory there is. The kind that's relevant here is the customer base.
If I head an organized crime syndicate selling heroin in Nashville, and you arrive in Nashville and start selling heroin, I'm going to have some opinions. The fact that you interact with your customers over the phone won't protect you - to be a drug dealer, you still need people to know that you're a drug dealer, and I'm going to know it too.
It's not like it's unheard of for organized crime to emphasize controlling "anyone working in our industry, wherever their office might happen to be located" over "anyone whose office is located at 2630 Elm Hill Pike, whatever business they might be in".
But there's probably still fewer drug dealers in Nashville by sheer headcount. Sure, the rival gangs would still engage in their customary shenanigans, but when you don't need to have a goon on every corner the wars end up being less bloody?
But that wasn't the claim. The claim is that "violent drug gangs were replaced by less violent ordinary people".
My counterproposal is that it's _the same people_ (modulo staff turnover) dealing drugs, and they're just as willing to use violence as ever, but the need to use violence has gone down.
Also, the twitter "thread" (it's a single tweet) specifically states that the mechanism for violence going down is a huge increase in the number of drug dealers, not a decrease.
"Twitter thread claiming that cell phones help explain the secular decline in crime since 1990. As “texting your drug dealer” replaced “finding your drug dealer on a street corner”, control of territory became less important, and violent drug gangs were replaced by less violent ordinary people."
Somebody tell the Kinahans they don't have to be shooting people left, right and centre, they can just use mobile phones instead!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutch%E2%80%93Kinahan_feud
#29:
> He did end up including something by me on the back cover. I must admit I was kind of hoping it would be hidden among many other reviewer blurbs so that my name wasn’t too prominent, but I guess all those other potential reviewers chickened out, like I almost did.
But you're openly antifeminist. It's a running theme of your work. My favorite expression of this was from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ :
> I notice that, no matter how many long rants against feminism I write, everyone continues to assume I am a feminist. It’s like, “He doesn’t make too many spelling errors, his writing isn’t peppered with racial slurs – he’s got to be a feminist. He probably just forgot the word ‘not’ in each of his last 228 sentences.”
Why wouldn't you want to write a blurb for "Don't be a Feminist"?
Scott is Not A Feminist in ways I can understand and sympathise with, and even a few of them I hold myself.
Caplan is likely* to be Not A Feminist in a way that makes me want to do Emmeline Pankhurst cosplaying.
*From the little I've read of his views on various things, writing I don't like and don't agree with, so YMMV and obligatory disclaimers here.
Yes, there's a ton of disagreement about what "feminist" means. Let's call the two definitions Feminist-1 and Feminist-2.
Feminist-1: I believe that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities, and that a woman must never be told she cannot do xyz just because she's a woman (other than biologically impossible things, like producing sperm). I am a Feminist-1, and I'm pretty sure Scott is too. Basically, you are a bad person if you are not a Feminist-1 in the 21st century.
Feminist-2: I believe that society is fundamentally sexist, all men are potential rapists, women are oppressed and downtrodden and must constantly be on the lookout for all the evil sexists out to abuse/oppress/commit microaggressions against them. I am not a Feminist-2.
What's unclear to me is whether Caplan means "Don't Be a Feminist-1" or "Don't Be a Feminist-2."
I think Caplan is likely to be Feminist-1 but also to write his book in ways that sound like "Don't be a Feminist-1", and if challenged on it, would then claim "that's not feminism, that's just common sense/sound economic principles" or summat.
His wife is a corporate lawyer and he seems happy enough that she went off to college and got an education (despite a book about how higher education is basically useless) and then a job, rather than staying at home being a full-time wife and mother (granted, he also has a book about free-range parenting so probably not on the side of full-time stay at home wife and mother).
I realise I am making a ton of assumptions about the book and about what Caplan believes, and I also realise it's mainly because I don't like the guy - or rather, the views of his that I've read. So yeah, bias galore here. But an awful lot of people today *do* tend towards "That's not feminism, that's just basic [whatever]" because they have forgotten, or never known, that getting to the stage we now enjoy required a lot of fighting for women's rights, it didn't just fall out of the sky.
For instance, I'm currently reading a lot of older fiction - from the 40s-60s - and it is now noticeable to me how the generally male authors portray their female characters; they're pretty, and that's about the extent of it. They exist to be love interests/damsel in distress for the male lead, who gets a personality and job and interests, while the women - if middle-class/ladies - are just there to be admired, wooed and won. Lower-class women do work, but they're servants, shop assistants, waitresses and the like, only there to do spear-carrier parts and of no account else.
You don't have to be a raving feminist to ask for something more about Susan Saintly than if she was blonde or red-haired, tall or petite, as a secondary character in a story. You've told us about Marcus Laffert, our hero, and his interest in collecting match-boxes since a boy (which will come in handy when a match-box is a vital clue five chapters later), but Susan is a dressmaker's dummy, only animated when she needs Marcus to save her or when he's crushing her in his embrace and kissing her madly after he proposes. Men exist in a rounded world, the world we see all around us as well as their interior life, but women are - well, who knows what the ladies are off doing, when they're not there being the love-interest in Marcus' arms?
Not totally a counter argument, but some of this is just the degree to which many many books basically have a protagonist and a bunch of paper plates. So if your protagonist isn’t a woman, the women are all going to be paper plates.
I agree with you that most of the gains of feminism up through IDK 1960-1990 or somewhere in there should be protected and cherished.
But once they got onto issues like the “pay gap” and turning normal human courtship into sexual assault if the woman so chooses……..well it went a bit off the rails.
>I agree with you that most of the gains of feminism up through IDK 1960-1990 or somewhere in there should be protected and cherished.
Why? It empirically hasn't done women any good. Of course, reversing course would probably make them unhappier still, but just so we're all on the same page, these changes have coincided with women becoming much less happy.
>Basically, you are a bad person if you are not a Feminist-1 in the 21st century.
Congratulations, you've labelled a majority of non-white men around the world as "bad people".
And I must say, it must be so easy going through life with such a one dimensionl view of the world.
#33:
I notice this very interesting disclaimer in the image:
> Note: Paid work includes commute time
This immediately suggests to me that we are comparing unlike things. If paid work includes commute time, childcare should include almost all time, certainly all time when you and the child are both at home. Instead, childcare is limited, in the "childcare-heavy" year of 2016, to 22 hours _a week_ between both parents.
Something is fishy in the definition of "childcare". It's very possible that the change in reported hours shown in the graph has more to do with different classification of the same activities than with different amounts of childcare being done.
#34:
from the thread:
> Japanese names rendered in Chinese look Chinese, basically, and while these are known war criminals, they're not, like, Hitler level famous.
This is a staggering claim. Japanese names do not resemble Chinese names. It's not at all difficult to tell the difference; it would have been obvious to most people looking at the names that they were (1) not Chinese, and (2) almost certainly Japanese. (With an exception for Tani Hisao; he was one of the people listed and his name could probably pass for Chinese. But he's there in the middle of a bunch of obviously Japanese names. The guy on the tablet to his left is surnamed 田中！)
The idea that nobody recognized the particular individuals named is enough for the story. It makes sense. Why did it need to be embellished?
The etizolam guy might have been conscious but not forming memories, Memento-style.
I genuinely hope Henry Purcell Has Risen is a thing, and not just an example.
I'm writing this in reply to all the comments above about children walking/riding to school, and the general level of mandatory suoervision today vs. previous generations. I'm breaking this out as a seperate thread because I think it's important, It certainly informed my feelings about this.
--NOTE: I do not remember the source of this story and I am recalling it just from memory, but I did read about this. (No, I swear! This hapened!) I will try to track down the original again ASAP. --
_______________________________________
So,
In the mid-70's a couple Psych grad students in Michigan (U. Mich or Mich. State) needed a grant proposal for the summer. One thought, "Hey! my Aunt. M_ says all the neighborhood kids kinda congregate at her house, maybe we could just, like, follow my nephew and his friends around and film them all summer...?"
In 1975, this was just fine, so two ~23-y male grad students got stipends, film equipment, a van, and permission from a dozen or more sets of parents, to follow 5-12 year old children around all summer and film them for months.
The kids hated it and were totally uncooperative...for about an hour, and then totally forgot about these guys and ignored them (even though they knew, and even helped them out, "Oh, we're going to the park now, maybe just meet us there.") The kids completely forgot about the camera(s). Seriously. (*)
The result was hundreds of hours of completely naive footage of kids being kids, essentially with no adults present. They really did usually kinda gather at Aunt M_'s house, which was central, around 9-10am, then whatever group would just go down to the creek or ride bikes around or go to the HS field and play. No plan, no leader, boys, girls, usually a core group of 4-5 kids but maybe a dozen, from ~6 to max of 11. They would invent games, have battles, argue, fight, make up, help each other, dissapear for a week angry but come back, the whole gamut of social stuff (pre-puberty and adult problems.)
Well, the footage was archived and theses written and was ignored for ~30 years. Then the grad students got back together and decided to do a "7-up" kinda thing and connect with the original kids who had been their subjects.
This is where it gets emotional.
When they interviewed a woman, 8 years old at the time, now (**) a mother with children near the same age, she wept seeing the footage of her childhood self, unconcerned, playing, being a kid. But when the researchers asked her,
-- "Do your kids play in the neighborhood with their friends? Would you let your own kids be in a study like this?", she was adamant:
-- "Oh, no! I couldn't, I'd be so afraid for them, it's too dangerous."
And then she started crying again.
_________________________
What else to say about this...? I will try to track down the original source. Maybe it came through Lenore Skenazy, but if anybody recalls reading this story please clarify, not just the source but any mis-remembrances I have made.
___________
* -- Stop and try to imagine a modern child being totally un-image-conscious and not even thinking about a camera being present unless it was a forced, awkward "photo-op" like a mandatory school portrait or a holiday with relatives and grandparents. Imagine a world where taking your picture was a distinct, formal event, that had to be arranged beforehand, and suffered at the time, and except for those weird occasions, nobody was watching you. Ever. Try to imagine this.
** -- This interview was IIRC 10+ years ago, the woman would have been ~40 then, probably.
Could it be this TAL episode: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/157/secret-life-of-daytime/act-three
Interesting...yes, a similar subject. TAL will not reveal the date of that episode, but it's not what I was remembering.
The crux of the story I remember was the interview with the mother, who wished children still had such freedom, but would never, ever, allow her own children to be alone or independant. How she cried at the contradiction but was still so afraid.
BR.
This story made my day. Thank you!
So what happened? And when did it happen?
I think I found something closer, though with a man, not a woman. It is the first segment of this Invisibilia episode:
https://www.npr.org/2015/01/16/377517810/world-with-no-fear
19 - AI art generation may put some number of artists out of work in the same way that photography put some number of portraitists out of business. But a lot more people are now able to hang pictures of their families on the wall.
I think some amount of this concern simply misunderstands the motivation for art (both consumption and generation). From signaling (look at this one of a kind thing I own!) to ideation (the brilliance of The Persistence of Memory has almost nothing to do with the technical prowess of Dali).
Stuff like AI art generation is going have a huge impact on art, but worrying that its going to 'eat creative work' seems wildly off the mark to me.
It will have little impact on actual "artists" who create original styles and so on. But for rank and file creative workers, a great many have been rendered obsolete.
#2: The idea that one of the bombings or the other might not have been justified reeks of historical hindsight. And I am not even one who buys into in the whole line about a Japanese invasion otherwise being necessary. It was a long war, tons of people were killed and tons of cities destroyed, these were experimental weapons, and did not cause damage out of scale with other activities both sides were undertaking during the war.
It is interesting (and maybe unsurprising) that Truman distanced himself at the time, and then later "bigged up" his involvement.
Yeah, and arguing that Nagasaki was unjustified because it didn't actually affect Japanese thinking is clearly hindsight bias.
Yeah, except people don't say that *at the time* the bombing was justified, they say that the bombing itself ended the war.
Justified is a strange word, but we could have just accepted a conditional surrender. The argument against this was that we needed to prosecute the emperor...and yet he wasn't prosecuted and even stayed on as a figurehead. People change their minds, sure, but it's bizarre that punishing the emperor was supposedly considered so important that the government were willing to have untold thousands of US soldiers killed in an invasion of Japan, but not so important that there was any kind of follow through on this. Which lends weight to all of this being unnecessary and just an excuse to demonstrate the power of American weapons to the world (mostly, to the USSR).
You don’t think demonstrating the power of the weapons to Japan and the USSR was a valid reason for dropping them?
Well, the argument goes that the Japanese war government was not that impressed with the weapons qua weapons -- they'd already seen much worse in the firebombing of Tokyo, for example, and that they were far more concerned about the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, perhaps because of the very plausible expectation that this would result in permanent territorial loss to the USSR. And that the Japanese government actually used the atomic bombings as a way to "sell" a surrender to the Japanese people. From a certain point of view, they might be seen as weirdly grateful for the atomic bombs, because it gave Hirohito a way to ask his people to "bear the unbearable," which he might not've had the guts to do if they hadn't happened (or had just been dropped in Tokyo Bay as a demo).
As for the USSR: they already knew very well the power of atomic bombs, thanks to their effective atomic espionage and the somewhat surprising willingness of a certain class of American intellectual to sell out his country via a rose-colored view of Stalin's Soviet Union that was, by 1944, certainly almost willinglly delusional. Joe 1 was detonated a mere 4 years after Hiroshima. There was nothing about Hiroshima or Nagasaki that would've been a surprise to Stalin.
Perhaps, but it's absolutely not the official nor standard justification given. And the jewish communists working on or connected to the manhattan project had already leaked all the information about the bomb to the soviets. If we were really that worried about the soviets to this degree, we should have bombed *the soviets*, not the Japanese.
The really big brained move would have been to provide no help to the soviets against the invading germans and covertly provide support to the germans on the eastern front to help prolong the fighting long enough to develop the bomb, then nuke moscow, launch invasions of europe and defeat both powers in one fell swoop. Though of course now we're truly in hindsight territory.
Instead of "prosecute the emperor" I would say "dismantle the imperial system", which was amply accomplished. Japan's conditional surrender offer (which only came *after* Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the choice was never "conditional surrender or land invasion") seems to have essentially been conditional on still being an empire.
And, yeah, I think 20th century history might have played out very different if the Empire of Japan continued existing past WWII. Something like post-WWI Germany where the government gets taken over by extremists (again) doesn't seem off-the-table.
>Instead of "prosecute the emperor" I would say "dismantle the imperial system"
He stayed on as emperor. That was the main thing the Japanese wanted, the emperor himself. And that happened.
>Japan's conditional surrender offer (which only came *after* Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the choice was never "conditional surrender or land invasion") seems to have essentially been conditional on still being an empire.
No *official* offer was made, but we now know the US government/military knew that the emperor was interested in conditional surrender before the bombings were carried out and did not pursue it because they didn't want him staying on as emperor.
And guess what happened....he ended up staying on as emperor.
And even if you think this would never have happened without the bombings, it's absolutely insane that the US didn't even try to pursue a conditional surrender.
>And, yeah, I think 20th century history might have played out very different if the Empire of Japan continued existing past WWII. Something like post-WWI Germany where the government gets taken over by extremists (again) doesn't seem off-the-table.
The empire of Japan wouldn't have continued existing. There's no reason to think that we couldn't have gotten *the actual system that we ended up getting* with Japan without the bombings or invasion, and again, at the very least, it's indefensible to not even try. If you think there is some definite, iron-clad raeson this couldn't have worked...now you're the one guilty of hindsight bias.
Removing the emperor and charging him with war crimes would have if anything made it much more likely that extremists would have taken over.
> No *official* offer was made, but we now know the US government/military knew that the emperor was interested in conditional surrender before the bombings were carried out and did not pursue it…
Because they were very concerned about what the impact on baseball might be. Very farsighted.
I don't think that's really Wellerstein's point here. I've read him for a while, and my impression is that while I think there's a good chance he would *like* to find a good reason for the use of atomic bombs to be something one can just reject wholesale, as a barbaric act, he's too good and honest enough of historian not to recognize that the plain facts don't lend themselves to any such easy interpretation. He definitely asks the hard questions: *does* this theory of why it was necessary hold up? and often times the answer is "not really," but (1) that's not too surprising, that any simplistic theory of history is usually wrong (or at least insufficiently nuanced), and (2) he's usually aware that simplistic post-hoc rationalization either way is not any great indication of what it was like to actually make the real decision, in real time, while history was unfolding, and (3) those hard questions *should* be asked, so that even if the answer is "yeah it was the right call"[1] we have genuinely thought through why we think that way.
In this particular thread, I think what he's exploring is Truman's evolving attitude towards the bomb, and how that influenced -- in perhaps surprisingly long-lived ways -- the nature of command and control of nuclear weapons during the subsequent decades. We know very well that FDR kept Truman completely in the dark about the project, so Truman had to come up to speed very fast in April of 1945, and we can also suspect that Truman didn't really want to know, he kind of wanted to leave the warmaking to the generals, he didn't see himself in the same messianic/Big Brains Of The Outfit way that FDR did. So it's a very interesting story that Truman apparently was shocked enough by the sequence of events to reverse his attitude and assert authority.
It's an interesting question what might have happened if Senator Taft -- a civilian who'd never served, and one of the last non-interventionists -- had prevailed over Eisenhower in 1952. In Eisenhower it was no great conflict to have nukes in his personal hands, as people by and large still thought of him as "the general" and he probably thought of himself that way. So it was perhaps a mere polite fiction that there was a strict "civilian" control of nukes, far from the military side. And then by the time we get all the way to JFK, things are a lot more fixed.
But what if Taft had prevailed? Would there have been a lot more tension over the issue of where control of nuclear weapons rested? The pros might well have resented Taft, as someone without any military record at all, a guy in some sense on the wrong side of history in terms of the Second World War, and someone who didn't want to extend any kind of nuclear umbrella over anyone. Maybe that would've been a deeply unpopular position he couldn't make stick. On the other hand...the President has a lot of power, bully pulpit included, and attitudes about the correct stewardship of nukes had not settled. Maybe Taft's ideas (whatever they were) would've been very influential. Maybe there would never have been much of a nuclear umbrella, maybe the Cold War would've accelerated much slower (assuming Stalin dies on schedule). What a change that would have made.
------------
[1] And I fall in that camp. I would have used both bombs, and on real cities, not in demonstrations, just the way it happened. It would've been a hard choice, and I wouldn't want to be Truman at night alone in bed, once he saw the photos from Hiroshima, but I think it was the best choice anyone could've made at the time.
I'm also a little dubious of using the Cabinet's deliberations as.conclusive evidence of the reasons for surrender, as my understanding is that Hirohito has to essentially order the cabinet to ratify his decision to surrender on the Allies' offered term, and even then there was a coup attempt afterwards with the aim of preventing the surrender broadcast.
Apart from the surrender broadcast itself, which can be read as a political/propoganda message, did Hirohito ever talk about his reasons for ordering the surrender?
#4: I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Virgino!
#21 The birth order thing has always been really interesting to me. My anecdata was that in highschool the top 10% of the class or so was like 27 firstborns and 3 others. kind of a hard pattern to miss.
Ditto in college where the TAs and people in the departments "academic" focused crowd was once again almost entirely first borns. Interestingly the professors were not, with many whose older siblings were like judges/engineers/doctors. A real "second son goes to the church" type of vibe.
Anyway, I see with my own children the cause I always suspected. Older child is victim of parents more rigorous and paranoid expectations for first child. by second child they have chilled a bit. Also benefits from spending more time with adults compared to second child. Also benefits from being tasked with helping raise second child (and second child suffers from this).
My first son is much more serious/academic and less "class clown/artsy" than second.
Anyway easy to see how that would translate into reading wordy blogs.
Fun Fact: North Korea's Hwasong-6 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a 770kg warhead to the entirety of South Korea and parts of Japan is derived from the Soviet R-17 Elbrus, better known as the Scud.
The soviet-built missile that was reverse-engineered in the DPRK was given to them not by the USSR, but by Egypt, in return for sending 20 Korean pilots to fight against Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
The etizolam thing suggests nothing about p-zombies...merely interaction with memory permanence.
The etizolam story is disturbing and fascinating, and what I find the most concerning question is left unasked: was the author of the post conscious when he wrote the post?
On a personal note, I've been dealing with long covid for the past few years (pre-vaccine), and one of the frustrating effects is a sometimes loss of penetrating insight into my own thoughts. I've gotten fairly good at having apparently convincing technical conversations without feeling like I'm generating the thoughts myself or being able to remember details later. Guess I'll continue to stay away from etizolam
#19. It seems to be the same with movies - one can watch movies for free or almost free for whole lifetime and still not run out. Still, somehow new movies make many millions. And it's not because they're good - almost all of them are utter trash, especially compared to the best of old ones. But somehow this works, as an ongoing business. I wonder what's the difference?
From the Resident Contrarian link:
> If you came from a family that did pretty well financially, went to college and then immediately started to do pretty well yourself, it’s hard to get any kind of context for what life is like at lower income levels. This isn’t a matter of the relatively-wealthy being dumb or insensitive; it’s just legitimately difficult to get a handle on what it’s like in a life you’ve never lived, and often being legitimately confused as to why anyone would opt to make less money instead of improving their lot with training and education.
I don't understand this. I came from a wealthy family and started making a lot of money right out of college, and it was always clear to me . The actual incomes and (some of) costs that the poor or even middle-class are faced with are readily available! More than that, they're almost unavoidable! Even those living in the richest neighborhoods in the world have _some_ exposure to businesses that serve the non-rich.
Is this just as simple as "I'm the type of person who ended up rationalist-adjacent so I overthink things"? If so, "dumb" still feels like a good description of this ignorance. Note that we're not talking about some upper-crust 0.1%ers here; the couple the excerpt is referring to has a _combined_ income of $200k.
This is a frustrating thing to bring up, because it sounds like a childish boast that I noticed something that the subject of this article didn't. I don't care about that; I truly feel like I'm missing something.
Re #19: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41112099 Eager Readers in Your Area!
Re #33: there are 26% of households that are single family compared to 9% in 1960 (latest data that I found was 2014 https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/), so that adds a little bit to the mom's childcare number from today and makes the difference between moms and dads childcare a little bit less for the households with two parents
Kelsey's thread was awesome, but @historycourses has her beat at over 700 likes = hot history takes (though he has over 1000 likes so he's not done) https://twitter.com/Historycourses/status/1566518220194021377?t=_fsC1lq7Ne4JXc6YLiVzzA&s=19
Kelsey's thread was awesome, but @historycourses has her beat at over 700 likes = hot history takes (though he has over 1000 likes so he's not done) https://twitter.com/Historycourses/status/1566518220194021377?t=_fsC1lq7Ne4JXc6YLiVzzA&s=19
#33, about the childcare thing: can I venture the hypothesis that dads are so abysmal at it that each hour they do creates an extra 45mn of work for moms?
19&31&37: software programming is going to change drastically over the coming decade
#33: I'm very interested in why parental investment has increased over time, and hope to write something about it soon. If anyone has any good sources that document the increase in sub-populations, or put forward hypotheses and evidence for why this occurred, I'd be happy if you share it here. (Or if you're also interested and want to chat about it, reply and we'll coordinate.)
#1: Valued dice-like objects found in association with soldiers and coins? Call me crazy but for their function, I'm going to go with gambling. With the undercut nodules doing the double duty of 1. holding interchangeable pentagonal pieces of card (did the Romans have playing cards?) or leather/vellum, and 2. helping to resolve the results of ambiguous rolls on uneven/non-flat surfaces. The holes could compensate for -- or induce -- bias, as in 'loaded' dice.
Prediction: the 'soles' of the nodules should show signs of wear (or light hammering) as a result of being repeatedly rolled and bumped against hard surfaces.
Either that or they're spoke nipple key multi-tools for the various configurations of bicycle used by the Roman military.
As for 38 (the negative utilitarian assassin) - this is particularly funny to me because I really wanted to use this view as an example to why caring about "potential people" easily leads to absurdity, when reading your review of What We Owe The Future. In my view, it is pretty easy to see that if you don't hold these beliefs (in that order, but I can't say anything definite about the relative weights):
1. human suffering should be minimised (for existing humans)
2. human happiness should be maximised (for existing humans)
then you get all sorts of bizarre results. If you drop the 'for existing humans' bit, you can get the aforementioned negative utilitarian view. If you switch the order of 1 and 2, you can get that it's ok for a sociopath (or whatever) to tortue someone as long as his happiness from doing it is greater than the victim’s suffering. If you drop 2, you can again get the neg-utilitarian view again, or some variations on a happiness malthusian trap.
I’m not saying this solves everything or even a lot of interesting problems in metaethics or population ethics or whatever, just that reading the quotes from What We Owe The Future made it pretty clear the author kind of got his assumptions mixed up.
Some people would find it intuitive to add “3. The human race needs to keep existing” as another axiom (I personally don’t), but it doesn’t work if it's not an explicit assumption. If you try to derive it from 1 or 2 you get strange stuff.
As for 39 (Yom Kippur and Egypt, just for general knowledge) - I’m not Egyptian, but I am Israeli, and I can tell you that here the general attitude towards the Yom Kippur war, including what they teach us in schools and so on, is mainly focused on it being an intelligence debacle, even born of hubris in some interpretations, where a lot of casualties and being surprised by the enemy could have been avoided. Interestingly, there are two dedicated Wikipedia entries in Hebrew, that haven’t been translated to English, about the wrongful attitude of Israeli intelligence agencies at the time.
Anyway, according to wiki, it doesn’t seem the Egyptians treated that war as a great success either, so yeah, interesting.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War#Response_in_Egypt )
"Potential people" is a straw man. If a couple is planning to start trying to get pregnant soon, so they begin saving up money for their planned baby, would you criticize this as illogical? Or at least equally as illogical as planning for 10,000 years in the future?
Of course not. Because they are not "doing things to benefit potential people, who don't even exist" (no one does that), they are doing things so that when the time comes that the potential people are actual people, they will be in a better situation than the conterfactual world where they didn't prepare.
That... really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Have you read the book review? A, it literally talks about "potential people", B, it says that a decision that also makes less human exist in the future is worse than one that doesn't, cause its like killing them. Which leads to all sorts of absurdities (for example, every couple deciding to NOT have a child is responsible for the loss of life of that child and all their potential descendants).
Saving up for a child, even if they are not born yet, has... well... nothing to do with those arguments. Its great to plan for a long time ahead if we can, even 10k years, and I'm in no way against that. But planning ahead =/= the moral arguments used in What We Owe the Future. The (wrong) framework for ethics he offers there creates more problems than it solves, regardless of whether or not planning ahead is generally a good thing.
I recently finished reading "Truman", the Truman biography. It went into a lot of detail about Truman's atomic bomb decisions. One thing that struck me was how all the tricky moral arguments I have ever heard regarding if and how the atom bombs should be dropped seemed to have been voiced to Truman in meetings before he decided to move forward with it.
That doesn't exactly contradict the claim that Truman was not aware of the atomic bomb plans, but it is strange that he would give so much thought and attention to how the bombings should go, and then somehow not be up to date with how the army was actually deploying it.
>Was this person a p-zombie? If so, have we resolved the philosophical debate about whether p-zombies are possible?
A with sleep, twilight drugs, and most other forms of 'unconsciousness', I find it far more likely that people in this state are conscious and just not recording long-term memories of their conscious experiences, than that they were actually not conscious at the time.
(where 'conscious' = producing qualia in some way, not necessarily in their normal state of mind.)
Re: #32
Looks like the debate over p-zombies is still open:
https://droct0.tumblr.com/post/693555702051094528