Does anyone know of an ethnographic study of how street gangs work? I want to understand things like how many people are involved in retail drug sales, how do the adult members interact with the juveniles, what's the level of involvement of different members, do people have specialized jobs?
US: 'An economic analysis of a drug-selling gang's finances' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2586895). There's a summary of this research in the book 'Freakonomics'.
I administer a rapid covid testing program at my workplace. Several dozen people, relatively close quarters, lots of exposure to the general public. Currently we have everyone doing nasal swab rapid tests every day at home before work, but there are some new preprints suggesting (with uneven quality, as befits anything based on *data* from the last couple of weeks!) that saliva samples are more sensitive, at least early on. The study design here for example https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full.pdf is small n and not exactly comparable to typical nasal or oral rapid test sample collection, but does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm not sure how far to update. I know there were earlier papers or at least preprints about saliva, and SalivaDirect is a thing, but I don't know to apply that in the rapid-testing-for-omicron contest.
I don't know the current state of the debate, but I am pretty certain that the place of highest viral load differs strongly from person to person. So for some people the saliva sample works better than the nasal swab, and for others it's the other way round. This is one of the reasons why rapid tests are not 100% reliable: you might simply search in the wrong place. (PCR tests are so much more sensitive that you still find the virus even if you search in the wrong place.)
Comparing nasal vs. saliva tests still makes sense, but it is only a statistical question, i.e., how often does option A work better than B, and vice versa? My understanding was that nasal swab are usually more reliable than saliva, and that this is because viral load is usually higher in the deep parts of the nose. But saliva samples do work in principle; e.g., lollipop tests are used on a large scale in schools in some countries, and they work reasonably well. And test kits have very different qualities, so I would think that a good saliva test kit easily beats a bad nasal swab test kit.
But I didn't follow recent updates, so all this may be outdated. And for omicron, we have good reason to believe that those old heuristics don't work well anymore. Omicron seems to be more adapted to upper respiratory tissue than older variants, which would favor saliva tests.
Either way, I would not focus on the question nasal vs. saliva, but rather on using a test kit that got good test results from independent agencies. (NOT the percentage that sellers advertise with - those are basically made up.) For example, here is an extensive list from the German Paul-Ehrlich-Institut:
Note that this list only contains tests that *passed* the minimum requirements, so if you don't want to work through the numbers, you might consider all tests from that list as "good".
I'm reading The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, but I have a hard time trusting it based on the wild social science studies it cites. E.g:
# Kindergartners are better at a spaghetti tower building challenge than college students.
# "Belonging cues" (like eye contact and communication patterns) are better predictors of group performance than any other factor (including IQ of group members).
# Subjects work 50% longer on a solitary puzzle if they, early in the experiment, are given a note with not-actually-helpful information from a fictional previous subject.
# If you ask a stranger "I'm so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your phone?", you are 422% more likely to get a yes than if you just ask "Can I borrow your phone?"
# Patients admitted after suicide attempts are 50% less likely to be readmitted if they get postcards with well-wishes from the hospital.
This is just the first 25 pages. My bullshit sensor is going crazy: all of this can't all replicate, right? Is this book worth reading?
You're probably right to suspect that some of these won't replicate, but they seem individually plausible to me. (Except for the phone one for the reason existential-vertigo points out.)
I very much doubt that Kindergarners are better at any task than college students, unless the task is "run around in circles the longest." And even then, probably not.
I was reading Zvi's summary of his Omicron model, and I found that his recommendations contradict a lot of what Scott has posted on ACX:
1. He recommends that we take Vitamin D as a preventative measure against Covid. Scott of course said that he doesn't believe in this recommendation
2. He thinks taking Merck's pill is mostly bad as it will help the virus mutate more, and that it shouldn't have been approved by the CDC. Scott of course has been haranguing the CDC to approve drugs faster, etc. Of course the argument can be made that in the cost-benefit analysis, consumption of Merck's pill is the rational thing to do or something. I haven't done such a cost-benefit analysis myself. But the overall impression that I got on reading Scott's writing was that the CDC should speed up approvals.
Seeing as Scott is an influential writer who is now *clearly* influencing public policy, I wonder if he'd like to address these points. In case he's wrong about his recommendations, it might result in hundreds and thousands of preventable deaths. Of course every attempt at understanding and prediction carries with it some chance of being wrong. However, addressing views that run counter to one's own is what any good Rationalist should do anyway.
Zvi agrees with Scott that the CDC (and FDA) should in general approve drugs faster; Zvi just thinks the Merck pill in particular shouldn't have been approved.
If a rapid covid antigen test shows positive results in under 1 minute is this indicative of a higher viral load than a test that takes 15 minutes to show a positive?
I just saw the Matrix Resurrections and thought it was awful. Probably the worst of the franchise.
It got me thinking: Is there any way the second and third movies (Reloaded and Revolutions) could have been fixed so that they were at least 90% as good as the first movie? If yes, then what specific things should have been different?
Resurrections was a reboot that couldn't reboot -- they included a new Neo (Bugs), a new Trinity (Lexy) and their team (including a reskinned Morpheus), plus a new villain (the Analyst) and a reskinned Agent Smith. But they were relegated to second fiddle as the old Neo and Trinity were still around. The film was so consciously up-its-own-butt self-aware that I assume this was intended as a statement on something.
As for Reloaded and Revolutions... no, probably not.
The new heroes seemed like just someone whose role is to be slaughtered at a convenient moment, to show the viewer that the situation is getting serious, and to motivate (the old) Neo to assume his final form and avenge them.
This did not happen (which was nice, because unexpected), but it prevented me from paying much attention to the new heroes.
I liked the plots of the second and third movies and a lot of the moments and visuals, but they had pretty big problems with pacing. The core sin seemed to be attempting to top the first movie by setting up hideously expensive action sequences, then padding the scenes in question well beyond what was optimal for storytelling purposes in an effort to "get their money's worth" from the sets and props (for practical effects) or the 3D assets (for CGI effects). Biting the bullet and shortening things like the freeway chase scene, the Burly Brawl, and the Zion rave would improve the sequels considerably.
It's George Lucas syndrome, where no one was willing to tell the directors "no."
The fight with Smith early in the second movie opened with Smith using his unbeatable superweapon [1] off the bat. And Neo resists it. And Neo is superman, so the rest of the fight scene is completely uninteresting from a plot perspective.
I have an unpopular opinion: I liked the 2nd and 3rd movies. The action and special effects didn't age well, but they were good for early 2000s. They fleshed out more of the world, explained more how the machines set up the construct from the inside, really made some of the programs (like the oracle, keymaker, vampires, and ghost-dudes) be interesting side-characters and villains. The scene-by-scene action made sense (as long as you agreed that they had to make it to a landline to escape, most of the characters' actions made sense), which is more than you can say about a lot of action/thriller movies.
I think why people didn't like them has to do with expectations. The first movie was light action and heavy mindfuck, and the other two were light/non-mindfucks and just heavy action, and so there was a bit of genre-switching going on. So if you go into 2 and 3 waiting for your mind to be blown, that was just never going to happen.
I think if you wanted to make the 2nd or 3rd one better (and this actually applies to the 4th one too), they would have had to lean all the way into the simulation hypothesis: reveal that the "real world" is ALSO a simulation, and that they have no idea how many levels deep they are. This would also have explained why Neo seems to have some slightly magical powers in the real world. I think this would have been pretty hard to do, convincingly, but it's the only way they could have kept the magic of the first one alive.
Another problem was that the "mindfuckery" of the second and third movies missed the mark because it was too hard to understand the theme of each film. The first movie's mindfuck was very simple and easy to understand: Reality is an illusion. The second was...something...about "causality," and the third was some schlock about "free will."
The 2nd and 3rd did have mindfucks, like Neo's ability to control the Matrix being a general superpower to control all machines. And people hated the additional mindfuck, because they feel it invalidated the first one. (I was fine with it, though.)
Well, no, because it didn't make sense. That's actually what I'm referring to by the "magical powers" Neo seemed to have. I think that only would have made sense if that layer were a simulation also.
Note that every single one of Neo's real-world powers involves machines - and not just machines in general, but The Machines who set up the Matrix and the One in the first place. His blind sight can't see Trinity or Bane or the Zionist ship, but it *can* see Smith (a program), as well as the power plant and Machine City.
The obvious explanation is that the One - who is, after all, a cyborg, like every other human born into the Matrix - is given some degree of access to the machines' IFF/C&C network, presumably in order to help rebuild and "defend" Zion while restarting it.
We thought Neo's superpower was his ability to be awesome in the matrix. But his actual superpower is that he's a technopath, which manifested itself in the matrix as being awesome in it.
Exactly! Either he should have continued to only have powers in the simulation, or they should have revealed the real world is a simulation as well, but they didn't do either. And it would have been a good reveal: what do you do with the people who can't handle the simulation? Give them a new simulation, one where they're rebels who have figured it all out. It can also fix the fact that using human batteries makes no scientific sense: if the human battery story was just another lie then you can come up with a better reason that all of humanity is living in a simulation. Heck, you could even have it that the machine are in a simulation as well and don't know it and some unknown power has imprisoned them and humanity both, but that's getting a little silly.
But then again, that would have have muddled the original Gnostic theme of overcoming an imprisoning lie to find true reality. If the true reality is also an imprisoning lie, then you can't really escape: every time you think you've escaped you can't be sure you're not just in another lie. It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
That's one thing I really liked about the new movie, was that Neo could not be sure whether he was going crazy or was in a false reality. How could he be? It was a good look at how you can be paralyzed by the fact that you can't directly determine what is real and what isn't. The rest of the movie was pretty meh, but the Neo simulation sequence was pretty good.
(the main thing I think they could have done to fix the sequels was to make the architect scene better. As it is it's a bit confusing: I know on my first watch through I didn't really understand the implications of what he was saying.)
>It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
But that would actually be an interesting move, cinematically! The best sequels (imo) are the ones that completely change your perspective on the original works.
I agree about the new one, the gaslighting of Neo was the only good part of the movie.
The problem is that the first film is basically a self-contained story, Neo goes through an entire hero's journey.
The best bet would have been to properly set the series up as a trilogy in the first place, to stretch the premise of the first film out into at least two, with a conclusion that combines some of the events of the second two movies into one.
Re-watching the original movie, the pacing strikes me as extremely fast, we barely get to experience Neo living his blue-pilled existence before the red pill is dropped on us, so it feels like there was a lot of untapped potential to work with there. I could see a pretty interesting 60+ minutes spent developing Neo as a character and gradually getting hints that he's living in something called "The Matrix" until his first real encounters with Trinity/Morpheus/Agent Smith. But I imagine that slower burn might not resulted in as successful of a first movie, even if the trilogy was better for it.
I agree. They should have not made any "sequels," though additional movies set in the Matrix universe featuring different characters than there were in the first film could have been cool (the Animatrix did this is short film format).
As a child, I was told that 15% was a standard tip, and 20% was for exceptional service. Lately, I've seen these amounts creeping upward, with 15% often being the minimum selectable option for online ordering. This would make sense if food prices are increasing more slowly than general inflation, but do we have any data suggesting this is the case? If not, what's going on?
I think food has gotten cheaper relative to the "average" good. But my intuition is that *restaraunts* have gotten more expensive (after adjusting for inflation of course). Hmm...
20% as the standard tip is becoming common because of changes in beliefs about the morality of tipping based industries for workers who aren't in the top 5% of service workers or so.
On ranked-choice vs approval voting: I buy the argument that there are more ways to "spoil" a RCV election than an approval election, and you can be more "strategic" with RCV (lying about preferences to get your preferred candidate elected). But it doesn't change the fact that if I think the thing you're being asked to do with approval voting is nonsensical. "Mark yes for all candidates you approve of and no for the rest." Approve of compared to what? I would rather vote for any candidate on the presidential ballot last year than vote for a dog to be president, should I check all the boxes? But there's one I would like more than the others, maybe I should only check that one? It's just not clear what you're even "supposed" to do! It seems that approval voting discourages strategic voting in the technical sense (lying about your preferences) in large part by shifting your strategy to where you draw the line of vote/no vote. As far as I can see there's no honest, non-strategic way to answer that question. I personally wouldn't know what to do if presented with an approval-voting ballot.
Versus with RCV (and even FPTP) there's a pretty clear interpretation of what you're "supposed" to do: write down your candidates in the order you'd prefer seeing them elected (or mark your favorite for FPTP). You don't force people to strategically decide a cutoff, which again I think is an underspecified task. Having clear instructions for non-strategic voters is a dealbreaker for any voting system in my view.
If given an approval ballot, just mark "Yes" on any candidates that would make you happy if they were elected. And mark "No" for all the candidates that would make you sad if they were elected.
This is provably non-optimal; if your cutoff for approval is not between the candidates with serious chances of victory then your voting power is nullified.
(All voting systems except random ballot have some sort of tactical voting, but approval's tactical voting problem is one of the more obvious. IRV has scenarios in which voting tactically is indicated, but they're quite narrow and voters don't generally have enough information to notice they're in such a situation.)
And in the jurisdictions that have adopted it, the elections seem to have turned out fine. Voters were able to decide who they approved of, and the outcomes seemed in line with voter preferences.
AV is not some mysterious hypothetical system that has hidden doomsday scenarios we need to theorize about... it has been implemented with no issues in some moderately large cities.
I don’t disagree with your analysis, but just in case you are presented with an approval ballot, this is the “strategic” vote that makes the most sense to me:
Guess who the two most likely candidates to win are. If this is a local election, good luck, but if it’s a national election you should be able to consult polling data.
Then, vote for the better of those two candidates, as well as any candidates you think are better than that candidate.
This strategy is optimal in many cases, but it’s also a good strategy for society to coordinate around, because if everyone does this, we elect the cordorcet winner when one exists.
Several years ago I was working on a fantasy world strategy/simulation that while it didn't simplify the military aspects brough the focus and attention and mechanical complexity of the other parts of the simulation up to parity. I sometimes refer to the type of game I am trying to make as a DIP game. Diplomacy|Intrigue|Politics. This is because that is what differentiates it from existing games. Whether we are talking about Paradox, Matrix, Slitherine, or purely independent games of a similar type. 4X, Grand Strategy, Political Sim(think Democracy 2-4).
As of earlier this month I am back to working on it after doing various things as well as just slacking off during the pandemic. I expect to have either release or EA on Steam/GoG/Epic/Other around early December next year.
My secondary focus is on a sort of verisimilitude where you feel much more like a politician or potentate that engages in politics rather than a god king or a hive mind. The game has both characters with more detail than CK2-3 and populations with more detail tha Vicky/Imperator. Both of these entities have an Ideology that indicates how they think the world should be organized. They also have Opinions, a numerical variable, based on various modifiers, about each other character and population they are aware of.
This, should, feel much more like a real leader trying to get things done. Opinion functions like political capital to be expended in order to do things you want to do. Start an unpopular war and get war exhaustion and ideology penalties and expend resources you could have expended for other purposes. Start a popular war and gain Opinion boosts from Ideology and if your populace hates the people you are fighting or likes that you are freeing people they like from tyranny.
Maybe you want to integrate a major minority population group from conquered lands. You can allow them to serve in government jobs/bureaucracy for a boost. But you may upset others who previously had access to that privilege. Pass various edicts/laws to give them rights, similar to Imperator but more detailed and with more options. Yes Imperator is, at least until Vicky 3 comes out, the most interesting as far as population based gameplay among Paradox games. While there isn't an overarching yes/no on immigration or w/e many policies affect parts of what we call immigration in modern societies. This game is a fantasy game so it isn't quite based on the same conflicts.
You also have to manage important/powerful characters. Flattery, bribes, titles, intimidation. I made a large effort to expand from what 4X and Grand Strategy games do with Intrigue. The Conspiracy system allows you to build up human and material capital to pursue anything from a small plot to murder another character to an "Ancient Conspiracy". A decades to millennia long secret organization to topple or usurp and empire. Essentially the Conspiracy panel/menu allows you to connect what in other games would be totally discrete actions that build up to a single greater purpose.
Many of you might be familiar with the Plot and Secrets menus from Ck2-3. But here you can do far more. You can promise land or titles or money or resources. Trade favors like military assistance, share intel from your personal "Intelligence Network", and do other stuff. The regular Diplomacy menu allows you to promise things as part of treaties but that is a little simpler and treaties are generally public. A given Conspiracy generates a Secret(you can find the 2014-2015 Axioms Of Dominion wiki which describes secrets and ideologies and all these other mechanics here: https://axioms-of-dominion.fandom.com/wiki/Axioms_Of_Dominion_Wiki) for each action of the Conspiracy and connects them in a unique way. That is the penalty for the superior organizational power of Conspiracies. Members of Conspiracies can induct others, in part or in whole, as part of their efforts to complete their parts of the overall project.
Axioms is primarily a fun video game where you can actually, compared to false claims of games in the past, feel like a character in GoT or some other media based on politics. I'm really trying to give an experience that even a modern day politician can relate to. "Why don't they just do [thing the person speaking wants]!" Because they have a complex consituency with competing and sometimes contradictory desires.
Consider the Biden BBB Bill. You have to add something to appease one Senator but it pisses off another Senator. Can you weaken the provision or add some pork to please both? Putting in a lot of long-time goals of disparate groups can gain support until you run into your very own Joe Manchin. Axioms should provide a ton of situations similar to that. Although discrete actions such as Flattering or Reasoning or even casting a literal magic mind fudgery spell will obviously not be comparable to how that works in real life. But at a higher level I think it should feel pretty close. The internal politics simulation isn't quite complex enough to have legislation and legislatures and such, at least in most cases. There's no "voting" system per se. But something like Greek democracy is pretty close to possible. And Treaties and to some degree Conspiracies function similar to how real life domestic legislation functions at a high level.
Additionally a polity can adopt a standardized "Charter" to create a governing system similar to the HRE. You can create individualized vassal contracts, I think maybe CK3 added this?, but vassals will be aware of who has a better deal, although they may also know why. Both characters and populations will have an increased opinion of "governments" that are less centralized. Triumvirates vs Dictatorships vs Councils/Parliaments, etc. There's a somewhat fixed opinion bonus, modified by ideology, as you dilute power. Of course the cost is getting all the relevant deciders on board for major group actions.
I've sketched out a way for the AI to use these mechanics, perhaps not quite to the level a player could thought process wise, such that the AI could organically form an HRE-esque superstate. A lot of this relies on the scale. I'm trying to get performance to the point that a 40000 province map can work on decently recent modern PC setups. Most people might have to make do with ~4000-8000 and perhaps a little less variety in AI political organization. I personally expect that I might need to upgrade to 32gigs of RAM to get bigger maps working.
I'm curious if a lot of ACX people play more complicated strategy games, vs Civ/Endless/GalCiv stuff.
This sounds very interesting to me, though these days I seldom have time to learn new complex strategy games -- I got into CK3 but only because it's similar enough to CK2 which I've played off and on since launch.
In this vein, one interesting and somewhat forgotten game that I grew up playing is the old Koei title, Genghis Khan 2. These days it has basically been superseded by the CK games (which are a far more complex simulation) but I do think it had some unique mechanics for depicting the fact that "no man rules alone" and for trying to make large empires increasingly unmanageable (something CK tries to do but doesn't really succeed at, and EU4 doesn't really even attempt).
I know there are some mods for CK2 that try to get this balance better, though I haven't tried them.
If you haven't read it, I'd also suggest taking a look at "The Dictator's Handbook", which is a very fun and fast read about these sorts of power dynamics.
I'm pretty strongly considering some kind of AP system ala GK2 and Star Dynasties. I'd have liked to do some sort of timer system but it is hard to code and people are motivated to cheat to get around it.
I'm planning to write a couple more posts on substack about unique stuff in Axioms but the trouble is that because the systems are so interconnected, which is great for gameplay, it is hard to really detail much about a given system in isolation. If you read the only post currently up, about my version of "Unrest" you'll see what I mean.
CK2 isn't really saveable, for my purposes, by mods. You'd just be overloading events and decisions so much. Tons of mods are already at that point. Same for EU4 really. M&T Pop Overhaul did about as much as you can do with EU4 and it is pretty clunky.
Well I've subscribed to your Substack. This all makes sense to me, I'll be curious what you come up with.
It sounds like you're making a product that will be a niche within a niche, but that's fine. Part of the promise of CK2, and what kept me coming back to it, is that it feels like a game where my empire can collapse and I can be reduced to a single county somewhere and yet the game isn't over and in fact has just gotten *more* interesting. So I'd love to see more games that play this way.
But I get the sense most players aren't like me, they love blobbing and get upset when they aren't blobbing. And the truth is I don't mind blobbing to some degree, but when I look back at all of my great games of CK2, the ones with really interesting stories, they all featured some sort of massive imperial collapse.
I should dig up some old blog posts about the Cinnamon Wars or the dragon worshipping place with stolen draconic attributes. Or one of the HRE-esque examples if you like imperial collapse.
Since your the only sub might as well pander and do a post on Charters and Ancient Conspiracies as it applies to big polities.
Especially seeing as my GUI library is shitting itself after a version upgrades. Turns out 5 years gives a lot of time for problems to build up.
There are *a lot* of claims in this podcast about the vaccines, the FDA, the relative harm of the variants, the comparative safety of mRNA vaccines compared to traditional vaccines, the suspected number of deaths in response to vaccination, etc.
Is there any detailed analysis and refutation or support of these claims from anyone in the rationalist community? I don't see anything (besides some allusions in 2 or 3 comments) on here, and nothing on Zvi's site.
There was a recent episode of the generally sane Zubin Damania's podcast that broke most of McCullough's points down in detail. He is broadly sympathetic to heterodox ideas but very critical of these arguments in particular.
Zvi seems to be getting annoyed with the entire Bret Weinstein orbit and just ignoring them for understandable reasons.
Can you help me understand these "understandable" reasons? I believe you have them, but the content-free dunk on McCullough with no substantiation that GBergeron's pulling isn't helpful to anyone who's trying to do any sense-making of this situation as a layperson.
Looks like this might be the podcast you're recommending?
That's right. Always awkward finding and copying links on mobile. Broadly, the loosely affiliated set I'm referring to have collectively been a quite predictable Gish gallop of reflexive meta-contrarianism, basically amounting to just inverting whatever the mainstream narrative happens to be, with a variety of incidental justifications. This rarely contributes new or interesting information. I'm generally all for amplifying weird long-tail ideas, just in this case the signal-to-noise ratio has been trash.
* are you narrowly looking at COVID related arguments with this set, or literally everything these people say?
Part of why I ask is I really enjoyed Bret and his wife Heather’s recent book. There are a couple of points they make in it that go a bit extreme for me but on the whole, the case they make for looking at life through an evolutionary biology lens and the insights it brings is a really solid and compelling one.
Your reply here, completely respectfully, is hard to read as to whether it’s just a smear/sneer job that says “don’t bother with those people” or whether there are specifics here (people, claims, videos) that don’t hold up and are common enough to cast doubt on their general credibility.
Specifically Covid. I think Bret and Heather are otherwise at least interesting, if sometimes interestingly wrong, and the pandemic has somehow broken their brains. Their new book looks great. Hopefully they're back to normal a year from now. They were of course prone to uncritical metacontrarianism before, but it was much more likely to produce something worth thinking about pre-pandemic (and even early on in 2020 -- they were pretty open-minded before the vaccine epoch).
I'm not very invested in this argument here, but if you look at the last year or so of pandemic-related podcast guests (Geert Vanden Bossche, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Tess Lawrie...) there's a common thread of having had interesting and potentially really helpful contrarian ideas that haven't panned out in the face of accumulating evidence, and then just digging in hard and repeating themselves. It's good that someone was worrying about potential long-tail vaccine risks and standing up for long-shot therapeutics with some promising early evidence (and fluvoxamine, at least, seems to have worked out!), but those need to be held loosely and subject to Bayesian updating as new evidence appears, and that just doesn't seem to be happening.
Scott and Zvi, for example, have done a much better job of updating and even completely changing their minds as new information appears.
EDIT: I had meant to explain that what's been particularly frustrating about 2021!Bret Weinstein is that he doesn't apply the same healthy skepticism to contrarian pandemic folks as he does to everything else. There's a strong element of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ that gets old quickly.
I don’t follow their podcast so thank you for mentioning that that’s where the questionable science is going down.
If I had to make my own guess - I wonder if it’s the “trust us, we’re the science” attitude that they’re reacting to, lining up with a point they stress multiple times in their book: that hubris in the face of hypernovelty is dangerous. I believe that, under the crank theories, the real concerns boil down to “why aren’t we being more deliberate in the approach here” combined with something approaching Scott’s Pascalian medicine argument and “sticking with medications that we understand the safety profile of.” A lot of the panic seems to stem from what could result from spreading the spike protein excessively through our bodies, and not inherently being anti-vaccines, just anti-the-particular-mechanism-and-potential-dangers-of-this-vaccine.
That is a thing that happens. It seems like the experience of being right *once* about something where the mainstream was wrong creates a lifetime reflexive second-option bias in some folks, without any further connection to facts, evidence, logic, etc. etc. The worthwhile thinkers are just *incidentally* heterodox without making it their entire schtick.
I agree that the experience of being right (and being famous for being right) can make one overconfident (and wanting to experience the high again). Not sure about the mainsteam/heterodox distinction, though.
It seems like some people go "mainstream -> heterodox -> crackpot", but some other people go directly "mainstream -> crackpot". Could it be that the latter option is actually the natural progression, and the former is an exception when the first overconfident non-mainstream idea accidentally happens to be correct?
It's one big reason I'd like a larger heterodox community, so that they can help each other understand that being lucky once doesn't they're lucky forever.
Or, even better, if our discourse were diverse enough that we didn't need to create a group called "heterodox" because that's what everyone is.
I think a better question is what are the most significant 1 or 2 claims that he is most confident in, and can these be refuted? A detailed analysis/refutation of *all* the claims sounds like succumbing to a Gish Gallop.
If these 1 or 2 stand up, then perhaps a deeper dive is warranted. Maybe it turns out he is right about everything, I don't know, haven't listened to the podcast; but this in general is how I would go about it.
The two that stick out the most for me, personally, were:
* The claim that the incidence rate for vaccine safety prior to COVID, as measured in deaths attributable directly to vaccination, was something like 180 deaths over 270 million vaccinations. And that the count currently w/r/t the COVID vaccines (or perhaps specifically the mRNA vaccines) is something close to 10x-50x higher than that, based, lowest-case, on VAERS data (and then depending on whatever level of VAERS underreporting you suspect to reach the higher tier)
* The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization, extending out to a general claim or theme of his argument that all the medical establishment's eggs seem to be in the vaccination basket, more or less, and that any of the evidence for (insert your favorite non-vaccine treatment type here) or any protocol to use such in order to prevent hospitalizations, reduce spread, flatten curves, and save the world aren't being seriously considered or turned into meaningful action plans that can be given to equip doctors with more tools.
The latter one seems particularly salient to Scott given the recent posts re: fluvoxamine and Pascalian medicine.
(Edited to add: no idea which particular claims Dr. McCullough himself is most confident in. Might not be those two.)
> The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization,
Thank you! Do you have anything in regards to the other claim about vaccine safety / comparative # of deaths from COVID vaccinations versus prior types of vaccinations?
I finally watched the Black Panther 2018 movie. (Spoilers follow.)
As a superhero action movie, I have no objection. It's fun, and it makes about as much sense as any other superhero movie, which is perfectly okay.
As a political message that doesn't even try to be subtle... when the important characters talked about difficult life of their "brothers" in USA, it was quite hypocritical from the *in-universe* perspective, in my opinion.
Hypocritical, as in: nowhere in the movie they show any concern about the well-being of their "brothers" *in Africa*; some of which are living right next to them. They probably see the poor people right out of their windows in the skyscrapers made invisible by superior technology. They keep observing them for decades or maybe centuries (not sure how long is the history of the fictional Wakanda), and they are quite okay with the quality-of-life difference.
It's only learning about mistreatment of black people *in USA* that causes the political upheaval that is the plot of the story. Which is also kinda weird, because - depending on how long Wakanda exists - why weren't they more concerned about, you know, *slavery* in USA, in the past. (Did Wakanda perhaps participate in the slave trade, and thus gained the capital to build their empire? Because having magical unobtainium is nice, but if you aren't *selling* it, it does not really explain all the wealth and modern technology.) What exactly is so special about today?
Of course, the out-universe explanation is that the movie is made today (which makes today so special), and the target audience are Americans (which makes America so special, and the rest of the world so morally irrelevant). Of course.
But it is fun to imagine a Straussian reading of the movie, as containing *two* political messages: one quite blunt, the other subtle. The Straussian reading is that no matter how much people talk about the race, wealth actually matters much more. (Even the people saying "Black Lives Matter" are ultimately talking about *American* blacks. No one needs to say it explicitly; yet everyone clearly understands that the hashtag is not about de-worming Africa.) The fictional Wakanda is a rich country; it is natural that the inhabitants only care about what happens in other rich countries. It is embarrassing for the wealthy Wakandians living incognito in USA to be treated as second-class citizens. The poverty they see out of their skyscrapers is not relevant, because they are never forced to interact with it, unless they choose to.
Therefore, I also approve of Black Panther as a subversive movie. The hidden message is that rich people need to be treated with respect, regardless of their race. Wakanda may not exist in the real world, but there are many important and wealthy people outside of USA, and we all together must strive to make their visits in USA as pleasant as possible.
From my review of Black Panther, shortly after seeing it:
Black Panther does one thing well, pats itself on the back, then doubles down on Disney's Marvel's tradition of tediously status-quo gender, age, and class relations.
Spoilers, though this is mostly about the troubling implications of the movie's world-building:
In Wakanda, the position of absolute monarch* is decided by either direct inheritance or by the challenge of ritual melee and/or hand-to-hand combat. Furthermore, only the family members of the five tribal leaders are eligible to challenge for the monarchy.
Let's stop right there.
That's in the text of the movie. There is no disputing these are the conditions under which Wakanda operates. In fact, these conditions inform the major plot points of the movie.
Wakanda's system of government inherently privileges young, physically fit men of the ruling class who've had the luxury of dedicated and extensive combat training.
Anyone older than about 35, anyone who isn't in the outlier territory of peak human athletic fitness, virtually all women, everyone who doesn't have the resources to dedicate 10+ hours a day to combat training, and everyone outside of certain bloodlines is barred from the ability to achieve leadership.
Let's just pause and examine that absurdity. Imagine if German Chancellors, British and Japanese Prime Minsters, American Presidents, et al were *LITERALLY* elevated to lifetime absolute dictatorship via the MMA Octagon, one that operates without weight classes and only for certain powerful families.
Seriously consider that, for a moment.
Yeah. Wakanda's system of government is *objectively* ageist, ableist, misogynist, and accessible only to the literal ruling classes.
Even worse, though, is that the movie doesn't attempt to dismantle Wakanda's obsolete and toxic system of government, nor even work within that system to egalitarian ends.
Instead, when Killmonger legally challenges for and is believed to have legally achieved absolute monarchy and then very legally orders his army to war, rather than having one of the female protagonists legally challenge for and achieve absolute monarchy under the provisions of the law, the surviving female members of Wakanda's ruling family LITERALLY RUN TO A DIFFERENT MAN TO LITERALLY BEG HIM, ***LITERALLY ON THEIR KNEES(!!!)*** TO CHALLENGE FOR THE RIGHT TO LITERALLY RULE OVER THEM.
Stop.
That's what happened.
This movie could have pulled the *epic* twist of casually discarding the 18th male protagonist in the Marvel's unbroken streak by letting T'Challa die and having one of the (infinitely more interesting) female leads step up to assume Queen-and-Black-Panthership, but it didn't.
"Yeah, but in the original comic book the character is a man and the fans..."
Shut the fuck up.
Be pissed. This movie is one step forward and three huge steps back.
* (Side bar: Is it even believable that any technologically advanced, educated, and professedly egalitarian human civilization would operate as an absolute monarchy? That's its own essay, but I would argue no. Proof: All of human history up until now, where the remaining absolute monarchies are Brunei and Oman.)
> It's in a comic book universe, so it's optimized for hand-to-hand combat.
White comic book heroes do lots of hand-to-hand violence, too. Yet the society they live in (unless it is an obvious dystopia) is usually more civilized than "whoever is best at punching other people becomes the absolute dictator".
Wakanda seems like designed by (and for) people who try to appear woke, yet can't overcome even their most basic racial prejudices.
"Hey, imagine this utopia for black people, which is like super rich and super technologically advanced, but was hidden in Africa until recently..."
"Sounds interesting. Please tell me more about how the society works! Like, what is their political system? How do they make the important decisions on national scale?"
"Well, they are blacks, so... uhm... probably using physical violence..."
A large theme in many runs of Black Panther, the comic is that Wakanda's culture is backwards and barbarian and they need to "catch up" (aka become another neoliberal free-market-capitalist American-culture-dominated two-party democracy with some degree of corruption, because that's what the American audience sees as the natural state of Man with everything else being some weird and slightly malicious deviation) because of a vaguely-Whig-history argument of "times have changed".
I will counterpoint that Wakanda attained massive technological advancement and material prosperity (the latter is less obvious in the movie, but even though they've failed to annihilate poverty the poor of Wakanda benefit from a largesse from the ruling class that means they essentially live like upper-middle-class Americans in clay housing) under their system of tribal elder governance and ritual duels. There's no reason to believe that their prosperity and social order aren't intertwined, such that if they decided to become a "civilized nation" corporate raiders and incompetent/corrupt bureaucrats wouldn't immediately plunder their land for all it has and leave the people significantly worse off.
On the meta level: Black Panther was a character made by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as part of a push in the '70's to appeal to the black audience for comic books by putting Black superheroes on the shelves. The two characters that came out of this were a noble king from a neo-tribal-futuristic society (combining Jack Kirby's love of blending ancient culture and futuristic technology with the pan-African movements happening at that time) and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, a super-powered jive-talking bad mother with a good heart but flexible morals ripped straight from the reel of a blaxploitation film. You could argue that both of these characters are immensely offensive to the point where you'd want to disinter the corpses of Lee and Kirby to try them for hate crimes, but they were, and still are, popular among their target demographic and I don't feel like trying to lecture black people about how something they like is actually racist towards them.
Having WMDs under control of a fightocracy is insane and any current or previous king should have implemented controls on that.
Like, instead of the law being "the king gets to order the army to invade other countries," make the law that "the king may not send any vehicles out to conquer other countries."
And yet this apparently was never a problem until Killmonger couped- quite possibly because this is a Marvel comic, which are fantasy stories that run off of the inherent assumption that nations have moral character and the True King would never abuse his power. Fantasy, like all fiction except for extremely dry and bleak dramas about depressed writers living in the Bay Area, does not hold up to "rationality" (here meaning "the persistent insistence that fantastical stories must slavishly cleave to 21st-century Bay Area-culture conceptions of how the world works"). In the real world, basically every single superhero in the US would either be shackled to a federal bureaucracy and used as tools to enforce realpolitik interests instead of protecting the populace or be declared an enemy of the state with kill-on-sight orders. Not even Worm, which this community tends to uphold as the One Rational Superhero Story, actually does this.
My point is that there are some real low expectations here about what an African utopia would look like: One where a powerful black woman - a literal queen - would sink to her knees to beg a man to challenge the legal succession of the absolute monarchy.
That people aren't outraged about that scene astonishes me to this day.
Thanks. When people haven't seen anything positive about themselves, they'll accept pretty mediocre stuff.
What amazes me is that Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which is a sympathetic account from the murderer's point of view of a young woman who's killed for the crime of being pretty in public.
I don't think I've seen *any* pushback from the woke side.
Huh? Dr. Horrible is certainly not a hero, but that’s a very misleading description of the plot.
*Spoilers* Penny is tragic and very much unintentional collateral damage in an attack targeted against Captain Hammer, and killing her pretty much removes Dr. horrible’s last bit of humanity.
From a Doylist perspective, the shrapnel "randomly" killed Penny rather than any of the dozens of other potential victims because Whedon needed to remove Dr. Horrible's last bit of humanity. Only Penny had that power. and she had that power because she looked pretty in a laundromat.
Since when is Wakanda "professedly egalitarian"? My question was whether the commoners were even aware of the battle at the end, or was it purely the nobles fighting each other?
Actually, you're right. The king's guard are all women, and while they're depicted as being capable and fierce warriors, none of them are eligible for leadership due to their bloodlines, even if they're better fighters than the men of the ruling families.
I thought a number of your questions were answered in the film? First, Wakanda is ancient. It’s basically Black Atlantis. So, yes, they did indeed sit by throughout slavery. This is explained as a deliberate policy of isolation on the logic that their technology was too powerful to be released into the world. Basically, the world might be going to shit, but it will be even worse if we try to play world police and add vibranium to the mix.
Now, perhaps this is flawed logic, but then, whether that logic is flawed is the central conflict of the movie. In any case, it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable that a powerful ruling dynasty could sustain isolation as a policy for a long time.
There seems to have always been a minority faction in favor of non-isolation, and that’s where Killmonger (and his father) come from.
As for “why care about brothers in America instead of the poverty you see from your front door”. Well, Killmonger’s concern for black brothers in the US and elsewhere seems to be a nationalistic case, as much as materialistic one. That is, he cares more about self determination for a pan-African race rather than ending poverty per se.
I don’t agree with this logic, but it’s not like “race based nationalism” is a position without real-world parallels.
The weird one is that after the main events of the film, we see T’Challa going out and engaging in seemingly materialistic support of the black diaspora, but NOT apparently attempting to engage in the nationalism of Killmonger. And that DOES raise the question “why not help the even poorer people just outside your stealth bubble first” although the film does not say explicitly that they aren’t also being helped. But it is an American movie for mostly American audiences.
Gurgaon is a city in India. It doesn't have a municipal government, but it seems to be about as good or bad as the rest of India.
There's an interesting bit of stationary bandit theory-- bribery is less expensive because there's only one agency to bribe instead of several each collecting bribes for the same thing.
Oh dear. I see your point--it would be hilarious & fascinating. But I'm a little afraid of putting myself (and others) into a situation where they have to mentally navigate the Unsong AU constantly!!
Also, sadly, I fear it may make telepathy not seem OP! (just because on muds usually there's a mechanism for sending chats to someone not in the same "room," and we get used to that norm. But then, this doesn't have to folow THAT convention.)
Sorry do people still play MUDs seriously? Why not just have a text/icon browser game in the style of Warring Factions or something? If you aren't doing a Minecraft style server based game. Just seems like there's no reason to play MUDs specifically.
I think of people as having a lot of temporal reach these days. Old things might not be extremely popular, or not for long, but it's more likely that they'll have a small fan base keeping them going indefinitely.
This is why I'm annoyed with The Truman Show and Permutation City-- both have fans completely abandoning something that fascinated them.
Sure... maybe it's just nostalgia for many pleasant hours I spent on those over a decade ago.
But yes, some still do! A Wheel of Time mud I used to play seems to be reviving! (Unsurprisingly, perhaps!) They now have a discord, and I logged on and saw character-names I haven't seen in years.
Looked into "Warring Factions." (I don't "keep up on" lots of game stuff! Clearly.) It seems to me it fits a different niche? More like massively-multiplayer Civ, I would guess? (tho that could be a very rough approximation.)
Oh, very neat! t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶-̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶!̶, ermmm... what I meant to say is, thank you for sharing this--I didn't know this specific thing existed / the name for it!!
(If i make one and get like at least 20-50 people, would you like me to invite you?)
Perhaps "text based MMORPG" would be clearer to those too young to remember MUDs. (Whereas I tend to think of MMORPGs as large, commercialized, graphical MUDs.
Does anyone know of an ethnographic study of how street gangs work? I want to understand things like how many people are involved in retail drug sales, how do the adult members interact with the juveniles, what's the level of involvement of different members, do people have specialized jobs?
US: 'An economic analysis of a drug-selling gang's finances' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2586895). There's a summary of this research in the book 'Freakonomics'.
Less relevant, but interesting:
El Salvador: Review of several books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/05/13/ms-13-el-salvador-lost-everything-beast/).
US: 'Gang Membership and Adherence to the “Code of the Street”' (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2012.684432). For context, maybe read this article, which isn't specifically about gangs (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/05/the-code-of-the-streets/306601/).
Thanks!
Does anyone understand how continuous kilns used for brickmaking work? I just discovered them, but the webpages devoted to them are too confusing.
This is the best source I've found so far: https://civilengineering-softstudies.com/40-drying-burning-of-bricks-continuous-intermittent-bulls-trench-kiln-hoffmans-kiln.html
I administer a rapid covid testing program at my workplace. Several dozen people, relatively close quarters, lots of exposure to the general public. Currently we have everyone doing nasal swab rapid tests every day at home before work, but there are some new preprints suggesting (with uneven quality, as befits anything based on *data* from the last couple of weeks!) that saliva samples are more sensitive, at least early on. The study design here for example https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full.pdf is small n and not exactly comparable to typical nasal or oral rapid test sample collection, but does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm not sure how far to update. I know there were earlier papers or at least preprints about saliva, and SalivaDirect is a thing, but I don't know to apply that in the rapid-testing-for-omicron contest.
I don't know the current state of the debate, but I am pretty certain that the place of highest viral load differs strongly from person to person. So for some people the saliva sample works better than the nasal swab, and for others it's the other way round. This is one of the reasons why rapid tests are not 100% reliable: you might simply search in the wrong place. (PCR tests are so much more sensitive that you still find the virus even if you search in the wrong place.)
Comparing nasal vs. saliva tests still makes sense, but it is only a statistical question, i.e., how often does option A work better than B, and vice versa? My understanding was that nasal swab are usually more reliable than saliva, and that this is because viral load is usually higher in the deep parts of the nose. But saliva samples do work in principle; e.g., lollipop tests are used on a large scale in schools in some countries, and they work reasonably well. And test kits have very different qualities, so I would think that a good saliva test kit easily beats a bad nasal swab test kit.
But I didn't follow recent updates, so all this may be outdated. And for omicron, we have good reason to believe that those old heuristics don't work well anymore. Omicron seems to be more adapted to upper respiratory tissue than older variants, which would favor saliva tests.
Either way, I would not focus on the question nasal vs. saliva, but rather on using a test kit that got good test results from independent agencies. (NOT the percentage that sellers advertise with - those are basically made up.) For example, here is an extensive list from the German Paul-Ehrlich-Institut:
https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers/evaluierung-sensitivitaet-sars-cov-2-antigentests.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=69
Note that this list only contains tests that *passed* the minimum requirements, so if you don't want to work through the numbers, you might consider all tests from that list as "good".
Thanks for your kind words! I am glad that I could help!
I'm reading The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, but I have a hard time trusting it based on the wild social science studies it cites. E.g:
# Kindergartners are better at a spaghetti tower building challenge than college students.
# "Belonging cues" (like eye contact and communication patterns) are better predictors of group performance than any other factor (including IQ of group members).
# Subjects work 50% longer on a solitary puzzle if they, early in the experiment, are given a note with not-actually-helpful information from a fictional previous subject.
# If you ask a stranger "I'm so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your phone?", you are 422% more likely to get a yes than if you just ask "Can I borrow your phone?"
# Patients admitted after suicide attempts are 50% less likely to be readmitted if they get postcards with well-wishes from the hospital.
This is just the first 25 pages. My bullshit sensor is going crazy: all of this can't all replicate, right? Is this book worth reading?
You're probably right to suspect that some of these won't replicate, but they seem individually plausible to me. (Except for the phone one for the reason existential-vertigo points out.)
I'm pretty sure this phone experiment is a redo of a much more popular Xerox experiment: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201310/the-power-the-word-because-get-people-do-stuff
PS. I think it's important to note: Coyle says one asks for a phone during the rain on a train station. Not exactly a safe space to lend a phone.
What does "422% more likely" even mean here? Do people really get a <20% hit rate on "can I borrow your phone?"?!
I very much doubt that Kindergarners are better at any task than college students, unless the task is "run around in circles the longest." And even then, probably not.
I was reading Zvi's summary of his Omicron model, and I found that his recommendations contradict a lot of what Scott has posted on ACX:
1. He recommends that we take Vitamin D as a preventative measure against Covid. Scott of course said that he doesn't believe in this recommendation
2. He thinks taking Merck's pill is mostly bad as it will help the virus mutate more, and that it shouldn't have been approved by the CDC. Scott of course has been haranguing the CDC to approve drugs faster, etc. Of course the argument can be made that in the cost-benefit analysis, consumption of Merck's pill is the rational thing to do or something. I haven't done such a cost-benefit analysis myself. But the overall impression that I got on reading Scott's writing was that the CDC should speed up approvals.
Seeing as Scott is an influential writer who is now *clearly* influencing public policy, I wonder if he'd like to address these points. In case he's wrong about his recommendations, it might result in hundreds and thousands of preventable deaths. Of course every attempt at understanding and prediction carries with it some chance of being wrong. However, addressing views that run counter to one's own is what any good Rationalist should do anyway.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-my-current-model
Zvi agrees with Scott that the CDC (and FDA) should in general approve drugs faster; Zvi just thinks the Merck pill in particular shouldn't have been approved.
Scott has said that Vitamin D probably doesn't work, meaning the chances are less than 50%.
But he's also said it's cheap and has low side-effects so even if it's only like 25% likely to help, you should probably do it.
If a rapid covid antigen test shows positive results in under 1 minute is this indicative of a higher viral load than a test that takes 15 minutes to show a positive?
I just saw the Matrix Resurrections and thought it was awful. Probably the worst of the franchise.
It got me thinking: Is there any way the second and third movies (Reloaded and Revolutions) could have been fixed so that they were at least 90% as good as the first movie? If yes, then what specific things should have been different?
Resurrections was a reboot that couldn't reboot -- they included a new Neo (Bugs), a new Trinity (Lexy) and their team (including a reskinned Morpheus), plus a new villain (the Analyst) and a reskinned Agent Smith. But they were relegated to second fiddle as the old Neo and Trinity were still around. The film was so consciously up-its-own-butt self-aware that I assume this was intended as a statement on something.
As for Reloaded and Revolutions... no, probably not.
The new heroes seemed like just someone whose role is to be slaughtered at a convenient moment, to show the viewer that the situation is getting serious, and to motivate (the old) Neo to assume his final form and avenge them.
This did not happen (which was nice, because unexpected), but it prevented me from paying much attention to the new heroes.
I liked the plots of the second and third movies and a lot of the moments and visuals, but they had pretty big problems with pacing. The core sin seemed to be attempting to top the first movie by setting up hideously expensive action sequences, then padding the scenes in question well beyond what was optimal for storytelling purposes in an effort to "get their money's worth" from the sets and props (for practical effects) or the 3D assets (for CGI effects). Biting the bullet and shortening things like the freeway chase scene, the Burly Brawl, and the Zion rave would improve the sequels considerably.
It's George Lucas syndrome, where no one was willing to tell the directors "no."
The fight with Smith early in the second movie opened with Smith using his unbeatable superweapon [1] off the bat. And Neo resists it. And Neo is superman, so the rest of the fight scene is completely uninteresting from a plot perspective.
[1] taking over a host
I have an unpopular opinion: I liked the 2nd and 3rd movies. The action and special effects didn't age well, but they were good for early 2000s. They fleshed out more of the world, explained more how the machines set up the construct from the inside, really made some of the programs (like the oracle, keymaker, vampires, and ghost-dudes) be interesting side-characters and villains. The scene-by-scene action made sense (as long as you agreed that they had to make it to a landline to escape, most of the characters' actions made sense), which is more than you can say about a lot of action/thriller movies.
I think why people didn't like them has to do with expectations. The first movie was light action and heavy mindfuck, and the other two were light/non-mindfucks and just heavy action, and so there was a bit of genre-switching going on. So if you go into 2 and 3 waiting for your mind to be blown, that was just never going to happen.
I think if you wanted to make the 2nd or 3rd one better (and this actually applies to the 4th one too), they would have had to lean all the way into the simulation hypothesis: reveal that the "real world" is ALSO a simulation, and that they have no idea how many levels deep they are. This would also have explained why Neo seems to have some slightly magical powers in the real world. I think this would have been pretty hard to do, convincingly, but it's the only way they could have kept the magic of the first one alive.
Same opinion here, I liked the 2nd and 3rd movies a lot better than the first.
Another problem was that the "mindfuckery" of the second and third movies missed the mark because it was too hard to understand the theme of each film. The first movie's mindfuck was very simple and easy to understand: Reality is an illusion. The second was...something...about "causality," and the third was some schlock about "free will."
The 2nd and 3rd did have mindfucks, like Neo's ability to control the Matrix being a general superpower to control all machines. And people hated the additional mindfuck, because they feel it invalidated the first one. (I was fine with it, though.)
Well, no, because it didn't make sense. That's actually what I'm referring to by the "magical powers" Neo seemed to have. I think that only would have made sense if that layer were a simulation also.
Note that every single one of Neo's real-world powers involves machines - and not just machines in general, but The Machines who set up the Matrix and the One in the first place. His blind sight can't see Trinity or Bane or the Zionist ship, but it *can* see Smith (a program), as well as the power plant and Machine City.
The obvious explanation is that the One - who is, after all, a cyborg, like every other human born into the Matrix - is given some degree of access to the machines' IFF/C&C network, presumably in order to help rebuild and "defend" Zion while restarting it.
Hmm, this is a compelling argument, I'll have to rewatch some time.
We thought Neo's superpower was his ability to be awesome in the matrix. But his actual superpower is that he's a technopath, which manifested itself in the matrix as being awesome in it.
Exactly! Either he should have continued to only have powers in the simulation, or they should have revealed the real world is a simulation as well, but they didn't do either. And it would have been a good reveal: what do you do with the people who can't handle the simulation? Give them a new simulation, one where they're rebels who have figured it all out. It can also fix the fact that using human batteries makes no scientific sense: if the human battery story was just another lie then you can come up with a better reason that all of humanity is living in a simulation. Heck, you could even have it that the machine are in a simulation as well and don't know it and some unknown power has imprisoned them and humanity both, but that's getting a little silly.
But then again, that would have have muddled the original Gnostic theme of overcoming an imprisoning lie to find true reality. If the true reality is also an imprisoning lie, then you can't really escape: every time you think you've escaped you can't be sure you're not just in another lie. It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
That's one thing I really liked about the new movie, was that Neo could not be sure whether he was going crazy or was in a false reality. How could he be? It was a good look at how you can be paralyzed by the fact that you can't directly determine what is real and what isn't. The rest of the movie was pretty meh, but the Neo simulation sequence was pretty good.
(the main thing I think they could have done to fix the sequels was to make the architect scene better. As it is it's a bit confusing: I know on my first watch through I didn't really understand the implications of what he was saying.)
>It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
But that would actually be an interesting move, cinematically! The best sequels (imo) are the ones that completely change your perspective on the original works.
I agree about the new one, the gaslighting of Neo was the only good part of the movie.
The problem is that the first film is basically a self-contained story, Neo goes through an entire hero's journey.
The best bet would have been to properly set the series up as a trilogy in the first place, to stretch the premise of the first film out into at least two, with a conclusion that combines some of the events of the second two movies into one.
Re-watching the original movie, the pacing strikes me as extremely fast, we barely get to experience Neo living his blue-pilled existence before the red pill is dropped on us, so it feels like there was a lot of untapped potential to work with there. I could see a pretty interesting 60+ minutes spent developing Neo as a character and gradually getting hints that he's living in something called "The Matrix" until his first real encounters with Trinity/Morpheus/Agent Smith. But I imagine that slower burn might not resulted in as successful of a first movie, even if the trilogy was better for it.
I agree. They should have not made any "sequels," though additional movies set in the Matrix universe featuring different characters than there were in the first film could have been cool (the Animatrix did this is short film format).
Tipping inflation:
As a child, I was told that 15% was a standard tip, and 20% was for exceptional service. Lately, I've seen these amounts creeping upward, with 15% often being the minimum selectable option for online ordering. This would make sense if food prices are increasing more slowly than general inflation, but do we have any data suggesting this is the case? If not, what's going on?
I’ve done 20% ish for a long time (15% seems fine too). What does annoy me is:
1) an inflated tipping expectation for takeout (why would I pay the same for “throw the food in a box” that I do for table service or home delivery?)
2) delivery apps calculating the 20% on the bill AFTER adding their stupid fees. No, I tip on the food bill, not the extra $10 GrubHub tacks on.
I think food has gotten cheaper relative to the "average" good. But my intuition is that *restaraunts* have gotten more expensive (after adjusting for inflation of course). Hmm...
20% as the standard tip is becoming common because of changes in beliefs about the morality of tipping based industries for workers who aren't in the top 5% of service workers or so.
Mr Pink doesn’t believe in tipping.
https://www.google.com/search?q=reservoir+dogs+tipping&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:bbfedda0,vid:4fbwwlHPtRM,st:0
I remember 10% being the standard so either I'm old or I was in a different sub-culture, but yeah now 15% is the bare minimum.
On ranked-choice vs approval voting: I buy the argument that there are more ways to "spoil" a RCV election than an approval election, and you can be more "strategic" with RCV (lying about preferences to get your preferred candidate elected). But it doesn't change the fact that if I think the thing you're being asked to do with approval voting is nonsensical. "Mark yes for all candidates you approve of and no for the rest." Approve of compared to what? I would rather vote for any candidate on the presidential ballot last year than vote for a dog to be president, should I check all the boxes? But there's one I would like more than the others, maybe I should only check that one? It's just not clear what you're even "supposed" to do! It seems that approval voting discourages strategic voting in the technical sense (lying about your preferences) in large part by shifting your strategy to where you draw the line of vote/no vote. As far as I can see there's no honest, non-strategic way to answer that question. I personally wouldn't know what to do if presented with an approval-voting ballot.
Versus with RCV (and even FPTP) there's a pretty clear interpretation of what you're "supposed" to do: write down your candidates in the order you'd prefer seeing them elected (or mark your favorite for FPTP). You don't force people to strategically decide a cutoff, which again I think is an underspecified task. Having clear instructions for non-strategic voters is a dealbreaker for any voting system in my view.
If given an approval ballot, just mark "Yes" on any candidates that would make you happy if they were elected. And mark "No" for all the candidates that would make you sad if they were elected.
This is provably non-optimal; if your cutoff for approval is not between the candidates with serious chances of victory then your voting power is nullified.
(All voting systems except random ballot have some sort of tactical voting, but approval's tactical voting problem is one of the more obvious. IRV has scenarios in which voting tactically is indicated, but they're quite narrow and voters don't generally have enough information to notice they're in such a situation.)
In general, people have no trouble responding to approval questions, see for example all of the approval polls: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
And in the jurisdictions that have adopted it, the elections seem to have turned out fine. Voters were able to decide who they approved of, and the outcomes seemed in line with voter preferences.
AV is not some mysterious hypothetical system that has hidden doomsday scenarios we need to theorize about... it has been implemented with no issues in some moderately large cities.
I don’t disagree with your analysis, but just in case you are presented with an approval ballot, this is the “strategic” vote that makes the most sense to me:
Guess who the two most likely candidates to win are. If this is a local election, good luck, but if it’s a national election you should be able to consult polling data.
Then, vote for the better of those two candidates, as well as any candidates you think are better than that candidate.
This strategy is optimal in many cases, but it’s also a good strategy for society to coordinate around, because if everyone does this, we elect the cordorcet winner when one exists.
Several years ago I was working on a fantasy world strategy/simulation that while it didn't simplify the military aspects brough the focus and attention and mechanical complexity of the other parts of the simulation up to parity. I sometimes refer to the type of game I am trying to make as a DIP game. Diplomacy|Intrigue|Politics. This is because that is what differentiates it from existing games. Whether we are talking about Paradox, Matrix, Slitherine, or purely independent games of a similar type. 4X, Grand Strategy, Political Sim(think Democracy 2-4).
As of earlier this month I am back to working on it after doing various things as well as just slacking off during the pandemic. I expect to have either release or EA on Steam/GoG/Epic/Other around early December next year.
My secondary focus is on a sort of verisimilitude where you feel much more like a politician or potentate that engages in politics rather than a god king or a hive mind. The game has both characters with more detail than CK2-3 and populations with more detail tha Vicky/Imperator. Both of these entities have an Ideology that indicates how they think the world should be organized. They also have Opinions, a numerical variable, based on various modifiers, about each other character and population they are aware of.
This, should, feel much more like a real leader trying to get things done. Opinion functions like political capital to be expended in order to do things you want to do. Start an unpopular war and get war exhaustion and ideology penalties and expend resources you could have expended for other purposes. Start a popular war and gain Opinion boosts from Ideology and if your populace hates the people you are fighting or likes that you are freeing people they like from tyranny.
Maybe you want to integrate a major minority population group from conquered lands. You can allow them to serve in government jobs/bureaucracy for a boost. But you may upset others who previously had access to that privilege. Pass various edicts/laws to give them rights, similar to Imperator but more detailed and with more options. Yes Imperator is, at least until Vicky 3 comes out, the most interesting as far as population based gameplay among Paradox games. While there isn't an overarching yes/no on immigration or w/e many policies affect parts of what we call immigration in modern societies. This game is a fantasy game so it isn't quite based on the same conflicts.
You also have to manage important/powerful characters. Flattery, bribes, titles, intimidation. I made a large effort to expand from what 4X and Grand Strategy games do with Intrigue. The Conspiracy system allows you to build up human and material capital to pursue anything from a small plot to murder another character to an "Ancient Conspiracy". A decades to millennia long secret organization to topple or usurp and empire. Essentially the Conspiracy panel/menu allows you to connect what in other games would be totally discrete actions that build up to a single greater purpose.
Many of you might be familiar with the Plot and Secrets menus from Ck2-3. But here you can do far more. You can promise land or titles or money or resources. Trade favors like military assistance, share intel from your personal "Intelligence Network", and do other stuff. The regular Diplomacy menu allows you to promise things as part of treaties but that is a little simpler and treaties are generally public. A given Conspiracy generates a Secret(you can find the 2014-2015 Axioms Of Dominion wiki which describes secrets and ideologies and all these other mechanics here: https://axioms-of-dominion.fandom.com/wiki/Axioms_Of_Dominion_Wiki) for each action of the Conspiracy and connects them in a unique way. That is the penalty for the superior organizational power of Conspiracies. Members of Conspiracies can induct others, in part or in whole, as part of their efforts to complete their parts of the overall project.
Axioms is primarily a fun video game where you can actually, compared to false claims of games in the past, feel like a character in GoT or some other media based on politics. I'm really trying to give an experience that even a modern day politician can relate to. "Why don't they just do [thing the person speaking wants]!" Because they have a complex consituency with competing and sometimes contradictory desires.
Consider the Biden BBB Bill. You have to add something to appease one Senator but it pisses off another Senator. Can you weaken the provision or add some pork to please both? Putting in a lot of long-time goals of disparate groups can gain support until you run into your very own Joe Manchin. Axioms should provide a ton of situations similar to that. Although discrete actions such as Flattering or Reasoning or even casting a literal magic mind fudgery spell will obviously not be comparable to how that works in real life. But at a higher level I think it should feel pretty close. The internal politics simulation isn't quite complex enough to have legislation and legislatures and such, at least in most cases. There's no "voting" system per se. But something like Greek democracy is pretty close to possible. And Treaties and to some degree Conspiracies function similar to how real life domestic legislation functions at a high level.
Additionally a polity can adopt a standardized "Charter" to create a governing system similar to the HRE. You can create individualized vassal contracts, I think maybe CK3 added this?, but vassals will be aware of who has a better deal, although they may also know why. Both characters and populations will have an increased opinion of "governments" that are less centralized. Triumvirates vs Dictatorships vs Councils/Parliaments, etc. There's a somewhat fixed opinion bonus, modified by ideology, as you dilute power. Of course the cost is getting all the relevant deciders on board for major group actions.
I've sketched out a way for the AI to use these mechanics, perhaps not quite to the level a player could thought process wise, such that the AI could organically form an HRE-esque superstate. A lot of this relies on the scale. I'm trying to get performance to the point that a 40000 province map can work on decently recent modern PC setups. Most people might have to make do with ~4000-8000 and perhaps a little less variety in AI political organization. I personally expect that I might need to upgrade to 32gigs of RAM to get bigger maps working.
I'm curious if a lot of ACX people play more complicated strategy games, vs Civ/Endless/GalCiv stuff.
This sounds very interesting to me, though these days I seldom have time to learn new complex strategy games -- I got into CK3 but only because it's similar enough to CK2 which I've played off and on since launch.
In this vein, one interesting and somewhat forgotten game that I grew up playing is the old Koei title, Genghis Khan 2. These days it has basically been superseded by the CK games (which are a far more complex simulation) but I do think it had some unique mechanics for depicting the fact that "no man rules alone" and for trying to make large empires increasingly unmanageable (something CK tries to do but doesn't really succeed at, and EU4 doesn't really even attempt).
I know there are some mods for CK2 that try to get this balance better, though I haven't tried them.
If you haven't read it, I'd also suggest taking a look at "The Dictator's Handbook", which is a very fun and fast read about these sorts of power dynamics.
I'm pretty strongly considering some kind of AP system ala GK2 and Star Dynasties. I'd have liked to do some sort of timer system but it is hard to code and people are motivated to cheat to get around it.
I'm planning to write a couple more posts on substack about unique stuff in Axioms but the trouble is that because the systems are so interconnected, which is great for gameplay, it is hard to really detail much about a given system in isolation. If you read the only post currently up, about my version of "Unrest" you'll see what I mean.
CK2 isn't really saveable, for my purposes, by mods. You'd just be overloading events and decisions so much. Tons of mods are already at that point. Same for EU4 really. M&T Pop Overhaul did about as much as you can do with EU4 and it is pretty clunky.
Well I've subscribed to your Substack. This all makes sense to me, I'll be curious what you come up with.
It sounds like you're making a product that will be a niche within a niche, but that's fine. Part of the promise of CK2, and what kept me coming back to it, is that it feels like a game where my empire can collapse and I can be reduced to a single county somewhere and yet the game isn't over and in fact has just gotten *more* interesting. So I'd love to see more games that play this way.
But I get the sense most players aren't like me, they love blobbing and get upset when they aren't blobbing. And the truth is I don't mind blobbing to some degree, but when I look back at all of my great games of CK2, the ones with really interesting stories, they all featured some sort of massive imperial collapse.
I should dig up some old blog posts about the Cinnamon Wars or the dragon worshipping place with stolen draconic attributes. Or one of the HRE-esque examples if you like imperial collapse.
Since your the only sub might as well pander and do a post on Charters and Ancient Conspiracies as it applies to big polities.
Especially seeing as my GUI library is shitting itself after a version upgrades. Turns out 5 years gives a lot of time for problems to build up.
Last night I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZte37vtFTkYT7b0b04Qz
There are *a lot* of claims in this podcast about the vaccines, the FDA, the relative harm of the variants, the comparative safety of mRNA vaccines compared to traditional vaccines, the suspected number of deaths in response to vaccination, etc.
Is there any detailed analysis and refutation or support of these claims from anyone in the rationalist community? I don't see anything (besides some allusions in 2 or 3 comments) on here, and nothing on Zvi's site.
There was a recent episode of the generally sane Zubin Damania's podcast that broke most of McCullough's points down in detail. He is broadly sympathetic to heterodox ideas but very critical of these arguments in particular.
Zvi seems to be getting annoyed with the entire Bret Weinstein orbit and just ignoring them for understandable reasons.
Can you help me understand these "understandable" reasons? I believe you have them, but the content-free dunk on McCullough with no substantiation that GBergeron's pulling isn't helpful to anyone who's trying to do any sense-making of this situation as a layperson.
Looks like this might be the podcast you're recommending?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-joe-rogan-dr-peter-mccullough-interview-explained/id1218431966?i=1000545319182
I'll give it a listen. Thanks!
That's right. Always awkward finding and copying links on mobile. Broadly, the loosely affiliated set I'm referring to have collectively been a quite predictable Gish gallop of reflexive meta-contrarianism, basically amounting to just inverting whatever the mainstream narrative happens to be, with a variety of incidental justifications. This rarely contributes new or interesting information. I'm generally all for amplifying weird long-tail ideas, just in this case the signal-to-noise ratio has been trash.
Can you help me understand:
* who is the loosely affiliated set?
* are you narrowly looking at COVID related arguments with this set, or literally everything these people say?
Part of why I ask is I really enjoyed Bret and his wife Heather’s recent book. There are a couple of points they make in it that go a bit extreme for me but on the whole, the case they make for looking at life through an evolutionary biology lens and the insights it brings is a really solid and compelling one.
Your reply here, completely respectfully, is hard to read as to whether it’s just a smear/sneer job that says “don’t bother with those people” or whether there are specifics here (people, claims, videos) that don’t hold up and are common enough to cast doubt on their general credibility.
Specifically Covid. I think Bret and Heather are otherwise at least interesting, if sometimes interestingly wrong, and the pandemic has somehow broken their brains. Their new book looks great. Hopefully they're back to normal a year from now. They were of course prone to uncritical metacontrarianism before, but it was much more likely to produce something worth thinking about pre-pandemic (and even early on in 2020 -- they were pretty open-minded before the vaccine epoch).
I'm not very invested in this argument here, but if you look at the last year or so of pandemic-related podcast guests (Geert Vanden Bossche, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Tess Lawrie...) there's a common thread of having had interesting and potentially really helpful contrarian ideas that haven't panned out in the face of accumulating evidence, and then just digging in hard and repeating themselves. It's good that someone was worrying about potential long-tail vaccine risks and standing up for long-shot therapeutics with some promising early evidence (and fluvoxamine, at least, seems to have worked out!), but those need to be held loosely and subject to Bayesian updating as new evidence appears, and that just doesn't seem to be happening.
Scott and Zvi, for example, have done a much better job of updating and even completely changing their minds as new information appears.
EDIT: I had meant to explain that what's been particularly frustrating about 2021!Bret Weinstein is that he doesn't apply the same healthy skepticism to contrarian pandemic folks as he does to everything else. There's a strong element of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ that gets old quickly.
Thank you for the thorough reply!
I don’t follow their podcast so thank you for mentioning that that’s where the questionable science is going down.
If I had to make my own guess - I wonder if it’s the “trust us, we’re the science” attitude that they’re reacting to, lining up with a point they stress multiple times in their book: that hubris in the face of hypernovelty is dangerous. I believe that, under the crank theories, the real concerns boil down to “why aren’t we being more deliberate in the approach here” combined with something approaching Scott’s Pascalian medicine argument and “sticking with medications that we understand the safety profile of.” A lot of the panic seems to stem from what could result from spreading the spike protein excessively through our bodies, and not inherently being anti-vaccines, just anti-the-particular-mechanism-and-potential-dangers-of-this-vaccine.
It's a shame that heterodox thinkers have a strong tendency to become insane.
That is a thing that happens. It seems like the experience of being right *once* about something where the mainstream was wrong creates a lifetime reflexive second-option bias in some folks, without any further connection to facts, evidence, logic, etc. etc. The worthwhile thinkers are just *incidentally* heterodox without making it their entire schtick.
I agree that the experience of being right (and being famous for being right) can make one overconfident (and wanting to experience the high again). Not sure about the mainsteam/heterodox distinction, though.
It seems like some people go "mainstream -> heterodox -> crackpot", but some other people go directly "mainstream -> crackpot". Could it be that the latter option is actually the natural progression, and the former is an exception when the first overconfident non-mainstream idea accidentally happens to be correct?
See also: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
It's one big reason I'd like a larger heterodox community, so that they can help each other understand that being lucky once doesn't they're lucky forever.
Or, even better, if our discourse were diverse enough that we didn't need to create a group called "heterodox" because that's what everyone is.
i’m a taco. Last night I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough.
Sounds about right.
Do you have literally anything more to offer to a fruitful discussion?
Any fruitful discussion ended with "Dr. Peter McCullough."
I'm not so sure. Sure looks to me like he, and me, are trying to start a conversation, and you're not.
I think a better question is what are the most significant 1 or 2 claims that he is most confident in, and can these be refuted? A detailed analysis/refutation of *all* the claims sounds like succumbing to a Gish Gallop.
If these 1 or 2 stand up, then perhaps a deeper dive is warranted. Maybe it turns out he is right about everything, I don't know, haven't listened to the podcast; but this in general is how I would go about it.
The two that stick out the most for me, personally, were:
* The claim that the incidence rate for vaccine safety prior to COVID, as measured in deaths attributable directly to vaccination, was something like 180 deaths over 270 million vaccinations. And that the count currently w/r/t the COVID vaccines (or perhaps specifically the mRNA vaccines) is something close to 10x-50x higher than that, based, lowest-case, on VAERS data (and then depending on whatever level of VAERS underreporting you suspect to reach the higher tier)
* The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization, extending out to a general claim or theme of his argument that all the medical establishment's eggs seem to be in the vaccination basket, more or less, and that any of the evidence for (insert your favorite non-vaccine treatment type here) or any protocol to use such in order to prevent hospitalizations, reduce spread, flatten curves, and save the world aren't being seriously considered or turned into meaningful action plans that can be given to equip doctors with more tools.
The latter one seems particularly salient to Scott given the recent posts re: fluvoxamine and Pascalian medicine.
(Edited to add: no idea which particular claims Dr. McCullough himself is most confident in. Might not be those two.)
> The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization,
Hell, jstr has posted one here on ACX:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7833340/figure/fig1/
That's from the NIH. It's almost a year old, so there are probably better things since then, but "no one has published anything like this" fails.
Thank you! Do you have anything in regards to the other claim about vaccine safety / comparative # of deaths from COVID vaccinations versus prior types of vaccinations?
Can you help me understand why this protocol, being from the NIH, is not “mainstream?”
I finally watched the Black Panther 2018 movie. (Spoilers follow.)
As a superhero action movie, I have no objection. It's fun, and it makes about as much sense as any other superhero movie, which is perfectly okay.
As a political message that doesn't even try to be subtle... when the important characters talked about difficult life of their "brothers" in USA, it was quite hypocritical from the *in-universe* perspective, in my opinion.
Hypocritical, as in: nowhere in the movie they show any concern about the well-being of their "brothers" *in Africa*; some of which are living right next to them. They probably see the poor people right out of their windows in the skyscrapers made invisible by superior technology. They keep observing them for decades or maybe centuries (not sure how long is the history of the fictional Wakanda), and they are quite okay with the quality-of-life difference.
It's only learning about mistreatment of black people *in USA* that causes the political upheaval that is the plot of the story. Which is also kinda weird, because - depending on how long Wakanda exists - why weren't they more concerned about, you know, *slavery* in USA, in the past. (Did Wakanda perhaps participate in the slave trade, and thus gained the capital to build their empire? Because having magical unobtainium is nice, but if you aren't *selling* it, it does not really explain all the wealth and modern technology.) What exactly is so special about today?
Of course, the out-universe explanation is that the movie is made today (which makes today so special), and the target audience are Americans (which makes America so special, and the rest of the world so morally irrelevant). Of course.
But it is fun to imagine a Straussian reading of the movie, as containing *two* political messages: one quite blunt, the other subtle. The Straussian reading is that no matter how much people talk about the race, wealth actually matters much more. (Even the people saying "Black Lives Matter" are ultimately talking about *American* blacks. No one needs to say it explicitly; yet everyone clearly understands that the hashtag is not about de-worming Africa.) The fictional Wakanda is a rich country; it is natural that the inhabitants only care about what happens in other rich countries. It is embarrassing for the wealthy Wakandians living incognito in USA to be treated as second-class citizens. The poverty they see out of their skyscrapers is not relevant, because they are never forced to interact with it, unless they choose to.
Therefore, I also approve of Black Panther as a subversive movie. The hidden message is that rich people need to be treated with respect, regardless of their race. Wakanda may not exist in the real world, but there are many important and wealthy people outside of USA, and we all together must strive to make their visits in USA as pleasant as possible.
From my review of Black Panther, shortly after seeing it:
Black Panther does one thing well, pats itself on the back, then doubles down on Disney's Marvel's tradition of tediously status-quo gender, age, and class relations.
Spoilers, though this is mostly about the troubling implications of the movie's world-building:
In Wakanda, the position of absolute monarch* is decided by either direct inheritance or by the challenge of ritual melee and/or hand-to-hand combat. Furthermore, only the family members of the five tribal leaders are eligible to challenge for the monarchy.
Let's stop right there.
That's in the text of the movie. There is no disputing these are the conditions under which Wakanda operates. In fact, these conditions inform the major plot points of the movie.
Wakanda's system of government inherently privileges young, physically fit men of the ruling class who've had the luxury of dedicated and extensive combat training.
Anyone older than about 35, anyone who isn't in the outlier territory of peak human athletic fitness, virtually all women, everyone who doesn't have the resources to dedicate 10+ hours a day to combat training, and everyone outside of certain bloodlines is barred from the ability to achieve leadership.
Let's just pause and examine that absurdity. Imagine if German Chancellors, British and Japanese Prime Minsters, American Presidents, et al were *LITERALLY* elevated to lifetime absolute dictatorship via the MMA Octagon, one that operates without weight classes and only for certain powerful families.
Seriously consider that, for a moment.
Yeah. Wakanda's system of government is *objectively* ageist, ableist, misogynist, and accessible only to the literal ruling classes.
Even worse, though, is that the movie doesn't attempt to dismantle Wakanda's obsolete and toxic system of government, nor even work within that system to egalitarian ends.
Instead, when Killmonger legally challenges for and is believed to have legally achieved absolute monarchy and then very legally orders his army to war, rather than having one of the female protagonists legally challenge for and achieve absolute monarchy under the provisions of the law, the surviving female members of Wakanda's ruling family LITERALLY RUN TO A DIFFERENT MAN TO LITERALLY BEG HIM, ***LITERALLY ON THEIR KNEES(!!!)*** TO CHALLENGE FOR THE RIGHT TO LITERALLY RULE OVER THEM.
Stop.
That's what happened.
This movie could have pulled the *epic* twist of casually discarding the 18th male protagonist in the Marvel's unbroken streak by letting T'Challa die and having one of the (infinitely more interesting) female leads step up to assume Queen-and-Black-Panthership, but it didn't.
"Yeah, but in the original comic book the character is a man and the fans..."
Shut the fuck up.
Be pissed. This movie is one step forward and three huge steps back.
* (Side bar: Is it even believable that any technologically advanced, educated, and professedly egalitarian human civilization would operate as an absolute monarchy? That's its own essay, but I would argue no. Proof: All of human history up until now, where the remaining absolute monarchies are Brunei and Oman.)
Wakanda isn't utopian, it's a pleasure for people who want to imagine Africans as not just successful, but *highly* successful.
It's in a comic book universe, so it's optimized for hand-to-hand combat.
> It's in a comic book universe, so it's optimized for hand-to-hand combat.
White comic book heroes do lots of hand-to-hand violence, too. Yet the society they live in (unless it is an obvious dystopia) is usually more civilized than "whoever is best at punching other people becomes the absolute dictator".
Wakanda seems like designed by (and for) people who try to appear woke, yet can't overcome even their most basic racial prejudices.
"Hey, imagine this utopia for black people, which is like super rich and super technologically advanced, but was hidden in Africa until recently..."
"Sounds interesting. Please tell me more about how the society works! Like, what is their political system? How do they make the important decisions on national scale?"
"Well, they are blacks, so... uhm... probably using physical violence..."
A large theme in many runs of Black Panther, the comic is that Wakanda's culture is backwards and barbarian and they need to "catch up" (aka become another neoliberal free-market-capitalist American-culture-dominated two-party democracy with some degree of corruption, because that's what the American audience sees as the natural state of Man with everything else being some weird and slightly malicious deviation) because of a vaguely-Whig-history argument of "times have changed".
I will counterpoint that Wakanda attained massive technological advancement and material prosperity (the latter is less obvious in the movie, but even though they've failed to annihilate poverty the poor of Wakanda benefit from a largesse from the ruling class that means they essentially live like upper-middle-class Americans in clay housing) under their system of tribal elder governance and ritual duels. There's no reason to believe that their prosperity and social order aren't intertwined, such that if they decided to become a "civilized nation" corporate raiders and incompetent/corrupt bureaucrats wouldn't immediately plunder their land for all it has and leave the people significantly worse off.
On the meta level: Black Panther was a character made by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as part of a push in the '70's to appeal to the black audience for comic books by putting Black superheroes on the shelves. The two characters that came out of this were a noble king from a neo-tribal-futuristic society (combining Jack Kirby's love of blending ancient culture and futuristic technology with the pan-African movements happening at that time) and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, a super-powered jive-talking bad mother with a good heart but flexible morals ripped straight from the reel of a blaxploitation film. You could argue that both of these characters are immensely offensive to the point where you'd want to disinter the corpses of Lee and Kirby to try them for hate crimes, but they were, and still are, popular among their target demographic and I don't feel like trying to lecture black people about how something they like is actually racist towards them.
Having WMDs under control of a fightocracy is insane and any current or previous king should have implemented controls on that.
Like, instead of the law being "the king gets to order the army to invade other countries," make the law that "the king may not send any vehicles out to conquer other countries."
And yet this apparently was never a problem until Killmonger couped- quite possibly because this is a Marvel comic, which are fantasy stories that run off of the inherent assumption that nations have moral character and the True King would never abuse his power. Fantasy, like all fiction except for extremely dry and bleak dramas about depressed writers living in the Bay Area, does not hold up to "rationality" (here meaning "the persistent insistence that fantastical stories must slavishly cleave to 21st-century Bay Area-culture conceptions of how the world works"). In the real world, basically every single superhero in the US would either be shackled to a federal bureaucracy and used as tools to enforce realpolitik interests instead of protecting the populace or be declared an enemy of the state with kill-on-sight orders. Not even Worm, which this community tends to uphold as the One Rational Superhero Story, actually does this.
I assumed the method of choosing rulers in Wakanda was based on older comics, but I don't really know.
I certainly saw an authorial intent to depict Wakanda as a utopia, and so did a lot of the audience:
"A Brief History of Wakanda, Black Panther’s Fictional Utopia" - https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/black-panthers-wakanda-explained.html
"Why Black Panther’s Wakanda Is the Black Utopia We’ve Been Waiting For"
https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2018/02/07/why-black-panthers-wakanda-is-the-black-utopia-weve-been-waiting-for
"Black Panther’s Wakanda is a transportation utopia with a dash of reality"
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17044448/black-panther-wakanda-maglev-train-hyperloop-transportation
"The Wonder of Wakanda: How This Black Utopian Space Is a Game Changer for Artists and Audiences"
https://www.theroot.com/the-wonder-of-wakanda-how-this-black-utopian-space-is-1822938854
"Black Panther: A Modern Utopia, A Modern Critique"
https://blogs.bsu.edu/dlr/2018/11/04/black-panther-a-modern-utopia-a-modern-critique/
"'Black Panther' Displays a Utopia Seeking to Close the Polarization Gap"
https://www.themantle.com/arts-and-culture/black-panther-displays-utopia-seeking-close-polarization-gap
"Let Us Have Wakanda! The Black Utopia"
https://sistabrutha.com/black-panther-let-us-have-wakanda-the-black-utopia/
etc.
My point is that there are some real low expectations here about what an African utopia would look like: One where a powerful black woman - a literal queen - would sink to her knees to beg a man to challenge the legal succession of the absolute monarchy.
That people aren't outraged about that scene astonishes me to this day.
Thanks. When people haven't seen anything positive about themselves, they'll accept pretty mediocre stuff.
What amazes me is that Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which is a sympathetic account from the murderer's point of view of a young woman who's killed for the crime of being pretty in public.
I don't think I've seen *any* pushback from the woke side.
Huh? Dr. Horrible is certainly not a hero, but that’s a very misleading description of the plot.
*Spoilers* Penny is tragic and very much unintentional collateral damage in an attack targeted against Captain Hammer, and killing her pretty much removes Dr. horrible’s last bit of humanity.
From a Doylist perspective, the shrapnel "randomly" killed Penny rather than any of the dozens of other potential victims because Whedon needed to remove Dr. Horrible's last bit of humanity. Only Penny had that power. and she had that power because she looked pretty in a laundromat.
Since when is Wakanda "professedly egalitarian"? My question was whether the commoners were even aware of the battle at the end, or was it purely the nobles fighting each other?
Actually, you're right. The king's guard are all women, and while they're depicted as being capable and fierce warriors, none of them are eligible for leadership due to their bloodlines, even if they're better fighters than the men of the ruling families.
Nothing egalitarian about that whatsoever.
I'm not sure how much that 'logic' is part of the objective function for writing the script.
I thought a number of your questions were answered in the film? First, Wakanda is ancient. It’s basically Black Atlantis. So, yes, they did indeed sit by throughout slavery. This is explained as a deliberate policy of isolation on the logic that their technology was too powerful to be released into the world. Basically, the world might be going to shit, but it will be even worse if we try to play world police and add vibranium to the mix.
Now, perhaps this is flawed logic, but then, whether that logic is flawed is the central conflict of the movie. In any case, it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable that a powerful ruling dynasty could sustain isolation as a policy for a long time.
There seems to have always been a minority faction in favor of non-isolation, and that’s where Killmonger (and his father) come from.
As for “why care about brothers in America instead of the poverty you see from your front door”. Well, Killmonger’s concern for black brothers in the US and elsewhere seems to be a nationalistic case, as much as materialistic one. That is, he cares more about self determination for a pan-African race rather than ending poverty per se.
I don’t agree with this logic, but it’s not like “race based nationalism” is a position without real-world parallels.
The weird one is that after the main events of the film, we see T’Challa going out and engaging in seemingly materialistic support of the black diaspora, but NOT apparently attempting to engage in the nationalism of Killmonger. And that DOES raise the question “why not help the even poorer people just outside your stealth bubble first” although the film does not say explicitly that they aren’t also being helped. But it is an American movie for mostly American audiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD0bR7JXI6k&ab_channel=PolyMatterzzz
Gurgaon is a city in India. It doesn't have a municipal government, but it seems to be about as good or bad as the rest of India.
There's an interesting bit of stationary bandit theory-- bribery is less expensive because there's only one agency to bribe instead of several each collecting bribes for the same thing.
Okay, ACX people: Text-based mud for ACX and/or datasecretlox and/or ACX-adjacent people!
What would it be like?
Asking for a friend--go!!
I think you could just base it in the world of Unsong. That seems like the low hanging fruit here.
Oh dear. I see your point--it would be hilarious & fascinating. But I'm a little afraid of putting myself (and others) into a situation where they have to mentally navigate the Unsong AU constantly!!
Also, sadly, I fear it may make telepathy not seem OP! (just because on muds usually there's a mechanism for sending chats to someone not in the same "room," and we get used to that norm. But then, this doesn't have to folow THAT convention.)
Sorry do people still play MUDs seriously? Why not just have a text/icon browser game in the style of Warring Factions or something? If you aren't doing a Minecraft style server based game. Just seems like there's no reason to play MUDs specifically.
I think of people as having a lot of temporal reach these days. Old things might not be extremely popular, or not for long, but it's more likely that they'll have a small fan base keeping them going indefinitely.
This is why I'm annoyed with The Truman Show and Permutation City-- both have fans completely abandoning something that fascinated them.
Sure... maybe it's just nostalgia for many pleasant hours I spent on those over a decade ago.
But yes, some still do! A Wheel of Time mud I used to play seems to be reviving! (Unsurprisingly, perhaps!) They now have a discord, and I logged on and saw character-names I haven't seen in years.
Looked into "Warring Factions." (I don't "keep up on" lots of game stuff! Clearly.) It seems to me it fits a different niche? More like massively-multiplayer Civ, I would guess? (tho that could be a very rough approximation.)
I met my wife on what was basically a MUD, called a Talker. (Oh, there's a perfect wikipedia article about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talker )
It might have lost out to Discords, which would be a shame, because you can really create a nice community.
Oh, very neat! t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶-̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶!̶, ermmm... what I meant to say is, thank you for sharing this--I didn't know this specific thing existed / the name for it!!
(If i make one and get like at least 20-50 people, would you like me to invite you?)
It sounds fun but I probably don't have time for another thing. Sorry, but thank you!
WTF is text-based mud? (asking for a friend)
Perhaps "text based MMORPG" would be clearer to those too young to remember MUDs. (Whereas I tend to think of MMORPGs as large, commercialized, graphical MUDs.
> (Whereas I tend to think of MMORPGs as large, commercialized, graphical MUDs.)
:> reasonable.