As we all know, it is impossible to tile the plane with regular pentagons. However, suppose you were willing to use slightly non-regular pentagons (with different alterations on each tile) so that it *appears* to be a regular tiling. Is there any easy method to figure out how to do this and what the minimum maximum deviation from regular you would need is?
Maybe we can start with filling Lobachevsky plane with pentagons and then applying some mapping function back to Euclidean. (ah no, it seems it won't work if you need tiles to be about same area)
Guy with a high-end products/leather consulting/reviews business is named Tanner... Tanner Leatherstein. Now, is that nominative determinism or just a clever nom-de-plum for marketing purposes?
This open thread is at the point where things start to wind down, so I’m just going to throw out a joke:
It’s late at night and a man is getting ready to go to bed when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail.
“Yes,” it says. “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.” Furious at being disturbed, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he can, and storms off to bed.
Two years later there comes another knock. The man answers and again he finds the snail, who looks up at him and says, “What the f*ck was that all about?”
There was this winemaker, see, who wanted to rid his vineyard of grapevine snails. So he hired a couple of people, gave them a little bucket each, and sent them to collect snails. At closing time, they came all back with their buckets full of snails, except one, who happened to be a retrained civil servant.
So they went to look for him, and found him in the vineyard, desperate, with the bucket empty. He explained: "Well, yes I saw the snails and went to collect them, but then: chop-chop! They all ran away!"
I see a motte-and-bailey fallacy in every argument I *hear* that has someone say something like "Our personalities are determined by a combination of both nature/genetics and nurture/environment".
Obviously, that statement is true: both genetics and environment shape our personalities. But when people say it, there's something else going on.
The emphatic statement is: "it is a combination! We say this in iconoclastic opposition to the FOOLS who believe it to be either/or!", and the context is usually in "response" to some scientist who just showed that there is a genetic component to [homosexuality/obesity/what have you] (and who probably worked their fingers to the bone in order to do so).
But the scientist fully accepts that, aggregated across many people, it is a combination, and their little gene is one factor - so why on *earth* would people be so emphatic about this very obvious fact?
The truth is that their interest is in believing a different statement: "environment plays a larger role than genetics" - that statement is their bailey. They won't say it out loud, because it'd mean they'd have to define "larger". But they believe it, and they like believing it. It allows them to pour scorn on lots of things they don't like, things which have changed the environment of people growing up. They can use this to promote their preferred solutions to problems, without engaging with the question of how much impact their solutions would have.
When they say stuff that comes from their bailey, if you say "but genetics plays a significant part in that problem, and we may want to consider anatomy-level solutions to it, for example one study found that-", they will say "Ah but do you not see, people are this way due to a COMBINATION of genetics and environment!", and then that's it - if you reply back, no matter how quantitative you are, they will be taking you to disagree with their facile motte.
Similar to the people who always say that correlation doesn't imply causation. Certainly an incredibly important mental model to keep in mind when doing science, but the more interesting follow-up to a correlation, is to try to explore various causality models, rather than dismissing the pattern outright.
What if the person just wants to have an accurate understanding of the world, and thinks it really does seem like personality has both genetic and environmental influences?
The other two repliers to you comment have done a good job of saying what I think.
Let me emphasize for a fourth time that I think that personality has both genetic and environmental influences.
In fact, it is completely boringly true: absolutely everyone believes it (try and find me someone alive today who unambiguously states that they do not believe it).
That's if we take it at face value. My claim is that you shouldn't take it at face value, because it is a "motte": a facile statement that, in practice, is used to backhandedly imply that the person they are speaking to does *not* believe it.
>What if the person just wants to have an accurate understanding of the world, and thinks it really does seem like personality has both genetic and environmental influences?
Then its weird for them to emphasize that because virtually nobody is claiming it is entirely genetic (but on the other hand, many people scoff at the idea that personality is heritable).
Then they should try to take account of both aspects and possibly control or otherwise identify/test the individual components.
The way OP presents it it's more about using the phrase to ignore the discussion on one side.
I don't recall seeing it much besides to argue against something being mostly one side (and presenting an absurd/noncentral example) though it seemed to be more of a "whaboutism" then what the OP mentions.
Surely this is not surprising, though? I mean, this is what people are like. Which means, parenthetically, it must be adaptive to tribal survival, and it's interesting to speculate why.
My thought would be that it's a high-risk-high-reward gambit: let's say you're a proponent of changing the environment to solve Social Problem X. Someone comes along and offers very sound scientific evidence that the environment has a 1% effect on X. If you maintain your faith in your solution, despite good evidence ot the contrary, you are embarking on a high-risk-high-reward path. It is very likely you will turn out ot be wrong (so that's the high risk), but if you happen to turn out right -- the research was mistaken, or it turns out the environmental mod you champion turns out to be unexpectedly and spectacularly effective -- then you will reap an enormous reward, because you'll have been a prophet. So that's the high reward.
Presumably if most people in the tribe behave this way, it's a disaster, but if a relative handful do, this allows the tribe to cover a few highly-leveraged bets at low cost. (If a bet doesn't pan out, all that happens is one member of the tribe is exposed as a fool or charlatan.)
I had a professor in my psych undergrad who opened up a class by promising to fail anyone who wrote as a conclusion in any test question or assigned essay that some trait was both the result of genetics and environment.
That's because this is a trite statement and not at all what we're interested in when talking about nature vs. nurture. What we're interested in explaining is variance - why some people are one way and other people are another. More specifically, what we want to know is the relative contribution of hereditary factors and environmental factors, which varies based on what population comparison we are making. (e.g. Height is highly heritable in America right now, but if you want to explain the variance in height in America between 1900 and 2000, it's mostly environmental factors that explain it. )
> The truth is that their interest is in believing a different statement: "environment plays a larger role than genetics" - that statement is their bailey. They won't say it out loud, because it'd mean they'd have to define "larger". But they believe it, and they like believing it. It
I think we need to coin a Mind Reader fallacy. If a person doesn’t say something out loud how the fuck do you know what they are thinking?
I see this pretty often here. People willing to assign a set of unproven attributes, unspoken positions etc to their - sometimes simply imagined - ideological enemy.
Now I am not accusing you of the following. It’s just an exaggerated example.
“I voted Democrat.”
Oh so you are _for_ Black Lives Matter protestors burning down cities!
“Uhm no, I’m pretty much against that.”
This is rationalism?
Should I assume merely by the tone of your original post that you believe blacks are dumber and more prone to violence than whites?
I could imagine that possibility but it would be stupid to assume it’s true because you didn’t say it.
You and I don’t know each other beyond what we say out loud here.
I'm absolutely convinced that Motte-and-Bailey is a big part of political discourse. A very current example is Kanye's "white lives matter" thing (sorry for CW but I think it can be throwaway!) - everyone knows not to take that phrase at face value. But with your comment, you're pointing out something negative about the use of "Motte-and-bailey". And I think it's right to do so, because MaB is in some sense "the good/sophisticated version of strawmanning"
"Bob strawmans Alice" = Alice said X. Bob, immediately after Alice said X, gave gave an argument against Y, demonstrating clearly the foolishness and nastiness of Y. But Alice objected that she did not actually believe Y, she only believes X.
"Bob accused Alice of having a motte-and-bailey" = Alice said X. Bob, immediately after Alice said X, gave an argument against Y. Because Bob knew that when people say X, it's really a motte for their bailey. Their bailey is Y.
Everyone hates being strawmanned, myself included. So, motte-and-baileying too much is bad. I'm not sure of a good, bullet-proof solution to this, other than taking extremely large amounts of time and care with arguments against individuals.
But why exactly would so many people so consistently say "personality it is a combination of genetic and environmental influences" in response to me saying "a study recently found a genetic influence on X"? Even though, again, everyone knows that statement is true?
There's a pattern. You're right that I can't be certain about them believing "environment plays a larger role"! But I think the widespreadness of this belief is the best explanation for the pattern I've observed.
I think I had a handle on M&B but I did go back and read the SSC posts
This is so tricky without actual examples.
I can think of a number of reasons why some would assert “but it both!” other than some hidden agenda.
Habit:
Not a directly applicable example but if it’s 104 degrees in the shade chances are you will hear someone say “Hot enough for you”.
IOW Sometimes it’s just a vocal tic that people automatically deploy in certain circumstances.
Laziness:
Related to habit. Hmm this may not apply to what this guy just said, but it’s commonly accepted that ‘it’s both’ so if I don’t feel like thinking very carefully at least nobody can say I’m _wrong_.
Group think:
No explanation necessary.
Foul mood:
I had an argument with my wife this morning, so I’m not conceding anything today.
Petty dominance game:
If I disagree I won’t cede any of my - imaginary - power.
In the end your thesis may be correct but I’m probably a lot older than you so I can’t avoid remembering all the times I’ve incorrectly surmised other peoples’ motivations. At least not without putting my liver at risk. jk
I don’t think my theory of mind is any wackier than the next guy’s but experience has taught me to be very careful about saying “I know what you are thinking.”
>I don’t think my theory of mind is any wackier than the next guy’s but experience has taught me to be very careful about saying “I know what you are thinking.”
As I already explained to you, we can infer it from the implications they think this statement has - namely those that imply environmental differences are what is important.
Your exapmle with Democrats and BLM is extremely poor. Those are two distinct things, whereas Hamish is directly talking about different statements about the exact same thing - heritability.
I can see why those things would cause the person to say "but it both". But I don't see why it would create a general pattern of people saying that rather than something else.
I wouldn't say I *know* that a given person is motte-and-baileying. Just that, at this point, I think they are around 70+%. And it's very annoying, because if it really is the case that 50+% of the time I am talking to someone who disagrees with me about something, they should just come out and say that thing. That would probably lead to a more interesting discussion for everyone, and in any case it would be a more honest one.
To put it differently, they should defend their bailey, instead of pretending that I am attacking their motte (when really their motte is boringly true / in no way something I would deny).
>I think we need to coin a Mind Reader fallacy. If a person doesn’t say something out loud how the fuck do you know what they are thinking?
By inferring it from the implications they believe follow from their declarations of "combination!"
Countless times I've heard people say something to the effect of "intelligence is affected by genes but its also affected by environment, so that means we should still be providing more funding to schools". This obscures the extent that environmental variations explains intelligence variation and therefore whether a given funding increase could be expected to provide an adequate return on investment even taking "environment" naively, but it also completely ignores how much of that fraction IS a result of educational variation specifically.
If I wanted to put some time into answering this question, I'd look into getting API access to the Amazon reviews and/or sales rank data. Amazon categorizes books as memoir, and within that category, there are sure to be some items with no sales and no reviews (or only bad reviews). The authors of those are who you're asking about.
Seems to be a bit of a vague one. Cool in this instance can be short for 'cool headed', in which case the amount of money is the whole of the amount listed no exaggeration or undercounting. Alternatively, it could be cool as a descriptor in which case it's as you found it, signifying the amount of money is surprisingly large.
So, to use an example. A meal that cost a cool twenty would have cost exactly twenty bucks. A meal that cost a cool two hundred is an approximate but this was remarkably high for a meal.
Does anyone else ever make it a point to click-through Substack emails to new posts, so that supported bloggers get better "engagement" numbers on email blasts? Or is that not how such things work anymore?
Someone pseudonymous is booting up a blog on the mindset of privacy concerns at https://psyvacy.substack.com/ - are there any others adjacent to this topic out there?
If India managed to maintain it's caste system largely unchanged for thousands of years, why did the caste system in the Southern United States so rapidly collapse?
>I’m guessing you’re looking for something in Western culture, not the fact that the Confederacy lost the civil war.
But the lower castes did not lose an analogous war, because such war was never fought. Which means that losing a war cannot possibily be the fundamnetal explanation.
And the founding of the United States was throwing off the English caste system. No more state-granted noble titles, no more "jury of your peers", All Men Are Created Equal.
Not really. Some early powerful US families attempted to set themselves up in the manner similar to which the British aristocracy functioned: buy big tracts of land, then live idly off the rent. The massive and ever-expanding availability of land in the US made this model non-viable and both flattened the class system and made it much less calcified as people were able to rise in wealth and prestige via trades and trading.
There were certainly powerful families but economic differences made the social structure of revolutionary America very different.
I'm continuing my 2 year hobby of memorising a monthly poem. I'm still looking for recommendations, under the loose criteria of having a rhyme scheme, being at least somewhat significant culturally, and shorter than ~50 lines. What are poems that have resonated with you? In particular I am also looking for poems dealing with grief and loss.
Well, for a killer one, there's Seamus Heaney's "Mid-Term Break" (c'mon Substack, let us format comments or at least keep line-break formatting instead of clumping it all together):
Mid-Term Break
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Since it's spooky season, what about The Raven? I don't know if it's the right length, but I love Kubla Khan. And how do you feel about Robert Service? The Cremation of Sam McGee is really fun and spooky (and deals with loss).
The Raven is actually my project for next year! I think having 24 shorter poems under my belt, it will be time to try something longer and the Raven has been a favourite of mine for a long time now.
It seems to be popular in our host's circles to reference The Hymn of Breaking Strain, a poem by Kipling. (For instance, it was explicitly used in Unsong and obliquely referenced in Project Lawful.) It rhymes, is roughly 50 lines long, and is somewhat about loss.
I don't usually like Hopkins, and I still have trouble with bits of it, but it may be the only one of his I've memorized.
"They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods."
There's likely plenty better suited to your query in Kipling, and certainly plenty worth memorizing, but this does deal with loss, in a way, and is one of his better-known ones. I think it's the first poem I ever memorized.
There's always The Sally Gardens; I know it as a song, but it was a poem first. Or Do Not Go Gentle.
Ozymandius is loss in a different sense. ("I met a traveler from an antique land...")
I will chime in again if I think of others. It's a fascinating query.
I'm over 70 and one of the things that occasionally bugs me is that my motivation for doing anything has gone (not that I need to do much, but I really enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishing something). I understand that testosterone is not the answer; ideas?
Adderall is energy and motivation in a little white pill. It's not very good for you, but in your place I'd put it on the list of possibilities. Sartre used amphetamines to power through the process of writing his final book.
I'm much younger than you, but suffer from Chronic Fatigue, which I think gives me some insight into what you're feeling. David Friedman's suggestion below is a good one, but the other part I'd add in is the importance of spending time with other people, in person. If you like games, play against other humans. If you like reading, talk to people about the books you're reading, or make a point of sitting and reading together. Spending time with younger, more energetic people should also help - I gather grand-kids are good for that, if you have them :)
I am also over 70. A good many years ago I concluded that if I spent all my time playing — arguing online, reading fiction, playing computer games — I felt stale. So I committed myself to spending two hours a day, seven days a week, on writing projects, broadly defined. In addition to making the rest of the day feel like an earned vacation, it also gets me into doing things that give me a feeling of accomplishment. I have finally managed to complete a poem I had been thinking about doing for a couple of decades, have written chapter drafts for what should end up as a book or two on a range of topics largely inspired by my accumulated blog posts, somewhat over a thousand of them.
Might work for you, might not, but once you are committed to spending the time you may end up finding interesting things to spend it on. Certainly I did.
It goes through all the mechanisms (physical and mental) that they have researched which affect Dopamine, Epinephrine and Acetylcholine - He goes through all the tools that affect these three and I would highly recommend looking at this
The item that is not covered is hormonal precursor / impacts on motivation and Focus.
If you are interested in this and want a deeper dive into Dopamine and Motivation he has another indepth dive here: https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU
I feel dumb offering suggestions to someone older and wiser than me, so sorry if any of this comes across as obvious.
Do you get out often? I find walks and a change of scenery motivates me like nothing else. Grab a coffee, say hi to a stranger, look at buildings, birds... By the time I get home I'm shaken out of whatever monotony was keeping me unmotivated.
I also watched Don Hertzfeldt's 'It's Such a Beautiful Day' recently which gave a temporary boost.
I know that the original poster mentioned NOT (testosterone), but to go straight to recommending medication (in two posts) seems extremely odd.
Are you a health care professional with prescribing privileges?
I'm in 60s. It's seems the first thing would likely investigation of the history. It seems like he is really looking for a hobby or hobbies and for an investigation into possible anhedonia or to distinguish between lack of motivation that could just a normal symptom of generally getting older or if it is sign possibly depression or some other ailment.
While the owen tries something small like to do wordle for 10 days, I'd suggest Owen also try some self investigation: What things did you use to do, what does your spouse, your siblings, and your friends do and think of about motivation and decreased motivation with age. Is lack of motivation a 20 year slide or a 2 year thing corresponding to pandemic or related to retirement or a 6 month acute drop. And then talk with your primary care physician armed with thorough and honest history.
"It seems like he is really looking for a hobby or hobbies and for an investigation into possible anhedonia or to distinguish between lack of motivation that could just a normal symptom of generally getting older or if it is sign possibly depression or some other ailment."
I actually think that is your take on what he *should* be asking for. In fact he is asking for suggestions. Given that, I think it is reasonable to include drugs that increase motivation and energy on the list. He's a grown-up, & can take into consideration the downside of using those drugs. (And it's not as though there's no downside to ruminating alone or with a shrinkazoid about whether he is anhedonic, just getting old, or experiencing a sign of Some Other Ailment)
lots of discourse on direct action strategies of protesters, including splashing tomato soup on van gogh paintings and pouring milk on the floor of a grocery store. i think its a great example of coupling "we die in a climate crisis" with "you dont get to enjoy art anymore because we are dying".
my model of change is that
1. first people get upset at you because they are being inconvenienced, ie you dont get to enjoy art, your favorite highway was blocked off and now you're late to work
2. weeks later they know protestors are just a fact of life, and now its the government's fault they havent gotten off their asses and done something about it
i myself have done some disruptions, and jail is pretty traumatizing, but i'd say if you measured my successes by way of the Unit of Caring (the us dollar) i provided 5 million usd of value.
You know, if you people had enough sense to do something like covering an oil billionaire's car in black oil/grease (or at least, black paint), you might have something resembling success in this regard. It doesn't inconvenience regular people, you're not mindlessly lashing out at something irrelevant that people value, few people are going to feel bad (and may even feel good) about seeing some rich asshole having his car ruined.
Throwing soup at a one-of-a-kind painting is dumb. Doing it to protest something unrelated is also dumb. You're going to make a lot of people mad at your and your organization. *But* you bring awareness to your cause. Whether that awareness-anger-ratio is worth it seems debatable.
disruption is a key component of civil disobedience protests. because disruption spreads uncertainty and gives weak actors leverage against powerful opponents, it is the strongest weapon of social movements.
I don't think this is right. The goto example is the Civil Rights Movement, right? Thing is, that only worked because of the overreaction of the authorities. Same as in 2020 with BLM. Early on the police were surprised and got caught on camera beating the crap out of random people, including old dudes with canes. That got the problem good attention, and brought out huge protests and lots of support. Which disappeared as the police got their shit together.
Disruption gets you attention, yes. But either your cause has to be unknown and very sympathetic (the Jim Crow south), or you have to provoke a reaction that pisses people off more than your action does (Jim Crow again, May 2020 BLM). Fail at both and you're just hurting your cause, by drawing attention to it and linking to something negative (throwing soup at a painting).
Note: the painting was not damaged, so my earlier reaction was over the top. Damaging the frame isn't a crime against humanity the way that destroying a Van Gogh would have been.
Controversies, whether about climate change or other things, happen because people disagree. It's natural enough to assume that your view of what should happen is correct but if you know that many intelligent and well informed people disagree, shouldn't you discount your estimate of the value of what you did to allow for the possibility that you were wrong and any effect you had was to make the world worse off rather than better off?
ive read a lot of books by people who have studied social change for decades and they say its cool to engage in nonviolent direct action that exacerbates contradictions, demonstrates power, and can't be ignored. one of my favorites is This is an uprising by englers
further, it seems like a very very bad idea to take advice from people who are ideologically opposed and committed to your failure. its just not a good idea.
finally, i dont think most of these commenters are well informed. there is a great inferential gap between us, and idk what to do about that while most of them are saying "actually you should be in jail longer". it certainly makes me think that they are not Well Informed
Anyone can get a book published nowadays, so I'm not sure why you think "reading lots of books" is a sign of credibility. I'm sure plenty of Flat Earthers and Q-Anon believers read a lot of books too, and those books reinforce their own views, just like the ones you've read have reinforced yours. And for what it's worth, I have a Master's degree in Political Science and I've never heard of the book you mentioned. (Granted, contrary to what a lot of right-wingers think, Saul Alinsky and Abbie Hoffman were never part of our curriculum, and while we did read Marx, it was with the specific understanding that he was wrong. So maybe the world of academia is just too "establishment" for your liking.)
Honest question though: Is there anything that anyone here can say that will actually cause you to adjust your beliefs or stances by even the slightest amount? Because it certainly doesn't look that way, which makes me wonder why you even bothered posting this in the first place. Just as a way of bragging and Owning The Libs from the left?
As the old saying goes, "a fanatic is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject." And there is little value in debating fanatics.
>further, it seems like a very very bad idea to take advice from people who are ideologically opposed and committed to your failure. its just not a good idea.
Then why are you here telling us about how great your actions are?
You don't think you can learn anything by listening to the arguments of people who disagree with you? That seems like a policy designed to make sure that, if you are wrong, you don't discover it.
The people blocking that pipeline back in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests) were engaging in non-violent direct action, and while I didn't agree with them, I could respect their commitment, and wished the best for everyone involved. There are legitimate protest actions that people can take to effect change.
You haven't mentioned any here. You're deliberately stopping random people getting to work, to effect something they have no control over. What, are you protesting car use as a whole? If you're opposed to gas use, then protest outside the central fuel station, block the trucks delivering the gas. You'll still get arrested, and piss people off, and not change anything, but at least you'll be targeting the group responsible instead of complete strangers.
Absolutely no one thinks the best way to win a war is to invade your enemy's neighbors first. Making more enemies won't help you.
I think you're wrong. The pipeline became a huge cause on the left, forcing the Obama administration to repeatedly delay it and finally deny cert. The Trump admin restarted it, then the Biden admin re-stopped it. The corp trying to build it finally cancelled it, probably realizing that it was going to get shut off every other decade if they didn't.
It's a textbook example of making an unknown cause famous, providing sympathetic protesters, getting them abused by unsympathetic security forces (they hosed the protesters down in the winter, if memory serves), and finally winning your point. It was absolutely effective.
And yet you failed to notice you're copying toddlers. "Throw food and then lie down in the street" doesn't make the President of the United States give you what you want for the one month he has authority to do so.
greensborough north carolina 1960, many black people, mostly students, committed the crime of sitting in at a restaurant, and it was deeply unpopular, and it was coordinated by people willing to fight legal battles and imprisonment. and in 4 years copycat protests became popular, and normies had to concede that it didnt make much sense to deny freedom to an underclass when they wielded such power (sitting in at restaurants)
My guess is that <ambiguous pronoun> is probably just messing around. And <AP> is pleased to have generated a couple hundred reactions with what <AP> probably knows is a weak argument. Jerking our chain for fun. I could be way off base, but that’s my read.
I can only imagine what must be going through your mind reading all of these comments. Perhaps you dismiss all of this through some rationalization; "they're out to get me", "these people are ignorant", "they're trolling" but that would be a real pity.
In this reply there are a lot of people who have given you a very specific critique and this should shed some light on your belief structures that may be faulty.
Although if you convinced someone that the god they believed in for their entire life was false would they thank you
"i myself have done some disruptions, and jail is pretty traumatizing, but i'd say if you measured my successes by way of the Unit of Caring (the us dollar) i provided 5 million usd of value."
No offense, but this sounds absolutely delusional. If anything, you've provided negative value to whatever movements you claim to support, because you wanted to do something that *felt cathartic* instead of putting in the work to actually bring about any real changes in policy and/or public opinion. The real work of change is quite boring and tedious: It involves a lot of long hours making phone calls, knocking doors, handing out flyers on street corners, writing letters to your local elected representatives, going to town hall meetings, and lots of banal logistical work that would make the average day at the office seem exciting by comparison. I should know, I've spent literally years doing it! But the new breed of Very Online edgelord activists wants to skip all the hard parts and focus on "fun" stuff like arguing with people on Twitter, vandalizing public property, and shouting at normies so you can feel self-righteously superior to them, regardless of how unproductive or even counter-productive it may be.
you are listing a lot of activities involved in electoralism, which is useful for turning already-won victories into legislation and policy. however, i think there are more fundamental and actually effective strategies by way of, for instance, organizing marches - which are meant to silently imply "look how we can march around like a military force would" as well as demonstrating a count of voters. another more fundemental and actually effective strategy is to fight legal battles by committing a premediated and carefully planned crime, designed to force out the contradictions between current policy and human values
"however, i think there are more fundamental and actually effective strategies by way of, for instance, organizing marches - which are meant to silently imply "look how we can march around like a military force would" as well as demonstrating a count of voters."
This is highly ineffective, because no one is actually going to be afraid of these people. They represent an extremely small percentage of the overall population, and the moment they actually tried to *act* like a military (e.g. actually use force), they would be completely annihilated. They are allowed to march around precisely because of the fact that they're no real threat to anyone, and in a liberal democratic society, the state and the populace are inclined to tolerate such behaviors as long as they don't become *too* disruptive. But the tolerance of the majority isn't infinite, and stunts like the soup incident will definitely cause it to wane.
There are situations in which the tactics you're describing can work: For example, if the actual military is on the side of the protesters (as was the case during several Latin American coups), or if the protesters have the support of an overwhelming majority of the overall population (as was the case during many of the Arab Spring revolts). But neither of those are true in 21st century America. Expecting that a movement with support from less than 1% of the overall population can intimidate the other 99% into appeasing their demands is absurd.
"another more fundemental and actually effective strategy is to fight legal battles by committing a premediated and carefully planned crime, designed to force out the contradictions between current policy and human values"
And unless you're fighting specifically for people's right to vandalize famous works of art (which is a cause that very few people would get behind), the soup incident doesn't fall into this category at all. The crime is entirely unrelated to the thing you're actually protesting.
"human values", of course, referring to things that have only ever existed in modern european-majority societies. Though I'm sure you have some 'progressive savage' understanding of world history.
"weeks later they know protestors are just a fact of life, and now its the government's fault they havent gotten off their asses and done something about it"
Yes, but when people start demanding that the government "do something," what they have in mind is "using whatever degree of force is necessary to suppress the protests," not "giving the protesters everything they want."
It's been statistically proven that these sorts of extreme methods always *reduce* popular support for whatever cause the protesters are fighting for: Back in 2020, support for the Black Lives Matter movement was up to almost 80% when the protests started, but declined to around 50% after weeks of rioting and extreme demands like "abolish the police," with the steepest declines in the cities that had the greatest amount of violent incidents and property damage. Hell, in Kenosha, support for BLM declined to barely over 50% *among the Black population!*
Splashing tomato soup on priceless works of art does nothing but make people hate the perpetrators and, by extension, climate activists in general. If this turns out to just be a one-off incident, then people will probably forget about it quickly enough, but if things like this start to happen on a regular basis, then it will absolutely torpedo support for environmentalism. (For that matter, the whole narrative that "climate change will literally kill us all and cause human extinction!" also hurts the climate movement, because it's completely bogus and a great many people are aware of that fact. Very few actual climate scientists believe that, and you can't convincingly tell people to "trust the science" while simultaneously denying it yourself.)
Also, leaving aside the many pragmatic arguments against this type of aggressive activism, the whole notion that "we are suffering, therefore other people shouldn't be allowed to be content" is just deeply unethical. It's seen as abusive when people do it on the individual level, why should it be seen as any less evil when it's done on the societal level?
I'm going to destroy a literally irreplaceable painting if I don't get my way right now is not a successful protest. I don't actually know what those guys were protesting against, and I don't care. If I found out, I would be for that thing because fuck those guys. I can't imagine the worldview of a person who that protest would influence positively. It's alien to me.
As to stuff like the public roads, that's well enough I suppose. I think it's bad tactics, be it done with tractors, trucks or bodies, but yeah, that's fine enough and something gov't can and should deal with in normal ways. But I think, on balance, it probably hurts rather than helps whatever cause it supposed to represent.
But destroying a Van Gogh is fucking well out of bounds and those assholes should go to jail for the rest of their lives for crimes against humanity.
Fortunately, there was a glass in the frame in front of the Van Gogh. You can thus reduce your ire to "these imbeciles were too stupid to destroy the irreplaceable painting".
Yeah, I saw that, but thanks for pointing it out in a reply. Glad I was overreacting. I'm going to assume that they knew it was protected and that they intended their protest to be "the art is temporarily unavailable" and not "priceless masterwork permanently damaged".
That drops it back to a public roads protest. I might be sympathetic or unsympathetic, but whatever. Ultimately I think that the people who made the news blocking the road that Trump was taking to a rally in 2016 help his campaign, and the truckers that blocked the roads (in Canada and here) in 2021/2 hurt the legitimacy of the anti-mandate crowd (both by tying anti-mandate to anti-vax and by being unsympathetic jerks). But that's a matter of tactics and choices and as long as you take the legal consequences without complaint I'm basically fine it.
#1 definitely happens, but when people are upset about #1 going into #2, people are just as likely to demand that government "get of their asses" and do something about the *protestors*, rather than demand that whatever issue is being protested be fixed.
See, for example, the explosion of state laws making it easier to run over protesters who are blocking the road. Or the attempts to require a minimum distance between protestors and abortion clinics. Depending on the situation, nuisance protests can easily make people more upset at the protestor than they are about the issue being protested. Which is kinda one of the inherent risks of a tactic that involves being a nuisance to people.
See also the disturbing number of people who think Kyle Rittenhouse was a hero. Not "stupid kid but technically innocent", but positively heroic in his selfless efforts to protect the community from dangerous criminals.
How would you view similar activists for causes you aren't as enthused about (say anti-abortionists or whatever)? As nutters or as kindred spirits? Creating a nuisance or effecting a change?
Funny you should mention that! There were pro-life campaigners who tried using signs with graphic imagery of aborted foetuses and similar tactics.
Did it work? No.
Do you think the received story about "abortion clinic bombers and abortion doctors assassins" means that those tactics worked?
So yes, if some pro-life group went around throwing tins of tomato soup on paintings and gluing themselves to the road, I would think they were idiot nuisances. What worked in the USA? The Supreme Court saying decisions on abortion law should go back to the states to make legislation, and decades of work plugging away at pro-life issues. Not shock tactics, not publicity stunts.
It's a great example of "being a goddamn idiot doing pointless virtue signalling".
The balding young man in a dress spray-painting the Aston Martin showroom garnered nothing but some amused derision. If you want ordinary people to take whatever it is you are protesting about seriously, try not looking like a reject from a Monty Python sketch.
Splashing tomato soup over a van Gogh does what, exactly? They blattered on about cold, hungry families not being able to afford to heat a tin of soup, but they would have done more for an actual cold, hungry family by donating those wasted tins of soup to a charity or - horror of horrors! - getting off their privileged middle-class backsides and going out to deliver hot meals to the old and indigent.
But that wouldn't have garnered the same feeling of "Fighting Da Man!" now would it?
Also, many people do actually go out and deliver food to the hungry, or help out in a soup kitchen, or whatever else. None of them ever appear in a news article or trend on social media. The people who get news and social media coverage are the ones who throw a can of soup at a painting or dump milk on the floor of a store.
We reward the attention-grabbing and destructive behavior, and ignore the decent and helpful behavior. And we get more of what we reward....
>2. weeks later they know protestors are just a fact of life, and now its the government's fault they havent gotten off their asses and done something about it
This doesn't work for climate change. No government on earth can stop climate change by passing some policies. If GHG are going to be meaningfully reduced, it's going to be a process occurring over decades involving cooperation between many countries.
Honestly, this all sounds like you trying to justify throwing tantrums which you enjoy throwing instead of actually putting in the work to determine what will be actually effective and executing it.
Almost the only people who support this kind of action are people who already agree with you. People in the middle just think you're a bunch of nutters and if anything are put off by this silliness.
>i myself have done some disruptions, and jail is pretty traumatizing, but i'd say if you measured my successes by way of the Unit of Caring (the us dollar) i provided 5 million usd of value.
I mean I understand and respect your intent but I think the more likely result is that people will indeed think "it's the government's fault they haven't gotten off their asses and done something about it," but they'll want 'doing something about it' to mean arrests/jail time/making it a felony to block the highway on their morning commute.
Brilliant cheap carbon capture machines: Plants! Luckily they have a lot of them in Brazil. How would some random person in North America or Europe go about to stop the Brazilian government from destroying its rainforests?
Exactly what I always say. People who lack the competence or work ethic to actually contribute to solutions, so they just pull a worthless little stunt where the real goal is getting attention like a toddler. If you care that deeply about climate change, go study climate science and join a team working on carbon capture. Or get involved politically and try to get some wins on the local level.
Just out of curiosity, where do these people think the tins of soup, glue, and canister to spray-paint come from? How are these items produced? Could they possibly involve the use of.... oil?
The paint spraying is harmless, which means it's also ineffectual. He (she? they? hard to tell what their preferred pronouns are when they're clearly male but also wearing a long dress) didn't smash the window or engage in serious property damage, which avoids getting arrested (probably?) but also just means this is "nuisance" level protest rather than anything useful.
Yes, it got publicity. But the publicity it got was "who's this tosser?" not "ah, my awareness of the seriousness of climate change has been raised". It's very nice of them that this group, whomever they may be, are fully inclusive of non-binary folx as street-level activists but does that do anything practical towards stopping oil (or whatever it is they are protesting)?
hey i will engage with serious replies that demonstrate charity. its not worth my time to try to bridge some gap if you can't lend me even an ounce of decorum
Decorum? You're the one trying to overhaul society. Why do you deserve "decorum"? Do you "lend an ounce of decorum" to people who disagree with you in good faith on contentious political issues? Of COURSE you don't. Those people are RACISTS or SEXISTS or TRANSPHOBICS and they deserve to be destroyed.
If you come on here to boast that by your own estimation you have caused $5 million worth of disruption, then it is on you to put up or shut up about how you derive that figure, what good or benefit you imagine you have done, and the final efficacy of anything that you might have participated in.
Did your protesting or night in jail actually achieve anything other than give you the feeling of "I'm so badass, such a rebel against Badness and Mean Stuff!"? Did you get anything done other than waste the time of the cops and the courts? Can you point to anything about "after my/our protest, this bad thing was stopped and/or this good thing was put in its place"?
And why does a ruff'n'tuff disruptor of social norms care about decorum, anyhow?
"Harmless" is exactly the point: they did something stupid and ineffectual that achieved nothing tangible towards the cause of climate change or whatever it is they are protesting, but two young ninnies got to feel like they were doing more than just being nuisances.
I'm sure BP and Exxon and the boardrooms of the other companies on the list below are all having meetings about "Did you hear about the tomato soup? Clearly we must shut down all our wells now!"
>King regarded civil disobedience to be a display and practice of reverence for law: "Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."
There were some comments below about TDS. Doesn't TDS basically mean that DT is "living in your head rent free", preventing you from thinking clearly?
If so, isn't that DT's *fault*, considering much of DT's political strategy was to nettle and discombobulate his opponents and detractors like a professional boxer? Isn't the TDS epidemic, then, a very good reason for disliking DT? (I also dislike the lab or bat whatever it was that started Covid.)
I can't help noticing that having an unhealthy obsession with right-wing public figures has been very common at least since Obama years (possibly before, but I can't speak to it because I was less aware of these things). Trump let the obsessed people concentrate all their hate on him, but, if you talk to someone with TDS, they will happily tell you how much they hate other prominent right-wingers - currently, Abbott, Kavanaugh, Cruz, DeSantis, Tucker Carlson come to mind, but there are many more. (Heck, remember when everyone raged against definitely not right-wing Whole Foods for their CEO opposing Obamacare? Or remember how all college students demanded not to allow Chick-fil-a on campus because the CEO said that marriage is between a man and a woman?)
So on one hand Trump did present a convenient target for hate, allowing to focus it all on him, but on the other it was there before him, less concentrated and carefully curated by the media. If you stand in the middle of a battlefield and scream insults, while waving a bunch of flags of your side, on one hand you expect and deserve the enemy to shoot all they have at you, mostly ignoring the rest of your army until it gets too close, but on the other hand the battle is already going on, and you did not start it.
>> I can't help noticing that having an unhealthy obsession with right-wing public figures has been very common at least since Obama years (possibly before, but I can't speak to it because I was less aware of these things).
I think it was around before - I remember Bush Derangement Syndrome being a thing 2001-2008. I don't think it's isolated to public figures on the right though. Obama spent a 8 years living rent free in a *lot* of conservative heads, as did Clinton.
"Or remember how all college students demanded not to allow Chick-fil-a on campus because the CEO said that marriage is between a man and a woman?"
If memory serves, it was because he donates significant money, to the tune of millions of dollars, to charities that helped write the law in Africa that makes homosexuality a capital crime.
Of course, right-wingers at the time (and since) like to pretend it's about marriage, but certainly the memes that pass around liberal facebook frequently mention the whole killing the gays thing.
I think you demonstrated my point perfectly. Lots of people really hated the guy, and when you give your version of why, we find out that your version was presumably based on something that even Politifact rates mostly false. At least my version of why people hated him was based on something he actually said.
I wouldn't be super surprised to find out it's false. I wondered about that when I was posting. But yeah, that's the one. That's what passed around left circles to gin up support for the boycott.
But I don't think it proves your point. Passing around a post around saying Chick-fil-a doesn't want gays to get married wouldn't get you a very good boycott. Saying that Chick-fil-a money is used to kill gay people does the job. Whoever set that up knew they had to lie to get the job done.
Oh, I think you're very likely to be right about that Facebok meme being mostly responsible in this case. If I had known about it, I would have probably come to the same conclusion as you.
I'm just pointing out the pattern of mass derangement towards prominent right-wingers that predates TDS. I can't make up my mind which of the possible two scenarios in this case is worse - a crazy number of people raging against that guy for something he said, or a crazy number of people raging against him because they uncritically gobbled up a not very factual claim made somewhere on Facebook likely with the purpose of inciting all the hate.
Whichever it is, I think it's a big problem, because this kind of thing makes it very hard for the two sides to come to any kind of agreement. (And I also think that it's very clearly a problem that did not start with Trump, even if it sounds as if he'd like to take all the credit.)
Well, gee. Waking up in the morning and remembering the country is being run by a guy who probably couldn’t pass a high school civics test has a way of sticking in your thoughts. I wouldn’t necessarily think of this as derangement.
I am once again pointing out that white male Republicans have the highest knowledge of civics on average.
But having smart black guy in office resulted in what, exactly? Psychotic interventions in the middle east and north africa that caused untold suffering.
TDS is, or should, refer not just to Trump being annoying or agravating or people not liking him but to something extra.
TDS really blew up in the 2016-2018 era and was characterized by:
-An overwhelming obsession with Trump. 24/7 coverage and constant discussion. He dominated discourse and people (Maddow) ran entire shows about Trump Drama for years.
-Unhinged fears. Again, especially in 2017-2018, it was widely believed on the left that Trump was a direct Russian asset for an assortment of reasons. In 2022, hopefully, we can reflect and see that these fears were, at best, dramatically overblown.
So someone might dislike Trump for a variety of good or bad reasons but there's clearly a difference between the obsessive and panic driven coverage and discussion of Trump that dominated in 2017-2018 and normal criticism. I do think there are still people with severe TDS when it comes to certain current and recent events but the CW aspect brings more heat than light so lets stick to things 3+ years old.
Maddow and others couldn't get Trump out of their heads for 5 minutes. It deranged them. That's the whole idea. That was Trump's big strategy before and after he became POTUS. Stay inside of everyone's heads.
>Isn't the TDS epidemic, then, a very good reason for disliking DT? (I also dislike the lab or bat whatever it was that started Covid.)
That's probably one of the core, basic disagreements that split the human race: are you responsible for your emotions, or is what you perceive as the cause of your emotions responsible for them?
You can easily construct ad-absurdum rebuttal of either (what about the absolute asshole making everyone mad? What about the absolute crybaby being traumatized by everything?), and...I don't have much more insight on the subject, actually.
I think the right answer is that *both* are at fault. There's no reason that blame for things needs to add up to 100%. Some things there's less blame to go around because it really was an unforeseeable accident. Some things there's more blame to go around because lots of people's intentional actions had foreseeable consequences on other people's intentional actions.
It is if you make certain assumptions. So say these are true:
1. The causes for your TDS are all bad things that are right to upset you
2. They actually happened
3. They are Trump's fault.
4. You are reacting in correct proportion to them.
But a person who is accusing you of having TDS isn't at that point in the argument where the person making your argument has already won on all fronts, if that makes sense. They are essentially accusing the TDS-haver of being a person for whom one or more of the four above things are false.
Your argument is a bit like someone saying "Since you are a Nazi, isn't any emotion I have about you justified?". And it might be so, if I'm a Nazi - but I'm certainly going to argue on that point.
So "living in someone's head" is something a lot of basketball players attempt to do to each other. They talk shit, say things to their opponents like: "Your mom sucked my dick last night." They try to make the other guy angry so he will react emotionally and lose focus on the game he is supposed to be playing.
The answers in that scenario would be:
1. Yes
2. No
3. N/A
4. A proportional response is still the wrong one because it means your frame of mind has been taken from one field of play to another.
Putting this back into a political context: anger at some of Trump's tweets or comments may be reasonable. However, inserting that anger into an analysis of how otherwise Trump is performing as POTUS might yield an unbalanced assessment.
I gotta say I LOLed at this comment (and the part at the end).
I think yes, it is DT’s fault because it’s essentially exactly what he’s going for.
At the same time, part of DTS seems to be having no self-awareness and not realizing he’s mostly just trolling.
Personally, I find a troll more likable than a self-righteous manipulator (aka the rest of politicians). But that’s probably from watching too much South Park and being conditioned to find Cartman hilarious.
Subjectively, you know what you mean when you say “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but objectively i think you might be projecting the symptom of cluelessness/poor self-awareness in the diagnostic criteria of TDS, if what you’re assuming is that the only reason someone might be triggered by Trump’s trolling is if they don’t understand how Trump is constantly trolling… It’s actually pretty naive and insulating to make that assumption, in the same way Trumpian thought purposely misreads the motivations of Biden voters (“There’s NO WAY that 50 million people would ever be seriously willing to vote for a person while simultaneously experiencing a mere low-to-moderate behavioral drive to attend tailgate rallies with a bunch of other political jackoffs…”) in order to rationalize his own self-serving, laughably dumb election fictions. His style of rhetoric *relies* on the token chucklefucks of his base to misunderstand the actual big picture, which is why he puts on the fucking makeup and puts on the show.
Which brings me back to the alternative explanation for why TDS suffers may actually understand how trolling works and yet still be incensed by a president doing it: because of the TONS of chucklefucks in his base who think that being smart enough to pick up on Trump’s trolling means they can’t be blatantly yet credulously defrauded, because of how Trump’s literal textbook schoolyard tactics have poisoned the discourse in a way you would need to be extremely manipulable not to recognize as a disaster for everybody involved, regardless of their preferred political outcomes, and finally, because the mere existence of an insincere, unserious (“trolly”) Commander in Chief of history’s greatest aggregation of power just reflects so poorly on my own fellow countrymen that i don’t know how sad it would be if they actually got their way and leveled the whole system for the giggles you get from not even really knowing how to give half an actual fuck about anything but sensationalist schadenfreude
What do people think of recall elections and other ways to make governments more (temporally) responsive to the popular will without destabilising politics? I.e. to avoid the situation where a deeply unpopular government still has a de-jure mandate from a few years ago when people liked them more.
In the real world, a number of countries allow recalls to happen if a petition passes a certain threshold proportion of the electorate. This can either apply to individual politicians or the government as a whole, depending on the country. While these are rarely triggered and even more rarely succeed, perhaps a good horse runs even at the shadow of a whip.
For political systems not that different from ours, despite the fact I just made them up, how about the westminster system except with annual recall elections (triggering a general election if they succeed) that drop in threshold every year since the last GE. So it takes 90% popular opposition in the first year, 50% in the 5th year and 10% in the 9th. A new government gets a few years to win public confidence but is kicked out faster if the public get fed up with it.
Or one like westminster but where there are no general elections. Elections are instead spread out across time, with each MP being elected once every 5 years (kind of like midterms but moreso). An average of 5 constituencies would need to hold an election per fortnight for this to work in the UK. Thus a government that suddenly became less popular would see its majority slowly eroded until the opposition could force through a VoNC.
This question is apropos of no particular political developments that might be taking place right now, or anything.
This sort of problem can also be addressed in the context of a system where the Head of Government is de jure responsible to a separate Head of State whose ordinary duties are mainly ministerial and ceremonial but who has strong reserve powers for emergencies. In a situation like that, the Head of State typically has the legal authority to dismiss the Head of Government and call new elections. In practice, these reserve powers very rarely need to be officially invoked, since the implicit threat is generally enough to enforce political norms around resignations and early elections. Other less drastic reserve powers can also be used as leverage, as things like appointment powers and assent to laws passed by the legislature can also be privately made conditional on an appropriate show of popular mandate (snap elections, referendums, etc).
You lose predictability, which feels like a bad thing - a government can't rely on n years to implement its program. You also make it less likely that a government will do things that it believes will be unpopular but in the national interest.
The "five seats every fortnight" Westminster system seems particularly problematic; you could easily wind up in a situation where the government balances on a knife edge and power swaps back and forth on an irregular weekly schedule for a period of years.
I would think this would also be a problem for international relations. A government of one nation may hesitate to sign a treaty with another nation's government that may suddenly change with little warning.
Treaties don't work like that. And if they did ... you signed them with the government of the day, not the head of state. they could still.be invalidated by a normal change of government.
On paper treaties don't work like that; in practice the toothlessness of international law means that they often kind of do.
And it's not even 100% clear to me that they shouldn't, to some extent - I think "no government can bind its successor" is a principle with a lot going for it; how you trade that off against being able to make and rely on long term commitments is a hard problem. Otherwise a government that wants to prevent a democratically elected successor reversing its policies just has to find a willing neighbour and commit to them in a treaty.
Hyperdiffusion is called pseudoscience three times just in the intro of its wiki page. Seems ungenerous as there are respectable people who say the Olmecs were influenced by Asian sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2741354
According to the Wikipedia page, hyperdiffusion is the "claim that all major cultural innovations and societies derive from one (usually lost) ancient civilization".
I might be sympathetic to the idea that Wikipedia is using an ungenerous definition, but the article you linked to doesn't even contain the word "hyperdiffusion".
The Wikipedia article, likewise, doesn't refute the idea that Asian cultures influenced the Olmecs.
Yeah, should have explained more. When I looked at the map of possible diffusion, the one that struck me as least likely was the arrow from Asia to Central America. Then I ran into the paper about Olmecs which supports that arrow being real. The paper doesn't talk about any central event, but does make the case for very long range diffusion of ideas that were fundamental to Meso-American civilization. Everyone knows the Mayan calendar and how important it was to them. Maybe that was borrowed from South Eastern Asia.
Joseph Campbell also makes the case that agricultural creation myths in Polynesia and Algonquian Native Americans are so similar because of, possibly, a global diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEqR73j_oMY&t=935s
Campbell is *absolutely* fringe in any academic sense. All of his ideas are pseudoscience that got popular with laymen, he's like Frazer in that regard.
Is anyone living their life in a significantly differently manner as a direct result of AI risk fears? (Excluding those who are working directly on AI Safety). It seems that the main problem in acting on beliefs of elevated risk is uncertainty in outcomes and timelines. For instance, deciding not to save for retirement seems like a bad idea if you think there is even a (say) 20% chance that AGI is not invented by the time you hit the age of 60. Working a high-paying, high-stress job for a decade in order to retire early and enjoy yourself seems like it would only be a good idea if AGI is at least 20 years away. Curious how others think about this topic.
You might already know about this but CodeProject dot com is a great resource for getting into this sort of thing. You can probably find related articles on their AI page as well as their Internet of Things page.
It's supported by a big community of developers and you can get answers to programming questions there.
Thanks Gunflint, I bookmarked it. Kind of looks like it's for people who are at least halfway up the slope, whereas I am sitting in the grassy area at the bottom of the mountain. I have had absolutely nothing to do with programming, and am starting from scratch. But I'm not too proud to ask simple questions, even in a setting like that. And I like math, logic and puzzles, so will probably be ok.
In my view treating AGI and Singularity fantasies as reality is useless. However, in my lifetime I have been and will continue to promote and vote for people who will try to get things like basic income and robot taxes going so that we can allow AI and robot to take over jobs without throwing everybody not already rich under the bus.
I am donating more money to charity moving from 1% - 10% of income and not putting money in an Investment Savings Account. anymore. Though there are several factors interplaying at once, I wouldn't call it all AI determined, but it maybe 40%.
I posted on this topic over at lesswrong. Personally I have stopped all retirement contributions, and I am trying to work out better ways yo use wealh that are consistent with my beliefs about the future.
Not really concerned. I expect it will be viable at least 20 years after safe, reliable, personal cold fusion is in every home, powering every car, etc
So when I strap into my cold fusion powered Prius, I’ll start giving it some serious thought.
Are speeches/sermons/lectures/concerts/performances a human universal? I.e. one person or a small group of people do some act, a larger group of people watch without participating. I can't find this in the Wikipedia list of human universals, so I thought I ask here. On one hand, it feels very modern to me with the clear distinction between the person acting and the observers. One the other hand, it seems very natural. If anyone has read some interesting anthropology or history on the subject, please share and I'll be grateful.
I don't know about universals, but I disagree about the audience/actor distinction being modern. The Greeks were having drama competitions 2500 years ago. Maybe I'm missing what you're getting at?
Some performers do seem to plug into some seemingly cosmic energy. Van Morrison was having some staging problems and drawing hecklers at a concert at Winterland in the early 1970s, before he finally walked off -- to be replaced by the oracle of the cotton fields of Brooklyn, Taj Mahal. Taj growled his big stoner grin and had everyone on their feet dancing within minutes. No princess, that Taj. He just plugged into the collective song.
The book Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is about a bushman/San ethnic group, on the margin of the Kalahari Desert, between about the 1930s and 1970s. Performances were usually interactive, and there was nothing that we would recognize as a speech.
For example, one person recounts a dream or a hunt, but others break in with comments and jokes. It's just a form of conversation. Or one person goes into a trance as part of a healing ritual for someone who is ill, but the rest of the group is singing or talking or wiping sweat off of the healer, rather than sitting silently.
There was one type of performance, the women's drum dance, where men were expected to sit and watch rather than participate. The author, Marjorie Shostak, thinks it most likely developed in the 19th century (perhaps implying there might have been direct or indirect European influence).
I reviewed chapter 13 (on healing rituals). My above comment misremembered a few details, but it's broadly accurate.
This line on the women's drum dance is the closest thing in the chapter to a passive audience at a performance:
>Although some men do not bother to attend, others are drawn to it and sit watching.
Overall, it's a good book if you're interested in what might or might not be a human universal, especially related to gender and sexuality norms, and women's attitudes towards health. Colin Turnbull's The Forest People, about the Mbuti, might also be worthwhile.
I really can't imagine hunter-gatherers doing this. They would have collective, largely interactive musical performances, but the idea of one person explicitly lecturing a group seems like a kind of formalness that doesn't exist for these kind of people.
I suspect that the idea of one person lecturing a group depends on the group being largely anonymous to the one person while the one person is known to the group, which depends on a larger than tribal society. That said, even in a family/tribal context, there would likely be times when one person is up front by the fire telling their story of how they found the cache of honey on the mountaintop - though these might be much more like Q&A sessions or one-many conversations, more than a lecture.
Do people in Berkeley know about the history of the Morrell Airship? In 1908, a guy named Morrell built a (hilariously phallic) 450-foot dirigible roughly where MLK Park is today. After two spectacular failures, in which miraculously no one was killed, he lost his investors. A worthwhile watch just for the photos of a flying bratwurst the size of a city block:
Why don't states that have run out of lethal injection drugs just kill death row inmates via nitrogen? Or, any other similar gas that replaces oxygen. Nitrogen's lethal, it's very widely available (i.e. can't be blocked by the EU), and death is supposed to be fairly painless. It seems like a nobrainer- instead, I see states casting around for weird alternate ways to execute inmates. Why not gas? In fact, why did states go the lethal injectable drugs route at all? Gas seems very easy and much cheaper
I'm also very confused - why that specific drug? Doesn't the US make a shit tonne of various drugs? 1 gram of most opioids would work and would be unblockable.
South Carolina has re-authorized the use of firing squads.
I haven't looked into the details for SC, but I remember that the official US Military protocol for execution by firing squad (*) is an evergreen bit of information on another forum I subscribe to and occasionally comment on. It seems like a very quick and effective system.
(Of course, it's for executions during wartime, and in military chain-of-command. Still, I would anticipate no problems rounding up the N riflemen needed. Note: the BS about half the squad shooting blanks to salve their conscience, is Hollywood falderal.)
For the record, I support the death penalty. However, the record of many spectacular miscarriages of justice ... It is alarming to hear of it regularly esp. w/r/t DNA exoneration of people imprisoned for decades. Still, obvious cases would best for society if those people were gone, closure etc.
________________
* -- If you wonder when/why firing squads are needed, remember that since the beginning of origanized armies, Spies are summarily executed.
Because any change in method would be seized upon by anti-death-penalty activists and it would be shut down, *even if the new method were more humane than lethal injection*.
Seems disingenuous to me, unless your honest stance is that capital punishment hypothetically WOULD be just fine if only there were a better method for it.
Given how long this has been going on, that the AVERAGE time people spend on death row in the US (I'm assuming this is focused on the US issue) is over a decade, and how similar tactics for abortions worked out, I'm not sure what definition of effective would fit it. Non-direct, yes, but effective?
Also, they would probably want some heavier noble gas like argon/krypton. While more expensive, it's easier to contain, works faster, and less likely to cause scares (of the dihydrogen monooxide type)
None of that has to do with deterring the execution method. Or how effective that strategy is.
My point on that segment is that they still use separate long and expensive things rather than just sticking to the "effective" way. Even if it is to delay it until it works out, that still doesn't imply anything on the effectiveness of the original strategy.
I think you are assuming states or politicians "want" to execute people, as opposed to the death penalty being something voters are for, which politicians can spend some of their political capital to achieve.
What is more in a politician's favor than being able to be pro-death-penalty, without actually killing anybody? Killing people is politically risky; if somebody was executed wrongfully and it later becomes obvious, you don't want to be the person who can be blamed for making that possible. Plus, you have to spend political capital to make it happen.
Whereas, if you're pro death penalty, but you just can't get anything done, well, that's not your fault.
The most humane way to kill people would be a massive falling weight that crushes the brain before nerve impulses have time to travel. No one seriously proposes this simply because it would look barbaric.
My understanding is that execution methods are usually optimized to minimize the psychological toll on the executioner, rather than to minimize the suffering of the condemned.
I personally think this is the correct prioritization, although I'm still in favor of reducing suffering for the condemned if it can be done with no downsides.
I mean, it was explicitly invented to be a more humane method of execution than those that were standard at the time - no risk of the headsman being bad at his job and taking many axe swings to do the beheading
If you change the method of execution, death penalty opponents will immediately sue you on the grounds that the new method is inhumane, regardless of what it is, just to use the legal system to filibuster it. The only solution that does not require a long and expensive legal defense is to use a method that a previous court has already ruled is humane.
Largely because the death penalty doesn't mean the state can just kill them however they feel like. In all the cases I've seen people are sentenced to death by very specific means, and those means are codified into law and in the specific sentences. This can be changed, people in Arizona for instance sentenced to death by gas chamber could opt-in to lethal injection as we were transitioning away from the gas chamber (cyanide gas if I recall correctly, not nitrogen.)
If that's true, why don't the state legislatures just change the laws? I don't see that Texas or another red state is going to have a tough time pushing a new execution method through state government
Anti-death-penalty activists have deep pockets and will absolutely work each individual method up to SCOTUS. Funny how strategic suppression lawsuits are fine if they're done by and for the Good Side, isn't it.
I note that anti-abortion campaigners absolutely believe that they're saving lives by doing so, and the lives of innocent unborn babies, no less (rather than condemned criminals, a much less sympathetic group)
If you're trying to do *anything*, and you talk yourself into "by any means necessary", you are a menace to society and need to do much less and reflect much more. "By any means necessary" is a blank check, and one that often adds up to a cost far greater than the value of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. But your myopic focus on the one good thing you are hoping to do, blinds you to all other consequences.
Except that 'saving lives by any means necessary' isn't allowed when an average citizen wants to be armed for self defense, or wants to live in an area without ethnic groups with higher percentages of violence, or the police want to use coercion to get a confession of a drug dealer, or number of other less dramatic solutions that are not in favor with Elite Left.
So it's basically special pleading in the form of disruption of democracy and social norms, and those advocating for the use of any means for special ends are gonna miss those norms when they're gone.
"Saving lives by any means necessary" isn't something generally favoured in any public policy field in any country known to me, although different balances can legitimately be struck in, for example, the regulation of motorised transport. At any rate, the concept is quite clearly different from saving someone from being killed.
Being opposed to areas members of certain ethnic groups are unable to live doesn't strike me as a notably left wing stance, "elite" or not.
Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma have authorized the use of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method.
I can’t find a source but I seem to recall that one reason it was never implemented was that it is a rather pleasant way to die. A sort of euphoric intoxication can occur before death. Not what these states want to see in an execution. Writhing in pain, smoking body parts, bursting into flame, etc are more in line with the desired effect.
Not a guy with a serene smile shaking his head saying, “I suppose you stupid fucks will figure out I’m innocent about ten minutes after I’m …”
The original sedative used for lethal injections, sodium thiopental, is absolutely a painkiller. States had to switch to less effective drugs after the EU banned export of sodium thiopental for use in executions.
What's the reason they don't use e.g. fentanyl, which is legal for medical uses? I could be wrong but I imagine death by fentanyl overdose is anesthetising and therefore not painful.
(I'm against the death penalty but as long as we have it we ought to carry it out intelligently)
Yeah, seconding this. Related question- is it really that hard to manufacture a very small batch of any chemical compound, in this case sodium thiopental? I understand that a full-scale factory cranking industrial amounts requires a great deal of manufacturing expertise- but if you're literally just making 1-2 doses, can't..... any chemist just whip that up, with the right reagents? Why is it so hard? (I mean I'm not particularly pro-death penalty, I'm just curious from a chemical engineering POV)
Imagine that you are trying to get as many people as possible to fill out a survey, and you have a few rewards (discrete) that you can give out as you see fit. What's the game theory approach to optimize the # of people who fill out the survey?
There are ~140 people total in the pool and the time frame for completion is ~2 weeks
I've never seen a survey offer a prize worth caring about. When I fill out surveys, it's because I've been persuaded that my doing so is valuable; I suggest you focus on explaining how your research is important, so people want to help you.
Sounds to me like you should be seeking a psychology answer rather than a game theory answer.
The game theory answer would be something about determining everyone's minimum price to fill out the survey and then offering them the smallest amount that you can that's still above that price until you run out of resources. (Using lotteries to create expected values in the desired range if your rewards are too big.) But that assumes that people respond rationally to incentives, which is materially false in most realistic scenarios of the sort you've described.
What most people actually seem to do is to pool your rewards into bundles that are large enough to feel emotionally impactful but not so big that you hit large obvious diminishing returns, and then enter all participants into a lottery for those bundles. I don't know whether that's backed up by research or not.
I liked the approach from Aella's kink survey, where after you fill out the survey it gives you a fun "what fictional character are you as kinky as" message that you can share with your friends.
(I did not reach the end of the survey but apparently tons of people did, and I think many of them were motivated by the message at the end.)
Not theory, but a single data point: We had a pool of ~400 people and found they were more incentivized to take the survey when we had more, smaller rewards versus fewer, big ones.
Put all the prize pool together, the winner is drawn by lot, you get one lot/number for people you make take the survey, you must at least make another person take the survey.
My inspiration is stuff that I use to saw a lot on twitter, a company giving out a thing of high value to one or a few person choosed randomly, on the condition that they share and follow. The initial idea was that to get into the pool you have to make someone else take the survey, but that doesn't capitalize on the people that are ready to put in more work to get more chances. Adding the rule "you bring 10 people you get 10x more chances to win" fixes that.
This is all intuition, I never studied any of this stuff formally.
Thoughts on semaglutide and pancreatic cancer risk ? I believe it is generally accepted that inflammation is associated with increased cancer risk and this drug does show increased incidence of pancreatitis. I know the clinical studies on semaglutide did not show increased cancer risk, but they're relatively short-term and pancreatic cancer is usually only detected in later stages after a tumor has been growing for years.
My father looked into this and I vaguely remember him saying that he thought the studies picked up a weak signal that would have been statistically significant if they had been done better, don't remember the details. He tried to get money and resources for better studies but got frustrated after too much bureaucracy.
The few studies that I found with a quick google suggest that the rate of pancreatitis is about equal between control and treatment groups, 0.3 vs. 0.4 % (another study shows more cases in placebo group). Pancreatitis ==> 13x odds ratio of pancreatic cancer development so that would be a concern but I'd question whether it's relevant.
Given how many cancers are associated with obesity I'd say it's worth it
Hey Trebuchet, I noticed you commented on Zvi's Balsa FAQ and someone replied, then it disappeared before I could read the reply. Did you delete it, or...?
I didn't note the author, but there was an early comment arguing that Zvi should remove a question from the FAQ. Zvi did delete that question, and presumably the comment too.
Don't have a copypaste available, but the question was something along the lines of "isn't this all a big thing to stop Trump; aren't you Trump-deranged?" and the answer that he mostly wanted prosperity for its own sake but also thought Trump was bad because he was authoritarian and prosperity would help defeat him; he said that he's aware most people with TDS aren't aware they have TDS and that if you think him thinking Trump is bad because he's authoritarian implies he has TDS then you should think he has TDS.
Trebuchet's comment said, roughly, that this question/answer might as well have put out a giant sign saying he's going to be a Democrat shill, when the rest of the post didn't really make you think about Trump at all. (Note again that this is my recollection of what trebuchet said, not how I'd describe things.)
Zvi said something fairly-similar in his first response to criticism https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/why-balsa-research-is-worthwhile/ - I notice that there are very good nonpartisan, uncontroversial reasons to want specifically Donald Trump not to be in the White House (most obviously, his age, the extreme difficulty he had and would again have in Doing Things as an outsider, and his extreme divisiveness to the point that the Democrats' loyalty might not be assured), but Zvi instead gave the controversial answer that even I have reservations about.
Does it seem reasonable to think Zvi has TDS because he writes about how Trump is a bad authoritarian who should be stopped, in the same posts he talks about wanting to be a nonpartisan organization that avoids culture war issues? That really seems like he is so deranged that he can't notice "Stop the top Republican candidate from winning" is culture war. Or I suppose, that he's just doing fundraising PR and trying to double-dip on "policy wonks who like nonpartisanship" and "libs with TDS".
I don't understand why a comment that Trump has authoritarian tendencies is perceived as partisan. Is it possible to criticize someone like Trump without it being considered partisan?
I don't like Trump, though I agree with some of his policies. My dislike for him is not partisan. There are other Republicans I would support. Yet any time I express dislike for Trump, regardless of reason, it is perceived as partisan by Republicans who support him.
It's not the disliking Trump, it's loudly disliking Trump while simultaneously trying to be a nonpartisan avoider of the culture war. That suggests a serious lack of self-awareness.
"We also believe that Trump is at this point a would-be authoritarian and that his returning to the Presidency would be quite bad and is worth working to prevent."
Commenters apparently convinced Zvi that it was a bad idea to openly oppose the presumptive Republican presidential candidate while also claiming to be nonpartisan.
To be clear, I did consider this when writing the post spilling the beans. But considering the fact that he's accepting donations, and considering his previous post which is still up, I decided it was worth dropping the bomb.
Authoritarian is a propaganda term. The Democrats were furiously demanding that the entire country be put into hard lockdown based on the opinions given by liberal figures of authority. This is far more "authoritarian" than anything Trump ever did, regardless of whether lockdowns were an effective or otherwise "objectively" correct option or not.
The general pattern of the past seven years or so in the US, from what I see, is progressives and Democrats stacking the deck while Republicans flip the table. Flipping the table is more spectacular, but a stacked deck still isn't a fair game - it's worth remembering that Russia and the PRC do have elections, and they're not even rigged in terms of votes AFAIK, but media control and disqualification make them useless for actually unseating the ruling party.
For a quick rundown of the deck-stacking measures:
1) strong ideological bias of schools and especially universities, some of it hidden from parents
2) delegitimisation of conservatism and Republicans in media (including some places where there *hasn't* been a successful mirror-version, like Wikipedia)
3) censorship of conservatives and Republicans on social media platforms (mostly unofficial, although the Disinformation Governance Board was an attempt at official)
4) demographic change via immigration
5) opposition to anti-illegal-voting measures (yes, yes, I know the Democrats' reason for this is fear of Jim Crow, but if you gain from illegal action X and you oppose measures to stop X you're in implicit collusion with the criminals doing X regardless of your motives).
Now, obviously, you can say that all of that is still legal and some of Trump's various schemes weren't, which is mostly true, and you can say that Trump's schemes were pretty slimy, which is definitely true, but that list (particularly #1-#3, plus the so-far-unrealised possibility of disqualifying Trump) hits most of the beats of a group trying to set up a Russian-style de facto one party state (there is also a word for the practice of coordinating the vast majority of cultural and scientific organisations around a specific political agenda) and it's not very surprising that people would object to that.
The situation in the US is definitely asymmetrical, but it's tricky to pick one side as undermining democracy more than the other - they both do it, just in different ways.
Long runs were my goto method when I was younger. As my joints have aged bicycling either outdoors or on my turbo trainer have taken their place.
Strength training is good- and good for you - too. I have a large basement so I like free weights. I have a bench and squat rack and I try to keep to two workouts a week for maintenance. Bench press, bent forward row and squats are my usual routine.
Any sort of physical workout is good for clearing your mind and moving your motivation off top dead center.
I should have been specific, but it is specially weight lifting that helped in my case. Cardio and general physical activity are almost neutral nowadays but helped a lot at first. I have no idea what the general action mechanism is, so your mileage might vary and I might be forgetting another lifestyle intervention I can't think of
The only debate seems to turn on a conflation of efficacy vs. effectiveness. There doesn't seem to be any credible evidence that colonoscopies are not efficacious for individuals. All of the studies that might seem to show that are actually about population-level effectiveness, which, while relevant for public policy, has no relevance for personal medical care. For more detail on this distinction, see: https://peterattiamd.com/colonoscopy-and-acm/
"Parenthetically, of the 11,843 colonoscopies performed in this study there were zero perforations and 15 (0.127%) bleeding complications. If nothing else, this reinforces how safe colonoscopy is in the hands of experienced endoscopists. "
There were ZERO perforations because ZERO of the colonoscopies done in study were under anesthesia! Anesthesia not used in Europe. Without anesthesia it is the patient that prevents perforation because they tell the doctor - Stop! You're hurting me.
Anecdotally, a friend of the family died from sepsis after a poorly-conducted colonoscopy*. The chance of finding a problem and fixing it has to be weighed against the chance of creating a problem.
*(I think this was the same place that killed another friend by giving her radiation treatment in the wrong part of her body. True Rural medicine sucks.)
One of the most useful books I read, back in the early 2000’s, was “Raising Your Spirited Child.” My 2nd child was particularly sensitive (with her, we learned that Target sold socks without seams, because seams bothered her so much, and many other kids too, apparently!) The book validated how each kid was different and it’s okay to respect their innate temperaments and unique selves. We also had a wonderful pediatrician who said kids with her temperament usually did really well in school because they have so much tenacity and focus. This kid loves to get A’s and is now in grad school. So there’s that.
Not necessarily. This was 22 years ago and I hadn’t ever heard of Asperger’s. The title to the book is: “Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, and Energetic.” Perhaps I am being preciously euphemistic, but she was never diagnosed with Asperger’s. My point was seeing sensitivity as part of my child’s temperament, not something to be fixed, was very helpful for me.
What is the point? If a child grew up to successful adult while everyone thought she had simply an innate "spirited" or sensitive temperament, and we would then find out that yes, some MDs would have diagnosed her with some sort of Asperger's ... was that kind of Asperger's diagnosis ever useful? Map is not the territory, etcetera.
It's not as useful to be diagnosed as an adult, but for parents of a younger child who notice one or two prominent symptoms (eg. sensitivity to any roughness in fabrics), knowing the other tendencies in the cluster (eg. other sensory issues, like bright lights and loud noises, or a tendency to take things at face value) helps parents head off potential problems before they crop up rather than after they have caused suffering to the child.
Sure. But my point was more in direction ... if the existence of cluster of tendencies / symptoms / personality traits and their characteristics can also be effectively communicated by calling it certain kind of personality cluster and writing books about that particular personality cluster, is it then worse or better than thinking about the same cluster in terms of "medical condition"? We in the West have a certain framework for thinking about medical conditions and diagnoses, and it lends much better to the kind of condition that after diagnosis can be treated by medical professionals with discrete interventions (operations, medications, therapy sessions...). Nobody is diagnosed as "normal", after all.
And yes, I am aware that for some people on the spectrum it can be debilitating.
This sounds like my daughter - very bothered by socks, car seats, and other tactile clothing. She's got a ton of tenacity and focus, but also a lot of anxiety about doing well. She was quite concerned about getting the lowest grade so far this year - 97% in one class.
"Spirited" sounds like a euphemism that's probably about right.
I was always bothered by seams. Also a good pupil.
As a father of two girls age 2 and 4 I would love to hear more from parents that are further down the road as to what advice has turned out to be useful (and what is bunk).
My brother and his wife are soon going to have a child. I don't have any experience with children (and frankly, not much with young parents either). Are there things that you shoud do/should not do? Things that are very appreciated, things that are taboo? For example, I can imagine that unless they specifically ask for it, sending resources on pedagogy or childcare could be seen as weird/annoying/bad/obnoxious.
In addition to the other good advice, I note that there are a few vaccines one is meant to get booster shots for before interacting with a newborn. I know Whooping Cough is one of them but I'm sure there are others. (I need to look into it because I too am about to be an uncle in a few weeks)
Good one! The whooping cough vaccine's protection attenuates over the course of about a decade. My wife (then girlfriend) got it back in 2009 and it was no fun. She coughed hard enough to crack a rib, and then, of course, kept coughing. It was painful and went on for weeks.
In addition to what everyone else has said: one of the most valuable things you can give to the parents of a small child is time to themselves. Offering to take the baby for a walk around the block, or watch the baby at home so the parents can themselves take a walk around the block, can be wonderful. Maybe not in the first few weeks, but soon after that.
Do: offer to bring by snacks/ cooked meals, ask if they need anything from the store, offer to help out with errands/etc. Emphasize that you are not fazed if baby cries or if they need to be late to an event. Educate yourself on how primitive newborns are (no neck control!) so you know what to expect and don't suggest that their 2 month old should be sitting up or speaking. Suggest looking up "5 S's" on youtube to learn how to help calm fussy baby. Ask parents how they are doing instead of just asking about the baby.
Don't: insist on rigorous meeting times, since the new baby's nap schedule will likely dictate this. Offer suggestions for why baby is crying. Insist on meeting baby before they are ready. Buy random baby crap they don't want.
oh, sorry I more thing I forgot: wash your hands before touching the baby, and don't visit if you're sick, even if it's just a cold! A newborn with a cold is very unhappy, and a fever in a newborn is a medical emergency that requires hospitalization.
The extremes of early sickness fade fast. That's mostly a very young newborn, which calms down significantly after a few weeks and especially a few months.
yes, >~2 months you no longer have to go to the ER for fever, but I still think sickness in older babies should be prevented when it's simple stuff like not visiting when you're actively sick!
the parents will definitely not be thanking you if you pass along a mild sickness to their slightly older baby, as it often interferes with their sleep and they get pretty cranky.
I'll third the idea of doing chores. My mother in law came to visit when our son was about 2 weeks old and the biggest help was that she could do little chores which gave my wife and I a few extra minutes to sleep. Laundry, dishes, take out the trash - these things are awesome.
Also just being another set of eyes or hands for watching or holding the baby is really helpful. I would say that infants are a lot more sturdy than I thought before having one. As long as their head is supported it would be really hard to hurt them when you hold them, so don't be too nervous.
It depends on the personality of your brother and his wife, but my wife and I weren't really interested in chatting much during those first weeks/months. Just too tired, too much to do and think about. So don't expect much in that way and don't be offended if they seem annoyed all the time (lack of sleep does that to you!).
If your sister in law has to pump (instead of nurse) this will be a big pain in the ass for her. It takes up just as much time as nursing but the baby still hasn't eaten. Being available to give her time to pump can be really helpful as well.
Slightly different emphasis. Chores are a favor, do it graciously and if you aren't feeling it feel free not to.
But, when you're ready for babysitting, treat it like they're doing you a favor. "Hey guys, can I get some uncle time on Friday? You guys could go out."
This will be (likely) very much appreciated, and will let you build a relationship with the kid.
Another idea for a little later: take the kid for a weekend or a week. I did this with my sisters' kids when they were little and midsize, and now they do this for me. For the parent it's a nice couple of days for a getaway (or long home project), for the kids it's an adventure (I used to take my nieces and nephew to Shakespeare in the park and the Ren Faire), and for you it will (hopefully) be a treat. Kid time, especially when you don't have kids, can be a lot of fun, and it's different from the rest of your life.
I would second this. If you really want to help them go visit them and help them with chores for a while. The initial stages are very labor/attention intensive.
I make it clear to them that I'm doing this to make me feel better so they should not feel obligated to read it. I have had several get back to me that the two page writeup was useful (partially because it doesn't overlap with most other 'helpful tips').
My conclusions: this is not "The Lord of the Rings". Think of it as "Amazon's 'Rings Of Power'" and it's an okay-ish fantasy show. But they have gone from changing the canon to inventing their very own original horseshit which is now driving the plot, such as it is, so it's not Tolkien.
One of the worst episodes of television I have ever watched is the Racist Truck Episode of "Supernatural". But the worst thing about that was simple dumb stupid idiocy. It wasn't mean-spirited, it wasn't ripping something better off, it was a ham-handed attempt at "Racism Bad" and when people said this was a terrible episode, nobody came out swinging about "criticism of this episode means you hate empowered black women in lead roles so you are a white supremacist". It was accepted that this was awful, and everyone moved on.
Rings Of Awesome Powa! is not that kind of awful. It's mean-spirited pissing on canon. Payne and McKay (who, out of their own mouths in a "Hollywood Reporter" interview, admitted they had spent ten years writing scripts that never got made) think they can write better than Tolkien, so they invent their own crap. Now Sauron is an incel who goes bad because Galadriel rejected him harshly. And this is "complexly evil" not simplistic evil like Tolkien wrote about cosmic entities. Sauron is gonna be the next Tony Soprano or Walter White in season two!
The fact that *these* are their benchmarks shows the poverty of their imaginations. "Uh, duh, how we gonna write bad guy for modern audience? Uh, how 'bout we copy hit shows that ended fifteen and nine years ago respectively?"
“Season one opens with: Who is Galadriel? Where did she come from? What did she suffer? Why is she driven?” says Payne. “We’re doing the same thing with Sauron in season two. We’ll fill in all the missing pieces.”
“Sauron can now just be Sauron,” McKay adds. “Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He’s evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he’d overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open. We’re really excited. Season two has a canonical story. There may well be viewers who are like, ‘This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!’ In season two, we’re giving it to them.”
I could go on, but why bother? It's not Tolkien. As modern generic TV fantasy, it's meh. Too much crammed into the last episode to try and cliffhanger us into caring about season two, when as ever the 'mysteries' are transparently obvious:
Is the Stranger Gandalf? (Heck, yeah)
Is Isildur dead? (No, he has to grow up and kill Sauron, like in the movies this show has been copying all season)
Is Elendil's fake daughter going to look into the palantir? (Of course she is)
Is Pharazon going to take advantage of Tar-Palantir's death and Míriel's blindness to seize power? (If he doesn't, he's an idiot, and he's one of the few characters with three functioning brain cells in this show)
Is Elendil's fake daughter going to be the human version of Galadriel and, after looking into the palantir and seeing the future, she is now going to be making all the decisions about the fate of Númenor that her father made in canon, the same way Galadriel is the one who decided three rings should be made? (Well, since they have to do something more with her than have her standing around looking gormless, Isildur is off the scene for the moment, and Anarion apparently does not exist, yes to all this).
Is Celeborn dead? (Since they decided in episode seven that oh yeah, Galadriel has a husband so she can't bone Sauron, no - though he may well wish he were)
Dash it, sometimes I wish the some of the very old original primitive versions of the legendarium had survived into Tolkien's later revisions, because I'd love to turn Makar and Meássë loose on these twerps:
My feelings about the show are mixed, and I found the finale disappointing, but:
"Sauron is an incel who goes bad because Galadriel rejected him harshly"
He was bad all along, just convincing her he wasn't by telling incomplete truths. I don't love that last, since book Galadriel was suspicious of Annatar from the get go. But he didn't become evil in the finale. He wants to order the world and rule it, and is known to have been willing to use brutal methods (as Adar recounts) to advance those goals well before he ever met Galadriel.
(His efforts to get established as a smith in Numenor suggest that plan A was to forge rings there, and maybe make it his power base.)
Offering her all the kingdoms of the world to rule by his side is an innovation, but probably not all that different from what Saruman presumably thought he was agreeing to as he plotted his sudden but inevitable betrayal.
The Stranger is likely Gandalf, though some other wizard remains possible. If he is Gandalf, he shouldn't be going to Rhun ("to the East I go not"), while the Blue Wizards did. But the latter don't appear in LotR and so using one of them would require the Tolkien Estate to give permission.
I don't think "Is Isildur dead?" or "Is Earien going to look in the palantir" really even qualify as mysteries. As you say, anyone who's seen the film knows Isildur will wind up with an heir, and anyone who's seen *any* film knows that you don't show someone walking up the stairs to a palantir in order to establish that she turned around at the last moment to get bubble tea. Thinking Isildur is dead is presumably going to affect Elendil's motivations next season.
Likewise, even if one had never read the Akallabeth, Pharazon surely reads as "scheming vizier" to literally anyone. He's even got the beard! (Though I don't think the show has informed the viewer how close he is in the line of succession.)
Anarion does exist, even if he's Sir Not Appearing This Season. He's doing something Elendil doesn't approve of in the west. Almost certainly western Numenor rather than The West, though I suppose some version of Amandil's attempt to redo Earendil's journey that will wind up with him shipwrecked and unsuccessful isn't completely ruled out. (Except then Elendil would be concerned rather than angry.)
Possibly Earien will be giving Elendil the advice he got from his father re being ready to get out of Dodge, based on her palantir vision.
I do wonder just what the show Numenoreans are doing with all those ships They have a Sea Guard but no naval adversaries (unless they think they're defending against Valinor, in which case lotsa luck), and a busy harbor even though going to Middle Earth with 5, make that 3 ships was a momentous and politically fraught decision. (And Pelargir is an old Numenorean port that can be resettled with Southlanders.) Book Numenor was a major maritime empire engaged in extensive colonization and pillage by this point, but RoP Numenor doesn't appear to be doing that.
The mystery box approach is frustrating, because they're trying to invent mysteries in a canon where we already know X lives and Y happens.
This may work for a casual audience that doesn't know the books or the movies, but then the question remains: who are they making this show for? They've been going very heavy on the Tolkien angle, but if their audience is "people just tuning in for a fantasy show who know nothing about the world in question", then why not just do Original Series?
And even if you are a casual viewer who has no idea who Isildur is, you must have picked up that he lives because his horsie was set free to run off and find him. Like Lassie. Or Aragorn's horse, in the movies, which the show is totally not copying scenes and even lifting dialogue from, not at all!
So their 'mysteries' are very obvious. Yes, that's Gandalf. Yes, Isildur is alive (because if he's dead, then Berak the Horsie would be very upset and we don't upset animals today in movies). Yes, Earien is going to look in the palantir. They *might* possibly set up more (fake) conflict between Earien and her father due to what she sees - if she sees the Destruction of Númenor like everyone else who has looked in, she might double-down on her opposition to getting involved in war in Middle-earth.
"Pharazon surely reads as "scheming vizier" to literally anyone. He's even got the beard!"
Don't forget the eyebrows! Those are Evil Eyebrows with the best of them!
Rings of Power Númenor is *all over the place*. They have a settlement/port in Middle-earth, after declaring in earlier episodes that they had nothing to do with the place for centuries. They have a navy, but they're doing nothing with it. The mighty fleet of three ships couldn't be brought back up to its original strength of five ships by taking any of the other ships we see in the harbour?
As for the handling of Sauron, that is the greatest divergence.
Everything he said to Galadriel was true - she is the one who insisted he was the King of the Southlands, not him; he did tell her he took the pouch off a dead man; he did want to remain in Númenor and it was Galadriel who promised Miriel that he would come along; since we see the forging of the three rings without previously making the nine and the seven, it does look like he genuinely wanted to help the Elves.
Now, there could be a masterplan in place whereby he caused the Darkness that made the Elves fade so they need the mithril so he can pop up to tell them to make rings with it, rings he will control - and that in order to get into Eregion, he manipulated Galadriel all along, but that would mean that he had to know she would end up on a ship to Valinor and then jump overboard so he could be on a raft in exactly the right place to pick her up and worm his way into her confidence so that she would take him along. That's more plotting than the show has demonstrated it can pull off so far.
Halbrand/Sauron's character has acted very variably all along; at times, he was obviously doing bad things (e.g. on the raft when he split off alone and then the rest of them got attacked and killed by a sea monster so that he and Galadriel were the only ones left) but then at other times he seems genuine about just wanting to stay in Númenor and work as a smith. Galadriel has done worse things than he has done so far, so how much was him being manipulative and how much was him trying to sincerely change?
Of course Sauron is evil, of course his initial weak impulse to repent after the War of Wrath faded, but this version of Sauron is so different from canon that I think they really are trying to portray him as some kind of conflicted anti-hero; Galadriel could have set him on the right path if only she hadn't rejected him out of hand when he wanted her help to bind him to the light!
It's mushy nonsense, and I do think they chopped and changed from one episode to another based on audience reaction; they did seem to be setting up a Galadriel/Halbrand romance, but since most people had already guessed he was Sauron, that wouldn't work any more so they threw in a mention of Celeborn in episode seven and had the big break-up in the finale.
Because they had dawdled along time-wasting in the previous episodes, and as I suspect had intended to stretch out storylines into the second season (like 'is Halbrand Sauron?' maintaining the 'mystery' so that they could introduce him into Eregion and becoming a confidante of Celebrimbor), they had to finish everything up in a hurry for the finale.
So rush, rush, rush, the rings get forged in a matter of days, Galadriel finally suspects Halbrand is not who she thinks due to a random line from Celebrimbor that is an echo of what Adar said (even though up to now she is the one who has been pushing him as King of the Southlands) and we get that 'revelation' which everyone knew was coming.
They built up the notion of the white-cloaked cultists, then threw all that away in a hurried conclusion (unless they plan to bring them back as a 'surprise' when Gandalf and Nori get to Rhun - you thought we were dead, but we can't be killed by you!) and now we have Sauron heading off to Mordor and Galadriel responsible for the three Elven rings.
And apparently still not telling anyone that yes, Sauron is back and that was him? Will we have this drawn out through season two - when is she going to tell? Elrond knows now as well, is he going to tell? what will they do?
EDIT: Funnily enough, I would have enjoyed a few episodes of Celebrimbor and Halbrand being forge buddies, because (a) finally Celebrimbor got something to do other than stand around in his bathrobe (b) the exploding forge bits were funny, yes I'm easily pleased (c) they seemed to be genuinely getting on well and (d) I would have liked to see the process of learning to make the rings, seven and nine as well as the three. It would have fit better if the sixteen were the first trial essays, getting stronger as they learned more, and *then* we had the big revelation, Halbrand flees, and Celebrimbor changes the plan so that instead of the final One Ring they had intended to create, he makes the three Elven rings.
But we couldn't get that because they had to cram everything into the finale in order to tidy up their dangling plots.
I'm guessing that their main imagined viewer is someone who saw the films, doesn't know them backwards and forwards but may be caught short by major contradictions. (So, e.g., Celeborn certainly isn't dead and neither is Isildur, but they're not expected to know much more than "the Rings were forged" and *maybe* "Numenor fell", rather than any details.)
Though they're clearly throwing in details that only book fans would care about, whether or not they can win them all over. Showing Aman in the days of the Trees, alluding to stories they don't have the rights to tell in sculpture, etc. That's obviously polarizing, and will only irritate people who are already unhappy with the massive liberties they're taking. But it's hard to know how it will all shake out.
(I know plenty of people who hate the Jackson movies for similar reasons, and I can certainly while away a few hours on the places where he fundamentally fails to get Tolkien myself. But I like the films overall, and it's probably fair to say that they're remembered very positively in popular culture and genre fandom generally even if the controversy within Tolkien fandom will never die.)
I'm not sure the chronology of the production allows for them to have made changes based on audience reaction, unless it was from test audiences.
I agree that I really wish they'd spent more time on the forging of the Rings and Halbrand insinuating himself into Eregion. (Send Galadriel somewhere else if she's not to look dense for not twigging sooner.) I don't like the idea of the Three being the first Rings they ever forged, with no need for essays in the craft and no clear idea why they'd forge sixteen more Great Rings with the emergency past and Sauron revealed.
(Also: who puts a forge at the top of a tower? I'm not remotely an expert, but that just seems like a bad idea, from having to haul fuel and metal up and down the stairs to the hazards of explosions like the one we see messing with the structure.)
I don't think Sauron is going to be a conflicted antihero so much as a villain whose motives we know. Adar kind of fills that slot anyway, and I won't be surprised if the heroes are forced to make common cause with him on the grounds that "independent Orc kingdom" is better than a Dark Lord.
Of course they have the general prequel problem that they can't actually win. But maybe the Orcs get driven offstage to the east or south. Or they're crushed with sad music in a way that helps enable the victory of the Last Alliance as Galadriel sheds a single tear for her erstwhile foe.
I do think that Sauron is supposed to be adapting his plans on the fly, though not necessarily full "everything that has transpired has done so according to my design". I'm not sure if he's supposed to have planned his chance meeting with Galadriel (which yes, would be a stretch even for an immortal Ainu, not least because no one sane could predict that one of the oldest and most respected Eldar in Middle-Earth would jump into the ocean, let alone where). I *think* he's supposed to be trying to make opportunities as they come: get in Galadriel's good graces, insinuate himself into Numenorean smithcraft, okay, maybe he can work with king of the Southlands if the elf won't leave him in peace to use ringcraft in Numenor, wait, infiltrating the Noldor is even better!
Maybe he knew about (or arranged) the whole Elvish decay/mithril/Celebrimbor wanting to emulate Feanor thing and manipulated affairs from the beginning to get himself put into the middle of it. But I don't think that's been shown, and I agree that would be a lot of a lot if they confirm that's what happened. I'd at least rather read it as Sauron's adapting fluidly to changing circumstances and taking advantage of his adversaries' ignorance.
I'm guessing that there wasn't a lot of sincere interest in helping the Elves as much as laying the groundwork for dominating them. (Ideally with Galadriel as Witch-queen, but if not, oh well.)
Presenting himself as offering a means to improve the world is in keeping with pre-Downfall Sauron. But I think the fact that he's been comprehensively lying through omission and that he's shown to have been doing monstrous experimentation (both his northern stronghold and Adar's reports, the latter reaffirmed by Halbrand's clear rage at Adar) communicates to the audience that he's not actually misunderstood, and while he may have self-righteous justifications they're not actually righteous and I don't think we're meant to think they are.
(Which isn't to say some segment of the fandom won't become his partisans. But people got from actual Tolkien to writing "The Last Ringbearer". Ditto shipping heroes with hot villains. There's no accounting for fans.)
I'd actually missed that Galadriel didn't tell them Halbrand was Sauron. I really hope that's an editing oversight and it will be clear she did tell them next season.
I agree puzzle box storytelling is getting very old, and hope they're not going to keep relying on it to the same extent going forward.
What is absolutely infuriating is that somebody involved with this has read the books, or knows something, maybe just Googled shit online, because they put in tiny details that only lore nerds will catch.
Like having the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships (a real 'blink and you'll miss it' reference). Or the bat-eared headdress of one of the white cloaked mystics referring to Thuringwethil (and the moon phases on the collar of another make me think 'moon - werewolves - Draugluin'). Small little things that are plainly nods to the lore and those fans who know the lore.
And then they do crap like give Elendil a daughter, invent 'Halbrand', and so on.
The Jackson films have their flaws, no two ways about it; they got Denethor wrong, for a start (but that's a choice I understand making for the sake of the movie story). "The Hobbit" movies were wrong, too little material stretched out over three movies, meaning that a ton of filler had to be inserted and invented. But there are moments there where Jackson just gets it *right*, even if he has made changes. There aren't any similar moments I can point to in "Rings of Power"; the dinner table scene between Durin and Gil-galad was one I *thought* might be something, where there is a seriousness about what Dwarves value and what Elves have made of it, and that there is some kind of diplomacy between Dwarves and Elves going on, some kind of cultural respect - but then the show ruins it by cheapening it: Durin made it all up, he only wanted a free table because Dísa has been nagging him to get a new one so he lied to con Gil-galad out of it.
Even Ralph Bakshi is looking way better by comparison. He just tried rotoscoping and other novel effects, he didn't mess about with the plot.
A forge at the top of a tower? Yes. It's meant to be Celebrimbor's workshop, but given the explosion they are indeed forging the mithril alloy there, which as you say is *dumb*.
And what about the giant forge they needed the Dwarves to build, which has been flying up at top speed (can't beat Dwarven craftsmanship) and is now a useless huge building in the courtyard? It's more bad storytelling: well yeah they don't need the industrial forge now that they won't be using every scrap of mithril the Dwarves can produce, but it's a red herring that is a waste of audience attention, and more of the way they introduce and then dump plot elements for convenience.
I admit I'd missed the Bough of Return till you'd mentioned it in an earlier comment.
I'm not too bothered by invented characters if they're not disruptive to the story. (The effortful demographic box checking can be obtrusive, but it's the style of the time.) Inventing interstitial stories isn't necessarily a bad thing for an adaptation, and something like Elendil having a daughter doesn't throw things out of whack the way, e.g., Thingol having a son and heir would unbalance the story of Beren and Luthien.
Especially if her early inclination towards the King's Men means that she's not going to outlive Numenor, which wouldn't surprise me.
Likewise, Arondir and Bronwyn. We know there were elf-mortal romances other than the three big ones, since the princes of Dol Amroth were descended from one. And that story is especially odd in the context of Tolkien's idea that Elves (other than Finwe) don't marry twice. The main departure from Tolkien is having the male in this one be from the higher kindred, where Tolkien always has the man marrying up. (Thingol->Melian as well as all the Eldar/Edain marriages and Finduilas's unrequited love for Turin. Arguably Eol->Aredhel also fits the pattern even though they're both Elves.)
Pharazon having a son, especially one who isn't Miriel's, is a bigger departure, But I'm willing to wait and see what they do with that.
One problem with this sort of storytelling is that the first season involves a lot of table setting. We're in the first 20% of the story, so to some extent it's like asking for brilliance in Jackson' first half of The Fellowship of the Ring. (Which gave us the ridiculous wizard battle, because when you have Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee together the last thing you want to do is just let them act at one another. But it did also give us Hobbiton looking just as Hobbiton should, to its great credit.)
I absolutely get not wanting to spend another eight hours seeing where it will go next season when they haven't won your trust. And all things being equal I'd prefer a closer adaptation rather than an "inspired by" story. I'm still curious enough for now. Though a two-year gap is not going to help retain audience interest, or even memory of exactly what happened this season.
>nobody came out swinging about "criticism of this episode means you hate empowered black women in lead roles so you are a white supremacist". It was accepted that this was awful, and everyone moved on.
That's because it aired in 2006, when it was much harder to defend a bad story by calling your opponents racist.
Especially because in 2006 it certainly felt like there a lot of people in Fandom starting down this road.
(In fact, there were people who excessively focused on the inadequate treatment of racism as to why that episode was bad - because if the show had better interrogated its own internal racism it would have been worthwhile.)
It's very nearly so bad you should watch it, but only if you don't care about Tolkien's canon.
I don't know who half the actors are; the one guy I thought was excellent was Joseph Mawle, who plays Adar and even under the prosthetic makeup managed to out-act Morfydd 'One Expression' Clark in their scene together.
The guy who plays Elendil is Lloyd Owen, who I see is RADA trained. Then he gets told in episode seven "stand there and be emotional with the horsie". I hope to God the actors are trousering the cash with both hands, because they might as well be getting some benefit from this trainwreck.
There have been some fun memes out of it, but as anything approaching "Lord of the Rings", apart from shamelessly copying scenes and dialogue from the Jackson movies - forget it! What's even worse is that all concerned, from Bezos on down, have sworn and vowed and declared and avouched that they are YUUUGE Tolkien fans and want to be as faithful to the canon as possible and are so inspired that they start every day with a quote from the books.
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
I'm telling you, this makes Ralph Bakshi look like a genius in comparison. He may have been 60s/70s counter-culture trippin', but the worst thing he did was steal Boromir's trousers. He didn't decide to rewrite the entire freakin' lore so that Sauron was disguised as a human from 'the Southlands' and was infatuated to the point of proposing marriage to Galadriel.
No, that's not something I imagined after sustaining massive brain damage - they really went and did that.
What is the point of Elendil's fake daughter? They said they created her to "inject some female energy" into the wotsit, and their main sign of this is her bazooms. They are not the most massive of bazooms ever, but they are very noticeably bazooms, and possibly even braless bazooms, and they're about the one thing that you remember about her. The show seemed to be trying to start up a romance between her and Pharazon's fake son, but to say that this was watery would be an insult to water, which after all is a vitally necessary element.
I'm guessing Earien is there to be a viewpoint character to the King's Men and the descent of Numenorean society, which Elendil and Isildur are necessarily going to be outside of as secret and then increasingly open rebels. Pharazon is an obvious villain, but arguably someone needs to be the "normal", not initially evil Numenorean who gets caught up in the events of the Downfall through desperation and temptation and fear. I may be wrong, of course.
Yeah, but I think Cemen, Pharazon's fake son, is the guy who is/was supposed to be the 'ordinary viewpoint Númenorean who's a King's Man'.
Up until he was impressed with Earien's bazooms and was persuaded by her to go off to try to persuade his father not to support Míriel sending ships to Middle-earth to liberate the Southlands.
I have no idea what is supposed to be going on there. Earien was standing around in the square watching the whole "Elves are gonna take our jobs!" rabble-rousing, and it *seemed* like she didn't like this, but at this stage I don't know if she's pro- or anti-Faithful. She seems to be "don't go to war", her chief reason for trying to get Cemen to persuade his dad to stop the liberation fleet (all three ships), but if her opinions are any more formed than that is hard to say.
And Cemen is all over the place - first he was "heck yeah I am proud Númenorean" and supporting his dad, then he switched to bazooms and was "why get involved in someone else's war?" where Pharazon had to explain the facts of political life to him (for Númenor's gain by having a client state in Middle-earth which will enable us to have a base for trade and exploitation of resources), then he tried burning down/blowing up one ship which managed to take out two ships (so he was effective in his own way) but didn't stop the liberation fleet of three ships sailing.
Since the show can't be bothered to give us any background on who is thinking what, I have no idea what Earien's politics - if any - are, or what Cemen's are now: does he stick with Dad who is on track to be the de facto ruler of Númenor now, or does he remain loyal to bazooms, and is Earien on Pharazon's side now? What will she do after looking in the palantir?
I'm not even interested in getting that answered, since both Earien and Cemen are tissue-thin characters with no development other than "I'm Earendil's daughter" and "I'm attracted to her (for whatever reasons, probably bazooms because she has done nothing or said nothing of note yet)".
Some of them seem to be good actors, if they got anything in the damn script to work with. He's a RADA graduate, so he's got the training and the chops, and his biggest scene so far was doing some horse-whispering.
Whoever is playing Celebrimbor might as well have phoned in his lines (all six of them he's had so far) while they stuck a mannequin in a bathrobe in the corner to represent him, for all he's been given to do so far. It's particularly galling since he's the smith who crafted the rings, and that *should* have been his Big Episodes, but they knocked off the smithing in about ten minutes of the finale, so back he goes into standing around doing nothing much for the next season.
The only thing that would draw me to watch season two is if we get a lot more of Adar, who is a vaguely sympathetic character and the guy playing him is a damn good actor. However, it looks like season two is going to be "all Sauron, all the time" as our dauntless duo of showrunners develop him to be "Tony Soprano or Walter White".
I just started a substack! It's called "Eat Shit and Prosper"—gonna be talking a lot about the gut microbiome and its connection to psychiatric/neurodegenerative diseases, but also more general stuff about microbial ecology.
Some practical advice for staying healthy in an increasingly adversarial world, with a lil dose of pontification on who's really driving the bus (hint: you are the bus).
Quick question about eating shit: Is fecal transplant looking promising for people with Crohn's disease? I looked into it for a friend a few years ago, & results seemed mixed.
Looking promising! 36% of patients in full clinical remission 2 months out from a 2-dose regimen. Maybe not the miracle you'd hope to see, but it's a lot better than pretty much anything else.
More importantly, pretty much no serious adverse events, i.e. not likely to make things worse if they give it a try.
My friend has an 11 yo son who has lots of stomach aches and upsets from his Crohn's. Kid's now on -- I forget what, but some drug the docs hoped not to have to use on him. Maybe a steroid? And still with lots of stomach pain even on whatever undesirable drug it is. At my suggestion, friend asked the doc about fecal transplant, doc knew about it -- apparently down-the-hatch route is called "crapsules" -- but declined to try that at this point. Is there a down side to fecal transplant? Do docs just regard it as too iffy and weird? Are they all hypnotized by sales pitches from drug reps? What's the case against crapsules?
I know, when docs were first doing this they just mixed water and donor feces in a blender and gave it to patient as an enema. (Patients were told to BYOB, bring your own blender.) I’d try this myself in a heartbeat if I had Crohn’s.
FDA is regulating it as a drug, meaning a doctor can only do FMT as part of a registered clinical trial.
They issued an "enforcement discretion" notice allowing it to be used outside of clinical trials for C. diff, because tens of thousands of people die of that every year.
But for everything else, the current thinking is "You can wait until Rebiotix introduces the $5000 version of shit-in-a-bag/shit-in-a-pill". And you'll pay out of pocket because it'll be off-label use. Fortunately, poop is unique among drugs in that literally everybody healthy produces it once a day.
Come talk to me about "the horror" when you're watching one of your parents die of Alzheimer's, when they're hitting the cliff where the faculties start to go quicker and quicker, and there's exactly one medical procedure that's been reported to reverse the progression, and no doctor will do it for them even though it's got a better risk profile than any approved drug for their condition.
Or when your kid is practically skin and bones, and you have to try and think of the words to say that'll get him to eat a little, even though he's not faking the tears when he says the mashed potatoes makes his insides hurt, but you've tried every food, every diet, and no matter what it is, everything makes him hurt, and at the back of your mind you wonder if he's right when he says you should just let him starve to death.
Antibiotics are, of course, a powerful tool that have their place in medicine. But "overuse" is specifically using them outside of that place, and there's no reason we shouldn't come down on that as hard as possible.
Been a while since I took a close look at the stats, but IIRC 1/3-1/2 of antibiotic prescriptions are deemed unnecessary in retrospect.
Obviously few physicians prescribe an antibiotic they know is unnecessary, but "see if it helps" thinking is all too common, especially among patients. The "customer is always right" mentality is not helping with this situation.
Also: that last graph you linked....interesting that the slope doesn't actually change when penicillin is introduced. What do you think is up with that?
I can never decide if this guy is an honest broker, or feels the need to play devils advocate because the opposing viewpoint is so prevailing that he feels the need to come out with "hot takes". Certainly solar/wind have some downsides. But the language in these tweets seems kind of silly.
Yep, I haven’t seen him advocate for oil and gas, but I have seen him advocate for nuclear.
But I think advocating against solar/wind isn’t a great strategy. Similar to how anti-nuclear advocacy has resulted in increased coal power, advocating against solar/wind will result in the same, which seems bad.
If the discussion is really about solar vs nuclear, I appreciate pointing out the limitations of solar (of which baseload power is the biggest), but fossil fuel electricity is still the main problem, and should be the main focus of criticism, IMO.
I would say that the main *immediate* problem, seems to be politically symbolic decisions to shut down functioning existing power plants like the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, without giving one shred of thought to the physical repurcussions of those decisions.
Shellenberger rose quite a bit in my estimation when I learned about all his work to stop the Diablo Canyon shutdown.
In other good news on the nuclear front, GA's new nuclear plant, delayed for three DECADES, has finally loaded all the fuel into the first reactor, and will power up in a few months pending standard start-up/fuelling tests and observations.
Maybe in Germany? But the biggest change in power generation in the United States in the last 20 years has been a steep decline in coal, and a corresponding rise in natural gas. Solar/wind is still single-digit percentages and nuclear has been very stable.
Is wind still single-digit percentages? I thought that gas was about 40%, nuclear, coal, and "renewables" were each about 20%, and that within renewables, wind had passed hydro and solar is growing substantially too.
That's pretty spot on, but yes wind is at 9%. And I doubt it will get a lot larger, for the same reason hydro has been stuck where it is for decades. Both depend critically on having a certain unusual geographical situation -- either a nicely dammable river for hydro, or an unusually steady wind and lots of space for wind. The good places are already mostly used up.
It's possible someone might think of some innovation in wind turbine design that makes use in lower wind speeds plausible -- I think that has already happened once -- but places where the wind just blows all day all the time are necessarily pretty unusual -- I mean, there's a good reason we switched away from sail power in transport long ago -- and having a use factor of 5% really makes a hash out of your ROI.
Didn't hydro follow a standard sort of S curve in that growth? At least, it looks like there were several decades of stable growth in hydro, and then a slowdown, before it stalled. Wind seems to still be in the early days of stable growth, so I wouldn't expect it to stall any time soon.
Thanks for the charts! I was talking about United States (in response to a comment about United States) and it looks from this like wind is about 9% of power generation here - so still single digit percents, but not for long.
FWIW, I generally approve of advocacy that might help increase spread of nuclear power (Thorium holds promise here, but needs investment to have a chance to be implemented at scale). If pointing out limitations of renewables increases chances of adopting nuclear more widely, then I approve. I just see the most likely outcome of increased skepticism towards solar/wind as increased fossil fuels rather than nuclear, which doesn’t seem like a good trade-off
So everything that told me calories is (fat + protein + carbs) was wrong! It also seems to make beer nutrition labels extra deceptive. Why is there no row for alcohol?
I was taught (in nursing school) that calories equals carbs plus protein plus fat plus alcohol, but we don't consider it a macro because hopefully it isn't contributing a large amount of calories to your diet. It shouldn't really be considered a carb because it has a different kcal/g contribution
OTOH, I would be kinda amazed if the metabolic efficiency for sugar (sucrose) was very different between humans. Being more energy efficient is obviously a survival trait.
The strict definition of a carbohydrate is that its empirical formula is Cn(H2O)m where n and m are arbitrary integers (sucrose, for instance is C12(H2O)11). Ethanol is thus not a carbohydrate, as it has too many hydrogens (its empirical formula is C2H6O).
Is that the legal strict definition of a carbohydrate or the chemical strict definition of a carbohydrate? Chemical and legal definitions are famously different for many words, such as "organic".
Why have batteries beat out hydrogen as the go-to form of energy storage for renewables, whether in cars or for the grid? I would naively imagine that a lot of the infrastructure built for natural gas could be used/expanded to transport hydrogen, making it possible to produce hydrogen in places where renewable sources are cheap and bounteous, and then ship the hydrogen via pipes, rail, etc. to other places, just as we have done for many (most?) of our energy needs for over a century with oil and gas. I assume there are reasons for why batteries seem to be winning out thus far, but what information I am able to find with a few Google searches is either contradictory or unenlightening. Probably I just don't know enough about it to even know how to effectively search on this topic.
For transportation, batteries have the advantage that you don't need to convert energy from electricity to hydrogen and then to whatever form you want again, which requires expensive equipment on the electrolysis side and has fairly low (30%?) round-trip efficiency, and can also use already-existing infrastructure to move it to and from where it is needed.
For grid use, I don't think there are any attempts for serious day-scale battery storage, just for hour-scale storage. And batteries are pretty good in storing energy for an hour.
I've seen proposals for grid-scale battery storage using chemicals other than lithium.
Basically, lithium is really good for consumer applications, but for grid-scale storage you want cheaper materials and long-term reliability after many recharge cycles. So there's been some research into battery chemistry that works better for grid storage (I think the one I saw was aluminum-sulfur?), though it'll probably take a few years to be ready.
I'm curious why there isn't more work on making liquid fuels (eg ethanol) from water and carbon dioxide plus energy. This seems to be the ideal energy storage material, it's super energy dense and you can carry it in a bucket. Do we lack an efficient chemical pathway for doing it?
There's plenty of ways to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels from other hydrocarbon fuels, e.g. water gas used to be used a century or more ago for fuel, and there's modern "syngas" and in the last energy crisis (in the 70s) we talked a lot about coal gasification for the purpose of making so-called "clean fuels."
However I think few green aficianados would be pleased by these solutions, what they would typically want is some way to make fuel from CO2, water, and sunlight, the way plants do. That's definitely trickier. CO2 is obviously a very, very stable molecule when you live at the bottom of a lake of O2, so unwrapping the C from the eager grasp of the O takes some doing. Plants can do it because they have enzymes, which can pretty much do any organic reaction, even those that look ridiculous on paper. I think there may be some very slow progress on inorganic catalysts, and with trying to engineer enzymes to do it.
I surmise that part of the problem may be that for the plant's purposes glucose is an excellent end-point, but not so much for ours, because its material properties as a fuel aren't good. Generally we want a pretty hydrophobic fuel, like a pure hydrocarbon, or at worst an alcohol, because otherwise it tends to stick to stuff, lose water and get gummy, or absorb water and get diluted, et cetera. On the other hand, living cells like hydrophilic fuel (like sugars) because that makes it super easy to transport and store.
Garrett's answer to my query mentioned the Sabatier process. After reading a bit about it, it does sound like the primary barrier is prices of synthetic fuel have not historically been competitive with naturally occurring hydrocarbons. Perhaps the elevated fuel prices in Europe will spur more innovation in that area, driving down prices.
>produce hydrogen in places where renewable sources are cheap and bounteous, and then ship the hydrogen via pipes, rail, etc. to other places
You could do this (though not with natural gas pipes, for reasons others have noted), but it would be less efficient than simply using high-voltage power lines, because electrolysis and fuel cells both have significant inefficiencies.
Natural gas is piped places because we don't make it using electricity; we dig it out of the ground.
As Garret said, basically none of the natural gas infrastructure is suitable for hydrogen.
In addition, you would need to manufacture a ton of new infra anyway since the current grid is largely not powered by natural gas either, and neither are cars.
On the other hand, batteries are fully compatible and modular (give or take various integration problems) with the existing electrical grid. You can plug your hybrid car into standard outlets in your garage.
The dominant form today is actually pumped hydropower, which is surprisingly efficient and very mature, but difficult to build out at scale. Li-ion batters are much easier to just build where you need them. Every other form of storage is either in its infancy or has major drawbacks:
Lead-acid batteries: require careful management to extend their lifetimes.
Isn't hydrogen difficult to store, because hydrogen atoms are so small? Also I assume that most people just go "Hindenburg disaster!" when they hear "hydrogen."
For use in homes or cars, batteries directly produce electricity which can just plug into existing infrastructure. Hydrogen gas would require some additional infrastructure to convert to electricity. For grid-scale storage, I'm not sure.
Hydrogen is much more difficult to store as the atoms are just so small that they easily escape and need a lot of pressure. Similarly the efficiency of converting energy into hydrogen is relatively low compared to batteries, i.e. you lose a lot of energy by converting forth and back
As far as storage goes - if you're only storing energy overnight, batteries have much lower energy loss than hydrogen. If you're storing energy for weeks or months ... the arguments are less clear. I'm guessing it's just inertia and "economic incentives" that favor that inertia.
Putting hydrogen in passenger automobiles is a terrible idea for lots of reasons. Hydrogen is difficult to store, difficult to transport, and explosive. Building out an entire network to distribute it (so even stupid people can safely use it) is a fool's errand.
Diesel's the only common automotive fuel that isn't a potential flammable gas; both petrol (a.k.a. gasoline) and LPG are capable of explosion, but nonetheless these are pretty common and safe.
1. Hydrogen is a very small molecule, which means that it leaks through pipe walls and seals fairly easily. On a small scale this isn't a big deal, but on a large scale you are going lose a lot of your energy storage.
2. Hydrogen will combine with materials used to create most existing pipe infrastructure, rendering them extremely brittle.
3. Hydrogen isn't a liquid at anything near STP. This means you need to keep it under significant pressure or cryogenic temperatures. Doing either of these requires significant energy input and means that your fueling stations need to have specialty equipment.
None of these is especially difficult to overcome, but it is substantially more expensive to do so. If you want to use the existing natural gas infrastructure you are better off looking at the Sabatier process to convert your hydrogen and available carbon dioxide into "natural" gas which can use the existing infrastructure. OTOH if you just want to use hydrogen you are probably best to use it for something like long-haul trucking where using specialty refueling stations and equipment is more reasonable.
Thanks, that answers my question about why hydrogen is not a viable alternative to batteries. Reading a bit about the Sabatier process was very helpful. I now wonder why synthetic hydrocarbons haven't taken off more than they have thus far, as they do seem like a clearcut case of alternatives that could use existing infrastructure. Perhaps the elevated fuel prices in Europe will spur more innovation in that space.
Also, hydrogen is much more flammable than pretty much anything else you'd consider using as a fuel. But the flames are pretty much invisible in daylight. Which, coupled with "leaks through pipe walls and seals fairly easily", is a recipe for random horrible death. Hydrogen systems are best left to trained professionals, which is a serious limitation for consumer-facing applications.
Long-haul trucking, presumably we can get the truckers and their mechanics properly trained if we want to go that route.
Yes, now Hondurans are free to wallow in their democratic peace and violence indefinitely. I'm sure that promising left-wing candidate in the next election is the real solution to all their problems though.
I’ve been reading lots of books about outer space with my kids (N.B.: if you’re wondering whether you want to have kids, it’s worth it just to read books about outer space with them). One of the things they’re super interested in are the gas giants in our solar system.
Can any experts out there explain what the hell is up with, like, Jupiter? It really has no solid substance on it? If you had a super powered space suit and entered Jupiter’s atmosphere, would you just keep falling through it until you hit the core and then just bob around? How is there a center of gravity without solid matter? I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it.
In the same vein: my boys love to talk about what it’d be like to visit each planet and the various moons. Does anyone know any place to find a good description of what that would be like? The closest I ever found was a fun XKCD description of what would happen if you tried to fly a plane on each planet (https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/), but that’s a frustratingly limited scenario.
Holy shit! You guys are amazing. We’ll be reading these posts / watching these videos for weeks to come. My boys are going to love this. Thank you all so much!
It depends a little on what you mean by "solid." If you just mean something about as dense as ordinary familiar solids, like wood, glass, rocks you'd find lying around on the ground, then that would happen when you got ~25% of the way to Jupiter's center. About halfway down it's about as dense as ordinary metals like iron or copper, and by the time you get to within 20% of the core it's reached the densest substances we know on the surface of the Earth, like gold or iridium.
But physicists normally define a "solid" (with certain subtle exceptions related to glasses) as a substance in which the atoms or molecules form a regular crystalline array, which makes it much more resistant to twisting force than an equally dense liquid or solid. In that sense, it's less clear whether there's big regions of crystalline solid in Jupiter -- the problem being it's mostly made of H2 and He, neither of which form crystals easily[1], except at very low temperatures (the center of Jupiter may be ~40,000K) and very high pressures, basically because H2 molecules and He atoms exert essentially no force on each other unless they're actually touching, and when they do touch they act like very hard, very rigid, but very slick little balls that can't push into each other but can slide around each other easily. Makes holding a crystal of H2 or He together like trying to hold a tower of polished glass marbles together -- you'd need huge pressure from all sides.
We don't know how much of the heavier elements are down in the core of Jupiter (because it's hard to get samples back ha ha), and we don't know that much about the behavior of H2 at extremely high pressures. A lot of clever work has been done with diamond anvil cells, but it's hard to characterize the material properties of the micrograms or less of material you can fit in there. The current fashionable thought is that H2 becomes a metal at sufficiently high pressures, and this might be what's going on inside Jupiter, it might have a giant layer of H metal, currents flowing through which may explain its gargantuan magnetic field.
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[1] It's possible that He doesn't solidify at 1atm even at 0K, due to quantum effects.
I just realized that I typed "[only watch S1]". Ooops. I meant to write that I had only watched S1 myself and so couldn't speak the the quality of the other seasons.
Well depends on your defintion of "solid". The presures and temperatures get very high, so you get progressively more and more dense liquid/gas that eventually stops being like anything you would be used to.
"If you had a super powered space suit and entered Jupiter’s atmosphere, would you just keep falling through it until you hit the core and then just bob around? "
No you would fall until you hit the zone where you were neutrally bouyant. Where the graviational pull is equalized by your bouyancy. Humans aren't very dense.
"How is there a center of gravity without solid matter?"
Gravity for such a large thing is VERY strong. All the stuff is ever so slightly pulling on all the other stuff, but there is just a TON of stuff. If fact this is easier without solids, as the shape is more elastic and the natural shape of such an object is a sphere (well and ellipsoid sphere because it is rotating so the "waist"/equator swells due to angular momentum.
In fact it is easier to get a liquid/gas/plamsa into a sphere than a solid as the solid wants to retain its shape more. The earth isn't a sphere because the solids that make it up are a sphere. The solids just a dozen kilometers down are like toothpaste, and deeper they get even more fluid.
"Does anyone know any place to find a good description of what that would be like? "
I am positive you could find something like this for some/all planets on Youtube. Youtube has GREAT astronomy content.
Think about the Sun. That REALLY has nothing solid. If you fell in and didn't mind the heat, you'd keep falling (being compressed under pressure) until you hit the core.
To answer the first person's question, gravity doesn't depend on a solid surface. The Earth's atmosphere doesn't affect Earth's gravity much, but that's because there is not much of it compared to the Earth. It still has a gravitational pull.
No you would fall until you hit the zone where you were neutrally bouyant. Where the graviational pull is equalized by your bouyancy. Humans aren't very dense.
It's actually more likely you'll hit a "sea" of something denser and just float ontop of that. Kind of like Earth except it probably won't be sea water. And you might have already sunk through a layer or two of other liquids.
Liquids don't compress well so it's unlikely that there will be a full gradient of density by the time it approaches the typical human density. Though I'm assuming you'll be hitting one of the calmer regions and not one of the areas of unending storms in which you'll probably have other issues to worry about than the mixing of the layers.
"my boys love to talk about what it’d be like to visit each planet and the various moons. Does anyone know any place to find a good description of what that would be like?"
I’m also not an expert, and that matches my understanding as well. If you imagine jumping into water on earth, you sink for a bit and then stop (and probably float). The buoyant force is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid, so you sink/fall when you’re more dense than the fluid. When you’re less dense than the fluid, the buoyant force is greater than your weight, and so you’re pushed upward. You float when your density matches that of the fluid.
Not suicide so far as I'm aware, but there's research out about retirements and quitting being drastically up, and fewer successful hires in large districts (but more in small ones):
Some of the specific numbers are 45% higher retirement rate (~1 in 77 additional officers retiring), 18% higher resignation rate (~1 in 131), and 5% lower (average) hire rate (~1 in 217 fewer), but it's probably best to look at the actual link, especially the "Percent Change Between Time Periods by Agency Size" table; there's nuance in there.
Other grain of salt to consider I suppose is that the data's a bit over a year old at this point, and it's possible things have changed in that year.
"Despite suicide rates for the general population declining by 3 percent, or 1,656 people, from 2019 to 2020, according to CDC data, the rates among first responders showed moderate to no decrease from 2017 to 2020, the Ruderman study found."
I'm an Economics undergrad, due to graduate in a bit more than half a year or so. I have two questions, one about productivity, one about entering CS. (Unfortunately, I don't have people around me who can really answer these in detail-apologies if these aren't relevant for this place.)
1. I'm relatively happy with myself as far as it goes (I've figured out how to be consistently happy for multiple months, exercise etc is providing me with a higher energy budget) but it turns out that I'm really bad at working hard. I was able to 'coast' through school, and college is also not very hard, so there hasn't been a reason for me not to procrastinate. My limit on intense focus-unless I'm programming, and thus 'playing'-seems to be around 2-3 hours a day, and that mostly on very good days. Is there a way to raise that? (I've had good success with installing habits like exercise by basically making myself do it consistently for a month or so, and then using the momentum from that to keep doing it. is there an analog for increasing perseverance?)
I ask this because it really seems like this is now the blocker on me being able to do things-my current algorithm of 'do <thing> until it's interesting, then stop' isn't really working out. (Also makes it hard to start new projects which potentially could have been fun but aren't, since I think they'd be boring and never start them.)
2. While I like Economics (yes, really-I suspect it's done a fair share in making me smarter, by installing the reflex to look for problems if nothing else...) my original thing has always been CS. I don't have a CS degree though, and don't really have tangible projects, since I was mostly pulled by my curiosity when I was younger. (So I know parts of Haskell and Prolog, but barely have the equivalent of an IRC client coded...I think my laziness w.r.t. projects just stems from a lack of inherent curiosity for them though, I suspect I'd be fine in an environment that provides external structure and insentives.)
So, if I don't have a CS degree, what do I do to be hired? bootcamps? work on some actual projects? randomly email people? prep for interviews? some superset/subset of all these?
I would strongly, STRONGLY encourage you to not create input-level goals for yourself like amount-of-focus, and instead find opportunities/jobs/ways of working where you judge yourself and are judged by others on output goals.
Some of the most productive people I know only really focus 3 hours a day, because their ideal pattern of work is that the other 5 hours is necessary-but-low-value-add work (e.g., think of all the emails involved in scheduling big important workshops) or just sitting there letting their brain run a bunch of thinking in the background.
If you instead focus on input-level goals, you will find it very hard to be happy if you are a typical American overachiever college graduate, because it is always hypothetically possible to do a little more work each day than you did. This way lies burnout.
(The counterexample is someone who has a bounded keep-the-streak-going goal, like "I go to the gym for 120 minutes a week", but most professional jobs you would take don't think about business inputs that way.)
I'd say 2-3 hours a day is not terrible, I'm usually pretty happy with 3-4 hours of real work, and proud of a 6 hour work day. (For background, I work in software.)
In regards to getting a job in software, you can't really go wrong with networking. If you have just a couple small projects under your belt to demonstrate you're capable, and then befriend the right people, you can totally land a job. I have a friend that was trying to get into software, she had a degree in bio but had done a couple CS projects, and had just started in a CS program, and it was straightforward for me to organize an internship with my employer to get her in the door. She just accepted a full-time salaried position with them a couple months ago. Really the demand for tech workers is so high, if you can just demonstrate the ability to learn, your odds are good.
2-3 hours of focused work per day is actually a lot more than most employees get during the day or can sustain.
Building projects is a great way to demonstrate your skills. Or focus on programming jobs that also leverage your economics knowledge like Data Engineers or similar.
A lot of people "work hard" without producing much. 2-3 hours of intense, focused work should be exhausting, you should be beat afterwards. And it's not slacking, I don't think most people are doing 8 hours of intense, focused work because I don't see many peers with 3-4x my output.
I say, try listing relevant coursework and experience on your resume, even if it's not your degree. It can be an asset, especially if you're applying to finance-type jobs, to go for the more programming-heavy/quant jobs
When I went to my college's career fairs, most of the recruitment was geared towards the econ people by finance and trading firms. I brought my resume with; it had some CS coursework on it, like "algorithms" and "basic Python". I got asked a logic puzzle by one recruiter right at the career fair, and my experience was pretty limited. I say put it on your resume, go to career fairs, and apply places.
If you're a US citizen, you can look into work for the national security establishment: treasury/finance type jobs and economic analysis. But I knew someone in physics who applied for data science analytics type positions in this field, and had success. So your specific degree doesn't pigeon-hole you into just that role.
How old are you? I see myself as a fundementally "lazy" person who is prone to coasting, probably in large part due to how easy school was for me and a totally unstructured/crap childhood with few real expectations/consequences.
My "coasting" got seriously in the way of professional/academic success until ~26-27, at which point my unhappiness with my station in life exceeded my desire to coast and I started working hard more systematically and consistently. I still slack off for streches, but only to an extent that my talent can more than compensate. For instance I have a meeting in 10 minutes I should have been prepping for for the last 20, but I am good enough that my presence in the meeting will still be well above average with only 5-10 minutes of prep.
Anyway, I wouldn't see yourself as "doomed" to you current situaiton. From the outside everyone thingks I am super hard working and diligent, and I do at times where needed put in 70-80-100 weeks. But I also have weeks where there is 60 hours of work and I do 30, and then the next week I need to scramble my ass off to catch up. It does help that I have my own business, so I cannot rely on others, if I don't do work it simply doesn't get done since I am the only one at my business who can do the things I do. it can be good to setup incentives like this where the consequences of bad behavior are high. Then eventually your habits change a bit.
Tackle 1) as though your life and success depend on it, because they do There are plenty of tips to be found on the huberman lab podcast. The ones that have worked for me are - sleeping by 10pm. Working (not working out) first thing in the morning (after getting ready), cutting out all or most sources of un-earned dopamine
I recommend a bootcamp. I don't usually recommend them--however, a key factor is who you are going in, and if you're already proficient in programming, it's actually a *better* fit for you than if you weren't.
1) because you'll rapidly skill up in the skills most in demand, and 2) you'll also get decent at knowing how to present and interview to get good tech jobs.
Even if you think you don't want to work in 'those' areas, getting a year or two of exp will make it easier to pursue the niche Haskell/Prolog/whatever jobs.
I'd be wary of folks saying you can get in without a big commitment like a bootcamp; it's widely understood that getting into tech is the hardest part (the first job), and also that it's harder to get your foot in the door than it was a few years ago (i.e. when other folks did).
If you're interested in data/data science, just get in somewhere and start studying python.
If you're educated and can do Excel, you'll get hired to do analytics somewhere. If you can do Python, they will take advantage of that and you'll get promoted fast.
This is something I didn't consider. I'm not really interested in data science that much (Economics was mostly a 'best worst option' deal) but I know Python and might pick this up if other stuff doesn't work out.
Not that familiar with Excel, though, but I'm sure that can be fixed pretty easily. (I know a friend who used to do Excel and VBA in a bank and earned really well..it sounds soul-sucking but I might as well also look into that...)
I see lots of guys in the data space with this kind of "econ, meteorology, finance" background. I don't think it's intrinsically any easier than actual software engineering but there's a much simpler transition.
Like, in software engineering, it feels very binary: either you can code or you can't. In data there's lots of intermediate steps: Excel->SQL->Python/R->Software/Data Engineer. It's much easier to get your foot in the door and much easier to climb the tech stack.
You can try and build that focus to keep working on the boring bits. I need it at work for CS, as the fun part of writing the code flies by, but then adding the right tests and cleaning it up to handle dumb edge cases is boring. That's why they pay you to do work.
I might recommend trying to finish a project or two. Limit the scope up front, but then make a roadmap and try and keep at least one commit per day. That streak maintenance, number go up thing helped me stick to it. Doesn't have to be a big commit, even just tidying a bit counts, it's more that you say down and got to work.
Maybe also pick something which isn't in just for yourself? I spent some time localizing someone else's app and sharing that back upstream. This can help avoid being sloppy, as you want the code to be accepted.
My third book, Losing My Religions, has been published. It covers several topics I think will be of interest to you, and I quote Scott in it for the main philosophy chapter.
The e-book files are available for free, as I hope the book can be as helpful as possible to as many people who want to read it.
Any parents here have resources for early childhood education that actually seemed to work? A lot of things give me an extreme eyebrow raise although most of what I see from Montessori types seem practical as far as making him feel confident and competent. Is anything else out there? Is Montessori real? Son is going to be one in a few months and want to see if we can be more deliberate. Parents only please unless you also happen to be a working expert.
Edit: thanks for all the suggestions. Also as a point of clarity I am not proposing to raise my son in a Soviet style elite training program more like “hey this actually helped my kid learn to read.” My main goal is of course to give him the tools to build a happy and successful life not quiz him on the relative abundance of deuterium until the light goes out of his smile.
Big agreement with baby sign language, How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen (they have books aimed at specific age groups too, and a book about siblings, all of which are worth checking out), Janet Lansbury/RIE, and just reading a lot. Very true that they will learn how to be and behave from YOU starting NOW. I have 3 but they're still pretty little.
For school we just figured, given their parents' background, our kids would be fine academically and intelligence-ly no matter what, so we focused on the type of life experience they would have at school. For us, we went with a school that emphasizes outdoor time, working with hands, self-direction, focus, mixed ages, no tech until later grades, that kind of thing. It aligns with our values about how to spend time. This is a Montessori school, but there's a lot of variation among Montessori schools. Probably the local public school would have been fine academically and they would do fine, but the 15 minute recess and wasted time and tablets really depressed me. There's more to life than academics and they spend so much time at school that it sure counts as 'life' too.
At home we read a ton and talk about ideas often. My daughter loves the show Numberblocks and wanders around happily reciting math problems. I include them in all housework tasks and expect them to do age-appropriate chores pretty much from birth. No Soviet elites here, just bright, busy kids doing their own thing.
I have three kids. They all read well above grade level. For my oldest and youngest it just came naturally. My middle I sat with, evening after evening, as she frustratedly beat her way through the beginner books and felt herself stupid because it was hard. Through K and 1st, she tested at grade level. In the summer after 1st grade we listened to some American Girl audiobooks on a family road trip vacation. They hit just right for her, and she came home and burned through all of those books my wife could dig out from when she was a kid, and then all of the ones we could find for her. When she started the second grade she tested as being at the end of 4th grade in terms of her reading, and has stayed consistently ahead.
For whatever reason*, it took her longer, and I was very worried that my middle baby might be (gasp!) average. But she was fine, and when she was ready to read she advanced rapidly. All of which is to say that some kids are on a different calendar than normal, and it's mostly fine.
*the reason was likely moderate dyslexia, diagnosed later
I do think we sometimes discredit the idea that distribution curves exist within people as well as across people. I’m fully waiting for him to be a jock pro level athlete just to surprise me.
My biggest piece of advice would be to have expectations and require your children to meet them. People are really good at raising their behavior to the required level. Not any of this touchy feely garbage. Presumably you love and care for your kids, most people don't need advice about that these days.
What most parents struggle with is establishing that they are in charge, their word goes, and that their are consequences for not living up to expectations. You are a stand in for "the world/god" when they grow up. Except you actually care about them. So it is great for them. But you need to teach them that "the world" will punish them for laziness/stupidity/recklessness etc.
Otherwise you end up with a 15 year old who has had a great emotionally nurturing and supportive life, and has zero ability to do hard work, and zero ability to overcome challenges or obstacles.
Anyway, my relationship with my kids is great, and everyone talks about how great they are. Athletic, relatively interested in academics, polite, well behaved, socially the center of the kids in the nieghborhood. And I would put a lot of that down to me not accepting bad behavior or whining whenthey were say 2-6. Don't let them get their way by crying. Make them pick up after themselves. Hell by 7 or 8 they can start doing dishes and other small chores. If you don't like how they are are using their access to Netflix, take it away for 5 days. If you can't get them to focus about the danger of streets, give them a light cuff across the head, or an unpleasant face to face scolding. Your kids should be a little bit afraid of one of the parents and their disapproval/rebuke. You are certainly going to be a lot more measured and loving about it than the world will be.
This is so true. And such hard work. It is so much easier to just let things slide than to consistently enforce discipline.
But the clarity and consistency of discipline is also important. Actions should have clear, known consequences (positive and negative).
The legal system is just "discipline for grown-ups" and many principles of the legal system are similarly applicable to children. Principles like notice, proportionality, non-arbitrary enforcement, intent, etc.
And this is completely separate from your other task, which is making sure that your children know that they are loved and supported.
I homeschooled my daughter up through 5th grade. This site is a wonderful resource, whether you are homeschooling or not: https://www.hoagiesgifted.org
Emily Oster has some sections on this in her book Cribsheet. The biggest take away for me is that who the parents are (and if they are educated and rich basically) has such a huge impact on child outcomes that stressing about the perfect education scheme is likely wasted effort. Finding something your kid likes and enjoys is probably more important. Emily's advice has been basically, if you are asking this is probably doesn't matter for you because you are already such an involved parent (in a good way).
We are currently touring schools for our 18 mo old. Montessori, Waldorf, etc. All of them have been good. We will probably make the decision based on cost, how long the school day is, and distance to our house.
Meh see while that sort of thing is true in aggregate, I feel like among the very engaged invested upper middle class parents I know, you still see pretty disparate outcomes in child bahvior that track pretty closely on parent behavior. Granted there are some difficult chicken/egg effects, where perhaps the parents of 8 year olds who get pushed around by them a little bit had particularly bossy kids and that is how they got there.
But from my sample I would see a big overlap even among "upper middle class kids who are going to be "fine", between kids who don't face real reprecussions for their behavior, and kids who are ill behaved at say 10 or lazy/undisicplined at 15.
Just because the average in a group is 80 insetad of 50, doens't mean there aren't strategies to put them on the higher end of that average.
I think that parents need to have a stronger concept of what is and isn't malleable in their child. You're not going to change their IQ, and you're not going to change some fundamental aspects of their personality. But a lot of other stuff is up for grabs. For instance, you're not going to turn a shy child into a gregarious one, but you can equip a shy child with enough social skills to be able to comfortably navigate social situations despite their shyness. You probably can't turn a lazy child into a hardworking one, but you can equip the lazy child with enough discipline to get things done despite their natural laziness.
I had poor follow-through on a lot of methodologies. However, baby sign language can help immensely to bridge communication the gap between now and when they speak. Also reading and pointing out things in books: pictures, objects, narrating things. My kids are different in verbal ability but also the first one got a lot more of this than the second and I think there's a noticeable difference.
On modeling emotional behavior: they really record how you talk and mirror you back. I've heard my own phrases thrown at me by a 3 y.o., my same tones of frustration, etc. Which leads me to believe that how you carry yourself and behave in front of them really makes a difference.
On things they're good at: with both my kids, around age 2.5 or so, I had a light-bulb moments where I intuitively just GOT how to show them something and they just GOT me. With the older, I suddenly found that I could EXPLAIN, verbally, and she understood me (finding an object, following a direction, etc.). With the second one, I could SHOW HER, physically, how to do it, and she could just repeat it, in a way that the other one couldn't. Maybe you might have this, and maybe you might not, but they might have a learning style and it might mesh with yours and stuff might just click: but you have to keep trying.
On learning to read: my older child, who has good verbal ability, we did the phonics using just magnetic letters. We learned letters and then at some point I started introducing their sounds; at age 3 or so I started doing informal phonics, words like CAT RAT BIN etc. Then, kids being very suggestible, I said "aaaaah but sometimes the A likes to make an "Ay" sound, like if you put the secret little E here".... and did the phonics combinations with magnetic letters; just thought of word families as they came up. I tried a book, but the book required writing skills and we weren't there yet.
On music: there are programs for early musical education; if your child is singing at ~2-3, you can start "Do Re Mi", and if you find they have perfect pitch you can start some musical and rhytmic education, even piano. There's a Russian lady who has a whole methodology (but in Russian) and videos teaching her 2-yo grandkids, and there's a Catholic method called "Ward method", but there are lots of other resources.
On counting/math: I take a similar ad-hoc kind of approach -- counting, "what if you counted UP by two? HEY what is two and two?" And just casual introduction of division, multiplication, fractions, place value. If they get bored I don't push too much.
On Montessori: I think it's school-dependent, and you need to go and see if it's just overpriced daycare with overpriced "fancy" toys or if they do something useful. A friend's son went to Montessori and it seems like they definitely learn self-direction and good habits; but it might not be as a good a fit or a more social and boisterous kid. But this is hearsay.
Thanks for this and baby sign language is actually what made me curious about what is out there. My wife saw it on TikTok and I was certain it was nonsense but low and behold at only seven months he’s very good at signing milk even though it also means “breastfeed me until I fall asleep.” Wouldn’t have thought the deliberate communication capacity was there before the speech but was wrong.
I'll second the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen books. I'll also add the Whole Brain Child series as books that seem possibly useful. Perhaps the best book I've read on parents and kids is Allison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter: https://www.amazon.com/Gardener-Carpenter-Development-Relationship-Children/dp/1250132258/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=. I think what I've distilled from the decently researched parenting books I've read is essentially the following: Kids need food, shelter and love from their parents. Outside of that, your specific parenting style probably won't make too much of a difference. Connection is more important than control. Trying to exercise too much control will probably make you (and your kids) miserable while having very few benefits.
Mine are 9 and 11 now and seem to be turning out ok :-)
Montessori - found the ideas interesting (following the child etc) but very hard to do at home. John Holt, mentioned by somebody else, is interesting reading too.
Not quite 'education' in a formal sense but I found RIE (and specifically Janet Lansbury's blog) really useful - changed the type of 'toys' that I got my children at that age and still influences my parenting in lots of ways.
Again, also not education as such but I found the book How to Talk So Kids will Listen and How to Listen So Kids will Talk helpful. Too young for it at the moment, but I think it's worth reading sooner rather than later.
Think there is lots of evidence that reading to children is super-important (and lovely bonding time even with mine at their age!)
Remember that the behaviour you model as a parent is more important than anything else. If you are curious, then they will probably become curious too. If you are kind, they will probably become kind etc.
Also also remember that you need to stay sane - your moods will rub off on your children. You want to have fun with them.
But overall, I think if you are asking this question here, then you probably won't go too far wrong from an educational point of view :-)
I have five children. They (and a bunch of research) have taught me that children are just the way they are. I can't imagine a pedagogy that would have worked for all of my children. For example, only child number 4 turned out to be interested in aestetic pursuits like painting and sculpturing. So my best advice is keep it open and stay tuned to your child's interests.
"Seven Ages of Childhood" by Ella Cabot describes the various epochs of a child's development in readily accessible detail. Different ages will require different approaches; this was something that I guess I had intuited before but had never had it explained to me so straightforwardly. https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Ages-Childhood-Classic-Reprint/dp/133169972X
Haven't read his book, so just guessing: He said lots of random stuff, probably repeated the most edgy opinions he heard from other people, and got some of that right.
Okay, let me lead with the fact that I’m not about to kill myself.
That said, over the years, I occasionally have been mildly suicidal, so as a general rule I don’t keep any means in my house if I don’t have to. That said, some things you need to be a functional adult (knives for example), so for such things I usually do research on why they would be a terrible way to kill oneself.
This has been a pretty effective strategy over the years that has kept me from having to worry too much about my suicide risk.
Now I’m Type 1 diabetic, and I have insulin on me all the time. Having accidentally been severely hypoglycemic to the point of almost passing out before, it seems like a pretty effective and painless way to go. So, I need help figuring out why it would be bad means, since I’m coming up blank (standard stuff about suicide=bad isn’t helpful here, and insulin also mitigates an alarming number of those arguments).
Maybe someone snuck into your house and replaced all your insulin with itching powder. Trying to overdose will just make you scratch yourself to death.
Uh ... trigger warning? This is an explanation of why something could be bad. It will, to a certain mindset, be quite bad.
Quantum immortality may be correct. If so, then you should expect any suicide attempt to result in the most likely future in which you survive - given that the attempt was made, but failed.
So, if you imagine yourself waking up from such an attempt, what harms could the attempt have made upon your body? Brain damage is a possibility; you could wake up without the ability to talk coherently. And if quantum immortality is correct, you'll be stuck with that for a potentially very long time.
I'm aware of the "standard stuff about suicide=bad," and it's reasonably effective, but having it reiterated to me isn't helpful here, and I find that eliminating means is a fairly effective second line of defense for me that makes me feel safer.
I think that it depends on context. Usually no, but if you have to run defense, say as a prison guard, it might be worth considering ways that a prisoner might attack you.
My understanding is that this actually can be an effective treatment for certain kinds of body dysmorphia, so yes, it's an appropriate question in some contexts.
The prison guard analogy posits two "yous", which I think you should thoroughly discuss with a professional.
But would a healthcare professional allow a discussion of what's the best? way to murder someone? Beyond ethics there would be significant legal ramifications.
Removing means is an important defense to an impetuous act.
As to dysmorphia (really body integrity identity disorder) treatment that ostensibly allows what's the best way to voluntarily cut off healthy limb, I'd like to see research. Because I believe that there would be significant ethical issues.
>The prison guard analogy posits two "yous", which I think you should thoroughly discuss with a professional.
There is a reasonably common framing with mental illness, where the illness is personified and othered. IE, "Hang in there, people really do like you and want to be around you, your anxiety is lying to you."
One person on my feed used to talk about days when her head weasels were particularly difficult.
The idea, IIUI, is to separate the "real" you from the disease.
mm, probably true, but it's also not something that I'd probably choose to discuss, especially not in a public conversation where I might be worried that someone would use whatever was come up with.
You've hit upon one of the reasons that I'm posting semi-anonymously on an internet forum instead of actually asking my doctor. If you might pose harm to yourself or others, they have an obligation to report you, and it's hard to phrase "why is insulin a bad way to kill myself" in a way that I'm confident wouldn't alarm them.
Yup.
I'll try and find the reference where I heard about it, but tbh it will probably take me a little while to get around to. Once I get it, I'll post it as a reply to your comment, but let's table it until then?
I've dealt with suicidal ideation most of my life, but I've never been super close to suicide. I think you're being a little over concerned about the "if you might pose hard to yourself or others." I've talked extensively about suicidal ideation with counselors and psychiatrists, and they have never reported me. From my experience, you need to be really close to actually committing the act before they're going to do anything, and any counselor is going to be happy to talk to you about this. They likely won't want to focus on the cost/benefit analysis of different methods though, instead they're going to talk to you about the reasons in your life that you're considering this in the first place (why are all the arguments you've seen for suicide=bad so unconvincing to you, what are some arguments you might find more convincing).
I guess I'm wondering, can you imagine structuring your life in such away that suicide is a more distant threat? It seems like you're interested in your own safety. Maybe instead of letting yourself be suicidal and trying to remove all the dangers, create things to cling to. I'm no expert, but from behavioral psych, you can't simply remove behaviors and leave a void there, something else always fills the gap. Sounds like you're doing a good job removing the dangers, and creating gaps, but that's only half the battle. You need to fill yourself with something else or more dangers, often more tenacious, will come in to fill those spaces. Shrinks are pretty good at helping you build a life worth living.
Mystik, do you rationally think that your life will always be this way? I know from experience that it can feel that way, but it is entirely possible that feeling is incorrect.
I think I will occasionally be suicidal going forward in life, and I’ll probably always need insulin. But I also don’t think that I’ll always be suicidal through my life.
It's inconsistent, success is not guaranteed since it is possible you will be found and given relatively straight forward aid. However, there could be complications leaving you permanently brain damaged but not dead and placing you under more constant supervision/care. It could be thought of as an alternative method of poisoning yourself with all the flaws and failures inherent to that method.
We have a diabetic relation who lived alone and went into a diabetic coma. Someone was trying to contact her at the time via phone, and when she didn't pick up came by and found her.
She was hospitalized for several weeks, had to do rehab, could barely walk when she got home, and still uses a walker from time to time. As far and I can tell she's still incredibly weak, has pain and appetite issues, and is suffering permanent effects from that time period.
This doesn't directly answer your question but -- what about getting a service dog who will recognize a diabetic coma? I understand that if you had decided to kill yourself you could just shut the dog out of the room. But still --seems like it would be a good thing to have anyway, in case you have have an unintentional coma, and for company. And the dog would bark his head off if locked out of your room when it senses something's wrong, and that might bring people to your home. There are also little safes you can buy -- put an item inside, enter how long the safe will stay locked. You could keep all your extra insulin locked up, just have enough around for today's doses plus however much extra you might need today if your blood sugar gets too high.
The dog might be a good solution once I move to a different apartment, I'll keep it in mind. Unfortunately, I have so little insulin resistance that there's no way to keep so little insulin around that it couldn't be an issue (it just isn't sold in such small units).
For the second (and final) time, I want to signal boost excellent work being done by Phil Magness and co-authors. They try and expose left leaning academics who are tarring champions of markets and liberty like Mises. The left leaning academics use academically and intellectually dishonest techniques which readers of this blog would be no strangers to, given Scott's personal history with the NYT, but I was still surprised that even academics are being so dishonest in peer reviewed work.
Misrepresenting Mises: Quotation Editing and a Rejection of Peer Review at Cambridge University Press
I tend to get twitchy when I read descriptions like "champions of markets and liberty". I don't know who Mises is from a hole in the ground, all I've seen is complaints about the 'Mises caucus' took over some Libertarian/libertarian movement and got some local power and now it's all gone to hell (citation needed).
Plus I've just finished re-reading Robert Harris' "Cicero" trilogy and while he is not the greatest prose stylist in the world, the historical basis is fascinating enough to keep anyone reading, and it should cure readers of naive hero-worship, given all the presentation of X, Y or Z as villainous monster or heroic champion, regardless of the actual facts, but depending on the political necessity of the day.
Are "left-leaning academics" out to get this guy and those like him? Possibly. Are those guys heroic champions? Possibly. Is it political partisanship that A is on one side and B is on the other, and who you think are the heroic champions of liberty depends on which side you fall? Most likely.
Ludwig von Moses was an early 20th century economist who was a "founder" of what is known as the Austrian School. At a high-level its basically just free market stuff, but there are some specific monetary policy elements which make it different than other free market schools of thought. Mises, Hayek, and Freeman are the big three free-market economists of the 20th century. https://mises.org is the organization which tries to carry on his legacy.
Mises Caucus is a bunch of nut cases who think of themselves as libertarians but really just seem to care about gun rights and not paying taxes and being free to be jerks with little consequence. As a free market proponent and what most people would identify as libertarian, these Mises Caucus guys are very embarrassing and potentially dangerous. Their views are a more extreme version of the Tea Party (which is where many of the members got their start).
They worked very hard the past few years to gain power within the Libertarian party and took effective control over the party recently. Their views and actions are so divergent from traditional LP folks that many people have left the party and state level parties have disbanded to avoiding supporting the national party. If you are conspiratorial person it would be pretty easy to justify a theory that the Mises Caucus was funded/supported by the far right to complete obliterate the already weak Libertarian Party.
So basically Mises Caucus =/= Ludwig von Mises and Libertarian Party =/= libertarianism.
If you can't even spell "Friedman" correctly (not "Freeman") - when the man's literal son is posting in this comment thread! - then you probably shouldn't be making such bold claims about groups you dislike because it suggests you don't know the first thing about them.
The justified complaint of the Mises caucus was that the people running the Libertarian Party were watering down libertarian doctrine to appeal to the center and left. The problem is that it rather looks as though the Mises Caucus people are doing the same thing in the other direction, as when they use arguments from Hans Hoppe to make a case for immigration restrictions.
Immigration restrictions are the only thing that will stop libertarianism becoming completely irrelevant (to the extent it isn't already). How do libertarians not understand this by now? They can barely convince people of libertariansim in perhaps the most (ideologically) libertarian country in history, and yet they imagine they're going to convince hundreds of millions of foreigners to radically alter their political views. It's delusional.
>really just seem to care about gun rights and not paying taxes and being free to be jerks with little consequence.
I know you're listing these to distinguish from "good" libertarians, but the Mises Caucus is only a few years old, and those (especially the first two) have all been distinguishing traits of self-described American (right-)libertarians for well over a decade, since those describe all the libertarians I knew in high school. All you're missing is drug legalization.
(Edit: unless I've misread and you're listing these to point out that these are the *only* things they share with "real" libertarians, which makes the third item a self-burn directed at your own tribe)
You also can't really neatly separate American right-libertarianism from the Libertarian party, because without that it is quite literally just liberalism by another name[1]. The 15 years between its coinage to refer to right-liberals/ancaps and the party's formation is dwarfed by the 50 years the Libertarian party has had to to define the movement. (Not to mention the century before that where the term used associated with the left)
"You also can't really neatly separate American right-libertarianism from the Libertarian party, because without that it is quite literally just liberalism by another name[1]."
Not quite. Classical liberalism included support for broadening the franchise. Modern libertarianism doesn't include any particular position on the details of how a democracy should be run.
Beyond that, the problem is that the enemies of liberalism stole its name early in the Twentieth Century; most people now associate "liberalism" with an ideology that includes watered down democratic socialism, support for government regulation of the economy and redistribution.
We solved that problem by stealing "libertarian" from the left anarchists, who can't complain since they don't believe in property rights. But I doubt that there has been any time in the past fifty years when a majority of libertarians were part of the LP. That's why it has become common to distinguish between libertarian and Libertarian. I am a libertarian but not a Libertarian.
Fair points. And I suppose I should defer to you for definitions here. :P
I will say that my point is more about how, when accounting for how the philosophy has evolved from its classical-liberal roots, any definition of libertarianism which does not at least account for the shared influence of The Party is similar to (to use a more extreme example) a definition of "the left" which doesn't account for the influence of Marxism(-Leninism)/Sovietism.
Endorsed on the complaints about the muddying of the term "liberal", I've complained before about how it means both anything and nothing at this point.
>We solved that problem by stealing "libertarian" from the left anarchists, who can't complain since they don't believe in property rights.
Actual lol, thank you.
>I doubt that there has been any time in the past fifty years when a majority of libertarians were part of the LP.
Granted, but I think a substantial part of this has to be attributed to "the official Libertarian party for elected office" being as near an oxymoron as you can get in said context (barring actual anarchist parties). I suspect that *any* individual who enthusiastically engages with the apparatus of the state is going to have a difficult time getting majority libertarian support, without even accounting for the normal values-dissonance between political parties and their constituents.
The Mises caucus thing is actually super confusing because it's less about Mises the man than the institute named after him, which is more influenced by Mises' student Rothbard. Among popular libertarian/Austrian economics there's a divide between the people who tend to associate with the Mises Institute and those who are roughly organized around the folks at George Mason university. Very little of that divide actually has to do with Ludwig von Mises himself.
I think Austrian economics is a dead end, but I have to give kudos to mises.org for making so much material freely available (before SciHub came around to make that the norm for academic publications).
Paleolibertarians (right on culture but don't want the government imposing things, right on economics) vs neolibertarians (1990s-left on culture, right on economics), more or less?
I think it's sort of devolved to that to some degree. On a more academic level it's closer to what you might call dogmatic vs. practical libertarianism; Rothbard or early Nozick vs. Mill; Non-aggression principle absolutists vs. utilitarian libertarians. All of those are probably somewhat reductionist but you can start to see the idea. The Mises folks have also been criticized for being too close to the alt-right. That might be an understatement, though I'm trying to remain somewhat impartial in my description even though I am personally not impartial. Someone told me that they're now all-in on Russian propaganda, though I haven't bothered to check as I've been done with them for years.
Why would you think they would need to? Just because one is "uncomfortably close to the alt right" doesn't oblige one to necessarily swallow every piece of 1940s NSDAP race laws.
For a start, you could take a few minutes and read any one of the articles that I've linked to, and that would go a long way towards answering your questions
She *could*, but one of the lovely things about a site like this is that if you ask a simple question you often get a simple answer. As Deiseach did here, from Julian. No clicks or articles required.
The thing is, it's pretty annoying when someone comes here with their personal crusade. We've had much more egregious cases over the years, but the basic pattern is the same. You're asking for attention and time, but what are you offering in return? You certainly haven't done the legwork of *actually informing us*, which would be an obvious place to start if you want us to be more informed.
I'm offering you a link to a well researched and well written piece of scholarship, which in turn is trying to raise the quality of research, something we all depend on. You're of course welcome to not engage with it, but I found the uninformed preachiness of the post I was replying to uncalled for. Your mileage may vary.
Which makes you question why God isn't doing it Himself? Does He always delegate this kind of work, reserving Himself for actual miracles and saving people from themselves?
I've read plenty of research papers, just very few that deal with opinions on other people. The closest I've come to reading stuff like this is in literature reviews, which tend to take biased positions. But I've never seen anything this egregious.
The public dissatisfaction with 'trust the science' is more about the publication of dubious, or even fake, research.
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But the cachet comes from publishing something new, not in finding fault in published work (which publishers are often loath to retract).
But also note that Nancy MacLean's hit piece on John Buchanan was not peer-reviewed. If it had been, perhaps some of her slime and malquoting would have been discoverd?
I think the Slobodian and Cambridge University press example says otherwise. The peer review process there uncovered some of the problems, but they were simply ignored in favour of political point scoring
Yeah, except the other candies recommended are *also* bad for you, and doubtless have FDA warnings against over-consumption.
I love licorice but I've had to give it up since it does raise blood pressure. However, the chocolate candies recommended in its stead are also packed full of sugars (very bad!) and other agents, and consuming a ton of them instead of a ton of licorice is also frowned upon.
I would eat licorice but I never see the real stuff we had when we were kids, that was like leather. You remember, Deiseach I am sure, the long twists of it, up to 18 inches or so.
Is there a good theory on why people disagree on politics? Sometimes they can be reduced to fundamental value differences or disagreements on well defined predictions, but those are the rare cases.
Few suggestions of my own:
1. People get random influences over life that form their political opinions, so their politics draw something like a normal distribution. More realistically, stuff like social circles, environments and feedback loops would also have significant influence.
2. Or maybe it's the other way around - stuff that 99% of the people agree on won't become controversial topics, so the ones that people argue about are the ones that people naturally tend to have very different opinions of.
Neither of them feel completely satisfactory though. Does anyone have better ideas? Or maybe this is a well-researched topic already?
Some other posts here may say something similar, but I'd like to put out my own half-baked theory for folks to poke holes in. It starts with the observation that political/hot-button/culture war issues can be framed as "altruistic" vs "selfish" - e.g. abortion "Women should be able to make their own medical decisions" vs "My religion says it's a sin and everyone should obey my religion"; vegetarianism "I care about animal welfare" vs "I want to eat yummy animals", gays "People should be free to love as they wish to" vs "My religion says it's a sin and everyone should obey my religion"; gun control "People shouldn't have to get killed" vs "My cold dead hands". The framing can be flipped, e.g. abortion "I care about unborn fetuses" vs "My body, my choice". The 2nd step is to notice that evolution selects for both, "selfish" is obvious, "altruistic" needs group selection, which is somewhat controversial, but it seems obvious to me that kin altruism is evolutionarily adaptive. Since both traits are selected for, people wind up with a mix of both and conflict must follow.
Note that "selfish" tends to have negative connotations - almost every religion/ethical system deprecates "selfish" (2 exceptions I can think of are Ayn Randism and The Church Of Satan). But these negative connotations are human judgements, evolution doesn't judge.
I'd suggest a couple of things. First, people disagree because they disagree. Just in general, people think different stuff. There's a sense in which it's a mistake to seek an explanation for something that happens naturally.
Second, funnily enough, we disagree about politics because we're getting better at living peacefully with one another. Think of the things that people used to disagree about, that aren't nearly so salient any more. Religion is a biggie: I think the relative lack of religious wars and religious strife around the world at the moment is actually a real triumph. Think about how much Catholics and protestants used to divide up towns within living memory in the USA. But those kinds of divisions have faded, not because people agree more on how to worship god, but because we have very consciously taught children not to fight over those things.
Similarly, stuff like local pride and taste in music. Remember them censoring Elvis's dancing on TV? Real censorship because of a style of music. And stereotypically, parents complaining about the "noise" that their teenagers listen to. We seem to do that less now. Football clubs in England would have literal regular brawls with supporters of a club from a different part of London back in the 1970s. That seems to happen a bit less now. And again, I don't think it's because people aren't interested in their local area or their sports teams any more. They've just been taught that you can't turn those attachments into strife.
So what's left? Politics. We can't teach people not to argue about politics because politics is an inherently argumentative process. So that's where a lot of people's argumentative energy has gone.
Broadly, I think the most important divergences are differences in experiences.
If you're in a right-wing community, normal is right-wing, and people with an axe to grind with the community end up or present as left-wing. If you're in an left-wing community, normal is left-wing, and people with an axe to grind with the community end up or present as right-wing. But people with an axe to grind are not representative of people in general, and any given person's personal experiences are shaped to a significant extent by their more local political forces. So, to begin with, when left-wing people talk about right-wing people, they're really talking about right-wing-people-in-left-wing-enclaves, who are *not actually the same as right-wing people*. Likewise, when right-wing people talk about left-wing people, they are talking about left-wing-people-in-right-wing-enclaves.
So that's one kind of experience.
Another is that, in some places, whether or not your upstairs neighbor plays guitar at 4:00 AM is an important part of civil society, and in other places, your nearest neighbor can fire off cannons without disturbing you. I think a lot of the harshest disagreements in modern society come down to forcing other people to abide by rules that make no sense where they live, or for structuring society and our collective resources in a way which makes sense for one way of life but not another - whether or not free college sounds like a good idea depends in large part whether or not you see college as necessary to your way of life; likewise, whether or not open borders sound like a good idea depends in large part on whether or not you think your salary is globally competitive. Whether or not you want minimum wages or stronger unions depends on whether or not you see employment as a rare and valuable opportunity, or a constant exploitative temptation.
I think the best argument I ever heard for (2) was from video essay " How to Radicalize a Normie"[1], in the context of how the term "political" is used in internet forum culture:
>The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with, ”but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.
This sort of definition also goes a long way in explaining the phenomenon where certain people will label any representation of someone from outside their privileged/normative identity as "political"[2]
> Nobody, other than the usual lizardman constant, is bothered by "representation" per se.
Sure. Nobody holds the low status position "X" on the objective question. Everybody just hold position "Ephemism of X" on the meta-question which is conviniently functionally undistinguishable from "X" on objective question and isn't associated with low status. The fact that the meta question wouldn't even arise if everyone agreed on the objective question is also conviniently omitted from the discourse.
I mean, I think the objection here is that when they look at the current media landscape and conclude the problem is not -
"profit focused corporations are not great stewards of franchises, because their incentives lead them to greenlight and churn out as many low-quality sequels and remakes as possible because they'll sell tickets no matter how mediocre they are",
- but rather -
"allowing people who want diversity to make movies is bad"
-it's fair to say that they're a little biased on the object-level question. Especially when the most meme-ably bad movie of the year, Morbius, had a white male lead.
The problem with the black Little Mermaid isn't that she's black, it's that Disney's live action remakes are mediocre cash grabs that forsake the expressiveness you get from animation.
Now I will grant that "corporate wokism is just a marketing gimmick" is a totally valid position, but the question is why said lizardperson-believers are always so fixated on and offended by this particular marketing gimmick.
The problem is that diversity is both the justification for making the low quality sequel / remake and the shield for why the low quality sequel / remake is beyond criticism. This is why we complain so much about the diversity gimmick.
If you were to have gone to a producer and say "I want to do a Scooby-Doo spin-off without the title character", you'd have been laughed out of the room before you could finish your pitch. Then some D-list celeb added "Shaggy'll be an African-American, Velma will be Asian, Daphne will be Latinx, and Fred, well, since we're out of options, we'll just make him a moron to show what we think of white males" and the show got made. And it's to the point where artists doing fan art of the original series are being harassed for not adapting to the new diverse cast.
Allowing people that care about tallying diversity points more than producing good entertainment to make entertainment is a losing proposition for people that want entertainment. It's not impossible to combine diversity and entertainment, but it's not easy, and the pushback to those complaining about the poor quality of diverse entertainment we're getting makes it harder.
Allowing people that care more about money than producing good entertainment to make entertainment is also a losing proposition, but it's one that is inherently self-limiting. We complain about bad entertainment regardless of the cause, but when we complain about entertainment that's bad because those associated with it are relying on the diversity gimmick, we get pushback, and pushback that is riddled with inconsistencies and logical fallacies.
>Unironically correct. Regardless of how good their politics may or may not be that person _does_ have an agenda, and having an agenda _is_ ruining a community, and therefore that person should be ejected from the community if they can't keep it in their pants.
Ergo, anyone who complains about lack of free speech and wants to create stronger free speech norms should be removed from twitter, since that's an agenda. Also anyone who complains about trans people, and tries to argue we shouldn't let minors get whatever surgeries they want, because that's also an agenda. Definitely anyone who has anything to do with digital assets or currency, agendas galore. Also anyone [...]
Come on Treb. That wasn't even close to a well-reasoned first-principles position. You're just blindly doing tribe signaling. I expect better from you when trolling my comments. 4/10
ACX is, though, and the two of us are still here :P
I think the problem you're trying to get at is "don't start flame wars/re-ignite bitter arguments", specifically in a way that violates community norms. The problem isn't having an agenda *per se*, it's flaunting it in a way that's going to start strife in a community. Which ultimately comes back to "things on which the community disagrees".
In your gaming shop example, if you imagine a shop frequented by trans youths with pride flags on the window, said person would likely get the reaction "it's fine, now take out your damn chaos marines", with about the same tone as if they wouldn't shut up about the latest marvel movie or about how Necron Soulslurpers are overpowered and you can't believe Games Workshop released them.
Hacker news is a good example of this - you're allowed to discuss politics when it's relevant, but if you get into a flame war or post obvious flame bait, whether about gender politics or vim-vs-emacs, you get rate-limited.
"Unironically correct. Regardless of how good their politics may or may not be that person _does_ have an agenda, and having an agenda _is_ ruining a community, and therefore that person should be ejected from the community if they can't keep it in their pants."
You see the obvious counter to this, though: having a norm where the reformist is discouraged from critiquing some element of the status quo for the sake of the general good humour just cedes the political ground to whatever the local default is. Someone with an agenda still wins, now it just happens to be whoever got to the community first, established said default, and does not have to talk about their 'politics'.
Surely, at least sometimes, you've been the one to upset the apple cart with a minority opinion?
"It's childish and entitled to assume that every space one travels through must stroke one's political erogenous zones. Part of being a decent human being is being able to get along with people who are different from you."
I mostly agree with this. I just don't see it as favouring the incumbent ideology over the incoming ideology in any way. If anything, the opinion as stated seems to serve my argument.
"This assumes incorrectly that everybody is only doing stuff to push their politics, but even if in this case they had a deliberate culture they wanted to create -- are they somehow not entitled to have their own place? Is every knee required to bend?"
Well, the assumption is your original assumption. The interloper probably isn't exclusively a doorstep proselytiser either, they're in the community to do other stuff. But sure, if the safe space is deliberately created, like a LGBTQ+ Marksmanship Range or a Christian Dad Literary Club, and the knee is already bent a certain way, then I can see the reasoning. If the community is something like a general fandom, where the default is not honestly claimed but instead tacitly assumed by one group or another, then not so much.
"I have, yes. And because I'm a decent human being, I recognized when trying to evangelize my opinions was inappropriate, and was able to keep it in my pants."
I'm content to take your word for it, though I will admit it's a little difficult to believe it never left your pants at all, even just to test the waters.
Obviously, this takes place in the context of a certain political paradigm, but if everybody in the US were suddenly born with the exact same genes that affect political views, we should expect a dramatic decline in political views diversity in the US.
Things were so much simpler in the early 1990’s when a local casino could put up a billboard saying “Come in a Democrat and leave a Republican!” and everyone got the joke.
Incidentally, in a preview of cancel culture they were forced to take it down. So I guess not all snowflakes are on the left.
Things have gotten ever so much more complicated in the interim.
I've thought a lot about this question, and based on my observations over the years, I think it mainly boils down to the fact that people who disagree with me are evil.
I once argued with someone down to the fundamentals, where we realized he was ok with X on principle, and I wasn't, and we knew we weren't going to agree. How those preconceptions were formed? Maybe it was upbringing, may it's genetics, maybe both, who knows.
I know that certain books that I read really resonated with me, and some disgusted me viscerally, even at a pretty young age; and the same goes for people who hate those same books. So who knows.
There are arguments about facts, definitions and values. And there are meta-arguments about epistemology, ethics status games and all kind of other stuff which in the end are as well either about facts, or definitions or values. Interestingly, in my experience, much more are about facts than it seems at the first glance. The problem, however, that all of these three types of disagreements are mixed and confused with each other, due to people being bad at separating between nominative and descriptive reasoning and the nature of the memetic landscape.
Modern political disagreement isn't just an argument between two people, it's a memetic competition between highly optimized narratives. Both narratives have great, detailed, making total sense from inside, explanations, why your opponents are evil/crazy/stupid and you are good and right. How it's useless to even try to communicate with these crazy people, that only ridiculing and oppressing them can work, that it's definetely what your opponents are already doing anyway and that's the only reason why their ridiculous views are so widespreaded. There are also huge amount of cherrypicked examples, explanations why every apparent attempt of your opponent to argue in a good faith is actually a trick and a trap that will score them political points and what are the best way to trap them likewise, self reinforcing explotation of toxoplazma of rage dynamics and so on.
I like that expression, once you put it that way, it no longer feels strange that politics is way more controversial than other equally difficult subjects.
There are lots of explanations, some of which are good. Some is explained by differences in values and priorities. Some is explained by differing expectations of the effects of policy choices. Some is explained by naked self-interest, where different people have different interests.
I think most, though, is explained by tribalism. In the contemporary US, at least, nearly all the population is split into "red" and "blue" tribes, and most people accept their "tribe's" positions on most issues, because the people they identify with also accept these positions. I came across this explanation many years ago, which gives strong reasoning for this conclusion (I can now find it only on the Wayback Machine):
I don't know why you think value differences are rare; the people who can't define their core values still have a nebulous concept of them. That and tribalism account for most of it.
But looks like no one's mentioned personal power yet. There are the "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" people, who see a path to power from sowing discord and will do what they can to maximize it. Even in a world where everyone believes exactly the same things, people will always rally against the current leader because they want to be the current leader, and people will listen to them because of tribalism.
I think than Politics is the Mind-Killer because while our ancestral environment may have prepared us to be halfway decent Bayesians when hunting prey or whatever, in tribal politics calm reasoning was probably not a survival trait. These days, politics is mostly not a life-or-death thing any more, but in ancestral societies, supporting an idea which 80% of your fellow tribespersons abhorred would have bad consequences rather quickly.
John Nerst had an interesting post (https://everythingstudies.com/2022/05/24/the-political-is-personal/) about how people form political opinions by extrapolating from their own psychology, and often fail to realize that other peoples' minds work differently from their own. His own summary of the idea:
"We assume 1) that our experience of how our mind works is correct and 2) that other minds work the same way. This of course influences our attitudes on how to live life, and further extends to our beliefs about how society works and thus our political and moral views. So these are, ultimately, downstream of personal psychological quirks."
I don't think this explains all of political disagreement, but I think it undeniably forms a part.
"Sometimes they can be reduced to fundamental value differences or disagreements on well defined predictions, but those are the rare cases."
Are they the rare cases? They seem to me to be exactly this, philosophical differences put into practice. You and I can be presented with the exact same set of circumstances, facts, and feasible methods, but if I want to optimise for equality while you want to optimise for individual freedom - and someone else for prosperity, and so on - we'll end up in discord.
Tangentially, one of the more admirable aspects of the EA project (speaking as a distant and far from clued-in observer) is the attempt to find, quantify, and target relatively apolitical good that almost everyone can agree on. Pandemic prevention, malaria nets, vitamins, longer, higher-quality lives. Concern over AI risk always comes across as the one thing that doesn't look like the others.
"They seem to me to be exactly this, philosophical differences put into practice. You and I can be presented with the exact same set of circumstances, facts, and feasible methods, but if I want to optimise for equality while you want to optimise for individual freedom - and someone else for prosperity, and so on - we'll end up in discord."
I've heard this argument for years, and it hasn't been completely convincing to me, because I've always felt like it didn't dig far enough down.
For starters, I think we all agree that equality and individual freedom are good things to have, all other things being equal. That implies that if you're optimizing for equality and I'm optimizing for individual freedom, I can still look at your project and understand why and how it could be a thing I could want. Likewise for you, checking out my project. But if each of us could understand the good in the other's work, how can we oppose it even so? The most obvious answer is that each of us likes our own good thing more; the more subtle answer is that we are probably facing a choice between two goods at point where increasing one comes only at the expense of the other, and we've each chosen a different path of that fork.
But why did we each choose the path that we did? It wasn't a pure mental coin flip; if it were, we wouldn't defend our choices so strongly. It could be a coin flip that somehow keyed into our competitive drive, sort of like how you can divide any group of people into "team green" and "team purple" and stage a game and they'll compete, vigorously. But in those cases, everyone understands the game is contrived, and you can point that out and they'll go back to being one crowd. (Or maybe not - witness pro sports events where people get hurt in rioting.) We can't (typically) point out that our choice of optimization is contrived and go back to collaboration.
I often find it's because each of us has information the other does not, and if we compared notes, we'd maybe change our minds. That typically doesn't happen because we've each tied our reputation to our initial choice, but if we're supposedly rational, there's no reason to do that except by accident, and in that case we just note the mistake and proceed to share info. There's also cases when the information available isn't enough, and we're forced to rely on heuristics. But heuristics are themselves information; we could share them, too. What then?
When I dig *this* deep, I find that the heuristics are sort of floating atop a frothing sea of uncertainty - I'm putting 10% more certainty on one of my sources than you are, 8% more on another; or there are maybe ten different heuristics we're employing, each relying on over five factors, and those fifty factors are being processed by our subconscious faster than our conscious can track and record discretely, because they fluctuate quickly, often depending on yet more heuristics, and possibly grounding out in stuff like "I know this because it's allowed me to make small predictions hundreds of times over my life, and you only learned of it a minute ago so your confidence is necessarily near 50% only", and so on.
"I think we all agree that equality and individual freedom are good things to have, all other things being equal."
I don't think you should assume this. There's stuff like lawn maintenance laws, where individual freedom is curtailed for aesthetic uniformity. You can't optimize for both freedom and uniformity, you're tearing down one to build the other.
Equality means different things to different people.
>If I play golf against Tiger Woods, is the game fair before or after we institute a stroke handicap that allows for our vastly different skill levels?
So there are fundamentally conflicting values in play before you get to optimization.
I was talking more about the average voters. A random supporter of, say, Donald Trump, probably doesn't support him because he predicts 0.2%p higher GDP growth under Trump's presidency, it's likely more about vague nice feelings he has about him(same goes for any other politician, of course). What I'm curious is, how can we have such different vague impressions for the same people? Surely rational predictions can only diverge so far.
There’s a forthcoming book from Oliver Traldi on the Philosophy of Political Beliefs which I expect to be absolutely excellent, on this subject especially
I've seen some comments here to the effect that wokeness is ruining movies, and I wonder, granting that I'm an infrequent move-watcher.
Let's start with 90% of everything is crud. (Theodore Sturgeon's answer to generalized attacks on science fiction. Commonly misquoted as 90% of everything is crap. For those who came in late, science fiction used to be deeply unrespectable, and while there are still some holding to that view, things have changed quite a bit.)
So, if 90% of everything is crud-- and let's make it 95% of everything because production has gotten easier-- it follows that 95% of woke movies are crud. Furthermore, sequels are generally inferior to originals.
I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, a pretty woke movie, and while I'm not going to say it was the best ever, I'd say it's a solidly good movie. Engaging and varied. Embraces a comic book aesthetic with a big cuddly hug, sometimes rather subtly with slightly exaggerated acting. Some of humor is funny. (I'm a tough audience.)
IMO, I think you need to look more at the marketing than the movie. Plenty of movies have non-white actors or female leads or whatever, some of them are good, many are bad. But if all you hear about the movie is people talking about the casting (especially if this bias is from the *defenders* of the movie, that's because the movie itself doesn't have anything worth talking about and it's a bad movie.
Recent examples are the Star Wars movies 7-9, where the problem was "Mystery Box" plot and constant switching of directors, but the defenders accused anyone complaining about the travesty of sexism; Rings of Power (admittedly Tv not a movie) where the show just kind of shits on established canon and this enraged fans but the defence was to accuse detractors of racism (and this 'defence' was used *before the cast list was announced*, which really goes to show how deliberate the strategy was)
How to calculate the message of a movie: Make a list of the philosophical viewpoints expressed or demonstrated by characters in the movie. For each, add in the consequences of the characters acting on the basis of those viewpoints. Quantify those consequences as ultimately harmful or helpful to the characters. The message of the movie is pro- helpful viewpoints, anti- harmful viewpoints, or complex, in case of ties.
How to calculate the social impact of a movie: Make a list of the real people who earned money from the movie. Add to it the people who are prominently displayed as sympathetic characters. Quantify those people according to their degree of membership in groups that have faced historic discrimination at the hands of the movie's audience. Invert a person's score if they play a villain. The higher the score, the greater the woke social impact, as the movie earns money for and increases representation of historically marginalized groups.
The people asserting that woke films are always bad remind me of one of the most devastating counters in a debate I've ever seen: in the famous 1979 debate between Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark (who were angry that Monty Python's Life of Brian was blasphemous) and John Cleese and Michael Palin (who were defending it), there was the following exchange
Muggeridge: "I started off by saying that this is such a tenth-rate film that I don't believe that it would disturb anybody's faith."
Palin: "Yes, I know you started with an open mind; I realise that."
which basically ended things as far as I am concerned.
If you believe that you have sufficient objectivity and are so good at controlling for your own biases that you can assess the aesthetic and artistic value of a film or other artwork which you despise on ideological or moral grounds then I propose taking the following three steps.
1) Look around at the set of other people who believe themselves to be able to do that
2) Count what fraction of them are correct
3) Criticise the film on ideological and moral grounds, while saying "obviously I'm not the target audience, which make it hard for me to judge it artistically".
and thereby avoiding making yourself look like Muggeridge.
(Obvious exception: if the prevailing opinion among even the people who /do/ sympathise with it aesthetically is that something is junk, you can trust that).
For many people in this discussion, what you are proposing is that they simply agree to lose the argument, full-stop. Consider this dialogue:
Dave: I don't like that all movies today are made under a cultural mandate that they be pro-war. I don't like that war must always be portrayed as the correct move, that it's dictated and enforced that depictions of soldiers must fall into a range between "hero" and "pretty good guy". I don't like that there's a mandate that former soldiers are given a preference when considered for acting roles. I think it's often the case that shoehorning in pro-war stuff lessens movies - like sometimes I just want the story NOT to stop for various ham-handed pro-war stuff.
As you know, I am against war. But I'm also against bad movies, and this makes movies worse.
Bob: Oh, I gotcha. But yeah, you aren't allowed to notice the part where the war stuff is making movies worse.
Dave: I'm not?
Bob: Yeah, it's like this: lots of people like war. We've all agreed that good, polite people are allowed to talk about how they don't like war, but they aren't allowed to say a movie that has war in it is bad.
Dave: But sometime movies with war in them are bad even if the inclusion of war isn't causing it, right? They can't all be winners.
Bob: Maybe, but we've all decided you are too biased to have an opinion on them. You are completely cut out of discussion on them forever.
Dave: Are you going to stop advertising for them and saying how good they are, to prevent your own bias?
Bob: Listen, that would mean *I'd* default lose this argument, or at least we'd be tied. The rules are that we win by default here. Go team war!
Dave would be foolish to listen to Bob here, since Bob is just saying that Dave can't argue his points and should just lay down and die for the sake of a standard Bob unilaterally invented.
So say Dave says that, and points out that he's a human being and should be allowed to notice things and argue based on things he's noticed - that other people should, if they are bothered by his opinion, prove him wrong with better arguments and better evidence instead. He might hear something like this:
Bob: Listen, you are acting like this is the end of the world here. All this is, my friend, is me saying you should acknowledge your biases. A movie you think is bad is one that you might see is great if you didn't dislike it for ideological reasons. So you don't get to talk about this. I don't get why you are making this hard; movies aren't that important, and this isn't that important of a thing to talk about.
Dave: All humans are biased in this way?
Bob: Potentially, yes.
Dave: Is your side going to stop saying the movies are great, advertising for them, accusing other people of not liking it purely out of being unpatriotic traitors, etc., because movies aren't important enough to have opinions on in the face of potential bias?
Bob: No. Listen - the polite people did NOT get together and decide WE were going to lose. We decided YOU were going to lose. At this point I'm beginning to think you are being willfully obtuse just to annoy me. Obviously OUR goals here are very important and the movies are very important to those goals.
(Edited to add: a second argument I left incomplete)
Note that I'm not saying that you, Tatterdemalion, are going this far in the argument. But as soon as you say "Listen, we are going to establish situations in which some people are thought to be wrong not because of their arguments and evidence, but just because we've decided they are in some sort of category that shouldn't get to argue certain points at all", I get really uncomfortable; I'm not sure why I'd even consider agreeing to adhere to that kind of censorship standard.
***If you believe that you have sufficient objectivity and are so good at controlling for your own biases that you can assess the aesthetic and artistic value of a film or other artwork which you despise on ideological or moral grounds then I propose taking the following three steps.
1) Look around at the set of other people who believe themselves to be able to do that
2) Count what fraction of them are correct
3) Criticise the film on ideological and moral grounds, while saying "obviously I'm not the target audience, which make it hard for me to judge it artistically".
and thereby avoiding making yourself look like Muggeridge.***
He's very literally proposing that a person who find some work of art morally objectionable can't and shouldn't be able to have an opinion on them - that their bias makes them similar to Muggeridge, the villain in his example story.
Note that this is *more restrictive*, not less, than what you say here:
***The Argument is over whether movies are made bad *by* including woke themes, not merely if there can exist bad movies that happen to be woke***
In the proposed model, the idea of *why* the woke movie is bad isn't even approached. If a person dislikes wokeness, the model bans them from noticing it's bad at all, for any reason, full stop; they have to say "I'm not the target audience" and keep their thoughts on quality to themselves.
Again, this happens well before the person would get around to saying wokeness had caused the badness; they never get there at all, since they can't note the badness itself.
I agree with you, for the record, that woke movies can be good, and that unwoke movies can be bad. It's not the *only* thing happening. But I disagree to the extent you posit they are unrelated to each other; you can't optimize for both "good" and "woke" unless they are literally the same thing.
I mean, if by "woke movie" you mean "a movie which prominently features female characters and immigrant characters", then lots of movies (including universally regarded classics which have been beloved by audiences for decades) are "woke".
When someone says "this movie is woke", I take that to mean that it's a film which (explicitly or implicitly) endorses several tenets of the woke worldview e.g. "blank-slate" thinking, hostility to capitalism, a belief in the inescapable power of white supremacy and the patriarchy, and so on.
It's not hard to imagine how the film's worldview could have been "woker" than it actually is. Evelyn doesn't lead a dissatisfying life because she's discriminated against as a woman and a first-generation immigrant: she leads a dissatisfying life because of the choices she personally made, which the movie goes to great lengths to emphasise (specifically by contrasting her life with alternate branches of her life in which she made different choices which led to a more fulfilling lives). Evelyn's business isn't being unfairly audited by the IRS because it's an immigrant-run business: her business is being audited because it's a failing business with sloppily managed financial records.
I very much enjoyed the movie, loathed the woke marketing, and really hated Killmongers preachy black nationalism lines. (Also the kid sister got on my nerves as well, but that could just be me getting old.)
I thought Killmonger was an obvious villain, but I know at least one black person who had to work to see Killmonger as a villain. No blame, I think, but possibly a reminder of what can be going on emotionally.
I thought the little sister was annoying-- I didn't think she had much characterization except for an interesting smile.
I'm not convinced it made sense for Wakanda to have a stronger obligation to American blacks than to nearby African blacks, but I'll live with it for the sake of the movie.
That last part is what irritated me the most - this was the chance for Marvel to talk about Africa, this is *the* superhero for that whole continent! and they found a way to make it all about America anyway. "woke" politics is a temporary subset of a much more pervasive inability to recognise that not everywhere is America and most parts of the world have very different issues.
I never read the comic, but if I had to guess, I'd guess it got written because someone got to Lee and Kirby and said "you really need an African superhero so African readers have one", so they did, and the rest was history. And what we consequently got was "African superhero, as imagined by someone who writes American comic books".
I can understand doing this, in the same way I can understand producing a videogame shooter that doesn't force you to refill magazines by hand in order to keep your gun reloaded. If Lee and Kirby really tried to tell the story of an African superhero as it would actually occur in a world with mutants and Avengers and so on, and thus pay true respect to those cultures, it'd take them years to do the research or find someone with both comic writing skills and scholarship, and then the result would probably be too weird for their customers.
So anything like this, written between AD 1960 and 2060, probably has to be Ameri-centric. The money and moral angst simply aren't in the same place as the material.
Somewhat related to this is an irritation I had with James Cameron's Avatar movies. In the first one, Jake has to prove himself to the Na'vi, does so, and... becomes their leader??? Any species like that shouldn't turn that quickly in their perspective on a foreigner, even if he does assume a body like theirs, agree to help them fight the sky people, etc. Moreover, Neytiri's arc is defined almost completely by her relation to Jake. I don't recall a single independent thing she did in that movie. Everything was a reaction to what the humans were doing.
It'd be interesting to me if the second movie had her taking some sort of initiative, even if it's a hobby, that doesn't involve Jake. But I'm not expecting it.
It is interesting who is allowed to have emotional reactions to events and who is expected to be in control of their actions.
The above post gets to most of what annoyed me about Shuri was that she neither earned her position nor recognized her privilege. I wouldn't mind a movie (hopefully) less woke than CPT Marvel that let Shuri grow up and into her position and abilities.
The connection with America would certainly be more understandable if
I think the problem people had with Shuri (the main character's little sister) is more precisely that she was a Mary Sue - she already arrived at hero-tier competence and behaved like everyone else was a less-competent object of amusement for her.
A Mary Sue that happens to be a member of a woke-recognized minority can easily look like a woke trope, I would say. It could even have wound up there by someone trying to inject woke ideals, but Mary Sues are classically a result of wish fulfillment from the writer, and we can't always tell from the outside.
This was part of what I was getting at - the lack of gravitas on the part of the actor or the character. Granted, a young (cheap) actress isn't going to be Viola Davis or Angela Bassett. Nor are Dakota Flemings common on the ground.
I thought it was good not great. Part of that was I'd just come off watching Netflix's Luke Cage series, which went way harder on the racism and black community angles. I wouldn't put BP high on the woke scale, partly because the character's been around since 1966 and as far as I know it's a faithful adaptation. It's a superhero movie about an African superhero.
(I loved someone's tweet about Martin Freeman and Andy Sirkis, aka Bilbo and Gollum, being "the movie's Tolkien white guys".)
Luke Cage is also very grounded in NYC, instead of shoehorning American politics into a movie that could have been about somewhere else for a change, like, you know, Africa, where its set!
I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once just now just to comment on this. (It's silly fun, everyone watch it.) It's not woke at all; it's a Chinese Kung Fu movie. The only non-Chinese main character is Jamie Lee Curtis in a wig.
Probably not worth breaking down the difference, but I want to anyway.
The first major difference from the standard woke movie is that the actors are all cast for specific reasons. It's a Kung Fu movie, so the actors have to believably pull off Kung Fu. Michelle Yeoh is getting older, but she's been a Kung Fu star since at least Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. James Hong doesn't fight, but he was the villain in Big Trouble In Little China, so he's recognizably Kung Fu-adjacent. Jamie Lee Curtis is... um... famous.
The characters' race is a prominent plot point. They spend the entire movie switching between languages, they're concerned about their status as immigrants. James Hong's character can't speak English at all. Unlike the standard woke movie, you can't replace any of them with a white guy without rewriting the entire character. (They even own a laundromat; no woke movie would dare make their Chinese characters own a laundromat for fear of stereotyping.)
Michelle Yeoh's character is viewed negatively out the gate. She yells at her husband, draws attention to a Middle Eastern woman's large nose, and is rudely disapproving of her daughter's girlfriend. It's not a power fantasy character like a woke movie; you're not meant to want to be her. It's closer to a Will Smith fantasy movie, like I Robot, where the black guy is racist against the fantasy creatures. Maybe some people would count those as woke, I don't.
White folks aren't the bad guys. Jamie Lee Curtis is a villain exactly half the time, but it's a Chinese Kung Fu movie, the majority of villains are Chinese. Compare to something like The Expanse (one of the best versions of wokeness I'd say) where the main characters are all different races, but the majority of villains are white men, and the white good guys are still the most morally unsound of the bunch.
"The characters' race is a prominent plot point. They spend the entire movie switching between languages, they're concerned about their status as immigrants. James Hong's character can't speak English at all. Unlike the standard woke movie, you can't replace any of them with a white guy without rewriting the entire character. (They even own a laundromat; no woke movie would dare make their Chinese characters own a laundromat for fear of stereotyping.)"
Race being a prominent point, code-switching being on display, immigration being a prominent point. Showing a character who can't get by in English. The second half is just demonstrating a fundamental disagreement between us about what woke is: centering characters whose race is essential to who they are in their own lived experience seems to me to be exactly what woke is all about.
"centering characters whose race is essential to who they are in their own lived experience seems to be to be exactly what woke is all about."
If only it was. But take any character from The Expanse or The Boys*, and you can swap their races around without changing a word in the script. Finn from Star Wars has no racial history; he's just a guy. He and Poe could have swapped actors and you'd never know. Hell, he and Rose probably could have swapped.
I know I'd stop complaining if every woke movie was clever enough to use the family members' languages as a generational indicator. (The grandfather speaks Cantonese, the husband and wife swap between Mandarin and English, and the daughter nearly universally speaks English.)
*(Maybe the problem is I'm watching stuff on Amazon. Maybe Amazon's just egregiously bad about it. ...well, I mean they definitely are, but maybe they're worse than other shows.)
Ok, I'm not sure here. See, I think what I said about EEAO is right, but, OTOH, you're right that the new Star Wars stuff is considered pretty woke.
My first response is something like: if a movie is about intersection of gender and immigrant status with toxic family dynamics then it's woke in one way (stealing Kenny's phrasing because it's excellent), if it features various identities interacting with the story and it just doesn't mention it, then it's woke in different way.
But. Wouldn't pretty much every movie that isn't a 70s western be woke at that point? Which means it's probably the wrong answer.
And: my next thought is that woke is definitely about centering rather than ignoring identity, part of the point being that if you say something like, "I don't even see race, I just want everyone to succeed on their own merits", you're ignoring that the system in which they are supposed to succeed is the one built by and for straight white dudes, and everyone else implicitly is supposed to conform to the standards of that group. Which would mean that a movie in which any of the actors could be swapped (because their identities don't matter) shouldn't really be considered woke.
But that also seems wrong, because that would exclude the new Star Wars, which seemed to be at least trying for woke points with all of its "the force is female" stuff.
So I don't know. Maybe you could say woke done well centers identity in an organic way into its story and features a traditionally underrepresented protagonist, and woke done badly casts traditionally underrepresented protagonists and brags about it, but neglects to feature those identities in interesting or authentic ways that work for the story they're in.
So that would leave new Star Wars as bad woke because they wanted to be woke and got the diverse cast but didn't write anything woke into the characters or story, but, say, new Top Gun as not woke because even though they also had a diverse cast, they weren't going for woke and talking up how "the sky is female". The line between bad woke and not woke would just come down to what the creators were trying to accomplish.
But hell, at this point I'm not sure. Sorry for wasting your time with my maybe this maybe that. Like I said, I'm not sure exactly where I land here and didn't want to just not reply.
And that's good storytelling. But woke characters typically aren't allowed to have flaws to grow out of. If there's a flaw, they've already gotten over it before the movie starts, and they'll eventually use their history as sage advice for someone.
Captain Marvel was considered pretty woke, and while she started from a higher baseline, that's pretty much her character's arc in that movie. She starts not knowing who she is and being put in a box by her mentors, and finds her way out, growing obscenely powerful in the process.
Haven't seen Captain Marvel so can't give details, but
>She starts not knowing who she is and being put in a box by her mentors,
These aren't character flaws, these are "the world is out to chain you". Horizon: Zero Dawn is my most hated example of wokeness; Aloy is a snotty child, but the world never calls her on it, and everyone who opposes her is a paper mache "oppressor" for her to "heroically" overcome.
Evelyn in EEAaO is not that; she's emotionally cruel to the people around her, and they're hurt by it. Her ever-sympathetic husband tries to have a heartfelt talk about their divorce papers, and she tells him how much better her life was in the world where they never married.
The woman isn't "Middle Eastern". Jenny Slate is an Jewish American.
I think the "woke" angle might be that the grandfather is depicted as a repressive influence who didn't want his daughter marrying a guy unlikely to make lots of money, and his daughter also is unwilling to reveal to him that his granddaughter is a lesbian. Which is not the only lesbian relationship in the film either.
I don't know if there's an agreed upon definition of woke, but I think the one used here is racial and sexual diversity in the cast and/or the story ; less/no homophobia/racism/*phobia, or at least not by the good people. I don't think I've ever seen a movie ruined by wokeness. I've seen things that maybe can be considered woke but also happen to be bad independently of the wokeness, like Ring of Power.
However, if by definition "wokeness" is what is superficial, by definition it won't bring anything good or great into a movie. From what I understand, there is a tendency in "woke" stuff to represent any difference as neutral or positive, and have people well-adjusted to it. I think it's nice to have an example like that out there, to know that it's possible. But on the other hand, if you only have that, what about the people that struggle with their identity?
I don't want to go too much into details about personal stuff here, but I've always struggled a lot with the things that make me different from other people. To take a light example, glasses. The only thing I've ever seen with glasses is people being almost blind when they lose them. That's not the case for me at all. I can still see, but my eye has to do a little bit more work to focus. My eye because only my left eye is useful, as I have amblyopia. My eyes aren't naturally aligned, so my brain suppressed the output of one eye to not have double vision. A simple search says that it's something that affects 1% to 5% of the population, yet I've never seen it in any movies.
Glasses are a simple example, but they illustrate the problem well: whenever a character has to have some difference, he always has the precise and accepted version of that difference. Which could be considered worse than not representing the difference at all, so this way people make fewer assumptions.
I think part of the solution to that is to try to show more humanity (which probably won't be compatible with the cinema industry). Movies like A Scanner Darkly, Drive My Car, The Looming Storm, Parasite all have a cast of flawed people, but flawed in a humane way. Some flaws they can't do anything about, some they don't want to, some it's not the right situation. Sometimes things go well, sometimes they don't. Trying not to judge, while still being honest about what's happening.
My right eye is about -12 dioptres since I was a kid, my left is only about -1.5. Still, my right is somehow dominant if it can be (say if I'm reading a book, close up). My brain can blank out the output of either eye is that is best[*] - but I still retain 3D vision, so both are being registered.
[*] Of late it fills up the holes too, as I have scotomata. Starting to notice where I miss some stuff, like a spider on the ceiling that falls in the gaps and is replaced by just ceiling, and then suddenly appears when my angle of vision changes. We all have blind spots, but mine are bigger.
I was enjoying the movie, but also, I grew up middle class. If my home resembled the home of the wealthy white villains, I don't know if I would have felt diffeerntly.
I didn't say that in a movie had to be bad to be woke. I said to be woke, a movie has to preach wokeness. "Woke" is an ideology about what race means and how oppression works. It has tenets. It has a creed. E.g. "no sex is bad or deviant as long as there is consent," "sex work is Good," "minorities can't be racists," "white straight men are trash." Those are woke talking points.
Simply having nonwhite or gay characters isn't a woke thing in and of itself.
"Life of Brian" surely pissed off enough of the audience to have been banned in Aberystwyth until the female lead became the mayor there. I'm not sure if pissing people off had been a conscious effort but I'd call it a great movie.
I also really liked "Black Snake Moan" which I'd consider woke alright.
And that's an interesting point - how is wokeness different from more traditional (ha!) Counterculture? Is it really "there's not too much discussion of oppression, you are just too racist")? ('The music's not too loud, you're just too old.')
It seems to me that there's a difference between the two, but I am not well articulating it now, even in my head.
One phenomenon I've noticed in the last decade or so is fiction with a quasi-historical setting, except that all the characters have twenty first century sensibilities, except possibly some villains. It's not just one maverick ahead of their times - it's everyone. E.g. we have gay characters and everyone is OK with them.
I think this relates to another phenomenon I've seen during the same period - people who no longer appreciate books they loved in childhood, because of their casual (and historically accurate) racism, sexism, etc. They now find these books actively unpleasant to reread.
I found the first lot of 1940s-without-heterosexism (etc.) historical novels quite jarring, but I've since found I can appreciate them by thinking of them as SF - novels set in an invented society where people behave just a bit differently than in actual history. There's a long tradition of SF that tries to show what the author imagines would be a better society, often in a quasi-medieval setting - minus the rats, fleas, lice, plagues, famines, religiosity, and lordly abuse of lesser members of society - as well as minus sexism, hetero-sexism, and other woke concerns. I treat this historical fiction as similar.
More interesting, perhaps, is that I can now look at books with historical settings written in the 1960s, and find the same phenomenon, except that the improvements in the characters' attitudes were in the direction of attitudes current in the mid-twentieth century. Those changes still seem more plausible to me - I have to stop and think to notice them - because that's the decade of my childhood, so I was reading such things while forming my ideas of how the world worked, past as well as present. I doubt they were really any less creative than the changes I see in more recent writing.
To me, it's that "oh, of course it is this way, because I know what the rules are and it will be this way." If I can predict who the villain will be by the demographics of the actor, AND I can predict how cartoonishly evil they will be (e.g. extremelyracist and misogynist in addition to their other acts of evil) it's not interesting. It's like if Parks & Rec had made Ron Swanson really stupid, always wrong and incompetent (instead of making him a sympathetic character, even with libertarian views and lots of comedy around that).
It also is coupled with a complete departure from logic, from the original art form, to stick to the narrative; maybe by people who don't care about the source material and just care about the narrative, plus eye-catching graphics and sex maybe. A good example is the most recent Persuasion adaptation by Netflix: I only saw the trailer, and you can go see in online discussions that a lot of fans of the book (including woke ones) boycotting it, because it takes the modern Independent Woman type, modern wording, puts it into Regency costumes and the source material be damned. without attention to the subtlety of the original character. Yes, it could just be a bad film, but the fact that it's bad in THIS PARTICULAR WAY is emblematic of the wokeness, IMO.
Ha. It definitely has the woke elements (e.g. ahistorical diverse casting), a la Bridgerton, but that's the zeitgeist and will be in most regency films of this era.
My breaking point was the use of the term "exes", anywhere in the film.
Another example, but this one is surprisingly old, is the 1999 Mansfield Park.
I mean, any moral/political movement can still technically make great films. "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Passion of the Christ" spring to mind. But whether it's 90% crud or 98% crud is a big deal, because it matters whether 10% of movies are good or whether it's 2%.
And wokeness has one really big failing, which is that it courts controversy. Hollywood has figured out that being loved by 50% and hated by 50% drives passion and drives engagement and being ignored is so much worse than being hated. It was subtler in the past but it's now clearly part of the formula to take generic Disney products, like that Little Mermaid movie, and add in at least one "woke" element to drive controversy and online engagement. And that's bad, its bad because it's another sacrifice the artistic vision has to make to commercial interests.
I mean, there's lots of crap that ends up being way better than it has any right to be, the "Angry Birds" movie is way, way better than it has any right to be.
The core issue is that any creative project is always going to have an internal struggle between creative vision and commercial practicalities. Wokeness is an issue because it's financially all about empty controversy and politics, getting attention through heat instead of quality.
Hopefully without getting too CW, the vibe I got off "She-Hulk" was that the overwhelming majority of creative energy went into producing 2-3 "viral clips" that generated tons of hate traffic because that's financially more rewarding than a quality production. There's just this inescapable vibe that "She-Hulk" was made to be hated, at least by a significant chunk of the US. And that's a major problem when you're trying to make a creative show.
I just want to chime in here to say that I thought She-Hulk was legitimately good. (Other than the finale, which fully hulk-jump a school of sharks.)
But otherwise it was a charming little show with delightfully lower stakes and lots of lol moments. I watched it with my daughters, who every Thursday evening for the last few weeks have asked if I wanted to watch a "great lawyer show", a cute gag from the opening of the first episode.
Someone from my facebook feed said it was pretty true to the spirit of the comics, but I felt like it was a whole other level of fourth wall breaking, and while the funny asides worked for me, literally skipping over writing a finale scene didn't.
Like, have Hulk-king just die horribly, like Bruce told her would happen in the first episode, then something funny with the abomination and wrap.
"It's not 'wokeness' that pushed Disney to make those creatively bankrupt live-action remakes."
No argument here, but that doesn't mean wokeness isn't making the creatively-bankrupt live-action remakes *worse* than they otherwise would have been.
Also, arguing that "yeah well who cares if they suck, they're shovelware anyway" seems to... give up a lot of ground in the argument about whether wokism makes things suck.
Is there a substantial difference between 'Disney does X because its management is woke' and 'Disney does X because almost all the creatives (actors / writers / directors) it works with are woke?' I mean, I think you're right that "it's *creators* who would like to put more diversity in their movies", it's just that it's Disney management's choice to tolerate creators wokeness for the sake of love/hate marketing.
I have about half a draft somewhere on this very subject. The way I see it is something like this:
1. There's no fundamental reason why a movie being woke would make it bad, in and of itself. There's at the least a theoretical film which is very woke, but tells a compelling story with great actors and fine direction that ends up very enjoyable. It's entirely possible that this movie is called D2: The Mighty Ducks, for instance.
2. There an at least theoretical way in which woke movies end up being worse on average, and worse the woker they get. This is that some woke creators *define* "being good" as "being more woke". This will work for the sactimonious, but not for anyone else - every sacrifice you make (and there are many to make) in pursuit of wokeness in that situation will reduce the quality of the film.
So Everything everywhere all at once gets a pass because (as pointed out by people who have seen it, I haven't) it simply doesn't make that many concessions - it has a Chinese/Female main character, and otherwise is a movie made to be a good movie. This has been a thing at least since Mulan, and worked there too (with mulan making, it seems, even more concessions.).
Bros does not seem to get a passing grade, but most critiques I've seem that mention quality as something besides wokeness seem to agree that it falls afoul of the primary-good-is-woke pitfall here; there's (I am told) tons of places where the main character stops the plot to give big speeches about wokeness being good, and he's starting up a wokeness museum, and it's all-woke-all-the-time at the expense of story telling.
Some where in the middle are things like Star Trek: Discovery and the new Star Wars movies, in which the writers and directors were all hired partially because wokeness and given a woke mandate, would only make partial compromises for that reason, but were also hamstrung in other ways (Star Trek tried to also be gritty, which fails in the same ways and for the same reason as wokeness; the director of the Star Wars movies is not actually someone who is proven to be a great director of blockbuster films and is themselves probably a "good = woke" compromise made by other people).
3. Now consider a third situation: the scenario where a movie is woke, and the best way the creators can think of to promote it is *as a woke movie* as opposed to *as a good movie*. Recall that Everything everywhere all at once was not promoted in a particularly "this is woke way"; the creators thought it was good, told you so, and were able to get credible critics to agree with them.
I have not seen the new little mermaid movie and am unlikely to do so, but I know it's probably bad or at least stunningly mediocre; I know this because I haven't seen clips of it being good. Disney could certainly show me those clips; I saw them with, say, Moana. Instead I just know it has a black protagonist, and Disney is swearing up and down that I'm a racist if I don't watch it.
Note that while I'm pretty certain Little Mermaid will be bad, I'm much less confident it's specifically *because* it's woke. There's a possibility (a strong one) that the movie is just bad because it's bad and wokeness is being used as an excuse.
So can a movie be woke and good? Sure. It happens pretty often, even. Does wokeness lower the chances of something being good? Probably - it's something a director or studio might optimize for at the expense of making something entertaining. Does a movie being promoted as woke (Ala Bros, Girl Ghostbusters, and Black Little Mermaid) mean it's bad? Almost always.
3. I saw something of the sort with *Children of Blood and Bone*, a reasonably good fantasy novel.... but the marketing was all about it being set in Africa, as though it had no other virtues.
I might as well plug *Light from Uncommon Stars* by Ryka Oaki, a very fine fantasy/science fiction novel which is simultaneously woke and anti-social justice. It's got a lot going for it, efficiency (at 350 pages, it's got a complicated deal with the devil, an alein with a donut shop, for the info geeks, it's got a tremendous amount about violins-- making, playing, teaching...), the plot is complex and the emotions are intense.
I have to admit I liked the politics so much it was hard for me to remember to talk about what else was good about the novel.
An interesting experiment (that unfortunately I don't have time to do) would be for me to read that novel and see if I find it anywhere near as good with potentially very different personal politics.
I think that's relevant because obviously if some creators think woke=good then some viewers do as well. I consider myself sort of middle of the road on this (grain of salt: I would); there are some woke things I don't mind and some that I do. It would be interesting to see if this triggered my anti-woke armaments.
James Bond is nonsense because you don't want a spy to be a conspicuous person. It's wish fulfillment fantasy, and as I recall, Fleming knew it.
If I understand objections to a black James Bond correctly, it's that a black man doesn't work as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a lot of white men. (I don't think a *blond* James Bond looks right, so I've got my own imprinting.)
Has anyone written a story where Mr. Flashy is the distraction so Mr. Inconspicuous can do the missions?
If, as has been suggested, "James Bond" is a job filled by a succession of people, how about multiple James Bonds, each of them in the racial majority for where the mission is happening?
FWIW I also didn't think Daniel Craig looked right to be Bond - to me, the previous actors could plausibly have been different people playing the same character, but now the only way to make sense of the series is as multiple spies with "James Bond" as their codename
The Bond movies don't all need to fit into the same continuity somehow. They're inconsistent stories about a man who is some sense the same character; while things like his birth date and hair colour may change from story to story, the basics of his personality don't; you won't find a teetotal Bond or a celibate one, or one who is cowardly or disloyal, or one who is socially awkward, or one who is lower middle class, or one who is married with children, or one who isn't white.
James Bond needs to be white for the same reason that John Shaft needs to be black and Princess Leia needs to be female. The characters are already deeply established in the minds of the audience as being such, which is the only reason you want to use their name, and changing key bits of their character will cause cognitive dissonance in the audience.
You can perfectly well have a story about a Black Englishman working for MI6 doing all sorts of flashy spy stuff, just like you can have a story about e.g. an Asian-American private detective dealing with crime and corruption in Chinatown, or a heroic Space Prince leading a rebellion against an Evil Overlord with his legion of stormtroopers. You just shouldn't use the names "James Bond", "John Shaft", or "Prince Leia" for them.
What do you mean by "shouldn't"? Do you mean a practical or a moral imperative? Is your argument that if someone makes a film about a Black Englishman etc called James Bond that people will not watch and/or enjoy the film, or that they will have done something unethical?
Honestly, I think a black Bond would be fine, so long as you could get his personality and his ultimate loyalty to the Crown. In fact I have always felt a Carribean Bond would work, in part because Fleming set so much of his stuff there.
The Carribbean equivalent of Bond is called Quarrel, he's the Jamaican who helps Bond in Dr No and then again in Live and Let Die. I'd be down for a Quarrel movie.
> Has anyone written a story where Mr. Flashy is the distraction so Mr. Inconspicuous can do the missions?
Not exactly "written a story," but this is how we're running our Stars Without Number campaign. My character goes "look at me look at me look at me" (he's a parody of James Holden) while everyone else does their thing.
Disagree on James Bond. Most people who object to a black James Bond (incidentally why is it always black? Blacks are 3.5% of the population of England compared to 7.8% Asian) would be perfectly happy to see a movie about a cool black (or Asian, just saying) British spy as long as it's not James Bond. People aren't unable to identify with people of a different race, I don't see people walking out of Men in Black or Beverly Hills Cop wishing Will Smith or Eddie Murphy had been replaced with a white dude to make it more relatable.
The argument about James Bond is that James Bond is a very specific character, and that whiteness is intrinsic to that character. James Bond isn't some random middle class dude, he (like Fleming) comes from the near-aristocracy, that specific class of British society that sits just outside the upper class and occasionally just inside it. James Bond is the kind of guy who quietly has an ancestral estate in Scotland sitting in mothballs. His roots go deep, the most recent immigrants in his family tree either fought at Hastings or wore Viking helmets. You can't take away the "is ethnically British" aspect of James Bond and have him be the same character.
His roots are infrequently mentioned, but it is canonically established that his parents were a Andrew Bond and Monique Delacroix Bond. (Looking this up, I have to contradict myself about a lack of immigrant roots, his mother was definitely Swiss.) Both parents died in a mountain climbing accident in France.
The family estate, as memorably featured in a recent film, was named (spoilers!) Skyfall.
James Bond should always be set in the 50s/60s and be about the UK dealing with its fall from global superpower status through a fixation on itself as a culture leader and weilder of the soft power of espionage.
That is where it works best, You want to make a spy movie set in 2000 or 2035, make it about someone else.
Not woke at all. The daughter is lesbian, which the movie accepts per se, but the grandfather completely rejects and the mother is not sure about. They come around to love her, but that's her as an individual, not lesbianism. A woke movie would have had them accept all sexual deviation.
Did she acknowledge that the weight thing was damaging? I thought the daughter just accepted it as her mother's way of saying she cared about her. But it's not like I've memorized the film.
Not so extraordinary. My father accepted my sister's marriage to a lawyer. The point of the movie is that people can grow and learn, not that you can accept lesbianism. You could change the story to a daughter who married a lawyer without making it more or less woke.
Tangentially related: I was watching an early season of MASH recently and I was a bit surprised to find an episode where a gay soldier was portrayed as sympathetic and respectable and the character trying to rat him out to the authorities as bigoted and unreasonable. This in a show from the 70s!
Emmm. Falling Down was anti- homophobia before that became mainstream cool. In contrast, when was the last time saw a movie that did NOT endorse gay activism or defended anti gay attitudes?
There was a time when The Culture accepted 'straight is normal and homosexuality is weird and wrong.' That time has passed.
I resent it passing far less than I resent the left pretending it hasn't.
I'm going to be in a board of a local private primary school my daughter is enrolled to. The official powers are quite vaguely defined, but I suspect a lot could be done than is usually expected. The school is quite open minded, has its own research group to dictate the style and content of the education.
I know this is a very context dependent etc., But does anyone has any ideas what (not) to do? Any pointers to e.g. interesting posts/blogs/ideas of some people from this or related community?
The most important thing you can possibly do is keep dumb kids out. No, really. It sounds harsh, but nothing else will determine the quality of the education as much as the quality of your daughter's peers. You could have the optimal curriculum and teachers, but if some bright spark in the school's management decides to admit a bunch of disruptive "disadvanataged" students to provide them "opporutinty" then it's going to be for nothing.
I'll agree that you should care more about disruptive than dumb. From a policy perspective, it may be difficult to separate it, as they both are identified by low test scores more often than not.
Sure, but if you want good educational outcomes, you probably want to filter out both kinds of students from your school. Though I think in both cases, this also depends on what methods are allowed to you in running your school. If you are allowed to track by ability, having some dumber kids in the school may not cause so much trouble; if you can't do that, then you either have to lose the dumb kids or bore the smart kids. If you are allowed to discipline misbehaving kids, up to and including kicking them out of the school, then you can take more chances in admitting kids with some past behavior issues. If admitting a kid means he can never be kicked out, then you probably want to be super careful about letting anyone disruptive in.
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My mom is in France now living with a french family for 4 months already, in a small village, but her family understandably got tired and asked her to find another place till the end of month. She can't drive so going anywhere was problem, she doesn't speak the language and her English is very basic.
Can anyone help with finding another family in France? Or some other safer than Ukraine place till summer, to spend winter and spring there?
She has some permit to be in France till December and it can be prolonged after that.
Hi Sergy, are you, or rather is your mother all set?
I see there is a offer below from Schweinepriester, which I think is great!
Also, if still needed, my contacts could ask around for an accomodation in Germany, but they told me, it's better to do so only once your mother has really decided she wants to be here. That's because they say them asking around sets chain reactions in motion (people asking more people, families maybe discussing options and so on), so better to be done only if there is a clear decision.
I hope you're doing fine and things are progressing as you wish.
Hi, TM! Not set yet, but after a lot of stress and trying maybe we have one real variant in France, also from this thread. If it's not going to work, then we'll look on another country. Yes, Schweinepriester is great, I agree. Thank you for your help!
The end of the month is soon. If there will be no better solution, she can stay at my place in Germany for maximally six months. It's a bit of a mess, though.
Thank you, it would be great to have variants, six month is great. I'll try to find something in France while there still time, indeed, but thank you for your offer.
Oh that's rough. I live right at the other side of the country so I'm not in the best position to help but I can still have a look. I would definitely try to get her to a town were she has better chances to find someone who speaks English or even Ukrainian.
Thank you. If you really can take a look that would be great, at least just to have options. It was Poland first (paid by employer for couple months), then France (also recommended by employer) - and dealing with moving to another country again is hard. Employer told that they can't really help anymore, but maybe they can find something again in Poland or Romania - but that's again moving, new documents, a lot of stress. Staying in France would be much preferable but then again, beggars not choosers.
France was great in many ways, mom would never be able to visit France on her own most likely, if only reason for that wouldn't be that bad. Sad that she didn't managed to learn French in 4 months there, but it's hard in her age without teachers. Practically mute foreigner is probably less pleasant to have than the one speaking at least on some basic level.
Well, authorities told that she should find another place till the end of month. People are just tired of all that, as I understand. Thank you for the link, I'll read it, maybe there is something there. It's all very ... bureaucratic, I guess. It seems that she would need to leave. Renting is impossible, it's too expensive and she doesn't work, she's 67. Maybe there will be some variants in Poland or Romania, maybe not, well, we'll see.
I thought about this, and I think 'authorities told that she should find another place till the end of month' is probably only the authorities' lazy answer. I'm pretty sure in France, like in Germany, like formally anywhere else around the authorities *have* to provide a place for her if she can't stay where she is now. Which could be totally somewhere else in France, or could be in a gym equipped with beds, or something else quite uncomfortable, but definitely a warm place with a roof. I don't think this is the most preferable option, but I think in principle she could insist.
Edit: Oh, as I mentioned the less comfortable options, it *could* of course also be possible that they find quite a good, comfortable place or new family close by.
Also, again starting from the experiences in my country, there are many NGOs, both German and Ukrainian and mixed, that try to assist, also by providing easily accessible information on all the legal and bureaucratic etc. procedures & offer personal advice. So if you have a bit of time, I'd recommend to look for the websites and phone numbers of such organizations in Paris or other bigger cities in the area, for basic information. Or maybe for a phone number of somebody who could talk to your mum in her own language and help/give guidance with next steps. I guess there is fewer of those NGOs & groups in France than in Germany, simply because there are more Ukrainians who arrived here which triggered a need for organization, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't a relevant number of helpful organizations & websites in France as well.
I hope that there will be at least something and I hope to find better variant, sleeping in a gym would be tough for her. She's not the kind to insist but she probably should.
Not much time, trying to survive on my own too, and can be mobilized at any moment also - that adds some stress, I almost ready to volunteer sometimes to eliminate uncertainty. I am trying to find NGOs and groups but it is surprisingly hard to find and what was found so far was mostly unhelpful.
If you can ask someone (from your other answer), and it's not too hard, that would be great, thank you. I still hope to find something in France, because changing countries is stressful in many ways, dealing with bureaucracy, even well meaning, is exhausting. It was Poland first, paid by employer, and mother managed not to receive any payments in two months she was there, still unclear how - a lot of people were helping but adjusting to the country was hard. In France it was more on the family and authorities, I guess.
I doubt there are still gyms for this in France, probably even less so outside big cities, and my cursory reading of the French pages suggested, that they were used for the first two nights upon arrival, but not for long term stay. I kind of wanted to mention the possibility, but I don't think this is the most likely case.
I understand this is stressful, both for her and for you. As you mentioned before, it's also bureaucratic. That why it's usually a game changer to find sb. who both wants to help and is familiar with both the formalities and with their practical implementation. That's the reason I recommended the NGOs or other support groups, they would be the typical candidate. In my place, there are also various localized chat groups on Telegram etc. for Ukrainians & supporters, where they can at least exchange on their experiences in a specific place and how it worked for others. But I see that it can be difficult to find such a person or group.
I admit, I can't really imagine to be in your situation and I wish you all the strength & calm that you need! Well, and everything else.
I will ask, and I understand how staying in France might be preferable to her, so I also wish you much luck!
Last, Scott had a specific section for support needed in such cases somewhere under one of the last Open Threads ... I have no idea, if anybody still looks there, or if there are already concrete offers, but you might wanna have a look (if not done yet).
So they... pretty much leave that task to her by herself, who doesn't even speak French? That's quite surprising. I thought the prefecture might have a list of possible logements, and pay some rent for her.
Yes, it's a bit strange how sudden it is and I am trying to find out if there are any variants at all. But that what was told to us, that we should find another family till the end of month.
She went to doctor, he gave her an appointment to Brest for eye doctor and there were no one to drive her there, it seems that this made the family bitter a bit. Totally understandable, - they did good thing and now are punished for this, caring for a stranger, driving her to buy clothes and food, to doctors and so on, not the first time losing a day, and at some point it's too much. So they asked her to find a taxi to get there, but taxi is too expensive, 150 eur or something. It seems that she found some variant how to get there with another french person (woman her age, neighbor probably) cheaper, but now this person kinda needs to spend a day with a foreigner just out of kindness... It's surprising how there is no buses/trains nearby in that region and you depend on cars only.
I don't know how authorities deal with stuff like that in any country: it's easier to find place to live in rural places but then you have problems with reaching to hospitals, shops. Very beautiful place otherwise. Her day is mostly walking 10 k steps, making food, and trying to learn French on her own. No other Ukrainians nearby too, she only talks with people using Google Translate.
Just as TM asked, it seem to me that perhaps it might be better for her in a place/country where there are more Ukrainians around?
In the Czech republic there are quite a lot of Ukrainian refugees right now, mostly women. In my city, when I get on a tram I almost always hear some Ukrainian nowadays and there's a fairly large Ukraininan community here since a lot of Ukrainians have been working in the Czech republic since before the war. Czech is also kind of similar-ish, not quite as much as Polish but people would probably be able to understand simple phrases/requests if talked to slowly. Most importantly, like I said, there is quite a large Ukrainian community here already.
There are also a lot of volunteers who help Ukrainians, the enthusiasm is not quite as high as it was 6 months ago, but still enough that if I ask around, I think I could be able to find someone able and willing to find a place for her (ideally with a Ukrainian family who lives here given that she does not speak any foreign languages). I cannot promise it would work 100% but I could ask around.
End of October is a pretty harsh deadline though. But I could try...
I have a flat I rarely use nowadays, but the problem is I am currently selling it, people come to see the flat occasionally and I might sell it in a month for all I know.
Let me know here if you think it makes sense for me to ask around. Generally, unless there is a reason for her to stay in France, I think that Poland or the Czech republic might be a better place for your mum given that there are fairly large Ukrainian communities in those countries and from what I understand Polish seems to be very close to Ukrainian (except for the alphabet of course), so she wouldn't be as isolated as she is now.
Thank you, I would be grateful if you could ask around. Got a message from people dealing with that: "Coming back on our previous discussion. Can you please let us know what will be your solution by this Friday so we can support if there is anything to be organized?" So any variants are needed. It would be great not to change countries but it's ok to get to any other safe country too indeed, heard a lot of good about Czechia and mother spent first two months in Poland immediately after the war already, was paid by employer, and then offered France. And now it seems it is time to move again.
I'm sorry to hear it's difficult. So generally, she can live in any EU country she wants, right? Would she be able/ interested to change the country? I know some people who were active in supporting people arriving from Ukraine in Germany, and I could ask them to spread the word. No promises though!
Overall, if zumBeispiel suggested it'd be easier in Germany, I'd disagree (without knowing details about France). At the beginning, many people offered their homes, probably in the idea to provide quick help, until 'the authorities' step in. But the authorities can't do miracles ... and the lack of affordable flats / living space was a problem in many areas of Germany already before. (There are some temporary, rather basic solutions if everything else fails, I guess.) I once and a while hear about sb. looking for a new place, when the time in the first or second place runs out.
Anyway, let me know if you want me to ask sb. who can ask others ...
Maybe this is a naive question but is there some (semi-) formalized/structured way to figure out which technologies one should focus on to optimize value as an employee. I am currently finishing a CS Bachelor's and feel that I should specialize consciously, alas I have no process. Any input is welcome.
I really don't think you need to specialize at your age. In many ways you don't *have* to specialize at all to maximize your value. Learning the new technology/language/industry isn't that hard when you are doing it on the job. The harder parts are basically being a good employee: being there consistently, communicating well, listening, giving good feedback, etc. Its shocking how doing these things can set you apart from many people.
I'd suggest reading this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ if you havent already. Although the subject is salary, I think it gives a good summary on how understand and maximize your value as en employee.
My advice to young people is always to focus on figuring out your personal productivity function. Are you able to set yourself goals systematically on a weekly/monthly basis and put in the hard yards on achieving them? If yes, ignore this advice. If not, focus on it before all else.
It depends among other things on the kind of IT in which you wish to specialize, i.e. whether commercial (finance & banking is where the big bucks are, not surprisingly), or scientific and technical.
For more academic IT, one formalized/structured approach would be to check the topic areas of papers in the ArXiV Computer Science section https://arxiv.org/list/cs/recent . But I can save you the trouble by pointing out that 99% of them relate to machine learning and AI.
How well a grounding in those or related expertise would currently optimise you for commercial IT is debatable; but I think it will be increasingly useful over time in all areas of IT, especially in analyzing and extracting trends and patterns from "big data".
It looks like the Chinese have monopolised face recognition technology, because 99.99% of papers on that are by all Chinese authors! But I think agriculture will be revolutionized in the coming years by AI/robotics capable of spotting pests and diseases on and in plants, and dealing with these, without having to drown plants with indiscriminate pesticides.
In Terms of Languages mostly Java and C++, I know basic backend stuff (SQL, NoSQL, DBMS, etc), I took a course on simulating biological systems (Python, R), I know basic HTML5, CSS and Javascript but Frontend isn't something I feel confident about.
On the reader surveys the average income of readers(with jobs, not students etc.) always comes out crazy high, ~200k (!?) I think, and you quite often see people mentioning in the comments that they're a millionaire or have some prestigious sounding job.
Is this really accurate? If you're in the demographic that enjoys reading this kind of blog, can you then reasonable expect to have a well above average income?
I certainly don't. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that does about how they ended up in that position, did they plan for it, did it happen organically, their career trajectory, whether they attribute it to any specific qualities they have, general advice etc.
You also have to be careful about income data. You might see the average income is $50k and think "oh I am doing pretty well as a college graduate making $80k".
But then if you look at the data for the average income for college graduates you find it is $90k. Well now maybe you don't feel so good.
But you say, I am 26, what is the average income of college graudates who are 26? Oh it is $60k, ok I am on the good side again.
And so on. It is important to think about who you are comparing yourselves to.
I have a B.A. and make $150-300k most years. But I am 41.
At 26 I was making $35k/year, and at 33 I was making $55k/year.
As for how that happened. The TDLR is:
1) Very intelligent but shitty childhood/parenting and learned bad work habits and attitude.
2) Took stupid degree in generic public uni that would impress no one (philosophy) and would be worth little on market.
3) Had shitty jobs out of college, expected the world to notice how brilliant I was. Wasted 3-5 years and lost a great GF.
4) Stopped waiting for the world to *notice me senpai* and started excelling at jobs, and negotiating hard and switching jobs when there wasn't room for growth or my contributions weren't being fairly compensated. Worried I would be alone
5) Lucked a bit into a few things (found my wife), but also was still busting ass and working hard and growing my profile in an industry.
6) Became leading expert in a few niche areas of my industry.
7) Set up my own consulting firm and priced my services low and ate up a large swath of the market with high quality low cost offerings.
thanks, that's the kind of comment I was hoping for. Was there a specific reason your work habits improved? Also how did you find/get into areas with the potential for growth?
I was *really* bright in school. One teacher said I was the smartest kid in my HS in 35 years. I also graduated with like a ~2.3GPA because it was all too easy and I didn't take it seriously (I would skip school to sit home and read non-fiction books at times).
I did much better in college, but still took a dumb degree and blew off a few classes needlessly for F's (often took 6 or 7 classes a semester, and would just skip ones I didn't like). So I definitely had some level of work ethic, but not an effective one.
Anyway, in HS everyone thought I was going to go to MIT and become a famous scientist or something. Even my teachers. Probably why they didn't help me more than they did even though I was struggling (suicidal, skipping class constantly).
So I didn't get accepted, or only got shitty FA from the top schools I applied to. A few told me to go do two years at a local uni and then they would accept me as a Xfer if I got good grades.
In a pique of rage/betrayal/confusion I took a year off. Girl Y who I can think laps around is going to Princeton? Isn't HS/college supposed ot be about learning and academics? I am better at academics than EVERYONE, by a notcibale margin, why doesn't that matter more?
Except of course that isn't what school is about mostly. It is mostly about jumping through hoops and teaching you to be a good part of a system, and I was shitty at that.
At uni everyone seemed to think I would be a professor, and I for sure wanted that.
But once again I think they sort of made assumptions I would be fine, and so they didn't take as much of an interest in giving me good advice as they could have (several professors I am still in touch with have expressed this to me).
But once again I couldn't get a full ride to a Phd. program (which my professors assured me I deserved) so I said screw it. Philosophy was very self consciously white-male dominated at the time and I don't think my membership in that group helped me at all despite my impoverished upbringing. Which sounds shitty, but I would bet an infinite amount of money that if I had been a woman/minority I would have gotten a full ride from the programs that were flirting with me.
Anyway, so now I am ~23, with just a philosophy BA from a random public uni and a not amazing work ethic. I would take seasonal jobs grading standardized essays, live frugally, and play lots of videogames. I did that for a couple years, lose my GF (looked like Natalie Portman/Audrey Hepburn), who wanted someone with more ambition.
Then I get a job doing some other thing where they were just looking to train up smart underacheivers to impersonate lawyers/accoutants and then have the lawyers/accountants sign off on the work. I was excellent at that. Like way better than my peers....
Which got me basically nothing. When you are making $12-$15/hour (plus a ton fo overtime, so actual pay wasn't terrible) you are replaceable and the people you are dealing with don't have the tools or authority to do much for you even if you are 4X better than everyone else. Plus you are a threat. So then you just stop trying, and look for another job.
So I did this a couple times, establishing a really good level of performance somewhere, and then if they couldn't reward that (which they almost never could), taking those rave reviews and references and getting a slightly better job.
But the big thing that changed over time was just disapointment and disatisfaction with my income and life station and future, and seeing that if I didn't put in more, I wasn't going to get more. No one in an office cares if you know more about Indian history than the girl who is from India and know more statistics than the in house statistician if you are there to process paperwork. They mostly just want you to do process paperwork like a robot. The world doesn't owe you shit, and doesn't care if you are smart. So use your smarts to actually beat your peers rather than expecting to be rewarded first.
Anyway, so keep switching jobs and impressing, but don't stick around if they don't reward it. Negotiate HARD for yourself. Know your value. If they would have trouble replacing you don't be afraid to make ultimatums about compensation, but also have a new gig lined up so you can follow through with them.
I did luck out in that I randomly did stumble at one point into an area where there was a low level of established expertise, in part because the subtopic was jsut a couple years old. Stuff that was difficult, but didn't pay amazing and so doesn't attract super bright people. I was able to just blow people out of the water there, mastering things in days/weeks the few established players struggled with for months. And once I had a big enough profile as *the guy*, I just went freelance and now all the work comes to me.
TLDR: Work ethic for me came from leanring that talent isn't enough. Finding areas where there is potential for growth invovles searching the space a lot, and also I would focus on areas that are *new*.
There is much more room for growth being the 50th person working on a law that was passed 1 year ago, than the 50th person working on a law that was passed 30 years ago. In the latter case all those people ahead of you have MANY years of experience on you, and intelligence can only get you so far. In the former case intelligence and the ability to learn quickly matter a lot more.
Yeah, sadly that corroborates my suspicion that intelligence on it's own isn't worth that much.
I don't think this blog's readership is selected for initiative or grit etc. So the high average income must be a statistical artefact, like some comments said below, or it reflects a few outliers.
Some of this seems like useful advice, not sure your ex-gf looking like Natalie Portman is that relevant, is it closing time at the water whole or something ;) but thanks anyway
Intelligence isn't worth much as a fact. Applied intelligence where you use your ability to think quicker and clearer and learner faster than your peers is valued. But you need some good work product to deonstrate that.
As fo the GF comments, more just getting across why I was so broken up about it at the time. It is kind of an important point in terms of my motivation. I was ~24/25, with a dead end job, and a GF who was better (IMO) than any likely replacement had left me.
In the end it worked out and I did do better, but there were a lonelyish couple years in the middle (mostly dating people I had zero long term interest in) and that helped a lot with my motivation to work harder. Moving backwards in mate quality can be a difficult pill to swallow.
The average income is like $50k and not that hard to beat. Especially if you're a bunch of engineers with an average income in the six figure range (~120k iirc). So yeah, well above average sure. When you check median instead you find the income is below average for a bunch of engineers (probably due to age).
Never underestimate the effect of people being more willing to share a high number than a low number. If there was a reader making $35,000/year and another reader making $250,000, I am confident to say we're much more likely to get that higher report than the lower.
That's assuming people are even being accurate, let alone not just straight out lying. There's very little incentive to lie about a smaller number, but people can be silly and could easily lie about a higher number (or exaggerate, or include total compensation rather than just cash income, etc.).
> On the reader surveys the average income of readers(with jobs, not students etc.) always comes out crazy high, ~200k (!?) I think
I think the distribution of incomes is right-skewed (because it's very possible to increase your income by +9x, but not by -9x), so statistically, the mean should be larger than the median.
This is it. The median income of an employed non-student United-Statian reader was $102k (close to the median salary in the bay area at the time) compared to a mean of $210k which drops to $150k if 2 extremely high-income data points are excluded ($100M and $80M/year).
I wouldn't hold my breath for an extremely high salary. Reading the blog has a higher predictive value for being in the bay area than having >1SD salary in the area you're in (citation needed).
Most posts on refugee law are either hastily written, lightly researched posts to keep up with what's trending on Twitter, or are posted many months after interest has passed. At Willing and Able, I’m aiming for the Goldilocks zone of fresh, topical takes on refugee law and politics, backed up by research and several days of reflection and accessible to non-lawyers. Please feel free to send me related questions that you'd like me to answer, and subscribe if you'd like to receive new posts. Thanks!
I've started a "finance in India" substack called Boring Money that I hope to make paid someday. Finance writing in India that humans can actually understand is pretty much non-existent and I hope to fill that gap. I'm heavily inspired by Matt Levine, so you might find me trying to "ape" him -- but it's just me trying to find my own voice.
Are these Trump insurrection hearings, as they seem to an outsider briefly watching the TV coverage, a carefully choreographed ham-acted exercise in Democrat propaganda, timed to start just before the mid-term elections? I guess the answer would range, depending on one's outlook, between "No, the timing is pure coincidence" to "No **** sherlock"!
Given the things that caused the hearings they are not propaganda imo. Only someone who had never seen real effective propaganda could think that.
I see some of the blogs you read when I hover over your name, though, so I see why you'd perceive them that way.
Personally I'm left wing, so I think the hearings are not the key thing to fight the mid terms on. But US Democrats are to the right of the British Tories so they don't have a ton of popular policies they could campaign on with actual sincerity.
Well they have to do them before Jan 23, because Democrats are likely to lose the house majority. Republic's are definitely not going to continue to allow the committee to exist if they have the majority.
>a carefully choreographed ham-acted exercise in Democrat propaganda
Yeah basically, but also because there's not really any other way for them react. They aren't going to get criminal charges out of this (maybe for peoples action after the fact like lying to the FBI or something). So they just have to use it for political outcomes. Propaganda is a cynical, though not entirely inaccurate, way of saying it.
I certainly think the Dems are milking this for all it's worth, and it's hard not to see these hearings in context with the totally false Mueller investigation and the two impeachment attempts (both clearly driven by pure assrage over Clinton's loss), but it's worth remembering the confounder of our political process increasingly taking enormous amounts of time. I mean, stumping for the next Presidential election is basically going to start right after the midterms. It's a nightmarish mélange of media and political incentives eating all available attention. There's basically *no possible moment* anymore when a judicial proceeding like this *wouldn't* interfere with some election or other.
Some republicans voted for impeachment, though - probably they weren't driven by assrage, except maybe over Trump's disregard for their personal safety on jan 6
Merely on the timing, it is worth noting that next (and probably final) hearing was originally scheduled for late September but was postponed due to Hurricane Ian.
Grain of salt me as a huge liberal, but... he fomented an attempted insurrection. It's blatantly antidemocratic and dangerous. Were we supposed to *not* have hearings? Or is the objection just about how they're being carried out?
I don't think they register to me as considerably different than other comparably political trials. I didn't parse them as timed... they just are taking forever and dragging on. But point of comparison off the top of my head - how long did the Leveson Inquiry take? My sense of that was *ages*.
I'm not a huge liberal (tests usually put me somewhat left of center), but I agree with you--the guy tried to launch a coup, he should be in jail. I have been reading conservative writers for a while, but I can't join a movement that wants to launch a coup. Seems un-American.
I think this was part of a plan to remain president despite his election defeat - something which fits the common definition of coup (or at least of self-coup)
1: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group : COUP D'ÉTAT
"In its first few hours, the coup seemed a terrifying confirmation of the power of the military, the police and, especially, the KGB."
— David Remnick
Funny, nowhere in this definition do I find "asking the government on tv"
If we were to set aside the question of Trump’s culpability for a second:
Under this definition, do you think it’s fair to say that the capitol rioters themselves were attempting a coup? I mean, the point of storming the capitol pretty clearly seems to have been trying (if ineffectually) to “overthrow or alter” the US government by force.
If we’re operating on this definition, it seems hard to dispute, at the very least, that the mob (or some subsection of it) was attempting a coup.
>>He literally didn't [try to launch a coup]. If 2 years of investigations finding zero proof that he did hasn't convinced you, what will?
I think it is well past a stretch to say that “zero proof” has been found.
The various investigations bogged down because of partisan bickering, and because proving “when you pumped up your supporters full of fear and anger with baseless claims that the election had just been stolen from you, and then told them things like ‘we're going to fight like hell,’ 'we will not let them silence your voices,' and 'we're going to have to fight much harder,' you *intended* to get your supporters to storm the capitol and overturn the election by violence” is a matter of intent which is incredibly hard to prove.
But as anyone old enough to remember OJ Simpson can tell you, “not enough evidence to support a conviction” is not the same thing as “zero evidence.” When King Henry says “will no one rid me of this meddlesome election result” and then his supporters all storm the capitol with zip-ties to force the ArchPence of Canterbury to nullify the results, what you have will look like circumstantial evidence to some and plausible deniability to others, but it's not “zero evidence.”
Responding in haphazard order because this makes me too angry at the state of society to want to type something coherent and long.
1. I did not say zero evidence. I said zero proof. EVEN WITHIN THIS TRIVIALLY EASILY VERIFIABLE CONTEXT YOU ARE OUTRIGHT LYING. And you could easily have not lied simply by not putting something I didn't say in quotes, repeatedly. Nevertheless, there is ALSO very weak Bayesian evidence that this was a coup attempt.
2. They did not storm the capitol with zip ties. They found them in there. You don't even know the facts and yet you act confident when accusing a man (and who knows how many of his supporters) of capital crimes!
3. 95 percent of the things he said are totally normal political statements that other politicians make frequently "Fight Like Hell" is a particularly cliched. THIS IS NOT AN INCITEMENT TO INSURRECTION. Even the specific statements he made questioning the election are not if unusual, not THAT unusual as we have had multiple elections in recent decades where politicians questioned the legitimacy of the election. This applies to your other comment too, most of which I did not care to read because you're clearly not arguing in anything like good faith. Your examples of things he said are almost all well within the political overton window, things that no one else is considered to be inciting a riot or insurrection for saying.
4. Furthermore, attempting to use or suggesting that someone else use legal procedural shenanigans to change the results of an election is ALSO not that unusual and also not a coup.
5. Protesting is a popularly agreed-upon right in this country. Protesting government actions outside government buildings is included in this. Telling your political followers to go and protest is completely commonplace. Donald Trump was completely within his rights as a president and citizen to do so, and if a small subset of the people he encouraged to protest turned it into a riot, that does not mean he is culpable for the riot.
6. After the protest did turn into a riot, he is literally on the record as telling them to stay peaceful, and then a bit later telling them to go home and disperse. This is not the act of a man who planned to take over the government by violence.
7. None of the rioters shot anyone, or even tried to shoot anyone. The only deaths on January 6 were deaths of the rioters themselves. This is not consistent with claims that this was a planned attempt to take over the government by violence.
8. You cannot just improvise a coup. There is zero proof that Trump took ANY of the necessary groundwork steps required to take a nation over by force of arms. He did not talk to generals about how many troops he would need to capture congress. He did not ask the navy to swear personal loyalty to him. He did not tell the air force to provide him with bombers and fighters. He did not have a squadron of tanks ready to roll in and control the white house and Washington DC. He didn't have deals set up with prominent republican rivals to divide up rulership of the country, or make agreements with foreign governments to provide him support against his own people. He didn't even have an organized civilian paramilitary!
9. Separate from all the informal secret steps one would have to take (and many of which would leave documentable evidence unless the tens of thousand of people involved had perfect opsec), Trump's public governmental actions when he was, I remind you, the supreme executive power in the country also do not fit in with those of a man planning a military takeover of the government. Over the course of hundreds of executive orders he did not do any of the steps that would obviously assist him in a coup attempt, like assigning personally loyal troops to the capitol, or delegating command of the armed forces directly to himself, or changing anything about the structure of government or how elections function.
10. None of this is trivial, and I find the fact that you and other people seemingly don't give a shit about ANY of this just because you hate trump deeply deeply unsettling. You are talking about treason and insurrection, two of the most serious possible crimes in our political and legal system, and you don't care that your evidence is "he said some things I didn't like and then some people rioted"
The evidentiary standards being used to conclude that Trump plotted a coup, ie to take over a nation by force of arms, events that historically result in dozens of deaths, if not hundreds of thousands (depending on how you count), would not hold up to convict someone of fucking shoplifting.
I’m appending do this because I don't want to bloat my first post but I think if you look at the actual text of Trumps Jan 6 speech, ‘“we're going to fight like hell,’ 'we will not let them silence your voices,' and 'we're going to have to fight much harder,'” just does not do justice to it as a summary.
I’ll give him that he does say – one time – that marchers will “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
But… well, there’s also the rest of it. Does it “prove he tried to do a coup on Jan 6?” No. But it’s not exactly what I think of when I think “zero evidence” either.
>>>All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.
>>> Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.
>>> We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen, I’m not going to let it happen.
>>> If this happened to the Democrats, there’d be hell all over the country going on. There’d be hell all over the country. But just remember this: You’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’ve got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.
>>> Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder.
>>> And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
>>> Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election. This is the presidential election. Last night was a little bit better because of the fact that we had a lot of eyes watching one specific state, but they cheated like hell anyway.
>>> In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures.
>>> Make no mistake, this election was stolen from you, from me and from the country. And not a single swing state has conducted a comprehensive audit to remove the illegal ballots. This should absolutely occur in every single contested state before the election is certified.
>>> We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.
>>> We must stop the steal and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.
>>> If we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country because it’s illegal when the votes are illegal when the way they got there is illegal when the states that vote are given false and fraudulent information.
>>> And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
>>> The Democrats are hopeless, they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Part of the problem with describing it as a coup was that there was no significant amount of force on Trump's side — no loyal military or police groups. A few hundred rioters, mostly unarmed, are not sufficient to seize power in a country of 300 million+.
I don't know what various of the rioters thought they were doing, but I think it is clear that Trump was going on a legal theory, probably dubious, under which there was a legal way of reversing the electoral outcome, one that required the cooperation of the VP.
I think the objections are more based on how they are being carried out. It's being advertised almost as if it were a reality TV show, and the October Surprise factor is certainly huge right now.
Other than people who were obviously decided on the matter even without the hearings, I don't think anyone really cares though. Maybe if this were 2024 and Trump were running for re-election, but it's 2022, Trump isn't on the ballot, and there are a whole bunch of topics that people care a lot more about - economy, crime, abortion.
Maybe, maybe not. It has long appeared that the whole committee was aiming at the 2022 election, and subpoenaing Trump in October before the election seems like a pretty big October Surprise - but maybe it's just a coincidence!
I guess we'll see whether it does anything more newsworthy than what it's done for the past year and a half. If you want an October surprise, it seems like a bad play to keep doing new things every week or two for a full year and a half, since everyone will have tuned it out by then.
Relative to the average hearing. Typical hearings are relatively boring affairs. The Jan 6 committee hired a former TV news executive to help produce the hearings. Ostensibly with goal of increasing viewership by presenting a sort of docu-drama or reality TV to increase engagement.
Are you suggesting that no one involved with any of them had any trials? That's simply false. I'd agree that not _many_ and certainly not nearly all the _deserving_ individuals had trials, but to be fair, most of the riots happened in places with far less surveillance and identifying people is much harder. Although places like Portland certainly had people they could have prosecuted and chose not to.
Are you merely stating that there were no _federal_ hearings? Why would the riots be a federal issue?
I'm not arguing that the riots weren't bad. I think the figure I saw was billions in property damage (often to small business owners who couldn't afford it). And I also don't disagree that the media response was shameful ("mostly peaceful" while fire rages in the background will never not be darkly hilarious).
HOWEVER.....I don't think there is any evidence that anyone tired to "storm the white house". There was a protest that was (as far as I can recall) _actually_ one of the mostly peaceful ones _near_ the whitehouse that was broken up with a lot more force than was probably necessary.
But even if my recollection is wrong (or I just never saw the evidence that it was a riot).....which federal politician was _before the fact_ encouraging _that specific riot_ and telling them to go to the whitehouse? Not cravenly apologzing or making excuses after the fact but before hand egging on? Those are two very different things. If you can find me evidence of a Federal politician, house, senate, or execute branch doing that (or similar before any riot that occured on or near federal grounds), then sure.
The closest I can think is the riots attacking the federal courthouse in Portland, and I very much doubt that any politician was, on any particular event, egging on a particular riot. I am 100% sure that they were dismissing the severity and apologizing for it after the fact, waving it away, etc. But that is _very_ different.
As for "founding of the country was explicitly delegitimized"....so? First Amendment pretty explicitly protects this. It may be dumb and bad, but it's also protected.
I just don't see what you think there should be federal hearings about. People said and did bad things. People who participated in the riots should have been prosecuted and weren't, but that's a state level issue.
Haven't they been going on for some months now? I don't doubt some considerations were made for midterms, but given the optics involved, it'd have been equally weird to hold off on such hearings until after the election (or not do/not televise them at all). No Good Choices on this one, I think.
I'm writing the sixth comment of this Open Thread despite living in Eastern Time (it's 3am for me) because I am stressing over my homework.
Here's an interesting fact about myself: I've been extensively writing down my dreams since late 2016. Today marks 6 years minus 4 days since the first dream I ever recorded (on 10/21/2016). I have been sort-of-but-not-really-wanting to write a fanfic of it with some kind of coherent storyline. Also, although the dreams themselves seem to occur at random days, a cursory analysis I recently did (manually counting the number of dreams I had in each quarter) finds that there were two periods where I had unusually frequent dreams: Oct 2016 - early/mid 2017, and early 2020 - early 2021. (The second period is almost certainly due to earlier-COVID19-pandemic isolation effects; I'm not so sure about what caused the first period.)
Please reply to this comment to ask me any and all questions about my dreams.
Do events in your dreams correlate with things that happened either before or after the dream? _An Experiment With Time_ is a weird book by someone who wrote down his dreams as soon as he woke up and claims they correlated as closely with future as with past events.
Not really AFAICT. In May 2020, I had a dream that covid was still around that September, which was a success. However, in March 2022, I had a dream that World War III was going to start that May, which was a failure.
Did you think of enriching your write-ups using AI art generators? As far as I've seen they seem to be quite good at outputting dream-like scenes in their incoherence and distortion.
How long do your dreams last? How "real" do they look? For example, a friend feel the same as in real life, whereas for me, there are few details, some pieces of the "background" are missing.
Having a dream feels like recalling a memory, but in real time.
My dreams' canonical length (as in how long the events in a dream should have canonically taken if they were from alternate universe) seems to vary from a few minutes to a month, with the median/mode somewhere around a few hours.
Thanks, that's interesting. I just had a conversation with a friend a few days ago and that's the first time I learned that dreams can last more than a day.
Oh I get that, I should have clarified that I was asking about the actual time felt. I've never felt that a dream lasted more than an hour or two myself.
I occasionally get lucid dreams, but only when I am sleep-saturated, for want of a better phrase, and thus practically awake anyway. The same applies to clearly recalling seeing color in dreams, which in my case I think has only ever happened when I am almost awake.
I don't think one's dreams are worth worrying about or taking any notice of, except perhaps when they are recurring. In the latter case, either there is some problem or conflict nagging at the subconscious, or the dreamer is one of those people whose minds seem to run on tram lines even when they are awake!
Speculating on how and why dreams first evolved, I reckon they originated when the first fish left the water and started evolving into amphibians. Dreams then were a crude form of "store and playback" memory which allowed the creatures to remember and retrace their paths from land back to water, and were triggered by thirst. Ask yourself, when are dreams most vivid, and the answer is undeniably when one is thirsty, perhaps having had a skinful the previous night! That IMHO is a throwback to our earliest amphibian ancestors.
>one of those people whose minds seem to run on tram lines even when they are awake!
Yes, I'm one of those...it's often difficult to sleep precisely because my brain refuses to shut down, no matter how physically exhausted rest of body is. There's just a real hunger for intellectual stimulation, which largely isn't satisfied in my daily routines. (Hence reading ACX at 3 in the morning, or whatever.) So it makes total sense that it is, in fact, still up to all kinds of shenanigans even while in Hibernate Mode. I guess I didn't notice for a long time cause I had some silly Freudian nonsense foisted on me by early psychiatry, that every dream is supposed to Mean Something(tm)...instead of them just, yknow, happening. So I'd subconsciously discard anything that wasn't a Logical Sequence Of Events based off Some Recent Experience or whatever. Some dreams are nicely ordered like that, most are not.
Well, as the pdf puts it...whether or not dreams actually "mean anything", the fact is that they'll happen whether we want them to or not. And considering the incredible amount of time one spends asleep over a whole lifetime, learning techniques to nudge dreams towards more enjoyable ends (even if not wholly lucid) is a big utility payoff. Not a terribly philosophical conclusion, but I think it's a practical approach to a vexing phenomenon. Dreams are just another belief to make pay rent!
(The most vivid dreams for me are the ones that speak to intense emotions which I'm uncomfortable with/unable to be open about in the waking world...dreaming of having friends/partner <-> deep loneliness is a recurring one, or Finding A Purpose <-> nihilistic emptiness is another. I wish it were something simple like a physical basis, that'd be so much easier to control and experiment with. Alcohol tends to introduce a lot of noise into dreams, if I can remember them at all while hungover the next morning.)
> it's often difficult to sleep precisely because my brain refuses to shut down
I'm sure that is quite a common problem, and I sympathise. Maybe no coffee after 6pm would help!
It wasn't quite what I meant though by "running on tramlines". That was a simile to describe someone set in their mental ways, and inflexible and repetitive in their thinking. I guess we all are to an extent, but it seems more pronounced in some people than others.
I think it has a lot more to do with working unnatural night shifts than when I take my coffee...the scheduling works for some people, I'm sure. But after 4.5 years of waking up between noon-1pm, getting off work at 11-midnight, and never seeing the sun for the majority of my waking hours...the system clock's given up at this point, haha. Turns out that just because someone's naturally a night owl, that doesn't mean they'll necessarily adapt well to a circadian-hostile work schedule. The times when I actually feel drowsy enough to nod right off are always while at work, or riding public transit...rarely while in bed.
Me failing to grasp the actual simile seems to imply that I'm in that group, too. Brain interpreted train -> runaway -> processing speed -> activity -> motion. But the important keyword was actually "track". Path dependence -> inflexibility -> switch costs -> routine -> pattern. (People often compliment me on being creative, and I'm like...no I'm not, I just regurgitate content and references that the average person doesn't know. Lookup tables aren't creative. Acutal thinking-outside-the-box doesn't happen so much with mechanical-oriented brains, I think. "That's against the rules!" Which I guess is why psychedelics are so enjoyable for me, a rare break from such stifling order. Dreams are low-key version of that.)
Nope to both (or at least I wouldn't remember any time the second thing happened), although I think I did come close to lucid dreaming once.
I think that people usually recommend diarizing your dreams and/or Weird Meditative Practices for those seeking to lucid dream. So far, I've tried the former but not the latter, without success. So, if you want to lucid dream, I would highly recommend that you try Weird Meditative Practices (with the caveats that I don't actually know what they are, and also n = 1). But also writing down your dreams might help a little.
Some time ago, Scott linked to Stephan Laberge's "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" pdf (of a book?), which contains a number of such Weird Meditative Practices. The low-power low-effort stuff's been working well - I used to think I didn't dream much, now it's something I notice almost every night - but the Out There stuff...I dunno, it's hard for me to sufficiently suspend my disbelief and just let the woo wash over. Supposedly really works, but it goes against general epistemic hygeine heuristics. Which, yeah, I know, rationality is about winning, and it works, so...yet anytime a message comes wrapped in Gwyneth Paltrow-esque language, it's hard to take seriously, whether the results speak for themselves or not.
Do you ever get bored by your dreams? I once tried to write my dreams down, starting with an unusually colorful one. Some time later I read the text and was struck about how boring that text was. It was like the dream was totally meaningless when I no longer remembered they day before the dream.
Can you pick out a random note of a dream you had and make any sense of it?
another dating ad: Lily, 25, English/history high school teacher from Australia looking for a long-term male partner over 26, preferably an engineer. reach out at lilyreadsyouremail @ gmail
I find it interesting (but unsurprising) Hanania highlighted, "Here's a fit, flexible young schoolteacher who's reading the Bible for fun" and "Here's a location independent millionaire who wants to live semi-off grid." Says something about (his perception of) sexual dynamics I think.
I'm not what you're looking for as I am already in a relationship (and not in Aus), but I just finished Gravity's Rainbow and haven't come across many others who have read it. Curious to hear your thoughts, if you're willing to share.
I happened to be on the train to my family's when reading the scene where Slothrop comes into Katje's hotel room after not seeing her for a long time and sticks it in, and she instantaneously orgasms — it aroused me so much I alighted the train to go home
I’ve been thinking of changing my user name to Slothrop. Well, I’m happily married, on the wrong continent and way too old for you but I’m glad to hear of an English teacher who likes Pynchon.
Slothrop's dream of going back to the White Visitation and finding the head of the conspiracy against him, only to realize that there was no "head", so much as it was just a bunch of people all fulfilling their role in a bigger faceless system stuck with me in a big way. Reminiscent of Tolstoy for me.
The scene where Bianca offers to hide Slothrop and keep him safe but he leaves is heartbreaking in an existential way, which is an unsettling emotion to come at the end of that scene.
A lot of the scenes involving der Racketenstad are striking.
I think the passage that stands out more than any other for me might be: "... do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't *wanted* to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible ..."
Although Proverbs for Paranoids 3 is also pretty provocative.
This strikes me as the perfect opportunity for some self-promotion. I'd apologize, but that would add hypocrisy to shamelessness.
On Substack, I have one post recommending some great piece of fiction on the internet. Lung's Last Ship in Suzhou deserves attention infinitely more than I do.
Other than that, I have two articles rambling on current geopolitics, in French. I'm not certain they're particularly insightful, but you know... that stuff is fascinating. Anyway.
What's to come : I should soon have the time to write a piece violently criticizing an article I read the other day, tying in Aristotle with a reactionary worldview. I swear, these liberals, sometimes...
The name of the article's Liberalism vs the Aristotelian Universe, by the way. Doesn't even try to hide his partisanship, disgusting.
Going to de-rec Last Ship in Suzhou. Here is what I wrote about it in the /r/rational subreddit when I finished catching up 3 months ago (minor spoilers):
Last Ship in Suzhou has been recommended on this sub several times over the past few months, so I read it. I'm not a huge fan of Xianxia, but I'm also not particularly against it or anything.
However, after catching up with the latest chapter (66, which is not the actual chapter count as their are non-numbered interludes, etc, resulting in 88 actual chapters), I have to de-rec it.
It's competently written in the sense that the grammer/prose isn't bad and dialogue is natural enough. And the characters are even somewhat (although not especially) interesting/engaging.
The problem is that both of the two MCs are completely passive. This story has been updating for over a year now and is probably a couple short-to-medium novels long (no idea how to get a good wordcount) and the MCs have not taken a single decisive action nor do they have a clear goal. There literally is not a plot yet. It's just a series of things that happen to the MCs. The closest thing to a goal that either of them have is David wants to figure out about "diving" down realms, which was mentioned by one character some 20+ chapters ago in passing, to see if it can get him home but so far, other than hearing about this thing, nothing has happened towards that goal. Normally in Xianxia, as I understand it, the main driving force of the story is the characters desire to increase their cultivation/power, but neither of the MCs seem to care that much about it, partially because, relative to the rest of the world, it seems to come ridiculously easily, for reasons which are extremely poorly explained.
Additionally, to my taste, the author is far to self congratulatory about their knowledge of traditional Chinese poetry and music. These things are often inserted into the story for, as far as I can tell, no other reason other than to prove that the characters (and therefore the author) know about them.
And of course, there is the relatively common critique (which applies to most things recced in this sub these days, in my opinion) that I have no idea why this story belongs here as opposed to a general webfiction/xianxia sub. The cultivation system is far too opaque to be understandable/legible to the reader, and, as I said, the MCs don't even have goals to pursue which also obviates doing so rationally or avoiding the carrying of the idiot ball while pusruing. If this story counts as "rational" fiction (even mediocre rational fiction) then the term has been watered down to the point of meaninglessness.
On the page of the fiction, here https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/41852/the-last-ship-in-suzhou, click on the "STATISTICS" rectangle. At the bottom right, there is a number of pages. If you put your mouse pointer on the question mark inside a circle, it will give you a precise wordcount. This is genuinely one of the worse UI I've ever seen.
About the two geopolitical articles, I can't comment on the content, as I don't follow geopolitics at all, but they "feel" relatively neutral which is refreshing. As for the recommandation, it does indeed sounds nice. I think it would benefit from a small definition/slightly more context about what is xianxia and, if the introduction takes patience, give a slight estimate.
It's not really a problem of attention span but of time investment vs payoff. At any moment, I have lots of stuff to watch/read, some for my pleasure, some recommanded by friends, some that seem interesting. Especially for video, I can easily see how much I will need to invest, and have a rough estimate of what I will get back. RoyalRoad doesn't seem to offer a .pdf, .epub or even .txt export. Fortunately there's a word count so I don't have to do it myself, 202 949 words. So between a long day and a small week.
I am exploring (very early stages) a remote mental health startup concept. If you might be interested in brainstorming or joining the team, send a note to protopiacone at gmail. Expertise in online technologies as well as therapy/counseling is welcome.
Let's see. Google says that a slice of toast has 75 kcal, which is ~310 kJ. In the video, they only toasted a single slice in a double chamber toaster (what a waste, shame on them!), so we can double that to ~600 kJ. This took about two minutes at 700 W, which is 84 kJ.
Power is defined as "the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time". So whether or not you use storage, saying the human powers the toaster is correct even in colloquial speech.
"per unit time" is essential here. If you pedal for twenty minutes to charge a battery to run a toaster for two minutes, you're not powering a toaster, you're powering a tenth of a toaster. In the same vein, you wouldn't say "a car motor can power an aircraft carrier" if you have to keep the car running for a year to charge a humongous battery just to push the ship out of port.
If you consider e.g. an athlete doing a hammer throw, would that athlete, by your argument, also not power the hammer? After all, the athlete merely stores kinetic energy in the hammer until it's ready to do the actual work of flying away on release. Or does the archer not power the arrow because the bow stores the energy?
I'll grant that your average granny on a treadmill would not be able to meaningfully power a toaster (the meaning being to toast a slice of bread) without a battery even if she kept treading for years, because what little power she puts out would be lost to inefficiencies in the toaster system.
This is really a discussion about how you define the system that ultimately does the work; where you draw the lines between energy generation, transmission/conversion, and consumption.
If you want to be really pedantic, both your granny and the cycling athlete from the video area themselves only batteries for the chemical energy they had for breakfast. That breakfast, in turn, was only a storage for solar energy. That solar energy, in turn, was fusion energy, previously stored in hydrogen plasma. And so on.
You're way overthinking this. There's system A, a human, generating 750 W of mechanical power somewhat continuously over the time it takes to toast a slice of bread, and system C, a toaster, consuming 700 W of electrical power over the same timespan. A third system C converts 750 W of mechanical power into 700 W of electrical power.
Can system A power system C? Yes.
Now replace Robert Förstemann with me, system A', generating 100 W of mechanical power. Can system A' power system C? No.
"Can a human power an arrow" is not a meaningful question in this context, because the power generated by the human system isn't continuously fed into the arrow system.
I was shown this video years ago in an thermodynamics class, to illustrate the difference between heat and kinetic energy. There was also a video about a car crash and that the kinetic energy diffused there was basically equivalent to bringing a glass of water from room temperature to boiling.
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "One Million Merits". If it's this hard to actually power a toaster in real life, what kind of insane reverse e-bikes were they pedaling?
Obviously it makes no thermodynamic sense to feed people extra food so they can turn bikes to make electricity. But this isn't like The Matrix, some cruel scenario where the humans only exist to fuel the machines, this is a kind post-scarcity utopia in which the humans exist anyway and we aren't going to kill them out anything so we need to give them something to do, so we put them on bikes and tell them they're doing something useful.
I always think about One Million Merits whenever anyone brings up UBI because this is what I think it is most likely to look like.
No, I think even in the most optimistic scenario where you happen to have a lot of hay sitting around for some reason you'd be better off burning the hay in a modern, efficient power plant to turn steam turbines.
But if you had a bunch of oxen and you felt like you needed to give them a sense of purpose and fulfilment...
It would remotely make sense in that such a setup would let you convert chemical energy (cattle feed) into electric energy. However, even by the low standards of bioenergy, it would be grossly inefficient because a lot of the energy would be lost to keeping the animals alive. You'd be much better off just burning the feed directly and use the heat to power a steam turbine, but even that wouldn't be saying much.
So in practical terms: no, given the existing alternatives to produce electrical energy from (ultimately) solar energy, that scheme would not make much sense.
My wife has a psychiatrist who does talk therapy, which means the same person who does her therapy also does her medication management. If you can find that, do. Don't know anything about the other credentials.
If you're right, a poor country just regained a tiny bit of land at some reputation cost.
If you're wrong, a system that could have brought massive amounts of wealth to numerous poor countries was just squashed before it could be shown to work.
In which, while there are political partisans on both sides, I'm not one bit surprised about the outcome.
Let's face it, the reason Prospera and other initiatives like it go for Honduras and South American/Caribbean countries is precisely because of the looser regulation - to be blunt, that the guys in power are more likely to do business because they are dreaming of schemes to cream off cash for themselves, and they can force through legislation permitting Prospera-clones by over-ruling the weak systems of law and governance in place.
It seems that indeed the former president who was so gung-ho for ZEDEs has been indicted for cocaine trafficking and extradited to the US:
“Juan Orlando Hernández, the recent former President of Honduras, allegedly partnered with some of the world’s most prolific narcotics traffickers to build a corrupt and brutally violent empire based on the illegal trafficking of tons of cocaine to the United States,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “Hernández is alleged to have used his vast political powers to protect and assist drug traffickers and cartel leaders by alerting them to possible interdictions, and sanctioning heavily armed violence to support their drug trade. I commend the career prosecutors of the Southern District of New York for their tireless efforts to disrupt the entire illicit drug trafficking ecosystem, from street-level dealers to a former world leader, and everything in-between.”
I'm not saying Prospera or its founders had anything to do with criminal enterprises or any knowledge of same. I am saying that rich Westerners wanting to build toy states go to places like Honduras precisely because of the institutional corruption and system of spoils governance, because that lets them set up without the oversight/interference that Western countries would engage in.
And for that very reason, why expect any stability or keeping your word or that the contract you signed with the last guy is going to be honoured by the new guy who came to power by promising to root out the corruption of the last guy? Like it or lump it, Prospera is tainted by association, and the more enthused they are about "President Hernandez is a forward looking guy who wants to promote prosperity without red tape", the worse they look in hindsight: either knaves, who relied on Hernandez being a corrupt bully to push through what they wanted, or fools who didn't see the kind of system they were dealing with.
They got what they wanted, and now they're getting the rest of it, too. For the very reasons Honduras was attractive to them - weak systems that would let them set up their own independent mini-city state - the same reasons are now biting them in the backside. Contracts mean nothing, law means nothing, what the president wants and can force the courts to perform is what counts.
>that the president wants and can force the courts to perform
Do you imagine that there's some guardian angels floating about the United States, sight unseen, making sure that only laws that get passed, the only actions the government takes, are those that abide by the constitution?
Empirically speaking, the policies of electoral dictatorships are much more aligned with the views of the populace than in "actual" democracies. Which means democracy is a self-defeating ideology *even on its own terms*.
That might make sense if "illegitimate" and "unfree" were meaningful words. They're absolutely not.
But just to recap, your democracy cultism is so strong that you think that your idea of "Democracy" is so important that it trumps both actual living standards resulting from a given system as well as whether or not policies that the majority of people support actually come into existence. I say this being 100% serious, you are a religious fundamentalist.
"Controversial legislation passed by the Honduran government in 2013 allowed corporations to set up special economic zones with their own laws, regulation, courts, police forces, and schools."
...so a... town. It's just a town. The state is dissolving towns.
No, the special part of the economic zones is that they weren't subject to normal rules about towns and other regional governments within Honduras. They're being *demoted to* towns. Nobody wants to found a town in Honduras, except possibly Hondurans. (*Do* Hondurans want to found towns in Honduras? Probably, there's a fair number of Hondurans.)
Honestly this is the primary thing that would prevent me from getting involved with any sort of planned city like this. There's no legal status you can be granted, no promise that a host government can make you, that can't be arbitrarily reversed at any time. Unless you have some way to force a host government to play ball, you're sitting on a time bomb.
- the ZEDE law was only possible due to corruption
- this will make more money for Prospera's funders
But none of those are a moral claim about ZEDEs. Even if true, which is not established. None of them are claims that Prospera being shut down will *produce good consequences*.
Singapore is a result of an arguably-corrupt government. The New Deal was certainly a result of government action of exactly the same type as this one. (Whether that is considered corruption is debatable, though there is certainly a solid case that it is.) Both of those were good for their countries and for the world. Prospera being shut down is bad for the world.
Which ones? I'm reading the thing as "government nationalizes corporate assets after corporation finishes developing the land under assurances of no nationalization."
Government giving you explicit, written permit to engage in heavy investment before reverting it's policy is a terrible governing practice. It kills trust in the government and makes planning harder & more expensive.
If I can have a 100% guarantee that the govt won't bait-and-switch my investment plan, then as long as I expect return above markets (or other safe-ish uses), I should invest. If there's 50% chances that the govt will bait-and-switch me, then i should not invest unless the returns are over twice over market. The consequence of this kind of govt change of course is to make potential investments unprofitable. Be unpredictable enough, and nothing can be done anymore because everything is to be made illegal unpredictably.
It's not the same government, though, and if Prospera's founders couldn't work out that Central/South American governments are not the most stable and consistent, that's on them.
This was like building on the slopes of an active volcano, and hoping that it would remain dormant.
They're subject to taxes they weren't previously subject to; that's the asset. They've got nine years of development in place, they're stuck losing something.
It's not uncommon when I'm on this page on a computer to have all functions slow way down, & Mac informs me that "this page is using an unusual amount of energy. Perfomance will improve if you close it." (Thanks, Mac, the problem is my ability to read what's on the page we decline precipitously if I close it.). How can a page of text make such heavy demands on the computer, more than say a full-screen video or Photoshop with a big graphics file open?
I'm curious about this, not knowing much about web development — how much effort would it take for a front-end developer to look at the code and figure out why it is slow on iOS/Safari?
Substack's front-end seems to be badly coded. For me, Substack overall is incredibly slow (20s until responsive on my old computer!), and website benchmarks seem to support this.
Great article, I'm confused as to why noone in the police/fbi connected to the case would not at the very least compare the fingerprints. Seems a very low cost, high reward win for them at best, a minor inconvenience at worst.
It's like Jack the Ripper, everyone is always coming up with a new suspect and new 'proof' - remember Patricia Cornwell claiming it was Walter Sickert?
The article itself states that there have been several suspects and people are always coming up with a new "definitely the Zodiac killer" suspect. I think this guy is the same - I wouldn't put much stock in bloody fingerprints or DNA because in the same way, there have been claims about DNA and Jack the Ripper:
"Cornwell also had a stamp licked by the writer of one of the supposed Ripper letters analysed for DNA, and claimed it pointed to Sickert. However, the analysis could only be of Mitochondrial DNA, and the result could be shared by anything from between 1 percent and 10 percent of the population.
In September 2014, Finnish molecular biologist Jari Louhelainen claimed that his DNA analysis pointed to a different suspect, Aaron Kosminski, which also provoked criticism and controversy."
Next year, someone will come up with a new Zodiac and evidence to back up their claim.
Do you think admitting black students well below the normal academic ability of Oxford students for the sake of diversity is hurting Oxford's academic reputation?
Over half of all PMs went there (another quarter went to Cambridge).
You really have to look at universities on a per-department basis.
Oxford's zoology department has a good reputation and their english lit is legendary but I wasn't massively impressed by the engineering course there (one ought to go to a red brick place that was founded as a 'school of mines' rather than oxbridge for that sort of thing) and the quality of their PPE alumni is somewhat mixed.
"Can anyone comment on the validity of the statement that the Chinese semiconductor industry was 'decapitated' overnight by American sanctions? "
I'm in the semiconductor industry and have been trying to figure out what is going on. I *can* address how the industry works, though, and a full cut-off of western tech will be bad for China.
The reason is that there are, broadly, four major semiconductor equipment vendors: AMAT, ASML, KLA and LAM.
Three are American (AMAT, KLA, LAM) and one is Dutch (ASML).
You pretty much need equipment from these guys to make chips. If they won't sell them to you then you have a problem. I do not believe that the Chinese have equivalent companies and the tech is difficult so it will likely take a while for them to be replaced.
But ... can't the fabs just keep running with the existing tools? In practice, not really. The tools have consumables, many of which are highly specialized. Once you run out of those then the tools stops working. The consumables also are very high tech so you won't just replace those with Chinese equivalent.
And ... there are about six companies in the world that make the silicon ingots and bare wafers that are the starting point for building a wafer and thus chips. 99% of the wafers come from these companies. All are 'western' if we include Japan, Taiwan, etc. as western. Interestingly, I don't think any are American (but I only looked once and won't swear to this). No base wafer means no chips.
So ... if the cut off is: tools, spare parts, consumables, tech support then ... yeah, this will be very bad of the Chinese semi industry.
Note that all of this is discussing fairly modern processes. I'm pretty sure that China will be able to make indigineous chips with, to pick a date out of the air, year 2000 level tech if they need to do so. Might take a few years, but shouldn't be a problem. But you don't want your semi industry to be 20 years behind.
Well, for perspective, this is the last piece of news I read about it:
> Apple has put on hold plans to use memory chips from China's Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) in its products, multiple sources told Nikkei Asia...Apple originally planned to start using the government-funded YMTC's chips as early as this year, as they are at least 20% cheaper than those of its leading rivals, supply chain executives said...Apple had already completed the monthslong process to certify YMTC's 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory for use in iPhones...Apple originally planned to start using the government-funded YMTC's chips as early as this year, as they are at least 20% cheaper than those of its leading rivals, supply chain executives said...YMTC chips were initially planned to be used only for iPhones sold in the Chinese market. One source, however, said Apple was considering eventually purchasing up to 40% of the NAND flash memory needed for all iPhones from YMTC.
So, this one Chinese chip company just lost an order for potentially half of all iPhone (>half US market now, incidentally) memory worldwide long-term. That's... not small.
The Wall Street Journal suggests that the only thing that's really happened "overnight" is that many US nationals have been asked by their employers to restrict the work they do, but that in the end, yes, probably lots of them will have to leave China and the operations there will lose considerable expertise.
I think decapitate is the wrong word. It's more like an immediate flesh wound that will turn into soothing serious if China cannot address it.
I've read a number of sources that consistently call it an act of major economic and military consequence for China (the noah smith post does a good job of laying out the details).
Here was my take in my own short post from last week.
As we all know, it is impossible to tile the plane with regular pentagons. However, suppose you were willing to use slightly non-regular pentagons (with different alterations on each tile) so that it *appears* to be a regular tiling. Is there any easy method to figure out how to do this and what the minimum maximum deviation from regular you would need is?
Did you check this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_tiling
This has points where four pentagons touch. If such points are to be removed, then deviations from regularity increase a lot...
I am also interested in this question!
Maybe we can start with filling Lobachevsky plane with pentagons and then applying some mapping function back to Euclidean. (ah no, it seems it won't work if you need tiles to be about same area)
Are you thinking of something like a Penrose tiling?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling
Guy with a high-end products/leather consulting/reviews business is named Tanner... Tanner Leatherstein. Now, is that nominative determinism or just a clever nom-de-plum for marketing purposes?
Either way, funny enough to mention. https://www.tannerleatherstein.com/about
Seeing as I can't find any record of anyone else with that last name, I'm going to say nom de plum.
Leatherstein is an implausible half-English half-German construction.
The full German version Lederstein does seem to be a real surname.
This open thread is at the point where things start to wind down, so I’m just going to throw out a joke:
It’s late at night and a man is getting ready to go to bed when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail.
“Yes,” it says. “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.” Furious at being disturbed, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he can, and storms off to bed.
Two years later there comes another knock. The man answers and again he finds the snail, who looks up at him and says, “What the f*ck was that all about?”
Oooh, saviour of the thread, with snail jokes!
There was this winemaker, see, who wanted to rid his vineyard of grapevine snails. So he hired a couple of people, gave them a little bucket each, and sent them to collect snails. At closing time, they came all back with their buckets full of snails, except one, who happened to be a retrained civil servant.
So they went to look for him, and found him in the vineyard, desperate, with the bucket empty. He explained: "Well, yes I saw the snails and went to collect them, but then: chop-chop! They all ran away!"
https://interessant3.substack.com/ Three Interesting Things Once a Week. Pretty simple.
I see a motte-and-bailey fallacy in every argument I *hear* that has someone say something like "Our personalities are determined by a combination of both nature/genetics and nurture/environment".
Obviously, that statement is true: both genetics and environment shape our personalities. But when people say it, there's something else going on.
The emphatic statement is: "it is a combination! We say this in iconoclastic opposition to the FOOLS who believe it to be either/or!", and the context is usually in "response" to some scientist who just showed that there is a genetic component to [homosexuality/obesity/what have you] (and who probably worked their fingers to the bone in order to do so).
But the scientist fully accepts that, aggregated across many people, it is a combination, and their little gene is one factor - so why on *earth* would people be so emphatic about this very obvious fact?
The truth is that their interest is in believing a different statement: "environment plays a larger role than genetics" - that statement is their bailey. They won't say it out loud, because it'd mean they'd have to define "larger". But they believe it, and they like believing it. It allows them to pour scorn on lots of things they don't like, things which have changed the environment of people growing up. They can use this to promote their preferred solutions to problems, without engaging with the question of how much impact their solutions would have.
When they say stuff that comes from their bailey, if you say "but genetics plays a significant part in that problem, and we may want to consider anatomy-level solutions to it, for example one study found that-", they will say "Ah but do you not see, people are this way due to a COMBINATION of genetics and environment!", and then that's it - if you reply back, no matter how quantitative you are, they will be taking you to disagree with their facile motte.
Similar to the people who always say that correlation doesn't imply causation. Certainly an incredibly important mental model to keep in mind when doing science, but the more interesting follow-up to a correlation, is to try to explore various causality models, rather than dismissing the pattern outright.
What if the person just wants to have an accurate understanding of the world, and thinks it really does seem like personality has both genetic and environmental influences?
The other two repliers to you comment have done a good job of saying what I think.
Let me emphasize for a fourth time that I think that personality has both genetic and environmental influences.
In fact, it is completely boringly true: absolutely everyone believes it (try and find me someone alive today who unambiguously states that they do not believe it).
That's if we take it at face value. My claim is that you shouldn't take it at face value, because it is a "motte": a facile statement that, in practice, is used to backhandedly imply that the person they are speaking to does *not* believe it.
>What if the person just wants to have an accurate understanding of the world, and thinks it really does seem like personality has both genetic and environmental influences?
Then its weird for them to emphasize that because virtually nobody is claiming it is entirely genetic (but on the other hand, many people scoff at the idea that personality is heritable).
Then they should try to take account of both aspects and possibly control or otherwise identify/test the individual components.
The way OP presents it it's more about using the phrase to ignore the discussion on one side.
I don't recall seeing it much besides to argue against something being mostly one side (and presenting an absurd/noncentral example) though it seemed to be more of a "whaboutism" then what the OP mentions.
Surely this is not surprising, though? I mean, this is what people are like. Which means, parenthetically, it must be adaptive to tribal survival, and it's interesting to speculate why.
My thought would be that it's a high-risk-high-reward gambit: let's say you're a proponent of changing the environment to solve Social Problem X. Someone comes along and offers very sound scientific evidence that the environment has a 1% effect on X. If you maintain your faith in your solution, despite good evidence ot the contrary, you are embarking on a high-risk-high-reward path. It is very likely you will turn out ot be wrong (so that's the high risk), but if you happen to turn out right -- the research was mistaken, or it turns out the environmental mod you champion turns out to be unexpectedly and spectacularly effective -- then you will reap an enormous reward, because you'll have been a prophet. So that's the high reward.
Presumably if most people in the tribe behave this way, it's a disaster, but if a relative handful do, this allows the tribe to cover a few highly-leveraged bets at low cost. (If a bet doesn't pan out, all that happens is one member of the tribe is exposed as a fool or charlatan.)
I had a professor in my psych undergrad who opened up a class by promising to fail anyone who wrote as a conclusion in any test question or assigned essay that some trait was both the result of genetics and environment.
That's because this is a trite statement and not at all what we're interested in when talking about nature vs. nurture. What we're interested in explaining is variance - why some people are one way and other people are another. More specifically, what we want to know is the relative contribution of hereditary factors and environmental factors, which varies based on what population comparison we are making. (e.g. Height is highly heritable in America right now, but if you want to explain the variance in height in America between 1900 and 2000, it's mostly environmental factors that explain it. )
>>>mostly environmental factors
Has someone done the math on this?
> The truth is that their interest is in believing a different statement: "environment plays a larger role than genetics" - that statement is their bailey. They won't say it out loud, because it'd mean they'd have to define "larger". But they believe it, and they like believing it. It
I think we need to coin a Mind Reader fallacy. If a person doesn’t say something out loud how the fuck do you know what they are thinking?
I see this pretty often here. People willing to assign a set of unproven attributes, unspoken positions etc to their - sometimes simply imagined - ideological enemy.
Now I am not accusing you of the following. It’s just an exaggerated example.
“I voted Democrat.”
Oh so you are _for_ Black Lives Matter protestors burning down cities!
“Uhm no, I’m pretty much against that.”
This is rationalism?
Should I assume merely by the tone of your original post that you believe blacks are dumber and more prone to violence than whites?
I could imagine that possibility but it would be stupid to assume it’s true because you didn’t say it.
You and I don’t know each other beyond what we say out loud here.
This is a very interesting comment, because there's something tricky to articulate here. I would like to assume you have read about motte-and-bailey, the references are this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/ (shortish post listing examples) or this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ (bombastic but very culture war heavy, in fact one of the most CW SSC posts) - either one is fine.
I'm absolutely convinced that Motte-and-Bailey is a big part of political discourse. A very current example is Kanye's "white lives matter" thing (sorry for CW but I think it can be throwaway!) - everyone knows not to take that phrase at face value. But with your comment, you're pointing out something negative about the use of "Motte-and-bailey". And I think it's right to do so, because MaB is in some sense "the good/sophisticated version of strawmanning"
"Bob strawmans Alice" = Alice said X. Bob, immediately after Alice said X, gave gave an argument against Y, demonstrating clearly the foolishness and nastiness of Y. But Alice objected that she did not actually believe Y, she only believes X.
"Bob accused Alice of having a motte-and-bailey" = Alice said X. Bob, immediately after Alice said X, gave an argument against Y. Because Bob knew that when people say X, it's really a motte for their bailey. Their bailey is Y.
Everyone hates being strawmanned, myself included. So, motte-and-baileying too much is bad. I'm not sure of a good, bullet-proof solution to this, other than taking extremely large amounts of time and care with arguments against individuals.
But why exactly would so many people so consistently say "personality it is a combination of genetic and environmental influences" in response to me saying "a study recently found a genetic influence on X"? Even though, again, everyone knows that statement is true?
There's a pattern. You're right that I can't be certain about them believing "environment plays a larger role"! But I think the widespreadness of this belief is the best explanation for the pattern I've observed.
I think I had a handle on M&B but I did go back and read the SSC posts
This is so tricky without actual examples.
I can think of a number of reasons why some would assert “but it both!” other than some hidden agenda.
Habit:
Not a directly applicable example but if it’s 104 degrees in the shade chances are you will hear someone say “Hot enough for you”.
IOW Sometimes it’s just a vocal tic that people automatically deploy in certain circumstances.
Laziness:
Related to habit. Hmm this may not apply to what this guy just said, but it’s commonly accepted that ‘it’s both’ so if I don’t feel like thinking very carefully at least nobody can say I’m _wrong_.
Group think:
No explanation necessary.
Foul mood:
I had an argument with my wife this morning, so I’m not conceding anything today.
Petty dominance game:
If I disagree I won’t cede any of my - imaginary - power.
In the end your thesis may be correct but I’m probably a lot older than you so I can’t avoid remembering all the times I’ve incorrectly surmised other peoples’ motivations. At least not without putting my liver at risk. jk
I don’t think my theory of mind is any wackier than the next guy’s but experience has taught me to be very careful about saying “I know what you are thinking.”
>I don’t think my theory of mind is any wackier than the next guy’s but experience has taught me to be very careful about saying “I know what you are thinking.”
As I already explained to you, we can infer it from the implications they think this statement has - namely those that imply environmental differences are what is important.
Your exapmle with Democrats and BLM is extremely poor. Those are two distinct things, whereas Hamish is directly talking about different statements about the exact same thing - heritability.
I can see why those things would cause the person to say "but it both". But I don't see why it would create a general pattern of people saying that rather than something else.
I wouldn't say I *know* that a given person is motte-and-baileying. Just that, at this point, I think they are around 70+%. And it's very annoying, because if it really is the case that 50+% of the time I am talking to someone who disagrees with me about something, they should just come out and say that thing. That would probably lead to a more interesting discussion for everyone, and in any case it would be a more honest one.
To put it differently, they should defend their bailey, instead of pretending that I am attacking their motte (when really their motte is boringly true / in no way something I would deny).
Having slept on it I can offer my own bit of mind reading of hidden motivation. Fear of starting a discussion that will wander into eugenics.
Haha, well don't worry, I just read YOUR mind ;) the wonders of language! I do not agree with Emil Kirkegaard, but I do agree with Toby Young.
>I think we need to coin a Mind Reader fallacy. If a person doesn’t say something out loud how the fuck do you know what they are thinking?
By inferring it from the implications they believe follow from their declarations of "combination!"
Countless times I've heard people say something to the effect of "intelligence is affected by genes but its also affected by environment, so that means we should still be providing more funding to schools". This obscures the extent that environmental variations explains intelligence variation and therefore whether a given funding increase could be expected to provide an adequate return on investment even taking "environment" naively, but it also completely ignores how much of that fraction IS a result of educational variation specifically.
Give me an example of a person who wrote an autobiography that no one cared about or bought.
There was one called Nobody Gives a Shit What I've Been Through, but I didn't read it.
If I wanted to put some time into answering this question, I'd look into getting API access to the Amazon reviews and/or sales rank data. Amazon categorizes books as memoir, and within that category, there are sure to be some items with no sales and no reviews (or only bad reviews). The authors of those are who you're asking about.
https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/browsenodeinfo.html
There's a Reddit thread for best and worst autobiographies, that's as close as I can get to ignored.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/twe6r0/lets_discuss_best_and_worst_autobiographiesmemoirs/
Confessions of a Sociopath sounds like it's in the running. Apparently it's heavy narcissism from someone who's not actually a diagnosed sociopath.
How would anyone know about it?
Ain't no such critter - everyone got a momma.
What does the expression "For a cool [amount of money]" mean?
I've heard it many times in my life, but have never understood what "For a cool" added to such statements.
I found this definition online, but is it right?
12. ADJECTIVE [ADJECTIVE noun]
You can use cool to emphasize that an amount or figure is very large, especially when it has been obtained easily.
[informal, emphasis]
Columbia recently re-signed the band for a cool $30 million.
I believe cool actually refers to the lack of hyperbole.
The phrase dates backs to the 1700s but was also the title of a famous early 1930s novel satirizing Horatio Alger.
Seems to be a bit of a vague one. Cool in this instance can be short for 'cool headed', in which case the amount of money is the whole of the amount listed no exaggeration or undercounting. Alternatively, it could be cool as a descriptor in which case it's as you found it, signifying the amount of money is surprisingly large.
So, to use an example. A meal that cost a cool twenty would have cost exactly twenty bucks. A meal that cost a cool two hundred is an approximate but this was remarkably high for a meal.
Hope that helps.
Does anyone else ever make it a point to click-through Substack emails to new posts, so that supported bloggers get better "engagement" numbers on email blasts? Or is that not how such things work anymore?
every time. what else would i do?
Someone pseudonymous is booting up a blog on the mindset of privacy concerns at https://psyvacy.substack.com/ - are there any others adjacent to this topic out there?
If India managed to maintain it's caste system largely unchanged for thousands of years, why did the caste system in the Southern United States so rapidly collapse?
A cursory glance at the Wikipedia page suggests that the caste system very much did not exist largely unchanged for thousands of years...
Genetic analysis demonstrates that the anti-colonial rhetoric of WP is incorrect.
I’m guessing you’re looking for something in Western culture, not the fact that the Confederacy lost the civil war.
There’s Christianity and the fact that chattel slavery was not a big part of the European culture that first settled the United States.
>I’m guessing you’re looking for something in Western culture, not the fact that the Confederacy lost the civil war.
But the lower castes did not lose an analogous war, because such war was never fought. Which means that losing a war cannot possibily be the fundamnetal explanation.
I should have specified I meant the early 20th Century Jim Crow state of affairs.
I’m confused. The Jim Crow era was a period when whites were trying to re-establish the caste system.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States.
And the founding of the United States was throwing off the English caste system. No more state-granted noble titles, no more "jury of your peers", All Men Are Created Equal.
I think this is very naive. The early US had extremely powerful families that took the place of British nobility.
Not really. Some early powerful US families attempted to set themselves up in the manner similar to which the British aristocracy functioned: buy big tracts of land, then live idly off the rent. The massive and ever-expanding availability of land in the US made this model non-viable and both flattened the class system and made it much less calcified as people were able to rise in wealth and prestige via trades and trading.
There were certainly powerful families but economic differences made the social structure of revolutionary America very different.
I'm continuing my 2 year hobby of memorising a monthly poem. I'm still looking for recommendations, under the loose criteria of having a rhyme scheme, being at least somewhat significant culturally, and shorter than ~50 lines. What are poems that have resonated with you? In particular I am also looking for poems dealing with grief and loss.
At Henry's Bier, by John Berryman
At Henry’s bier let some thing fall out well:
enter there none who somewhat has to sell,
the music ancient & gradual,
the voices solemn but the grief subdued,
no hairy jokes but everybody’s mood
subdued, subdued,
until the Dancer comes, in a short short dress
hair black & long & loose, dark dark glasses,
uptilted face,
pallor & strangeness, the music changes
to “Give!” & “Ow!” an how! the music changes,
she kicks a backward limb
on tiptoe, pirouettes, & she is free
to the knocking music, sails, dips, & suddenly
returns to the terrible gay
occasion hopeless & mad, she weaves, it’s hell,
she flings to her head a leg, bobs, all is well,
she dances Henry away.
Naming of Parts,
Ars poetica https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica
The Shield of Achilles https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=26040 and
Repose of https://dailypoetry.me/hart-crane/repose-rivers/
all lack the rhyme scheme, but I love them all. Second the recommendation of The Oracle, and the Kipling (Ford o Kabul River is another).
Oh, and also Lady of Shallot. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45360/the-lady-of-shalott-1842
I strongly recommend Clive James' "Japanese Maple":
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
Well, for a killer one, there's Seamus Heaney's "Mid-Term Break" (c'mon Substack, let us format comments or at least keep line-break formatting instead of clumping it all together):
Mid-Term Break
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
Kipling's "Hymn to Breaking Strain" is a favorite of mine.
I also like Houseman "The Oracles"
My favorite Kipling poem is "The Mary Gloster," a Browning monolog that I think better than Browning's, but it is more than fifty lines.
"They flee from me that sometimes did me seek" by Wyatt is short and good.
Derek Mahon is a favourite and I love his account of Horace's eleventh ode (carpe diem)
Don’t waste your time, Leuconoé, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisable future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine: the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.
"The days are more fun than the years...." is a sentiment I try to bring to mind very frequently.
In rather different vein, Emily Dickinson's poems are nice and short for remembering, and this one moves me very much
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity
Wonderful and moving poem indeed!
Since it's spooky season, what about The Raven? I don't know if it's the right length, but I love Kubla Khan. And how do you feel about Robert Service? The Cremation of Sam McGee is really fun and spooky (and deals with loss).
The Raven is actually my project for next year! I think having 24 shorter poems under my belt, it will be time to try something longer and the Raven has been a favourite of mine for a long time now.
Dirge Without Music
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love ,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
And, of course, also by Millay:
CHILDHOOD IS THE KINGDOM WHERE NOBODY DIES
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.
And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
—mothers and fathers don't die.
And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?"
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.
Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.
Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
Don't know many. I guess I'll suggest O Fortuna. Do they have to be in English?
Don't think The Spider and the Fly count as grief or loss, but it's 44 lines.
The Logical Song, by Supertramp? Music counts as poems, right?
It seems to be popular in our host's circles to reference The Hymn of Breaking Strain, a poem by Kipling. (For instance, it was explicitly used in Unsong and obliquely referenced in Project Lawful.) It rhymes, is roughly 50 lines long, and is somewhat about loss.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_strain.htm
"Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for."
I don't usually like Hopkins, and I still have trouble with bits of it, but it may be the only one of his I've memorized.
"They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods."
There's likely plenty better suited to your query in Kipling, and certainly plenty worth memorizing, but this does deal with loss, in a way, and is one of his better-known ones. I think it's the first poem I ever memorized.
There's always The Sally Gardens; I know it as a song, but it was a poem first. Or Do Not Go Gentle.
Ozymandius is loss in a different sense. ("I met a traveler from an antique land...")
I will chime in again if I think of others. It's a fascinating query.
Thank you for these, they are lovely. The Road Through The Wood is a good one, I've always been a fan of Kipling.
Do Not Go Gentle and Ozymandius are already in my repertoire!
Another (short) good lesser known Robert Frost poem is "I Have Been One Acquainted With the Night".
I'm over 70 and one of the things that occasionally bugs me is that my motivation for doing anything has gone (not that I need to do much, but I really enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishing something). I understand that testosterone is not the answer; ideas?
Adderall is energy and motivation in a little white pill. It's not very good for you, but in your place I'd put it on the list of possibilities. Sartre used amphetamines to power through the process of writing his final book.
Have you had your test levels checked though?
I'm much younger than you, but suffer from Chronic Fatigue, which I think gives me some insight into what you're feeling. David Friedman's suggestion below is a good one, but the other part I'd add in is the importance of spending time with other people, in person. If you like games, play against other humans. If you like reading, talk to people about the books you're reading, or make a point of sitting and reading together. Spending time with younger, more energetic people should also help - I gather grand-kids are good for that, if you have them :)
I have a one hour skype with my grandson once a week.
I am also over 70. A good many years ago I concluded that if I spent all my time playing — arguing online, reading fiction, playing computer games — I felt stale. So I committed myself to spending two hours a day, seven days a week, on writing projects, broadly defined. In addition to making the rest of the day feel like an earned vacation, it also gets me into doing things that give me a feeling of accomplishment. I have finally managed to complete a poem I had been thinking about doing for a couple of decades, have written chapter drafts for what should end up as a book or two on a range of topics largely inspired by my accumulated blog posts, somewhat over a thousand of them.
Might work for you, might not, but once you are committed to spending the time you may end up finding interesting things to spend it on. Certainly I did.
Hang in there Owen.
I can highly recommend Huberman's video on Motivation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA50EK70whE
It goes through all the mechanisms (physical and mental) that they have researched which affect Dopamine, Epinephrine and Acetylcholine - He goes through all the tools that affect these three and I would highly recommend looking at this
The item that is not covered is hormonal precursor / impacts on motivation and Focus.
If you are interested in this and want a deeper dive into Dopamine and Motivation he has another indepth dive here: https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU
I feel dumb offering suggestions to someone older and wiser than me, so sorry if any of this comes across as obvious.
Do you get out often? I find walks and a change of scenery motivates me like nothing else. Grab a coffee, say hi to a stranger, look at buildings, birds... By the time I get home I'm shaken out of whatever monotony was keeping me unmotivated.
I also watched Don Hertzfeldt's 'It's Such a Beautiful Day' recently which gave a temporary boost.
Thanks for writing a considered reply. I get out often, walk a lot in nature but it doesn't increase my motivation. Sorry!!
Have you tried Ritalin/Adderall/misc dopamine-increasing substance ?
No. Not keen on amphetamines
Perhaps modafinil / armodafinil is worth a shot then ?
I know that the original poster mentioned NOT (testosterone), but to go straight to recommending medication (in two posts) seems extremely odd.
Are you a health care professional with prescribing privileges?
I'm in 60s. It's seems the first thing would likely investigation of the history. It seems like he is really looking for a hobby or hobbies and for an investigation into possible anhedonia or to distinguish between lack of motivation that could just a normal symptom of generally getting older or if it is sign possibly depression or some other ailment.
While the owen tries something small like to do wordle for 10 days, I'd suggest Owen also try some self investigation: What things did you use to do, what does your spouse, your siblings, and your friends do and think of about motivation and decreased motivation with age. Is lack of motivation a 20 year slide or a 2 year thing corresponding to pandemic or related to retirement or a 6 month acute drop. And then talk with your primary care physician armed with thorough and honest history.
"It seems like he is really looking for a hobby or hobbies and for an investigation into possible anhedonia or to distinguish between lack of motivation that could just a normal symptom of generally getting older or if it is sign possibly depression or some other ailment."
I actually think that is your take on what he *should* be asking for. In fact he is asking for suggestions. Given that, I think it is reasonable to include drugs that increase motivation and energy on the list. He's a grown-up, & can take into consideration the downside of using those drugs. (And it's not as though there's no downside to ruminating alone or with a shrinkazoid about whether he is anhedonic, just getting old, or experiencing a sign of Some Other Ailment)
I don't think any one without a license to prescribe should be recommending prescription medication.
That medications are even advertised in US is highly problematic.
lots of discourse on direct action strategies of protesters, including splashing tomato soup on van gogh paintings and pouring milk on the floor of a grocery store. i think its a great example of coupling "we die in a climate crisis" with "you dont get to enjoy art anymore because we are dying".
my model of change is that
1. first people get upset at you because they are being inconvenienced, ie you dont get to enjoy art, your favorite highway was blocked off and now you're late to work
2. weeks later they know protestors are just a fact of life, and now its the government's fault they havent gotten off their asses and done something about it
i myself have done some disruptions, and jail is pretty traumatizing, but i'd say if you measured my successes by way of the Unit of Caring (the us dollar) i provided 5 million usd of value.
You know, if you people had enough sense to do something like covering an oil billionaire's car in black oil/grease (or at least, black paint), you might have something resembling success in this regard. It doesn't inconvenience regular people, you're not mindlessly lashing out at something irrelevant that people value, few people are going to feel bad (and may even feel good) about seeing some rich asshole having his car ruined.
I think a better explanation of this act is similar to the first section of Scott's "Toxoplasma of Rage": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ (which I really need to re-read again because it's been a while)
Throwing soup at a one-of-a-kind painting is dumb. Doing it to protest something unrelated is also dumb. You're going to make a lot of people mad at your and your organization. *But* you bring awareness to your cause. Whether that awareness-anger-ratio is worth it seems debatable.
disruption is a key component of civil disobedience protests. because disruption spreads uncertainty and gives weak actors leverage against powerful opponents, it is the strongest weapon of social movements.
So would it be OK for the police to come break some shit in your living room in an effort to gain, you know, leverage?
This is all just meaningless words
I don't think this is right. The goto example is the Civil Rights Movement, right? Thing is, that only worked because of the overreaction of the authorities. Same as in 2020 with BLM. Early on the police were surprised and got caught on camera beating the crap out of random people, including old dudes with canes. That got the problem good attention, and brought out huge protests and lots of support. Which disappeared as the police got their shit together.
Disruption gets you attention, yes. But either your cause has to be unknown and very sympathetic (the Jim Crow south), or you have to provoke a reaction that pisses people off more than your action does (Jim Crow again, May 2020 BLM). Fail at both and you're just hurting your cause, by drawing attention to it and linking to something negative (throwing soup at a painting).
Note: the painting was not damaged, so my earlier reaction was over the top. Damaging the frame isn't a crime against humanity the way that destroying a Van Gogh would have been.
The awareness it raises is "oh, those are the soup-throwing idiots" which doesn't really advance the cause.
Controversies, whether about climate change or other things, happen because people disagree. It's natural enough to assume that your view of what should happen is correct but if you know that many intelligent and well informed people disagree, shouldn't you discount your estimate of the value of what you did to allow for the possibility that you were wrong and any effect you had was to make the world worse off rather than better off?
ive read a lot of books by people who have studied social change for decades and they say its cool to engage in nonviolent direct action that exacerbates contradictions, demonstrates power, and can't be ignored. one of my favorites is This is an uprising by englers
further, it seems like a very very bad idea to take advice from people who are ideologically opposed and committed to your failure. its just not a good idea.
finally, i dont think most of these commenters are well informed. there is a great inferential gap between us, and idk what to do about that while most of them are saying "actually you should be in jail longer". it certainly makes me think that they are not Well Informed
Anyone can get a book published nowadays, so I'm not sure why you think "reading lots of books" is a sign of credibility. I'm sure plenty of Flat Earthers and Q-Anon believers read a lot of books too, and those books reinforce their own views, just like the ones you've read have reinforced yours. And for what it's worth, I have a Master's degree in Political Science and I've never heard of the book you mentioned. (Granted, contrary to what a lot of right-wingers think, Saul Alinsky and Abbie Hoffman were never part of our curriculum, and while we did read Marx, it was with the specific understanding that he was wrong. So maybe the world of academia is just too "establishment" for your liking.)
Honest question though: Is there anything that anyone here can say that will actually cause you to adjust your beliefs or stances by even the slightest amount? Because it certainly doesn't look that way, which makes me wonder why you even bothered posting this in the first place. Just as a way of bragging and Owning The Libs from the left?
As the old saying goes, "a fanatic is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject." And there is little value in debating fanatics.
>further, it seems like a very very bad idea to take advice from people who are ideologically opposed and committed to your failure. its just not a good idea.
Then why are you here telling us about how great your actions are?
You don't think you can learn anything by listening to the arguments of people who disagree with you? That seems like a policy designed to make sure that, if you are wrong, you don't discover it.
The people blocking that pipeline back in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests) were engaging in non-violent direct action, and while I didn't agree with them, I could respect their commitment, and wished the best for everyone involved. There are legitimate protest actions that people can take to effect change.
You haven't mentioned any here. You're deliberately stopping random people getting to work, to effect something they have no control over. What, are you protesting car use as a whole? If you're opposed to gas use, then protest outside the central fuel station, block the trucks delivering the gas. You'll still get arrested, and piss people off, and not change anything, but at least you'll be targeting the group responsible instead of complete strangers.
Absolutely no one thinks the best way to win a war is to invade your enemy's neighbors first. Making more enemies won't help you.
>Absolutely no one thinks the best way to win a war is to invade your enemy's neighbors first. Making more enemies won't help you.
Not at all your point but the Netherlands and Belgium would like a word . . .
And look how that turned out for Germany! But you have a good point that "X is clearly false" != " no one believes X"
+1
hey cant help but notice but that protest that you posted literally didn't work? im talking about effective activism
I think you're wrong. The pipeline became a huge cause on the left, forcing the Obama administration to repeatedly delay it and finally deny cert. The Trump admin restarted it, then the Biden admin re-stopped it. The corp trying to build it finally cancelled it, probably realizing that it was going to get shut off every other decade if they didn't.
It's a textbook example of making an unknown cause famous, providing sympathetic protesters, getting them abused by unsympathetic security forces (they hosed the protesters down in the winter, if memory serves), and finally winning your point. It was absolutely effective.
And yet you failed to notice you're copying toddlers. "Throw food and then lie down in the street" doesn't make the President of the United States give you what you want for the one month he has authority to do so.
Can you give an example of effective activism?
greensborough north carolina 1960, many black people, mostly students, committed the crime of sitting in at a restaurant, and it was deeply unpopular, and it was coordinated by people willing to fight legal battles and imprisonment. and in 4 years copycat protests became popular, and normies had to concede that it didnt make much sense to deny freedom to an underclass when they wielded such power (sitting in at restaurants)
Not sure why this generated such a fuss. Kids say dopey things sometimes. They usually grow out of it.
im 30 thanks
30 year olds should know better than to say goofy stuff like their impotent rage has created $5 million in value
Not everyone has reached mental maturity by age 30. Some never do.
My guess is that <ambiguous pronoun> is probably just messing around. And <AP> is pleased to have generated a couple hundred reactions with what <AP> probably knows is a weak argument. Jerking our chain for fun. I could be way off base, but that’s my read.
I can only imagine what must be going through your mind reading all of these comments. Perhaps you dismiss all of this through some rationalization; "they're out to get me", "these people are ignorant", "they're trolling" but that would be a real pity.
In this reply there are a lot of people who have given you a very specific critique and this should shed some light on your belief structures that may be faulty.
Although if you convinced someone that the god they believed in for their entire life was false would they thank you
i will engage with posts that demonstrate charity
"i myself have done some disruptions, and jail is pretty traumatizing, but i'd say if you measured my successes by way of the Unit of Caring (the us dollar) i provided 5 million usd of value."
No offense, but this sounds absolutely delusional. If anything, you've provided negative value to whatever movements you claim to support, because you wanted to do something that *felt cathartic* instead of putting in the work to actually bring about any real changes in policy and/or public opinion. The real work of change is quite boring and tedious: It involves a lot of long hours making phone calls, knocking doors, handing out flyers on street corners, writing letters to your local elected representatives, going to town hall meetings, and lots of banal logistical work that would make the average day at the office seem exciting by comparison. I should know, I've spent literally years doing it! But the new breed of Very Online edgelord activists wants to skip all the hard parts and focus on "fun" stuff like arguing with people on Twitter, vandalizing public property, and shouting at normies so you can feel self-righteously superior to them, regardless of how unproductive or even counter-productive it may be.
you are listing a lot of activities involved in electoralism, which is useful for turning already-won victories into legislation and policy. however, i think there are more fundamental and actually effective strategies by way of, for instance, organizing marches - which are meant to silently imply "look how we can march around like a military force would" as well as demonstrating a count of voters. another more fundemental and actually effective strategy is to fight legal battles by committing a premediated and carefully planned crime, designed to force out the contradictions between current policy and human values
"however, i think there are more fundamental and actually effective strategies by way of, for instance, organizing marches - which are meant to silently imply "look how we can march around like a military force would" as well as demonstrating a count of voters."
This is highly ineffective, because no one is actually going to be afraid of these people. They represent an extremely small percentage of the overall population, and the moment they actually tried to *act* like a military (e.g. actually use force), they would be completely annihilated. They are allowed to march around precisely because of the fact that they're no real threat to anyone, and in a liberal democratic society, the state and the populace are inclined to tolerate such behaviors as long as they don't become *too* disruptive. But the tolerance of the majority isn't infinite, and stunts like the soup incident will definitely cause it to wane.
There are situations in which the tactics you're describing can work: For example, if the actual military is on the side of the protesters (as was the case during several Latin American coups), or if the protesters have the support of an overwhelming majority of the overall population (as was the case during many of the Arab Spring revolts). But neither of those are true in 21st century America. Expecting that a movement with support from less than 1% of the overall population can intimidate the other 99% into appeasing their demands is absurd.
"another more fundemental and actually effective strategy is to fight legal battles by committing a premediated and carefully planned crime, designed to force out the contradictions between current policy and human values"
And unless you're fighting specifically for people's right to vandalize famous works of art (which is a cause that very few people would get behind), the soup incident doesn't fall into this category at all. The crime is entirely unrelated to the thing you're actually protesting.
"human values", of course, referring to things that have only ever existed in modern european-majority societies. Though I'm sure you have some 'progressive savage' understanding of world history.
"weeks later they know protestors are just a fact of life, and now its the government's fault they havent gotten off their asses and done something about it"
Yes, but when people start demanding that the government "do something," what they have in mind is "using whatever degree of force is necessary to suppress the protests," not "giving the protesters everything they want."
It's been statistically proven that these sorts of extreme methods always *reduce* popular support for whatever cause the protesters are fighting for: Back in 2020, support for the Black Lives Matter movement was up to almost 80% when the protests started, but declined to around 50% after weeks of rioting and extreme demands like "abolish the police," with the steepest declines in the cities that had the greatest amount of violent incidents and property damage. Hell, in Kenosha, support for BLM declined to barely over 50% *among the Black population!*
Splashing tomato soup on priceless works of art does nothing but make people hate the perpetrators and, by extension, climate activists in general. If this turns out to just be a one-off incident, then people will probably forget about it quickly enough, but if things like this start to happen on a regular basis, then it will absolutely torpedo support for environmentalism. (For that matter, the whole narrative that "climate change will literally kill us all and cause human extinction!" also hurts the climate movement, because it's completely bogus and a great many people are aware of that fact. Very few actual climate scientists believe that, and you can't convincingly tell people to "trust the science" while simultaneously denying it yourself.)
Also, leaving aside the many pragmatic arguments against this type of aggressive activism, the whole notion that "we are suffering, therefore other people shouldn't be allowed to be content" is just deeply unethical. It's seen as abusive when people do it on the individual level, why should it be seen as any less evil when it's done on the societal level?
Thank you for doing this. That was a really good response.
This is exactly what I came here to say, and you said it better than I could!
I'm going to destroy a literally irreplaceable painting if I don't get my way right now is not a successful protest. I don't actually know what those guys were protesting against, and I don't care. If I found out, I would be for that thing because fuck those guys. I can't imagine the worldview of a person who that protest would influence positively. It's alien to me.
As to stuff like the public roads, that's well enough I suppose. I think it's bad tactics, be it done with tractors, trucks or bodies, but yeah, that's fine enough and something gov't can and should deal with in normal ways. But I think, on balance, it probably hurts rather than helps whatever cause it supposed to represent.
But destroying a Van Gogh is fucking well out of bounds and those assholes should go to jail for the rest of their lives for crimes against humanity.
Fortunately, there was a glass in the frame in front of the Van Gogh. You can thus reduce your ire to "these imbeciles were too stupid to destroy the irreplaceable painting".
I assumed they knew there was a glass frame and so intended to get the intention without actually destroying some irreplaceable priceless thing.
Yeah, I saw that, but thanks for pointing it out in a reply. Glad I was overreacting. I'm going to assume that they knew it was protected and that they intended their protest to be "the art is temporarily unavailable" and not "priceless masterwork permanently damaged".
That drops it back to a public roads protest. I might be sympathetic or unsympathetic, but whatever. Ultimately I think that the people who made the news blocking the road that Trump was taking to a rally in 2016 help his campaign, and the truckers that blocked the roads (in Canada and here) in 2021/2 hurt the legitimacy of the anti-mandate crowd (both by tying anti-mandate to anti-vax and by being unsympathetic jerks). But that's a matter of tactics and choices and as long as you take the legal consequences without complaint I'm basically fine it.
I think there's a gap in your strategy.
#1 definitely happens, but when people are upset about #1 going into #2, people are just as likely to demand that government "get of their asses" and do something about the *protestors*, rather than demand that whatever issue is being protested be fixed.
See, for example, the explosion of state laws making it easier to run over protesters who are blocking the road. Or the attempts to require a minimum distance between protestors and abortion clinics. Depending on the situation, nuisance protests can easily make people more upset at the protestor than they are about the issue being protested. Which is kinda one of the inherent risks of a tactic that involves being a nuisance to people.
See also the disturbing number of people who think Kyle Rittenhouse was a hero. Not "stupid kid but technically innocent", but positively heroic in his selfless efforts to protect the community from dangerous criminals.
How would you view similar activists for causes you aren't as enthused about (say anti-abortionists or whatever)? As nutters or as kindred spirits? Creating a nuisance or effecting a change?
Funny you should mention that! There were pro-life campaigners who tried using signs with graphic imagery of aborted foetuses and similar tactics.
Did it work? No.
Do you think the received story about "abortion clinic bombers and abortion doctors assassins" means that those tactics worked?
So yes, if some pro-life group went around throwing tins of tomato soup on paintings and gluing themselves to the road, I would think they were idiot nuisances. What worked in the USA? The Supreme Court saying decisions on abortion law should go back to the states to make legislation, and decades of work plugging away at pro-life issues. Not shock tactics, not publicity stunts.
It's a great example of "being a goddamn idiot doing pointless virtue signalling".
The balding young man in a dress spray-painting the Aston Martin showroom garnered nothing but some amused derision. If you want ordinary people to take whatever it is you are protesting about seriously, try not looking like a reject from a Monty Python sketch.
Splashing tomato soup over a van Gogh does what, exactly? They blattered on about cold, hungry families not being able to afford to heat a tin of soup, but they would have done more for an actual cold, hungry family by donating those wasted tins of soup to a charity or - horror of horrors! - getting off their privileged middle-class backsides and going out to deliver hot meals to the old and indigent.
But that wouldn't have garnered the same feeling of "Fighting Da Man!" now would it?
Also, many people do actually go out and deliver food to the hungry, or help out in a soup kitchen, or whatever else. None of them ever appear in a news article or trend on social media. The people who get news and social media coverage are the ones who throw a can of soup at a painting or dump milk on the floor of a store.
We reward the attention-grabbing and destructive behavior, and ignore the decent and helpful behavior. And we get more of what we reward....
Care to give more detail about how you estimated 5 million usd of value?
>2. weeks later they know protestors are just a fact of life, and now its the government's fault they havent gotten off their asses and done something about it
This doesn't work for climate change. No government on earth can stop climate change by passing some policies. If GHG are going to be meaningfully reduced, it's going to be a process occurring over decades involving cooperation between many countries.
Honestly, this all sounds like you trying to justify throwing tantrums which you enjoy throwing instead of actually putting in the work to determine what will be actually effective and executing it.
Almost the only people who support this kind of action are people who already agree with you. People in the middle just think you're a bunch of nutters and if anything are put off by this silliness.
>i myself have done some disruptions, and jail is pretty traumatizing, but i'd say if you measured my successes by way of the Unit of Caring (the us dollar) i provided 5 million usd of value.
This is delusional
I mean I understand and respect your intent but I think the more likely result is that people will indeed think "it's the government's fault they haven't gotten off their asses and done something about it," but they'll want 'doing something about it' to mean arrests/jail time/making it a felony to block the highway on their morning commute.
The best way to protest is to work to make batteries, PV modules, and carbon capture from the air ridiculously cheap.
Some people are doing that.
Yes the best but also simultaneously the most difficult
It's much easier to destroy.
Brilliant cheap carbon capture machines: Plants! Luckily they have a lot of them in Brazil. How would some random person in North America or Europe go about to stop the Brazilian government from destroying its rainforests?
Perhaps Europe could set an example, not destroy its own old growth woods?
...oh, right...
Yeah, dang it, a couple of centuries too late for that!
Exactly what I always say. People who lack the competence or work ethic to actually contribute to solutions, so they just pull a worthless little stunt where the real goal is getting attention like a toddler. If you care that deeply about climate change, go study climate science and join a team working on carbon capture. Or get involved politically and try to get some wins on the local level.
> who usually don't deliberately throw soup at paintings.
Citation needed
"I bravely put myself out there with my comb-over and terrible fashion choices to protest a luxury car brand!"
https://news.sky.com/video/just-stop-oil-activist-sprays-aston-martin-showroom-with-orange-paint-12722077
Just out of curiosity, where do these people think the tins of soup, glue, and canister to spray-paint come from? How are these items produced? Could they possibly involve the use of.... oil?
The paint spraying is harmless, which means it's also ineffectual. He (she? they? hard to tell what their preferred pronouns are when they're clearly male but also wearing a long dress) didn't smash the window or engage in serious property damage, which avoids getting arrested (probably?) but also just means this is "nuisance" level protest rather than anything useful.
Yes, it got publicity. But the publicity it got was "who's this tosser?" not "ah, my awareness of the seriousness of climate change has been raised". It's very nice of them that this group, whomever they may be, are fully inclusive of non-binary folx as street-level activists but does that do anything practical towards stopping oil (or whatever it is they are protesting)?
hey i will engage with serious replies that demonstrate charity. its not worth my time to try to bridge some gap if you can't lend me even an ounce of decorum
Decorum? You're the one trying to overhaul society. Why do you deserve "decorum"? Do you "lend an ounce of decorum" to people who disagree with you in good faith on contentious political issues? Of COURSE you don't. Those people are RACISTS or SEXISTS or TRANSPHOBICS and they deserve to be destroyed.
Hm? You mean their disruptive direct action didn't jolt you out of your complacency and cause you to change your position?
If you come on here to boast that by your own estimation you have caused $5 million worth of disruption, then it is on you to put up or shut up about how you derive that figure, what good or benefit you imagine you have done, and the final efficacy of anything that you might have participated in.
Did your protesting or night in jail actually achieve anything other than give you the feeling of "I'm so badass, such a rebel against Badness and Mean Stuff!"? Did you get anything done other than waste the time of the cops and the courts? Can you point to anything about "after my/our protest, this bad thing was stopped and/or this good thing was put in its place"?
And why does a ruff'n'tuff disruptor of social norms care about decorum, anyhow?
"Let's go block that highway because we have strong political opinions. Don't worry, people will forget we made them angry in a few weeks."
"Hi. I'm the guy who kept you stuck in traffic for 3 hours that day. Can we have a civil conversation about how that was totally worth it to me?"
Maybe your model of how people respond to assholery is wrong.
It might be ineffective but throwing tomato soup on a glass protector is pretty harmless imo.
"Harmless" is exactly the point: they did something stupid and ineffectual that achieved nothing tangible towards the cause of climate change or whatever it is they are protesting, but two young ninnies got to feel like they were doing more than just being nuisances.
I'm sure BP and Exxon and the boardrooms of the other companies on the list below are all having meetings about "Did you hear about the tomato soup? Clearly we must shut down all our wells now!"
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/010715/worlds-top-10-oil-companies.asp
Can you ask for civility after a sit in or other such activity? Civil disobediance is by definition uncivil.
Okay? Then don't demand decorum!
That's literally the opposite of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is disobedience that remains civil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
>King regarded civil disobedience to be a display and practice of reverence for law: "Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."
Food-based tantrums aren't civil disobedience.
There were some comments below about TDS. Doesn't TDS basically mean that DT is "living in your head rent free", preventing you from thinking clearly?
If so, isn't that DT's *fault*, considering much of DT's political strategy was to nettle and discombobulate his opponents and detractors like a professional boxer? Isn't the TDS epidemic, then, a very good reason for disliking DT? (I also dislike the lab or bat whatever it was that started Covid.)
I can't help noticing that having an unhealthy obsession with right-wing public figures has been very common at least since Obama years (possibly before, but I can't speak to it because I was less aware of these things). Trump let the obsessed people concentrate all their hate on him, but, if you talk to someone with TDS, they will happily tell you how much they hate other prominent right-wingers - currently, Abbott, Kavanaugh, Cruz, DeSantis, Tucker Carlson come to mind, but there are many more. (Heck, remember when everyone raged against definitely not right-wing Whole Foods for their CEO opposing Obamacare? Or remember how all college students demanded not to allow Chick-fil-a on campus because the CEO said that marriage is between a man and a woman?)
So on one hand Trump did present a convenient target for hate, allowing to focus it all on him, but on the other it was there before him, less concentrated and carefully curated by the media. If you stand in the middle of a battlefield and scream insults, while waving a bunch of flags of your side, on one hand you expect and deserve the enemy to shoot all they have at you, mostly ignoring the rest of your army until it gets too close, but on the other hand the battle is already going on, and you did not start it.
>> I can't help noticing that having an unhealthy obsession with right-wing public figures has been very common at least since Obama years (possibly before, but I can't speak to it because I was less aware of these things).
I think it was around before - I remember Bush Derangement Syndrome being a thing 2001-2008. I don't think it's isolated to public figures on the right though. Obama spent a 8 years living rent free in a *lot* of conservative heads, as did Clinton.
"Or remember how all college students demanded not to allow Chick-fil-a on campus because the CEO said that marriage is between a man and a woman?"
If memory serves, it was because he donates significant money, to the tune of millions of dollars, to charities that helped write the law in Africa that makes homosexuality a capital crime.
Of course, right-wingers at the time (and since) like to pretend it's about marriage, but certainly the memes that pass around liberal facebook frequently mention the whole killing the gays thing.
Never heard about that before. Googled it now. Is it this?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/oct/25/facebook-posts/what-does-chick-fil-have-do-ugandas-anti-gay-bill-/
I think you demonstrated my point perfectly. Lots of people really hated the guy, and when you give your version of why, we find out that your version was presumably based on something that even Politifact rates mostly false. At least my version of why people hated him was based on something he actually said.
I wouldn't be super surprised to find out it's false. I wondered about that when I was posting. But yeah, that's the one. That's what passed around left circles to gin up support for the boycott.
But I don't think it proves your point. Passing around a post around saying Chick-fil-a doesn't want gays to get married wouldn't get you a very good boycott. Saying that Chick-fil-a money is used to kill gay people does the job. Whoever set that up knew they had to lie to get the job done.
Oh, I think you're very likely to be right about that Facebok meme being mostly responsible in this case. If I had known about it, I would have probably come to the same conclusion as you.
I'm just pointing out the pattern of mass derangement towards prominent right-wingers that predates TDS. I can't make up my mind which of the possible two scenarios in this case is worse - a crazy number of people raging against that guy for something he said, or a crazy number of people raging against him because they uncritically gobbled up a not very factual claim made somewhere on Facebook likely with the purpose of inciting all the hate.
Whichever it is, I think it's a big problem, because this kind of thing makes it very hard for the two sides to come to any kind of agreement. (And I also think that it's very clearly a problem that did not start with Trump, even if it sounds as if he'd like to take all the credit.)
Oh, 100% my dude. I too remember the 2nd Bush administration. And, for that matter, the Obama administration. This is just how we are.
Well, gee. Waking up in the morning and remembering the country is being run by a guy who probably couldn’t pass a high school civics test has a way of sticking in your thoughts. I wouldn’t necessarily think of this as derangement.
I am once again pointing out that white male Republicans have the highest knowledge of civics on average.
But having smart black guy in office resulted in what, exactly? Psychotic interventions in the middle east and north africa that caused untold suffering.
TDS is, or should, refer not just to Trump being annoying or agravating or people not liking him but to something extra.
TDS really blew up in the 2016-2018 era and was characterized by:
-An overwhelming obsession with Trump. 24/7 coverage and constant discussion. He dominated discourse and people (Maddow) ran entire shows about Trump Drama for years.
-Unhinged fears. Again, especially in 2017-2018, it was widely believed on the left that Trump was a direct Russian asset for an assortment of reasons. In 2022, hopefully, we can reflect and see that these fears were, at best, dramatically overblown.
So someone might dislike Trump for a variety of good or bad reasons but there's clearly a difference between the obsessive and panic driven coverage and discussion of Trump that dominated in 2017-2018 and normal criticism. I do think there are still people with severe TDS when it comes to certain current and recent events but the CW aspect brings more heat than light so lets stick to things 3+ years old.
Maddow and others couldn't get Trump out of their heads for 5 minutes. It deranged them. That's the whole idea. That was Trump's big strategy before and after he became POTUS. Stay inside of everyone's heads.
>Isn't the TDS epidemic, then, a very good reason for disliking DT? (I also dislike the lab or bat whatever it was that started Covid.)
That's probably one of the core, basic disagreements that split the human race: are you responsible for your emotions, or is what you perceive as the cause of your emotions responsible for them?
You can easily construct ad-absurdum rebuttal of either (what about the absolute asshole making everyone mad? What about the absolute crybaby being traumatized by everything?), and...I don't have much more insight on the subject, actually.
I think the right answer is that *both* are at fault. There's no reason that blame for things needs to add up to 100%. Some things there's less blame to go around because it really was an unforeseeable accident. Some things there's more blame to go around because lots of people's intentional actions had foreseeable consequences on other people's intentional actions.
https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/TDS
I don't know why you all are blaming DynaTrace Inc. for Tokyo Disney Sea.
I’m going with The Daily Show.
It is if you make certain assumptions. So say these are true:
1. The causes for your TDS are all bad things that are right to upset you
2. They actually happened
3. They are Trump's fault.
4. You are reacting in correct proportion to them.
But a person who is accusing you of having TDS isn't at that point in the argument where the person making your argument has already won on all fronts, if that makes sense. They are essentially accusing the TDS-haver of being a person for whom one or more of the four above things are false.
Your argument is a bit like someone saying "Since you are a Nazi, isn't any emotion I have about you justified?". And it might be so, if I'm a Nazi - but I'm certainly going to argue on that point.
So "living in someone's head" is something a lot of basketball players attempt to do to each other. They talk shit, say things to their opponents like: "Your mom sucked my dick last night." They try to make the other guy angry so he will react emotionally and lose focus on the game he is supposed to be playing.
The answers in that scenario would be:
1. Yes
2. No
3. N/A
4. A proportional response is still the wrong one because it means your frame of mind has been taken from one field of play to another.
Putting this back into a political context: anger at some of Trump's tweets or comments may be reasonable. However, inserting that anger into an analysis of how otherwise Trump is performing as POTUS might yield an unbalanced assessment.
I gotta say I LOLed at this comment (and the part at the end).
I think yes, it is DT’s fault because it’s essentially exactly what he’s going for.
At the same time, part of DTS seems to be having no self-awareness and not realizing he’s mostly just trolling.
Personally, I find a troll more likable than a self-righteous manipulator (aka the rest of politicians). But that’s probably from watching too much South Park and being conditioned to find Cartman hilarious.
Subjectively, you know what you mean when you say “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but objectively i think you might be projecting the symptom of cluelessness/poor self-awareness in the diagnostic criteria of TDS, if what you’re assuming is that the only reason someone might be triggered by Trump’s trolling is if they don’t understand how Trump is constantly trolling… It’s actually pretty naive and insulating to make that assumption, in the same way Trumpian thought purposely misreads the motivations of Biden voters (“There’s NO WAY that 50 million people would ever be seriously willing to vote for a person while simultaneously experiencing a mere low-to-moderate behavioral drive to attend tailgate rallies with a bunch of other political jackoffs…”) in order to rationalize his own self-serving, laughably dumb election fictions. His style of rhetoric *relies* on the token chucklefucks of his base to misunderstand the actual big picture, which is why he puts on the fucking makeup and puts on the show.
Which brings me back to the alternative explanation for why TDS suffers may actually understand how trolling works and yet still be incensed by a president doing it: because of the TONS of chucklefucks in his base who think that being smart enough to pick up on Trump’s trolling means they can’t be blatantly yet credulously defrauded, because of how Trump’s literal textbook schoolyard tactics have poisoned the discourse in a way you would need to be extremely manipulable not to recognize as a disaster for everybody involved, regardless of their preferred political outcomes, and finally, because the mere existence of an insincere, unserious (“trolly”) Commander in Chief of history’s greatest aggregation of power just reflects so poorly on my own fellow countrymen that i don’t know how sad it would be if they actually got their way and leveled the whole system for the giggles you get from not even really knowing how to give half an actual fuck about anything but sensationalist schadenfreude
What do people think of recall elections and other ways to make governments more (temporally) responsive to the popular will without destabilising politics? I.e. to avoid the situation where a deeply unpopular government still has a de-jure mandate from a few years ago when people liked them more.
In the real world, a number of countries allow recalls to happen if a petition passes a certain threshold proportion of the electorate. This can either apply to individual politicians or the government as a whole, depending on the country. While these are rarely triggered and even more rarely succeed, perhaps a good horse runs even at the shadow of a whip.
For political systems not that different from ours, despite the fact I just made them up, how about the westminster system except with annual recall elections (triggering a general election if they succeed) that drop in threshold every year since the last GE. So it takes 90% popular opposition in the first year, 50% in the 5th year and 10% in the 9th. A new government gets a few years to win public confidence but is kicked out faster if the public get fed up with it.
Or one like westminster but where there are no general elections. Elections are instead spread out across time, with each MP being elected once every 5 years (kind of like midterms but moreso). An average of 5 constituencies would need to hold an election per fortnight for this to work in the UK. Thus a government that suddenly became less popular would see its majority slowly eroded until the opposition could force through a VoNC.
This question is apropos of no particular political developments that might be taking place right now, or anything.
This sort of problem can also be addressed in the context of a system where the Head of Government is de jure responsible to a separate Head of State whose ordinary duties are mainly ministerial and ceremonial but who has strong reserve powers for emergencies. In a situation like that, the Head of State typically has the legal authority to dismiss the Head of Government and call new elections. In practice, these reserve powers very rarely need to be officially invoked, since the implicit threat is generally enough to enforce political norms around resignations and early elections. Other less drastic reserve powers can also be used as leverage, as things like appointment powers and assent to laws passed by the legislature can also be privately made conditional on an appropriate show of popular mandate (snap elections, referendums, etc).
I think you can't let the recall value drop below like 30% of the votes of the last election.
You need to make the costs high enough that it won't just be used as griefing, but I think more checks on power are always better.
You lose predictability, which feels like a bad thing - a government can't rely on n years to implement its program. You also make it less likely that a government will do things that it believes will be unpopular but in the national interest.
The "five seats every fortnight" Westminster system seems particularly problematic; you could easily wind up in a situation where the government balances on a knife edge and power swaps back and forth on an irregular weekly schedule for a period of years.
Yes, you can overdo recall...it's what I call a Laffer-like problem, where the sweet spot is in the middle somewhere that is hard to identify.
I would think this would also be a problem for international relations. A government of one nation may hesitate to sign a treaty with another nation's government that may suddenly change with little warning.
Treaties don't work like that. And if they did ... you signed them with the government of the day, not the head of state. they could still.be invalidated by a normal change of government.
On paper treaties don't work like that; in practice the toothlessness of international law means that they often kind of do.
And it's not even 100% clear to me that they shouldn't, to some extent - I think "no government can bind its successor" is a principle with a lot going for it; how you trade that off against being able to make and rely on long term commitments is a hard problem. Otherwise a government that wants to prevent a democratically elected successor reversing its policies just has to find a willing neighbour and commit to them in a treaty.
Recalls are predictable themselves...if things are going that badly, a recall is not unexpected. Or unwelcome.
Hyperdiffusion is called pseudoscience three times just in the intro of its wiki page. Seems ungenerous as there are respectable people who say the Olmecs were influenced by Asian sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2741354
According to the Wikipedia page, hyperdiffusion is the "claim that all major cultural innovations and societies derive from one (usually lost) ancient civilization".
I might be sympathetic to the idea that Wikipedia is using an ungenerous definition, but the article you linked to doesn't even contain the word "hyperdiffusion".
The Wikipedia article, likewise, doesn't refute the idea that Asian cultures influenced the Olmecs.
So, I'm not really sure what point you're making.
Yeah, should have explained more. When I looked at the map of possible diffusion, the one that struck me as least likely was the arrow from Asia to Central America. Then I ran into the paper about Olmecs which supports that arrow being real. The paper doesn't talk about any central event, but does make the case for very long range diffusion of ideas that were fundamental to Meso-American civilization. Everyone knows the Mayan calendar and how important it was to them. Maybe that was borrowed from South Eastern Asia.
Joseph Campbell also makes the case that agricultural creation myths in Polynesia and Algonquian Native Americans are so similar because of, possibly, a global diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEqR73j_oMY&t=935s
He's not exactly fringe.
Campbell is *absolutely* fringe in any academic sense. All of his ideas are pseudoscience that got popular with laymen, he's like Frazer in that regard.
Is anyone living their life in a significantly differently manner as a direct result of AI risk fears? (Excluding those who are working directly on AI Safety). It seems that the main problem in acting on beliefs of elevated risk is uncertainty in outcomes and timelines. For instance, deciding not to save for retirement seems like a bad idea if you think there is even a (say) 20% chance that AGI is not invented by the time you hit the age of 60. Working a high-paying, high-stress job for a decade in order to retire early and enjoy yourself seems like it would only be a good idea if AGI is at least 20 years away. Curious how others think about this topic.
I ordered a MouseAir kit because I want to learn more about AI. I am not joking. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunair/mouseair-ai-based-diy-cat-toy-for-the-raspberry-pi
You might already know about this but CodeProject dot com is a great resource for getting into this sort of thing. You can probably find related articles on their AI page as well as their Internet of Things page.
It's supported by a big community of developers and you can get answers to programming questions there.
Thanks Gunflint, I bookmarked it. Kind of looks like it's for people who are at least halfway up the slope, whereas I am sitting in the grassy area at the bottom of the mountain. I have had absolutely nothing to do with programming, and am starting from scratch. But I'm not too proud to ask simple questions, even in a setting like that. And I like math, logic and puzzles, so will probably be ok.
They are good about answering the questions of newcomers at that site. The star rating system for published articles is pretty reliable too.
In my view treating AGI and Singularity fantasies as reality is useless. However, in my lifetime I have been and will continue to promote and vote for people who will try to get things like basic income and robot taxes going so that we can allow AI and robot to take over jobs without throwing everybody not already rich under the bus.
I am donating more money to charity moving from 1% - 10% of income and not putting money in an Investment Savings Account. anymore. Though there are several factors interplaying at once, I wouldn't call it all AI determined, but it maybe 40%.
No one said yes to a related question last week (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-245/comment/9619623). I remain interested in hearing from people who are doing this, but they seem hard to find.
I posted on this topic over at lesswrong. Personally I have stopped all retirement contributions, and I am trying to work out better ways yo use wealh that are consistent with my beliefs about the future.
Not really concerned. I expect it will be viable at least 20 years after safe, reliable, personal cold fusion is in every home, powering every car, etc
So when I strap into my cold fusion powered Prius, I’ll start giving it some serious thought.
I'm living my life differently by telling myself that I'm going to learn about AI so I can help with AI Safety but then not doing it. :/
In case you've never read the famous argument to the contrary and would like to:
"There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
Are speeches/sermons/lectures/concerts/performances a human universal? I.e. one person or a small group of people do some act, a larger group of people watch without participating. I can't find this in the Wikipedia list of human universals, so I thought I ask here. On one hand, it feels very modern to me with the clear distinction between the person acting and the observers. One the other hand, it seems very natural. If anyone has read some interesting anthropology or history on the subject, please share and I'll be grateful.
I don't know about universals, but I disagree about the audience/actor distinction being modern. The Greeks were having drama competitions 2500 years ago. Maybe I'm missing what you're getting at?
Some performers do seem to plug into some seemingly cosmic energy. Van Morrison was having some staging problems and drawing hecklers at a concert at Winterland in the early 1970s, before he finally walked off -- to be replaced by the oracle of the cotton fields of Brooklyn, Taj Mahal. Taj growled his big stoner grin and had everyone on their feet dancing within minutes. No princess, that Taj. He just plugged into the collective song.
But of course, it morphs into a shared experience, rather than a vicarious one.
The book Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is about a bushman/San ethnic group, on the margin of the Kalahari Desert, between about the 1930s and 1970s. Performances were usually interactive, and there was nothing that we would recognize as a speech.
For example, one person recounts a dream or a hunt, but others break in with comments and jokes. It's just a form of conversation. Or one person goes into a trance as part of a healing ritual for someone who is ill, but the rest of the group is singing or talking or wiping sweat off of the healer, rather than sitting silently.
There was one type of performance, the women's drum dance, where men were expected to sit and watch rather than participate. The author, Marjorie Shostak, thinks it most likely developed in the 19th century (perhaps implying there might have been direct or indirect European influence).
This is exactly what I'm was looking for. Thank you.
I reviewed chapter 13 (on healing rituals). My above comment misremembered a few details, but it's broadly accurate.
This line on the women's drum dance is the closest thing in the chapter to a passive audience at a performance:
>Although some men do not bother to attend, others are drawn to it and sit watching.
Overall, it's a good book if you're interested in what might or might not be a human universal, especially related to gender and sexuality norms, and women's attitudes towards health. Colin Turnbull's The Forest People, about the Mbuti, might also be worthwhile.
I really can't imagine hunter-gatherers doing this. They would have collective, largely interactive musical performances, but the idea of one person explicitly lecturing a group seems like a kind of formalness that doesn't exist for these kind of people.
I suspect that the idea of one person lecturing a group depends on the group being largely anonymous to the one person while the one person is known to the group, which depends on a larger than tribal society. That said, even in a family/tribal context, there would likely be times when one person is up front by the fire telling their story of how they found the cache of honey on the mountaintop - though these might be much more like Q&A sessions or one-many conversations, more than a lecture.
Do people in Berkeley know about the history of the Morrell Airship? In 1908, a guy named Morrell built a (hilariously phallic) 450-foot dirigible roughly where MLK Park is today. After two spectacular failures, in which miraculously no one was killed, he lost his investors. A worthwhile watch just for the photos of a flying bratwurst the size of a city block:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR-yQ4TObJ8
"I came to Berkeley to build my ship for trial purposes, to train my crew and demonstrate to the world that my theory is right."
I've only been to Berkeley once, but I feel like it's some sort of natural attractor for people who might make this statement.
I'd heard of it, but I've never been to Berkeley.
Why don't states that have run out of lethal injection drugs just kill death row inmates via nitrogen? Or, any other similar gas that replaces oxygen. Nitrogen's lethal, it's very widely available (i.e. can't be blocked by the EU), and death is supposed to be fairly painless. It seems like a nobrainer- instead, I see states casting around for weird alternate ways to execute inmates. Why not gas? In fact, why did states go the lethal injectable drugs route at all? Gas seems very easy and much cheaper
I'm also very confused - why that specific drug? Doesn't the US make a shit tonne of various drugs? 1 gram of most opioids would work and would be unblockable.
South Carolina has re-authorized the use of firing squads.
I haven't looked into the details for SC, but I remember that the official US Military protocol for execution by firing squad (*) is an evergreen bit of information on another forum I subscribe to and occasionally comment on. It seems like a very quick and effective system.
(Of course, it's for executions during wartime, and in military chain-of-command. Still, I would anticipate no problems rounding up the N riflemen needed. Note: the BS about half the squad shooting blanks to salve their conscience, is Hollywood falderal.)
For the record, I support the death penalty. However, the record of many spectacular miscarriages of justice ... It is alarming to hear of it regularly esp. w/r/t DNA exoneration of people imprisoned for decades. Still, obvious cases would best for society if those people were gone, closure etc.
________________
* -- If you wonder when/why firing squads are needed, remember that since the beginning of origanized armies, Spies are summarily executed.
On the subject of that particular firing squad rumor, I'd like to share with you all a delightful piece of sketch comedy:
https://youtu.be/x7KBpWxdrj0?t=385
I had read somewhere that that just one of the rifles had a blank charge.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/us/waukesha-parade-attack-trial
Sometimes you get camera footage of the guy committing the crime from multiple angles and then they spend their whole trial trolling the court.
That's NOT what the question was. Textbook Motte and Bailey.
You are moving the goal posts. First it's 'what if they are innocent' then it's 'well, so they're guilty but do they truly deserve to die'.
A life sentence is Death By Old Age.
Because any change in method would be seized upon by anti-death-penalty activists and it would be shut down, *even if the new method were more humane than lethal injection*.
Seems disingenuous to me, unless your honest stance is that capital punishment hypothetically WOULD be just fine if only there were a better method for it.
As much as you think US conservative states would be fine with abortion if their clinics pass all the various regulations on it.
Disagree. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
Given how long this has been going on, that the AVERAGE time people spend on death row in the US (I'm assuming this is focused on the US issue) is over a decade, and how similar tactics for abortions worked out, I'm not sure what definition of effective would fit it. Non-direct, yes, but effective?
Also, they would probably want some heavier noble gas like argon/krypton. While more expensive, it's easier to contain, works faster, and less likely to cause scares (of the dihydrogen monooxide type)
None of that has to do with deterring the execution method. Or how effective that strategy is.
My point on that segment is that they still use separate long and expensive things rather than just sticking to the "effective" way. Even if it is to delay it until it works out, that still doesn't imply anything on the effectiveness of the original strategy.
Good post.
I think you are assuming states or politicians "want" to execute people, as opposed to the death penalty being something voters are for, which politicians can spend some of their political capital to achieve.
What is more in a politician's favor than being able to be pro-death-penalty, without actually killing anybody? Killing people is politically risky; if somebody was executed wrongfully and it later becomes obvious, you don't want to be the person who can be blamed for making that possible. Plus, you have to spend political capital to make it happen.
Whereas, if you're pro death penalty, but you just can't get anything done, well, that's not your fault.
The most humane way to kill people would be a massive falling weight that crushes the brain before nerve impulses have time to travel. No one seriously proposes this simply because it would look barbaric.
My understanding is that execution methods are usually optimized to minimize the psychological toll on the executioner, rather than to minimize the suffering of the condemned.
I personally think this is the correct prioritization, although I'm still in favor of reducing suffering for the condemned if it can be done with no downsides.
The guillotine works pretty well too.
Yeah, honestly I'd guess the guillotine was probably more humane than the methods we use now.
I mean, it was explicitly invented to be a more humane method of execution than those that were standard at the time - no risk of the headsman being bad at his job and taking many axe swings to do the beheading
If you change the method of execution, death penalty opponents will immediately sue you on the grounds that the new method is inhumane, regardless of what it is, just to use the legal system to filibuster it. The only solution that does not require a long and expensive legal defense is to use a method that a previous court has already ruled is humane.
Largely because the death penalty doesn't mean the state can just kill them however they feel like. In all the cases I've seen people are sentenced to death by very specific means, and those means are codified into law and in the specific sentences. This can be changed, people in Arizona for instance sentenced to death by gas chamber could opt-in to lethal injection as we were transitioning away from the gas chamber (cyanide gas if I recall correctly, not nitrogen.)
If that's true, why don't the state legislatures just change the laws? I don't see that Texas or another red state is going to have a tough time pushing a new execution method through state government
"state government"
Anti-death-penalty activists have deep pockets and will absolutely work each individual method up to SCOTUS. Funny how strategic suppression lawsuits are fine if they're done by and for the Good Side, isn't it.
I note that anti-abortion campaigners absolutely believe that they're saving lives by doing so, and the lives of innocent unborn babies, no less (rather than condemned criminals, a much less sympathetic group)
If you're trying to do *anything*, and you talk yourself into "by any means necessary", you are a menace to society and need to do much less and reflect much more. "By any means necessary" is a blank check, and one that often adds up to a cost far greater than the value of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. But your myopic focus on the one good thing you are hoping to do, blinds you to all other consequences.
No? The guilty of capital crimes should die, saving their lives is vile, the morality is straightforward.
Except that 'saving lives by any means necessary' isn't allowed when an average citizen wants to be armed for self defense, or wants to live in an area without ethnic groups with higher percentages of violence, or the police want to use coercion to get a confession of a drug dealer, or number of other less dramatic solutions that are not in favor with Elite Left.
So it's basically special pleading in the form of disruption of democracy and social norms, and those advocating for the use of any means for special ends are gonna miss those norms when they're gone.
"Saving lives by any means necessary" isn't something generally favoured in any public policy field in any country known to me, although different balances can legitimately be struck in, for example, the regulation of motorised transport. At any rate, the concept is quite clearly different from saving someone from being killed.
Being opposed to areas members of certain ethnic groups are unable to live doesn't strike me as a notably left wing stance, "elite" or not.
Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma have authorized the use of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method.
I can’t find a source but I seem to recall that one reason it was never implemented was that it is a rather pleasant way to die. A sort of euphoric intoxication can occur before death. Not what these states want to see in an execution. Writhing in pain, smoking body parts, bursting into flame, etc are more in line with the desired effect.
Not a guy with a serene smile shaking his head saying, “I suppose you stupid fucks will figure out I’m innocent about ten minutes after I’m …”
The original sedative used for lethal injections, sodium thiopental, is absolutely a painkiller. States had to switch to less effective drugs after the EU banned export of sodium thiopental for use in executions.
What's the reason they don't use e.g. fentanyl, which is legal for medical uses? I could be wrong but I imagine death by fentanyl overdose is anesthetising and therefore not painful.
(I'm against the death penalty but as long as we have it we ought to carry it out intelligently)
What do you mean about it being hard to watch -- you mean disturbing to watch?
Why can't sodium thiopental be manufactured outside Europe?
Yeah, seconding this. Related question- is it really that hard to manufacture a very small batch of any chemical compound, in this case sodium thiopental? I understand that a full-scale factory cranking industrial amounts requires a great deal of manufacturing expertise- but if you're literally just making 1-2 doses, can't..... any chemist just whip that up, with the right reagents? Why is it so hard? (I mean I'm not particularly pro-death penalty, I'm just curious from a chemical engineering POV)
But the government obviously can? Or immunize someone else (like a compounding pharmacy) to do it?
Imagine that you are trying to get as many people as possible to fill out a survey, and you have a few rewards (discrete) that you can give out as you see fit. What's the game theory approach to optimize the # of people who fill out the survey?
There are ~140 people total in the pool and the time frame for completion is ~2 weeks
Maybe offer a reward that doesn't cost you much, but would be valued by your target audience.
I've never seen a survey offer a prize worth caring about. When I fill out surveys, it's because I've been persuaded that my doing so is valuable; I suggest you focus on explaining how your research is important, so people want to help you.
Sounds to me like you should be seeking a psychology answer rather than a game theory answer.
The game theory answer would be something about determining everyone's minimum price to fill out the survey and then offering them the smallest amount that you can that's still above that price until you run out of resources. (Using lotteries to create expected values in the desired range if your rewards are too big.) But that assumes that people respond rationally to incentives, which is materially false in most realistic scenarios of the sort you've described.
What most people actually seem to do is to pool your rewards into bundles that are large enough to feel emotionally impactful but not so big that you hit large obvious diminishing returns, and then enter all participants into a lottery for those bundles. I don't know whether that's backed up by research or not.
I liked the approach from Aella's kink survey, where after you fill out the survey it gives you a fun "what fictional character are you as kinky as" message that you can share with your friends.
(I did not reach the end of the survey but apparently tons of people did, and I think many of them were motivated by the message at the end.)
unfortunately the survey cannot be changed and it is boring
It also gives you a numerical score so you and your friends can compare.
Not theory, but a single data point: We had a pool of ~400 people and found they were more incentivized to take the survey when we had more, smaller rewards versus fewer, big ones.
Put all the prize pool together, the winner is drawn by lot, you get one lot/number for people you make take the survey, you must at least make another person take the survey.
My inspiration is stuff that I use to saw a lot on twitter, a company giving out a thing of high value to one or a few person choosed randomly, on the condition that they share and follow. The initial idea was that to get into the pool you have to make someone else take the survey, but that doesn't capitalize on the people that are ready to put in more work to get more chances. Adding the rule "you bring 10 people you get 10x more chances to win" fixes that.
This is all intuition, I never studied any of this stuff formally.
Thoughts on semaglutide and pancreatic cancer risk ? I believe it is generally accepted that inflammation is associated with increased cancer risk and this drug does show increased incidence of pancreatitis. I know the clinical studies on semaglutide did not show increased cancer risk, but they're relatively short-term and pancreatic cancer is usually only detected in later stages after a tumor has been growing for years.
I thought newest research is pointing in direction of fungal infection as initiator of pancreatic cancer.
My father looked into this and I vaguely remember him saying that he thought the studies picked up a weak signal that would have been statistically significant if they had been done better, don't remember the details. He tried to get money and resources for better studies but got frustrated after too much bureaucracy.
The few studies that I found with a quick google suggest that the rate of pancreatitis is about equal between control and treatment groups, 0.3 vs. 0.4 % (another study shows more cases in placebo group). Pancreatitis ==> 13x odds ratio of pancreatic cancer development so that would be a concern but I'd question whether it's relevant.
Given how many cancers are associated with obesity I'd say it's worth it
Hey Trebuchet, I noticed you commented on Zvi's Balsa FAQ and someone replied, then it disappeared before I could read the reply. Did you delete it, or...?
As a test, I wrote a comment on Zvi's blog noting the deletion: https://web.archive.org/web/20221018143316/https://thezvi.substack.com/p/balsa-faq/comments
Zvi deleted it.
I didn't note the author, but there was an early comment arguing that Zvi should remove a question from the FAQ. Zvi did delete that question, and presumably the comment too.
What was the removed question?
Don't have a copypaste available, but the question was something along the lines of "isn't this all a big thing to stop Trump; aren't you Trump-deranged?" and the answer that he mostly wanted prosperity for its own sake but also thought Trump was bad because he was authoritarian and prosperity would help defeat him; he said that he's aware most people with TDS aren't aware they have TDS and that if you think him thinking Trump is bad because he's authoritarian implies he has TDS then you should think he has TDS.
Trebuchet's comment said, roughly, that this question/answer might as well have put out a giant sign saying he's going to be a Democrat shill, when the rest of the post didn't really make you think about Trump at all. (Note again that this is my recollection of what trebuchet said, not how I'd describe things.)
Zvi said something fairly-similar in his first response to criticism https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/why-balsa-research-is-worthwhile/ - I notice that there are very good nonpartisan, uncontroversial reasons to want specifically Donald Trump not to be in the White House (most obviously, his age, the extreme difficulty he had and would again have in Doing Things as an outsider, and his extreme divisiveness to the point that the Democrats' loyalty might not be assured), but Zvi instead gave the controversial answer that even I have reservations about.
Does it seem reasonable to think Zvi has TDS because he writes about how Trump is a bad authoritarian who should be stopped, in the same posts he talks about wanting to be a nonpartisan organization that avoids culture war issues? That really seems like he is so deranged that he can't notice "Stop the top Republican candidate from winning" is culture war. Or I suppose, that he's just doing fundraising PR and trying to double-dip on "policy wonks who like nonpartisanship" and "libs with TDS".
I don't understand why a comment that Trump has authoritarian tendencies is perceived as partisan. Is it possible to criticize someone like Trump without it being considered partisan?
I don't like Trump, though I agree with some of his policies. My dislike for him is not partisan. There are other Republicans I would support. Yet any time I express dislike for Trump, regardless of reason, it is perceived as partisan by Republicans who support him.
No, it's not TDS. You can reasonably dislike Trump without having TDS; TDS requires a certain histrionic panic.
Having said that, while I greatly admire the Zvi, this smells like an upcoming victim of Conquest's second law.
It's not the disliking Trump, it's loudly disliking Trump while simultaneously trying to be a nonpartisan avoider of the culture war. That suggests a serious lack of self-awareness.
Ah, I found it from a another comment:
"We also believe that Trump is at this point a would-be authoritarian and that his returning to the Presidency would be quite bad and is worth working to prevent."
Commenters apparently convinced Zvi that it was a bad idea to openly oppose the presumptive Republican presidential candidate while also claiming to be nonpartisan.
Isn't removing it worse than leaving it in? Isn't having a hidden anti-Trump agenda worse than having an open anti-Trump agenda?
It's only worse if people find out.
To be clear, I did consider this when writing the post spilling the beans. But considering the fact that he's accepting donations, and considering his previous post which is still up, I decided it was worth dropping the bomb.
Authoritarian is a propaganda term. The Democrats were furiously demanding that the entire country be put into hard lockdown based on the opinions given by liberal figures of authority. This is far more "authoritarian" than anything Trump ever did, regardless of whether lockdowns were an effective or otherwise "objectively" correct option or not.
Not as authoritarian as Trump's attempt to have the VP unilaterally declare him the next president, which would have ended presidential democracy.
Yeah I'll take that over being literally imprisoned for months on end.
The general pattern of the past seven years or so in the US, from what I see, is progressives and Democrats stacking the deck while Republicans flip the table. Flipping the table is more spectacular, but a stacked deck still isn't a fair game - it's worth remembering that Russia and the PRC do have elections, and they're not even rigged in terms of votes AFAIK, but media control and disqualification make them useless for actually unseating the ruling party.
For a quick rundown of the deck-stacking measures:
1) strong ideological bias of schools and especially universities, some of it hidden from parents
2) delegitimisation of conservatism and Republicans in media (including some places where there *hasn't* been a successful mirror-version, like Wikipedia)
3) censorship of conservatives and Republicans on social media platforms (mostly unofficial, although the Disinformation Governance Board was an attempt at official)
4) demographic change via immigration
5) opposition to anti-illegal-voting measures (yes, yes, I know the Democrats' reason for this is fear of Jim Crow, but if you gain from illegal action X and you oppose measures to stop X you're in implicit collusion with the criminals doing X regardless of your motives).
Now, obviously, you can say that all of that is still legal and some of Trump's various schemes weren't, which is mostly true, and you can say that Trump's schemes were pretty slimy, which is definitely true, but that list (particularly #1-#3, plus the so-far-unrealised possibility of disqualifying Trump) hits most of the beats of a group trying to set up a Russian-style de facto one party state (there is also a word for the practice of coordinating the vast majority of cultural and scientific organisations around a specific political agenda) and it's not very surprising that people would object to that.
The situation in the US is definitely asymmetrical, but it's tricky to pick one side as undermining democracy more than the other - they both do it, just in different ways.
What is the one thing that has given you the largest productivity boost?
Fear
This one definitely resonates.
Maybe the showrunners for the Rings of Power could use some more fear? Though, I suspect what they lack is courage...
Really enjoyed your review of it in one of the previous threads!
Doing what I like doing instead of what I think I should like doing.
your words cut deep, deeper than any blade
Practice! Specifically with things I have some inherent emotional investment in.
Beeminder
Exercise helps in the long run for me. In the short term, the usual chemical suspects do the job well enough
any particular kinds of exercise? Or just any form of exercise does the trick for you?
Long runs were my goto method when I was younger. As my joints have aged bicycling either outdoors or on my turbo trainer have taken their place.
Strength training is good- and good for you - too. I have a large basement so I like free weights. I have a bench and squat rack and I try to keep to two workouts a week for maintenance. Bench press, bent forward row and squats are my usual routine.
Any sort of physical workout is good for clearing your mind and moving your motivation off top dead center.
I should have been specific, but it is specially weight lifting that helped in my case. Cardio and general physical activity are almost neutral nowadays but helped a lot at first. I have no idea what the general action mechanism is, so your mileage might vary and I might be forgetting another lifestyle intervention I can't think of
Marriage. More generally, having a goal (supporting my family) that went beyond daily grind or entertainment.
Before I was in a serious relationship, I could have gotten by on $10-12/hour in a crummy apartment and not worried about it too much.
Isn't it really weird how salient income becomes once you have a long-term partner?
Never cared about money or wealth at all when I was single, now I think about it at least 3x a day
Getting older, acquiring more obligations, and hence being busier. Work expands to fill the time available.
Amphetamines.
You know I been watching that old tv show Breaking Bad on Netflix. Seem like it did kind of energize and motivate some of the characters.
Birth.
The great colonoscopy debate.
https://youtu.be/WqmbqoDGYt4
The only debate seems to turn on a conflation of efficacy vs. effectiveness. There doesn't seem to be any credible evidence that colonoscopies are not efficacious for individuals. All of the studies that might seem to show that are actually about population-level effectiveness, which, while relevant for public policy, has no relevance for personal medical care. For more detail on this distinction, see: https://peterattiamd.com/colonoscopy-and-acm/
"Parenthetically, of the 11,843 colonoscopies performed in this study there were zero perforations and 15 (0.127%) bleeding complications. If nothing else, this reinforces how safe colonoscopy is in the hands of experienced endoscopists. "
There were ZERO perforations because ZERO of the colonoscopies done in study were under anesthesia! Anesthesia not used in Europe. Without anesthesia it is the patient that prevents perforation because they tell the doctor - Stop! You're hurting me.
Anecdotally, a friend of the family died from sepsis after a poorly-conducted colonoscopy*. The chance of finding a problem and fixing it has to be weighed against the chance of creating a problem.
*(I think this was the same place that killed another friend by giving her radiation treatment in the wrong part of her body. True Rural medicine sucks.)
Yes, there are risks, as with pretty much any medical intervention, but that does not negate the net efficacy of the procedure.
What studies on colonoscopy? This was essential first RCT.
One of the most useful books I read, back in the early 2000’s, was “Raising Your Spirited Child.” My 2nd child was particularly sensitive (with her, we learned that Target sold socks without seams, because seams bothered her so much, and many other kids too, apparently!) The book validated how each kid was different and it’s okay to respect their innate temperaments and unique selves. We also had a wonderful pediatrician who said kids with her temperament usually did really well in school because they have so much tenacity and focus. This kid loves to get A’s and is now in grad school. So there’s that.
So... sorry if I'm being hopelessly obtuse here, but is "spirited" just a precious euphemism for "has Aspergers"?
Not necessarily. This was 22 years ago and I hadn’t ever heard of Asperger’s. The title to the book is: “Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, and Energetic.” Perhaps I am being preciously euphemistic, but she was never diagnosed with Asperger’s. My point was seeing sensitivity as part of my child’s temperament, not something to be fixed, was very helpful for me.
I'm not trying to accuse you personally of anything, I'm just saying, that sounds exactly like Aspergers.
What is the point? If a child grew up to successful adult while everyone thought she had simply an innate "spirited" or sensitive temperament, and we would then find out that yes, some MDs would have diagnosed her with some sort of Asperger's ... was that kind of Asperger's diagnosis ever useful? Map is not the territory, etcetera.
It's not as useful to be diagnosed as an adult, but for parents of a younger child who notice one or two prominent symptoms (eg. sensitivity to any roughness in fabrics), knowing the other tendencies in the cluster (eg. other sensory issues, like bright lights and loud noises, or a tendency to take things at face value) helps parents head off potential problems before they crop up rather than after they have caused suffering to the child.
Sure. But my point was more in direction ... if the existence of cluster of tendencies / symptoms / personality traits and their characteristics can also be effectively communicated by calling it certain kind of personality cluster and writing books about that particular personality cluster, is it then worse or better than thinking about the same cluster in terms of "medical condition"? We in the West have a certain framework for thinking about medical conditions and diagnoses, and it lends much better to the kind of condition that after diagnosis can be treated by medical professionals with discrete interventions (operations, medications, therapy sessions...). Nobody is diagnosed as "normal", after all.
And yes, I am aware that for some people on the spectrum it can be debilitating.
This sounds like my daughter - very bothered by socks, car seats, and other tactile clothing. She's got a ton of tenacity and focus, but also a lot of anxiety about doing well. She was quite concerned about getting the lowest grade so far this year - 97% in one class.
"Spirited" sounds like a euphemism that's probably about right.
I was always bothered by seams. Also a good pupil.
As a father of two girls age 2 and 4 I would love to hear more from parents that are further down the road as to what advice has turned out to be useful (and what is bunk).
My brother and his wife are soon going to have a child. I don't have any experience with children (and frankly, not much with young parents either). Are there things that you shoud do/should not do? Things that are very appreciated, things that are taboo? For example, I can imagine that unless they specifically ask for it, sending resources on pedagogy or childcare could be seen as weird/annoying/bad/obnoxious.
In addition to the other good advice, I note that there are a few vaccines one is meant to get booster shots for before interacting with a newborn. I know Whooping Cough is one of them but I'm sure there are others. (I need to look into it because I too am about to be an uncle in a few weeks)
Good one! The whooping cough vaccine's protection attenuates over the course of about a decade. My wife (then girlfriend) got it back in 2009 and it was no fun. She coughed hard enough to crack a rib, and then, of course, kept coughing. It was painful and went on for weeks.
Unless otherwise indicated, all unsolicited advice is criticism, and will be perceived as such.
In addition to what everyone else has said: one of the most valuable things you can give to the parents of a small child is time to themselves. Offering to take the baby for a walk around the block, or watch the baby at home so the parents can themselves take a walk around the block, can be wonderful. Maybe not in the first few weeks, but soon after that.
Do: offer to bring by snacks/ cooked meals, ask if they need anything from the store, offer to help out with errands/etc. Emphasize that you are not fazed if baby cries or if they need to be late to an event. Educate yourself on how primitive newborns are (no neck control!) so you know what to expect and don't suggest that their 2 month old should be sitting up or speaking. Suggest looking up "5 S's" on youtube to learn how to help calm fussy baby. Ask parents how they are doing instead of just asking about the baby.
Don't: insist on rigorous meeting times, since the new baby's nap schedule will likely dictate this. Offer suggestions for why baby is crying. Insist on meeting baby before they are ready. Buy random baby crap they don't want.
Source: I have a young child :)
Thank you!
oh, sorry I more thing I forgot: wash your hands before touching the baby, and don't visit if you're sick, even if it's just a cold! A newborn with a cold is very unhappy, and a fever in a newborn is a medical emergency that requires hospitalization.
Thanks for the precision. I knew that you had to be careful but didn't know that a fever could be this dangerous.
The extremes of early sickness fade fast. That's mostly a very young newborn, which calms down significantly after a few weeks and especially a few months.
yes, >~2 months you no longer have to go to the ER for fever, but I still think sickness in older babies should be prevented when it's simple stuff like not visiting when you're actively sick!
the parents will definitely not be thanking you if you pass along a mild sickness to their slightly older baby, as it often interferes with their sleep and they get pretty cranky.
And as soon as they start in daycare they (and you) will be sick ~1/month, and yes I am speaking from experience
I'll third the idea of doing chores. My mother in law came to visit when our son was about 2 weeks old and the biggest help was that she could do little chores which gave my wife and I a few extra minutes to sleep. Laundry, dishes, take out the trash - these things are awesome.
Also just being another set of eyes or hands for watching or holding the baby is really helpful. I would say that infants are a lot more sturdy than I thought before having one. As long as their head is supported it would be really hard to hurt them when you hold them, so don't be too nervous.
It depends on the personality of your brother and his wife, but my wife and I weren't really interested in chatting much during those first weeks/months. Just too tired, too much to do and think about. So don't expect much in that way and don't be offended if they seem annoyed all the time (lack of sleep does that to you!).
If your sister in law has to pump (instead of nurse) this will be a big pain in the ass for her. It takes up just as much time as nursing but the baby still hasn't eaten. Being available to give her time to pump can be really helpful as well.
Thanks for the detailed answer, I'll keep that in mind!
Are you local? If so, the best thing you can do is go over, do dishes for them, learn to change a diaper etc.
This is great advice.
Slightly different emphasis. Chores are a favor, do it graciously and if you aren't feeling it feel free not to.
But, when you're ready for babysitting, treat it like they're doing you a favor. "Hey guys, can I get some uncle time on Friday? You guys could go out."
This will be (likely) very much appreciated, and will let you build a relationship with the kid.
Another idea for a little later: take the kid for a weekend or a week. I did this with my sisters' kids when they were little and midsize, and now they do this for me. For the parent it's a nice couple of days for a getaway (or long home project), for the kids it's an adventure (I used to take my nieces and nephew to Shakespeare in the park and the Ren Faire), and for you it will (hopefully) be a treat. Kid time, especially when you don't have kids, can be a lot of fun, and it's different from the rest of your life.
Bringing prepared food or dishes ready to be cooked is also very much appreciated
Thanks!
I am, so I'll keep that in mind. Thanks!
I would second this. If you really want to help them go visit them and help them with chores for a while. The initial stages are very labor/attention intensive.
Thank you!
I tend to send this (quite short!) link to my friends expecting a first baby:
http://mistybeach.com/mark/Babies.html
I make it clear to them that I'm doing this to make me feel better so they should not feel obligated to read it. I have had several get back to me that the two page writeup was useful (partially because it doesn't overlap with most other 'helpful tips').
Yeah, as a dad I agree: that’s some solid advice
Thanks!
Thanks!
Has Deiseach reviewed the end of Rings of Power yet?
I have done, in Open Thread 245:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-245/comment/9731208
My conclusions: this is not "The Lord of the Rings". Think of it as "Amazon's 'Rings Of Power'" and it's an okay-ish fantasy show. But they have gone from changing the canon to inventing their very own original horseshit which is now driving the plot, such as it is, so it's not Tolkien.
One of the worst episodes of television I have ever watched is the Racist Truck Episode of "Supernatural". But the worst thing about that was simple dumb stupid idiocy. It wasn't mean-spirited, it wasn't ripping something better off, it was a ham-handed attempt at "Racism Bad" and when people said this was a terrible episode, nobody came out swinging about "criticism of this episode means you hate empowered black women in lead roles so you are a white supremacist". It was accepted that this was awful, and everyone moved on.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/Racist_Truck
Rings Of Awesome Powa! is not that kind of awful. It's mean-spirited pissing on canon. Payne and McKay (who, out of their own mouths in a "Hollywood Reporter" interview, admitted they had spent ten years writing scripts that never got made) think they can write better than Tolkien, so they invent their own crap. Now Sauron is an incel who goes bad because Galadriel rejected him harshly. And this is "complexly evil" not simplistic evil like Tolkien wrote about cosmic entities. Sauron is gonna be the next Tony Soprano or Walter White in season two!
The fact that *these* are their benchmarks shows the poverty of their imaginations. "Uh, duh, how we gonna write bad guy for modern audience? Uh, how 'bout we copy hit shows that ended fifteen and nine years ago respectively?"
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/rings-of-power-sauron-season-2-lotr-1235240809/
“Season one opens with: Who is Galadriel? Where did she come from? What did she suffer? Why is she driven?” says Payne. “We’re doing the same thing with Sauron in season two. We’ll fill in all the missing pieces.”
“Sauron can now just be Sauron,” McKay adds. “Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He’s evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he’d overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open. We’re really excited. Season two has a canonical story. There may well be viewers who are like, ‘This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!’ In season two, we’re giving it to them.”
I could go on, but why bother? It's not Tolkien. As modern generic TV fantasy, it's meh. Too much crammed into the last episode to try and cliffhanger us into caring about season two, when as ever the 'mysteries' are transparently obvious:
Is the Stranger Gandalf? (Heck, yeah)
Is Isildur dead? (No, he has to grow up and kill Sauron, like in the movies this show has been copying all season)
Is Elendil's fake daughter going to look into the palantir? (Of course she is)
Is Pharazon going to take advantage of Tar-Palantir's death and Míriel's blindness to seize power? (If he doesn't, he's an idiot, and he's one of the few characters with three functioning brain cells in this show)
Is Elendil's fake daughter going to be the human version of Galadriel and, after looking into the palantir and seeing the future, she is now going to be making all the decisions about the fate of Númenor that her father made in canon, the same way Galadriel is the one who decided three rings should be made? (Well, since they have to do something more with her than have her standing around looking gormless, Isildur is off the scene for the moment, and Anarion apparently does not exist, yes to all this).
Is Celeborn dead? (Since they decided in episode seven that oh yeah, Galadriel has a husband so she can't bone Sauron, no - though he may well wish he were)
Dash it, sometimes I wish the some of the very old original primitive versions of the legendarium had survived into Tolkien's later revisions, because I'd love to turn Makar and Meássë loose on these twerps:
https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/reference/characterofthemonth/makar-measse.php
Yes, Sauron can now be like a Mafia boss! What a comedown for an eternal spirit who was involved in the very creation of the material world!
My feelings about the show are mixed, and I found the finale disappointing, but:
"Sauron is an incel who goes bad because Galadriel rejected him harshly"
He was bad all along, just convincing her he wasn't by telling incomplete truths. I don't love that last, since book Galadriel was suspicious of Annatar from the get go. But he didn't become evil in the finale. He wants to order the world and rule it, and is known to have been willing to use brutal methods (as Adar recounts) to advance those goals well before he ever met Galadriel.
(His efforts to get established as a smith in Numenor suggest that plan A was to forge rings there, and maybe make it his power base.)
Offering her all the kingdoms of the world to rule by his side is an innovation, but probably not all that different from what Saruman presumably thought he was agreeing to as he plotted his sudden but inevitable betrayal.
The Stranger is likely Gandalf, though some other wizard remains possible. If he is Gandalf, he shouldn't be going to Rhun ("to the East I go not"), while the Blue Wizards did. But the latter don't appear in LotR and so using one of them would require the Tolkien Estate to give permission.
I don't think "Is Isildur dead?" or "Is Earien going to look in the palantir" really even qualify as mysteries. As you say, anyone who's seen the film knows Isildur will wind up with an heir, and anyone who's seen *any* film knows that you don't show someone walking up the stairs to a palantir in order to establish that she turned around at the last moment to get bubble tea. Thinking Isildur is dead is presumably going to affect Elendil's motivations next season.
Likewise, even if one had never read the Akallabeth, Pharazon surely reads as "scheming vizier" to literally anyone. He's even got the beard! (Though I don't think the show has informed the viewer how close he is in the line of succession.)
Anarion does exist, even if he's Sir Not Appearing This Season. He's doing something Elendil doesn't approve of in the west. Almost certainly western Numenor rather than The West, though I suppose some version of Amandil's attempt to redo Earendil's journey that will wind up with him shipwrecked and unsuccessful isn't completely ruled out. (Except then Elendil would be concerned rather than angry.)
Possibly Earien will be giving Elendil the advice he got from his father re being ready to get out of Dodge, based on her palantir vision.
I do wonder just what the show Numenoreans are doing with all those ships They have a Sea Guard but no naval adversaries (unless they think they're defending against Valinor, in which case lotsa luck), and a busy harbor even though going to Middle Earth with 5, make that 3 ships was a momentous and politically fraught decision. (And Pelargir is an old Numenorean port that can be resettled with Southlanders.) Book Numenor was a major maritime empire engaged in extensive colonization and pillage by this point, but RoP Numenor doesn't appear to be doing that.
The mystery box approach is frustrating, because they're trying to invent mysteries in a canon where we already know X lives and Y happens.
This may work for a casual audience that doesn't know the books or the movies, but then the question remains: who are they making this show for? They've been going very heavy on the Tolkien angle, but if their audience is "people just tuning in for a fantasy show who know nothing about the world in question", then why not just do Original Series?
And even if you are a casual viewer who has no idea who Isildur is, you must have picked up that he lives because his horsie was set free to run off and find him. Like Lassie. Or Aragorn's horse, in the movies, which the show is totally not copying scenes and even lifting dialogue from, not at all!
So their 'mysteries' are very obvious. Yes, that's Gandalf. Yes, Isildur is alive (because if he's dead, then Berak the Horsie would be very upset and we don't upset animals today in movies). Yes, Earien is going to look in the palantir. They *might* possibly set up more (fake) conflict between Earien and her father due to what she sees - if she sees the Destruction of Númenor like everyone else who has looked in, she might double-down on her opposition to getting involved in war in Middle-earth.
"Pharazon surely reads as "scheming vizier" to literally anyone. He's even got the beard!"
Don't forget the eyebrows! Those are Evil Eyebrows with the best of them!
Rings of Power Númenor is *all over the place*. They have a settlement/port in Middle-earth, after declaring in earlier episodes that they had nothing to do with the place for centuries. They have a navy, but they're doing nothing with it. The mighty fleet of three ships couldn't be brought back up to its original strength of five ships by taking any of the other ships we see in the harbour?
As for the handling of Sauron, that is the greatest divergence.
Everything he said to Galadriel was true - she is the one who insisted he was the King of the Southlands, not him; he did tell her he took the pouch off a dead man; he did want to remain in Númenor and it was Galadriel who promised Miriel that he would come along; since we see the forging of the three rings without previously making the nine and the seven, it does look like he genuinely wanted to help the Elves.
Now, there could be a masterplan in place whereby he caused the Darkness that made the Elves fade so they need the mithril so he can pop up to tell them to make rings with it, rings he will control - and that in order to get into Eregion, he manipulated Galadriel all along, but that would mean that he had to know she would end up on a ship to Valinor and then jump overboard so he could be on a raft in exactly the right place to pick her up and worm his way into her confidence so that she would take him along. That's more plotting than the show has demonstrated it can pull off so far.
Halbrand/Sauron's character has acted very variably all along; at times, he was obviously doing bad things (e.g. on the raft when he split off alone and then the rest of them got attacked and killed by a sea monster so that he and Galadriel were the only ones left) but then at other times he seems genuine about just wanting to stay in Númenor and work as a smith. Galadriel has done worse things than he has done so far, so how much was him being manipulative and how much was him trying to sincerely change?
Of course Sauron is evil, of course his initial weak impulse to repent after the War of Wrath faded, but this version of Sauron is so different from canon that I think they really are trying to portray him as some kind of conflicted anti-hero; Galadriel could have set him on the right path if only she hadn't rejected him out of hand when he wanted her help to bind him to the light!
It's mushy nonsense, and I do think they chopped and changed from one episode to another based on audience reaction; they did seem to be setting up a Galadriel/Halbrand romance, but since most people had already guessed he was Sauron, that wouldn't work any more so they threw in a mention of Celeborn in episode seven and had the big break-up in the finale.
Because they had dawdled along time-wasting in the previous episodes, and as I suspect had intended to stretch out storylines into the second season (like 'is Halbrand Sauron?' maintaining the 'mystery' so that they could introduce him into Eregion and becoming a confidante of Celebrimbor), they had to finish everything up in a hurry for the finale.
So rush, rush, rush, the rings get forged in a matter of days, Galadriel finally suspects Halbrand is not who she thinks due to a random line from Celebrimbor that is an echo of what Adar said (even though up to now she is the one who has been pushing him as King of the Southlands) and we get that 'revelation' which everyone knew was coming.
They built up the notion of the white-cloaked cultists, then threw all that away in a hurried conclusion (unless they plan to bring them back as a 'surprise' when Gandalf and Nori get to Rhun - you thought we were dead, but we can't be killed by you!) and now we have Sauron heading off to Mordor and Galadriel responsible for the three Elven rings.
And apparently still not telling anyone that yes, Sauron is back and that was him? Will we have this drawn out through season two - when is she going to tell? Elrond knows now as well, is he going to tell? what will they do?
EDIT: Funnily enough, I would have enjoyed a few episodes of Celebrimbor and Halbrand being forge buddies, because (a) finally Celebrimbor got something to do other than stand around in his bathrobe (b) the exploding forge bits were funny, yes I'm easily pleased (c) they seemed to be genuinely getting on well and (d) I would have liked to see the process of learning to make the rings, seven and nine as well as the three. It would have fit better if the sixteen were the first trial essays, getting stronger as they learned more, and *then* we had the big revelation, Halbrand flees, and Celebrimbor changes the plan so that instead of the final One Ring they had intended to create, he makes the three Elven rings.
But we couldn't get that because they had to cram everything into the finale in order to tidy up their dangling plots.
I'm guessing that their main imagined viewer is someone who saw the films, doesn't know them backwards and forwards but may be caught short by major contradictions. (So, e.g., Celeborn certainly isn't dead and neither is Isildur, but they're not expected to know much more than "the Rings were forged" and *maybe* "Numenor fell", rather than any details.)
Though they're clearly throwing in details that only book fans would care about, whether or not they can win them all over. Showing Aman in the days of the Trees, alluding to stories they don't have the rights to tell in sculpture, etc. That's obviously polarizing, and will only irritate people who are already unhappy with the massive liberties they're taking. But it's hard to know how it will all shake out.
(I know plenty of people who hate the Jackson movies for similar reasons, and I can certainly while away a few hours on the places where he fundamentally fails to get Tolkien myself. But I like the films overall, and it's probably fair to say that they're remembered very positively in popular culture and genre fandom generally even if the controversy within Tolkien fandom will never die.)
I'm not sure the chronology of the production allows for them to have made changes based on audience reaction, unless it was from test audiences.
I agree that I really wish they'd spent more time on the forging of the Rings and Halbrand insinuating himself into Eregion. (Send Galadriel somewhere else if she's not to look dense for not twigging sooner.) I don't like the idea of the Three being the first Rings they ever forged, with no need for essays in the craft and no clear idea why they'd forge sixteen more Great Rings with the emergency past and Sauron revealed.
(Also: who puts a forge at the top of a tower? I'm not remotely an expert, but that just seems like a bad idea, from having to haul fuel and metal up and down the stairs to the hazards of explosions like the one we see messing with the structure.)
I don't think Sauron is going to be a conflicted antihero so much as a villain whose motives we know. Adar kind of fills that slot anyway, and I won't be surprised if the heroes are forced to make common cause with him on the grounds that "independent Orc kingdom" is better than a Dark Lord.
Of course they have the general prequel problem that they can't actually win. But maybe the Orcs get driven offstage to the east or south. Or they're crushed with sad music in a way that helps enable the victory of the Last Alliance as Galadriel sheds a single tear for her erstwhile foe.
I do think that Sauron is supposed to be adapting his plans on the fly, though not necessarily full "everything that has transpired has done so according to my design". I'm not sure if he's supposed to have planned his chance meeting with Galadriel (which yes, would be a stretch even for an immortal Ainu, not least because no one sane could predict that one of the oldest and most respected Eldar in Middle-Earth would jump into the ocean, let alone where). I *think* he's supposed to be trying to make opportunities as they come: get in Galadriel's good graces, insinuate himself into Numenorean smithcraft, okay, maybe he can work with king of the Southlands if the elf won't leave him in peace to use ringcraft in Numenor, wait, infiltrating the Noldor is even better!
Maybe he knew about (or arranged) the whole Elvish decay/mithril/Celebrimbor wanting to emulate Feanor thing and manipulated affairs from the beginning to get himself put into the middle of it. But I don't think that's been shown, and I agree that would be a lot of a lot if they confirm that's what happened. I'd at least rather read it as Sauron's adapting fluidly to changing circumstances and taking advantage of his adversaries' ignorance.
I'm guessing that there wasn't a lot of sincere interest in helping the Elves as much as laying the groundwork for dominating them. (Ideally with Galadriel as Witch-queen, but if not, oh well.)
Presenting himself as offering a means to improve the world is in keeping with pre-Downfall Sauron. But I think the fact that he's been comprehensively lying through omission and that he's shown to have been doing monstrous experimentation (both his northern stronghold and Adar's reports, the latter reaffirmed by Halbrand's clear rage at Adar) communicates to the audience that he's not actually misunderstood, and while he may have self-righteous justifications they're not actually righteous and I don't think we're meant to think they are.
(Which isn't to say some segment of the fandom won't become his partisans. But people got from actual Tolkien to writing "The Last Ringbearer". Ditto shipping heroes with hot villains. There's no accounting for fans.)
I'd actually missed that Galadriel didn't tell them Halbrand was Sauron. I really hope that's an editing oversight and it will be clear she did tell them next season.
I agree puzzle box storytelling is getting very old, and hope they're not going to keep relying on it to the same extent going forward.
What is absolutely infuriating is that somebody involved with this has read the books, or knows something, maybe just Googled shit online, because they put in tiny details that only lore nerds will catch.
Like having the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships (a real 'blink and you'll miss it' reference). Or the bat-eared headdress of one of the white cloaked mystics referring to Thuringwethil (and the moon phases on the collar of another make me think 'moon - werewolves - Draugluin'). Small little things that are plainly nods to the lore and those fans who know the lore.
And then they do crap like give Elendil a daughter, invent 'Halbrand', and so on.
The Jackson films have their flaws, no two ways about it; they got Denethor wrong, for a start (but that's a choice I understand making for the sake of the movie story). "The Hobbit" movies were wrong, too little material stretched out over three movies, meaning that a ton of filler had to be inserted and invented. But there are moments there where Jackson just gets it *right*, even if he has made changes. There aren't any similar moments I can point to in "Rings of Power"; the dinner table scene between Durin and Gil-galad was one I *thought* might be something, where there is a seriousness about what Dwarves value and what Elves have made of it, and that there is some kind of diplomacy between Dwarves and Elves going on, some kind of cultural respect - but then the show ruins it by cheapening it: Durin made it all up, he only wanted a free table because Dísa has been nagging him to get a new one so he lied to con Gil-galad out of it.
Even Ralph Bakshi is looking way better by comparison. He just tried rotoscoping and other novel effects, he didn't mess about with the plot.
A forge at the top of a tower? Yes. It's meant to be Celebrimbor's workshop, but given the explosion they are indeed forging the mithril alloy there, which as you say is *dumb*.
And what about the giant forge they needed the Dwarves to build, which has been flying up at top speed (can't beat Dwarven craftsmanship) and is now a useless huge building in the courtyard? It's more bad storytelling: well yeah they don't need the industrial forge now that they won't be using every scrap of mithril the Dwarves can produce, but it's a red herring that is a waste of audience attention, and more of the way they introduce and then dump plot elements for convenience.
I admit I'd missed the Bough of Return till you'd mentioned it in an earlier comment.
I'm not too bothered by invented characters if they're not disruptive to the story. (The effortful demographic box checking can be obtrusive, but it's the style of the time.) Inventing interstitial stories isn't necessarily a bad thing for an adaptation, and something like Elendil having a daughter doesn't throw things out of whack the way, e.g., Thingol having a son and heir would unbalance the story of Beren and Luthien.
Especially if her early inclination towards the King's Men means that she's not going to outlive Numenor, which wouldn't surprise me.
Likewise, Arondir and Bronwyn. We know there were elf-mortal romances other than the three big ones, since the princes of Dol Amroth were descended from one. And that story is especially odd in the context of Tolkien's idea that Elves (other than Finwe) don't marry twice. The main departure from Tolkien is having the male in this one be from the higher kindred, where Tolkien always has the man marrying up. (Thingol->Melian as well as all the Eldar/Edain marriages and Finduilas's unrequited love for Turin. Arguably Eol->Aredhel also fits the pattern even though they're both Elves.)
Pharazon having a son, especially one who isn't Miriel's, is a bigger departure, But I'm willing to wait and see what they do with that.
One problem with this sort of storytelling is that the first season involves a lot of table setting. We're in the first 20% of the story, so to some extent it's like asking for brilliance in Jackson' first half of The Fellowship of the Ring. (Which gave us the ridiculous wizard battle, because when you have Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee together the last thing you want to do is just let them act at one another. But it did also give us Hobbiton looking just as Hobbiton should, to its great credit.)
I absolutely get not wanting to spend another eight hours seeing where it will go next season when they haven't won your trust. And all things being equal I'd prefer a closer adaptation rather than an "inspired by" story. I'm still curious enough for now. Though a two-year gap is not going to help retain audience interest, or even memory of exactly what happened this season.
>nobody came out swinging about "criticism of this episode means you hate empowered black women in lead roles so you are a white supremacist". It was accepted that this was awful, and everyone moved on.
That's because it aired in 2006, when it was much harder to defend a bad story by calling your opponents racist.
Ah, for the dear dead days of the past!
Especially because in 2006 it certainly felt like there a lot of people in Fandom starting down this road.
(In fact, there were people who excessively focused on the inadequate treatment of racism as to why that episode was bad - because if the show had better interrogated its own internal racism it would have been worthwhile.)
I love how you write! So personnal and fun!
It's very nearly so bad you should watch it, but only if you don't care about Tolkien's canon.
I don't know who half the actors are; the one guy I thought was excellent was Joseph Mawle, who plays Adar and even under the prosthetic makeup managed to out-act Morfydd 'One Expression' Clark in their scene together.
The guy who plays Elendil is Lloyd Owen, who I see is RADA trained. Then he gets told in episode seven "stand there and be emotional with the horsie". I hope to God the actors are trousering the cash with both hands, because they might as well be getting some benefit from this trainwreck.
There have been some fun memes out of it, but as anything approaching "Lord of the Rings", apart from shamelessly copying scenes and dialogue from the Jackson movies - forget it! What's even worse is that all concerned, from Bezos on down, have sworn and vowed and declared and avouched that they are YUUUGE Tolkien fans and want to be as faithful to the canon as possible and are so inspired that they start every day with a quote from the books.
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
I'm telling you, this makes Ralph Bakshi look like a genius in comparison. He may have been 60s/70s counter-culture trippin', but the worst thing he did was steal Boromir's trousers. He didn't decide to rewrite the entire freakin' lore so that Sauron was disguised as a human from 'the Southlands' and was infatuated to the point of proposing marriage to Galadriel.
No, that's not something I imagined after sustaining massive brain damage - they really went and did that.
What is the point of Elendil's fake daughter? They said they created her to "inject some female energy" into the wotsit, and their main sign of this is her bazooms. They are not the most massive of bazooms ever, but they are very noticeably bazooms, and possibly even braless bazooms, and they're about the one thing that you remember about her. The show seemed to be trying to start up a romance between her and Pharazon's fake son, but to say that this was watery would be an insult to water, which after all is a vitally necessary element.
I'm guessing Earien is there to be a viewpoint character to the King's Men and the descent of Numenorean society, which Elendil and Isildur are necessarily going to be outside of as secret and then increasingly open rebels. Pharazon is an obvious villain, but arguably someone needs to be the "normal", not initially evil Numenorean who gets caught up in the events of the Downfall through desperation and temptation and fear. I may be wrong, of course.
Yeah, but I think Cemen, Pharazon's fake son, is the guy who is/was supposed to be the 'ordinary viewpoint Númenorean who's a King's Man'.
Up until he was impressed with Earien's bazooms and was persuaded by her to go off to try to persuade his father not to support Míriel sending ships to Middle-earth to liberate the Southlands.
I have no idea what is supposed to be going on there. Earien was standing around in the square watching the whole "Elves are gonna take our jobs!" rabble-rousing, and it *seemed* like she didn't like this, but at this stage I don't know if she's pro- or anti-Faithful. She seems to be "don't go to war", her chief reason for trying to get Cemen to persuade his dad to stop the liberation fleet (all three ships), but if her opinions are any more formed than that is hard to say.
And Cemen is all over the place - first he was "heck yeah I am proud Númenorean" and supporting his dad, then he switched to bazooms and was "why get involved in someone else's war?" where Pharazon had to explain the facts of political life to him (for Númenor's gain by having a client state in Middle-earth which will enable us to have a base for trade and exploitation of resources), then he tried burning down/blowing up one ship which managed to take out two ships (so he was effective in his own way) but didn't stop the liberation fleet of three ships sailing.
Since the show can't be bothered to give us any background on who is thinking what, I have no idea what Earien's politics - if any - are, or what Cemen's are now: does he stick with Dad who is on track to be the de facto ruler of Númenor now, or does he remain loyal to bazooms, and is Earien on Pharazon's side now? What will she do after looking in the palantir?
I'm not even interested in getting that answered, since both Earien and Cemen are tissue-thin characters with no development other than "I'm Earendil's daughter" and "I'm attracted to her (for whatever reasons, probably bazooms because she has done nothing or said nothing of note yet)".
She’s in the Builders’ Guild, and I can think of only one major construction project in Numenor’s future.
(“So how are you on altars? Say about six feet long, or as much more as Numenoreans are taller than other Men?”)
I have to say, I really like Owen's voice. I almost wonder if they should have saved him to be Saruman, whether in this production or some other.
Some of them seem to be good actors, if they got anything in the damn script to work with. He's a RADA graduate, so he's got the training and the chops, and his biggest scene so far was doing some horse-whispering.
Whoever is playing Celebrimbor might as well have phoned in his lines (all six of them he's had so far) while they stuck a mannequin in a bathrobe in the corner to represent him, for all he's been given to do so far. It's particularly galling since he's the smith who crafted the rings, and that *should* have been his Big Episodes, but they knocked off the smithing in about ten minutes of the finale, so back he goes into standing around doing nothing much for the next season.
The only thing that would draw me to watch season two is if we get a lot more of Adar, who is a vaguely sympathetic character and the guy playing him is a damn good actor. However, it looks like season two is going to be "all Sauron, all the time" as our dauntless duo of showrunners develop him to be "Tony Soprano or Walter White".
There's something to look forward to 🙄
Thanks for the link! XD
I just started a substack! It's called "Eat Shit and Prosper"—gonna be talking a lot about the gut microbiome and its connection to psychiatric/neurodegenerative diseases, but also more general stuff about microbial ecology.
https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-jungle
Some practical advice for staying healthy in an increasingly adversarial world, with a lil dose of pontification on who's really driving the bus (hint: you are the bus).
I thought the Orange Menace wrote that book.
Quick question about eating shit: Is fecal transplant looking promising for people with Crohn's disease? I looked into it for a friend a few years ago, & results seemed mixed.
Looking promising! 36% of patients in full clinical remission 2 months out from a 2-dose regimen. Maybe not the miracle you'd hope to see, but it's a lot better than pretty much anything else.
More importantly, pretty much no serious adverse events, i.e. not likely to make things worse if they give it a try.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jgh.15598
Better and longer-lasting results with multiple attempts, apparently much higher response rates going down the hatch rather than up the back.
My friend has an 11 yo son who has lots of stomach aches and upsets from his Crohn's. Kid's now on -- I forget what, but some drug the docs hoped not to have to use on him. Maybe a steroid? And still with lots of stomach pain even on whatever undesirable drug it is. At my suggestion, friend asked the doc about fecal transplant, doc knew about it -- apparently down-the-hatch route is called "crapsules" -- but declined to try that at this point. Is there a down side to fecal transplant? Do docs just regard it as too iffy and weird? Are they all hypnotized by sales pitches from drug reps? What's the case against crapsules?
You could do the experiment if you have a suitable donor. It is perhaps unattractive but nobody will die.
I know, when docs were first doing this they just mixed water and donor feces in a blender and gave it to patient as an enema. (Patients were told to BYOB, bring your own blender.) I’d try this myself in a heartbeat if I had Crohn’s.
Is your friend healthy? Thepowerofpoop.com has some solid guides for DIY
Edit: also, when docs were first doing this, it was 4th century China and people like Ge Hong were calling it the "yellow soup".
Ge Hong also known for reporting the usefulness of Artemisia in malaria! and eating mercury to try and attain immortality.
Still, as Meatloaf would say...
Regulatory capture.
FDA is regulating it as a drug, meaning a doctor can only do FMT as part of a registered clinical trial.
They issued an "enforcement discretion" notice allowing it to be used outside of clinical trials for C. diff, because tens of thousands of people die of that every year.
But for everything else, the current thinking is "You can wait until Rebiotix introduces the $5000 version of shit-in-a-bag/shit-in-a-pill". And you'll pay out of pocket because it'll be off-label use. Fortunately, poop is unique among drugs in that literally everybody healthy produces it once a day.
Shoot me an email. SDSkolnick@gmail.com
Come talk to me about "the horror" when you're watching one of your parents die of Alzheimer's, when they're hitting the cliff where the faculties start to go quicker and quicker, and there's exactly one medical procedure that's been reported to reverse the progression, and no doctor will do it for them even though it's got a better risk profile than any approved drug for their condition.
Or when your kid is practically skin and bones, and you have to try and think of the words to say that'll get him to eat a little, even though he's not faking the tears when he says the mashed potatoes makes his insides hurt, but you've tried every food, every diet, and no matter what it is, everything makes him hurt, and at the back of your mind you wonder if he's right when he says you should just let him starve to death.
Here's your citation, since I'm sure you'd ask. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300060520925930
Antibiotics are, of course, a powerful tool that have their place in medicine. But "overuse" is specifically using them outside of that place, and there's no reason we shouldn't come down on that as hard as possible.
Been a while since I took a close look at the stats, but IIRC 1/3-1/2 of antibiotic prescriptions are deemed unnecessary in retrospect.
Obviously few physicians prescribe an antibiotic they know is unnecessary, but "see if it helps" thinking is all too common, especially among patients. The "customer is always right" mentality is not helping with this situation.
Also: that last graph you linked....interesting that the slope doesn't actually change when penicillin is introduced. What do you think is up with that?
Erstwhile friend-of-the-blog Michael Shellenberger appears to have gone all-in on "solar/wind bad, oil/gas good" on his Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1581730315852136448
It's not worth my effort to respond to his Gish Gallop of talking points, but maybe somebody he will listen to could take a crack at it.
Germany industry is going at a gallop.
I can never decide if this guy is an honest broker, or feels the need to play devils advocate because the opposing viewpoint is so prevailing that he feels the need to come out with "hot takes". Certainly solar/wind have some downsides. But the language in these tweets seems kind of silly.
He's an advocate for nuclear energy, I believe, not for oil and gas.
Yep, I haven’t seen him advocate for oil and gas, but I have seen him advocate for nuclear.
But I think advocating against solar/wind isn’t a great strategy. Similar to how anti-nuclear advocacy has resulted in increased coal power, advocating against solar/wind will result in the same, which seems bad.
If the discussion is really about solar vs nuclear, I appreciate pointing out the limitations of solar (of which baseload power is the biggest), but fossil fuel electricity is still the main problem, and should be the main focus of criticism, IMO.
I would say that the main *immediate* problem, seems to be politically symbolic decisions to shut down functioning existing power plants like the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, without giving one shred of thought to the physical repurcussions of those decisions.
Shellenberger rose quite a bit in my estimation when I learned about all his work to stop the Diablo Canyon shutdown.
In other good news on the nuclear front, GA's new nuclear plant, delayed for three DECADES, has finally loaded all the fuel into the first reactor, and will power up in a few months pending standard start-up/fuelling tests and observations.
Maybe in Germany? But the biggest change in power generation in the United States in the last 20 years has been a steep decline in coal, and a corresponding rise in natural gas. Solar/wind is still single-digit percentages and nuclear has been very stable.
Is wind still single-digit percentages? I thought that gas was about 40%, nuclear, coal, and "renewables" were each about 20%, and that within renewables, wind had passed hydro and solar is growing substantially too.
That's pretty spot on, but yes wind is at 9%. And I doubt it will get a lot larger, for the same reason hydro has been stuck where it is for decades. Both depend critically on having a certain unusual geographical situation -- either a nicely dammable river for hydro, or an unusually steady wind and lots of space for wind. The good places are already mostly used up.
It's possible someone might think of some innovation in wind turbine design that makes use in lower wind speeds plausible -- I think that has already happened once -- but places where the wind just blows all day all the time are necessarily pretty unusual -- I mean, there's a good reason we switched away from sail power in transport long ago -- and having a use factor of 5% really makes a hash out of your ROI.
Didn't hydro follow a standard sort of S curve in that growth? At least, it looks like there were several decades of stable growth in hydro, and then a slowdown, before it stalled. Wind seems to still be in the early days of stable growth, so I wouldn't expect it to stall any time soon.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42955
My go-to for this sort of thing is Our World in Data. Some relevant charts: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source will give you the % values you want for electricity production, which is what we've been talking about. Wind is not close to passing hydropower, but you can look at country-by-country stuff to see if it might be true for individual countries. For example, in USA it is true that wind has surpassed hydroelectric (see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-source-stacked?country=OWID_WRL~CHN~IND~USA~JPN~DEU~GBR~BRA~FRA~CAN~SWE~ZAF)
Big list of additional charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-key-charts
Thanks for the charts! I was talking about United States (in response to a comment about United States) and it looks from this like wind is about 9% of power generation here - so still single digit percents, but not for long.
Yes, I was specifically thinking of Germany.
FWIW, I generally approve of advocacy that might help increase spread of nuclear power (Thorium holds promise here, but needs investment to have a chance to be implemented at scale). If pointing out limitations of renewables increases chances of adopting nuclear more widely, then I approve. I just see the most likely outcome of increased skepticism towards solar/wind as increased fossil fuels rather than nuclear, which doesn’t seem like a good trade-off
why does this have 95 calories, when the macros seem to add up to much less? https://www.michelobultra.com/products/beers/michelob-ultra
"Carbs" probably doesn't count the alcohol. 355mL of beverage * 4.2 alcohol by volume = ~ 15mL.
15 mL * 0.789 g/mL x 7kCal/g = ~83 kCal.
Add in the basic carbs plus some rounding and you get to 95 kCal.
Interesting! I also found this (https://www.mensjournal.com/food-drink/how-count-alcohol-against-your-daily-macros/)
So everything that told me calories is (fat + protein + carbs) was wrong! It also seems to make beer nutrition labels extra deceptive. Why is there no row for alcohol?
I was taught (in nursing school) that calories equals carbs plus protein plus fat plus alcohol, but we don't consider it a macro because hopefully it isn't contributing a large amount of calories to your diet. It shouldn't really be considered a carb because it has a different kcal/g contribution
Also speciecist. :-)
OTOH, I would be kinda amazed if the metabolic efficiency for sugar (sucrose) was very different between humans. Being more energy efficient is obviously a survival trait.
I am very willing to believe that. We learned lots of questionable things.
Ethanol is a carbohydrate.
Can you add some flavor here? Why does it not show up on the label then? Why does wikipedia just call it "similar" to a carbohydrate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol#Metabolism
and list it separately here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient#Macronutrients
The strict definition of a carbohydrate is that its empirical formula is Cn(H2O)m where n and m are arbitrary integers (sucrose, for instance is C12(H2O)11). Ethanol is thus not a carbohydrate, as it has too many hydrogens (its empirical formula is C2H6O).
Is that the legal strict definition of a carbohydrate or the chemical strict definition of a carbohydrate? Chemical and legal definitions are famously different for many words, such as "organic".
What about formaldehyde? :-)
Why have batteries beat out hydrogen as the go-to form of energy storage for renewables, whether in cars or for the grid? I would naively imagine that a lot of the infrastructure built for natural gas could be used/expanded to transport hydrogen, making it possible to produce hydrogen in places where renewable sources are cheap and bounteous, and then ship the hydrogen via pipes, rail, etc. to other places, just as we have done for many (most?) of our energy needs for over a century with oil and gas. I assume there are reasons for why batteries seem to be winning out thus far, but what information I am able to find with a few Google searches is either contradictory or unenlightening. Probably I just don't know enough about it to even know how to effectively search on this topic.
For transportation, batteries have the advantage that you don't need to convert energy from electricity to hydrogen and then to whatever form you want again, which requires expensive equipment on the electrolysis side and has fairly low (30%?) round-trip efficiency, and can also use already-existing infrastructure to move it to and from where it is needed.
For grid use, I don't think there are any attempts for serious day-scale battery storage, just for hour-scale storage. And batteries are pretty good in storing energy for an hour.
I've seen proposals for grid-scale battery storage using chemicals other than lithium.
Basically, lithium is really good for consumer applications, but for grid-scale storage you want cheaper materials and long-term reliability after many recharge cycles. So there's been some research into battery chemistry that works better for grid storage (I think the one I saw was aluminum-sulfur?), though it'll probably take a few years to be ready.
I'm curious why there isn't more work on making liquid fuels (eg ethanol) from water and carbon dioxide plus energy. This seems to be the ideal energy storage material, it's super energy dense and you can carry it in a bucket. Do we lack an efficient chemical pathway for doing it?
There's plenty of ways to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels from other hydrocarbon fuels, e.g. water gas used to be used a century or more ago for fuel, and there's modern "syngas" and in the last energy crisis (in the 70s) we talked a lot about coal gasification for the purpose of making so-called "clean fuels."
However I think few green aficianados would be pleased by these solutions, what they would typically want is some way to make fuel from CO2, water, and sunlight, the way plants do. That's definitely trickier. CO2 is obviously a very, very stable molecule when you live at the bottom of a lake of O2, so unwrapping the C from the eager grasp of the O takes some doing. Plants can do it because they have enzymes, which can pretty much do any organic reaction, even those that look ridiculous on paper. I think there may be some very slow progress on inorganic catalysts, and with trying to engineer enzymes to do it.
I surmise that part of the problem may be that for the plant's purposes glucose is an excellent end-point, but not so much for ours, because its material properties as a fuel aren't good. Generally we want a pretty hydrophobic fuel, like a pure hydrocarbon, or at worst an alcohol, because otherwise it tends to stick to stuff, lose water and get gummy, or absorb water and get diluted, et cetera. On the other hand, living cells like hydrophilic fuel (like sugars) because that makes it super easy to transport and store.
Garrett's answer to my query mentioned the Sabatier process. After reading a bit about it, it does sound like the primary barrier is prices of synthetic fuel have not historically been competitive with naturally occurring hydrocarbons. Perhaps the elevated fuel prices in Europe will spur more innovation in that area, driving down prices.
H2 is a gigantic pain in the ass to work with. Even rocket ship designers avoid if it they can.
>produce hydrogen in places where renewable sources are cheap and bounteous, and then ship the hydrogen via pipes, rail, etc. to other places
You could do this (though not with natural gas pipes, for reasons others have noted), but it would be less efficient than simply using high-voltage power lines, because electrolysis and fuel cells both have significant inefficiencies.
Natural gas is piped places because we don't make it using electricity; we dig it out of the ground.
As Garret said, basically none of the natural gas infrastructure is suitable for hydrogen.
In addition, you would need to manufacture a ton of new infra anyway since the current grid is largely not powered by natural gas either, and neither are cars.
On the other hand, batteries are fully compatible and modular (give or take various integration problems) with the existing electrical grid. You can plug your hybrid car into standard outlets in your garage.
With regards to grid storage, this paper helped me understand the strengths & weaknessess of the various technologies out there:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/76097.pdf
The dominant form today is actually pumped hydropower, which is surprisingly efficient and very mature, but difficult to build out at scale. Li-ion batters are much easier to just build where you need them. Every other form of storage is either in its infancy or has major drawbacks:
Lead-acid batteries: require careful management to extend their lifetimes.
Compressed-air storage: still being developed.
Flywheels: poor capacity for the price.
Other gravity systems: still being developed.
Isn't hydrogen difficult to store, because hydrogen atoms are so small? Also I assume that most people just go "Hindenburg disaster!" when they hear "hydrogen."
For use in homes or cars, batteries directly produce electricity which can just plug into existing infrastructure. Hydrogen gas would require some additional infrastructure to convert to electricity. For grid-scale storage, I'm not sure.
Hydrogen is much more difficult to store as the atoms are just so small that they easily escape and need a lot of pressure. Similarly the efficiency of converting energy into hydrogen is relatively low compared to batteries, i.e. you lose a lot of energy by converting forth and back
As far as storage goes - if you're only storing energy overnight, batteries have much lower energy loss than hydrogen. If you're storing energy for weeks or months ... the arguments are less clear. I'm guessing it's just inertia and "economic incentives" that favor that inertia.
Putting hydrogen in passenger automobiles is a terrible idea for lots of reasons. Hydrogen is difficult to store, difficult to transport, and explosive. Building out an entire network to distribute it (so even stupid people can safely use it) is a fool's errand.
Diesel's the only common automotive fuel that isn't a potential flammable gas; both petrol (a.k.a. gasoline) and LPG are capable of explosion, but nonetheless these are pretty common and safe.
1. Hydrogen is a very small molecule, which means that it leaks through pipe walls and seals fairly easily. On a small scale this isn't a big deal, but on a large scale you are going lose a lot of your energy storage.
2. Hydrogen will combine with materials used to create most existing pipe infrastructure, rendering them extremely brittle.
3. Hydrogen isn't a liquid at anything near STP. This means you need to keep it under significant pressure or cryogenic temperatures. Doing either of these requires significant energy input and means that your fueling stations need to have specialty equipment.
None of these is especially difficult to overcome, but it is substantially more expensive to do so. If you want to use the existing natural gas infrastructure you are better off looking at the Sabatier process to convert your hydrogen and available carbon dioxide into "natural" gas which can use the existing infrastructure. OTOH if you just want to use hydrogen you are probably best to use it for something like long-haul trucking where using specialty refueling stations and equipment is more reasonable.
Thanks, that answers my question about why hydrogen is not a viable alternative to batteries. Reading a bit about the Sabatier process was very helpful. I now wonder why synthetic hydrocarbons haven't taken off more than they have thus far, as they do seem like a clearcut case of alternatives that could use existing infrastructure. Perhaps the elevated fuel prices in Europe will spur more innovation in that space.
Also, hydrogen is much more flammable than pretty much anything else you'd consider using as a fuel. But the flames are pretty much invisible in daylight. Which, coupled with "leaks through pipe walls and seals fairly easily", is a recipe for random horrible death. Hydrogen systems are best left to trained professionals, which is a serious limitation for consumer-facing applications.
Long-haul trucking, presumably we can get the truckers and their mechanics properly trained if we want to go that route.
Upcoming unconferences in Prospera, the charter city on the beautiful Caribbean island of Roatan:
Prospera Edtech Summit, October 28-30, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/edtech2022
Prospera Fintech Summit, November 18-20, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/fintech2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-62722
Very unlikely to be cancelled, sorry to say
Yes, now Hondurans are free to wallow in their democratic peace and violence indefinitely. I'm sure that promising left-wing candidate in the next election is the real solution to all their problems though.
I’ve been reading lots of books about outer space with my kids (N.B.: if you’re wondering whether you want to have kids, it’s worth it just to read books about outer space with them). One of the things they’re super interested in are the gas giants in our solar system.
Can any experts out there explain what the hell is up with, like, Jupiter? It really has no solid substance on it? If you had a super powered space suit and entered Jupiter’s atmosphere, would you just keep falling through it until you hit the core and then just bob around? How is there a center of gravity without solid matter? I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it.
In the same vein: my boys love to talk about what it’d be like to visit each planet and the various moons. Does anyone know any place to find a good description of what that would be like? The closest I ever found was a fun XKCD description of what would happen if you tried to fly a plane on each planet (https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/), but that’s a frustratingly limited scenario.
More generally, are there good places for kids who are interested in that sort of thing to hang out with each other?
Holy shit! You guys are amazing. We’ll be reading these posts / watching these videos for weeks to come. My boys are going to love this. Thank you all so much!
It depends a little on what you mean by "solid." If you just mean something about as dense as ordinary familiar solids, like wood, glass, rocks you'd find lying around on the ground, then that would happen when you got ~25% of the way to Jupiter's center. About halfway down it's about as dense as ordinary metals like iron or copper, and by the time you get to within 20% of the core it's reached the densest substances we know on the surface of the Earth, like gold or iridium.
But physicists normally define a "solid" (with certain subtle exceptions related to glasses) as a substance in which the atoms or molecules form a regular crystalline array, which makes it much more resistant to twisting force than an equally dense liquid or solid. In that sense, it's less clear whether there's big regions of crystalline solid in Jupiter -- the problem being it's mostly made of H2 and He, neither of which form crystals easily[1], except at very low temperatures (the center of Jupiter may be ~40,000K) and very high pressures, basically because H2 molecules and He atoms exert essentially no force on each other unless they're actually touching, and when they do touch they act like very hard, very rigid, but very slick little balls that can't push into each other but can slide around each other easily. Makes holding a crystal of H2 or He together like trying to hold a tower of polished glass marbles together -- you'd need huge pressure from all sides.
We don't know how much of the heavier elements are down in the core of Jupiter (because it's hard to get samples back ha ha), and we don't know that much about the behavior of H2 at extremely high pressures. A lot of clever work has been done with diamond anvil cells, but it's hard to characterize the material properties of the micrograms or less of material you can fit in there. The current fashionable thought is that H2 becomes a metal at sufficiently high pressures, and this might be what's going on inside Jupiter, it might have a giant layer of H metal, currents flowing through which may explain its gargantuan magnetic field.
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[1] It's possible that He doesn't solidify at 1atm even at 0K, due to quantum effects.
Not a direct answer to your question, but a few movies/videos I recommend (10 year old kid appropriate):
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Odyssey_(TV_series)
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universe_(TV_series)#Season_1:_2007 [only watch S1]
For great fun the Spitzer Space Telescope people put out an "IRRelevant Astronomy" series of short videos that my kid enjoyed.
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRrelevant_Astronomy
I just realized that I typed "[only watch S1]". Ooops. I meant to write that I had only watched S1 myself and so couldn't speak the the quality of the other seasons.
"It really has no solid substance on it?"
Well depends on your defintion of "solid". The presures and temperatures get very high, so you get progressively more and more dense liquid/gas that eventually stops being like anything you would be used to.
"If you had a super powered space suit and entered Jupiter’s atmosphere, would you just keep falling through it until you hit the core and then just bob around? "
No you would fall until you hit the zone where you were neutrally bouyant. Where the graviational pull is equalized by your bouyancy. Humans aren't very dense.
"How is there a center of gravity without solid matter?"
Gravity for such a large thing is VERY strong. All the stuff is ever so slightly pulling on all the other stuff, but there is just a TON of stuff. If fact this is easier without solids, as the shape is more elastic and the natural shape of such an object is a sphere (well and ellipsoid sphere because it is rotating so the "waist"/equator swells due to angular momentum.
In fact it is easier to get a liquid/gas/plamsa into a sphere than a solid as the solid wants to retain its shape more. The earth isn't a sphere because the solids that make it up are a sphere. The solids just a dozen kilometers down are like toothpaste, and deeper they get even more fluid.
"Does anyone know any place to find a good description of what that would be like? "
I am positive you could find something like this for some/all planets on Youtube. Youtube has GREAT astronomy content.
Think about the Sun. That REALLY has nothing solid. If you fell in and didn't mind the heat, you'd keep falling (being compressed under pressure) until you hit the core.
To answer the first person's question, gravity doesn't depend on a solid surface. The Earth's atmosphere doesn't affect Earth's gravity much, but that's because there is not much of it compared to the Earth. It still has a gravitational pull.
No you would fall until you hit the zone where you were neutrally bouyant. Where the graviational pull is equalized by your bouyancy. Humans aren't very dense.
would you oscillate first?
It's actually more likely you'll hit a "sea" of something denser and just float ontop of that. Kind of like Earth except it probably won't be sea water. And you might have already sunk through a layer or two of other liquids.
Liquids don't compress well so it's unlikely that there will be a full gradient of density by the time it approaches the typical human density. Though I'm assuming you'll be hitting one of the calmer regions and not one of the areas of unending storms in which you'll probably have other issues to worry about than the mixing of the layers.
Until the friction stopped you, yeah.
"my boys love to talk about what it’d be like to visit each planet and the various moons. Does anyone know any place to find a good description of what that would be like?"
You could let them play Doom.
Lots of good info comparing Earth’s and Jupiter’s core. Briefly, Jupiter has a rocky inner core coated in a thick layer of metallic hydrogen.
https://sciencing.com/jupiters-core-vs-earths-core-21848.html#:~:text=Size%20and%20Mass&text=The%20core%27s%20density%20is%20estimated,(151%20billion%20trillion%20tons).
I’m also not an expert, and that matches my understanding as well. If you imagine jumping into water on earth, you sink for a bit and then stop (and probably float). The buoyant force is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid, so you sink/fall when you’re more dense than the fluid. When you’re less dense than the fluid, the buoyant force is greater than your weight, and so you’re pushed upward. You float when your density matches that of the fluid.
Is there any evidence that the anti-police movement in the U.S. has damaged the mental health of police or raised their suicide rate?
Not suicide so far as I'm aware, but there's research out about retirements and quitting being drastically up, and fewer successful hires in large districts (but more in small ones):
https://www.policeforum.org/workforcesurveyjune2021
Some of the specific numbers are 45% higher retirement rate (~1 in 77 additional officers retiring), 18% higher resignation rate (~1 in 131), and 5% lower (average) hire rate (~1 in 217 fewer), but it's probably best to look at the actual link, especially the "Percent Change Between Time Periods by Agency Size" table; there's nuance in there.
Other grain of salt to consider I suppose is that the data's a bit over a year old at this point, and it's possible things have changed in that year.
Vaguely related https://www.reuters.com/world/us/officer-who-responded-us-capitol-attack-is-third-die-by-suicide-2021-08-02/
Suicide rate seems flat for police:
"Despite suicide rates for the general population declining by 3 percent, or 1,656 people, from 2019 to 2020, according to CDC data, the rates among first responders showed moderate to no decrease from 2017 to 2020, the Ruderman study found."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/10/high-suicide-rate-police-firefighters-mental-health/7470846001/
I'm an Economics undergrad, due to graduate in a bit more than half a year or so. I have two questions, one about productivity, one about entering CS. (Unfortunately, I don't have people around me who can really answer these in detail-apologies if these aren't relevant for this place.)
1. I'm relatively happy with myself as far as it goes (I've figured out how to be consistently happy for multiple months, exercise etc is providing me with a higher energy budget) but it turns out that I'm really bad at working hard. I was able to 'coast' through school, and college is also not very hard, so there hasn't been a reason for me not to procrastinate. My limit on intense focus-unless I'm programming, and thus 'playing'-seems to be around 2-3 hours a day, and that mostly on very good days. Is there a way to raise that? (I've had good success with installing habits like exercise by basically making myself do it consistently for a month or so, and then using the momentum from that to keep doing it. is there an analog for increasing perseverance?)
I ask this because it really seems like this is now the blocker on me being able to do things-my current algorithm of 'do <thing> until it's interesting, then stop' isn't really working out. (Also makes it hard to start new projects which potentially could have been fun but aren't, since I think they'd be boring and never start them.)
2. While I like Economics (yes, really-I suspect it's done a fair share in making me smarter, by installing the reflex to look for problems if nothing else...) my original thing has always been CS. I don't have a CS degree though, and don't really have tangible projects, since I was mostly pulled by my curiosity when I was younger. (So I know parts of Haskell and Prolog, but barely have the equivalent of an IRC client coded...I think my laziness w.r.t. projects just stems from a lack of inherent curiosity for them though, I suspect I'd be fine in an environment that provides external structure and insentives.)
So, if I don't have a CS degree, what do I do to be hired? bootcamps? work on some actual projects? randomly email people? prep for interviews? some superset/subset of all these?
I would strongly, STRONGLY encourage you to not create input-level goals for yourself like amount-of-focus, and instead find opportunities/jobs/ways of working where you judge yourself and are judged by others on output goals.
Some of the most productive people I know only really focus 3 hours a day, because their ideal pattern of work is that the other 5 hours is necessary-but-low-value-add work (e.g., think of all the emails involved in scheduling big important workshops) or just sitting there letting their brain run a bunch of thinking in the background.
If you instead focus on input-level goals, you will find it very hard to be happy if you are a typical American overachiever college graduate, because it is always hypothetically possible to do a little more work each day than you did. This way lies burnout.
(The counterexample is someone who has a bounded keep-the-streak-going goal, like "I go to the gym for 120 minutes a week", but most professional jobs you would take don't think about business inputs that way.)
I'd say 2-3 hours a day is not terrible, I'm usually pretty happy with 3-4 hours of real work, and proud of a 6 hour work day. (For background, I work in software.)
In regards to getting a job in software, you can't really go wrong with networking. If you have just a couple small projects under your belt to demonstrate you're capable, and then befriend the right people, you can totally land a job. I have a friend that was trying to get into software, she had a degree in bio but had done a couple CS projects, and had just started in a CS program, and it was straightforward for me to organize an internship with my employer to get her in the door. She just accepted a full-time salaried position with them a couple months ago. Really the demand for tech workers is so high, if you can just demonstrate the ability to learn, your odds are good.
2-3 hours of focused work per day is actually a lot more than most employees get during the day or can sustain.
Building projects is a great way to demonstrate your skills. Or focus on programming jobs that also leverage your economics knowledge like Data Engineers or similar.
Yeah, +1 to this.
A lot of people "work hard" without producing much. 2-3 hours of intense, focused work should be exhausting, you should be beat afterwards. And it's not slacking, I don't think most people are doing 8 hours of intense, focused work because I don't see many peers with 3-4x my output.
I say, try listing relevant coursework and experience on your resume, even if it's not your degree. It can be an asset, especially if you're applying to finance-type jobs, to go for the more programming-heavy/quant jobs
When I went to my college's career fairs, most of the recruitment was geared towards the econ people by finance and trading firms. I brought my resume with; it had some CS coursework on it, like "algorithms" and "basic Python". I got asked a logic puzzle by one recruiter right at the career fair, and my experience was pretty limited. I say put it on your resume, go to career fairs, and apply places.
If you're a US citizen, you can look into work for the national security establishment: treasury/finance type jobs and economic analysis. But I knew someone in physics who applied for data science analytics type positions in this field, and had success. So your specific degree doesn't pigeon-hole you into just that role.
How old are you? I see myself as a fundementally "lazy" person who is prone to coasting, probably in large part due to how easy school was for me and a totally unstructured/crap childhood with few real expectations/consequences.
My "coasting" got seriously in the way of professional/academic success until ~26-27, at which point my unhappiness with my station in life exceeded my desire to coast and I started working hard more systematically and consistently. I still slack off for streches, but only to an extent that my talent can more than compensate. For instance I have a meeting in 10 minutes I should have been prepping for for the last 20, but I am good enough that my presence in the meeting will still be well above average with only 5-10 minutes of prep.
Anyway, I wouldn't see yourself as "doomed" to you current situaiton. From the outside everyone thingks I am super hard working and diligent, and I do at times where needed put in 70-80-100 weeks. But I also have weeks where there is 60 hours of work and I do 30, and then the next week I need to scramble my ass off to catch up. It does help that I have my own business, so I cannot rely on others, if I don't do work it simply doesn't get done since I am the only one at my business who can do the things I do. it can be good to setup incentives like this where the consequences of bad behavior are high. Then eventually your habits change a bit.
Tackle 1) as though your life and success depend on it, because they do There are plenty of tips to be found on the huberman lab podcast. The ones that have worked for me are - sleeping by 10pm. Working (not working out) first thing in the morning (after getting ready), cutting out all or most sources of un-earned dopamine
I recommend a bootcamp. I don't usually recommend them--however, a key factor is who you are going in, and if you're already proficient in programming, it's actually a *better* fit for you than if you weren't.
1) because you'll rapidly skill up in the skills most in demand, and 2) you'll also get decent at knowing how to present and interview to get good tech jobs.
Even if you think you don't want to work in 'those' areas, getting a year or two of exp will make it easier to pursue the niche Haskell/Prolog/whatever jobs.
I'd be wary of folks saying you can get in without a big commitment like a bootcamp; it's widely understood that getting into tech is the hardest part (the first job), and also that it's harder to get your foot in the door than it was a few years ago (i.e. when other folks did).
If you're interested in data/data science, just get in somewhere and start studying python.
If you're educated and can do Excel, you'll get hired to do analytics somewhere. If you can do Python, they will take advantage of that and you'll get promoted fast.
This is something I didn't consider. I'm not really interested in data science that much (Economics was mostly a 'best worst option' deal) but I know Python and might pick this up if other stuff doesn't work out.
Not that familiar with Excel, though, but I'm sure that can be fixed pretty easily. (I know a friend who used to do Excel and VBA in a bank and earned really well..it sounds soul-sucking but I might as well also look into that...)
I see lots of guys in the data space with this kind of "econ, meteorology, finance" background. I don't think it's intrinsically any easier than actual software engineering but there's a much simpler transition.
Like, in software engineering, it feels very binary: either you can code or you can't. In data there's lots of intermediate steps: Excel->SQL->Python/R->Software/Data Engineer. It's much easier to get your foot in the door and much easier to climb the tech stack.
You can try and build that focus to keep working on the boring bits. I need it at work for CS, as the fun part of writing the code flies by, but then adding the right tests and cleaning it up to handle dumb edge cases is boring. That's why they pay you to do work.
I might recommend trying to finish a project or two. Limit the scope up front, but then make a roadmap and try and keep at least one commit per day. That streak maintenance, number go up thing helped me stick to it. Doesn't have to be a big commit, even just tidying a bit counts, it's more that you say down and got to work.
Maybe also pick something which isn't in just for yourself? I spent some time localizing someone else's app and sharing that back upstream. This can help avoid being sloppy, as you want the code to be accepted.
Sound like actionable advice?
thanks, I think this is useful. I've used streaks before to great effect (primarily to install habits) so maybe I can reuse them in this context too.
Really the problems are more about finding projects that seem interesting. Maybe I should just pick up something random? let me see.
Hi Friends,
My third book, Losing My Religions, has been published. It covers several topics I think will be of interest to you, and I quote Scott in it for the main philosophy chapter.
The e-book files are available for free, as I hope the book can be as helpful as possible to as many people who want to read it.
You can get the files and read the early reviews at: https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Take care!
Any parents here have resources for early childhood education that actually seemed to work? A lot of things give me an extreme eyebrow raise although most of what I see from Montessori types seem practical as far as making him feel confident and competent. Is anything else out there? Is Montessori real? Son is going to be one in a few months and want to see if we can be more deliberate. Parents only please unless you also happen to be a working expert.
Edit: thanks for all the suggestions. Also as a point of clarity I am not proposing to raise my son in a Soviet style elite training program more like “hey this actually helped my kid learn to read.” My main goal is of course to give him the tools to build a happy and successful life not quiz him on the relative abundance of deuterium until the light goes out of his smile.
Big agreement with baby sign language, How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen (they have books aimed at specific age groups too, and a book about siblings, all of which are worth checking out), Janet Lansbury/RIE, and just reading a lot. Very true that they will learn how to be and behave from YOU starting NOW. I have 3 but they're still pretty little.
For school we just figured, given their parents' background, our kids would be fine academically and intelligence-ly no matter what, so we focused on the type of life experience they would have at school. For us, we went with a school that emphasizes outdoor time, working with hands, self-direction, focus, mixed ages, no tech until later grades, that kind of thing. It aligns with our values about how to spend time. This is a Montessori school, but there's a lot of variation among Montessori schools. Probably the local public school would have been fine academically and they would do fine, but the 15 minute recess and wasted time and tablets really depressed me. There's more to life than academics and they spend so much time at school that it sure counts as 'life' too.
At home we read a ton and talk about ideas often. My daughter loves the show Numberblocks and wanders around happily reciting math problems. I include them in all housework tasks and expect them to do age-appropriate chores pretty much from birth. No Soviet elites here, just bright, busy kids doing their own thing.
I have three kids. They all read well above grade level. For my oldest and youngest it just came naturally. My middle I sat with, evening after evening, as she frustratedly beat her way through the beginner books and felt herself stupid because it was hard. Through K and 1st, she tested at grade level. In the summer after 1st grade we listened to some American Girl audiobooks on a family road trip vacation. They hit just right for her, and she came home and burned through all of those books my wife could dig out from when she was a kid, and then all of the ones we could find for her. When she started the second grade she tested as being at the end of 4th grade in terms of her reading, and has stayed consistently ahead.
For whatever reason*, it took her longer, and I was very worried that my middle baby might be (gasp!) average. But she was fine, and when she was ready to read she advanced rapidly. All of which is to say that some kids are on a different calendar than normal, and it's mostly fine.
*the reason was likely moderate dyslexia, diagnosed later
I do think we sometimes discredit the idea that distribution curves exist within people as well as across people. I’m fully waiting for him to be a jock pro level athlete just to surprise me.
And once they've done that ten or twenty times, they'll be on a different reading level. Like a lot of things, this one is about reps.
My biggest piece of advice would be to have expectations and require your children to meet them. People are really good at raising their behavior to the required level. Not any of this touchy feely garbage. Presumably you love and care for your kids, most people don't need advice about that these days.
What most parents struggle with is establishing that they are in charge, their word goes, and that their are consequences for not living up to expectations. You are a stand in for "the world/god" when they grow up. Except you actually care about them. So it is great for them. But you need to teach them that "the world" will punish them for laziness/stupidity/recklessness etc.
Otherwise you end up with a 15 year old who has had a great emotionally nurturing and supportive life, and has zero ability to do hard work, and zero ability to overcome challenges or obstacles.
Anyway, my relationship with my kids is great, and everyone talks about how great they are. Athletic, relatively interested in academics, polite, well behaved, socially the center of the kids in the nieghborhood. And I would put a lot of that down to me not accepting bad behavior or whining whenthey were say 2-6. Don't let them get their way by crying. Make them pick up after themselves. Hell by 7 or 8 they can start doing dishes and other small chores. If you don't like how they are are using their access to Netflix, take it away for 5 days. If you can't get them to focus about the danger of streets, give them a light cuff across the head, or an unpleasant face to face scolding. Your kids should be a little bit afraid of one of the parents and their disapproval/rebuke. You are certainly going to be a lot more measured and loving about it than the world will be.
This is so true. And such hard work. It is so much easier to just let things slide than to consistently enforce discipline.
But the clarity and consistency of discipline is also important. Actions should have clear, known consequences (positive and negative).
The legal system is just "discipline for grown-ups" and many principles of the legal system are similarly applicable to children. Principles like notice, proportionality, non-arbitrary enforcement, intent, etc.
And this is completely separate from your other task, which is making sure that your children know that they are loved and supported.
I homeschooled my daughter up through 5th grade. This site is a wonderful resource, whether you are homeschooling or not: https://www.hoagiesgifted.org
Emily Oster has some sections on this in her book Cribsheet. The biggest take away for me is that who the parents are (and if they are educated and rich basically) has such a huge impact on child outcomes that stressing about the perfect education scheme is likely wasted effort. Finding something your kid likes and enjoys is probably more important. Emily's advice has been basically, if you are asking this is probably doesn't matter for you because you are already such an involved parent (in a good way).
We are currently touring schools for our 18 mo old. Montessori, Waldorf, etc. All of them have been good. We will probably make the decision based on cost, how long the school day is, and distance to our house.
Meh see while that sort of thing is true in aggregate, I feel like among the very engaged invested upper middle class parents I know, you still see pretty disparate outcomes in child bahvior that track pretty closely on parent behavior. Granted there are some difficult chicken/egg effects, where perhaps the parents of 8 year olds who get pushed around by them a little bit had particularly bossy kids and that is how they got there.
But from my sample I would see a big overlap even among "upper middle class kids who are going to be "fine", between kids who don't face real reprecussions for their behavior, and kids who are ill behaved at say 10 or lazy/undisicplined at 15.
Just because the average in a group is 80 insetad of 50, doens't mean there aren't strategies to put them on the higher end of that average.
I think that parents need to have a stronger concept of what is and isn't malleable in their child. You're not going to change their IQ, and you're not going to change some fundamental aspects of their personality. But a lot of other stuff is up for grabs. For instance, you're not going to turn a shy child into a gregarious one, but you can equip a shy child with enough social skills to be able to comfortably navigate social situations despite their shyness. You probably can't turn a lazy child into a hardworking one, but you can equip the lazy child with enough discipline to get things done despite their natural laziness.
I had poor follow-through on a lot of methodologies. However, baby sign language can help immensely to bridge communication the gap between now and when they speak. Also reading and pointing out things in books: pictures, objects, narrating things. My kids are different in verbal ability but also the first one got a lot more of this than the second and I think there's a noticeable difference.
On modeling emotional behavior: they really record how you talk and mirror you back. I've heard my own phrases thrown at me by a 3 y.o., my same tones of frustration, etc. Which leads me to believe that how you carry yourself and behave in front of them really makes a difference.
On things they're good at: with both my kids, around age 2.5 or so, I had a light-bulb moments where I intuitively just GOT how to show them something and they just GOT me. With the older, I suddenly found that I could EXPLAIN, verbally, and she understood me (finding an object, following a direction, etc.). With the second one, I could SHOW HER, physically, how to do it, and she could just repeat it, in a way that the other one couldn't. Maybe you might have this, and maybe you might not, but they might have a learning style and it might mesh with yours and stuff might just click: but you have to keep trying.
On learning to read: my older child, who has good verbal ability, we did the phonics using just magnetic letters. We learned letters and then at some point I started introducing their sounds; at age 3 or so I started doing informal phonics, words like CAT RAT BIN etc. Then, kids being very suggestible, I said "aaaaah but sometimes the A likes to make an "Ay" sound, like if you put the secret little E here".... and did the phonics combinations with magnetic letters; just thought of word families as they came up. I tried a book, but the book required writing skills and we weren't there yet.
On music: there are programs for early musical education; if your child is singing at ~2-3, you can start "Do Re Mi", and if you find they have perfect pitch you can start some musical and rhytmic education, even piano. There's a Russian lady who has a whole methodology (but in Russian) and videos teaching her 2-yo grandkids, and there's a Catholic method called "Ward method", but there are lots of other resources.
On counting/math: I take a similar ad-hoc kind of approach -- counting, "what if you counted UP by two? HEY what is two and two?" And just casual introduction of division, multiplication, fractions, place value. If they get bored I don't push too much.
On Montessori: I think it's school-dependent, and you need to go and see if it's just overpriced daycare with overpriced "fancy" toys or if they do something useful. A friend's son went to Montessori and it seems like they definitely learn self-direction and good habits; but it might not be as a good a fit or a more social and boisterous kid. But this is hearsay.
Thanks for this and baby sign language is actually what made me curious about what is out there. My wife saw it on TikTok and I was certain it was nonsense but low and behold at only seven months he’s very good at signing milk even though it also means “breastfeed me until I fall asleep.” Wouldn’t have thought the deliberate communication capacity was there before the speech but was wrong.
Yeah, the signs for “more” and “all done” were super helpful for our little guy, months before he could talk
For more specific educational advice, I haven't used this, but people who seem to know what they're talking about claim it's a great way to teach reading: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985/ref=sr_1_3?campaign_id=229&crid=UMRBEVC3M38S&dchild=1&emc=edit_jm_20210903&instance_id=39540&keywords=teach+your+child+to+read+in+100+easy+lessons&nl=john-mcwhorter&qid=1630530587®i_id=71409965&segment_id=68013&sprefix=teach+your+%2Caps%2C184&sr=8-3&te=1&user_id=114bf234264be577dca001b47594e4e6
I'll second the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen books. I'll also add the Whole Brain Child series as books that seem possibly useful. Perhaps the best book I've read on parents and kids is Allison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter: https://www.amazon.com/Gardener-Carpenter-Development-Relationship-Children/dp/1250132258/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=. I think what I've distilled from the decently researched parenting books I've read is essentially the following: Kids need food, shelter and love from their parents. Outside of that, your specific parenting style probably won't make too much of a difference. Connection is more important than control. Trying to exercise too much control will probably make you (and your kids) miserable while having very few benefits.
Thanks!
Mine are 9 and 11 now and seem to be turning out ok :-)
Montessori - found the ideas interesting (following the child etc) but very hard to do at home. John Holt, mentioned by somebody else, is interesting reading too.
Not quite 'education' in a formal sense but I found RIE (and specifically Janet Lansbury's blog) really useful - changed the type of 'toys' that I got my children at that age and still influences my parenting in lots of ways.
Again, also not education as such but I found the book How to Talk So Kids will Listen and How to Listen So Kids will Talk helpful. Too young for it at the moment, but I think it's worth reading sooner rather than later.
Think there is lots of evidence that reading to children is super-important (and lovely bonding time even with mine at their age!)
Remember that the behaviour you model as a parent is more important than anything else. If you are curious, then they will probably become curious too. If you are kind, they will probably become kind etc.
Also also remember that you need to stay sane - your moods will rub off on your children. You want to have fun with them.
But overall, I think if you are asking this question here, then you probably won't go too far wrong from an educational point of view :-)
This is wonderful thank you!
I have five children. They (and a bunch of research) have taught me that children are just the way they are. I can't imagine a pedagogy that would have worked for all of my children. For example, only child number 4 turned out to be interested in aestetic pursuits like painting and sculpturing. So my best advice is keep it open and stay tuned to your child's interests.
Perhaps not exactly what you are looking for but I have three book recommendations. "Emile" by Rousseau really challenged my thinking on why I wanted certain things for my children. I'm usually in opposition to most of his political philosophy, but when I found myself agreeing with him on several points regarding parenting, the chance for serious self-reflection was welcome. https://www.amazon.com/Emile-Philosophical-Treatise-Education-Annotated/dp/B0B38CX3ZD/ref=sr_1_3?crid=IULOPY2TQYFM&keywords=emile+rousseau&qid=1666012722&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIzLjU5IiwicXNhIjoiMy4yNyIsInFzcCI6IjMuMjYifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=emile+rousseau%2Cstripbooks%2C94&sr=1-3
"Seven Ages of Childhood" by Ella Cabot describes the various epochs of a child's development in readily accessible detail. Different ages will require different approaches; this was something that I guess I had intuited before but had never had it explained to me so straightforwardly. https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Ages-Childhood-Classic-Reprint/dp/133169972X
"How Children Fail by John Holt was an excellent discussion of what goes on in elementary-age children's minds as they negotiate the demands of formal education. Very illuminating and thought-provoking, especially since I'm homeschooling my kids and I can see them doing many of the things Holt describes. https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Development/dp/0201484021/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ILQ67T46JMRG&keywords=how+children+fail&qid=1666012620&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIxLjE1IiwicXNhIjoiMC41NCIsInFzcCI6IjAuNjEifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=how+children+fail%2Caps%2C100&sr=8-1
Rousseau is a moron.
Rousseau abandoned all of his children to orphanages. He is possibly the worst reference on parenting in history.
Did he go to the Benjamin Franklin school of parenting?
Which is why if I find myself agreeing with something he says, it's a great opportunity for puzzling out why I think that way.
Haven't read his book, so just guessing: He said lots of random stuff, probably repeated the most edgy opinions he heard from other people, and got some of that right.
Okay, let me lead with the fact that I’m not about to kill myself.
That said, over the years, I occasionally have been mildly suicidal, so as a general rule I don’t keep any means in my house if I don’t have to. That said, some things you need to be a functional adult (knives for example), so for such things I usually do research on why they would be a terrible way to kill oneself.
This has been a pretty effective strategy over the years that has kept me from having to worry too much about my suicide risk.
Now I’m Type 1 diabetic, and I have insulin on me all the time. Having accidentally been severely hypoglycemic to the point of almost passing out before, it seems like a pretty effective and painless way to go. So, I need help figuring out why it would be bad means, since I’m coming up blank (standard stuff about suicide=bad isn’t helpful here, and insulin also mitigates an alarming number of those arguments).
Thanks
-Mystik
Maybe someone snuck into your house and replaced all your insulin with itching powder. Trying to overdose will just make you scratch yourself to death.
Uh ... trigger warning? This is an explanation of why something could be bad. It will, to a certain mindset, be quite bad.
Quantum immortality may be correct. If so, then you should expect any suicide attempt to result in the most likely future in which you survive - given that the attempt was made, but failed.
So, if you imagine yourself waking up from such an attempt, what harms could the attempt have made upon your body? Brain damage is a possibility; you could wake up without the ability to talk coherently. And if quantum immortality is correct, you'll be stuck with that for a potentially very long time.
Why isn't the " standard stuff about suicide=bad isn’t helpful here"?
Do you believe that "what's the best way to murder someone" is an acceptable question?
How about what's the best way to voluntarily chop off a healthy limb?
No these questions are not rational and useful questions.
There are no means that can justify the end.
Just to go in line:
I'm aware of the "standard stuff about suicide=bad," and it's reasonably effective, but having it reiterated to me isn't helpful here, and I find that eliminating means is a fairly effective second line of defense for me that makes me feel safer.
I think that it depends on context. Usually no, but if you have to run defense, say as a prison guard, it might be worth considering ways that a prisoner might attack you.
My understanding is that this actually can be an effective treatment for certain kinds of body dysmorphia, so yes, it's an appropriate question in some contexts.
Thank you for explaining your thought process.
The prison guard analogy posits two "yous", which I think you should thoroughly discuss with a professional.
But would a healthcare professional allow a discussion of what's the best? way to murder someone? Beyond ethics there would be significant legal ramifications.
Removing means is an important defense to an impetuous act.
As to dysmorphia (really body integrity identity disorder) treatment that ostensibly allows what's the best way to voluntarily cut off healthy limb, I'd like to see research. Because I believe that there would be significant ethical issues.
>The prison guard analogy posits two "yous", which I think you should thoroughly discuss with a professional.
There is a reasonably common framing with mental illness, where the illness is personified and othered. IE, "Hang in there, people really do like you and want to be around you, your anxiety is lying to you."
One person on my feed used to talk about days when her head weasels were particularly difficult.
The idea, IIUI, is to separate the "real" you from the disease.
mm, probably true, but it's also not something that I'd probably choose to discuss, especially not in a public conversation where I might be worried that someone would use whatever was come up with.
You've hit upon one of the reasons that I'm posting semi-anonymously on an internet forum instead of actually asking my doctor. If you might pose harm to yourself or others, they have an obligation to report you, and it's hard to phrase "why is insulin a bad way to kill myself" in a way that I'm confident wouldn't alarm them.
Yup.
I'll try and find the reference where I heard about it, but tbh it will probably take me a little while to get around to. Once I get it, I'll post it as a reply to your comment, but let's table it until then?
Consider that your reticence to talk with your doctor could be the prisoner trying to plan something to hurt the prison guard.
Your doctor should be informed.
There is no "good" way to get murdered or to experience an attempted murder.
But I appreciate your instincts to avoid the near occasion of harm. That is a good instinct.
I've dealt with suicidal ideation most of my life, but I've never been super close to suicide. I think you're being a little over concerned about the "if you might pose hard to yourself or others." I've talked extensively about suicidal ideation with counselors and psychiatrists, and they have never reported me. From my experience, you need to be really close to actually committing the act before they're going to do anything, and any counselor is going to be happy to talk to you about this. They likely won't want to focus on the cost/benefit analysis of different methods though, instead they're going to talk to you about the reasons in your life that you're considering this in the first place (why are all the arguments you've seen for suicide=bad so unconvincing to you, what are some arguments you might find more convincing).
I guess I'm wondering, can you imagine structuring your life in such away that suicide is a more distant threat? It seems like you're interested in your own safety. Maybe instead of letting yourself be suicidal and trying to remove all the dangers, create things to cling to. I'm no expert, but from behavioral psych, you can't simply remove behaviors and leave a void there, something else always fills the gap. Sounds like you're doing a good job removing the dangers, and creating gaps, but that's only half the battle. You need to fill yourself with something else or more dangers, often more tenacious, will come in to fill those spaces. Shrinks are pretty good at helping you build a life worth living.
Mystik, do you rationally think that your life will always be this way? I know from experience that it can feel that way, but it is entirely possible that feeling is incorrect.
I think I will occasionally be suicidal going forward in life, and I’ll probably always need insulin. But I also don’t think that I’ll always be suicidal through my life.
It's inconsistent, success is not guaranteed since it is possible you will be found and given relatively straight forward aid. However, there could be complications leaving you permanently brain damaged but not dead and placing you under more constant supervision/care. It could be thought of as an alternative method of poisoning yourself with all the flaws and failures inherent to that method.
The problem is that I live alone. Realistically no one would find me for a few days
We have a diabetic relation who lived alone and went into a diabetic coma. Someone was trying to contact her at the time via phone, and when she didn't pick up came by and found her.
She was hospitalized for several weeks, had to do rehab, could barely walk when she got home, and still uses a walker from time to time. As far and I can tell she's still incredibly weak, has pain and appetite issues, and is suffering permanent effects from that time period.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm sorry to hear that happened to the relative, and I appreciate you being willing to share the story.
This doesn't directly answer your question but -- what about getting a service dog who will recognize a diabetic coma? I understand that if you had decided to kill yourself you could just shut the dog out of the room. But still --seems like it would be a good thing to have anyway, in case you have have an unintentional coma, and for company. And the dog would bark his head off if locked out of your room when it senses something's wrong, and that might bring people to your home. There are also little safes you can buy -- put an item inside, enter how long the safe will stay locked. You could keep all your extra insulin locked up, just have enough around for today's doses plus however much extra you might need today if your blood sugar gets too high.
The dog might be a good solution once I move to a different apartment, I'll keep it in mind. Unfortunately, I have so little insulin resistance that there's no way to keep so little insulin around that it couldn't be an issue (it just isn't sold in such small units).
For the second (and final) time, I want to signal boost excellent work being done by Phil Magness and co-authors. They try and expose left leaning academics who are tarring champions of markets and liberty like Mises. The left leaning academics use academically and intellectually dishonest techniques which readers of this blog would be no strangers to, given Scott's personal history with the NYT, but I was still surprised that even academics are being so dishonest in peer reviewed work.
Misrepresenting Mises: Quotation Editing and a Rejection of Peer Review at Cambridge University Press
https://econjwatch.org/articles/misrepresenting-mises-quotation-editing-and-a-rejection-of-peer-review-at-cambridge-university-press
Darity, Camara, and MacLean on William H. Hutt
https://econjwatch.org/articles/darity-camara-and-maclean-on-william-h-hutt
The intellectual dishonesty they expose is stunning to me.
I tend to get twitchy when I read descriptions like "champions of markets and liberty". I don't know who Mises is from a hole in the ground, all I've seen is complaints about the 'Mises caucus' took over some Libertarian/libertarian movement and got some local power and now it's all gone to hell (citation needed).
Plus I've just finished re-reading Robert Harris' "Cicero" trilogy and while he is not the greatest prose stylist in the world, the historical basis is fascinating enough to keep anyone reading, and it should cure readers of naive hero-worship, given all the presentation of X, Y or Z as villainous monster or heroic champion, regardless of the actual facts, but depending on the political necessity of the day.
Are "left-leaning academics" out to get this guy and those like him? Possibly. Are those guys heroic champions? Possibly. Is it political partisanship that A is on one side and B is on the other, and who you think are the heroic champions of liberty depends on which side you fall? Most likely.
Magness hates the "Mises Caucus" and their inspiration in Hans Herman Hoppe.
Ludwig von Moses was an early 20th century economist who was a "founder" of what is known as the Austrian School. At a high-level its basically just free market stuff, but there are some specific monetary policy elements which make it different than other free market schools of thought. Mises, Hayek, and Freeman are the big three free-market economists of the 20th century. https://mises.org is the organization which tries to carry on his legacy.
Mises Caucus is a bunch of nut cases who think of themselves as libertarians but really just seem to care about gun rights and not paying taxes and being free to be jerks with little consequence. As a free market proponent and what most people would identify as libertarian, these Mises Caucus guys are very embarrassing and potentially dangerous. Their views are a more extreme version of the Tea Party (which is where many of the members got their start).
They worked very hard the past few years to gain power within the Libertarian party and took effective control over the party recently. Their views and actions are so divergent from traditional LP folks that many people have left the party and state level parties have disbanded to avoiding supporting the national party. If you are conspiratorial person it would be pretty easy to justify a theory that the Mises Caucus was funded/supported by the far right to complete obliterate the already weak Libertarian Party.
So basically Mises Caucus =/= Ludwig von Mises and Libertarian Party =/= libertarianism.
If you can't even spell "Friedman" correctly (not "Freeman") - when the man's literal son is posting in this comment thread! - then you probably shouldn't be making such bold claims about groups you dislike because it suggests you don't know the first thing about them.
The justified complaint of the Mises caucus was that the people running the Libertarian Party were watering down libertarian doctrine to appeal to the center and left. The problem is that it rather looks as though the Mises Caucus people are doing the same thing in the other direction, as when they use arguments from Hans Hoppe to make a case for immigration restrictions.
Immigration restrictions are the only thing that will stop libertarianism becoming completely irrelevant (to the extent it isn't already). How do libertarians not understand this by now? They can barely convince people of libertariansim in perhaps the most (ideologically) libertarian country in history, and yet they imagine they're going to convince hundreds of millions of foreigners to radically alter their political views. It's delusional.
>really just seem to care about gun rights and not paying taxes and being free to be jerks with little consequence.
I know you're listing these to distinguish from "good" libertarians, but the Mises Caucus is only a few years old, and those (especially the first two) have all been distinguishing traits of self-described American (right-)libertarians for well over a decade, since those describe all the libertarians I knew in high school. All you're missing is drug legalization.
(Edit: unless I've misread and you're listing these to point out that these are the *only* things they share with "real" libertarians, which makes the third item a self-burn directed at your own tribe)
You also can't really neatly separate American right-libertarianism from the Libertarian party, because without that it is quite literally just liberalism by another name[1]. The 15 years between its coinage to refer to right-liberals/ancaps and the party's formation is dwarfed by the 50 years the Libertarian party has had to to define the movement. (Not to mention the century before that where the term used associated with the left)
[1] https://fee.org/articles/who-is-a-libertarian/
"You also can't really neatly separate American right-libertarianism from the Libertarian party, because without that it is quite literally just liberalism by another name[1]."
Not quite. Classical liberalism included support for broadening the franchise. Modern libertarianism doesn't include any particular position on the details of how a democracy should be run.
Beyond that, the problem is that the enemies of liberalism stole its name early in the Twentieth Century; most people now associate "liberalism" with an ideology that includes watered down democratic socialism, support for government regulation of the economy and redistribution.
We solved that problem by stealing "libertarian" from the left anarchists, who can't complain since they don't believe in property rights. But I doubt that there has been any time in the past fifty years when a majority of libertarians were part of the LP. That's why it has become common to distinguish between libertarian and Libertarian. I am a libertarian but not a Libertarian.
Fair points. And I suppose I should defer to you for definitions here. :P
I will say that my point is more about how, when accounting for how the philosophy has evolved from its classical-liberal roots, any definition of libertarianism which does not at least account for the shared influence of The Party is similar to (to use a more extreme example) a definition of "the left" which doesn't account for the influence of Marxism(-Leninism)/Sovietism.
Endorsed on the complaints about the muddying of the term "liberal", I've complained before about how it means both anything and nothing at this point.
>We solved that problem by stealing "libertarian" from the left anarchists, who can't complain since they don't believe in property rights.
Actual lol, thank you.
>I doubt that there has been any time in the past fifty years when a majority of libertarians were part of the LP.
Granted, but I think a substantial part of this has to be attributed to "the official Libertarian party for elected office" being as near an oxymoron as you can get in said context (barring actual anarchist parties). I suspect that *any* individual who enthusiastically engages with the apparatus of the state is going to have a difficult time getting majority libertarian support, without even accounting for the normal values-dissonance between political parties and their constituents.
The Mises caucus thing is actually super confusing because it's less about Mises the man than the institute named after him, which is more influenced by Mises' student Rothbard. Among popular libertarian/Austrian economics there's a divide between the people who tend to associate with the Mises Institute and those who are roughly organized around the folks at George Mason university. Very little of that divide actually has to do with Ludwig von Mises himself.
I think Austrian economics is a dead end, but I have to give kudos to mises.org for making so much material freely available (before SciHub came around to make that the norm for academic publications).
Paleolibertarians (right on culture but don't want the government imposing things, right on economics) vs neolibertarians (1990s-left on culture, right on economics), more or less?
I think it's sort of devolved to that to some degree. On a more academic level it's closer to what you might call dogmatic vs. practical libertarianism; Rothbard or early Nozick vs. Mill; Non-aggression principle absolutists vs. utilitarian libertarians. All of those are probably somewhat reductionist but you can start to see the idea. The Mises folks have also been criticized for being too close to the alt-right. That might be an understatement, though I'm trying to remain somewhat impartial in my description even though I am personally not impartial. Someone told me that they're now all-in on Russian propaganda, though I haven't bothered to check as I've been done with them for years.
Ironically, I believe Mises himself claimed to be a utilitarian rather than a deontologist. Of course, he also wasn't an anarchist (unlike Rothbard).
Rothbard was an anti-statist, not "anarchist".
Correct that Mises was a utilitarian. But Rothbard described himself as an anarchist. I believe he coined the term "anarcho-capitalist."
How do they get around Mises' ancestry?
Have you considered that your belief that anyone right of center hates jews is a propagandistic left-wing caricature?
Why would you think they would need to? Just because one is "uncomfortably close to the alt right" doesn't oblige one to necessarily swallow every piece of 1940s NSDAP race laws.
Educate yourself a bit more before being so free with opinions perhaps?
Opinion is free, and I reserve the right to say "what makes this guy a big champion?" rather than tamely accepting that is so.
For a start, you could take a few minutes and read any one of the articles that I've linked to, and that would go a long way towards answering your questions
She *could*, but one of the lovely things about a site like this is that if you ask a simple question you often get a simple answer. As Deiseach did here, from Julian. No clicks or articles required.
You have (of course) every right to an opinion. But it's my opinion that you would be better served if you tried to have it be more informed.
The thing is, it's pretty annoying when someone comes here with their personal crusade. We've had much more egregious cases over the years, but the basic pattern is the same. You're asking for attention and time, but what are you offering in return? You certainly haven't done the legwork of *actually informing us*, which would be an obvious place to start if you want us to be more informed.
I'm offering you a link to a well researched and well written piece of scholarship, which in turn is trying to raise the quality of research, something we all depend on. You're of course welcome to not engage with it, but I found the uninformed preachiness of the post I was replying to uncalled for. Your mileage may vary.
Phil is doing God's work.
Which makes you question why God isn't doing it Himself? Does He always delegate this kind of work, reserving Himself for actual miracles and saving people from themselves?
Indeed, I find his efforts very impressive. My worry is that as usual, the hit pieces gain traction, while the corrections will get buried.
Your surprise suggests you are new to reading research papers.
Peer review is often used to suppress ideas that go against the prevailing views and opinions of the community.
Sometimes reviewers don't agree with a paper, but let it through because they have to show solidarity with the community, e.g.,
"Why the masturbation paper indicts academia": https://thomasprosser.substack.com/p/why-the-masturbation-paper-indicts
I think the difference is that my field is economics. The article you've linked to, and the areas discussed in it, seem to have it worse.
I've read plenty of research papers, just very few that deal with opinions on other people. The closest I've come to reading stuff like this is in literature reviews, which tend to take biased positions. But I've never seen anything this egregious.
There is a recent palladium article which discusses the idea suppression angle (linking it to the appropriation of scientific authority by the state), although at a high level: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/10/10/the-transformations-of-science/
The public dissatisfaction with 'trust the science' is more about the publication of dubious, or even fake, research.
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But the cachet comes from publishing something new, not in finding fault in published work (which publishers are often loath to retract).
Retraction Watch https://retractionwatch.com/
is a site that a fare few academics would like to suppress
But also note that Nancy MacLean's hit piece on John Buchanan was not peer-reviewed. If it had been, perhaps some of her slime and malquoting would have been discoverd?
I think the Slobodian and Cambridge University press example says otherwise. The peer review process there uncovered some of the problems, but they were simply ignored in favour of political point scoring
People who've read the Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting might know that licorice is bad for you. This post explains how: https://denovo.substack.com/p/licorice-sucks
Yeah, except the other candies recommended are *also* bad for you, and doubtless have FDA warnings against over-consumption.
I love licorice but I've had to give it up since it does raise blood pressure. However, the chocolate candies recommended in its stead are also packed full of sugars (very bad!) and other agents, and consuming a ton of them instead of a ton of licorice is also frowned upon.
Moderation in everything is the key.
I would eat licorice but I never see the real stuff we had when we were kids, that was like leather. You remember, Deiseach I am sure, the long twists of it, up to 18 inches or so.
> Moderation in everything is the key.
Even in moderation.
100 year old person: "yes, I was part of that craze"
Is there a good theory on why people disagree on politics? Sometimes they can be reduced to fundamental value differences or disagreements on well defined predictions, but those are the rare cases.
Few suggestions of my own:
1. People get random influences over life that form their political opinions, so their politics draw something like a normal distribution. More realistically, stuff like social circles, environments and feedback loops would also have significant influence.
2. Or maybe it's the other way around - stuff that 99% of the people agree on won't become controversial topics, so the ones that people argue about are the ones that people naturally tend to have very different opinions of.
Neither of them feel completely satisfactory though. Does anyone have better ideas? Or maybe this is a well-researched topic already?
Some other posts here may say something similar, but I'd like to put out my own half-baked theory for folks to poke holes in. It starts with the observation that political/hot-button/culture war issues can be framed as "altruistic" vs "selfish" - e.g. abortion "Women should be able to make their own medical decisions" vs "My religion says it's a sin and everyone should obey my religion"; vegetarianism "I care about animal welfare" vs "I want to eat yummy animals", gays "People should be free to love as they wish to" vs "My religion says it's a sin and everyone should obey my religion"; gun control "People shouldn't have to get killed" vs "My cold dead hands". The framing can be flipped, e.g. abortion "I care about unborn fetuses" vs "My body, my choice". The 2nd step is to notice that evolution selects for both, "selfish" is obvious, "altruistic" needs group selection, which is somewhat controversial, but it seems obvious to me that kin altruism is evolutionarily adaptive. Since both traits are selected for, people wind up with a mix of both and conflict must follow.
Note that "selfish" tends to have negative connotations - almost every religion/ethical system deprecates "selfish" (2 exceptions I can think of are Ayn Randism and The Church Of Satan). But these negative connotations are human judgements, evolution doesn't judge.
I'd suggest a couple of things. First, people disagree because they disagree. Just in general, people think different stuff. There's a sense in which it's a mistake to seek an explanation for something that happens naturally.
Second, funnily enough, we disagree about politics because we're getting better at living peacefully with one another. Think of the things that people used to disagree about, that aren't nearly so salient any more. Religion is a biggie: I think the relative lack of religious wars and religious strife around the world at the moment is actually a real triumph. Think about how much Catholics and protestants used to divide up towns within living memory in the USA. But those kinds of divisions have faded, not because people agree more on how to worship god, but because we have very consciously taught children not to fight over those things.
Similarly, stuff like local pride and taste in music. Remember them censoring Elvis's dancing on TV? Real censorship because of a style of music. And stereotypically, parents complaining about the "noise" that their teenagers listen to. We seem to do that less now. Football clubs in England would have literal regular brawls with supporters of a club from a different part of London back in the 1970s. That seems to happen a bit less now. And again, I don't think it's because people aren't interested in their local area or their sports teams any more. They've just been taught that you can't turn those attachments into strife.
So what's left? Politics. We can't teach people not to argue about politics because politics is an inherently argumentative process. So that's where a lot of people's argumentative energy has gone.
Broadly, I think the most important divergences are differences in experiences.
If you're in a right-wing community, normal is right-wing, and people with an axe to grind with the community end up or present as left-wing. If you're in an left-wing community, normal is left-wing, and people with an axe to grind with the community end up or present as right-wing. But people with an axe to grind are not representative of people in general, and any given person's personal experiences are shaped to a significant extent by their more local political forces. So, to begin with, when left-wing people talk about right-wing people, they're really talking about right-wing-people-in-left-wing-enclaves, who are *not actually the same as right-wing people*. Likewise, when right-wing people talk about left-wing people, they are talking about left-wing-people-in-right-wing-enclaves.
So that's one kind of experience.
Another is that, in some places, whether or not your upstairs neighbor plays guitar at 4:00 AM is an important part of civil society, and in other places, your nearest neighbor can fire off cannons without disturbing you. I think a lot of the harshest disagreements in modern society come down to forcing other people to abide by rules that make no sense where they live, or for structuring society and our collective resources in a way which makes sense for one way of life but not another - whether or not free college sounds like a good idea depends in large part whether or not you see college as necessary to your way of life; likewise, whether or not open borders sound like a good idea depends in large part on whether or not you think your salary is globally competitive. Whether or not you want minimum wages or stronger unions depends on whether or not you see employment as a rare and valuable opportunity, or a constant exploitative temptation.
I think the best argument I ever heard for (2) was from video essay " How to Radicalize a Normie"[1], in the context of how the term "political" is used in internet forum culture:
>The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with, ”but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.
[1] https://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/188501365677/heres-how-to-radicalize-a-normie-a-video-essay
This sort of definition also goes a long way in explaining the phenomenon where certain people will label any representation of someone from outside their privileged/normative identity as "political"[2]
[2] https://twitter.com/emmahvossen/status/1138841342921060354
> Nobody, other than the usual lizardman constant, is bothered by "representation" per se.
Sure. Nobody holds the low status position "X" on the objective question. Everybody just hold position "Ephemism of X" on the meta-question which is conviniently functionally undistinguishable from "X" on objective question and isn't associated with low status. The fact that the meta question wouldn't even arise if everyone agreed on the objective question is also conviniently omitted from the discourse.
I mean, I think the objection here is that when they look at the current media landscape and conclude the problem is not -
"profit focused corporations are not great stewards of franchises, because their incentives lead them to greenlight and churn out as many low-quality sequels and remakes as possible because they'll sell tickets no matter how mediocre they are",
- but rather -
"allowing people who want diversity to make movies is bad"
-it's fair to say that they're a little biased on the object-level question. Especially when the most meme-ably bad movie of the year, Morbius, had a white male lead.
The problem with the black Little Mermaid isn't that she's black, it's that Disney's live action remakes are mediocre cash grabs that forsake the expressiveness you get from animation.
Now I will grant that "corporate wokism is just a marketing gimmick" is a totally valid position, but the question is why said lizardperson-believers are always so fixated on and offended by this particular marketing gimmick.
The problem is that diversity is both the justification for making the low quality sequel / remake and the shield for why the low quality sequel / remake is beyond criticism. This is why we complain so much about the diversity gimmick.
If you were to have gone to a producer and say "I want to do a Scooby-Doo spin-off without the title character", you'd have been laughed out of the room before you could finish your pitch. Then some D-list celeb added "Shaggy'll be an African-American, Velma will be Asian, Daphne will be Latinx, and Fred, well, since we're out of options, we'll just make him a moron to show what we think of white males" and the show got made. And it's to the point where artists doing fan art of the original series are being harassed for not adapting to the new diverse cast.
Allowing people that care about tallying diversity points more than producing good entertainment to make entertainment is a losing proposition for people that want entertainment. It's not impossible to combine diversity and entertainment, but it's not easy, and the pushback to those complaining about the poor quality of diverse entertainment we're getting makes it harder.
Allowing people that care more about money than producing good entertainment to make entertainment is also a losing proposition, but it's one that is inherently self-limiting. We complain about bad entertainment regardless of the cause, but when we complain about entertainment that's bad because those associated with it are relying on the diversity gimmick, we get pushback, and pushback that is riddled with inconsistencies and logical fallacies.
>Unironically correct. Regardless of how good their politics may or may not be that person _does_ have an agenda, and having an agenda _is_ ruining a community, and therefore that person should be ejected from the community if they can't keep it in their pants.
Ergo, anyone who complains about lack of free speech and wants to create stronger free speech norms should be removed from twitter, since that's an agenda. Also anyone who complains about trans people, and tries to argue we shouldn't let minors get whatever surgeries they want, because that's also an agenda. Definitely anyone who has anything to do with digital assets or currency, agendas galore. Also anyone [...]
Come on Treb. That wasn't even close to a well-reasoned first-principles position. You're just blindly doing tribe signaling. I expect better from you when trolling my comments. 4/10
>Twitter isn't a community.
ACX is, though, and the two of us are still here :P
I think the problem you're trying to get at is "don't start flame wars/re-ignite bitter arguments", specifically in a way that violates community norms. The problem isn't having an agenda *per se*, it's flaunting it in a way that's going to start strife in a community. Which ultimately comes back to "things on which the community disagrees".
In your gaming shop example, if you imagine a shop frequented by trans youths with pride flags on the window, said person would likely get the reaction "it's fine, now take out your damn chaos marines", with about the same tone as if they wouldn't shut up about the latest marvel movie or about how Necron Soulslurpers are overpowered and you can't believe Games Workshop released them.
Hacker news is a good example of this - you're allowed to discuss politics when it's relevant, but if you get into a flame war or post obvious flame bait, whether about gender politics or vim-vs-emacs, you get rate-limited.
"Unironically correct. Regardless of how good their politics may or may not be that person _does_ have an agenda, and having an agenda _is_ ruining a community, and therefore that person should be ejected from the community if they can't keep it in their pants."
You see the obvious counter to this, though: having a norm where the reformist is discouraged from critiquing some element of the status quo for the sake of the general good humour just cedes the political ground to whatever the local default is. Someone with an agenda still wins, now it just happens to be whoever got to the community first, established said default, and does not have to talk about their 'politics'.
Surely, at least sometimes, you've been the one to upset the apple cart with a minority opinion?
"It's childish and entitled to assume that every space one travels through must stroke one's political erogenous zones. Part of being a decent human being is being able to get along with people who are different from you."
I mostly agree with this. I just don't see it as favouring the incumbent ideology over the incoming ideology in any way. If anything, the opinion as stated seems to serve my argument.
"This assumes incorrectly that everybody is only doing stuff to push their politics, but even if in this case they had a deliberate culture they wanted to create -- are they somehow not entitled to have their own place? Is every knee required to bend?"
Well, the assumption is your original assumption. The interloper probably isn't exclusively a doorstep proselytiser either, they're in the community to do other stuff. But sure, if the safe space is deliberately created, like a LGBTQ+ Marksmanship Range or a Christian Dad Literary Club, and the knee is already bent a certain way, then I can see the reasoning. If the community is something like a general fandom, where the default is not honestly claimed but instead tacitly assumed by one group or another, then not so much.
"I have, yes. And because I'm a decent human being, I recognized when trying to evangelize my opinions was inappropriate, and was able to keep it in my pants."
I'm content to take your word for it, though I will admit it's a little difficult to believe it never left your pants at all, even just to test the waters.
Like basically everything else, genetics enormously affects the development of political views: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/#:~:text=Almost%20forty%20years%20ago%2C%20evidence,be%20explained%20by%20genetic%20influences.
Obviously, this takes place in the context of a certain political paradigm, but if everybody in the US were suddenly born with the exact same genes that affect political views, we should expect a dramatic decline in political views diversity in the US.
Self interest and personality seem like the key factors, with herd instinct picking up the slack.
Happy is he whose self interest, personality and herd instinct all push in the same direction, for he need never feel doubt.
Things were so much simpler in the early 1990’s when a local casino could put up a billboard saying “Come in a Democrat and leave a Republican!” and everyone got the joke.
Incidentally, in a preview of cancel culture they were forced to take it down. So I guess not all snowflakes are on the left.
Things have gotten ever so much more complicated in the interim.
I've thought a lot about this question, and based on my observations over the years, I think it mainly boils down to the fact that people who disagree with me are evil.
I once argued with someone down to the fundamentals, where we realized he was ok with X on principle, and I wasn't, and we knew we weren't going to agree. How those preconceptions were formed? Maybe it was upbringing, may it's genetics, maybe both, who knows.
I know that certain books that I read really resonated with me, and some disgusted me viscerally, even at a pretty young age; and the same goes for people who hate those same books. So who knows.
There are arguments about facts, definitions and values. And there are meta-arguments about epistemology, ethics status games and all kind of other stuff which in the end are as well either about facts, or definitions or values. Interestingly, in my experience, much more are about facts than it seems at the first glance. The problem, however, that all of these three types of disagreements are mixed and confused with each other, due to people being bad at separating between nominative and descriptive reasoning and the nature of the memetic landscape.
Modern political disagreement isn't just an argument between two people, it's a memetic competition between highly optimized narratives. Both narratives have great, detailed, making total sense from inside, explanations, why your opponents are evil/crazy/stupid and you are good and right. How it's useless to even try to communicate with these crazy people, that only ridiculing and oppressing them can work, that it's definetely what your opponents are already doing anyway and that's the only reason why their ridiculous views are so widespreaded. There are also huge amount of cherrypicked examples, explanations why every apparent attempt of your opponent to argue in a good faith is actually a trick and a trap that will score them political points and what are the best way to trap them likewise, self reinforcing explotation of toxoplazma of rage dynamics and so on.
"highly optimized narratives"
I like that expression, once you put it that way, it no longer feels strange that politics is way more controversial than other equally difficult subjects.
There are lots of explanations, some of which are good. Some is explained by differences in values and priorities. Some is explained by differing expectations of the effects of policy choices. Some is explained by naked self-interest, where different people have different interests.
I think most, though, is explained by tribalism. In the contemporary US, at least, nearly all the population is split into "red" and "blue" tribes, and most people accept their "tribe's" positions on most issues, because the people they identify with also accept these positions. I came across this explanation many years ago, which gives strong reasoning for this conclusion (I can now find it only on the Wayback Machine):
https://web.archive.org/web/20070111190035/http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/irrationality.htm
Our esteemed host offered similar reasoning many years ago. He talks extensively about tribalism and self-segregation, without making it explicitly about political positions: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
I don't know why you think value differences are rare; the people who can't define their core values still have a nebulous concept of them. That and tribalism account for most of it.
But looks like no one's mentioned personal power yet. There are the "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" people, who see a path to power from sowing discord and will do what they can to maximize it. Even in a world where everyone believes exactly the same things, people will always rally against the current leader because they want to be the current leader, and people will listen to them because of tribalism.
I think than Politics is the Mind-Killer because while our ancestral environment may have prepared us to be halfway decent Bayesians when hunting prey or whatever, in tribal politics calm reasoning was probably not a survival trait. These days, politics is mostly not a life-or-death thing any more, but in ancestral societies, supporting an idea which 80% of your fellow tribespersons abhorred would have bad consequences rather quickly.
John Nerst had an interesting post (https://everythingstudies.com/2022/05/24/the-political-is-personal/) about how people form political opinions by extrapolating from their own psychology, and often fail to realize that other peoples' minds work differently from their own. His own summary of the idea:
"We assume 1) that our experience of how our mind works is correct and 2) that other minds work the same way. This of course influences our attitudes on how to live life, and further extends to our beliefs about how society works and thus our political and moral views. So these are, ultimately, downstream of personal psychological quirks."
I don't think this explains all of political disagreement, but I think it undeniably forms a part.
That makes sense. Thank you for the link, very interesting read.
"Sometimes they can be reduced to fundamental value differences or disagreements on well defined predictions, but those are the rare cases."
Are they the rare cases? They seem to me to be exactly this, philosophical differences put into practice. You and I can be presented with the exact same set of circumstances, facts, and feasible methods, but if I want to optimise for equality while you want to optimise for individual freedom - and someone else for prosperity, and so on - we'll end up in discord.
Tangentially, one of the more admirable aspects of the EA project (speaking as a distant and far from clued-in observer) is the attempt to find, quantify, and target relatively apolitical good that almost everyone can agree on. Pandemic prevention, malaria nets, vitamins, longer, higher-quality lives. Concern over AI risk always comes across as the one thing that doesn't look like the others.
"They seem to me to be exactly this, philosophical differences put into practice. You and I can be presented with the exact same set of circumstances, facts, and feasible methods, but if I want to optimise for equality while you want to optimise for individual freedom - and someone else for prosperity, and so on - we'll end up in discord."
I've heard this argument for years, and it hasn't been completely convincing to me, because I've always felt like it didn't dig far enough down.
For starters, I think we all agree that equality and individual freedom are good things to have, all other things being equal. That implies that if you're optimizing for equality and I'm optimizing for individual freedom, I can still look at your project and understand why and how it could be a thing I could want. Likewise for you, checking out my project. But if each of us could understand the good in the other's work, how can we oppose it even so? The most obvious answer is that each of us likes our own good thing more; the more subtle answer is that we are probably facing a choice between two goods at point where increasing one comes only at the expense of the other, and we've each chosen a different path of that fork.
But why did we each choose the path that we did? It wasn't a pure mental coin flip; if it were, we wouldn't defend our choices so strongly. It could be a coin flip that somehow keyed into our competitive drive, sort of like how you can divide any group of people into "team green" and "team purple" and stage a game and they'll compete, vigorously. But in those cases, everyone understands the game is contrived, and you can point that out and they'll go back to being one crowd. (Or maybe not - witness pro sports events where people get hurt in rioting.) We can't (typically) point out that our choice of optimization is contrived and go back to collaboration.
I often find it's because each of us has information the other does not, and if we compared notes, we'd maybe change our minds. That typically doesn't happen because we've each tied our reputation to our initial choice, but if we're supposedly rational, there's no reason to do that except by accident, and in that case we just note the mistake and proceed to share info. There's also cases when the information available isn't enough, and we're forced to rely on heuristics. But heuristics are themselves information; we could share them, too. What then?
When I dig *this* deep, I find that the heuristics are sort of floating atop a frothing sea of uncertainty - I'm putting 10% more certainty on one of my sources than you are, 8% more on another; or there are maybe ten different heuristics we're employing, each relying on over five factors, and those fifty factors are being processed by our subconscious faster than our conscious can track and record discretely, because they fluctuate quickly, often depending on yet more heuristics, and possibly grounding out in stuff like "I know this because it's allowed me to make small predictions hundreds of times over my life, and you only learned of it a minute ago so your confidence is necessarily near 50% only", and so on.
"I think we all agree that equality and individual freedom are good things to have, all other things being equal."
I don't think you should assume this. There's stuff like lawn maintenance laws, where individual freedom is curtailed for aesthetic uniformity. You can't optimize for both freedom and uniformity, you're tearing down one to build the other.
Equality means different things to different people.
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=36916
>If I play golf against Tiger Woods, is the game fair before or after we institute a stroke handicap that allows for our vastly different skill levels?
So there are fundamentally conflicting values in play before you get to optimization.
I was talking more about the average voters. A random supporter of, say, Donald Trump, probably doesn't support him because he predicts 0.2%p higher GDP growth under Trump's presidency, it's likely more about vague nice feelings he has about him(same goes for any other politician, of course). What I'm curious is, how can we have such different vague impressions for the same people? Surely rational predictions can only diverge so far.
There’s a forthcoming book from Oliver Traldi on the Philosophy of Political Beliefs which I expect to be absolutely excellent, on this subject especially
I've seen some comments here to the effect that wokeness is ruining movies, and I wonder, granting that I'm an infrequent move-watcher.
Let's start with 90% of everything is crud. (Theodore Sturgeon's answer to generalized attacks on science fiction. Commonly misquoted as 90% of everything is crap. For those who came in late, science fiction used to be deeply unrespectable, and while there are still some holding to that view, things have changed quite a bit.)
So, if 90% of everything is crud-- and let's make it 95% of everything because production has gotten easier-- it follows that 95% of woke movies are crud. Furthermore, sequels are generally inferior to originals.
I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, a pretty woke movie, and while I'm not going to say it was the best ever, I'd say it's a solidly good movie. Engaging and varied. Embraces a comic book aesthetic with a big cuddly hug, sometimes rather subtly with slightly exaggerated acting. Some of humor is funny. (I'm a tough audience.)
IMO, I think you need to look more at the marketing than the movie. Plenty of movies have non-white actors or female leads or whatever, some of them are good, many are bad. But if all you hear about the movie is people talking about the casting (especially if this bias is from the *defenders* of the movie, that's because the movie itself doesn't have anything worth talking about and it's a bad movie.
Recent examples are the Star Wars movies 7-9, where the problem was "Mystery Box" plot and constant switching of directors, but the defenders accused anyone complaining about the travesty of sexism; Rings of Power (admittedly Tv not a movie) where the show just kind of shits on established canon and this enraged fans but the defence was to accuse detractors of racism (and this 'defence' was used *before the cast list was announced*, which really goes to show how deliberate the strategy was)
How to calculate the message of a movie: Make a list of the philosophical viewpoints expressed or demonstrated by characters in the movie. For each, add in the consequences of the characters acting on the basis of those viewpoints. Quantify those consequences as ultimately harmful or helpful to the characters. The message of the movie is pro- helpful viewpoints, anti- harmful viewpoints, or complex, in case of ties.
How to calculate the social impact of a movie: Make a list of the real people who earned money from the movie. Add to it the people who are prominently displayed as sympathetic characters. Quantify those people according to their degree of membership in groups that have faced historic discrimination at the hands of the movie's audience. Invert a person's score if they play a villain. The higher the score, the greater the woke social impact, as the movie earns money for and increases representation of historically marginalized groups.
The people asserting that woke films are always bad remind me of one of the most devastating counters in a debate I've ever seen: in the famous 1979 debate between Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark (who were angry that Monty Python's Life of Brian was blasphemous) and John Cleese and Michael Palin (who were defending it), there was the following exchange
Muggeridge: "I started off by saying that this is such a tenth-rate film that I don't believe that it would disturb anybody's faith."
Palin: "Yes, I know you started with an open mind; I realise that."
which basically ended things as far as I am concerned.
If you believe that you have sufficient objectivity and are so good at controlling for your own biases that you can assess the aesthetic and artistic value of a film or other artwork which you despise on ideological or moral grounds then I propose taking the following three steps.
1) Look around at the set of other people who believe themselves to be able to do that
2) Count what fraction of them are correct
3) Criticise the film on ideological and moral grounds, while saying "obviously I'm not the target audience, which make it hard for me to judge it artistically".
and thereby avoiding making yourself look like Muggeridge.
(Obvious exception: if the prevailing opinion among even the people who /do/ sympathise with it aesthetically is that something is junk, you can trust that).
For many people in this discussion, what you are proposing is that they simply agree to lose the argument, full-stop. Consider this dialogue:
Dave: I don't like that all movies today are made under a cultural mandate that they be pro-war. I don't like that war must always be portrayed as the correct move, that it's dictated and enforced that depictions of soldiers must fall into a range between "hero" and "pretty good guy". I don't like that there's a mandate that former soldiers are given a preference when considered for acting roles. I think it's often the case that shoehorning in pro-war stuff lessens movies - like sometimes I just want the story NOT to stop for various ham-handed pro-war stuff.
As you know, I am against war. But I'm also against bad movies, and this makes movies worse.
Bob: Oh, I gotcha. But yeah, you aren't allowed to notice the part where the war stuff is making movies worse.
Dave: I'm not?
Bob: Yeah, it's like this: lots of people like war. We've all agreed that good, polite people are allowed to talk about how they don't like war, but they aren't allowed to say a movie that has war in it is bad.
Dave: But sometime movies with war in them are bad even if the inclusion of war isn't causing it, right? They can't all be winners.
Bob: Maybe, but we've all decided you are too biased to have an opinion on them. You are completely cut out of discussion on them forever.
Dave: Are you going to stop advertising for them and saying how good they are, to prevent your own bias?
Bob: Listen, that would mean *I'd* default lose this argument, or at least we'd be tied. The rules are that we win by default here. Go team war!
Dave would be foolish to listen to Bob here, since Bob is just saying that Dave can't argue his points and should just lay down and die for the sake of a standard Bob unilaterally invented.
So say Dave says that, and points out that he's a human being and should be allowed to notice things and argue based on things he's noticed - that other people should, if they are bothered by his opinion, prove him wrong with better arguments and better evidence instead. He might hear something like this:
Bob: Listen, you are acting like this is the end of the world here. All this is, my friend, is me saying you should acknowledge your biases. A movie you think is bad is one that you might see is great if you didn't dislike it for ideological reasons. So you don't get to talk about this. I don't get why you are making this hard; movies aren't that important, and this isn't that important of a thing to talk about.
Dave: All humans are biased in this way?
Bob: Potentially, yes.
Dave: Is your side going to stop saying the movies are great, advertising for them, accusing other people of not liking it purely out of being unpatriotic traitors, etc., because movies aren't important enough to have opinions on in the face of potential bias?
Bob: No. Listen - the polite people did NOT get together and decide WE were going to lose. We decided YOU were going to lose. At this point I'm beginning to think you are being willfully obtuse just to annoy me. Obviously OUR goals here are very important and the movies are very important to those goals.
(Edited to add: a second argument I left incomplete)
Note that I'm not saying that you, Tatterdemalion, are going this far in the argument. But as soon as you say "Listen, we are going to establish situations in which some people are thought to be wrong not because of their arguments and evidence, but just because we've decided they are in some sort of category that shouldn't get to argue certain points at all", I get really uncomfortable; I'm not sure why I'd even consider agreeing to adhere to that kind of censorship standard.
Here's what I'm responding to:
***If you believe that you have sufficient objectivity and are so good at controlling for your own biases that you can assess the aesthetic and artistic value of a film or other artwork which you despise on ideological or moral grounds then I propose taking the following three steps.
1) Look around at the set of other people who believe themselves to be able to do that
2) Count what fraction of them are correct
3) Criticise the film on ideological and moral grounds, while saying "obviously I'm not the target audience, which make it hard for me to judge it artistically".
and thereby avoiding making yourself look like Muggeridge.***
He's very literally proposing that a person who find some work of art morally objectionable can't and shouldn't be able to have an opinion on them - that their bias makes them similar to Muggeridge, the villain in his example story.
Note that this is *more restrictive*, not less, than what you say here:
***The Argument is over whether movies are made bad *by* including woke themes, not merely if there can exist bad movies that happen to be woke***
In the proposed model, the idea of *why* the woke movie is bad isn't even approached. If a person dislikes wokeness, the model bans them from noticing it's bad at all, for any reason, full stop; they have to say "I'm not the target audience" and keep their thoughts on quality to themselves.
Again, this happens well before the person would get around to saying wokeness had caused the badness; they never get there at all, since they can't note the badness itself.
I agree with you, for the record, that woke movies can be good, and that unwoke movies can be bad. It's not the *only* thing happening. But I disagree to the extent you posit they are unrelated to each other; you can't optimize for both "good" and "woke" unless they are literally the same thing.
Thanks, everyone. I've got a better understanding of the range of things people mean by woke.
I saw "Everything Everywhere All at Once" twice and it didn't strike me as woke at all. What about it struck you as woke?
It's about the intersection of gender and immigrant status with toxic family dynamics.
I mean, if by "woke movie" you mean "a movie which prominently features female characters and immigrant characters", then lots of movies (including universally regarded classics which have been beloved by audiences for decades) are "woke".
When someone says "this movie is woke", I take that to mean that it's a film which (explicitly or implicitly) endorses several tenets of the woke worldview e.g. "blank-slate" thinking, hostility to capitalism, a belief in the inescapable power of white supremacy and the patriarchy, and so on.
It's not hard to imagine how the film's worldview could have been "woker" than it actually is. Evelyn doesn't lead a dissatisfying life because she's discriminated against as a woman and a first-generation immigrant: she leads a dissatisfying life because of the choices she personally made, which the movie goes to great lengths to emphasise (specifically by contrasting her life with alternate branches of her life in which she made different choices which led to a more fulfilling lives). Evelyn's business isn't being unfairly audited by the IRS because it's an immigrant-run business: her business is being audited because it's a failing business with sloppily managed financial records.
Where would people put Black Panther on the woke scale? Do you consider it to be a good movie?
The woke *loved* that movie, for whatever that's worth.
I very much enjoyed the movie, loathed the woke marketing, and really hated Killmongers preachy black nationalism lines. (Also the kid sister got on my nerves as well, but that could just be me getting old.)
I thought Killmonger was an obvious villain, but I know at least one black person who had to work to see Killmonger as a villain. No blame, I think, but possibly a reminder of what can be going on emotionally.
I thought the little sister was annoying-- I didn't think she had much characterization except for an interesting smile.
I'm not convinced it made sense for Wakanda to have a stronger obligation to American blacks than to nearby African blacks, but I'll live with it for the sake of the movie.
That last part is what irritated me the most - this was the chance for Marvel to talk about Africa, this is *the* superhero for that whole continent! and they found a way to make it all about America anyway. "woke" politics is a temporary subset of a much more pervasive inability to recognise that not everywhere is America and most parts of the world have very different issues.
I never read the comic, but if I had to guess, I'd guess it got written because someone got to Lee and Kirby and said "you really need an African superhero so African readers have one", so they did, and the rest was history. And what we consequently got was "African superhero, as imagined by someone who writes American comic books".
I can understand doing this, in the same way I can understand producing a videogame shooter that doesn't force you to refill magazines by hand in order to keep your gun reloaded. If Lee and Kirby really tried to tell the story of an African superhero as it would actually occur in a world with mutants and Avengers and so on, and thus pay true respect to those cultures, it'd take them years to do the research or find someone with both comic writing skills and scholarship, and then the result would probably be too weird for their customers.
So anything like this, written between AD 1960 and 2060, probably has to be Ameri-centric. The money and moral angst simply aren't in the same place as the material.
Somewhat related to this is an irritation I had with James Cameron's Avatar movies. In the first one, Jake has to prove himself to the Na'vi, does so, and... becomes their leader??? Any species like that shouldn't turn that quickly in their perspective on a foreigner, even if he does assume a body like theirs, agree to help them fight the sky people, etc. Moreover, Neytiri's arc is defined almost completely by her relation to Jake. I don't recall a single independent thing she did in that movie. Everything was a reaction to what the humans were doing.
It'd be interesting to me if the second movie had her taking some sort of initiative, even if it's a hobby, that doesn't involve Jake. But I'm not expecting it.
It is interesting who is allowed to have emotional reactions to events and who is expected to be in control of their actions.
The above post gets to most of what annoyed me about Shuri was that she neither earned her position nor recognized her privilege. I wouldn't mind a movie (hopefully) less woke than CPT Marvel that let Shuri grow up and into her position and abilities.
The connection with America would certainly be more understandable if
I assume she got her position because she was really good at science.
I think the problem people had with Shuri (the main character's little sister) is more precisely that she was a Mary Sue - she already arrived at hero-tier competence and behaved like everyone else was a less-competent object of amusement for her.
A Mary Sue that happens to be a member of a woke-recognized minority can easily look like a woke trope, I would say. It could even have wound up there by someone trying to inject woke ideals, but Mary Sues are classically a result of wish fulfillment from the writer, and we can't always tell from the outside.
This was part of what I was getting at - the lack of gravitas on the part of the actor or the character. Granted, a young (cheap) actress isn't going to be Viola Davis or Angela Bassett. Nor are Dakota Flemings common on the ground.
I thought it was good not great. Part of that was I'd just come off watching Netflix's Luke Cage series, which went way harder on the racism and black community angles. I wouldn't put BP high on the woke scale, partly because the character's been around since 1966 and as far as I know it's a faithful adaptation. It's a superhero movie about an African superhero.
(I loved someone's tweet about Martin Freeman and Andy Sirkis, aka Bilbo and Gollum, being "the movie's Tolkien white guys".)
Luke Cage is also very grounded in NYC, instead of shoehorning American politics into a movie that could have been about somewhere else for a change, like, you know, Africa, where its set!
I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once just now just to comment on this. (It's silly fun, everyone watch it.) It's not woke at all; it's a Chinese Kung Fu movie. The only non-Chinese main character is Jamie Lee Curtis in a wig.
Probably not worth breaking down the difference, but I want to anyway.
The first major difference from the standard woke movie is that the actors are all cast for specific reasons. It's a Kung Fu movie, so the actors have to believably pull off Kung Fu. Michelle Yeoh is getting older, but she's been a Kung Fu star since at least Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. James Hong doesn't fight, but he was the villain in Big Trouble In Little China, so he's recognizably Kung Fu-adjacent. Jamie Lee Curtis is... um... famous.
The characters' race is a prominent plot point. They spend the entire movie switching between languages, they're concerned about their status as immigrants. James Hong's character can't speak English at all. Unlike the standard woke movie, you can't replace any of them with a white guy without rewriting the entire character. (They even own a laundromat; no woke movie would dare make their Chinese characters own a laundromat for fear of stereotyping.)
Michelle Yeoh's character is viewed negatively out the gate. She yells at her husband, draws attention to a Middle Eastern woman's large nose, and is rudely disapproving of her daughter's girlfriend. It's not a power fantasy character like a woke movie; you're not meant to want to be her. It's closer to a Will Smith fantasy movie, like I Robot, where the black guy is racist against the fantasy creatures. Maybe some people would count those as woke, I don't.
White folks aren't the bad guys. Jamie Lee Curtis is a villain exactly half the time, but it's a Chinese Kung Fu movie, the majority of villains are Chinese. Compare to something like The Expanse (one of the best versions of wokeness I'd say) where the main characters are all different races, but the majority of villains are white men, and the white good guys are still the most morally unsound of the bunch.
So, yeah. EEAaO, Not Woke.
It's funny. Your description sound exactly woke to me.
Which part?
What do you think of Kung Fu Hustle? It's a similar category of movie. Is it woke?
Oh. Noticed I didn't answer your second question, sorry. Haven't seen it.
This paragraph:
"The characters' race is a prominent plot point. They spend the entire movie switching between languages, they're concerned about their status as immigrants. James Hong's character can't speak English at all. Unlike the standard woke movie, you can't replace any of them with a white guy without rewriting the entire character. (They even own a laundromat; no woke movie would dare make their Chinese characters own a laundromat for fear of stereotyping.)"
Race being a prominent point, code-switching being on display, immigration being a prominent point. Showing a character who can't get by in English. The second half is just demonstrating a fundamental disagreement between us about what woke is: centering characters whose race is essential to who they are in their own lived experience seems to me to be exactly what woke is all about.
edit: typo
"centering characters whose race is essential to who they are in their own lived experience seems to be to be exactly what woke is all about."
If only it was. But take any character from The Expanse or The Boys*, and you can swap their races around without changing a word in the script. Finn from Star Wars has no racial history; he's just a guy. He and Poe could have swapped actors and you'd never know. Hell, he and Rose probably could have swapped.
I know I'd stop complaining if every woke movie was clever enough to use the family members' languages as a generational indicator. (The grandfather speaks Cantonese, the husband and wife swap between Mandarin and English, and the daughter nearly universally speaks English.)
*(Maybe the problem is I'm watching stuff on Amazon. Maybe Amazon's just egregiously bad about it. ...well, I mean they definitely are, but maybe they're worse than other shows.)
Hmm.
Ok, I'm not sure here. See, I think what I said about EEAO is right, but, OTOH, you're right that the new Star Wars stuff is considered pretty woke.
My first response is something like: if a movie is about intersection of gender and immigrant status with toxic family dynamics then it's woke in one way (stealing Kenny's phrasing because it's excellent), if it features various identities interacting with the story and it just doesn't mention it, then it's woke in different way.
But. Wouldn't pretty much every movie that isn't a 70s western be woke at that point? Which means it's probably the wrong answer.
And: my next thought is that woke is definitely about centering rather than ignoring identity, part of the point being that if you say something like, "I don't even see race, I just want everyone to succeed on their own merits", you're ignoring that the system in which they are supposed to succeed is the one built by and for straight white dudes, and everyone else implicitly is supposed to conform to the standards of that group. Which would mean that a movie in which any of the actors could be swapped (because their identities don't matter) shouldn't really be considered woke.
But that also seems wrong, because that would exclude the new Star Wars, which seemed to be at least trying for woke points with all of its "the force is female" stuff.
So I don't know. Maybe you could say woke done well centers identity in an organic way into its story and features a traditionally underrepresented protagonist, and woke done badly casts traditionally underrepresented protagonists and brags about it, but neglects to feature those identities in interesting or authentic ways that work for the story they're in.
So that would leave new Star Wars as bad woke because they wanted to be woke and got the diverse cast but didn't write anything woke into the characters or story, but, say, new Top Gun as not woke because even though they also had a diverse cast, they weren't going for woke and talking up how "the sky is female". The line between bad woke and not woke would just come down to what the creators were trying to accomplish.
But hell, at this point I'm not sure. Sorry for wasting your time with my maybe this maybe that. Like I said, I'm not sure exactly where I land here and didn't want to just not reply.
Yeoh's character starts with having little going for her, but she becomes a power fantasy.
And that's good storytelling. But woke characters typically aren't allowed to have flaws to grow out of. If there's a flaw, they've already gotten over it before the movie starts, and they'll eventually use their history as sage advice for someone.
Captain Marvel was considered pretty woke, and while she started from a higher baseline, that's pretty much her character's arc in that movie. She starts not knowing who she is and being put in a box by her mentors, and finds her way out, growing obscenely powerful in the process.
Haven't seen Captain Marvel so can't give details, but
>She starts not knowing who she is and being put in a box by her mentors,
These aren't character flaws, these are "the world is out to chain you". Horizon: Zero Dawn is my most hated example of wokeness; Aloy is a snotty child, but the world never calls her on it, and everyone who opposes her is a paper mache "oppressor" for her to "heroically" overcome.
Evelyn in EEAaO is not that; she's emotionally cruel to the people around her, and they're hurt by it. Her ever-sympathetic husband tries to have a heartfelt talk about their divorce papers, and she tells him how much better her life was in the world where they never married.
The woman isn't "Middle Eastern". Jenny Slate is an Jewish American.
I think the "woke" angle might be that the grandfather is depicted as a repressive influence who didn't want his daughter marrying a guy unlikely to make lots of money, and his daughter also is unwilling to reveal to him that his granddaughter is a lesbian. Which is not the only lesbian relationship in the film either.
I don't know if there's an agreed upon definition of woke, but I think the one used here is racial and sexual diversity in the cast and/or the story ; less/no homophobia/racism/*phobia, or at least not by the good people. I don't think I've ever seen a movie ruined by wokeness. I've seen things that maybe can be considered woke but also happen to be bad independently of the wokeness, like Ring of Power.
However, if by definition "wokeness" is what is superficial, by definition it won't bring anything good or great into a movie. From what I understand, there is a tendency in "woke" stuff to represent any difference as neutral or positive, and have people well-adjusted to it. I think it's nice to have an example like that out there, to know that it's possible. But on the other hand, if you only have that, what about the people that struggle with their identity?
I don't want to go too much into details about personal stuff here, but I've always struggled a lot with the things that make me different from other people. To take a light example, glasses. The only thing I've ever seen with glasses is people being almost blind when they lose them. That's not the case for me at all. I can still see, but my eye has to do a little bit more work to focus. My eye because only my left eye is useful, as I have amblyopia. My eyes aren't naturally aligned, so my brain suppressed the output of one eye to not have double vision. A simple search says that it's something that affects 1% to 5% of the population, yet I've never seen it in any movies.
Glasses are a simple example, but they illustrate the problem well: whenever a character has to have some difference, he always has the precise and accepted version of that difference. Which could be considered worse than not representing the difference at all, so this way people make fewer assumptions.
I think part of the solution to that is to try to show more humanity (which probably won't be compatible with the cinema industry). Movies like A Scanner Darkly, Drive My Car, The Looming Storm, Parasite all have a cast of flawed people, but flawed in a humane way. Some flaws they can't do anything about, some they don't want to, some it's not the right situation. Sometimes things go well, sometimes they don't. Trying not to judge, while still being honest about what's happening.
My right eye is about -12 dioptres since I was a kid, my left is only about -1.5. Still, my right is somehow dominant if it can be (say if I'm reading a book, close up). My brain can blank out the output of either eye is that is best[*] - but I still retain 3D vision, so both are being registered.
[*] Of late it fills up the holes too, as I have scotomata. Starting to notice where I miss some stuff, like a spider on the ceiling that falls in the gaps and is replaced by just ceiling, and then suddenly appears when my angle of vision changes. We all have blind spots, but mine are bigger.
Everything Everywhere All At Once isn't woke, it's Buddhist. Two different religions.
"Starring nonwhite characters" isn't what makes a movie woke. Repeating woke talking points is what makes a movie woke.
How about Get Out? I'd say it's very woke and very good.
I was enjoying the movie, but also, I grew up middle class. If my home resembled the home of the wealthy white villains, I don't know if I would have felt diffeerntly.
I saw them as a clear allegory for wokeness, and I'm hardly alone in it, so there's that.
Could you expand on how Everything Everywhere All at Once is Buddhist?
This doesn't seem implausible considering the shakiness of personal identity, but I'd like some further explanation.
I didn't say that in a movie had to be bad to be woke. I said to be woke, a movie has to preach wokeness. "Woke" is an ideology about what race means and how oppression works. It has tenets. It has a creed. E.g. "no sex is bad or deviant as long as there is consent," "sex work is Good," "minorities can't be racists," "white straight men are trash." Those are woke talking points.
Simply having nonwhite or gay characters isn't a woke thing in and of itself.
"Life of Brian" surely pissed off enough of the audience to have been banned in Aberystwyth until the female lead became the mayor there. I'm not sure if pissing people off had been a conscious effort but I'd call it a great movie.
I also really liked "Black Snake Moan" which I'd consider woke alright.
It was banned in Ireland. My family went on holiday to the Isle of Man and we all watched it there.
Interestingly, Life of Brian has a scene poking fun at transgenderism that sounds like it's aimed directly at the trans conversation today.
And that's an interesting point - how is wokeness different from more traditional (ha!) Counterculture? Is it really "there's not too much discussion of oppression, you are just too racist")? ('The music's not too loud, you're just too old.')
It seems to me that there's a difference between the two, but I am not well articulating it now, even in my head.
One phenomenon I've noticed in the last decade or so is fiction with a quasi-historical setting, except that all the characters have twenty first century sensibilities, except possibly some villains. It's not just one maverick ahead of their times - it's everyone. E.g. we have gay characters and everyone is OK with them.
I think this relates to another phenomenon I've seen during the same period - people who no longer appreciate books they loved in childhood, because of their casual (and historically accurate) racism, sexism, etc. They now find these books actively unpleasant to reread.
I found the first lot of 1940s-without-heterosexism (etc.) historical novels quite jarring, but I've since found I can appreciate them by thinking of them as SF - novels set in an invented society where people behave just a bit differently than in actual history. There's a long tradition of SF that tries to show what the author imagines would be a better society, often in a quasi-medieval setting - minus the rats, fleas, lice, plagues, famines, religiosity, and lordly abuse of lesser members of society - as well as minus sexism, hetero-sexism, and other woke concerns. I treat this historical fiction as similar.
More interesting, perhaps, is that I can now look at books with historical settings written in the 1960s, and find the same phenomenon, except that the improvements in the characters' attitudes were in the direction of attitudes current in the mid-twentieth century. Those changes still seem more plausible to me - I have to stop and think to notice them - because that's the decade of my childhood, so I was reading such things while forming my ideas of how the world worked, past as well as present. I doubt they were really any less creative than the changes I see in more recent writing.
To me, it's that "oh, of course it is this way, because I know what the rules are and it will be this way." If I can predict who the villain will be by the demographics of the actor, AND I can predict how cartoonishly evil they will be (e.g. extremelyracist and misogynist in addition to their other acts of evil) it's not interesting. It's like if Parks & Rec had made Ron Swanson really stupid, always wrong and incompetent (instead of making him a sympathetic character, even with libertarian views and lots of comedy around that).
It also is coupled with a complete departure from logic, from the original art form, to stick to the narrative; maybe by people who don't care about the source material and just care about the narrative, plus eye-catching graphics and sex maybe. A good example is the most recent Persuasion adaptation by Netflix: I only saw the trailer, and you can go see in online discussions that a lot of fans of the book (including woke ones) boycotting it, because it takes the modern Independent Woman type, modern wording, puts it into Regency costumes and the source material be damned. without attention to the subtlety of the original character. Yes, it could just be a bad film, but the fact that it's bad in THIS PARTICULAR WAY is emblematic of the wokeness, IMO.
Ha. It definitely has the woke elements (e.g. ahistorical diverse casting), a la Bridgerton, but that's the zeitgeist and will be in most regency films of this era.
My breaking point was the use of the term "exes", anywhere in the film.
Another example, but this one is surprisingly old, is the 1999 Mansfield Park.
I mean, any moral/political movement can still technically make great films. "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Passion of the Christ" spring to mind. But whether it's 90% crud or 98% crud is a big deal, because it matters whether 10% of movies are good or whether it's 2%.
And wokeness has one really big failing, which is that it courts controversy. Hollywood has figured out that being loved by 50% and hated by 50% drives passion and drives engagement and being ignored is so much worse than being hated. It was subtler in the past but it's now clearly part of the formula to take generic Disney products, like that Little Mermaid movie, and add in at least one "woke" element to drive controversy and online engagement. And that's bad, its bad because it's another sacrifice the artistic vision has to make to commercial interests.
I mean, there's lots of crap that ends up being way better than it has any right to be, the "Angry Birds" movie is way, way better than it has any right to be.
The core issue is that any creative project is always going to have an internal struggle between creative vision and commercial practicalities. Wokeness is an issue because it's financially all about empty controversy and politics, getting attention through heat instead of quality.
Hopefully without getting too CW, the vibe I got off "She-Hulk" was that the overwhelming majority of creative energy went into producing 2-3 "viral clips" that generated tons of hate traffic because that's financially more rewarding than a quality production. There's just this inescapable vibe that "She-Hulk" was made to be hated, at least by a significant chunk of the US. And that's a major problem when you're trying to make a creative show.
I just want to chime in here to say that I thought She-Hulk was legitimately good. (Other than the finale, which fully hulk-jump a school of sharks.)
But otherwise it was a charming little show with delightfully lower stakes and lots of lol moments. I watched it with my daughters, who every Thursday evening for the last few weeks have asked if I wanted to watch a "great lawyer show", a cute gag from the opening of the first episode.
"(Other than the finale, which fully hulk-jump a school of sharks.)"
Isn't this Hulk-accurate?
Someone from my facebook feed said it was pretty true to the spirit of the comics, but I felt like it was a whole other level of fourth wall breaking, and while the funny asides worked for me, literally skipping over writing a finale scene didn't.
Like, have Hulk-king just die horribly, like Bruce told her would happen in the first episode, then something funny with the abomination and wrap.
"It's not 'wokeness' that pushed Disney to make those creatively bankrupt live-action remakes."
No argument here, but that doesn't mean wokeness isn't making the creatively-bankrupt live-action remakes *worse* than they otherwise would have been.
Also, arguing that "yeah well who cares if they suck, they're shovelware anyway" seems to... give up a lot of ground in the argument about whether wokism makes things suck.
Is there a substantial difference between 'Disney does X because its management is woke' and 'Disney does X because almost all the creatives (actors / writers / directors) it works with are woke?' I mean, I think you're right that "it's *creators* who would like to put more diversity in their movies", it's just that it's Disney management's choice to tolerate creators wokeness for the sake of love/hate marketing.
I have about half a draft somewhere on this very subject. The way I see it is something like this:
1. There's no fundamental reason why a movie being woke would make it bad, in and of itself. There's at the least a theoretical film which is very woke, but tells a compelling story with great actors and fine direction that ends up very enjoyable. It's entirely possible that this movie is called D2: The Mighty Ducks, for instance.
2. There an at least theoretical way in which woke movies end up being worse on average, and worse the woker they get. This is that some woke creators *define* "being good" as "being more woke". This will work for the sactimonious, but not for anyone else - every sacrifice you make (and there are many to make) in pursuit of wokeness in that situation will reduce the quality of the film.
So Everything everywhere all at once gets a pass because (as pointed out by people who have seen it, I haven't) it simply doesn't make that many concessions - it has a Chinese/Female main character, and otherwise is a movie made to be a good movie. This has been a thing at least since Mulan, and worked there too (with mulan making, it seems, even more concessions.).
Bros does not seem to get a passing grade, but most critiques I've seem that mention quality as something besides wokeness seem to agree that it falls afoul of the primary-good-is-woke pitfall here; there's (I am told) tons of places where the main character stops the plot to give big speeches about wokeness being good, and he's starting up a wokeness museum, and it's all-woke-all-the-time at the expense of story telling.
Some where in the middle are things like Star Trek: Discovery and the new Star Wars movies, in which the writers and directors were all hired partially because wokeness and given a woke mandate, would only make partial compromises for that reason, but were also hamstrung in other ways (Star Trek tried to also be gritty, which fails in the same ways and for the same reason as wokeness; the director of the Star Wars movies is not actually someone who is proven to be a great director of blockbuster films and is themselves probably a "good = woke" compromise made by other people).
3. Now consider a third situation: the scenario where a movie is woke, and the best way the creators can think of to promote it is *as a woke movie* as opposed to *as a good movie*. Recall that Everything everywhere all at once was not promoted in a particularly "this is woke way"; the creators thought it was good, told you so, and were able to get credible critics to agree with them.
I have not seen the new little mermaid movie and am unlikely to do so, but I know it's probably bad or at least stunningly mediocre; I know this because I haven't seen clips of it being good. Disney could certainly show me those clips; I saw them with, say, Moana. Instead I just know it has a black protagonist, and Disney is swearing up and down that I'm a racist if I don't watch it.
Note that while I'm pretty certain Little Mermaid will be bad, I'm much less confident it's specifically *because* it's woke. There's a possibility (a strong one) that the movie is just bad because it's bad and wokeness is being used as an excuse.
So can a movie be woke and good? Sure. It happens pretty often, even. Does wokeness lower the chances of something being good? Probably - it's something a director or studio might optimize for at the expense of making something entertaining. Does a movie being promoted as woke (Ala Bros, Girl Ghostbusters, and Black Little Mermaid) mean it's bad? Almost always.
"It's entirely possible that this movie is called D2: The Mighty Ducks, for instance."
No it is not :-D
3. I saw something of the sort with *Children of Blood and Bone*, a reasonably good fantasy novel.... but the marketing was all about it being set in Africa, as though it had no other virtues.
I might as well plug *Light from Uncommon Stars* by Ryka Oaki, a very fine fantasy/science fiction novel which is simultaneously woke and anti-social justice. It's got a lot going for it, efficiency (at 350 pages, it's got a complicated deal with the devil, an alein with a donut shop, for the info geeks, it's got a tremendous amount about violins-- making, playing, teaching...), the plot is complex and the emotions are intense.
I have to admit I liked the politics so much it was hard for me to remember to talk about what else was good about the novel.
An interesting experiment (that unfortunately I don't have time to do) would be for me to read that novel and see if I find it anywhere near as good with potentially very different personal politics.
I think that's relevant because obviously if some creators think woke=good then some viewers do as well. I consider myself sort of middle of the road on this (grain of salt: I would); there are some woke things I don't mind and some that I do. It would be interesting to see if this triggered my anti-woke armaments.
I'm not sure if this fits, but what the hell.
James Bond is nonsense because you don't want a spy to be a conspicuous person. It's wish fulfillment fantasy, and as I recall, Fleming knew it.
If I understand objections to a black James Bond correctly, it's that a black man doesn't work as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a lot of white men. (I don't think a *blond* James Bond looks right, so I've got my own imprinting.)
Has anyone written a story where Mr. Flashy is the distraction so Mr. Inconspicuous can do the missions?
If, as has been suggested, "James Bond" is a job filled by a succession of people, how about multiple James Bonds, each of them in the racial majority for where the mission is happening?
FWIW I also didn't think Daniel Craig looked right to be Bond - to me, the previous actors could plausibly have been different people playing the same character, but now the only way to make sense of the series is as multiple spies with "James Bond" as their codename
The Bond movies don't all need to fit into the same continuity somehow. They're inconsistent stories about a man who is some sense the same character; while things like his birth date and hair colour may change from story to story, the basics of his personality don't; you won't find a teetotal Bond or a celibate one, or one who is cowardly or disloyal, or one who is socially awkward, or one who is lower middle class, or one who is married with children, or one who isn't white.
James Bond needs to be white for the same reason that John Shaft needs to be black and Princess Leia needs to be female. The characters are already deeply established in the minds of the audience as being such, which is the only reason you want to use their name, and changing key bits of their character will cause cognitive dissonance in the audience.
You can perfectly well have a story about a Black Englishman working for MI6 doing all sorts of flashy spy stuff, just like you can have a story about e.g. an Asian-American private detective dealing with crime and corruption in Chinatown, or a heroic Space Prince leading a rebellion against an Evil Overlord with his legion of stormtroopers. You just shouldn't use the names "James Bond", "John Shaft", or "Prince Leia" for them.
"Duke Paul" will work for the last, of course.
This!
What do you mean by "shouldn't"? Do you mean a practical or a moral imperative? Is your argument that if someone makes a film about a Black Englishman etc called James Bond that people will not watch and/or enjoy the film, or that they will have done something unethical?
"Duke Paul" - ISWYDT.
Honestly, I think a black Bond would be fine, so long as you could get his personality and his ultimate loyalty to the Crown. In fact I have always felt a Carribean Bond would work, in part because Fleming set so much of his stuff there.
The Carribbean equivalent of Bond is called Quarrel, he's the Jamaican who helps Bond in Dr No and then again in Live and Let Die. I'd be down for a Quarrel movie.
> Has anyone written a story where Mr. Flashy is the distraction so Mr. Inconspicuous can do the missions?
Not exactly "written a story," but this is how we're running our Stars Without Number campaign. My character goes "look at me look at me look at me" (he's a parody of James Holden) while everyone else does their thing.
Disagree on James Bond. Most people who object to a black James Bond (incidentally why is it always black? Blacks are 3.5% of the population of England compared to 7.8% Asian) would be perfectly happy to see a movie about a cool black (or Asian, just saying) British spy as long as it's not James Bond. People aren't unable to identify with people of a different race, I don't see people walking out of Men in Black or Beverly Hills Cop wishing Will Smith or Eddie Murphy had been replaced with a white dude to make it more relatable.
The argument about James Bond is that James Bond is a very specific character, and that whiteness is intrinsic to that character. James Bond isn't some random middle class dude, he (like Fleming) comes from the near-aristocracy, that specific class of British society that sits just outside the upper class and occasionally just inside it. James Bond is the kind of guy who quietly has an ancestral estate in Scotland sitting in mothballs. His roots go deep, the most recent immigrants in his family tree either fought at Hastings or wore Viking helmets. You can't take away the "is ethnically British" aspect of James Bond and have him be the same character.
He has no estate, pal. He would like to, but he's actually a pleb. You never ever hear about his family.
His roots are infrequently mentioned, but it is canonically established that his parents were a Andrew Bond and Monique Delacroix Bond. (Looking this up, I have to contradict myself about a lack of immigrant roots, his mother was definitely Swiss.) Both parents died in a mountain climbing accident in France.
The family estate, as memorably featured in a recent film, was named (spoilers!) Skyfall.
I stand corrected. (Though I kind of like the idea that he might have invented a posh family background, even if canon firmly rejects this.)
James Bond should always be set in the 50s/60s and be about the UK dealing with its fall from global superpower status through a fixation on itself as a culture leader and weilder of the soft power of espionage.
That is where it works best, You want to make a spy movie set in 2000 or 2035, make it about someone else.
This I think is a better example of 'wokeness ruining movies'. Here you're changing a central facet of the character to one that doesn't make sense purely for the sake of diversity. Tom Nichols lays out a decent case here: https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/61f1f7f09d9e380022bd41fa/leave-james-bond-alone/
I saw Amsterdam, and I think your premise applies to it as well. A solidly bad movie, made worse by the wokeness.
>I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once
Yes, this movie was quite good! Although it didn't seem particularly "woke" to me.
Not woke at all. The daughter is lesbian, which the movie accepts per se, but the grandfather completely rejects and the mother is not sure about. They come around to love her, but that's her as an individual, not lesbianism. A woke movie would have had them accept all sexual deviation.
Coming to love her and accept her partner is extraordinary compared to not so long ago.
And acknowledging that harassing her about her weight is damaging the relationship is also extraordinary.
Did she acknowledge that the weight thing was damaging? I thought the daughter just accepted it as her mother's way of saying she cared about her. But it's not like I've memorized the film.
I don't think the mother acknowledged anything, but she became aware enough to be kind rather than harsh.
Not so extraordinary. My father accepted my sister's marriage to a lawyer. The point of the movie is that people can grow and learn, not that you can accept lesbianism. You could change the story to a daughter who married a lawyer without making it more or less woke.
It's an extraordinary thing to have become normal in movies.
Meanwhile, I wonder whether a movie would be possible where the daughter marries someone rich but her family hates rich people.
Tangentially related: I was watching an early season of MASH recently and I was a bit surprised to find an episode where a gay soldier was portrayed as sympathetic and respectable and the character trying to rat him out to the authorities as bigoted and unreasonable. This in a show from the 70s!
Emmm. Falling Down was anti- homophobia before that became mainstream cool. In contrast, when was the last time saw a movie that did NOT endorse gay activism or defended anti gay attitudes?
There was a time when The Culture accepted 'straight is normal and homosexuality is weird and wrong.' That time has passed.
I resent it passing far less than I resent the left pretending it hasn't.
I'm going to be in a board of a local private primary school my daughter is enrolled to. The official powers are quite vaguely defined, but I suspect a lot could be done than is usually expected. The school is quite open minded, has its own research group to dictate the style and content of the education.
I know this is a very context dependent etc., But does anyone has any ideas what (not) to do? Any pointers to e.g. interesting posts/blogs/ideas of some people from this or related community?
The most important thing you can possibly do is keep dumb kids out. No, really. It sounds harsh, but nothing else will determine the quality of the education as much as the quality of your daughter's peers. You could have the optimal curriculum and teachers, but if some bright spark in the school's management decides to admit a bunch of disruptive "disadvanataged" students to provide them "opporutinty" then it's going to be for nothing.
I'll agree that you should care more about disruptive than dumb. From a policy perspective, it may be difficult to separate it, as they both are identified by low test scores more often than not.
"Dumb" and "disruptive" are different things, though they can overlap.
Sure, but if you want good educational outcomes, you probably want to filter out both kinds of students from your school. Though I think in both cases, this also depends on what methods are allowed to you in running your school. If you are allowed to track by ability, having some dumber kids in the school may not cause so much trouble; if you can't do that, then you either have to lose the dumb kids or bore the smart kids. If you are allowed to discipline misbehaving kids, up to and including kicking them out of the school, then you can take more chances in admitting kids with some past behavior issues. If admitting a kid means he can never be kicked out, then you probably want to be super careful about letting anyone disruptive in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHkmEnl55jo&t=5s
Around 20 mins in Cowen talks about what he would do if he ran a school. Could we worth a watch for some ideas.
The math department at the University of Florida is hiring for a tenure-track assistant professor position in the area of probability (broadly interpreted): https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/20597
I am the chair of the search committee, and a fellow ACX reader. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you might have (my email is in the job advertisement).
My mom is in France now living with a french family for 4 months already, in a small village, but her family understandably got tired and asked her to find another place till the end of month. She can't drive so going anywhere was problem, she doesn't speak the language and her English is very basic.
Can anyone help with finding another family in France? Or some other safer than Ukraine place till summer, to spend winter and spring there?
She has some permit to be in France till December and it can be prolonged after that.
Hi Sergy, are you, or rather is your mother all set?
I see there is a offer below from Schweinepriester, which I think is great!
Also, if still needed, my contacts could ask around for an accomodation in Germany, but they told me, it's better to do so only once your mother has really decided she wants to be here. That's because they say them asking around sets chain reactions in motion (people asking more people, families maybe discussing options and so on), so better to be done only if there is a clear decision.
I hope you're doing fine and things are progressing as you wish.
Hi, TM! Not set yet, but after a lot of stress and trying maybe we have one real variant in France, also from this thread. If it's not going to work, then we'll look on another country. Yes, Schweinepriester is great, I agree. Thank you for your help!
Good to hear, and much luck with the variant in France!
Also good to hear that this thread brought you closer to a solution.
The end of the month is soon. If there will be no better solution, she can stay at my place in Germany for maximally six months. It's a bit of a mess, though.
Thank you, it would be great to have variants, six month is great. I'll try to find something in France while there still time, indeed, but thank you for your offer.
Fine. If you need to get back to me, you probably can contact me on this thread.
Where is she currently living ? Depending on the area I may be able to think of something.
Finistère department. Thank you in any case.
Oh that's rough. I live right at the other side of the country so I'm not in the best position to help but I can still have a look. I would definitely try to get her to a town were she has better chances to find someone who speaks English or even Ukrainian.
Thank you. If you really can take a look that would be great, at least just to have options. It was Poland first (paid by employer for couple months), then France (also recommended by employer) - and dealing with moving to another country again is hard. Employer told that they can't really help anymore, but maybe they can find something again in Poland or Romania - but that's again moving, new documents, a lot of stress. Staying in France would be much preferable but then again, beggars not choosers.
France was great in many ways, mom would never be able to visit France on her own most likely, if only reason for that wouldn't be that bad. Sad that she didn't managed to learn French in 4 months there, but it's hard in her age without teachers. Practically mute foreigner is probably less pleasant to have than the one speaking at least on some basic level.
Can you give me a mail address or some other less public way to contact you ?
It's [redacted]
Could the authorities help? https://parrainage.refugies.info/ukraine
Well, authorities told that she should find another place till the end of month. People are just tired of all that, as I understand. Thank you for the link, I'll read it, maybe there is something there. It's all very ... bureaucratic, I guess. It seems that she would need to leave. Renting is impossible, it's too expensive and she doesn't work, she's 67. Maybe there will be some variants in Poland or Romania, maybe not, well, we'll see.
I thought about this, and I think 'authorities told that she should find another place till the end of month' is probably only the authorities' lazy answer. I'm pretty sure in France, like in Germany, like formally anywhere else around the authorities *have* to provide a place for her if she can't stay where she is now. Which could be totally somewhere else in France, or could be in a gym equipped with beds, or something else quite uncomfortable, but definitely a warm place with a roof. I don't think this is the most preferable option, but I think in principle she could insist.
Edit: Oh, as I mentioned the less comfortable options, it *could* of course also be possible that they find quite a good, comfortable place or new family close by.
Also, again starting from the experiences in my country, there are many NGOs, both German and Ukrainian and mixed, that try to assist, also by providing easily accessible information on all the legal and bureaucratic etc. procedures & offer personal advice. So if you have a bit of time, I'd recommend to look for the websites and phone numbers of such organizations in Paris or other bigger cities in the area, for basic information. Or maybe for a phone number of somebody who could talk to your mum in her own language and help/give guidance with next steps. I guess there is fewer of those NGOs & groups in France than in Germany, simply because there are more Ukrainians who arrived here which triggered a need for organization, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't a relevant number of helpful organizations & websites in France as well.
I hope that there will be at least something and I hope to find better variant, sleeping in a gym would be tough for her. She's not the kind to insist but she probably should.
Not much time, trying to survive on my own too, and can be mobilized at any moment also - that adds some stress, I almost ready to volunteer sometimes to eliminate uncertainty. I am trying to find NGOs and groups but it is surprisingly hard to find and what was found so far was mostly unhelpful.
If you can ask someone (from your other answer), and it's not too hard, that would be great, thank you. I still hope to find something in France, because changing countries is stressful in many ways, dealing with bureaucracy, even well meaning, is exhausting. It was Poland first, paid by employer, and mother managed not to receive any payments in two months she was there, still unclear how - a lot of people were helping but adjusting to the country was hard. In France it was more on the family and authorities, I guess.
I doubt there are still gyms for this in France, probably even less so outside big cities, and my cursory reading of the French pages suggested, that they were used for the first two nights upon arrival, but not for long term stay. I kind of wanted to mention the possibility, but I don't think this is the most likely case.
I understand this is stressful, both for her and for you. As you mentioned before, it's also bureaucratic. That why it's usually a game changer to find sb. who both wants to help and is familiar with both the formalities and with their practical implementation. That's the reason I recommended the NGOs or other support groups, they would be the typical candidate. In my place, there are also various localized chat groups on Telegram etc. for Ukrainians & supporters, where they can at least exchange on their experiences in a specific place and how it worked for others. But I see that it can be difficult to find such a person or group.
I admit, I can't really imagine to be in your situation and I wish you all the strength & calm that you need! Well, and everything else.
I will ask, and I understand how staying in France might be preferable to her, so I also wish you much luck!
Last, Scott had a specific section for support needed in such cases somewhere under one of the last Open Threads ... I have no idea, if anybody still looks there, or if there are already concrete offers, but you might wanna have a look (if not done yet).
So they... pretty much leave that task to her by herself, who doesn't even speak French? That's quite surprising. I thought the prefecture might have a list of possible logements, and pay some rent for her.
The German counterpart seems to be https://www.germany4ukraine.de/
Yes, it's a bit strange how sudden it is and I am trying to find out if there are any variants at all. But that what was told to us, that we should find another family till the end of month.
She went to doctor, he gave her an appointment to Brest for eye doctor and there were no one to drive her there, it seems that this made the family bitter a bit. Totally understandable, - they did good thing and now are punished for this, caring for a stranger, driving her to buy clothes and food, to doctors and so on, not the first time losing a day, and at some point it's too much. So they asked her to find a taxi to get there, but taxi is too expensive, 150 eur or something. It seems that she found some variant how to get there with another french person (woman her age, neighbor probably) cheaper, but now this person kinda needs to spend a day with a foreigner just out of kindness... It's surprising how there is no buses/trains nearby in that region and you depend on cars only.
I don't know how authorities deal with stuff like that in any country: it's easier to find place to live in rural places but then you have problems with reaching to hospitals, shops. Very beautiful place otherwise. Her day is mostly walking 10 k steps, making food, and trying to learn French on her own. No other Ukrainians nearby too, she only talks with people using Google Translate.
Just as TM asked, it seem to me that perhaps it might be better for her in a place/country where there are more Ukrainians around?
In the Czech republic there are quite a lot of Ukrainian refugees right now, mostly women. In my city, when I get on a tram I almost always hear some Ukrainian nowadays and there's a fairly large Ukraininan community here since a lot of Ukrainians have been working in the Czech republic since before the war. Czech is also kind of similar-ish, not quite as much as Polish but people would probably be able to understand simple phrases/requests if talked to slowly. Most importantly, like I said, there is quite a large Ukrainian community here already.
There are also a lot of volunteers who help Ukrainians, the enthusiasm is not quite as high as it was 6 months ago, but still enough that if I ask around, I think I could be able to find someone able and willing to find a place for her (ideally with a Ukrainian family who lives here given that she does not speak any foreign languages). I cannot promise it would work 100% but I could ask around.
End of October is a pretty harsh deadline though. But I could try...
I have a flat I rarely use nowadays, but the problem is I am currently selling it, people come to see the flat occasionally and I might sell it in a month for all I know.
Let me know here if you think it makes sense for me to ask around. Generally, unless there is a reason for her to stay in France, I think that Poland or the Czech republic might be a better place for your mum given that there are fairly large Ukrainian communities in those countries and from what I understand Polish seems to be very close to Ukrainian (except for the alphabet of course), so she wouldn't be as isolated as she is now.
Thank you, I would be grateful if you could ask around. Got a message from people dealing with that: "Coming back on our previous discussion. Can you please let us know what will be your solution by this Friday so we can support if there is anything to be organized?" So any variants are needed. It would be great not to change countries but it's ok to get to any other safe country too indeed, heard a lot of good about Czechia and mother spent first two months in Poland immediately after the war already, was paid by employer, and then offered France. And now it seems it is time to move again.
I'm sorry to hear it's difficult. So generally, she can live in any EU country she wants, right? Would she be able/ interested to change the country? I know some people who were active in supporting people arriving from Ukraine in Germany, and I could ask them to spread the word. No promises though!
Overall, if zumBeispiel suggested it'd be easier in Germany, I'd disagree (without knowing details about France). At the beginning, many people offered their homes, probably in the idea to provide quick help, until 'the authorities' step in. But the authorities can't do miracles ... and the lack of affordable flats / living space was a problem in many areas of Germany already before. (There are some temporary, rather basic solutions if everything else fails, I guess.) I once and a while hear about sb. looking for a new place, when the time in the first or second place runs out.
Anyway, let me know if you want me to ask sb. who can ask others ...
Maybe this is a naive question but is there some (semi-) formalized/structured way to figure out which technologies one should focus on to optimize value as an employee. I am currently finishing a CS Bachelor's and feel that I should specialize consciously, alas I have no process. Any input is welcome.
I really don't think you need to specialize at your age. In many ways you don't *have* to specialize at all to maximize your value. Learning the new technology/language/industry isn't that hard when you are doing it on the job. The harder parts are basically being a good employee: being there consistently, communicating well, listening, giving good feedback, etc. Its shocking how doing these things can set you apart from many people.
I'd suggest reading this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ if you havent already. Although the subject is salary, I think it gives a good summary on how understand and maximize your value as en employee.
My advice to young people is always to focus on figuring out your personal productivity function. Are you able to set yourself goals systematically on a weekly/monthly basis and put in the hard yards on achieving them? If yes, ignore this advice. If not, focus on it before all else.
It depends among other things on the kind of IT in which you wish to specialize, i.e. whether commercial (finance & banking is where the big bucks are, not surprisingly), or scientific and technical.
For more academic IT, one formalized/structured approach would be to check the topic areas of papers in the ArXiV Computer Science section https://arxiv.org/list/cs/recent . But I can save you the trouble by pointing out that 99% of them relate to machine learning and AI.
How well a grounding in those or related expertise would currently optimise you for commercial IT is debatable; but I think it will be increasingly useful over time in all areas of IT, especially in analyzing and extracting trends and patterns from "big data".
It looks like the Chinese have monopolised face recognition technology, because 99.99% of papers on that are by all Chinese authors! But I think agriculture will be revolutionized in the coming years by AI/robotics capable of spotting pests and diseases on and in plants, and dealing with these, without having to drown plants with indiscriminate pesticides.
I'm pretty naïve, but here's a question: What t̶e̶c̶h̶n̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶e̶s̶ subfields of CS *have* you focused on, so far?
In Terms of Languages mostly Java and C++, I know basic backend stuff (SQL, NoSQL, DBMS, etc), I took a course on simulating biological systems (Python, R), I know basic HTML5, CSS and Javascript but Frontend isn't something I feel confident about.
On the reader surveys the average income of readers(with jobs, not students etc.) always comes out crazy high, ~200k (!?) I think, and you quite often see people mentioning in the comments that they're a millionaire or have some prestigious sounding job.
Is this really accurate? If you're in the demographic that enjoys reading this kind of blog, can you then reasonable expect to have a well above average income?
I certainly don't. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that does about how they ended up in that position, did they plan for it, did it happen organically, their career trajectory, whether they attribute it to any specific qualities they have, general advice etc.
It's disproportionately read by bay area tech workers. There's not much more else to explain.
You also have to be careful about income data. You might see the average income is $50k and think "oh I am doing pretty well as a college graduate making $80k".
But then if you look at the data for the average income for college graduates you find it is $90k. Well now maybe you don't feel so good.
But you say, I am 26, what is the average income of college graudates who are 26? Oh it is $60k, ok I am on the good side again.
And so on. It is important to think about who you are comparing yourselves to.
I have a B.A. and make $150-300k most years. But I am 41.
At 26 I was making $35k/year, and at 33 I was making $55k/year.
As for how that happened. The TDLR is:
1) Very intelligent but shitty childhood/parenting and learned bad work habits and attitude.
2) Took stupid degree in generic public uni that would impress no one (philosophy) and would be worth little on market.
3) Had shitty jobs out of college, expected the world to notice how brilliant I was. Wasted 3-5 years and lost a great GF.
4) Stopped waiting for the world to *notice me senpai* and started excelling at jobs, and negotiating hard and switching jobs when there wasn't room for growth or my contributions weren't being fairly compensated. Worried I would be alone
5) Lucked a bit into a few things (found my wife), but also was still busting ass and working hard and growing my profile in an industry.
6) Became leading expert in a few niche areas of my industry.
7) Set up my own consulting firm and priced my services low and ate up a large swath of the market with high quality low cost offerings.
thanks, that's the kind of comment I was hoping for. Was there a specific reason your work habits improved? Also how did you find/get into areas with the potential for growth?
Work habits improvement:
Just disappointment.
I was *really* bright in school. One teacher said I was the smartest kid in my HS in 35 years. I also graduated with like a ~2.3GPA because it was all too easy and I didn't take it seriously (I would skip school to sit home and read non-fiction books at times).
I did much better in college, but still took a dumb degree and blew off a few classes needlessly for F's (often took 6 or 7 classes a semester, and would just skip ones I didn't like). So I definitely had some level of work ethic, but not an effective one.
Anyway, in HS everyone thought I was going to go to MIT and become a famous scientist or something. Even my teachers. Probably why they didn't help me more than they did even though I was struggling (suicidal, skipping class constantly).
So I didn't get accepted, or only got shitty FA from the top schools I applied to. A few told me to go do two years at a local uni and then they would accept me as a Xfer if I got good grades.
In a pique of rage/betrayal/confusion I took a year off. Girl Y who I can think laps around is going to Princeton? Isn't HS/college supposed ot be about learning and academics? I am better at academics than EVERYONE, by a notcibale margin, why doesn't that matter more?
Except of course that isn't what school is about mostly. It is mostly about jumping through hoops and teaching you to be a good part of a system, and I was shitty at that.
At uni everyone seemed to think I would be a professor, and I for sure wanted that.
But once again I think they sort of made assumptions I would be fine, and so they didn't take as much of an interest in giving me good advice as they could have (several professors I am still in touch with have expressed this to me).
But once again I couldn't get a full ride to a Phd. program (which my professors assured me I deserved) so I said screw it. Philosophy was very self consciously white-male dominated at the time and I don't think my membership in that group helped me at all despite my impoverished upbringing. Which sounds shitty, but I would bet an infinite amount of money that if I had been a woman/minority I would have gotten a full ride from the programs that were flirting with me.
Anyway, so now I am ~23, with just a philosophy BA from a random public uni and a not amazing work ethic. I would take seasonal jobs grading standardized essays, live frugally, and play lots of videogames. I did that for a couple years, lose my GF (looked like Natalie Portman/Audrey Hepburn), who wanted someone with more ambition.
Then I get a job doing some other thing where they were just looking to train up smart underacheivers to impersonate lawyers/accoutants and then have the lawyers/accountants sign off on the work. I was excellent at that. Like way better than my peers....
Which got me basically nothing. When you are making $12-$15/hour (plus a ton fo overtime, so actual pay wasn't terrible) you are replaceable and the people you are dealing with don't have the tools or authority to do much for you even if you are 4X better than everyone else. Plus you are a threat. So then you just stop trying, and look for another job.
So I did this a couple times, establishing a really good level of performance somewhere, and then if they couldn't reward that (which they almost never could), taking those rave reviews and references and getting a slightly better job.
But the big thing that changed over time was just disapointment and disatisfaction with my income and life station and future, and seeing that if I didn't put in more, I wasn't going to get more. No one in an office cares if you know more about Indian history than the girl who is from India and know more statistics than the in house statistician if you are there to process paperwork. They mostly just want you to do process paperwork like a robot. The world doesn't owe you shit, and doesn't care if you are smart. So use your smarts to actually beat your peers rather than expecting to be rewarded first.
Anyway, so keep switching jobs and impressing, but don't stick around if they don't reward it. Negotiate HARD for yourself. Know your value. If they would have trouble replacing you don't be afraid to make ultimatums about compensation, but also have a new gig lined up so you can follow through with them.
I did luck out in that I randomly did stumble at one point into an area where there was a low level of established expertise, in part because the subtopic was jsut a couple years old. Stuff that was difficult, but didn't pay amazing and so doesn't attract super bright people. I was able to just blow people out of the water there, mastering things in days/weeks the few established players struggled with for months. And once I had a big enough profile as *the guy*, I just went freelance and now all the work comes to me.
TLDR: Work ethic for me came from leanring that talent isn't enough. Finding areas where there is potential for growth invovles searching the space a lot, and also I would focus on areas that are *new*.
There is much more room for growth being the 50th person working on a law that was passed 1 year ago, than the 50th person working on a law that was passed 30 years ago. In the latter case all those people ahead of you have MANY years of experience on you, and intelligence can only get you so far. In the former case intelligence and the ability to learn quickly matter a lot more.
Yeah, sadly that corroborates my suspicion that intelligence on it's own isn't worth that much.
I don't think this blog's readership is selected for initiative or grit etc. So the high average income must be a statistical artefact, like some comments said below, or it reflects a few outliers.
Some of this seems like useful advice, not sure your ex-gf looking like Natalie Portman is that relevant, is it closing time at the water whole or something ;) but thanks anyway
Intelligence isn't worth much as a fact. Applied intelligence where you use your ability to think quicker and clearer and learner faster than your peers is valued. But you need some good work product to deonstrate that.
As fo the GF comments, more just getting across why I was so broken up about it at the time. It is kind of an important point in terms of my motivation. I was ~24/25, with a dead end job, and a GF who was better (IMO) than any likely replacement had left me.
In the end it worked out and I did do better, but there were a lonelyish couple years in the middle (mostly dating people I had zero long term interest in) and that helped a lot with my motivation to work harder. Moving backwards in mate quality can be a difficult pill to swallow.
The average income is like $50k and not that hard to beat. Especially if you're a bunch of engineers with an average income in the six figure range (~120k iirc). So yeah, well above average sure. When you check median instead you find the income is below average for a bunch of engineers (probably due to age).
Never underestimate the effect of people being more willing to share a high number than a low number. If there was a reader making $35,000/year and another reader making $250,000, I am confident to say we're much more likely to get that higher report than the lower.
That's assuming people are even being accurate, let alone not just straight out lying. There's very little incentive to lie about a smaller number, but people can be silly and could easily lie about a higher number (or exaggerate, or include total compensation rather than just cash income, etc.).
Just don't trust anecdata when data are available.
>...include total compensation rather than just cash income
Isn't the implication to cite TC not cash income (by which I think you mean base income)? The question is about income after, not salary.
Also, being a millionaire isn't all that impressive in VHCOL cities (majority of readers here) especially when one is older.
Tech nerds, isn’t it?
> On the reader surveys the average income of readers(with jobs, not students etc.) always comes out crazy high, ~200k (!?) I think
I think the distribution of incomes is right-skewed (because it's very possible to increase your income by +9x, but not by -9x), so statistically, the mean should be larger than the median.
This is it. The median income of an employed non-student United-Statian reader was $102k (close to the median salary in the bay area at the time) compared to a mean of $210k which drops to $150k if 2 extremely high-income data points are excluded ($100M and $80M/year).
I wouldn't hold my breath for an extremely high salary. Reading the blog has a higher predictive value for being in the bay area than having >1SD salary in the area you're in (citation needed).
And anything else power-law distributed, where having more is the best predictor of getting more, like number of friends, or population of cities.
Which Russians fleeing military service are entitled to refugee status? I've written my assessment here: https://willingandable.substack.com/p/which-russians-fleeing-military-service
Most posts on refugee law are either hastily written, lightly researched posts to keep up with what's trending on Twitter, or are posted many months after interest has passed. At Willing and Able, I’m aiming for the Goldilocks zone of fresh, topical takes on refugee law and politics, backed up by research and several days of reflection and accessible to non-lawyers. Please feel free to send me related questions that you'd like me to answer, and subscribe if you'd like to receive new posts. Thanks!
Here's a good article about asking for refuge in the European union. https://meduza.io/feature/2022/10/13/rossiyane-spasayuschiesya-ot-mobilizatsii-imeyut-pravo-na-ubezhische-v-es-no-rabotaet-li-eto-na-praktike
I've started a "finance in India" substack called Boring Money that I hope to make paid someday. Finance writing in India that humans can actually understand is pretty much non-existent and I hope to fill that gap. I'm heavily inspired by Matt Levine, so you might find me trying to "ape" him -- but it's just me trying to find my own voice.
Got some good feedback until now. Here's the latest post: https://boringmoney.substack.com/p/adani-really-likes-loans
No one in India has a sustainably paid newsletter at the moment so I'm pretty pumped about this. Please do share feedback!
Sounds great, I'll have a look for sure! Just out of curiosity - why the name?
Any chance you could check it out?
Appreciate it :)
Oh it's just an ironic take on people find money things boring.
Are these Trump insurrection hearings, as they seem to an outsider briefly watching the TV coverage, a carefully choreographed ham-acted exercise in Democrat propaganda, timed to start just before the mid-term elections? I guess the answer would range, depending on one's outlook, between "No, the timing is pure coincidence" to "No **** sherlock"!
Given the things that caused the hearings they are not propaganda imo. Only someone who had never seen real effective propaganda could think that.
I see some of the blogs you read when I hover over your name, though, so I see why you'd perceive them that way.
Personally I'm left wing, so I think the hearings are not the key thing to fight the mid terms on. But US Democrats are to the right of the British Tories so they don't have a ton of popular policies they could campaign on with actual sincerity.
Well they have to do them before Jan 23, because Democrats are likely to lose the house majority. Republic's are definitely not going to continue to allow the committee to exist if they have the majority.
>a carefully choreographed ham-acted exercise in Democrat propaganda
Yeah basically, but also because there's not really any other way for them react. They aren't going to get criminal charges out of this (maybe for peoples action after the fact like lying to the FBI or something). So they just have to use it for political outcomes. Propaganda is a cynical, though not entirely inaccurate, way of saying it.
I certainly think the Dems are milking this for all it's worth, and it's hard not to see these hearings in context with the totally false Mueller investigation and the two impeachment attempts (both clearly driven by pure assrage over Clinton's loss), but it's worth remembering the confounder of our political process increasingly taking enormous amounts of time. I mean, stumping for the next Presidential election is basically going to start right after the midterms. It's a nightmarish mélange of media and political incentives eating all available attention. There's basically *no possible moment* anymore when a judicial proceeding like this *wouldn't* interfere with some election or other.
Some republicans voted for impeachment, though - probably they weren't driven by assrage, except maybe over Trump's disregard for their personal safety on jan 6
Merely on the timing, it is worth noting that next (and probably final) hearing was originally scheduled for late September but was postponed due to Hurricane Ian.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/jan-6-panel-delays-hearing-as-hurricane-ian-hurtles-toward-florida
If Trump didn't want Democrats to get mileage out of insurrection hearings, he could have just not pretended that he won the election.
Grain of salt me as a huge liberal, but... he fomented an attempted insurrection. It's blatantly antidemocratic and dangerous. Were we supposed to *not* have hearings? Or is the objection just about how they're being carried out?
I don't think they register to me as considerably different than other comparably political trials. I didn't parse them as timed... they just are taking forever and dragging on. But point of comparison off the top of my head - how long did the Leveson Inquiry take? My sense of that was *ages*.
I'm not a huge liberal (tests usually put me somewhat left of center), but I agree with you--the guy tried to launch a coup, he should be in jail. I have been reading conservative writers for a while, but I can't join a movement that wants to launch a coup. Seems un-American.
He literally didn't. If 2 years of investigations finding zero proof that he did hasn't convinced you, what will?
Here he is on tv asking the vp to unilaterally overturn the election result: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-pence-electoral-college-vote-congress-b1783386.html
I think this was part of a plan to remain president despite his election defeat - something which fits the common definition of coup (or at least of self-coup)
Didn't he ask on TV for people to demand Congress to overturn the result of the election?
Merriam Webster:
Definition of coup (Entry 1 of 2)
1: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group : COUP D'ÉTAT
"In its first few hours, the coup seemed a terrifying confirmation of the power of the military, the police and, especially, the KGB."
— David Remnick
Funny, nowhere in this definition do I find "asking the government on tv"
If we were to set aside the question of Trump’s culpability for a second:
Under this definition, do you think it’s fair to say that the capitol rioters themselves were attempting a coup? I mean, the point of storming the capitol pretty clearly seems to have been trying (if ineffectually) to “overthrow or alter” the US government by force.
If we’re operating on this definition, it seems hard to dispute, at the very least, that the mob (or some subsection of it) was attempting a coup.
Asking for a small group of protestors to violently prevent the standard transition of power seems to be asking for a coup by your definition.
>>He literally didn't [try to launch a coup]. If 2 years of investigations finding zero proof that he did hasn't convinced you, what will?
I think it is well past a stretch to say that “zero proof” has been found.
The various investigations bogged down because of partisan bickering, and because proving “when you pumped up your supporters full of fear and anger with baseless claims that the election had just been stolen from you, and then told them things like ‘we're going to fight like hell,’ 'we will not let them silence your voices,' and 'we're going to have to fight much harder,' you *intended* to get your supporters to storm the capitol and overturn the election by violence” is a matter of intent which is incredibly hard to prove.
But as anyone old enough to remember OJ Simpson can tell you, “not enough evidence to support a conviction” is not the same thing as “zero evidence.” When King Henry says “will no one rid me of this meddlesome election result” and then his supporters all storm the capitol with zip-ties to force the ArchPence of Canterbury to nullify the results, what you have will look like circumstantial evidence to some and plausible deniability to others, but it's not “zero evidence.”
Responding in haphazard order because this makes me too angry at the state of society to want to type something coherent and long.
1. I did not say zero evidence. I said zero proof. EVEN WITHIN THIS TRIVIALLY EASILY VERIFIABLE CONTEXT YOU ARE OUTRIGHT LYING. And you could easily have not lied simply by not putting something I didn't say in quotes, repeatedly. Nevertheless, there is ALSO very weak Bayesian evidence that this was a coup attempt.
2. They did not storm the capitol with zip ties. They found them in there. You don't even know the facts and yet you act confident when accusing a man (and who knows how many of his supporters) of capital crimes!
3. 95 percent of the things he said are totally normal political statements that other politicians make frequently "Fight Like Hell" is a particularly cliched. THIS IS NOT AN INCITEMENT TO INSURRECTION. Even the specific statements he made questioning the election are not if unusual, not THAT unusual as we have had multiple elections in recent decades where politicians questioned the legitimacy of the election. This applies to your other comment too, most of which I did not care to read because you're clearly not arguing in anything like good faith. Your examples of things he said are almost all well within the political overton window, things that no one else is considered to be inciting a riot or insurrection for saying.
4. Furthermore, attempting to use or suggesting that someone else use legal procedural shenanigans to change the results of an election is ALSO not that unusual and also not a coup.
5. Protesting is a popularly agreed-upon right in this country. Protesting government actions outside government buildings is included in this. Telling your political followers to go and protest is completely commonplace. Donald Trump was completely within his rights as a president and citizen to do so, and if a small subset of the people he encouraged to protest turned it into a riot, that does not mean he is culpable for the riot.
6. After the protest did turn into a riot, he is literally on the record as telling them to stay peaceful, and then a bit later telling them to go home and disperse. This is not the act of a man who planned to take over the government by violence.
7. None of the rioters shot anyone, or even tried to shoot anyone. The only deaths on January 6 were deaths of the rioters themselves. This is not consistent with claims that this was a planned attempt to take over the government by violence.
8. You cannot just improvise a coup. There is zero proof that Trump took ANY of the necessary groundwork steps required to take a nation over by force of arms. He did not talk to generals about how many troops he would need to capture congress. He did not ask the navy to swear personal loyalty to him. He did not tell the air force to provide him with bombers and fighters. He did not have a squadron of tanks ready to roll in and control the white house and Washington DC. He didn't have deals set up with prominent republican rivals to divide up rulership of the country, or make agreements with foreign governments to provide him support against his own people. He didn't even have an organized civilian paramilitary!
9. Separate from all the informal secret steps one would have to take (and many of which would leave documentable evidence unless the tens of thousand of people involved had perfect opsec), Trump's public governmental actions when he was, I remind you, the supreme executive power in the country also do not fit in with those of a man planning a military takeover of the government. Over the course of hundreds of executive orders he did not do any of the steps that would obviously assist him in a coup attempt, like assigning personally loyal troops to the capitol, or delegating command of the armed forces directly to himself, or changing anything about the structure of government or how elections function.
10. None of this is trivial, and I find the fact that you and other people seemingly don't give a shit about ANY of this just because you hate trump deeply deeply unsettling. You are talking about treason and insurrection, two of the most serious possible crimes in our political and legal system, and you don't care that your evidence is "he said some things I didn't like and then some people rioted"
The evidentiary standards being used to conclude that Trump plotted a coup, ie to take over a nation by force of arms, events that historically result in dozens of deaths, if not hundreds of thousands (depending on how you count), would not hold up to convict someone of fucking shoplifting.
I’m appending do this because I don't want to bloat my first post but I think if you look at the actual text of Trumps Jan 6 speech, ‘“we're going to fight like hell,’ 'we will not let them silence your voices,' and 'we're going to have to fight much harder,'” just does not do justice to it as a summary.
I’ll give him that he does say – one time – that marchers will “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
But… well, there’s also the rest of it. Does it “prove he tried to do a coup on Jan 6?” No. But it’s not exactly what I think of when I think “zero evidence” either.
>>>All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.
>>> Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.
>>> We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen, I’m not going to let it happen.
>>> If this happened to the Democrats, there’d be hell all over the country going on. There’d be hell all over the country. But just remember this: You’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’ve got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.
>>> Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder.
>>> And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
>>> Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election. This is the presidential election. Last night was a little bit better because of the fact that we had a lot of eyes watching one specific state, but they cheated like hell anyway.
>>> In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures.
>>> Make no mistake, this election was stolen from you, from me and from the country. And not a single swing state has conducted a comprehensive audit to remove the illegal ballots. This should absolutely occur in every single contested state before the election is certified.
>>> We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.
>>> We must stop the steal and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.
>>> If we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country because it’s illegal when the votes are illegal when the way they got there is illegal when the states that vote are given false and fraudulent information.
>>> And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
>>> The Democrats are hopeless, they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-capitol-siege-media-e79eb5164613d6718e9f4502eb471f27 for people who want more context (and to see how much more iceberg is under this tip).
Part of the problem with describing it as a coup was that there was no significant amount of force on Trump's side — no loyal military or police groups. A few hundred rioters, mostly unarmed, are not sufficient to seize power in a country of 300 million+.
I don't know what various of the rioters thought they were doing, but I think it is clear that Trump was going on a legal theory, probably dubious, under which there was a legal way of reversing the electoral outcome, one that required the cooperation of the VP.
I think the objections are more based on how they are being carried out. It's being advertised almost as if it were a reality TV show, and the October Surprise factor is certainly huge right now.
Other than people who were obviously decided on the matter even without the hearings, I don't think anyone really cares though. Maybe if this were 2024 and Trump were running for re-election, but it's 2022, Trump isn't on the ballot, and there are a whole bunch of topics that people care a lot more about - economy, crime, abortion.
I don't think it counts as an October surprise if it's been dragging on slowly for over a year and a half.
Maybe, maybe not. It has long appeared that the whole committee was aiming at the 2022 election, and subpoenaing Trump in October before the election seems like a pretty big October Surprise - but maybe it's just a coincidence!
I guess we'll see whether it does anything more newsworthy than what it's done for the past year and a half. If you want an October surprise, it seems like a bad play to keep doing new things every week or two for a full year and a half, since everyone will have tuned it out by then.
I've seen them described as well-orchestrated, but I don't know if that means more interesting than the average hearing, or actually inaccurate?
Relative to the average hearing. Typical hearings are relatively boring affairs. The Jan 6 committee hired a former TV news executive to help produce the hearings. Ostensibly with goal of increasing viewership by presenting a sort of docu-drama or reality TV to increase engagement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/the-committee-hired-a-tv-executive-to-produce-the-hearings-for-maximum-impact.html
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/08/1103785079/a-former-tv-news-executive-is-producing-the-jan-6-hearings
Reality TV hearings for the Reality TV President. Seems appropriate.
(Alternate comment: guess the Democrats *are* capable of learning something from Trump after all)
Are you suggesting that no one involved with any of them had any trials? That's simply false. I'd agree that not _many_ and certainly not nearly all the _deserving_ individuals had trials, but to be fair, most of the riots happened in places with far less surveillance and identifying people is much harder. Although places like Portland certainly had people they could have prosecuted and chose not to.
Are you merely stating that there were no _federal_ hearings? Why would the riots be a federal issue?
I'm not arguing that the riots weren't bad. I think the figure I saw was billions in property damage (often to small business owners who couldn't afford it). And I also don't disagree that the media response was shameful ("mostly peaceful" while fire rages in the background will never not be darkly hilarious).
HOWEVER.....I don't think there is any evidence that anyone tired to "storm the white house". There was a protest that was (as far as I can recall) _actually_ one of the mostly peaceful ones _near_ the whitehouse that was broken up with a lot more force than was probably necessary.
But even if my recollection is wrong (or I just never saw the evidence that it was a riot).....which federal politician was _before the fact_ encouraging _that specific riot_ and telling them to go to the whitehouse? Not cravenly apologzing or making excuses after the fact but before hand egging on? Those are two very different things. If you can find me evidence of a Federal politician, house, senate, or execute branch doing that (or similar before any riot that occured on or near federal grounds), then sure.
The closest I can think is the riots attacking the federal courthouse in Portland, and I very much doubt that any politician was, on any particular event, egging on a particular riot. I am 100% sure that they were dismissing the severity and apologizing for it after the fact, waving it away, etc. But that is _very_ different.
As for "founding of the country was explicitly delegitimized"....so? First Amendment pretty explicitly protects this. It may be dumb and bad, but it's also protected.
I just don't see what you think there should be federal hearings about. People said and did bad things. People who participated in the riots should have been prosecuted and weren't, but that's a state level issue.
The first hearing was on June 9.
Is there anything that looks actually false to you, or do the hearings just seem one-sided?
Haven't they been going on for some months now? I don't doubt some considerations were made for midterms, but given the optics involved, it'd have been equally weird to hold off on such hearings until after the election (or not do/not televise them at all). No Good Choices on this one, I think.
I'm writing the sixth comment of this Open Thread despite living in Eastern Time (it's 3am for me) because I am stressing over my homework.
Here's an interesting fact about myself: I've been extensively writing down my dreams since late 2016. Today marks 6 years minus 4 days since the first dream I ever recorded (on 10/21/2016). I have been sort-of-but-not-really-wanting to write a fanfic of it with some kind of coherent storyline. Also, although the dreams themselves seem to occur at random days, a cursory analysis I recently did (manually counting the number of dreams I had in each quarter) finds that there were two periods where I had unusually frequent dreams: Oct 2016 - early/mid 2017, and early 2020 - early 2021. (The second period is almost certainly due to earlier-COVID19-pandemic isolation effects; I'm not so sure about what caused the first period.)
Please reply to this comment to ask me any and all questions about my dreams.
(EDIT: fixed numbering)
Do events in your dreams correlate with things that happened either before or after the dream? _An Experiment With Time_ is a weird book by someone who wrote down his dreams as soon as he woke up and claims they correlated as closely with future as with past events.
Not really AFAICT. In May 2020, I had a dream that covid was still around that September, which was a success. However, in March 2022, I had a dream that World War III was going to start that May, which was a failure.
Sam Kriss is doing a project on people's dreams: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/strange-news-from-another-star-no This month's theme is death and dying, distant ancestors, and the underworld. Maybe you can contribute!
What were the recurring ones?
My dreams are too high variance for that.
Lots of text written over an extended period is the good dataset for simple text analytics.
"Text as Data" by Grimmer, Robberts and Stewart is a good introduction.
Did you think of enriching your write-ups using AI art generators? As far as I've seen they seem to be quite good at outputting dream-like scenes in their incoherence and distortion.
No.
How long do your dreams last? How "real" do they look? For example, a friend feel the same as in real life, whereas for me, there are few details, some pieces of the "background" are missing.
Having a dream feels like recalling a memory, but in real time.
My dreams' canonical length (as in how long the events in a dream should have canonically taken if they were from alternate universe) seems to vary from a few minutes to a month, with the median/mode somewhere around a few hours.
Thanks, that's interesting. I just had a conversation with a friend a few days ago and that's the first time I learned that dreams can last more than a day.
Wait, that’s not what I meant!
My dreams can *feel* like they take various lengths, but they probably *actually* only take a sleep cycle or so.
Oh I get that, I should have clarified that I was asking about the actual time felt. I've never felt that a dream lasted more than an hour or two myself.
Any luck with lucid dreaming? I've been able to practice the habit of noticing that I do, in fact, dream frequently...but direction eludes me.
Also, do you ever feel so embarrassed by a dream that you don't end up writing it down, even though absolutely no one will ever read it?
I occasionally get lucid dreams, but only when I am sleep-saturated, for want of a better phrase, and thus practically awake anyway. The same applies to clearly recalling seeing color in dreams, which in my case I think has only ever happened when I am almost awake.
I don't think one's dreams are worth worrying about or taking any notice of, except perhaps when they are recurring. In the latter case, either there is some problem or conflict nagging at the subconscious, or the dreamer is one of those people whose minds seem to run on tram lines even when they are awake!
Speculating on how and why dreams first evolved, I reckon they originated when the first fish left the water and started evolving into amphibians. Dreams then were a crude form of "store and playback" memory which allowed the creatures to remember and retrace their paths from land back to water, and were triggered by thirst. Ask yourself, when are dreams most vivid, and the answer is undeniably when one is thirsty, perhaps having had a skinful the previous night! That IMHO is a throwback to our earliest amphibian ancestors.
>one of those people whose minds seem to run on tram lines even when they are awake!
Yes, I'm one of those...it's often difficult to sleep precisely because my brain refuses to shut down, no matter how physically exhausted rest of body is. There's just a real hunger for intellectual stimulation, which largely isn't satisfied in my daily routines. (Hence reading ACX at 3 in the morning, or whatever.) So it makes total sense that it is, in fact, still up to all kinds of shenanigans even while in Hibernate Mode. I guess I didn't notice for a long time cause I had some silly Freudian nonsense foisted on me by early psychiatry, that every dream is supposed to Mean Something(tm)...instead of them just, yknow, happening. So I'd subconsciously discard anything that wasn't a Logical Sequence Of Events based off Some Recent Experience or whatever. Some dreams are nicely ordered like that, most are not.
Well, as the pdf puts it...whether or not dreams actually "mean anything", the fact is that they'll happen whether we want them to or not. And considering the incredible amount of time one spends asleep over a whole lifetime, learning techniques to nudge dreams towards more enjoyable ends (even if not wholly lucid) is a big utility payoff. Not a terribly philosophical conclusion, but I think it's a practical approach to a vexing phenomenon. Dreams are just another belief to make pay rent!
(The most vivid dreams for me are the ones that speak to intense emotions which I'm uncomfortable with/unable to be open about in the waking world...dreaming of having friends/partner <-> deep loneliness is a recurring one, or Finding A Purpose <-> nihilistic emptiness is another. I wish it were something simple like a physical basis, that'd be so much easier to control and experiment with. Alcohol tends to introduce a lot of noise into dreams, if I can remember them at all while hungover the next morning.)
> it's often difficult to sleep precisely because my brain refuses to shut down
I'm sure that is quite a common problem, and I sympathise. Maybe no coffee after 6pm would help!
It wasn't quite what I meant though by "running on tramlines". That was a simile to describe someone set in their mental ways, and inflexible and repetitive in their thinking. I guess we all are to an extent, but it seems more pronounced in some people than others.
I think it has a lot more to do with working unnatural night shifts than when I take my coffee...the scheduling works for some people, I'm sure. But after 4.5 years of waking up between noon-1pm, getting off work at 11-midnight, and never seeing the sun for the majority of my waking hours...the system clock's given up at this point, haha. Turns out that just because someone's naturally a night owl, that doesn't mean they'll necessarily adapt well to a circadian-hostile work schedule. The times when I actually feel drowsy enough to nod right off are always while at work, or riding public transit...rarely while in bed.
Me failing to grasp the actual simile seems to imply that I'm in that group, too. Brain interpreted train -> runaway -> processing speed -> activity -> motion. But the important keyword was actually "track". Path dependence -> inflexibility -> switch costs -> routine -> pattern. (People often compliment me on being creative, and I'm like...no I'm not, I just regurgitate content and references that the average person doesn't know. Lookup tables aren't creative. Acutal thinking-outside-the-box doesn't happen so much with mechanical-oriented brains, I think. "That's against the rules!" Which I guess is why psychedelics are so enjoyable for me, a rare break from such stifling order. Dreams are low-key version of that.)
Nope to both (or at least I wouldn't remember any time the second thing happened), although I think I did come close to lucid dreaming once.
I think that people usually recommend diarizing your dreams and/or Weird Meditative Practices for those seeking to lucid dream. So far, I've tried the former but not the latter, without success. So, if you want to lucid dream, I would highly recommend that you try Weird Meditative Practices (with the caveats that I don't actually know what they are, and also n = 1). But also writing down your dreams might help a little.
Some time ago, Scott linked to Stephan Laberge's "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" pdf (of a book?), which contains a number of such Weird Meditative Practices. The low-power low-effort stuff's been working well - I used to think I didn't dream much, now it's something I notice almost every night - but the Out There stuff...I dunno, it's hard for me to sufficiently suspend my disbelief and just let the woo wash over. Supposedly really works, but it goes against general epistemic hygeine heuristics. Which, yeah, I know, rationality is about winning, and it works, so...yet anytime a message comes wrapped in Gwyneth Paltrow-esque language, it's hard to take seriously, whether the results speak for themselves or not.
Do you ever get bored by your dreams? I once tried to write my dreams down, starting with an unusually colorful one. Some time later I read the text and was struck about how boring that text was. It was like the dream was totally meaningless when I no longer remembered they day before the dream.
Can you pick out a random note of a dream you had and make any sense of it?
To the first question: Totally! I also have experienced having an amazing dream and not being able to write it fully down (several times I think).
To the second question: I think so(?), but the answer depends on what precisely you're asking about.
another dating ad: Lily, 25, English/history high school teacher from Australia looking for a long-term male partner over 26, preferably an engineer. reach out at lilyreadsyouremail @ gmail
for more details, go here https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1425626838991204354
I tick all those boxes, but I can't say I've ever met an English teacher who I've gotten along well with. Best of luck.
I find it interesting (but unsurprising) Hanania highlighted, "Here's a fit, flexible young schoolteacher who's reading the Bible for fun" and "Here's a location independent millionaire who wants to live semi-off grid." Says something about (his perception of) sexual dynamics I think.
_Are you_ in fact a credit card scam? Do software engineers count as "an engineer?"
email to find out!
unfortunately I'm not smart enough to be one, and yes to your second question
I'm not what you're looking for as I am already in a relationship (and not in Aus), but I just finished Gravity's Rainbow and haven't come across many others who have read it. Curious to hear your thoughts, if you're willing to share.
I happened to be on the train to my family's when reading the scene where Slothrop comes into Katje's hotel room after not seeing her for a long time and sticks it in, and she instantaneously orgasms — it aroused me so much I alighted the train to go home
any scenes stand out for you?
I’ve been thinking of changing my user name to Slothrop. Well, I’m happily married, on the wrong continent and way too old for you but I’m glad to hear of an English teacher who likes Pynchon.
happy to hear about your marriage!
Slothrop's dream of going back to the White Visitation and finding the head of the conspiracy against him, only to realize that there was no "head", so much as it was just a bunch of people all fulfilling their role in a bigger faceless system stuck with me in a big way. Reminiscent of Tolstoy for me.
The scene where von Göll predicts that someday everyone will have cameras that fit into their pockets and then all of life will just be a big movie seemed eerily prescient (and reminded me of this ACX Book Review - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the).
The scene where Bianca offers to hide Slothrop and keep him safe but he leaves is heartbreaking in an existential way, which is an unsettling emotion to come at the end of that scene.
A lot of the scenes involving der Racketenstad are striking.
I think the passage that stands out more than any other for me might be: "... do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't *wanted* to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible ..."
Although Proverbs for Paranoids 3 is also pretty provocative.
Reading that book was certainly an experience.
have you read V? also an extravagant reading
I haven’t, GR was my first exposure to Pynchon, and I just finished it a couple weeks ago. Exploring more by him is definitely on my list now.
This strikes me as the perfect opportunity for some self-promotion. I'd apologize, but that would add hypocrisy to shamelessness.
On Substack, I have one post recommending some great piece of fiction on the internet. Lung's Last Ship in Suzhou deserves attention infinitely more than I do.
Other than that, I have two articles rambling on current geopolitics, in French. I'm not certain they're particularly insightful, but you know... that stuff is fascinating. Anyway.
What's to come : I should soon have the time to write a piece violently criticizing an article I read the other day, tying in Aristotle with a reactionary worldview. I swear, these liberals, sometimes...
The name of the article's Liberalism vs the Aristotelian Universe, by the way. Doesn't even try to hide his partisanship, disgusting.
Going to de-rec Last Ship in Suzhou. Here is what I wrote about it in the /r/rational subreddit when I finished catching up 3 months ago (minor spoilers):
Last Ship in Suzhou has been recommended on this sub several times over the past few months, so I read it. I'm not a huge fan of Xianxia, but I'm also not particularly against it or anything.
However, after catching up with the latest chapter (66, which is not the actual chapter count as their are non-numbered interludes, etc, resulting in 88 actual chapters), I have to de-rec it.
It's competently written in the sense that the grammer/prose isn't bad and dialogue is natural enough. And the characters are even somewhat (although not especially) interesting/engaging.
The problem is that both of the two MCs are completely passive. This story has been updating for over a year now and is probably a couple short-to-medium novels long (no idea how to get a good wordcount) and the MCs have not taken a single decisive action nor do they have a clear goal. There literally is not a plot yet. It's just a series of things that happen to the MCs. The closest thing to a goal that either of them have is David wants to figure out about "diving" down realms, which was mentioned by one character some 20+ chapters ago in passing, to see if it can get him home but so far, other than hearing about this thing, nothing has happened towards that goal. Normally in Xianxia, as I understand it, the main driving force of the story is the characters desire to increase their cultivation/power, but neither of the MCs seem to care that much about it, partially because, relative to the rest of the world, it seems to come ridiculously easily, for reasons which are extremely poorly explained.
Additionally, to my taste, the author is far to self congratulatory about their knowledge of traditional Chinese poetry and music. These things are often inserted into the story for, as far as I can tell, no other reason other than to prove that the characters (and therefore the author) know about them.
And of course, there is the relatively common critique (which applies to most things recced in this sub these days, in my opinion) that I have no idea why this story belongs here as opposed to a general webfiction/xianxia sub. The cultivation system is far too opaque to be understandable/legible to the reader, and, as I said, the MCs don't even have goals to pursue which also obviates doing so rationally or avoiding the carrying of the idiot ball while pusruing. If this story counts as "rational" fiction (even mediocre rational fiction) then the term has been watered down to the point of meaninglessness.
> no idea how to get a good wordcount
On the page of the fiction, here https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/41852/the-last-ship-in-suzhou, click on the "STATISTICS" rectangle. At the bottom right, there is a number of pages. If you put your mouse pointer on the question mark inside a circle, it will give you a precise wordcount. This is genuinely one of the worse UI I've ever seen.
Yeah I think I got that reply to the comment when I originally made it. Just didn't bother updating when I copied here. Thanks though!
About the two geopolitical articles, I can't comment on the content, as I don't follow geopolitics at all, but they "feel" relatively neutral which is refreshing. As for the recommandation, it does indeed sounds nice. I think it would benefit from a small definition/slightly more context about what is xianxia and, if the introduction takes patience, give a slight estimate.
It's not really a problem of attention span but of time investment vs payoff. At any moment, I have lots of stuff to watch/read, some for my pleasure, some recommanded by friends, some that seem interesting. Especially for video, I can easily see how much I will need to invest, and have a rough estimate of what I will get back. RoyalRoad doesn't seem to offer a .pdf, .epub or even .txt export. Fortunately there's a word count so I don't have to do it myself, 202 949 words. So between a long day and a small week.
Salut Michel, je essaye lire l’article à propos la guerre ukrainien. Merci pour le pratique.
Merci !
I am exploring (very early stages) a remote mental health startup concept. If you might be interested in brainstorming or joining the team, send a note to protopiacone at gmail. Expertise in online technologies as well as therapy/counseling is welcome.
Hi, I would be interested, can you add the email adress? (Unfortunately I did not find it by googling).
Can a human power a toaster? Answer: Some can, barely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
Although I'm not sure what their message is (maybe "Consume less energy. Eat your bread untoasted."), this demonstration is pretty impressive.
If you eat the toast does that replenish the calories you burnt toasting it?
Let's see. Google says that a slice of toast has 75 kcal, which is ~310 kJ. In the video, they only toasted a single slice in a double chamber toaster (what a waste, shame on them!), so we can double that to ~600 kJ. This took about two minutes at 700 W, which is 84 kJ.
According to Wikipedia, the body is about 20% efficient at converting food energy into mechanical work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_muscle#Efficiency), so those 84 kJ required ~420 kJ, or 1.35 slices of toast.
So the answer is: yes, if you toast two slices in one go.
It becomes much easier if you allow battery storage.
True, but in that case the human doesn't *power* the toaster, they merely generate the *energy* for it.
Power is defined as "the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time". So whether or not you use storage, saying the human powers the toaster is correct even in colloquial speech.
"per unit time" is essential here. If you pedal for twenty minutes to charge a battery to run a toaster for two minutes, you're not powering a toaster, you're powering a tenth of a toaster. In the same vein, you wouldn't say "a car motor can power an aircraft carrier" if you have to keep the car running for a year to charge a humongous battery just to push the ship out of port.
If you consider e.g. an athlete doing a hammer throw, would that athlete, by your argument, also not power the hammer? After all, the athlete merely stores kinetic energy in the hammer until it's ready to do the actual work of flying away on release. Or does the archer not power the arrow because the bow stores the energy?
I'll grant that your average granny on a treadmill would not be able to meaningfully power a toaster (the meaning being to toast a slice of bread) without a battery even if she kept treading for years, because what little power she puts out would be lost to inefficiencies in the toaster system.
This is really a discussion about how you define the system that ultimately does the work; where you draw the lines between energy generation, transmission/conversion, and consumption.
If you want to be really pedantic, both your granny and the cycling athlete from the video area themselves only batteries for the chemical energy they had for breakfast. That breakfast, in turn, was only a storage for solar energy. That solar energy, in turn, was fusion energy, previously stored in hydrogen plasma. And so on.
You're way overthinking this. There's system A, a human, generating 750 W of mechanical power somewhat continuously over the time it takes to toast a slice of bread, and system C, a toaster, consuming 700 W of electrical power over the same timespan. A third system C converts 750 W of mechanical power into 700 W of electrical power.
Can system A power system C? Yes.
Now replace Robert Förstemann with me, system A', generating 100 W of mechanical power. Can system A' power system C? No.
"Can a human power an arrow" is not a meaningful question in this context, because the power generated by the human system isn't continuously fed into the arrow system.
"Can a human power a bow"? Yes.
I was shown this video years ago in an thermodynamics class, to illustrate the difference between heat and kinetic energy. There was also a video about a car crash and that the kinetic energy diffused there was basically equivalent to bringing a glass of water from room temperature to boiling.
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "One Million Merits". If it's this hard to actually power a toaster in real life, what kind of insane reverse e-bikes were they pedaling?
Oh, I have theories on that episode...
Obviously it makes no thermodynamic sense to feed people extra food so they can turn bikes to make electricity. But this isn't like The Matrix, some cruel scenario where the humans only exist to fuel the machines, this is a kind post-scarcity utopia in which the humans exist anyway and we aren't going to kill them out anything so we need to give them something to do, so we put them on bikes and tell them they're doing something useful.
I always think about One Million Merits whenever anyone brings up UBI because this is what I think it is most likely to look like.
Yeah, there was that Glenn Beck novel 'Agenda 21' where everyone has to walk back and forth on an energy-generating board all day.
I'm not sure he's wrong (broadly speaking).
Does it make sense to feed oxen so they can power an electricity producing treadmill?
No, I think even in the most optimistic scenario where you happen to have a lot of hay sitting around for some reason you'd be better off burning the hay in a modern, efficient power plant to turn steam turbines.
But if you had a bunch of oxen and you felt like you needed to give them a sense of purpose and fulfilment...
It would remotely make sense in that such a setup would let you convert chemical energy (cattle feed) into electric energy. However, even by the low standards of bioenergy, it would be grossly inefficient because a lot of the energy would be lost to keeping the animals alive. You'd be much better off just burning the feed directly and use the heat to power a steam turbine, but even that wouldn't be saying much.
So in practical terms: no, given the existing alternatives to produce electrical energy from (ultimately) solar energy, that scheme would not make much sense.
My wife has a psychiatrist who does talk therapy, which means the same person who does her therapy also does her medication management. If you can find that, do. Don't know anything about the other credentials.
If you're right, a poor country just regained a tiny bit of land at some reputation cost.
If you're wrong, a system that could have brought massive amounts of wealth to numerous poor countries was just squashed before it could be shown to work.
In which the poster is a democracy cultist who thinks public poverty is better than a private organization trying to make things better
In which, while there are political partisans on both sides, I'm not one bit surprised about the outcome.
Let's face it, the reason Prospera and other initiatives like it go for Honduras and South American/Caribbean countries is precisely because of the looser regulation - to be blunt, that the guys in power are more likely to do business because they are dreaming of schemes to cream off cash for themselves, and they can force through legislation permitting Prospera-clones by over-ruling the weak systems of law and governance in place.
It seems that indeed the former president who was so gung-ho for ZEDEs has been indicted for cocaine trafficking and extradited to the US:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/juan-orlando-hern%C3%A1ndez-former-president-honduras-indicted-drug-trafficking
“Juan Orlando Hernández, the recent former President of Honduras, allegedly partnered with some of the world’s most prolific narcotics traffickers to build a corrupt and brutally violent empire based on the illegal trafficking of tons of cocaine to the United States,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “Hernández is alleged to have used his vast political powers to protect and assist drug traffickers and cartel leaders by alerting them to possible interdictions, and sanctioning heavily armed violence to support their drug trade. I commend the career prosecutors of the Southern District of New York for their tireless efforts to disrupt the entire illicit drug trafficking ecosystem, from street-level dealers to a former world leader, and everything in-between.”
I'm not saying Prospera or its founders had anything to do with criminal enterprises or any knowledge of same. I am saying that rich Westerners wanting to build toy states go to places like Honduras precisely because of the institutional corruption and system of spoils governance, because that lets them set up without the oversight/interference that Western countries would engage in.
And for that very reason, why expect any stability or keeping your word or that the contract you signed with the last guy is going to be honoured by the new guy who came to power by promising to root out the corruption of the last guy? Like it or lump it, Prospera is tainted by association, and the more enthused they are about "President Hernandez is a forward looking guy who wants to promote prosperity without red tape", the worse they look in hindsight: either knaves, who relied on Hernandez being a corrupt bully to push through what they wanted, or fools who didn't see the kind of system they were dealing with.
They got what they wanted, and now they're getting the rest of it, too. For the very reasons Honduras was attractive to them - weak systems that would let them set up their own independent mini-city state - the same reasons are now biting them in the backside. Contracts mean nothing, law means nothing, what the president wants and can force the courts to perform is what counts.
>that the president wants and can force the courts to perform
Do you imagine that there's some guardian angels floating about the United States, sight unseen, making sure that only laws that get passed, the only actions the government takes, are those that abide by the constitution?
Empirically speaking, the policies of electoral dictatorships are much more aligned with the views of the populace than in "actual" democracies. Which means democracy is a self-defeating ideology *even on its own terms*.
That might make sense if "illegitimate" and "unfree" were meaningful words. They're absolutely not.
But just to recap, your democracy cultism is so strong that you think that your idea of "Democracy" is so important that it trumps both actual living standards resulting from a given system as well as whether or not policies that the majority of people support actually come into existence. I say this being 100% serious, you are a religious fundamentalist.
The article is from May. Scott posted updates both before and after the election; this doesn't have any new information.
Doesn't explain why it's a good thing. We lose an experiment in governance and gain... a tourist hotel.. maybe?
I'm guessing that for some of these people, losing an experiment is government is itself the good thing.
"Controversial legislation passed by the Honduran government in 2013 allowed corporations to set up special economic zones with their own laws, regulation, courts, police forces, and schools."
...so a... town. It's just a town. The state is dissolving towns.
No, the special part of the economic zones is that they weren't subject to normal rules about towns and other regional governments within Honduras. They're being *demoted to* towns. Nobody wants to found a town in Honduras, except possibly Hondurans. (*Do* Hondurans want to found towns in Honduras? Probably, there's a fair number of Hondurans.)
Honestly this is the primary thing that would prevent me from getting involved with any sort of planned city like this. There's no legal status you can be granted, no promise that a host government can make you, that can't be arbitrarily reversed at any time. Unless you have some way to force a host government to play ball, you're sitting on a time bomb.
>you're sitting on a time bomb.
Well the solution is in the problem, then, isn't it?
Nothing there suggests this is good.
Yes, I did, and no, it doesn't. It claims:
- the ZEDE law was unconstitutional
- the ZEDE law was only possible due to corruption
- this will make more money for Prospera's funders
But none of those are a moral claim about ZEDEs. Even if true, which is not established. None of them are claims that Prospera being shut down will *produce good consequences*.
Singapore is a result of an arguably-corrupt government. The New Deal was certainly a result of government action of exactly the same type as this one. (Whether that is considered corruption is debatable, though there is certainly a solid case that it is.) Both of those were good for their countries and for the world. Prospera being shut down is bad for the world.
Which ones? I'm reading the thing as "government nationalizes corporate assets after corporation finishes developing the land under assurances of no nationalization."
Government giving you explicit, written permit to engage in heavy investment before reverting it's policy is a terrible governing practice. It kills trust in the government and makes planning harder & more expensive.
If I can have a 100% guarantee that the govt won't bait-and-switch my investment plan, then as long as I expect return above markets (or other safe-ish uses), I should invest. If there's 50% chances that the govt will bait-and-switch me, then i should not invest unless the returns are over twice over market. The consequence of this kind of govt change of course is to make potential investments unprofitable. Be unpredictable enough, and nothing can be done anymore because everything is to be made illegal unpredictably.
It's not the same government, though, and if Prospera's founders couldn't work out that Central/South American governments are not the most stable and consistent, that's on them.
This was like building on the slopes of an active volcano, and hoping that it would remain dormant.
They're subject to taxes they weren't previously subject to; that's the asset. They've got nine years of development in place, they're stuck losing something.
It works fine on chrome for android
Works okay in Chrome on an Android phone for me. But everything is worse on phones, that's why I stick to the desktop PC.
This is my fault - I asked Substack not to collapse comment threads together, which they were doing to improve mobile speed. I stick to this decision.
It's not uncommon when I'm on this page on a computer to have all functions slow way down, & Mac informs me that "this page is using an unusual amount of energy. Perfomance will improve if you close it." (Thanks, Mac, the problem is my ability to read what's on the page we decline precipitously if I close it.). How can a page of text make such heavy demands on the computer, more than say a full-screen video or Photoshop with a big graphics file open?
I greatly appreciate that your substack is set up for conversation-- the others I've read seem to just show three comments at a time.
I'm curious about this, not knowing much about web development — how much effort would it take for a front-end developer to look at the code and figure out why it is slow on iOS/Safari?
Interesting. I read ACX on my iPhone over Chrome all the time and haven't noticed a problem.
Substack's front-end seems to be badly coded. For me, Substack overall is incredibly slow (20s until responsive on my old computer!), and website benchmarks seem to support this.
Great article, I'm confused as to why noone in the police/fbi connected to the case would not at the very least compare the fingerprints. Seems a very low cost, high reward win for them at best, a minor inconvenience at worst.
It's like Jack the Ripper, everyone is always coming up with a new suspect and new 'proof' - remember Patricia Cornwell claiming it was Walter Sickert?
The article itself states that there have been several suspects and people are always coming up with a new "definitely the Zodiac killer" suspect. I think this guy is the same - I wouldn't put much stock in bloody fingerprints or DNA because in the same way, there have been claims about DNA and Jack the Ripper:
"Cornwell also had a stamp licked by the writer of one of the supposed Ripper letters analysed for DNA, and claimed it pointed to Sickert. However, the analysis could only be of Mitochondrial DNA, and the result could be shared by anything from between 1 percent and 10 percent of the population.
In September 2014, Finnish molecular biologist Jari Louhelainen claimed that his DNA analysis pointed to a different suspect, Aaron Kosminski, which also provoked criticism and controversy."
Next year, someone will come up with a new Zodiac and evidence to back up their claim.
Not only that, but they're *bloody* fingerprints. Maybe there's DNA.
When a place has so many centuries of famous and infamous graduates, it's *very* difficult for any one graduate to shift the reputation much.
That's not really a meaningful categorization. Everything is because of dead white males. Credit where credit's due, after all.
Do you think admitting black students well below the normal academic ability of Oxford students for the sake of diversity is hurting Oxford's academic reputation?
Over half of all PMs went there (another quarter went to Cambridge).
You really have to look at universities on a per-department basis.
Oxford's zoology department has a good reputation and their english lit is legendary but I wasn't massively impressed by the engineering course there (one ought to go to a red brick place that was founded as a 'school of mines' rather than oxbridge for that sort of thing) and the quality of their PPE alumni is somewhat mixed.
Cus Cummings went there which brings it back up.
Yeah true but it certainly helped. He talks about some great tutorials on Athenian democracy, Tolstoy etc where he learned a lot.
Because Boris Johnson
Here is what seems to be a good summary: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/choking-off-chinas-ai-access
It looks to me like a strong bet that China won't eventually develop its own high-end chip industry.
"Can anyone comment on the validity of the statement that the Chinese semiconductor industry was 'decapitated' overnight by American sanctions? "
I'm in the semiconductor industry and have been trying to figure out what is going on. I *can* address how the industry works, though, and a full cut-off of western tech will be bad for China.
The reason is that there are, broadly, four major semiconductor equipment vendors: AMAT, ASML, KLA and LAM.
Three are American (AMAT, KLA, LAM) and one is Dutch (ASML).
You pretty much need equipment from these guys to make chips. If they won't sell them to you then you have a problem. I do not believe that the Chinese have equivalent companies and the tech is difficult so it will likely take a while for them to be replaced.
But ... can't the fabs just keep running with the existing tools? In practice, not really. The tools have consumables, many of which are highly specialized. Once you run out of those then the tools stops working. The consumables also are very high tech so you won't just replace those with Chinese equivalent.
And ... there are about six companies in the world that make the silicon ingots and bare wafers that are the starting point for building a wafer and thus chips. 99% of the wafers come from these companies. All are 'western' if we include Japan, Taiwan, etc. as western. Interestingly, I don't think any are American (but I only looked once and won't swear to this). No base wafer means no chips.
So ... if the cut off is: tools, spare parts, consumables, tech support then ... yeah, this will be very bad of the Chinese semi industry.
Note that all of this is discussing fairly modern processes. I'm pretty sure that China will be able to make indigineous chips with, to pick a date out of the air, year 2000 level tech if they need to do so. Might take a few years, but shouldn't be a problem. But you don't want your semi industry to be 20 years behind.
Well, for perspective, this is the last piece of news I read about it:
> Apple has put on hold plans to use memory chips from China's Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) in its products, multiple sources told Nikkei Asia...Apple originally planned to start using the government-funded YMTC's chips as early as this year, as they are at least 20% cheaper than those of its leading rivals, supply chain executives said...Apple had already completed the monthslong process to certify YMTC's 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory for use in iPhones...Apple originally planned to start using the government-funded YMTC's chips as early as this year, as they are at least 20% cheaper than those of its leading rivals, supply chain executives said...YMTC chips were initially planned to be used only for iPhones sold in the Chinese market. One source, however, said Apple was considering eventually purchasing up to 40% of the NAND flash memory needed for all iPhones from YMTC.
So, this one Chinese chip company just lost an order for potentially half of all iPhone (>half US market now, incidentally) memory worldwide long-term. That's... not small.
The decapitation is looking realer every day.
The Wall Street Journal suggests that the only thing that's really happened "overnight" is that many US nationals have been asked by their employers to restrict the work they do, but that in the end, yes, probably lots of them will have to leave China and the operations there will lose considerable expertise.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-executives-in-limbo-at-chinese-chip-companies-after-u-s-ban-11665912757?st=okp1gqlxzdpwxfb&reflink=share_mobilewebshare
I think decapitate is the wrong word. It's more like an immediate flesh wound that will turn into soothing serious if China cannot address it.
I've read a number of sources that consistently call it an act of major economic and military consequence for China (the noah smith post does a good job of laying out the details).
Here was my take in my own short post from last week.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/did-america-declare-war-on-china
Here's another source, it does quote that twitter thread you mention but it has some other sources/analysis as well.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/biden-declares-economic-war-on-the
Seems real to me. Here's a random news source I just found off Google News: https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/chinas-semiconductor-industry-rocked-by-us-export-controls/news-story/a5b46fb3cfd2651be23a549c38b3e2d6
(As a Wikipedian, finding Officially Reliable™ sources for random-things-you-heard-somewhere is table stakes.)