It’s worse than useless. There are poisonous chemicals in some things we get exposed to, in concentrations that at least may warrant some level of caution. By indiscriminately slapping a warning on everything it makes it impossible to tell what’s actually dangerous. So the end result may very well be a marginal increase in exposure to poisons re. a situation where a more dose-specific warning is used only when warranted.
Short version: if everything is poisonous then nothing is.
It's definitely useless, but similar useless rules hang on in all kinds of bureaucracies, because most people agree they're bad but not so bad that anyone makes it a priority to fix them. See also: taking your shoes off in the TSA line.
I guess the interesting California angle is that it shows a problem with direct democracy, because if it were legislation rather than a ballot measure it would be easier to fix. But it's far from certain it would be fixed anyway.
It definitely says something about bureaucracy and nanny-state-ism. I just don't think it's especially specific in either place or time.
If you’re interested in AI Governance and want to help others find careers where they do the most good they can, this may interest you.
Impact Academy is hiring a Program Director to lead its Project Exploration Program within AI Governance. This position requires a combination of leadership, strategic thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, and an understanding of AI governance.
Having just read the post on AI and intelligence Platonism I'm struck with a question. OpenAI made a great token predictor by, in some part, choosing not to have linguists try to embed their knowledge into the model.
With that in mind if we let a token prediction savant (IE GPT-X) embed concepts into the model why should we expect this to lead to an intelligence explosion?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
I wrote a quick piece on conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia (a very specific case study) -- it might make for an interesting read! (It's to-the-point and quite accessible -- tl;dr celebrities like self-promotion, who'd have thought?)
I haven't seen this recognized much, but many researchers believe that cultures as distant as Australian Aboriginals and the Navajo are so similar they share a cultural root. I write about the most compelling examples of similarities, and how far back the root may go: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion
I just read about a recent advance, where a patient received a pig kidney, and it has so far functioned in his body for a month. It made me consider, what if a pig kidney were not implanted, but instead connected to the circulatory system as is done with dialysis? I could be disposable, allowing the patient to even not take organ rejection drugs, which I presume suppress the immune system. Once the thing goes bad, replace it with a new one.
For a frightening taste of the red pill, arrange a tour of a dialysis center. I used to drive a guy to dialysis a few days a week, what a frightening place. First off, the guy was an admitted alcoholic, who said he used to drink 18 beers before work. Doctors told him he'd suffer greatly if he didn't stop. He said he'd had three warnings of kidney failure before they finally went. In his working days, he was a pipe-fitter overhauling the cooling system on freight train engines. Disassembling, rodding out—cleaning the pipes—reassembling the radiator for the engines. I'm sure this is some heavy lifting and a lifetime of this work results in a pretty fit dude. When I met him, he was 67, and looked like he was 87. Sitting on the side of the road, needing a lift to Walmart to fill some prescriptions, I had to help him get up. He smelled like crap too. Kidney patients don't excrete some salts in their urine, as healthy people do, they excrete them through their skin. Of course he's still a shit-head—a habitual liar, mostly lying to himself—and doesn't bathe every day ...
A dialysis machine is pretty big, they make smaller machines too. Patients sit in what looks like a big recliner, rows of them in a large room—kept pretty cold to prevent nasties growing. A technician connects a large bag with some special salts and two hoses to special ports implanted in the patients arm or chest. Blood is pumped out of their body, through the bag, and back into their body. The typical session is like 3 hours or better. Most patients take in a light sleeping bag or blankets.
In my mind, if you had a pig kidney, it would probably be smaller than a grapefruit. Connect it to the ports, leave it for a day or two, disconnect and dispose of it. Granted, you'd have this package you'd have to carry around, but it would be much better than 3 hours two to three times a week in the center.
The patients lose a shit load of blood in the process. Not like life-threatening, but its two to three times a week, it adds up. You don't go there because things are going well to begin with.
What do contemporary journalists mean when they casually employ the term "late capitalism"? Do progressives use it in an almost value-neutral way to describe a mixed or market economy in the 21st century? Is it meant to signal "I'm a progressive, btw." Might a non-progressive journalist write like that?
Example: In the recent New Yorker piece by Patrick Radden Keefe about the art dealer Larry Gagosian -- an excellent, interesting article -- Keefe writes: "Being supported by a mega-gallery like Gagosian is a gift, but it's complicated: such artists must produce work while this rowdy bacchanal of late capitalism plays out around them."
Is that just how progressives write now, where "late capitalism" just means "capitalism", or should one take it to have genuinely Marxist overtones?
The funniest part is when they complain about something that's a fact of the underlying world, no matter what economic system you exist in.
Like "Ugh, I have to go to my factory job. Late-stage capitalism." Like, what do you think happened if you didn't show up to your job at Tractor Factory #31 in the USSR?! No matter who owns the factory, you need the entire shift to be there on time for it to work.
Rule of thumb: appearance of words "capitalism" and "socialism" makes whatever other words surround them meaningless. I understand that sometimes one has to use, e.g., "socialism" when discussing the history of USSR, but such exceptions are vanishingly rare.
Signalling aside, I think it conveys something like "capitalism is both ethically bad, and also falling apart". So yes, Marxist, in the sense of "currently collapsing under its own contradictions" (not a quote).
In an incredible bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu, our talking heads have managed to take the exact same puerile statements about The Man and turn them into serious commentary by substituting ‘capitalism’ for The Man. If you’ve existed on the social web for more than 10 minutes, you’ll have seen this. Mad about gentrification? That’s just life under capitalism. There might be a supply chain issue for bourbon? Capitalism is broken. In a beautiful stroke of irony the internet is filled with merchandise for sale telling you that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. The sea is on fire?2 Proof capitalism can’t be managed. Someone says you should meal prep to save time? Stop sucking capitalism’s dick, man. Once you notice this trend, you will see it everywhere."
Yeah, that sounds right. I *am* seeing "late capitalism" everywhere now, even in 10,000 word essays which otherwise have no political valence.
As far as I can tell, using that phrase means "Capitalism sucks, and will end soon." I've only seen from the far left, not from regular progressives. I don't think anyone who actually likes Joe Biden would use that phrase.
I'm seeing "late capitalism" used so frequently now in places like The New Yorker which aren't generally associated with the far left that I think it's become a normal progressive thing. I suspect Ian S is correct, and it is just a lazy swipe at capitalism without any serious intent behind it.
Yes, exactly. It's largely just signaling. I live and work deep in the heart of Blue America and was for a while in the habit of asking people who'd dropped "late capitalism" in conversation what they specifically meant by that; mostly I got blank looks or shrugs. Much the same as when I used to inquire after one of my conservative/MAGA relatives had used "the deep state" in conversation.
(And to be clear in both instances there's always the one person who actually has an answer, they definitely exist. That answer will be delivered with big energy and will ramble on and on without ever arriving at any logical coherence. If you're not prepared to treat that as free entertainment I do _not_ recommend making the inquiry...realizing that my wife would simply turn and walk away whenever I did so helped me lose the habit!)
Wait, you think that America's large, unelected bureaucracies that actually run the government exist and influence the direction of the country? YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING LUNATIC!
Looks nice! Are you looking to do this entirely originally, rather than building on any of the existing crossword-fill lists? I think there are standard practices that some of the existing crossword-construction software uses, like scoring entries from 1 to 99 - things like ASPS and SSTS get very low scores, because they're not common words or acronyms that most people use, and get way overexposed because they have good letters for crosswords; if you see an interesting new word that is rising in popularity, but has never appeared in a crossword before, you might score it 99, to make the program try to go out of its way to put it in the grid.
So far it been all original. I’ve looked at the existing lists with scoring.
If I think I want to start submitting puzzles for publication I’ll probably buy one of them.
Many years ago I read that the Times paid a nominal $100 if they printed your puzzle. People mainly sent in puzzles in the hope of bragging rights. It might be more lucrative now.
I think they up it to $500 once you’ve had a certain number accepted. I haven’t submitted one yet but I hope to in the next year or two. It strikes me a lot like academic publishing, where it’s more about the prestige for sure - though I hope Robyn Weintraub is well-compensated for the constantly good ones she produces.
The puzzles have become a lot more fun in the last few years.
Clever word play, interesting rebuses and puzzles within the puzzle that require reading the letters of the answers in an unexpected order are more interesting than the old style that just relied on arcane knowledge to make them more challenging.
"An average-sized dog generates 770 kg of CO2e, and an even bigger dog can emit upwards of 2,500 kilograms of CO2e, which is twice as much as the emissions deriving from an average family car per year."
Well, if we should get rid of cows because of methane and the environmental impact of intensive cattle rearing, I'm up for "and we should get rid of your furbabies because modern pets consume way too many resources and are bad for the planet to boot".
I have a feeling that will go down less well with the "vegan non-cruelty" set than banning farming, though.
Whatever became of those red algae that you can feed the cows to reduce their flatulence? Win-win: The cow feels better with less gas, and produce less methane.
I always had this intuition that emissions from organisms shouldn't count because they are participating in an ecosystem, i.e. the carbon they emit comes from other organisms and is simply transmuted back and forth from atmosphere to biomass.
Juxtaposed with fossil fuels, where carbon is actually permanently sequestered in that form, so burning it represents a recurring cost whereas an organism is more like a fixed cost
Can someone more knowledgable tell me if this is totally wrong?
That would be true for wild animals, but domesticated animals eat food from farms, which produce CO2 because transportation, fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery all take energy.
Domesticated *plants* are also associated with transportation, fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery. Breatharians against Global Warming, anyone?
The animal-specific part is carbon-neutral to a first approximation, because the carbon an animal puts into the atmosphere comes entirely from carbon taken out of the atmosphere by plants that wouldn't have been grown if not to feed the domestic animals. Second-order effects may tilt the balance, of course.
Also, animals mostly don't occur in nature in the sort of sheer numbers that domestication has created. E.g. here is an estimate that livestock now make up more than three-fifths of all the mammal biomass on the planet:
Not that some wild mammals such as bison and antelopes can't or didn't occur in very large herds of course, but in nature those herds wax and wane. There are now around 1 _billion_ cattle on the planet and several hundred million pigs, and those totals are through human intervention kept pretty steady from year to year.
I was about to say this, but you said it better. Animals are part of the "carbon cycle". Burning fossil fuels isn't a cycle; it's a one-way street from underground to the atmosphere.
Actually that's not true. CO2 becomes food for plants. In the past 70 years, since CO2's big rise, we've seen earth greening by about 30%. So, because of CO2, we live in a much greener world. Carbon in the form of organic matter becomes entrained in streams and rivers eventually reaching the ocean, along with CO2 combines with calcium or magnesium and precipitates in warm water, thus sequestering the carbon.
About warming, we're warmer yes, but not hotter. Our day time highs are actually a bit lower, but the overnight lows a much higher. This is actually making the planet more habitable for humans and plants. We see a 'warmer' planet, but experience a cooler planet. The average temperature reported, is the average of overnight lows and daily highs for all locations. A small drop in the daily high is offset by a larger rise in the overnight low. We see the average go up, but we're not 'hotter' per-se.
Sounds about right: a human consumes ~2000 kcal a day. This is 8 MJ. If the man weighs 80kg this works out to 10^5 J a day per kg of flesh. C6H12O6 yields about 6kJ per gram, let’s make it 10. So a kg of flesh needs to eat 10g of sugar a day, let’s say 9. A mole of C6H12O6 is 180g and a dog is 20 kg, so a dog uses a mole of sugar a day. This yields 6 moles of CO2 a day, about 250g. A dog living 4000 days produces a ton of CO2.
I am trying to flesh out a personal rule of thumb and would appreciate others' insights. I have an idea bin in my head labelled "Hypotheses to only consider as a last resort because they are weak to confirmation bias". A trivial example of this would be the idea "I am smarter than everyone in this room and they are all jealous of me". When you believe this notion even a little, it can make all opposition seem like outpourings of spite or jealousy, preventing its own correction. So one should not entertain it before exhausting all other options.
I'm currently considering adding another idea to that bin: "trend X is a social contagion". I define social contagion as an idea with neutral or negative practical value that spreads mainly on its own Coolness Factor among mostly passive hosts. Basically the old school meaning of Meme. Putting that idea in the bin would mean treating everyone, even Those Darn Kids, with a strong presumption of intellectual agency and rational behaviour. Big ask, right?
What I would like from commenters here: pick your favourite purported social contagion (regular suspects on this blog are bisexuality, transgender, various mental illnesses...) and tell me what it would take to FALSIFY your belief that it's nothing but a trend. Would you require RCTs? A proven biological mechanism? Evidence from other cultures or time periods?
It’s not like a social contagion plays no useful role, even if the behavior per se is neutral or negative. It signals who is nearer to the source of the contagion, establishing social hierarchy. Signaling may seem wasteful (take mowing lawns as an example) but it does serve a purpose. Anyway, RCTs (if the methodology is sound) and a proven biological mechanism would do the trick for me.
I don't know if there's a bright line between "social contagion" and "not a social contagion".
If it's 1996 and you're dancing the Macarena, then obviously this is partially a social contagion. But it's also due to intrinsic factors -- you are the sort of person who is likely to engage in a popular dance craze when one comes along.
Similarly, transsexuality is partially a social contagion in that people are much more likely to identify as such if it's popular around them. But it's clearly not a pure social contagion in that only people who have some preexisting issues with their gender identity are likely to start identifying in that way.
For something to be a pure social contagion I think it would need to affect everyone more-or-less equally regardless of any intrinsic factors. I can't think of anything like this... although something like a panic in a crowded area might be close.
I'm in the belief there's multiple causes, both for homosexuality, and trans.
1. organically: there are people who are just wired to prefer the same sex, or believe they are of the wrong sex. Perhaps they're chimeras, which are co-joined twins where some parts of their body are part of the male child, and other parts are part of the female child. All the niceties of development worked out that they formed as typical, with one head, two arms, and two legs all appropriately attached in the evolutionary most efficient manner. Perhaps there is some trauma at the hands of the opposite sex, and nothing can break my fears.
2. rebellion: I hate everything about my parents, family, society ... I reject this all, and do everything I can to live my life the opposite. Some people come from truly awful families, and this could be a viable coping mechansim.
3. social contagion: I'm an edge lord following my edge lord friends in adopting the current edge lord fad.
I suspect it's useful to think about trends in several ways - both treat it as though every single person is adopting it for a good, considered, intrinsic reason with no social influence, and also do the opposite, treating it as though every single person is adopting it entirely due to social and structural factors rather than anything intrinsic to the behavior. Both are likely factors in every trend, but it's easy to think about them only one way (the rational way if you're doing it, and the structural way if others are).
So what does that look like for you in practice? Do you try to hold a mixed belief based on confidence (40% rational, 60% structural) or do you swap from one to the other as convenient?
I suspect almost every trend has some combination of intrinsic value, and extrinsic social dynamics, that explain why it got big. People naturally tend to think of it entirely in one set of terms, and thinking entirely in the opposite set of terms is going to be useful exercise for getting a more accurate representation.
Public health authorities in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, at least, deconstructed and debunked girls' enthusiasm for the myth of 'trans' years ago. One would have a hard time brainwashing them into turning back the clock. They're rather keen on Mother Nature, and She firmly objects to abuse.
Time and observation, mainly, over the course of decades. The corollary being that one can't know for certain what the causes of present behavior are until far in the future. Which isn't to say that one can't make educated guesses, but it's important to be aware of all the uncertain foundations one is basing conclusions on.
There's probably some "rationalist virtue" or another about how the strength of one's belief should only be in proportion to one's ability to disprove that belief. I'd even expect an equation derived from Bayes' Theorem could illustrate this.
A nitpick I have is the phrase "nothing but a trend". Suicide and mass shootings are both socially contagious means of expressing certain feelings, and those feelings themselves probably have a much stronger basis in non-social reality but may also have an aspect of social contagion too. But the effects are very real. Similarly, with something like trans, even if it's largely social contagion, the effects on people's psyches may be extremely real, just as real as any other part of their personalities.
Completely agreed. I think the real-world effects are the main reason WHY people feel the need to track down a root cause, rather than wait for time to vindicate them.
I’m really not trying to propose my own rules of thumb as a rationalist virtue. I just like to be careful about ideas that are Sticky In The Brain, since I’m very susceptible to that. If people here have workable ways to reality check themselves, on this subject or others, I’d love to hear about that too!
There is a difference between "I *know* how the other person feels" and "I *want* the other person to feel okay". Extreme example: a smart psychopath knows but doesn't care; an altruistic autist cares but doesn't know.
People treat different groups differently; for example someone may love their family, be indifferent to strangers of the same race, and hate people of a difference race (and maybe make an exception for one person of a different race who happens to be their colleague, because that is a cool guy).
In general, higher IQ helps. That is a correlation, not a perfect 1:1 relation.
From the perspective of knowing, intellectual reasoning can support (or substitute) one's instincts; simple reasoning like "if the other person is crying, they are probably sad", or complicated reasoning such as figuring out how a person with certain traits might feel in a complicated social situation. Generally, instincts work better if the other person is similar to you (because then you simply think "how would *I* feel in the situation as I perceive it?"), intelligence is required to notice things like "I enjoy X, but the other person hates X, so they are probably not happy in the situation X".
From the perspective of caring, intellectual reasoning can make you think about universal norms, for example to notice the tension between "it is good when I steal something from others, but it sucks when others steal stuff from me, so... maybe I should promote the norm of not stealing... which means I should stop stealing myself". That includes realizing that other people are sad when you steal from them (even if you don't see their faces at the moment).
I believe most tests of empathy test accuracy of one's perception of others' emotional state, not capacity to consider the feelings of others who are not present. For instance there's an interesting test of accuracy of reading someone's emotion if you see just their eyes -- I believe it's called "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" and for some reason it used to be available on Amazon, which would also score it at the end. Not sure whether still is. As I recall average score is 28 our of 36, and scores below 23 suggest the subject is pretty deficit at reading other's feelings, and may be on the autistic spectrum. Anyhow, it's just a bunch of pairs of expressive eyes, with multiple choice answers where you indicate whether you believe the person is, for example, bored, irritated, frightened or enraged.
It seems to me that what you are talking about is more properly called compassion. Pretty much everyone has a switch that turns off compassion for groups defined as Bad or Not Human. Many of us do it for the outgroups. Most of us do it for animals we eat for meat. 99.9% of us do it for insects in our homes.
perfect! high school bully read the mind of his victims through their eyes or body language. and the 'reading' is very accurate, I guess. so a compassionate person in general a highly intelligent person? what do u think?
I think that (a) compassion is pretty different from accuracy reading actual people in your lifeand (b) the research about bullies is that they are good at bullying, which involves reading the mental state of your victim, but overall they are not very accurate at assessing the points of view of other people. In general, bullies see others as bullies too, even though most are not, and so misread non-bullying requests for information or friendly overtures as attempts to get one-up and coerce them into behaving in a way that pleases the other.
Just because two things are correlated doesn't mean you expect everyone high on one is high on the other. It might be a useful default, but there are going to be enough cases where they come apart that you can populate a community entirely with people selected for being high on one and low on the other.
I expect the IQ-empathy correlation, while probably very real and verifiable, is likely much weaker than the height-weight correlation, and probably even weaker than the Californian-rich correlation.
I think having high empathy as a personality trait is perfectly consistent with "dehumanizing" some groups of people and treating them as if they are invalid targets of empathy. In fact, I think this was the normal and expected human condition until quite recently, and is still regrettably common.
When I was a college student I ended up dead broke in Athens and worked for a while cleaning rooms in an inexpensive hotel. The owner, who was a big hot-tempered Greek guy, often ran out of clean sheets, and when he did I was instructed to just smooth out the old sheets from the last person. Lots of grubby travelers came through that hotel, people who'd caught dysentery in Africa, people who never bathed, people who got drunk in the room and then peed in paper cups and lined the full cups up on the table before leaving. I personally caught crabs there, and not from sex. Plus sometimes the sheets were stained in easily recognizable ways. Anyhow, when he told me to reuse the old sheets, I reused the old sheets, and did the best I could to hide the sex stains down at the bottom and smooth out the sheet wrinkles. What else was I going to do? Call the Greek board of health? Quit my job? Leave little notes for new guests, "don't sniff the sheets?" To be honest, after a little while I stopped feeling shocked and guilty, and just got used to it. It was Greece, that's what the hotel-owners did, you know? Of course I realize that what I did was nowhere near as what Nazi's did, but it gave me a glimpse of how the process works.
For an English-speaking example, you could look at Duncan Campbell Scott: a Canadian poet whose works IMO demonstrate a deep empathy for indigenous peoples, who at the same time designed and oversaw a system to culturally genocide them.
Early 20th century? That totally makes sense. The whole point was they were going to save these people from their 'backward culture'.
Richard Henry Pratt in the USA had the famous quote "kill the Indian, save the man". It was exactly the same thing. Anglo-American (in Pratt's case) culture is superior, these people have an inferior culture, they're human too, shouldn't we save them?
It's not totally nuts, especially if carried out by the people in question themselves--the Meiji Restoration was basically the Japanese deciding to adopt Western culture to turn themselves into a major world power, *and actually succeeding*. They picked the wrong side in WW2, but even after that got to be one of the world's leading economies.
In two months I'll be running the Dublin Marathon to raise money for Focus Ireland, a charity that does great work for the homeless in the city. If you'd like to support this excellent cause, please consider donating to my fundraiser here: https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/FionnMurray
Many people aren't particularly interested in donating money to some random charity. But they are interested in their friend, and the friend's weird hobby. So if the friend wants to get people to donate, the friend can say "I'm only allowed to enter this special event for my weird hobby if I can get X people to donate Y money to Z charity". This leverages social connections into real charity.
An extra bonus comes when the hobby is a difficult thing, like running a long race, where people often feel like bailing halfway through. If the donors pledge to donate $10 per mile you run or whatever, that helps give you an extrinsic incentive to stick with your running even when you want to quit.
The particular thing with marathons, as FionnM has implied, said, is that there is a limited number of people who can take part in a given marathon. The London Marathon is the one I'm most familiar with from friends and family having run it.
There are essentially 3 ways to get into the London Marathon:
-You can be an elite-level marathon runner who has completed another race below a certain time, in which case you are guaranteed a place. There are also some places allotted to runners who have recently posted an outstanding time for their age group, and to members of accredited running clubs (in the latter case, the club gets to decide who gets to represent it).
-You can enter a lottery. For most people, the odds of success in this lottery are less than 4%.
-You can get in touch with a charity, which has bought a certain number of guaranteed entries (though a charity-specific scheme) and, as FionnM says, gives them out to runners willing to raise a minimum sum.
The charity buys a spot in the marathon and awards it to me on the condition that I meet a minimum fundraising threshold. It's a charity whose mission and work I really admire (for years they've been one of the charities I donate to every month as part of my Giving What We Can pledge).
Because runners tap their social networks to get donations, and homeless people usually don't have social networks full of people with significant amounts of spare money they'd like to donate on behalf of a friend's odd hobby.
I consider it poor form to take the piss out of someone trying in earnest to raise money for a charitable cause. Don't want to donate, fair enough, but don't be egregiously obnoxious.
I have a question: why is it that studios and book publishers invest so much effort and money in making new films and publishing new books, instead of endlessly re-publishing and marketing stuff from their archives?
You can only see a movie for the first time once in your life. Subsequent viewings might also be enjoyable, but it will be a different sort of enjoyment. This is as true on the population level, as it is on an individual level. We have jokes about spoiling Citizen Kane or even The Empire Strikes Back for exactly this reason: it's pretty much impossible for people who are steeped in our culture to watch the classics in the same way as the audiences back in the day did.
This addresses the "why is novelty a value in itself" part of the question, but there's an even simpler reason: culture marches on.
Imagine, if you will, that the original Star Wars (Ep. IV) was the Last Movie Ever Made - after which the only thing playing in cinemas would be either Star Wars or older. It so happens that Star Wars was a bit of a groundbreaking picture (which is exactly why I picked it), so a person living in this hypothetical world might reasonably ask "Why isn't anyone trying to build upon - or even exceed - what Star Wars has achieved?"
We know that in our world this would prove a solid business strategy. Therefore, unless we somehow forced everyone to stop making new movies, we would find that someone would be tempted to try, would find success with the strategy, and thus get everyone else following suit.
It's worth remembering that no amount of hype beats having a product people find appealing.
That's true, except few movies and even fewer books break new ground. Also, I'm not suggesting everyone rewatch the same movies; there are enough classics for most people to watch a new old film every time they go to the cinema.
I mean, with old books, you can of course buy them. It's not like people who want to read Lord of the Rings have a trouble finding a copy (at least in rich countries). With old movies, it is trickier, but arthouse cinema market exists and fills more or less exactly this niche.
And why is there less marketing of the old stuff than the new stuff? Maybe because old stuff is already firmly established as good, so it does not need as much promotion. Bad old stuff doesn't get republished.
When I read Dracula, there was a foreword explaining that it had been significantly abridged because substantial parts of it were basically pop culture references that are lost on modern audiences (such as characters marveling at these new telegraph machines). So I think one part of an answer is that even works that aren't primarily about current culture are still tailored towards the current culture to a significant extent.
I also recall seeing an online argument where someone complained that Moby Dick made various objectively bad storytelling decisions, such as going on long technical digressions that weren't important to the plot, and someone else defended it by saying that it did a good job for its time and people back then didn't know as much as we do now about how to write a good story. So I think another part of an answer is that The Arts actually do advance. Not every change is a fad; people occasionally invent new storytelling techniques and cinematography and so forth that are genuinely more effective than what came before. I don't think this advancement is very fast, but I think there's more than zero of it, which statistically means that older stuff tends to be at a disadvantage.
"When I read Dracula, there was a foreword explaining that it had been significantly abridged because substantial parts of it were basically pop culture references that are lost on modern audiences (such as characters marveling at these new telegraph machines)."
Please fill in for yourself my shocked swearing at this. How the hell is this supposed to give you the full effect of the work itself? What kind of lack of understanding about "this will give modern readers an insight into the past, and into how technological advances that are nowadays so familiar as to be trite to us were novel and even disruptive when first introduced" does this betray?
This is flat-out saying "modern readers are too shallow and lacking in attention span to be able to appreciate older works, all they are interested in are the sex'n'horror bits, so we're doing an edit for their social media-addled brains".
This is like giggling over how you've edited down the Iliad because all that stuff about spears and the rest of it is ancient pop culture that modern audiences can't relate to. Just imagine Achilles is Rambo or John Wick with the guns, not a sword.
I'm genuinely shocked here. And I genuinely suggest you get an unedited down 'for modern audiences' version of the book to see what the real thing is. Maybe you'll think it's boring, but maybe you'll get an insight into "hey, this latest tech fad that we think is so ground breaking is going to look pretty uncool in fifty to a hundred years time, too" and get some empathy going for the people of the past.
EDIT: If Kids These Days don't even know what a phonograph is, I think it's no harm for them to learn, and to learn to put in its place in time their enthusiasm over the latest model iPhone or whatever the newest tech advance is for The Youth; this too shall become a phonograph of its day:
"Mina Harker’s Journal.
29 September.—After I had tidied myself, I went down to Dr. Seward’s study. At the door I paused a moment, for I thought I heard him talking with some one. As, however, he had pressed me to be quick, I knocked at the door, and on his calling out, “Come in,” I entered.
To my intense surprise, there was no one with him. He was quite alone, and on the table opposite him was what I knew at once from the description to be a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much interested.
“I hope I did not keep you waiting,” I said; “but I stayed at the door as I heard you talking, and thought there was some one with you.”
“Oh,” he replied with a smile, “I was only entering my diary.”
“Your diary?” I asked him in surprise.
“Yes,” he answered. “I keep it in this.” As he spoke he laid his hand on the phonograph. I felt quite excited over it, and blurted out:—
“Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?”
I barely remember anything even of the version I read (this was years ago), so I'm certainly not going to try to argue about specific cuts, but your general arguments seem pretty extreme to me.
1) I think there's a huge difference between cutting explanations of things the audience already knows vs substituting familiar things for unfamiliar things; I'm pretty shocked that you are putting these on a par.
2) Historical insight is not the same as good storytelling; it's definitely *possible* to write passages that are great at the former and simultaneously terrible at the latter. Expecting everyone else to optimize for whatever parameters you care about is not reasonable, and if you're going to call someone dumb or shallow the first time they pick one story for entertainment value rather than research value then you're condemning approximately everyone who has ever lived.
3) Lots of pop culture references don't even provide historical insight unless you already know huge amounts about the time period. For example, I doubt a political cartoon from today's newspaper would mean anything to an average person 300 years from now.
Now, maybe these particular editors were terrible; I have no idea! I just bought the top search result on Amazon. But if you're trying to make a general argument that cutting out pop culture references from older works is reliably terrible, then I don't buy it at all.
Part of reading older works *is* the difference in style, attitudes, and a window onto the past.
If all a reader wants is the Bridgerton experience, where Regency ballgowns are draped over 21st century attitudes to feminism, sexual orientation, gender and race, then fine. But then why bother reading the originals, just read the plethora of modern YA products out there.
Part of the whole background of the novel "Dracula" is that it is set in the Modern Era (for the modern era of its time). That's why we get all the references to the Modern Woman in Mina, and shorthand, and telegraphs, and the phonograph diary and the rest of it. Stoker is writing a novel that is taking place in his Present Day, that's why everyone in the book goes "Vampires? What are those?" and when explained to them "But that's peasant superstition from a bygone age, everyone in the Modern World knows there are no such things" (I mean, I'm having an exchange right now with Bugmaster over that very mindset right now - they're upholding the 'this is the modern era of science and rational intelligence' versus 'blind credulous faith in Bronze Age superstition' - apologies if I'm over-stating their position there).
Cut those references out, and you weaken the book. Then (for our Modern Audience) it's just another old book when of course people believed stuff like that. They don't get what made it the hit it became.
"Lots of pop culture references don't even provide historical insight unless you already know huge amounts about the time period."
I think it's no harm for people to have to learn about things that happened further back than ten minutes ago. Maybe it's just me, but part of the pleasure of reading older works is finding out "hey, I don't get that reference", looking it up, and learning something new to broaden my knowledge of the world.
I entirely agree with you, but this is a longstanding argument that I've seen professional editors come out on the other side more than once. Decades before they started rewriting Dahl, Fleming, Christie, etc. for modern cultural sensibilities, there were extensive arguments on Usenet over a prominent editor's practice of getting rid of all the casual smoking, changing "newshen" to "newscaster" when describing a female reporter, etc.
He basically said that it was what it took to make them commercial, and that he had the sell-through numbers to prove it. And it's a fact that he and his company brought a lot of old stuff back into print that wouldn't have been available otherwise, and made an evident success in a field that isn't necessarily always friendly to mass-market reprints.
So I can't say he was wrong. He successfully sold forty-year-old stories to new readers. It's easy for me to think they would have sold similarly without the updates, but he worked in the field for decades and I haven't.
But I still hate it. As you say, for me a lot of the point of reading old books and watching old movies is to get a feel for different times and places. (There's a saying that every old film is a documentary, and I'm often fascinated by the little background differences.) It really bugs me to have that interfered with.
Even more in SF: I want to know when I see a pocket phone in a 1940s Heinlein story that it's something he imagined, not something the editor inserted because he thought the kids today wouldn't relate to a telegram.
If I want to see modern furniture or sensibilities in a period story, I can read any number of badly researched modern period pieces. Having them in a genuine old story is like going to Rome or Paris and only eating at McDonalds: what was the point of leaving home?
And I do feel as if the practice contributes to general historical illiteracy, even if it's basically spitting in the ocean. Certainly backprojecting current expectations can't help with the widespread sense that there's been no progress on various fronts in recent decades.
(Last week Slate featured the observation "There may never have been a time when 'artist' was a secure way to make a living, of course; there may also have never been a time when it was worse than it is now." Words fail.)
But these companies do re-release archival material. Electronic readers like the Kindle have led to vast swaths of literature being republished in electronic form. With movies and TV shows, old material is put out on physical media or syndicated to cable networks. So I don't know why you think archival material is sitting around unexploited. Check out the schedule for Turner Classic Movies.
If you're asking why companies invest any money in new product, instead of restricting themselves solely to selling old material, it's clearly because new product sells, and sells better than archival material does. Why content yourself with $X in profits from archival material when you can have $X from the archives plus $Y from new material, especially when $Y > $X.
My point is they underutilise old material, not that they don't use it at all. The box office is dominated by new films, not re-releases. And 'new material sells' doesn't answer the question - it remains: _why_ does new material sell?
Okay, the answer seems to me obvious: Hollywood (to restrict ourselves to one commercial art form) prefers to invest in new material because it does NOT believe it is under-utilizing its libraries, and believes that pushing archival material in preference to new material, as you suggest, would lead to materially worse outcomes. And they believe this, clearly, because they believe that consumers will spend more money on -- because consumers have a far stronger preference for -- new material.
Now, given that Hollywood believes that consumers prioritize novelty, there are two more questions. First, is Hollywood correct? And if the answer is yes, then comes the question you end with: "Why does new material sell?"
So first, what evidence does Hollywood have that the manufacture of new content offers bigger and better returns than the endless recycling of old content? Well, there's 90 years of box office performance to back the belief up:
Between the mid-30s and the mid-70s, Hollywood studios regularly re-released their successful films into theaters. "Gone With the Wind" (1939), for example, was re-released theatrically in 1942, 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1974. (And these re-releases all occurred before the coming of home video; also, the movie had never been shown on television. If you wanted to see GWTW, the only way was by attending one of these re-releases.) These re-releases were profitable, but they generated NOTHING close to the grosses that GWTW had piled up in its first release. Then with the coming of home video in the late '70s, the theatrical market for re-releases collapsed: GWTW's 1998 "60th anniversary" re-release generated only $6.8 million at the box office. (And this was not pure profit; there would have been substantial marketing costs to cover.) This compares to the $125.6 million that "The Truman Show" grossed, and that wasn't even a Top 10 film. What holds true for GWTW holds true for any re-release. (With the semi-exception of re-releases that were tricked out with new special effects or 3-D.)
Now, if 90 years of watching how theatrical re-releases stack up against first releases provides reasonable evidence for the empirical claim that consumers prefer novelty, we can move to the second question: "Why do consumers prefer novelty?"
And here I don't know what to say. It just seems to me brute fact that novelty is widely prioritized. Why that should be is not a question of corporate financial strategies, but of human psychology.
Then I think your follow-up question, maybe to be posted in the next Open Thread, would be about the psychological preference for novelty (at least in movies). Instead of encouraging speculation, I'd suggest asking a question like this:
Hypothetical: You are to be comfortably exiled to a desert island for a period of five years, but you will not be cut off entirely from civilization. You will be given a TV and a satellite dish that will be locked permanently to one of two TV channels. The first is a network that only shows new and current movies. The other is a network that only shows movies made before 1970. Stipulate that, over the 5 year period, each channel will show the same number of movies and the same number of repeats, so that one channel will not broadcast a greater number of individual movies than the other. Which channel do you chose to subscribe to for the duration, and why?
This should give some testimonial insight into whether and why people might prefer novel to archival films, and what the ratios are.
Frankly, I'm curious what your choice in the above hypothetical would be, and why.
I think that Disney is sort of doing that now with all of their live-action remakes.
As to why they don't take the original movie, I think it's because of cultural and technology changes. Just to take Disney again, a lot of their princess movies haven't aged super well, and are perceived as sexist now. By rewriting parts of the script, they can fix that, but that requires making a new movie. Sort of like why Shakespeare plays get reimagined a lot. Audiences generally don't want to hear old English, but the plots are still good.
Last point is just CGI. As CGI improves, older movies will look less impressive.
Granted, innovation is part of the answer (though definitely much more so in film than literature!). Is it really the case though that all audiences care about is CGI??
Disney engaged in the strategy of living off their catalog for a long time. They would re-release Snow White, or Cinderella, or one of the others on a certain cycle of years. They never made them available for television.
Culture has now caught up with them, and they need new forms, but for as long as they could, they milked it.
So this is an interesting one. I suppose this could be a good reason - but studios fail to capitalise on films that still enjoy copyright protection too. And, you could still make money off property that's out of copy right - in fact, if you're a cinema chain, you'd make more money then, since you wouldn't have to pay royalties.
People already have the stuff from their archives. If it's popular enough to bring back, that means everyone's already seen it. And time marches on. I don't imagine the current generation thinks anything of Office Space, or Chasing Amy.
And people get into creative businesses because they want to create things. Stephen King created the Richard Bachman pseudonym just so he could write more books in the same year. People make new things because those things are THEIRS.
And how much money do they actually put into new books, anyway.
You can absolutely go to a theater to watch Office Space, or The Big Lebowski, or (the obvious one) Rocky Horror Picture show. It's just that it's only small theaters in big cities, because these screenings don't really make sense unless there's enough people who want to do it at the same time to create a cult ambiance.
Marketing spending is supposed to be a multiplier: If you spend $1 million marketing a film, the calculation is that it will increase sales by substantially more than $1 million, because the extra spending needs to pay for itself at a minimum.
Are you proposing that Hollywood could generate just as much money at the box office by marketing old movies as they do marketing new movies? Then, given that the marketing for a major, wide-release film will be approximately $100 million, and that the theaters will only return 50% of the box office to the distributor as a licensing fee, you would have to think it likely that putting $100 million behind an archival release would generate at least an additional $200 million for it at the box office. Because those are the economics of new films that you are proposing to replace with re-releases of old films.
Last year, the first "Avatar" was given a wide re-release as a lead up to the release of its sequel. Yet despite the benefit of its near placement to the sequel's release, and the halo effect of the market spend for that sequel, the "Avatar" re-release only generated $24 million at the box office. Would you really bet an extra $100 million in marketing in the hope that that money would generate an extra $200 million in box office sales for the re-release?
You'd have to consult a marketing expert, and I lack the magic chalk to draw a summoning and binding circle. (I kid!)
I suspect the answer would be that marketing doesn't work unless there is something of true value to market -- there can be no sizzle without at least a little steak -- and that, if my comments above are correct, there is too little steak in archival material to make the kind of sizzle that would generate the kind of money that novel material generates.
Certainly it's the case with movies that gigantic marketing spends are not closely correlated with successful theatrical runs: lots of movies get big marketing pushes, but bomb.
I think the issue is that the back catalog is so big that it’s hard to get a lot of people who all want to watch the same one on the same day, unless it’s a film that has a cult following. Especially ever since vhs and dvd and streaming made it possible to watch almost anything on almost any day.
But with a new thing, most people who might want to watch it haven’t had a chance to yet.
Well how long does this work if people just stop creating new things and recycle the old things? When should this cut off have taken place.
After Shakespeare? After Raging Bull? After Moby Dick? After the first three seasons of Bewitched?
Companies are interested in new things, because there are always people out in the world interested in new things or new ways of seeing old things. Perhaps I am not really sure about what you’re driving at here.
There's more films than there are hours in an average lifespan; and way more books!
How 'new' are new films, really? Most are lazy rehashes of worn out cliches. I'm driving at this very question: why does the patina of 'newness' sell so much better than actual quality?
> why does the patina of 'newness' sell so much better than actual quality?
Well, that is sort of a trick question as you equate newness with lack of quality.
And if you believe certain literary critics, there is no such thing as a new story under the sun. The form it is told in, however, is very specific to the culture and time.
Would we be happy just watching old silent films? Some of us might, but maybe we would rather see Steve Martin doing kind of the same routines only in color and up-to-date.
You could think of painting and wonder why cave art isn’t just as relevant today as it was 40,000 years ago. Who needs Titian or Picasso or David Hockney?
People buy versions of old plays, and buy old classics, and buy the Friends series, and now if you try to sell them another copy of it they send you home, they've already got one you see, it's very nice.
Companies create new things because companies are comprised of people and the people who work at creative companies want to be part of the creative process. There's also the basic problem of only one company getting top spot; If your rival company has The Godfather and you've got, like, Dick Tracy, do you want to be second fiddle forever? Or do you want to make something new to try to knock them off their high (headless) horse?
There's something in this; yet, the profit motive usually dominates - granted, even coca cola tried 'new coke' but they quickly reverted to the original!
The entertainment industry is heavily hit-based, so companies are always on the outlook for the next smash hit. They obviously continue to milk established franchises (some would even say excessively so, to the detriment of actual novelty), but you can't really make as much, or even a tenth of what Harry Potter brought in at its peak by just endlessly re-releasing it as is.
See my comment about Disney above. Also the technological space of entertainment and art has exponentially changed in the last 75 years for most of the 20th century. It was pretty stable. You had radio, you had books, live theater and movies.
If you stayed at home, you had books, maybe radio, and any musical instrument you might be able to play. This is the world in which Disney could release Snow White, and the seven dwarfs every seven or eight years into the movie theaters and have a whole new generation of kids the right edge coming to see it. The aesthetic change in a generation of 10 years these days is profound.
I think the home entertainment complex is highly implicated in your question here.
Because there wouldn't be any hype. Marketing goes only so far, true hits happen due to word-of-mouth. Everybody has heard about Harry Potter already, and either read it or probably never would (for books), and only superfans or very young people might go watch it in the theaters.
Tom Holland of The Rest Is History podcast argues that modern progressivism is secularized Christianity, with the main common themes that the first will be last and vice versa. That value revaluation that Nietzsche hated so much and wanted to revalue again.
Yet, as far as I can tell, most modern progressives despise Christianity and in fact think of themselves as a reaction to it.
I want to know, in a Tom Holland sense of Christianity (the last will be first and vice versa), who are the real Christians today, in an intelligent sense.
Pop and political culture want you to believe transsexuals are. They have somehow been last and therefore now should be first. Ironically, I think that culture doesn't care much for Christianity.
Yet, isn't the real Christianity those who abide by it, not those who merely speak in its tongues?
Perhaps gays and transsexuals are the most Christian culture we have. They want to turn our corrupt society of money changers upside down. They want to reverse power. They want the last to be first, like Jesus did.
Tom Holland wrote Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, which explores much the same themes. First of all, it's a masterpiece of writing. You can't not be impressed by the eloquence of passages like:
"Today, as the floodtide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of American and European liberals risk being left stranded. Much of what they have cast as universal risk being exposed as nothing of the kind [...] Secularism owes its existence to the Medieval papacy. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible that humans are made in God's image, that his son died equally for everyone, that there is 'neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female'. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First, there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St. Paul. Then there came the aftershocks. The revolutions in the 11th century that sent Latin Christendom upon its momentus course. The revolution commemorated as the Reformation. The revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within its embrace every other way of seeing the world, the claim to a universalism that was culturally high specific, that human beings have rights, that they are born equal, that they are owed sustenance and shelter and refuge from persecution. These were never self-evident truths."
In the book, Holland attributes everything from science to human rights to abolitionism to the Beatles to communism to wokeism to a distinctively Christian worldview. On the one hand, he's not completely wrong: it's easy to see how a religion that worships a man tortured to death by an empire would appeal to the poor and the subjugated, and fuel moral revolutions throughout history. On the other hand, abolitionism, human rights, science, communism, woke, etc took hundreds or thousands or years after the coming of Christianity to be invented. Maybe they all have Christian elements, but the vast majority of the inspiration that led to them had to be non-Christian, or else why were they invented so late and often by non-Christians? There's also the fact that you can make a more convincing case for slavery than against it using the Bible, and a better case for genocide than against it using the story of the conquest of Canaan.
I really liked Holland's book, but I want to read either supporting or critical work by other scholars responding to it. If you know any, let me know. In the meanwhile, I don't think Holland's argument, even if 100% true, in any way discredits communism/wokeism/progressivism, nor does it in any way support Christianity's metaphysical claims. Pope John XXIII said in Veterum Sapientia that "the inauguration of Christianity did not mean the obliteration of man’s past achievements. Nothing was lost that was in any way true, just, noble and beautiful." In the same way, the inauguration of post-Christian progressivism does not mean the obliteration of man's past achievements. Nothing that was true, just, noble, or beautiful about Christianity needs to be lost; but just as the Christians didn't feel the need to keep worshipping Zeus, neither should we post-Christians feel the need to keep worshipping Jesus.
I particularly enjoyed your final paragraph, very insightful.
As to what read next, have you read WEIRDest people in the world? In case you have just read the book review on ACX, I plead to not judge the book by the review. I do not find it represented the books clarity and persuasiveness. I wanted to recommend you that book before I finished reading your comment. Now taking into account your last paragraph - I feel it really fits the whole theme of WEIRD, it perfectly describes what this book seems to be doing with me personally.
To give you my shortest summary possible: WEIRD describes all the unintended, unconscious effects of Christianity on the West in particular. By dissecting all the various underlying factors it reveals them to consciousness. I can now appreciate my own cultural christian heritage much more without having to feel religious in particular. I feel like I can square the circle, finally.
Thanks, I'll put "WEIRDest people in the world" on my reading list. I listened to a podcast with the author and thought he had interesting points, so I should probably get around to reading the book.
I have to retract my criticism of the book review: somehow I didn't finish reading it but then forgot about it. After finishing it, I have less to criticise. But anyway, I can recommend the book again - super fascinating.
There's a pretty simple genealogy. It's just not popular because it involves a lot of theology and a lot of historians really don't like doing theology. But basically in the early 20th century you had the Fundamentalist-Modernist split. It was around complicated theological questions which we don't have to get into here.
At the time the more liberal churches mocked the fundamentalist belief that modernist Christianity would lead to less belief in God. But the the vast majority of modernists would become secular in a generation or two. The descendants of these modernist churchgoers, both religious and irreligious, then went on to become a fair bit of the modern left. Especially the more elite, white forms of leftism. It's not a coincidence that episcopalianism, which was and arguably still is the church of the traditional American elite, is modernist and liberal.
This split had two major effects:
1.) Being religious became a sign of conservatism. (Before that it depended on which church you were in.) This also meant most established churches became conservative.
2.) Being secular became a widespread and open possibility. But most of these secular people remained semi-Christian or Christian descended in the sense they would still celebrate Christmas etc. They also had and have clear ideological influence from the old Modernist churches. Though not as much or as directly as some conservatives like to say (because they too do not like doing theology).
Not the early 20th century, more like the 70s, but I have an older, very secular liberal friend who says he was raised in a Baptist church that split from its roots which decided to preach the teachings of Jesus but without any literal belief in God. His very left-wing roots began in this actual Baptist church whose adherents over the decades eventually stopped identifying as Christian.
There's definitely some thought patterns. Like how you can be dragged down by the deeds of your ancestors, be it "original sin" or "white privilege." And a glorification of victimhood/martyrdom; blessed are ye when people misgender ye/xe/they. Unlike Christianity, though, the progressive movement looks to the future, ignoring the horrible bigoted past of last Thursday, when we only had 37 genders.
>(it's about undue, unexamined advantages in the present, not about inter-generational guilt)
maybe, but approximately 100% of 'white privilege' true believers also believe that white people, collectively, are guilty of "slavery" (not American slavery, but slavery per se!) and owe black people in perpetuity.
>and that makes even less sense when you consider how many people in the social justice movement are secular Jews — coming from a religion that doesn't *have* a notion of "original sin".
HAHAH, let me guess, if somebody blamed jews for being disproportionately responsible for woke BS, you'd shout them down as anti-semtici conspiracy theorists though, right?
"Whether you believe in or reject the notion of white privilege, it has nothing to do in how it works with that of original sin (it's about undue, unexamined advantages in the present, not about inter-generational guilt),"
This is completely a motte-and-bailey argument. Mainstream and celebrity "antiracists" absolutely use "white privilege" to mean "white people by their very existence uphold systems of oppression therefore by the fact of their being born white they owe a debt to oppressed people." Regardless of whatever it was supposed to mean originally.
So you've gone from motte-and-bailey to "no true Scotsman."
People who earn full tenure professorships for their original sin usage, or who drive mainstream news coverage or policy decisions are difficult to handwave away as not "real people on the left."
Or... wokism is based on dogma/faith and is impervious to empirical refutation.
"Religion is bad" is an argument only proposed by people such as yourself. I find it difficult to believe that you are unaware of anti-wokism among religious people, especially with your previous invocation of secular people in the SJ movement.
Jesus did indeed overturn the tables of the money-changers, but he did so not out of an abstract desire to upend all hierarchies, but out of zeal for the house of God and its holiness. Scripture has things to say about human power structures and the use and misuse of human authority, but prior to those teachings it calls on all humans -- regardless of power, race, sex, wealth, or any other demographic boxes -- to acknowledge the authority of God, our own sin, and our need for forgiveness in Christ.
Secular progressivism borrows some from Christian teachings on human dignity, and thereby (correctly) emphasizes the importance of caring for all human beings, including the poor and oppressed. However, by denying the deeper truths of the human condition as outlined above (God is holy, we are sinful and need forgiveness) it ends up in a radically different place from Christianity -- indeed, progressives often see claims related to God's authority as categorically wrong and oppressive when they conflict with the desires of the human individual.
I’ve long thought that Christianity has succeeded precisely because it’s so inconsistent and contradictory, so you can make it whatever you want it to be. Do you want fire and brimstone? There are plenty of Bible verses to cherry-pick to make that work. Do you want hippy-Jesus peace and love stuff? There are verses for that too. It doesn't matter if the Bible explicitly spells out, in the clearest language possible, that something is prohibited. You can just use "love the sinner," "turn the other cheek," and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" to invalidate the prohibition. And feel like you're the defender of traditional Christian values as you argue for throwing out the past 2000 of Christian teachings on something.
Hey Chicken F. S., I think woke hysteria is stoopit too, but I find your post extremely repellent. No doubt these people were not saints, but they are dead, and moreover they died young in a state of terror and pain and bewilderment with nobody to comfort them. And THEY did not ask to be glorified as race martyrs by the press, so you can't justify making fun of them on the grounds that they were self-important jackasses. The shit you wrote isn't any funnier or more appropriate than similar shit about the kids who were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook School. If you want to go after somebody, go sling insults at the living, who can come back at you.
They're bad people and it's good they're dead. And they would have had ZERO problem being race martyrs, as evidenced by violent black people being in almost universal agreement on making martyrs of these people.
>The shit you wrote isn't any funnier or more appropriate than similar shit about the kids who were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook School.
How many of the sandy hook kids were violent against pregnant women? How many of them pounded a man's head into the pavement who posed no threat to them? Trayvon Martin was literally shot while attempting to murder a man, and you think this is somehow REMOTELY comparable to children being murdered in cold blood?
>If you want to go after somebody, go sling insults at the living, who can come back at you.
Bravo Eremolalos, bravely shouting the truth...that the most powerful institutions in the country are in universal agreement with and who will destroy the lives of anyone who disagrees with it publically! Brave and stunning.
Amen what? You think children being shot in cold blood is remotely comparable to trayvon martin being shot in self defense as he attempted to murder a man?
I always liked and enjoyed ACX and SSC while being appalled by the edgelords who pop up in the comments from time to time and blatantly violate our host’s “pick at least 2 of true, kind, necessary” rule.
It's a bullshit rule, because most discussions are precisely about whether or not something is true in the first place! And "kind" and "necessary" are subjective to the point of meaninglessness.
Thank you drosophilist. I love the term “edgelord,” which I did not learn til last year. I’m not sure it applies to all of these people, though. Was wondering if this one, given any encouragement, would move straight on into “hey, let’s go shoot us some *coons*, haw haw.”
Oh yes, isn't Eremolalos being so wonderful and acting in such great faith! Mocking black nationalist religion means you obviously want to literally kill black people! How good faith! How fair! How reasonable!
I think it's probably fairer to say that western secularised progressivism *derives* several of its key ideas from Christianity, rather than actually *being* Christianity (just sans God). I think Holland himself would probably admit this, he just gets carried away in phrasology sometimes because 'longterm cultural influence of Christianity' is kind of his hobbyhorse. And he's right, insofar as progressives pick up the 'slave morality' torch that's been dropped in Europe by a dwindling Christianity and in the USA by a 'Christianity' that's increasingly alien to its original spirit.
As an addendum, a significant subset of the Christian church in the Anglophone world has become quite vocally progressive-aligned, and consumed overwhelmingly more by social justice issues than by theological conviction. My reading is that this is, at least on some level, an attempt to preserve the church community by updating the 'rallying flag' of belief in God which on its own has lost too much viability - see Scott's classic SSC post 'The Ideology Is Not The Movement', especially section IV-4. For the reasons outlined in that post though, this tends not to work very well, since the new rallying flag ultimately just encourages the next generation to bleed into the progressive mainstream and forget traditional religion altogether (especially since, as you say, mainline progressive rhetoric tends to despise Christianity).
And last I looked at it, these progressive churches have been losing membership at pretty high rates, while conservative churches have been gaining members (likely not the same people). Overall I think Christianity is still seeing an overall reduction in professed adherents, but I personally feel like there are more dedicated-to-God-over-secular Christians now than in recent years.
Since the (former) UMC was the largest mainline denomination and the chart stops pre-schism, and I have no idea how at Atlantic/Brookins partner will classify the GMC (they're not evangelical, per se) it will be interesting to see how they plot the trendline.
Hm. I'll grant that the "defund the police" movement has produced some people claiming that shoplifting and car robbery should be taken in stride because the people taking the stuff need it more than you. And the focus on helping the homeless is mostly dead-on.
> "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
But then there's this::
> "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
God (or alternately, reality) is like the Schelling point. If you disconnect from God (or reality), then you still may have a point of consensus, but over time it will shift around in vector space, and ultimately the only consistent description will be "the point that a large group of people agrees on", which is circular (or at best, like the ship of Theseus). One can think of the organized Church as an institution designed to prevent this drift. For example, by keeping random mystics on the fringes from having revelations and leading groups of people off into "heresy", and by making sure that beliefs are consistent and the consequences are fully explored.
Then your question is incoherent: who are the real Christians today, but without any trace of Christianity or Christian beliefs?
That's like asking "make me an apple tart but you can't use any apples".
If you're asking "what is the group which best exemplifies the secularised version of 'the last shall be first and the first shall be last'", then you're re-stating Holland's thesis that modern progressivism is an heir of the Christian values of Western society, even if it is opposed to doctrinal orthodox Christianity as implemented.
So yeah, the whole id-pol identity thing would fit under "the formerly marginalised must be brought front and centre and the privilged must stand back and yield their place" derivation of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last".
I think Holland is pointing out how, despite the rejection of doctrinal Christianity, the values which permeated society are still being used and taken as foundational by modern secularism, even if they deny or are not even aware of the particular influences there.
You're showing that with "What does Christiainty have to do with believing in God?"; the seculars aren't 'believing in God' or disbelieving in God, they're still working off a peculiarly *Christian* idea of who enters the Kingdom. It's not a 'general belief in god, whichever god you want to pick' derivation; if you don't come out of the Christianity-influenced culture here, you're not going to work on societal change from a basis of “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you".
That's what 'believing in God' has to do with it. Modern secular progressivism is living off the capital of preceding generations who were Christian specifically, and wrote those principles and that understanding into things like "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
All debates on God and secularisation should include a reference to G.K. Chesterton's extraordinary percipient observation in 1908:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered … it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
I think it depends on your perspective. A secular person (such as myself) might say that the ethical/game-theoretic moral conclusions are indeed self-evident; it is obvious why murder/theft/etc. are bad actions to take in human society, and why some degree of altruism and empathy should be encouraged instead, for the entire tribe or nation to survive. If this is the case, then it is the Christians who have spent ages taking unearned credit (and in fact plagiarizing older religions and philosophies when it suits them).
By analogy, Christians cannot necessarily claim credit for Calculus, even though Newton, the inventor/discoverer of Calculus, was a (sort of) Christian; Calculus works regardless of your faith (or lack thereof). And Christians certainly do not to claim credit for arithmetic (ancient Babylonians have that honor).
> it is obvious why murder/theft/etc. are bad actions to take in human society
I used to think like this, but now I know better. It is not obvious at all; in fact, punishing defectors can be the most important thing in life. To override this, one would presumably need something even more important, such as a divine commandment not to.
"the ethical/game-theoretic moral conclusions are indeed self-evident"
Well if they're so self-evident, why did someone have to come along and invent the fancy term of "game theory"?
Nobody needs to be told "water is wet and fire burns". But when you have to invoke "no, see, there's this complex mathematical model" about something, then I don't think it's as self-evident as you claim.
Sure, the devil's always in the details. You don't need a giant stone tablet in the sky to tell you that water is wet and fire burns; these things are self-evident. But why is water wet ? Why does fire burn ? The answers are surprisingly complicated, and you actually got lucky with the easy questions; if you asked "why is the sky blue ?", then the answer would be much more complicated.
Similarly, it's obvious why theft and murder are bad and should be discouraged, and why loving your immediate neighbour (at least) is a good thing, but questions like "why do people steal ?", "who should count as your neighbour ?", "what is the proper punishment for muder ?", etc., are subject to intensive study.
Christians have done very little to answer such questions. That is to say, over the years they experimented with the answers just like everyone else, with mixed results. Their one crowning achievement is, arguably, banning cousin marriage; and that was a political decision, not a theological one.
As for recent TV, I thought Fleishman Is in Trouble (Hulu) staring Jessie Eisenberg and Claire Danes was good. A NYC Jewish couple gets divorced. Shades of A Marriage Story and Philip Roth. I like how nobody is right or wrong, good or bad. Or maybe everyone is wrong and bad and that's just how it is, the only way it can be if we want to thrive and move on.
What I did not like was all the stolen use of recent cliche's without citation as if they were profound: Hemingway's "Slowly and then quickly." The comedy podcast (Anthony and Opie?) (Adam Carolla?) joke about the Free Pass your spouse would let you have sex with (the idea being it's a celeb you would never actually have a chance with) yet one caller comes in and says his Free Pass is Helen at the local Deli. Fleishman steals that joke and tries to make it meaningful. There were at least 3 or 4 other recent cliches it stole and that drove me nuts. Otherwise the writing is pretty good.
I liked how unabashedly secular Jewish it all was. How melancholy, painful, funny, cruel, and optimistic it is. I feel like most people around these parts think TV sucks, but it doesn't. Not all of it. Plenty of it is better than the last book you read.
Why can't someone make a similar show that is secular Christian? Sure, secular Christian is mostly an oxymoron but what about lapsed Catholics? Or even Protestant Christians who don't really believe. I know plenty of them. They exist. Secular Christians is a huge thing. It's basically the Democratic Party. Why do they have no media representation? Media in the sense of TV shows or movies?
I'll admit I haven't actually watched very much of it (and I'm sure it's varied a lot over the years) but I feel like "secular Christian" is basically how I'd describe the Simpson family - I know they attend church, but I've also never really seen anything that looks like real active faith to me.
But honestly, it's pretty rare for media to have any explicitly Christian characters at all nowadays, much less "explicitly Christian but non-practicing".
Secular/lapsed Christians *are* the default in media, you just don't notice because being lapsed means they don't talk about it.
You seem to be looking for "identifiably Christian but don't practice" and that's not gonna happen; if Reginald in New York stops attending the local Episcopal church, he's not going to have the Bible etc. lying around his house visible to indicate 'yeah, Reggie used to go to church but doesn't anymore'. Reggie is going to be Just An Ordinary Guy.
What you're asking for is the "granny still has holy pictures and the crucifix up on her walls and goes to Mass and says the rosary but the grandkids are lapsed" and that might happen, but it's going to be in particular contexts: Italian, Hispanic/Latino, Irish. The Protestant version will be the Southern Evangelical granny and the lapsed grandkids still stuck in the Bible Belt with the society around them paying lip-service to Christianity. Those are going to be 'ethnic' representations of particular instances.
General mainstream Protestant "I don't do that god stuff anymore" is the ordinary secular society around us. If you say "that's the Democratic Party", okay - what do you think Governor Newsom's religious life would look like if expressed in his home and daily life? Yeah, that looks like just like it is now.
Has anyone updated on the dangers of global warming in the past 2 years?
I myself have experienced some confirmation bias. I think global warming is a problem -- I can't quantify it. I expect the next couple decades to be hotter, and, living in a hot place, I'm not happy about it.
Now, I don't think climate change will be the problem at the level progressives keep screeching about, much like I don't think AI is the risk doomers screech about, or Hell is the hell Christians once screeched about, but I think progressives, doomers and Christians have about equal points. There's probably something there in each case to be taken seriously in appropriate measure; I don't believe the measure is high but it's non-zero.
As far as I'm concerned, global warming shifted from likely true to...just observably true. Like, go out to Napa and talk to the wine growers, it's a real thing they're dealing with, especially given how sensitive those microclimates are.
On the other hand, catastrophic climate change seems incredibly unlikely for...kinda mundane reasons of age. Like, "An Inconvenient Truth" is so old now but if you've been hearing climate doomerism for 20+ years...it just seems unlikely. Like "Oh, we ended up in the timeline where climate change is a bad but not catastrophic issue" and it's hard to take new doomer predictions seriously when I can remember falsified old ones from 20+ years ago.
Most persuasive stuff I've read about really bad events due to warming is that poor countries will suffer crop failures due to weather changes, and many people will starve.
Which current alarmist predictions? I think it has a zero percent chance to be worse than the alarmist predictions where it leads to human extinction. Certainly has a chance to be worse than the alarmist predictions where it reduces GDP by 1%.
Well ok there's always a level of "alarmist" that crosses into neverland. I was referring to the "worst-case" consensus scenario, something like +6°C increase by the end of this century.
I think there's a big difference between global warming (overwhelmingly strong evidence that it's a massive problem), AI (semi-plausible arguments that it might some day be a problem) and Hell (a fairy-story with no evidence whatsoever).
But also: there is no plausible scenario where global warming is actually an extinction risk. There are error bars on the predictions, but they are relatively small. For AI there could be an extinction risk. The error bars on the predictions are absolutely enormous.
That was interesting. I had previously seen the Nature article about "such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming" It would be quite an amplification effect, if real! Still, one study (with no way to check experimentally, of course) is likely to be an LK-99 of climate science. (Also, technically, 4C + 8C giving 12C is still not an extinction risk. Even 10 million survivors scrambling to eke out an existence as subsistence farmers in a thawed Antarctica is a civilization ending event but not a human species ending event.)
And I would assume Dr. Luke Kemp has given this a lot more thought than you or me, so his probability estimate should be more accurate than your rounding it down to zero.
What’s the probability that a Martian invasion destroys humanity? But fine, read ‘zero’ as ‘infinitesimal.’
As for Dr. Kemp, I think the whole field of climate science is hopelessly politicized so no, I don’t think expertise conveys any more accuracy than intelligent amateurs can achieve. See also the performance of epidemiologists in the recent pandemic.
To the extent that sports gambling is getting legalised in the United States, this will probably lead to a huge flood of unsophisticated dumb-bunny money into the markets, which might make it an excellent time to invest in this sort of thing.
How does Priomha even work? Surely if they're so successful they would just be banned from sports betting sites (as happens to many individual investors).
I've been out and about exploring the Boston area (which is my home), and have seen *several* different types of outdoor signs expressing NIMBY views (to wit: several signs opposing the 528 Boylston St proposal in Newton, and a different type of sign opposing the 845 Boylston St proposal in Brookline). Meanwhile, I have yet to see even a single YIMBY sign.
It seems that Elon Musk might have pulled off what The Artist Formerly Known as Prince pulled off.
I just read about a question concerning Proposition 65: https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/279310/is-my-stainless-steel-kitchen-sink-really-chemically-dangerous
It seems this is turning out to be utterly useless, and therefore of negative value. Is California going crazy?
It’s worse than useless. There are poisonous chemicals in some things we get exposed to, in concentrations that at least may warrant some level of caution. By indiscriminately slapping a warning on everything it makes it impossible to tell what’s actually dangerous. So the end result may very well be a marginal increase in exposure to poisons re. a situation where a more dose-specific warning is used only when warranted.
Short version: if everything is poisonous then nothing is.
Prop 65 was passed in 1986.
It's definitely useless, but similar useless rules hang on in all kinds of bureaucracies, because most people agree they're bad but not so bad that anyone makes it a priority to fix them. See also: taking your shoes off in the TSA line.
I guess the interesting California angle is that it shows a problem with direct democracy, because if it were legislation rather than a ballot measure it would be easier to fix. But it's far from certain it would be fixed anyway.
It definitely says something about bureaucracy and nanny-state-ism. I just don't think it's especially specific in either place or time.
Ah, I see. I have seen such warnings only recently, over the past few years, so had no idea it was such a relatively old law.
If you’re interested in AI Governance and want to help others find careers where they do the most good they can, this may interest you.
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If you know someone you think might be a good fit, please share this job description. There is a $500 prize for referring a successful candidate.
Having just read the post on AI and intelligence Platonism I'm struck with a question. OpenAI made a great token predictor by, in some part, choosing not to have linguists try to embed their knowledge into the model.
With that in mind if we let a token prediction savant (IE GPT-X) embed concepts into the model why should we expect this to lead to an intelligence explosion?
Saturday (8/19/23) Untrustworthy RCT's and Extinction Forcasts
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Kxs0RfeWMNx9KiTXKv3J1AOQD0qeY9AX_YNctQ1gb4/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 39th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Date: Saturday, Aug 19, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
Medicine is plagued by untrustworth clinical trials.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QIUwmS2FVxcfLyNSvtnbE-gG3GNf36Fg/view?usp=sharing
The Extinction Tournament - by Scott Alexander
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-extinction-tournament
Audio: https://podcastaddict.com/astral-codex-ten-podcast/episode/161177373?fbclid=IwAR2GqOxFtKVdm2E1ayYLdT4xqWQVeFoTRSyvUk8C_y9wyJRkBcpbArux2Hc
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
A summary and questions are forthcoming:
Why studying group differences in intelligence matters: If you don't, you end up saying insane things like "Pakistan can become the next Singapore"
https://theconversation.com/despite-domestic-political-turmoil-pakistan-is-well-placed-to-boost-regional-integration-211240
Were there actually any black women at Oppenheimer's early quantum physics lectures at Berkley?
I wrote a quick piece on conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia (a very specific case study) -- it might make for an interesting read! (It's to-the-point and quite accessible -- tl;dr celebrities like self-promotion, who'd have thought?)
https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/did-simu-liu-write-his-own-wikipedia
I haven't seen this recognized much, but many researchers believe that cultures as distant as Australian Aboriginals and the Navajo are so similar they share a cultural root. I write about the most compelling examples of similarities, and how far back the root may go: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion
Temporary Pig Kidney:
I just read about a recent advance, where a patient received a pig kidney, and it has so far functioned in his body for a month. It made me consider, what if a pig kidney were not implanted, but instead connected to the circulatory system as is done with dialysis? I could be disposable, allowing the patient to even not take organ rejection drugs, which I presume suppress the immune system. Once the thing goes bad, replace it with a new one.
For a frightening taste of the red pill, arrange a tour of a dialysis center. I used to drive a guy to dialysis a few days a week, what a frightening place. First off, the guy was an admitted alcoholic, who said he used to drink 18 beers before work. Doctors told him he'd suffer greatly if he didn't stop. He said he'd had three warnings of kidney failure before they finally went. In his working days, he was a pipe-fitter overhauling the cooling system on freight train engines. Disassembling, rodding out—cleaning the pipes—reassembling the radiator for the engines. I'm sure this is some heavy lifting and a lifetime of this work results in a pretty fit dude. When I met him, he was 67, and looked like he was 87. Sitting on the side of the road, needing a lift to Walmart to fill some prescriptions, I had to help him get up. He smelled like crap too. Kidney patients don't excrete some salts in their urine, as healthy people do, they excrete them through their skin. Of course he's still a shit-head—a habitual liar, mostly lying to himself—and doesn't bathe every day ...
If you hook someone up to an external pig kidney, how is that any more convenient than hooking someone up to a dialysis machine?
A dialysis machine is pretty big, they make smaller machines too. Patients sit in what looks like a big recliner, rows of them in a large room—kept pretty cold to prevent nasties growing. A technician connects a large bag with some special salts and two hoses to special ports implanted in the patients arm or chest. Blood is pumped out of their body, through the bag, and back into their body. The typical session is like 3 hours or better. Most patients take in a light sleeping bag or blankets.
In my mind, if you had a pig kidney, it would probably be smaller than a grapefruit. Connect it to the ports, leave it for a day or two, disconnect and dispose of it. Granted, you'd have this package you'd have to carry around, but it would be much better than 3 hours two to three times a week in the center.
The patients lose a shit load of blood in the process. Not like life-threatening, but its two to three times a week, it adds up. You don't go there because things are going well to begin with.
Google up images of dialysis center.
What do contemporary journalists mean when they casually employ the term "late capitalism"? Do progressives use it in an almost value-neutral way to describe a mixed or market economy in the 21st century? Is it meant to signal "I'm a progressive, btw." Might a non-progressive journalist write like that?
Example: In the recent New Yorker piece by Patrick Radden Keefe about the art dealer Larry Gagosian -- an excellent, interesting article -- Keefe writes: "Being supported by a mega-gallery like Gagosian is a gift, but it's complicated: such artists must produce work while this rowdy bacchanal of late capitalism plays out around them."
Is that just how progressives write now, where "late capitalism" just means "capitalism", or should one take it to have genuinely Marxist overtones?
The funniest part is when they complain about something that's a fact of the underlying world, no matter what economic system you exist in.
Like "Ugh, I have to go to my factory job. Late-stage capitalism." Like, what do you think happened if you didn't show up to your job at Tractor Factory #31 in the USSR?! No matter who owns the factory, you need the entire shift to be there on time for it to work.
Rule of thumb: appearance of words "capitalism" and "socialism" makes whatever other words surround them meaningless. I understand that sometimes one has to use, e.g., "socialism" when discussing the history of USSR, but such exceptions are vanishingly rare.
Signalling aside, I think it conveys something like "capitalism is both ethically bad, and also falling apart". So yes, Marxist, in the sense of "currently collapsing under its own contradictions" (not a quote).
It's just this:
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism
"Complaints Under Late Stage Capitalism
In an incredible bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu, our talking heads have managed to take the exact same puerile statements about The Man and turn them into serious commentary by substituting ‘capitalism’ for The Man. If you’ve existed on the social web for more than 10 minutes, you’ll have seen this. Mad about gentrification? That’s just life under capitalism. There might be a supply chain issue for bourbon? Capitalism is broken. In a beautiful stroke of irony the internet is filled with merchandise for sale telling you that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. The sea is on fire?2 Proof capitalism can’t be managed. Someone says you should meal prep to save time? Stop sucking capitalism’s dick, man. Once you notice this trend, you will see it everywhere."
Yeah, that sounds right. I *am* seeing "late capitalism" everywhere now, even in 10,000 word essays which otherwise have no political valence.
As far as I can tell, using that phrase means "Capitalism sucks, and will end soon." I've only seen from the far left, not from regular progressives. I don't think anyone who actually likes Joe Biden would use that phrase.
I'm seeing "late capitalism" used so frequently now in places like The New Yorker which aren't generally associated with the far left that I think it's become a normal progressive thing. I suspect Ian S is correct, and it is just a lazy swipe at capitalism without any serious intent behind it.
Yes, exactly. It's largely just signaling. I live and work deep in the heart of Blue America and was for a while in the habit of asking people who'd dropped "late capitalism" in conversation what they specifically meant by that; mostly I got blank looks or shrugs. Much the same as when I used to inquire after one of my conservative/MAGA relatives had used "the deep state" in conversation.
(And to be clear in both instances there's always the one person who actually has an answer, they definitely exist. That answer will be delivered with big energy and will ramble on and on without ever arriving at any logical coherence. If you're not prepared to treat that as free entertainment I do _not_ recommend making the inquiry...realizing that my wife would simply turn and walk away whenever I did so helped me lose the habit!)
'Deep state' is a much, much more meaningful term than 'late capitalism'.
Yes yes, absolutely, of course it is. Say how's your drink, you need a refresh I see, backinajiffy!
(Step quickly away, find wife, give her the wide-eye, mumble excuse to the hosts about a babysitter issue, exeunt ASAP...)
Wait, you think that America's large, unelected bureaucracies that actually run the government exist and influence the direction of the country? YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING LUNATIC!
Published an update on some crossword puzzle authoring code I'm working on.
https://gunflint.substack.com/p/computer-aided-crossword-creation
Looks nice! Are you looking to do this entirely originally, rather than building on any of the existing crossword-fill lists? I think there are standard practices that some of the existing crossword-construction software uses, like scoring entries from 1 to 99 - things like ASPS and SSTS get very low scores, because they're not common words or acronyms that most people use, and get way overexposed because they have good letters for crosswords; if you see an interesting new word that is rising in popularity, but has never appeared in a crossword before, you might score it 99, to make the program try to go out of its way to put it in the grid.
So far it been all original. I’ve looked at the existing lists with scoring.
If I think I want to start submitting puzzles for publication I’ll probably buy one of them.
Many years ago I read that the Times paid a nominal $100 if they printed your puzzle. People mainly sent in puzzles in the hope of bragging rights. It might be more lucrative now.
I think they up it to $500 once you’ve had a certain number accepted. I haven’t submitted one yet but I hope to in the next year or two. It strikes me a lot like academic publishing, where it’s more about the prestige for sure - though I hope Robyn Weintraub is well-compensated for the constantly good ones she produces.
The puzzles have become a lot more fun in the last few years.
Clever word play, interesting rebuses and puzzles within the puzzle that require reading the letters of the answers in an unexpected order are more interesting than the old style that just relied on arcane knowledge to make them more challenging.
Earth.org claims:
"An average-sized dog generates 770 kg of CO2e, and an even bigger dog can emit upwards of 2,500 kilograms of CO2e, which is twice as much as the emissions deriving from an average family car per year."
https://earth.org/environmental-impact-of-pets/#:~:text=An%20average%2Dsized%20dog%20generates,average%20family%20car%20per%20year.
Now, I want this to be true because I like cars and don't like dogs. But is it?
Well, if we should get rid of cows because of methane and the environmental impact of intensive cattle rearing, I'm up for "and we should get rid of your furbabies because modern pets consume way too many resources and are bad for the planet to boot".
I have a feeling that will go down less well with the "vegan non-cruelty" set than banning farming, though.
Whatever became of those red algae that you can feed the cows to reduce their flatulence? Win-win: The cow feels better with less gas, and produce less methane.
I always had this intuition that emissions from organisms shouldn't count because they are participating in an ecosystem, i.e. the carbon they emit comes from other organisms and is simply transmuted back and forth from atmosphere to biomass.
Juxtaposed with fossil fuels, where carbon is actually permanently sequestered in that form, so burning it represents a recurring cost whereas an organism is more like a fixed cost
Can someone more knowledgable tell me if this is totally wrong?
That would be true for wild animals, but domesticated animals eat food from farms, which produce CO2 because transportation, fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery all take energy.
Domesticated *plants* are also associated with transportation, fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery. Breatharians against Global Warming, anyone?
The animal-specific part is carbon-neutral to a first approximation, because the carbon an animal puts into the atmosphere comes entirely from carbon taken out of the atmosphere by plants that wouldn't have been grown if not to feed the domestic animals. Second-order effects may tilt the balance, of course.
Also, animals mostly don't occur in nature in the sort of sheer numbers that domestication has created. E.g. here is an estimate that livestock now make up more than three-fifths of all the mammal biomass on the planet:
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Not that some wild mammals such as bison and antelopes can't or didn't occur in very large herds of course, but in nature those herds wax and wane. There are now around 1 _billion_ cattle on the planet and several hundred million pigs, and those totals are through human intervention kept pretty steady from year to year.
I was about to say this, but you said it better. Animals are part of the "carbon cycle". Burning fossil fuels isn't a cycle; it's a one-way street from underground to the atmosphere.
Actually that's not true. CO2 becomes food for plants. In the past 70 years, since CO2's big rise, we've seen earth greening by about 30%. So, because of CO2, we live in a much greener world. Carbon in the form of organic matter becomes entrained in streams and rivers eventually reaching the ocean, along with CO2 combines with calcium or magnesium and precipitates in warm water, thus sequestering the carbon.
About warming, we're warmer yes, but not hotter. Our day time highs are actually a bit lower, but the overnight lows a much higher. This is actually making the planet more habitable for humans and plants. We see a 'warmer' planet, but experience a cooler planet. The average temperature reported, is the average of overnight lows and daily highs for all locations. A small drop in the daily high is offset by a larger rise in the overnight low. We see the average go up, but we're not 'hotter' per-se.
Sounds about right: a human consumes ~2000 kcal a day. This is 8 MJ. If the man weighs 80kg this works out to 10^5 J a day per kg of flesh. C6H12O6 yields about 6kJ per gram, let’s make it 10. So a kg of flesh needs to eat 10g of sugar a day, let’s say 9. A mole of C6H12O6 is 180g and a dog is 20 kg, so a dog uses a mole of sugar a day. This yields 6 moles of CO2 a day, about 250g. A dog living 4000 days produces a ton of CO2.
But making dogs costs less CO2 than making cars.
I am trying to flesh out a personal rule of thumb and would appreciate others' insights. I have an idea bin in my head labelled "Hypotheses to only consider as a last resort because they are weak to confirmation bias". A trivial example of this would be the idea "I am smarter than everyone in this room and they are all jealous of me". When you believe this notion even a little, it can make all opposition seem like outpourings of spite or jealousy, preventing its own correction. So one should not entertain it before exhausting all other options.
I'm currently considering adding another idea to that bin: "trend X is a social contagion". I define social contagion as an idea with neutral or negative practical value that spreads mainly on its own Coolness Factor among mostly passive hosts. Basically the old school meaning of Meme. Putting that idea in the bin would mean treating everyone, even Those Darn Kids, with a strong presumption of intellectual agency and rational behaviour. Big ask, right?
What I would like from commenters here: pick your favourite purported social contagion (regular suspects on this blog are bisexuality, transgender, various mental illnesses...) and tell me what it would take to FALSIFY your belief that it's nothing but a trend. Would you require RCTs? A proven biological mechanism? Evidence from other cultures or time periods?
Thanks in advance for your respectful comments.
It’s not like a social contagion plays no useful role, even if the behavior per se is neutral or negative. It signals who is nearer to the source of the contagion, establishing social hierarchy. Signaling may seem wasteful (take mowing lawns as an example) but it does serve a purpose. Anyway, RCTs (if the methodology is sound) and a proven biological mechanism would do the trick for me.
I don't know if there's a bright line between "social contagion" and "not a social contagion".
If it's 1996 and you're dancing the Macarena, then obviously this is partially a social contagion. But it's also due to intrinsic factors -- you are the sort of person who is likely to engage in a popular dance craze when one comes along.
Similarly, transsexuality is partially a social contagion in that people are much more likely to identify as such if it's popular around them. But it's clearly not a pure social contagion in that only people who have some preexisting issues with their gender identity are likely to start identifying in that way.
For something to be a pure social contagion I think it would need to affect everyone more-or-less equally regardless of any intrinsic factors. I can't think of anything like this... although something like a panic in a crowded area might be close.
I'm in the belief there's multiple causes, both for homosexuality, and trans.
1. organically: there are people who are just wired to prefer the same sex, or believe they are of the wrong sex. Perhaps they're chimeras, which are co-joined twins where some parts of their body are part of the male child, and other parts are part of the female child. All the niceties of development worked out that they formed as typical, with one head, two arms, and two legs all appropriately attached in the evolutionary most efficient manner. Perhaps there is some trauma at the hands of the opposite sex, and nothing can break my fears.
2. rebellion: I hate everything about my parents, family, society ... I reject this all, and do everything I can to live my life the opposite. Some people come from truly awful families, and this could be a viable coping mechansim.
3. social contagion: I'm an edge lord following my edge lord friends in adopting the current edge lord fad.
I suspect it's useful to think about trends in several ways - both treat it as though every single person is adopting it for a good, considered, intrinsic reason with no social influence, and also do the opposite, treating it as though every single person is adopting it entirely due to social and structural factors rather than anything intrinsic to the behavior. Both are likely factors in every trend, but it's easy to think about them only one way (the rational way if you're doing it, and the structural way if others are).
So what does that look like for you in practice? Do you try to hold a mixed belief based on confidence (40% rational, 60% structural) or do you swap from one to the other as convenient?
I suspect almost every trend has some combination of intrinsic value, and extrinsic social dynamics, that explain why it got big. People naturally tend to think of it entirely in one set of terms, and thinking entirely in the opposite set of terms is going to be useful exercise for getting a more accurate representation.
Public health authorities in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, at least, deconstructed and debunked girls' enthusiasm for the myth of 'trans' years ago. One would have a hard time brainwashing them into turning back the clock. They're rather keen on Mother Nature, and She firmly objects to abuse.
Time and observation, mainly, over the course of decades. The corollary being that one can't know for certain what the causes of present behavior are until far in the future. Which isn't to say that one can't make educated guesses, but it's important to be aware of all the uncertain foundations one is basing conclusions on.
There's probably some "rationalist virtue" or another about how the strength of one's belief should only be in proportion to one's ability to disprove that belief. I'd even expect an equation derived from Bayes' Theorem could illustrate this.
A nitpick I have is the phrase "nothing but a trend". Suicide and mass shootings are both socially contagious means of expressing certain feelings, and those feelings themselves probably have a much stronger basis in non-social reality but may also have an aspect of social contagion too. But the effects are very real. Similarly, with something like trans, even if it's largely social contagion, the effects on people's psyches may be extremely real, just as real as any other part of their personalities.
Completely agreed. I think the real-world effects are the main reason WHY people feel the need to track down a root cause, rather than wait for time to vindicate them.
I’m really not trying to propose my own rules of thumb as a rationalist virtue. I just like to be careful about ideas that are Sticky In The Brain, since I’m very susceptible to that. If people here have workable ways to reality check themselves, on this subject or others, I’d love to hear about that too!
is there any relation between iq and empathy?
There is a difference between "I *know* how the other person feels" and "I *want* the other person to feel okay". Extreme example: a smart psychopath knows but doesn't care; an altruistic autist cares but doesn't know.
People treat different groups differently; for example someone may love their family, be indifferent to strangers of the same race, and hate people of a difference race (and maybe make an exception for one person of a different race who happens to be their colleague, because that is a cool guy).
In general, higher IQ helps. That is a correlation, not a perfect 1:1 relation.
From the perspective of knowing, intellectual reasoning can support (or substitute) one's instincts; simple reasoning like "if the other person is crying, they are probably sad", or complicated reasoning such as figuring out how a person with certain traits might feel in a complicated social situation. Generally, instincts work better if the other person is similar to you (because then you simply think "how would *I* feel in the situation as I perceive it?"), intelligence is required to notice things like "I enjoy X, but the other person hates X, so they are probably not happy in the situation X".
From the perspective of caring, intellectual reasoning can make you think about universal norms, for example to notice the tension between "it is good when I steal something from others, but it sucks when others steal stuff from me, so... maybe I should promote the norm of not stealing... which means I should stop stealing myself". That includes realizing that other people are sad when you steal from them (even if you don't see their faces at the moment).
thanks for reply! what about nazi scientists? they had high iq but zero empathy towards Jews! how can you explain this behavior??
They're a highly selected, non-representative sample of high IQ people, obviously.
I believe most tests of empathy test accuracy of one's perception of others' emotional state, not capacity to consider the feelings of others who are not present. For instance there's an interesting test of accuracy of reading someone's emotion if you see just their eyes -- I believe it's called "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" and for some reason it used to be available on Amazon, which would also score it at the end. Not sure whether still is. As I recall average score is 28 our of 36, and scores below 23 suggest the subject is pretty deficit at reading other's feelings, and may be on the autistic spectrum. Anyhow, it's just a bunch of pairs of expressive eyes, with multiple choice answers where you indicate whether you believe the person is, for example, bored, irritated, frightened or enraged.
It seems to me that what you are talking about is more properly called compassion. Pretty much everyone has a switch that turns off compassion for groups defined as Bad or Not Human. Many of us do it for the outgroups. Most of us do it for animals we eat for meat. 99.9% of us do it for insects in our homes.
perfect! high school bully read the mind of his victims through their eyes or body language. and the 'reading' is very accurate, I guess. so a compassionate person in general a highly intelligent person? what do u think?
I think that (a) compassion is pretty different from accuracy reading actual people in your lifeand (b) the research about bullies is that they are good at bullying, which involves reading the mental state of your victim, but overall they are not very accurate at assessing the points of view of other people. In general, bullies see others as bullies too, even though most are not, and so misread non-bullying requests for information or friendly overtures as attempts to get one-up and coerce them into behaving in a way that pleases the other.
It’s called othering.
Just because two things are correlated doesn't mean you expect everyone high on one is high on the other. It might be a useful default, but there are going to be enough cases where they come apart that you can populate a community entirely with people selected for being high on one and low on the other.
I expect the IQ-empathy correlation, while probably very real and verifiable, is likely much weaker than the height-weight correlation, and probably even weaker than the Californian-rich correlation.
I think having high empathy as a personality trait is perfectly consistent with "dehumanizing" some groups of people and treating them as if they are invalid targets of empathy. In fact, I think this was the normal and expected human condition until quite recently, and is still regrettably common.
Do we know they all had zero empathy towards jews? How could we know that?
Only by their behavior.
When I was a college student I ended up dead broke in Athens and worked for a while cleaning rooms in an inexpensive hotel. The owner, who was a big hot-tempered Greek guy, often ran out of clean sheets, and when he did I was instructed to just smooth out the old sheets from the last person. Lots of grubby travelers came through that hotel, people who'd caught dysentery in Africa, people who never bathed, people who got drunk in the room and then peed in paper cups and lined the full cups up on the table before leaving. I personally caught crabs there, and not from sex. Plus sometimes the sheets were stained in easily recognizable ways. Anyhow, when he told me to reuse the old sheets, I reused the old sheets, and did the best I could to hide the sex stains down at the bottom and smooth out the sheet wrinkles. What else was I going to do? Call the Greek board of health? Quit my job? Leave little notes for new guests, "don't sniff the sheets?" To be honest, after a little while I stopped feeling shocked and guilty, and just got used to it. It was Greece, that's what the hotel-owners did, you know? Of course I realize that what I did was nowhere near as what Nazi's did, but it gave me a glimpse of how the process works.
For an English-speaking example, you could look at Duncan Campbell Scott: a Canadian poet whose works IMO demonstrate a deep empathy for indigenous peoples, who at the same time designed and oversaw a system to culturally genocide them.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/duncan-campbell-scott
Early 20th century? That totally makes sense. The whole point was they were going to save these people from their 'backward culture'.
Richard Henry Pratt in the USA had the famous quote "kill the Indian, save the man". It was exactly the same thing. Anglo-American (in Pratt's case) culture is superior, these people have an inferior culture, they're human too, shouldn't we save them?
It's not totally nuts, especially if carried out by the people in question themselves--the Meiji Restoration was basically the Japanese deciding to adopt Western culture to turn themselves into a major world power, *and actually succeeding*. They picked the wrong side in WW2, but even after that got to be one of the world's leading economies.
I admit I don't see the inconsistency between having empathy for people and wanting to rescue them from stone-age living conditions.
In two months I'll be running the Dublin Marathon to raise money for Focus Ireland, a charity that does great work for the homeless in the city. If you'd like to support this excellent cause, please consider donating to my fundraiser here: https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/FionnMurray
"...I'll be running the Dublin Marathon to raise money..."
Serious question: what does that mean?
Many people aren't particularly interested in donating money to some random charity. But they are interested in their friend, and the friend's weird hobby. So if the friend wants to get people to donate, the friend can say "I'm only allowed to enter this special event for my weird hobby if I can get X people to donate Y money to Z charity". This leverages social connections into real charity.
An extra bonus comes when the hobby is a difficult thing, like running a long race, where people often feel like bailing halfway through. If the donors pledge to donate $10 per mile you run or whatever, that helps give you an extrinsic incentive to stick with your running even when you want to quit.
The particular thing with marathons, as FionnM has implied, said, is that there is a limited number of people who can take part in a given marathon. The London Marathon is the one I'm most familiar with from friends and family having run it.
There are essentially 3 ways to get into the London Marathon:
-You can be an elite-level marathon runner who has completed another race below a certain time, in which case you are guaranteed a place. There are also some places allotted to runners who have recently posted an outstanding time for their age group, and to members of accredited running clubs (in the latter case, the club gets to decide who gets to represent it).
-You can enter a lottery. For most people, the odds of success in this lottery are less than 4%.
-You can get in touch with a charity, which has bought a certain number of guaranteed entries (though a charity-specific scheme) and, as FionnM says, gives them out to runners willing to raise a minimum sum.
The charity buys a spot in the marathon and awards it to me on the condition that I meet a minimum fundraising threshold. It's a charity whose mission and work I really admire (for years they've been one of the charities I donate to every month as part of my Giving What We Can pledge).
Why not get the homeless to run it themselves? They're the ones who need help, and they've got nothing but time.
Because runners tap their social networks to get donations, and homeless people usually don't have social networks full of people with significant amounts of spare money they'd like to donate on behalf of a friend's odd hobby.
That's not very funny and pretty obnoxious.
Your comment isn't any more useful than his. Also, I'd counter your anecdote with my own, that it was a little funny.
I consider it poor form to take the piss out of someone trying in earnest to raise money for a charitable cause. Don't want to donate, fair enough, but don't be egregiously obnoxious.
I have a question: why is it that studios and book publishers invest so much effort and money in making new films and publishing new books, instead of endlessly re-publishing and marketing stuff from their archives?
So, I collected some of these responses and my thoughts here: https://logos.substack.com/p/why-do-publishers-and-film-studios
Because everything old was once new.
You can only see a movie for the first time once in your life. Subsequent viewings might also be enjoyable, but it will be a different sort of enjoyment. This is as true on the population level, as it is on an individual level. We have jokes about spoiling Citizen Kane or even The Empire Strikes Back for exactly this reason: it's pretty much impossible for people who are steeped in our culture to watch the classics in the same way as the audiences back in the day did.
This addresses the "why is novelty a value in itself" part of the question, but there's an even simpler reason: culture marches on.
Imagine, if you will, that the original Star Wars (Ep. IV) was the Last Movie Ever Made - after which the only thing playing in cinemas would be either Star Wars or older. It so happens that Star Wars was a bit of a groundbreaking picture (which is exactly why I picked it), so a person living in this hypothetical world might reasonably ask "Why isn't anyone trying to build upon - or even exceed - what Star Wars has achieved?"
We know that in our world this would prove a solid business strategy. Therefore, unless we somehow forced everyone to stop making new movies, we would find that someone would be tempted to try, would find success with the strategy, and thus get everyone else following suit.
It's worth remembering that no amount of hype beats having a product people find appealing.
That's true, except few movies and even fewer books break new ground. Also, I'm not suggesting everyone rewatch the same movies; there are enough classics for most people to watch a new old film every time they go to the cinema.
I mean, with old books, you can of course buy them. It's not like people who want to read Lord of the Rings have a trouble finding a copy (at least in rich countries). With old movies, it is trickier, but arthouse cinema market exists and fills more or less exactly this niche.
And why is there less marketing of the old stuff than the new stuff? Maybe because old stuff is already firmly established as good, so it does not need as much promotion. Bad old stuff doesn't get republished.
When I read Dracula, there was a foreword explaining that it had been significantly abridged because substantial parts of it were basically pop culture references that are lost on modern audiences (such as characters marveling at these new telegraph machines). So I think one part of an answer is that even works that aren't primarily about current culture are still tailored towards the current culture to a significant extent.
I also recall seeing an online argument where someone complained that Moby Dick made various objectively bad storytelling decisions, such as going on long technical digressions that weren't important to the plot, and someone else defended it by saying that it did a good job for its time and people back then didn't know as much as we do now about how to write a good story. So I think another part of an answer is that The Arts actually do advance. Not every change is a fad; people occasionally invent new storytelling techniques and cinematography and so forth that are genuinely more effective than what came before. I don't think this advancement is very fast, but I think there's more than zero of it, which statistically means that older stuff tends to be at a disadvantage.
"When I read Dracula, there was a foreword explaining that it had been significantly abridged because substantial parts of it were basically pop culture references that are lost on modern audiences (such as characters marveling at these new telegraph machines)."
Please fill in for yourself my shocked swearing at this. How the hell is this supposed to give you the full effect of the work itself? What kind of lack of understanding about "this will give modern readers an insight into the past, and into how technological advances that are nowadays so familiar as to be trite to us were novel and even disruptive when first introduced" does this betray?
This is flat-out saying "modern readers are too shallow and lacking in attention span to be able to appreciate older works, all they are interested in are the sex'n'horror bits, so we're doing an edit for their social media-addled brains".
This is like giggling over how you've edited down the Iliad because all that stuff about spears and the rest of it is ancient pop culture that modern audiences can't relate to. Just imagine Achilles is Rambo or John Wick with the guns, not a sword.
I'm genuinely shocked here. And I genuinely suggest you get an unedited down 'for modern audiences' version of the book to see what the real thing is. Maybe you'll think it's boring, but maybe you'll get an insight into "hey, this latest tech fad that we think is so ground breaking is going to look pretty uncool in fifty to a hundred years time, too" and get some empathy going for the people of the past.
EDIT: If Kids These Days don't even know what a phonograph is, I think it's no harm for them to learn, and to learn to put in its place in time their enthusiasm over the latest model iPhone or whatever the newest tech advance is for The Youth; this too shall become a phonograph of its day:
"Mina Harker’s Journal.
29 September.—After I had tidied myself, I went down to Dr. Seward’s study. At the door I paused a moment, for I thought I heard him talking with some one. As, however, he had pressed me to be quick, I knocked at the door, and on his calling out, “Come in,” I entered.
To my intense surprise, there was no one with him. He was quite alone, and on the table opposite him was what I knew at once from the description to be a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much interested.
“I hope I did not keep you waiting,” I said; “but I stayed at the door as I heard you talking, and thought there was some one with you.”
“Oh,” he replied with a smile, “I was only entering my diary.”
“Your diary?” I asked him in surprise.
“Yes,” he answered. “I keep it in this.” As he spoke he laid his hand on the phonograph. I felt quite excited over it, and blurted out:—
“Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?”
I barely remember anything even of the version I read (this was years ago), so I'm certainly not going to try to argue about specific cuts, but your general arguments seem pretty extreme to me.
1) I think there's a huge difference between cutting explanations of things the audience already knows vs substituting familiar things for unfamiliar things; I'm pretty shocked that you are putting these on a par.
2) Historical insight is not the same as good storytelling; it's definitely *possible* to write passages that are great at the former and simultaneously terrible at the latter. Expecting everyone else to optimize for whatever parameters you care about is not reasonable, and if you're going to call someone dumb or shallow the first time they pick one story for entertainment value rather than research value then you're condemning approximately everyone who has ever lived.
3) Lots of pop culture references don't even provide historical insight unless you already know huge amounts about the time period. For example, I doubt a political cartoon from today's newspaper would mean anything to an average person 300 years from now.
Now, maybe these particular editors were terrible; I have no idea! I just bought the top search result on Amazon. But if you're trying to make a general argument that cutting out pop culture references from older works is reliably terrible, then I don't buy it at all.
Part of reading older works *is* the difference in style, attitudes, and a window onto the past.
If all a reader wants is the Bridgerton experience, where Regency ballgowns are draped over 21st century attitudes to feminism, sexual orientation, gender and race, then fine. But then why bother reading the originals, just read the plethora of modern YA products out there.
Part of the whole background of the novel "Dracula" is that it is set in the Modern Era (for the modern era of its time). That's why we get all the references to the Modern Woman in Mina, and shorthand, and telegraphs, and the phonograph diary and the rest of it. Stoker is writing a novel that is taking place in his Present Day, that's why everyone in the book goes "Vampires? What are those?" and when explained to them "But that's peasant superstition from a bygone age, everyone in the Modern World knows there are no such things" (I mean, I'm having an exchange right now with Bugmaster over that very mindset right now - they're upholding the 'this is the modern era of science and rational intelligence' versus 'blind credulous faith in Bronze Age superstition' - apologies if I'm over-stating their position there).
Cut those references out, and you weaken the book. Then (for our Modern Audience) it's just another old book when of course people believed stuff like that. They don't get what made it the hit it became.
"Lots of pop culture references don't even provide historical insight unless you already know huge amounts about the time period."
I think it's no harm for people to have to learn about things that happened further back than ten minutes ago. Maybe it's just me, but part of the pleasure of reading older works is finding out "hey, I don't get that reference", looking it up, and learning something new to broaden my knowledge of the world.
I entirely agree with you, but this is a longstanding argument that I've seen professional editors come out on the other side more than once. Decades before they started rewriting Dahl, Fleming, Christie, etc. for modern cultural sensibilities, there were extensive arguments on Usenet over a prominent editor's practice of getting rid of all the casual smoking, changing "newshen" to "newscaster" when describing a female reporter, etc.
He basically said that it was what it took to make them commercial, and that he had the sell-through numbers to prove it. And it's a fact that he and his company brought a lot of old stuff back into print that wouldn't have been available otherwise, and made an evident success in a field that isn't necessarily always friendly to mass-market reprints.
So I can't say he was wrong. He successfully sold forty-year-old stories to new readers. It's easy for me to think they would have sold similarly without the updates, but he worked in the field for decades and I haven't.
But I still hate it. As you say, for me a lot of the point of reading old books and watching old movies is to get a feel for different times and places. (There's a saying that every old film is a documentary, and I'm often fascinated by the little background differences.) It really bugs me to have that interfered with.
Even more in SF: I want to know when I see a pocket phone in a 1940s Heinlein story that it's something he imagined, not something the editor inserted because he thought the kids today wouldn't relate to a telegram.
If I want to see modern furniture or sensibilities in a period story, I can read any number of badly researched modern period pieces. Having them in a genuine old story is like going to Rome or Paris and only eating at McDonalds: what was the point of leaving home?
And I do feel as if the practice contributes to general historical illiteracy, even if it's basically spitting in the ocean. Certainly backprojecting current expectations can't help with the widespread sense that there's been no progress on various fronts in recent decades.
(Last week Slate featured the observation "There may never have been a time when 'artist' was a secure way to make a living, of course; there may also have never been a time when it was worse than it is now." Words fail.)
I doubt transformers rise of the beasts advanced art!
But these companies do re-release archival material. Electronic readers like the Kindle have led to vast swaths of literature being republished in electronic form. With movies and TV shows, old material is put out on physical media or syndicated to cable networks. So I don't know why you think archival material is sitting around unexploited. Check out the schedule for Turner Classic Movies.
If you're asking why companies invest any money in new product, instead of restricting themselves solely to selling old material, it's clearly because new product sells, and sells better than archival material does. Why content yourself with $X in profits from archival material when you can have $X from the archives plus $Y from new material, especially when $Y > $X.
My point is they underutilise old material, not that they don't use it at all. The box office is dominated by new films, not re-releases. And 'new material sells' doesn't answer the question - it remains: _why_ does new material sell?
Okay, the answer seems to me obvious: Hollywood (to restrict ourselves to one commercial art form) prefers to invest in new material because it does NOT believe it is under-utilizing its libraries, and believes that pushing archival material in preference to new material, as you suggest, would lead to materially worse outcomes. And they believe this, clearly, because they believe that consumers will spend more money on -- because consumers have a far stronger preference for -- new material.
Now, given that Hollywood believes that consumers prioritize novelty, there are two more questions. First, is Hollywood correct? And if the answer is yes, then comes the question you end with: "Why does new material sell?"
So first, what evidence does Hollywood have that the manufacture of new content offers bigger and better returns than the endless recycling of old content? Well, there's 90 years of box office performance to back the belief up:
Between the mid-30s and the mid-70s, Hollywood studios regularly re-released their successful films into theaters. "Gone With the Wind" (1939), for example, was re-released theatrically in 1942, 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1974. (And these re-releases all occurred before the coming of home video; also, the movie had never been shown on television. If you wanted to see GWTW, the only way was by attending one of these re-releases.) These re-releases were profitable, but they generated NOTHING close to the grosses that GWTW had piled up in its first release. Then with the coming of home video in the late '70s, the theatrical market for re-releases collapsed: GWTW's 1998 "60th anniversary" re-release generated only $6.8 million at the box office. (And this was not pure profit; there would have been substantial marketing costs to cover.) This compares to the $125.6 million that "The Truman Show" grossed, and that wasn't even a Top 10 film. What holds true for GWTW holds true for any re-release. (With the semi-exception of re-releases that were tricked out with new special effects or 3-D.)
Now, if 90 years of watching how theatrical re-releases stack up against first releases provides reasonable evidence for the empirical claim that consumers prefer novelty, we can move to the second question: "Why do consumers prefer novelty?"
And here I don't know what to say. It just seems to me brute fact that novelty is widely prioritized. Why that should be is not a question of corporate financial strategies, but of human psychology.
Interesting data, thanks! But yes, in this case I think the psychology is interesting to understand.
Then I think your follow-up question, maybe to be posted in the next Open Thread, would be about the psychological preference for novelty (at least in movies). Instead of encouraging speculation, I'd suggest asking a question like this:
Hypothetical: You are to be comfortably exiled to a desert island for a period of five years, but you will not be cut off entirely from civilization. You will be given a TV and a satellite dish that will be locked permanently to one of two TV channels. The first is a network that only shows new and current movies. The other is a network that only shows movies made before 1970. Stipulate that, over the 5 year period, each channel will show the same number of movies and the same number of repeats, so that one channel will not broadcast a greater number of individual movies than the other. Which channel do you chose to subscribe to for the duration, and why?
This should give some testimonial insight into whether and why people might prefer novel to archival films, and what the ratios are.
Frankly, I'm curious what your choice in the above hypothetical would be, and why.
I think that Disney is sort of doing that now with all of their live-action remakes.
As to why they don't take the original movie, I think it's because of cultural and technology changes. Just to take Disney again, a lot of their princess movies haven't aged super well, and are perceived as sexist now. By rewriting parts of the script, they can fix that, but that requires making a new movie. Sort of like why Shakespeare plays get reimagined a lot. Audiences generally don't want to hear old English, but the plots are still good.
Last point is just CGI. As CGI improves, older movies will look less impressive.
Granted, innovation is part of the answer (though definitely much more so in film than literature!). Is it really the case though that all audiences care about is CGI??
Disney engaged in the strategy of living off their catalog for a long time. They would re-release Snow White, or Cinderella, or one of the others on a certain cycle of years. They never made them available for television.
Culture has now caught up with them, and they need new forms, but for as long as they could, they milked it.
I think this is a good question and I would go to a theater to see a movie I loved just to see it in theaters again.
I think that used to happen a lot more before VHS.
It's hard to make money out of stuff that's out of copyright..
So this is an interesting one. I suppose this could be a good reason - but studios fail to capitalise on films that still enjoy copyright protection too. And, you could still make money off property that's out of copy right - in fact, if you're a cinema chain, you'd make more money then, since you wouldn't have to pay royalties.
Anyone else could, too.
The competitive positioning of cinemas against each other wouldn't change at all.
People already have the stuff from their archives. If it's popular enough to bring back, that means everyone's already seen it. And time marches on. I don't imagine the current generation thinks anything of Office Space, or Chasing Amy.
And people get into creative businesses because they want to create things. Stephen King created the Richard Bachman pseudonym just so he could write more books in the same year. People make new things because those things are THEIRS.
And how much money do they actually put into new books, anyway.
You can absolutely go to a theater to watch Office Space, or The Big Lebowski, or (the obvious one) Rocky Horror Picture show. It's just that it's only small theaters in big cities, because these screenings don't really make sense unless there's enough people who want to do it at the same time to create a cult ambiance.
So the question is why? What if these things were much more heavily marketed?
Marketing spending is supposed to be a multiplier: If you spend $1 million marketing a film, the calculation is that it will increase sales by substantially more than $1 million, because the extra spending needs to pay for itself at a minimum.
Are you proposing that Hollywood could generate just as much money at the box office by marketing old movies as they do marketing new movies? Then, given that the marketing for a major, wide-release film will be approximately $100 million, and that the theaters will only return 50% of the box office to the distributor as a licensing fee, you would have to think it likely that putting $100 million behind an archival release would generate at least an additional $200 million for it at the box office. Because those are the economics of new films that you are proposing to replace with re-releases of old films.
Last year, the first "Avatar" was given a wide re-release as a lead up to the release of its sequel. Yet despite the benefit of its near placement to the sequel's release, and the halo effect of the market spend for that sequel, the "Avatar" re-release only generated $24 million at the box office. Would you really bet an extra $100 million in marketing in the hope that that money would generate an extra $200 million in box office sales for the re-release?
I don't know; my question is, if not, why not?
You'd have to consult a marketing expert, and I lack the magic chalk to draw a summoning and binding circle. (I kid!)
I suspect the answer would be that marketing doesn't work unless there is something of true value to market -- there can be no sizzle without at least a little steak -- and that, if my comments above are correct, there is too little steak in archival material to make the kind of sizzle that would generate the kind of money that novel material generates.
Certainly it's the case with movies that gigantic marketing spends are not closely correlated with successful theatrical runs: lots of movies get big marketing pushes, but bomb.
I think the issue is that the back catalog is so big that it’s hard to get a lot of people who all want to watch the same one on the same day, unless it’s a film that has a cult following. Especially ever since vhs and dvd and streaming made it possible to watch almost anything on almost any day.
But with a new thing, most people who might want to watch it haven’t had a chance to yet.
I get why artists want to create new things. I'm questioning why companies do.
And I don't agree that people dislike old material. People do see old plays in theatres, read old classics, and watch friends reruns.
Well how long does this work if people just stop creating new things and recycle the old things? When should this cut off have taken place.
After Shakespeare? After Raging Bull? After Moby Dick? After the first three seasons of Bewitched?
Companies are interested in new things, because there are always people out in the world interested in new things or new ways of seeing old things. Perhaps I am not really sure about what you’re driving at here.
There's more films than there are hours in an average lifespan; and way more books!
How 'new' are new films, really? Most are lazy rehashes of worn out cliches. I'm driving at this very question: why does the patina of 'newness' sell so much better than actual quality?
> why does the patina of 'newness' sell so much better than actual quality?
Well, that is sort of a trick question as you equate newness with lack of quality.
And if you believe certain literary critics, there is no such thing as a new story under the sun. The form it is told in, however, is very specific to the culture and time.
Would we be happy just watching old silent films? Some of us might, but maybe we would rather see Steve Martin doing kind of the same routines only in color and up-to-date.
You could think of painting and wonder why cave art isn’t just as relevant today as it was 40,000 years ago. Who needs Titian or Picasso or David Hockney?
People buy versions of old plays, and buy old classics, and buy the Friends series, and now if you try to sell them another copy of it they send you home, they've already got one you see, it's very nice.
Companies create new things because companies are comprised of people and the people who work at creative companies want to be part of the creative process. There's also the basic problem of only one company getting top spot; If your rival company has The Godfather and you've got, like, Dick Tracy, do you want to be second fiddle forever? Or do you want to make something new to try to knock them off their high (headless) horse?
There's something in this; yet, the profit motive usually dominates - granted, even coca cola tried 'new coke' but they quickly reverted to the original!
The entertainment industry is heavily hit-based, so companies are always on the outlook for the next smash hit. They obviously continue to milk established franchises (some would even say excessively so, to the detriment of actual novelty), but you can't really make as much, or even a tenth of what Harry Potter brought in at its peak by just endlessly re-releasing it as is.
That's what I'm questioning - why not?
Novelty is iherantly valuable
Why?
See my comment about Disney above. Also the technological space of entertainment and art has exponentially changed in the last 75 years for most of the 20th century. It was pretty stable. You had radio, you had books, live theater and movies.
If you stayed at home, you had books, maybe radio, and any musical instrument you might be able to play. This is the world in which Disney could release Snow White, and the seven dwarfs every seven or eight years into the movie theaters and have a whole new generation of kids the right edge coming to see it. The aesthetic change in a generation of 10 years these days is profound.
I think the home entertainment complex is highly implicated in your question here.
But aesthetics come and go. Who's to say that a 40s film noir wouldn't be seen with fresh eyes now?
Because there wouldn't be any hype. Marketing goes only so far, true hits happen due to word-of-mouth. Everybody has heard about Harry Potter already, and either read it or probably never would (for books), and only superfans or very young people might go watch it in the theaters.
We're about to get an experiment in this, in that HBO will be making an entirely new HP adaptation series.
You think? Has this been tested? People still watch the mousetrap in London...
Tom Holland of The Rest Is History podcast argues that modern progressivism is secularized Christianity, with the main common themes that the first will be last and vice versa. That value revaluation that Nietzsche hated so much and wanted to revalue again.
Yet, as far as I can tell, most modern progressives despise Christianity and in fact think of themselves as a reaction to it.
I want to know, in a Tom Holland sense of Christianity (the last will be first and vice versa), who are the real Christians today, in an intelligent sense.
Pop and political culture want you to believe transsexuals are. They have somehow been last and therefore now should be first. Ironically, I think that culture doesn't care much for Christianity.
Yet, isn't the real Christianity those who abide by it, not those who merely speak in its tongues?
Perhaps gays and transsexuals are the most Christian culture we have. They want to turn our corrupt society of money changers upside down. They want to reverse power. They want the last to be first, like Jesus did.
Relevant: https://thealternativehypothesis.substack.com/p/neurological-confirmation-that-religion
Tom Holland wrote Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, which explores much the same themes. First of all, it's a masterpiece of writing. You can't not be impressed by the eloquence of passages like:
"Today, as the floodtide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of American and European liberals risk being left stranded. Much of what they have cast as universal risk being exposed as nothing of the kind [...] Secularism owes its existence to the Medieval papacy. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible that humans are made in God's image, that his son died equally for everyone, that there is 'neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female'. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First, there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St. Paul. Then there came the aftershocks. The revolutions in the 11th century that sent Latin Christendom upon its momentus course. The revolution commemorated as the Reformation. The revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within its embrace every other way of seeing the world, the claim to a universalism that was culturally high specific, that human beings have rights, that they are born equal, that they are owed sustenance and shelter and refuge from persecution. These were never self-evident truths."
In the book, Holland attributes everything from science to human rights to abolitionism to the Beatles to communism to wokeism to a distinctively Christian worldview. On the one hand, he's not completely wrong: it's easy to see how a religion that worships a man tortured to death by an empire would appeal to the poor and the subjugated, and fuel moral revolutions throughout history. On the other hand, abolitionism, human rights, science, communism, woke, etc took hundreds or thousands or years after the coming of Christianity to be invented. Maybe they all have Christian elements, but the vast majority of the inspiration that led to them had to be non-Christian, or else why were they invented so late and often by non-Christians? There's also the fact that you can make a more convincing case for slavery than against it using the Bible, and a better case for genocide than against it using the story of the conquest of Canaan.
I really liked Holland's book, but I want to read either supporting or critical work by other scholars responding to it. If you know any, let me know. In the meanwhile, I don't think Holland's argument, even if 100% true, in any way discredits communism/wokeism/progressivism, nor does it in any way support Christianity's metaphysical claims. Pope John XXIII said in Veterum Sapientia that "the inauguration of Christianity did not mean the obliteration of man’s past achievements. Nothing was lost that was in any way true, just, noble and beautiful." In the same way, the inauguration of post-Christian progressivism does not mean the obliteration of man's past achievements. Nothing that was true, just, noble, or beautiful about Christianity needs to be lost; but just as the Christians didn't feel the need to keep worshipping Zeus, neither should we post-Christians feel the need to keep worshipping Jesus.
I particularly enjoyed your final paragraph, very insightful.
As to what read next, have you read WEIRDest people in the world? In case you have just read the book review on ACX, I plead to not judge the book by the review. I do not find it represented the books clarity and persuasiveness. I wanted to recommend you that book before I finished reading your comment. Now taking into account your last paragraph - I feel it really fits the whole theme of WEIRD, it perfectly describes what this book seems to be doing with me personally.
To give you my shortest summary possible: WEIRD describes all the unintended, unconscious effects of Christianity on the West in particular. By dissecting all the various underlying factors it reveals them to consciousness. I can now appreciate my own cultural christian heritage much more without having to feel religious in particular. I feel like I can square the circle, finally.
Thanks, I'll put "WEIRDest people in the world" on my reading list. I listened to a podcast with the author and thought he had interesting points, so I should probably get around to reading the book.
I have to retract my criticism of the book review: somehow I didn't finish reading it but then forgot about it. After finishing it, I have less to criticise. But anyway, I can recommend the book again - super fascinating.
similarities don't entail genealogy; much more work would need to be done to show that, which, as far as I know, hasn't been done
There's a pretty simple genealogy. It's just not popular because it involves a lot of theology and a lot of historians really don't like doing theology. But basically in the early 20th century you had the Fundamentalist-Modernist split. It was around complicated theological questions which we don't have to get into here.
At the time the more liberal churches mocked the fundamentalist belief that modernist Christianity would lead to less belief in God. But the the vast majority of modernists would become secular in a generation or two. The descendants of these modernist churchgoers, both religious and irreligious, then went on to become a fair bit of the modern left. Especially the more elite, white forms of leftism. It's not a coincidence that episcopalianism, which was and arguably still is the church of the traditional American elite, is modernist and liberal.
This split had two major effects:
1.) Being religious became a sign of conservatism. (Before that it depended on which church you were in.) This also meant most established churches became conservative.
2.) Being secular became a widespread and open possibility. But most of these secular people remained semi-Christian or Christian descended in the sense they would still celebrate Christmas etc. They also had and have clear ideological influence from the old Modernist churches. Though not as much or as directly as some conservatives like to say (because they too do not like doing theology).
Not the early 20th century, more like the 70s, but I have an older, very secular liberal friend who says he was raised in a Baptist church that split from its roots which decided to preach the teachings of Jesus but without any literal belief in God. His very left-wing roots began in this actual Baptist church whose adherents over the decades eventually stopped identifying as Christian.
There's definitely some thought patterns. Like how you can be dragged down by the deeds of your ancestors, be it "original sin" or "white privilege." And a glorification of victimhood/martyrdom; blessed are ye when people misgender ye/xe/they. Unlike Christianity, though, the progressive movement looks to the future, ignoring the horrible bigoted past of last Thursday, when we only had 37 genders.
>(it's about undue, unexamined advantages in the present, not about inter-generational guilt)
maybe, but approximately 100% of 'white privilege' true believers also believe that white people, collectively, are guilty of "slavery" (not American slavery, but slavery per se!) and owe black people in perpetuity.
>and that makes even less sense when you consider how many people in the social justice movement are secular Jews — coming from a religion that doesn't *have* a notion of "original sin".
HAHAH, let me guess, if somebody blamed jews for being disproportionately responsible for woke BS, you'd shout them down as anti-semtici conspiracy theorists though, right?
"Whether you believe in or reject the notion of white privilege, it has nothing to do in how it works with that of original sin (it's about undue, unexamined advantages in the present, not about inter-generational guilt),"
This is completely a motte-and-bailey argument. Mainstream and celebrity "antiracists" absolutely use "white privilege" to mean "white people by their very existence uphold systems of oppression therefore by the fact of their being born white they owe a debt to oppressed people." Regardless of whatever it was supposed to mean originally.
So you've gone from motte-and-bailey to "no true Scotsman."
People who earn full tenure professorships for their original sin usage, or who drive mainstream news coverage or policy decisions are difficult to handwave away as not "real people on the left."
The analogy is shallow, and falls apart easily, but I still have to deal with idiots trying to guilt me because my ancestors were racist.
When secular Jews complain about "white people" and "white privilege" they mostly aren't referring to their own ethnic group.
Politics is literally religion (in the brain): https://thealternativehypothesis.substack.com/p/neurological-confirmation-that-religion
Or... wokism is based on dogma/faith and is impervious to empirical refutation.
"Religion is bad" is an argument only proposed by people such as yourself. I find it difficult to believe that you are unaware of anti-wokism among religious people, especially with your previous invocation of secular people in the SJ movement.
Jesus did indeed overturn the tables of the money-changers, but he did so not out of an abstract desire to upend all hierarchies, but out of zeal for the house of God and its holiness. Scripture has things to say about human power structures and the use and misuse of human authority, but prior to those teachings it calls on all humans -- regardless of power, race, sex, wealth, or any other demographic boxes -- to acknowledge the authority of God, our own sin, and our need for forgiveness in Christ.
Secular progressivism borrows some from Christian teachings on human dignity, and thereby (correctly) emphasizes the importance of caring for all human beings, including the poor and oppressed. However, by denying the deeper truths of the human condition as outlined above (God is holy, we are sinful and need forgiveness) it ends up in a radically different place from Christianity -- indeed, progressives often see claims related to God's authority as categorically wrong and oppressive when they conflict with the desires of the human individual.
I’ve long thought that Christianity has succeeded precisely because it’s so inconsistent and contradictory, so you can make it whatever you want it to be. Do you want fire and brimstone? There are plenty of Bible verses to cherry-pick to make that work. Do you want hippy-Jesus peace and love stuff? There are verses for that too. It doesn't matter if the Bible explicitly spells out, in the clearest language possible, that something is prohibited. You can just use "love the sinner," "turn the other cheek," and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" to invalidate the prohibition. And feel like you're the defender of traditional Christian values as you argue for throwing out the past 2000 of Christian teachings on something.
Banned for this comment.
Hey Chicken F. S., I think woke hysteria is stoopit too, but I find your post extremely repellent. No doubt these people were not saints, but they are dead, and moreover they died young in a state of terror and pain and bewilderment with nobody to comfort them. And THEY did not ask to be glorified as race martyrs by the press, so you can't justify making fun of them on the grounds that they were self-important jackasses. The shit you wrote isn't any funnier or more appropriate than similar shit about the kids who were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook School. If you want to go after somebody, go sling insults at the living, who can come back at you.
They're bad people and it's good they're dead. And they would have had ZERO problem being race martyrs, as evidenced by violent black people being in almost universal agreement on making martyrs of these people.
>The shit you wrote isn't any funnier or more appropriate than similar shit about the kids who were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook School.
How many of the sandy hook kids were violent against pregnant women? How many of them pounded a man's head into the pavement who posed no threat to them? Trayvon Martin was literally shot while attempting to murder a man, and you think this is somehow REMOTELY comparable to children being murdered in cold blood?
>If you want to go after somebody, go sling insults at the living, who can come back at you.
Bravo Eremolalos, bravely shouting the truth...that the most powerful institutions in the country are in universal agreement with and who will destroy the lives of anyone who disagrees with it publically! Brave and stunning.
Amen
Amen what? You think children being shot in cold blood is remotely comparable to trayvon martin being shot in self defense as he attempted to murder a man?
I was replying to Eromolalos’ comment.
I thought the post by chicken fried steak was in extremely poor taste.
Very well said, Eremolalos.
I always liked and enjoyed ACX and SSC while being appalled by the edgelords who pop up in the comments from time to time and blatantly violate our host’s “pick at least 2 of true, kind, necessary” rule.
>“pick at least 2 of true, kind, necessary” rule.
It's a bullshit rule, because most discussions are precisely about whether or not something is true in the first place! And "kind" and "necessary" are subjective to the point of meaninglessness.
Thank you drosophilist. I love the term “edgelord,” which I did not learn til last year. I’m not sure it applies to all of these people, though. Was wondering if this one, given any encouragement, would move straight on into “hey, let’s go shoot us some *coons*, haw haw.”
>“hey, let’s go shoot us some *coons*, haw haw.”
Oh yes, isn't Eremolalos being so wonderful and acting in such great faith! Mocking black nationalist religion means you obviously want to literally kill black people! How good faith! How fair! How reasonable!
I think it's probably fairer to say that western secularised progressivism *derives* several of its key ideas from Christianity, rather than actually *being* Christianity (just sans God). I think Holland himself would probably admit this, he just gets carried away in phrasology sometimes because 'longterm cultural influence of Christianity' is kind of his hobbyhorse. And he's right, insofar as progressives pick up the 'slave morality' torch that's been dropped in Europe by a dwindling Christianity and in the USA by a 'Christianity' that's increasingly alien to its original spirit.
As an addendum, a significant subset of the Christian church in the Anglophone world has become quite vocally progressive-aligned, and consumed overwhelmingly more by social justice issues than by theological conviction. My reading is that this is, at least on some level, an attempt to preserve the church community by updating the 'rallying flag' of belief in God which on its own has lost too much viability - see Scott's classic SSC post 'The Ideology Is Not The Movement', especially section IV-4. For the reasons outlined in that post though, this tends not to work very well, since the new rallying flag ultimately just encourages the next generation to bleed into the progressive mainstream and forget traditional religion altogether (especially since, as you say, mainline progressive rhetoric tends to despise Christianity).
And last I looked at it, these progressive churches have been losing membership at pretty high rates, while conservative churches have been gaining members (likely not the same people). Overall I think Christianity is still seeing an overall reduction in professed adherents, but I personally feel like there are more dedicated-to-God-over-secular Christians now than in recent years.
[citation needed]
I know that the growth of the former United Methodist Church was driven by Africans who are now part of the GMC.
Since the (former) UMC was the largest mainline denomination and the chart stops pre-schism, and I have no idea how at Atlantic/Brookins partner will classify the GMC (they're not evangelical, per se) it will be interesting to see how they plot the trendline.
Hm. I'll grant that the "defund the police" movement has produced some people claiming that shoplifting and car robbery should be taken in stride because the people taking the stuff need it more than you. And the focus on helping the homeless is mostly dead-on.
> "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
But then there's this::
> "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Plus there's that whole "believing in God" thing.
What does Christianity have to do with believing in God? Was believing in a god a question 2000 years ago? The question then was Which God?
God is a concept that doesn't disappear when you stop thinking about it.
I'll try to approach this from a different angle.
God (or alternately, reality) is like the Schelling point. If you disconnect from God (or reality), then you still may have a point of consensus, but over time it will shift around in vector space, and ultimately the only consistent description will be "the point that a large group of people agrees on", which is circular (or at best, like the ship of Theseus). One can think of the organized Church as an institution designed to prevent this drift. For example, by keeping random mystics on the fringes from having revelations and leading groups of people off into "heresy", and by making sure that beliefs are consistent and the consequences are fully explored.
Then your question is incoherent: who are the real Christians today, but without any trace of Christianity or Christian beliefs?
That's like asking "make me an apple tart but you can't use any apples".
If you're asking "what is the group which best exemplifies the secularised version of 'the last shall be first and the first shall be last'", then you're re-stating Holland's thesis that modern progressivism is an heir of the Christian values of Western society, even if it is opposed to doctrinal orthodox Christianity as implemented.
So yeah, the whole id-pol identity thing would fit under "the formerly marginalised must be brought front and centre and the privilged must stand back and yield their place" derivation of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last".
I think Holland is pointing out how, despite the rejection of doctrinal Christianity, the values which permeated society are still being used and taken as foundational by modern secularism, even if they deny or are not even aware of the particular influences there.
You're showing that with "What does Christiainty have to do with believing in God?"; the seculars aren't 'believing in God' or disbelieving in God, they're still working off a peculiarly *Christian* idea of who enters the Kingdom. It's not a 'general belief in god, whichever god you want to pick' derivation; if you don't come out of the Christianity-influenced culture here, you're not going to work on societal change from a basis of “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you".
That's what 'believing in God' has to do with it. Modern secular progressivism is living off the capital of preceding generations who were Christian specifically, and wrote those principles and that understanding into things like "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
All debates on God and secularisation should include a reference to G.K. Chesterton's extraordinary percipient observation in 1908:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered … it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
G.K.Chesterton: Orthodoxy (1908)
I think it depends on your perspective. A secular person (such as myself) might say that the ethical/game-theoretic moral conclusions are indeed self-evident; it is obvious why murder/theft/etc. are bad actions to take in human society, and why some degree of altruism and empathy should be encouraged instead, for the entire tribe or nation to survive. If this is the case, then it is the Christians who have spent ages taking unearned credit (and in fact plagiarizing older religions and philosophies when it suits them).
By analogy, Christians cannot necessarily claim credit for Calculus, even though Newton, the inventor/discoverer of Calculus, was a (sort of) Christian; Calculus works regardless of your faith (or lack thereof). And Christians certainly do not to claim credit for arithmetic (ancient Babylonians have that honor).
> it is obvious why murder/theft/etc. are bad actions to take in human society
I used to think like this, but now I know better. It is not obvious at all; in fact, punishing defectors can be the most important thing in life. To override this, one would presumably need something even more important, such as a divine commandment not to.
Christians punish defectors all the time, though (and have done so throughout history), so the divine commandment must not be working too well...
"the ethical/game-theoretic moral conclusions are indeed self-evident"
Well if they're so self-evident, why did someone have to come along and invent the fancy term of "game theory"?
Nobody needs to be told "water is wet and fire burns". But when you have to invoke "no, see, there's this complex mathematical model" about something, then I don't think it's as self-evident as you claim.
Sure, the devil's always in the details. You don't need a giant stone tablet in the sky to tell you that water is wet and fire burns; these things are self-evident. But why is water wet ? Why does fire burn ? The answers are surprisingly complicated, and you actually got lucky with the easy questions; if you asked "why is the sky blue ?", then the answer would be much more complicated.
Similarly, it's obvious why theft and murder are bad and should be discouraged, and why loving your immediate neighbour (at least) is a good thing, but questions like "why do people steal ?", "who should count as your neighbour ?", "what is the proper punishment for muder ?", etc., are subject to intensive study.
Christians have done very little to answer such questions. That is to say, over the years they experimented with the answers just like everyone else, with mixed results. Their one crowning achievement is, arguably, banning cousin marriage; and that was a political decision, not a theological one.
There is some truth to what you say, however You probably need to read the book. Rome wasn’t in any way liberal pre Christianity.
As for recent TV, I thought Fleishman Is in Trouble (Hulu) staring Jessie Eisenberg and Claire Danes was good. A NYC Jewish couple gets divorced. Shades of A Marriage Story and Philip Roth. I like how nobody is right or wrong, good or bad. Or maybe everyone is wrong and bad and that's just how it is, the only way it can be if we want to thrive and move on.
What I did not like was all the stolen use of recent cliche's without citation as if they were profound: Hemingway's "Slowly and then quickly." The comedy podcast (Anthony and Opie?) (Adam Carolla?) joke about the Free Pass your spouse would let you have sex with (the idea being it's a celeb you would never actually have a chance with) yet one caller comes in and says his Free Pass is Helen at the local Deli. Fleishman steals that joke and tries to make it meaningful. There were at least 3 or 4 other recent cliches it stole and that drove me nuts. Otherwise the writing is pretty good.
I liked how unabashedly secular Jewish it all was. How melancholy, painful, funny, cruel, and optimistic it is. I feel like most people around these parts think TV sucks, but it doesn't. Not all of it. Plenty of it is better than the last book you read.
Why can't someone make a similar show that is secular Christian? Sure, secular Christian is mostly an oxymoron but what about lapsed Catholics? Or even Protestant Christians who don't really believe. I know plenty of them. They exist. Secular Christians is a huge thing. It's basically the Democratic Party. Why do they have no media representation? Media in the sense of TV shows or movies?
I'll admit I haven't actually watched very much of it (and I'm sure it's varied a lot over the years) but I feel like "secular Christian" is basically how I'd describe the Simpson family - I know they attend church, but I've also never really seen anything that looks like real active faith to me.
But honestly, it's pretty rare for media to have any explicitly Christian characters at all nowadays, much less "explicitly Christian but non-practicing".
Secular/lapsed Christians *are* the default in media, you just don't notice because being lapsed means they don't talk about it.
You seem to be looking for "identifiably Christian but don't practice" and that's not gonna happen; if Reginald in New York stops attending the local Episcopal church, he's not going to have the Bible etc. lying around his house visible to indicate 'yeah, Reggie used to go to church but doesn't anymore'. Reggie is going to be Just An Ordinary Guy.
What you're asking for is the "granny still has holy pictures and the crucifix up on her walls and goes to Mass and says the rosary but the grandkids are lapsed" and that might happen, but it's going to be in particular contexts: Italian, Hispanic/Latino, Irish. The Protestant version will be the Southern Evangelical granny and the lapsed grandkids still stuck in the Bible Belt with the society around them paying lip-service to Christianity. Those are going to be 'ethnic' representations of particular instances.
General mainstream Protestant "I don't do that god stuff anymore" is the ordinary secular society around us. If you say "that's the Democratic Party", okay - what do you think Governor Newsom's religious life would look like if expressed in his home and daily life? Yeah, that looks like just like it is now.
I suppose The Sopranos is about semi-lapsed Catholics.
Has anyone updated on the dangers of global warming in the past 2 years?
I myself have experienced some confirmation bias. I think global warming is a problem -- I can't quantify it. I expect the next couple decades to be hotter, and, living in a hot place, I'm not happy about it.
Now, I don't think climate change will be the problem at the level progressives keep screeching about, much like I don't think AI is the risk doomers screech about, or Hell is the hell Christians once screeched about, but I think progressives, doomers and Christians have about equal points. There's probably something there in each case to be taken seriously in appropriate measure; I don't believe the measure is high but it's non-zero.
Or is Hell the place with the screeching?
Yeah.
As far as I'm concerned, global warming shifted from likely true to...just observably true. Like, go out to Napa and talk to the wine growers, it's a real thing they're dealing with, especially given how sensitive those microclimates are.
On the other hand, catastrophic climate change seems incredibly unlikely for...kinda mundane reasons of age. Like, "An Inconvenient Truth" is so old now but if you've been hearing climate doomerism for 20+ years...it just seems unlikely. Like "Oh, we ended up in the timeline where climate change is a bad but not catastrophic issue" and it's hard to take new doomer predictions seriously when I can remember falsified old ones from 20+ years ago.
Most persuasive stuff I've read about really bad events due to warming is that poor countries will suffer crop failures due to weather changes, and many people will starve.
Global warming has a meaningful chance to be much worse than the current alarmist predictions. Model errors run both ways.
Which current alarmist predictions? I think it has a zero percent chance to be worse than the alarmist predictions where it leads to human extinction. Certainly has a chance to be worse than the alarmist predictions where it reduces GDP by 1%.
Well ok there's always a level of "alarmist" that crosses into neverland. I was referring to the "worst-case" consensus scenario, something like +6°C increase by the end of this century.
I think there's a big difference between global warming (overwhelmingly strong evidence that it's a massive problem), AI (semi-plausible arguments that it might some day be a problem) and Hell (a fairy-story with no evidence whatsoever).
>overwhelmingly strong evidence that it's a massive problem
We have a lot of articles predicting things after they happen.
But also: there is no plausible scenario where global warming is actually an extinction risk. There are error bars on the predictions, but they are relatively small. For AI there could be an extinction risk. The error bars on the predictions are absolutely enormous.
This was not really hard to find: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe
That was interesting. I had previously seen the Nature article about "such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming" It would be quite an amplification effect, if real! Still, one study (with no way to check experimentally, of course) is likely to be an LK-99 of climate science. (Also, technically, 4C + 8C giving 12C is still not an extinction risk. Even 10 million survivors scrambling to eke out an existence as subsistence farmers in a thawed Antarctica is a civilization ending event but not a human species ending event.)
Clickbait. Zero percent chance that this is accurate.
Aw come on, zero is not a probability. https://www.readthesequences.com/Zero-And-One-Are-Not-Probabilities
And I would assume Dr. Luke Kemp has given this a lot more thought than you or me, so his probability estimate should be more accurate than your rounding it down to zero.
What’s the probability that a Martian invasion destroys humanity? But fine, read ‘zero’ as ‘infinitesimal.’
As for Dr. Kemp, I think the whole field of climate science is hopelessly politicized so no, I don’t think expertise conveys any more accuracy than intelligent amateurs can achieve. See also the performance of epidemiologists in the recent pandemic.
The article doesn't provide support for the headline.
Legal sports gambling is still relatively new in the USA. Does anyone know much about how the ecosystem works? My questions:
- If someone wants to give gambling advice for money, is that regulated?
- How efficient are the markets?
- Are hedge funds betting on American sports? If not, why not?
- Are there popular gambling advice companies or personalities?
- Are there hedge funds for sports gambling? Is that legal?
There are definitely hedge funds doing sports gambling.
Priomha Capital is supposedly the largest, and they do US sports (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) along with cricket, golf and horse racing: https://priomha.com/priomha-capital-cloney-multi-sport/
To the extent that sports gambling is getting legalised in the United States, this will probably lead to a huge flood of unsophisticated dumb-bunny money into the markets, which might make it an excellent time to invest in this sort of thing.
How does Priomha even work? Surely if they're so successful they would just be banned from sports betting sites (as happens to many individual investors).
I've been out and about exploring the Boston area (which is my home), and have seen *several* different types of outdoor signs expressing NIMBY views (to wit: several signs opposing the 528 Boylston St proposal in Newton, and a different type of sign opposing the 845 Boylston St proposal in Brookline). Meanwhile, I have yet to see even a single YIMBY sign.
Apparently YIMBY groups do exist in the Boston area (according to the reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/wn3g9w/yimby_groups_in_boston/ ). But all this is making me wonder: is the Boston area leaning YIMBY or NIMBY overall (among the subset of people who live th