1. A good-faith shorthand for "surely it's *really* obvious to both of us why those two things are not at all comparable, and listing all those reasons would be a waste of time. Are you aware of this and you were just making a snarky comment that wasn't meant to be taken seriously, or do you honestly think it *is* a valid comparison and could you elaborate on why?"
2. A bad-faith response that's one of the most obnoxious ever in my opinion, that's basically trying to enforce a social taboo against your position instead of engaging rationally with it. Translates to "you've just crossed the line into Formal Heresy", with equivalents like "wow, just wow!" and "get a load of this guy". I've seen this used by almost every group and it makes my blood boil; does anyone know if it has a name? Of course if you really *were* breaking a widely-held and clearly-justified taboo (like defending slavery or paedophilia) then this response would be understandable, but it's invariably not a real taboo at all, just something they think should be one or that is one only in their political group.
If it might be the first case I'd respond with "yes I did, could you explain why you object to that?" If it's clearly the second, I'd probably repeat my previous paragraph to them if they seem otherwise reasonable and it's the first time they've done this, and if they do it again, never try to interact rationally with them again.
Depends what you're trying to counter. Typically I take that as a sign they aren't trying to engage in good faith and are just there for ego-inflating rabble-rousing. So if there's an audience (or if it's, like, a small child or something), you may want to stay dignified and make your point all classy-like, but if there isn't (or if it's an ego audience) then it's time to start flicking water in that stubborn horse's face.
Either way a simple "yes" acts as a return volley that will make them actually say something.
It seemed as though he was having a bit of a meltdown - getting involved in a lot of culture war threads and being very direct in his responses. It was unusual for him to be that involved, though I wouldn't say that he hid his beliefs otherwise.
Maybe he gave himself a time out for getting too heated.
Scott doesn't tend to delete posts from people who got banned, especially those that didn't result in a ban.
I tried searching the 4 most recent threads for "bann" and "treb", and didn't find anything. Usually Scott replies with something like "user was banned for this comment", if I remember right? It looks like from some of the responses other people made in this thread, that a discussion got a bit heated, so I'm guessing that had something to do with it.
A) you keep speaking out of both sides of your mouth saying the _school_ is doing it to them. It's not clear what that would mean or that it's happening. Evidence please, and not of the anecdote variety.
B) Do you have literally any other examples? Anything at all? Are we really just in "extremism is anything I don't like" land? You say piles big - what else is in there? Evidence please.
This Saturday we are fortunate to have a special guest speaker, Professor Michael Rose, one of the leading researchers in the world on the evolution of aging and scientific strategies for health and life extension. His experiments and analysis point towards a heterodox approach to human life extension that has immediate implications on lifestyle and that provides a new scientific paradigm to develop advanced life extension technologies.
Please read the following outline of his research and approach to healthy long life, and bring your questions, comments, and criticisms for the presentation and lively discussion that will follow.
Embracing the power of evolution to stop aging | Dr. Michael Rose
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.
Here is a summary from Claude 2:
Aging as a Decline in Adaptation
Aging reflects a progressive decline in adaptation due to weakening natural selection after the onset of reproduction, not inherent biochemical deterioration. Some organisms exhibit no senescence, demonstrating that aging is not inevitable.
Experimental Evolution of Aging
Shifting onset of reproduction in fruit flies quickly changes lifespan and aging rates, demonstrating the malleability of aging by altering natural selection.
Role of Natural Selection in Patterns of Aging
Comparative biology reveals correlations between ecological mortality factors and aging rates, evidencing the role of natural selection in shaping aging.
Human Aging in Evolutionary Context
Humans likely evolved slow aging due to reduced extrinsic mortality from tools, hunting, and sociality attenuating the age-dependent decline in the forces of natural selection.
Impact of Agriculture on Human Aging
Agriculture initially decreased health but populations adapted genetically to cereal and milk diets, primarily during high selection pressure juvenile phases. Older adults retain poor adaptation to agriculture.
Cessation of Aging
There is a late-life cessation of aging where mortality/fertility plateaus due to negligible natural selection. Some populations may exhibit early cessation, investigable with hunter-gatherer lifestyles and medicine. Experiments shifting cessation of reproduction alter timing of aging cessation in flies, demonstrating it is evolvable.
Antagonistic Pleiotropy
Trade-offs between early reproduction and late survival due to antagonistic pleiotropy of genetic variants accelerate senescence. Natural selection favors sacrificing later health for early fertility due to asymmetric forces of natural selection declining with age.
Evolutionary Basis for Life Extension
Evolutionary experimental research provides the strongest framework for understanding the plasticity of aging rates and cessation. Mainstream molecular damage theories inadequately explain aging. Aging should be understood as an evolvable decline in adaptation amenable to genetic and environmental manipulation.
If we look at the historical dramas/biographies that won Best Picture at the Oscars, it seems that some decades of history get a lot more love than other decades. If we look at the decade in which the movies' characters achieved their fame/greatest achievement/etc., it seems that the 1940s and 1960s are really well represented. (So I'd attribute Lawrence of Arabia with the 1910s, because that's when Lawrence when to Arabia even though the movie also includes his death in 1935. But that's not why he's famous).
By my unscientific calculations, no one has yet made a historical drama/biography that won Best Picture set in the 1980s or the 1990s. There have been winners in every other decade since 1910. (Lawrence of Arabia for the 1910s, Chariots of Fire for the 1920s, The King's Speech for the 1930s, Patton for the 1940s, A Beautiful Mind for the 1950s, Green Book for the 1960s, Argo for the 1970s, Spotlight for the 2000s, probably too early for the 2010s and yet we already have Nomadland).
So my first question is: will we ever get a historical drama/biography that wins Best Picture and is centered primarily around people who became famous in the 1980s or 1990s?
When should we expect this movie to come out? How long until we no longer expect this movie to come out?
From what I understand of the Oscar process, it will wait until a director makes a very good movie (in year N-1), which should have won Best Picture except that the Academy gave it to someone else, and then next year (N) makes a serious biopic which the Academy can then give Best Picture to, in order to make up for the previous year (N-1). Of course, that means that a more deserving movie of the current year (N) doesn't get it, but that's OK, they'll give it to that director next year (N+1).
This is mostly tongue in cheek, but having dated a film studies person for a few years, it seems entirely too plausible.
Entirely plausible - looking through the past few years of Best Picture nominees, I'm not seeing any big snubs. Moreover, the nominees seem to really tilt towards the 1940s and 1960s. In fact, there seem to have been more World War I movies getting Best Picture nominations than historical drama/biographies about the 1980s and 1990s.
So maybe we're moving in the opposite direction and we're going to have more movies about the distant past rather than the recent past.
Originally I was going to idly speculate on Fukuyama's "end of history", and the problem with setting things in the Information Age, where there's too much data that could be dug up to undermine a 2-hour narrative. And maybe wonder about polarization, and whether that's going to have an effect - the Academy is solidly left, but that might not prevent problems coming from the other half of the country being incentivized to attack whatever film it is. It might just be safer, in terms of getting a big hit, to set things back in a time when fewer keyboard warriors were alive, when there was less data to contradict a good story.
Hey, idly speculate away. That's what makes this fun!
I agree with your take that newer historical dramas/biographies are more prone to culture war battles. That may also play a role in the rise of nonfiction movies about products, rather than people. For example, in the last year there have been movies about Air Jordans, Tetris and Flaming Hot Cheetos. I doubt we would have seen such movies 20 years ago.
It's easier to make a movie about your favorite product than your favorite politician when the past isn't settled. So we should expect historical films to focus on something other than historical figures from here on out.
I agree, but I also think that being faced with a large number of critical "all the things wrong with X" articles can diminish a movie's reception; take the sheen off, as they say. So part of my hunch (not even worthy of the name "theory") is that to avoid this effect, rather than improving accuracy, Hollywood instead sets movies in times and places where it's harder for people to be critical about them.
The 80s seems a tough sell for Hollywood because it would probably have to be pretty pro-Reagan, and that is like arsenic to most of the voters. Same with the 90s. Rudy Guiliani is like the seminal positive figure of that decade. I dont think there is much appetite to make a Clinton one either.
Yeah, Giuliani's rise and fall from competent mayor to incompetent lawyer is very Shakespearean actually, and intersects with many important figures of both times, but Hollywood's left-wing politics means they would see the 'rise' as bad. The liberals of the time hated Giuliani, I remember that.
I think that fits with some observations I've been reading that historical movies are more likely to center around products now than at any point in the past.
If you can't get behind Reagan, surely you can get behind Air Jordans, Tetris and Cheetos.
However, I'd wager these product-based movies are less likely to win a prestigious Oscar than a comparably well done biography.
The guy famously "cleaned up New York", but maybe it wasn't all that famous to people who weren't in the area? When I was nearby, it was getting noticeably less sketchy year by year, which was about how often I visited.
I have never lived in NY and have no particular reason to know anything about their mayors, and felt like it was common knowledge Rudy was instrumental in turning the city around from a really low point.
I left the state for good a decade before Giuliani, and never cared about the city even when I did live in upstate NY. But, yeah, Rudy was common knowledge even from my vantage point in LA.
It didn't win the Best Picture Oscar but The Social Network won 4 Golden Globes and 3 other Oscars. Winning best picture is a pretty arbitrary metric - the process is notoriously political and doesn't really select for quality. A less noisy analysis would probably use something like box office or award nominations. Really what you're looking for are mainstream serious movies. There have been big-budget films about George W Bush and Steve Jobs. The Devil Wears Prada was about Anna Wintour. Private Parts was about Howard Stern. I, Tonya was set in the 80s/90s. American Sniper was about a guy who did his stuff in the 2000's. Any of those films could conceivably have won Best Picture. It would be interesting to plot the trends over time though.
In truth, the reason I picked "Best Picture winner" as the metric was because the data set was small enough I could review it on my lunch break.
I also agree it'd be interesting to plot the trends over time - particularly in light of the 30-year nostalgia cycle I keep hearing about. I kinda feel like we should be expecting more 90s nostalgia and that we may have had less-than-normal amounts of 80s nostalgia. But that's just a vibe, and the data would be really cool to look at.... but not to assemble myself.
I don't have any metric to compare to others, but we've had a lot of 80s nostalgia recently. Peak probably in Stranger Things, but there's been others. Lots of movie remakes from that decade as well recently.
I would expect the countries that survive a zombie outbreak to be the ones that did well keeping Covid out. So that's New Zealand by virtue of geography, and China by virtue of a willingness to kill millions without hesitation.
Realistically, *no* country would be at serious risk in the event of a zombie outbreak, because they just aren't much of a threat as commonly portrayed. The only reason they are even a threat is because they somehow outnumber humans 100:1 and can teleport around offscreen and half the humans are invariably traitors to boot. In order to get anything like the Stock Zombie Setting, you basically need to posit a Thanos Snap magically turning 95% of the population into zombies, and presumably, New Zealand is not any more reistant to Thanos Snapping than the US is.
I was implying he would Flame of Anor away the Thanos Snap, but even if he's zombified we all know Gandalf recovers from death after a couple of adventures. It's fine in the long run.
The question isn't which countries would be well positioned to survive zombies. The real question is *how do you make zombies into a threat in the first place?*
The stock pop cultural zombie apocalypse is a bit paradoxical, because the zombies are slow, weak and uncoordinated, making them less of a threat than say, a herd of angry cows. And yet they somehow took over the world and regularly kill red shirts and so on. The only reason they are even a threat is because they somehow outnumber humans 100:1 and can teleport around offscreen and half the humans are invariably traitors to boot.
There's also the issue of how the apocalypse comes about in the first place. In order to get anything like the Stock Zombie Setting, you basically need to posit a Thanos Snap magically turning 95% of the population into zombies. Pandemics Do Not Work That Way, especially when you're talking about a disease where carriers have obvious visual symptoms and which is harder to spread than Ebola.
Government and military are largely irrelevant because the Stock Zombie Setting assumes that they got Thanos Snapped away before the start of the story. If your setting still has a functioning government, it can barely even be considered a zombie story any more.
Lastly, I have no idea what gun ownership is supposed to do with anything, unless it's just meant as a proxy for other societal factors. Sure Pop Cultural Zombies take +200% damage from Shotgun To The Face like they're vampires against garlic and stakes or something, but from a physics perspective, there's no reason why you couldn't just go at the zombies with an ordinary sword or even improvised weaponry, unless you're fighting the kind of zombie with magical regeneration powers, in which case guns aren't going to help you either.
At the beginning many people turn to zombies because the infection spreads very quickly. You become a new zombie in a few minutes, sometimes in a few seconds, after getting bitten by a zombie. Compare to e.g. covid, where I think you start spreading the viruses on the third day. So the exponential curve goes more than 1000 times faster, initially, in places with high population density.
And there is the element of surprise: before people start to understand what is happening and how to defend themselves, many already got zombified. Imagine yourself as an armed soldier or a policeman, if your teammates suddenly started behaving strangely, right now, would you immediately start shooting them in the head? It would take some time for "this is actually a zombie apocalypse, I am not joking" to become common knowledge.
Public order can be maintained by the police and army because most of the population complies with their orders, at least when the guns are pointed in their general direction. And when you actually start shooting, it causes panic, and most of the wannabe revolutionaries disperse. None of this happens with zombies. You can't stop a zombie apocalypse by taking out the zombie leaders.
A military unit would be perfectly able to protect its own members (as long as it does not run out of ammo), but I doubt they could take control of a city. I think they could protect a few high-priority targets, but other than that, they would simply see the civilization collapse all around them, because they couldn't simultaneously protect the factories, the fields, the offices, the streets, the trains, etc.
I agree that it would be unlike the typical zombie movie. The government and the military would survive. But most of the population would probably die during the first week. Then the military would eliminate the zombie mobs, and teach the survivors some basic self-defense against zombies. Civilization would start again, but the economical situation would be dramatically worse; too many things disrupted. (Housing might become cheaper, though -- so maybe it's not so bad, all things considered.) Political changes would probably happen, too; most likely in a direction most of us would not approve of.
First off, most zombie fiction I'm aware of as conversion be a *much* slower process, since that lets you write those sweet drama plots about whether to kill your infected teammates or not.
Second, even if we grant that, you're *still* vastly overestimating the zombie threat. And while you may not *shoot* your friends if they start acting strangely, you're certainly going to try to dodge and run away if they suddenly shamble over to you and physically attack you.
If a bunch of angry chimpanzees were teleported into a crowded mall, I'm sure they'd kill a bunch of people just due to the surprise factor. But I'm also confident that most people would escape unscathed. And chimpanzees are *much* more dangerous than zombies.
You're also ignoring physical constraints. You can't just say "exponential, but 1000 times faster" because that's not how zombie outbreaks work. The zombies have to *physically* move to the location of their victims and physically bite them, which put sharp constraints on the rate of spread, especially as zombies are slow and easily avoided. They're also stupid and uncoordinated, so they're not going to systematically go door to door searching for victims like real life death squads do.
You might like "All of Us Are Dead", where zombies are about as fast as humans, and the military is competent (after overcoming the initial surprise).
The speed of zombification... I like to imagine that it depends on the initial virus load. If a zombie bites you to a neck, or ten zombies bite you all over the body, you die and zombify quickly; but if you only get a small bite or scratch to your hand or leg, you may merely feel pain for a few hours, and then suddenly you get fever and die and zombify quickly. This allows quick exponential zombification of crowded areas *and* infected people being in denial and infiltrating safe spaces.
I think that in movies, unrealistically many doors just happen to be locked at the wrong moment. Also the zombies, despite being completely stupid, usually happen to block the door. The walls are easily broken when the zombies need to get into the room, but the humans in the room cannot similarly break them to escape from the room. Without these factors... yes, if a zombie was randomly teleported to the middle of a school, probably less than ten people would actually die from the bites, ten to twenty might die in the stampede, and everyone else would probably leave the school alive (because the doors wouldn't be locked, or someone would just kick them out because they wouldn't be armored).
Most of continental Europe would be screwed. Too dense, lots of passenger rail and other transport, fractured politics but interconnected economies and social ties.
I’m not sure that the US is invulnerable but it would definitely bounce back more quickly than other countries. I greatly enjoyed HBOs The Last of Us, but found it crazy that after 20 years!! the country would still be over run with zombies, lacking any formalized economy, and without at least a semi functioning government (or multiple regional ones). This didn’t hurt the story but really jumped out to me.
Guns are a poor countermeasure against zombie outbreaks, aside from the bit where the whole point of imaginary zombie outbreaks is that they give us an excuse to fantasize about shooting lots of people. But taking the premise as given, headshots are too unreliable to count on, suppressive fire doesn't work, and you don't need much range to deal with attackers who can only engage hand-to-hand.
Ability to quickly produce improvised flamethrowers, armor both body and vehicular tailored to the zombie threat, and secure fortified compounds, will be much more important. And much more widespread.
I'll grant 1, but 2-4 seem much less common in big US cities, which creates a worrying weak spot. Have you seen "All of Us Are Dead", a Korean high-school zombie series on Netflix?
But to answer your question, how about Haiti? (Putting aside the irony of Hollywood zombies in Haiti.)
A sufficiently strong outbreak along the southern border would probably stop and even reverse the immigration flow with Mexico, so that's half the country in favor right there. And once it's pointed out that eating brains is a simple application of equity, the other half would fall in line. I think we've got a winner!
Assuming that the United States is a spherical cow composed of two equal-sized, completely homogeneous parts which perfectly map to media stereotypes, yeah, I'll stand by the joke.
At any more detailed level of analysis it completely falls apart, of course.
Keep in mind the large oceans on either side, with limited population north of the US.
I think the worst candidates would be:
1) Large population, high density
2) Limited or no gun ownership
3) Geographic access to other populated areas (no oceans or mountains, etc.)
4) Lower levels of technology and/or infrastructure
From that list, I'm thinking that both India and China would be hard hit, though authoritarian willingness to kill their own citizens may help China. Places with smaller populations but more problems might include large African nations, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East.
Island nations would likely do better, as would very rural areas such as Siberia, the Sahara, and northern Canada.
I need help calculating how far from the Sun a Dyson Swarm would need to orbit to function efficiently. Assume the Swarm uses solar energy emitted by the Sun. The hotter the solar panels are, the less efficient they are at converting sunlight to energy.
At the Earth's distance from the Sun (93 million miles), a solar panel floating in space, receiving full sunlight, would heat up to 120°C. (If the solar panel were shaded by another object, it would cool down to only 3 Kelvin.)
At Mars' distance from the Sun (152 million miles), how hot would the solar panel get? Maybe the Dyson Swarm satellites should orbit at that distance.
Note that it's only 120 degrees if both a) you have the full swarm such that the effective area for reradiation is *only* the back, b) all the power generated by the panel is used onboard the satellite such that waste heat = sunlight striking the satellite (as opposed to waste heat = sunlight striking the satellite - power transferred off-satellite via laser).
With either of those not holding, it's significantly less than 120 degrees.
In any case, since both of those are simple multipliers, they don't complicate the question of moving things outward to Mars. Mars' orbit is actually substantially eccentric, so its distance from the Sun changes quite a lot (1.38-1.67 AU, or in Imperial units, 128-154 million miles). If you take Mars' average distance from the Sun (1.53 AU) as the distance of your sphere, then the temperature of a solar panel there is going to be sqrt(1/1.53) = 80.8% of the temperature (in Kelvin) of an equivalent solar panel at 1 AU (Earth orbit). Note, of course, that you will need 1.53^2 = 2.34x as much material in order to build a sphere in Mars orbit compared to Earth orbit, because the sphere will be larger.
Thank you. I also asked a NASA engineer about this, and to complicate things, he said different types of solar panels were optimized to work at different temperatures.
No, it doesn't. It says they get to ~150F. 150F =/= 150C (it's about 66C, though he says 70C, so I'm not sure which way he buggered up the conversion).
Do note also that the ISS receives significant amounts of Earthlight and probably a little drag heating from the atmosphere (it's well inside the exobase).
Also, "how well the solar panels can dissipate the energy that they're not capturing" is not an unknown in space; conduction = convection = 0 because space is an approximately-perfect thermal insulator, and radiation is directly linked to temperature by the Stefan-Boltzmann law. There is *some* variability based on geometry of the collectors, but it's not especially large.
I didn't meant heat dissipation was an unknown in a physics sense, what I meant was that how big you're willing to make a heatsink matters. My (very low) understanding is that you could dissipate a ton of heat with a sufficiently large heatsink. Of course if you have a Dyson swarm you might be radiating that waste heat onto other satellites, so I guess you need some clever geometry? I definitely don't think the situation is as simple as "a solar panel at distance X will reach temperature Y"
A heat sink only stores heat; I think you're thinking of a radiator.
And yes, the issue is that the geometry of the system limits the useful area of your radiators. Any given outgoing sightline can only have one radiator radiating along it, because if there were two then one would block the other. For a full Dyson swarm with ~100% of the star's light absorbed, then unless your radiators extend outward by a significant distance *relative to the swarm size* (which would be thousands of kilometres, not happening), your effective radiator area is limited to the surface area of the sphere - and this limit is very nearly attained by simply making the satellites flat panels in synchronous rotation (the side opposite the star being the "radiator"), so there's no real room for getting clever.
It's not quite as simple as "a solar panel at distance X will reach temperature Y", no, because if the solar panel is transmitting energy somewhere else then that's energy it doesn't radiate as heat. It's more like "a solar panel at distance X with absorbed -> beamed power efficiency Y will reach temperature Z". But the setup really does impose hard limits (limits which would indeed not apply to a solar panel on its own, as it could extend a radiator behind the panel to increase effective radiating area and without all the other satellites this would actually work).
I mean, I suppose if you had multiple different geometries of satellites, then you could make some of them get slightly warmer than Z and some slightly cooler, but that doesn't seem amazingly useful.
Consonants are more straight forward but they can be interesting too. I didn’t learn to distinguish the voiced alveolar stop ‘d’ from a voiced dental stop ‘d̪’ until I had a South Asian coworker who’s name used them.
I didn’t really pick up on the difference until she white boarded the respective tongue positions.
"In 529 AD Damascius, the last head of the Academy in Athens, closed down the philosophical school and, with several fellow scholars, went into exile in Persia. This is often portrayed as the final act in “the closing of the western mind” and the beginning of “the darkening age”; the symbolic closing of an institution founded by Plato himself almost a millennium earlier. It is regularly portrayed in popular writing and anti-theist polemic as the end of ancient science and rationalism in the west and the beginning of a one thousand year medieval dark age. But is this true? What was the Academy and why did it close? And what does this tell us about Christianity and intellectual history?"
Given this preliminary snippet, and given I detested Nixey's take, I'm hoping for a good old barney here, though maybe he might be a bit more sympathetic to Jones:
"In 2017 Jones gave newspaper arts journalist Catherine Nixey a glowing pre-publication review for her notorious book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017), which featured prominently on the book’s cover and in its publicity material. Jones announced enthusiastically that “Nixey’s debut challenges our whole understanding of Christianity’s earliest years and the medieval society that followed” and declared her “a formidable classicist and historian”. Actual experts in the relevant period and subject matter, on the other hand, were rather less than impressed with Nixey’s biased and polemical work, with Oxford Classicist Peter Thonemann pointing to her reliance on “quite a bit of nifty footwork” and Dame Averil Cameron calling it “overstated and unbalanced” and “a travesty” (see “Review – Catherine Nixey ‘The Darkening Age'” for my full critique of Nixey’s rather terrible book).
So perhaps Jones was depending on Nixey when he turned his attention to the subject of Christian responses to Classical philosophy and learning while writing Power and Thrones."
Hi, I've never posted but wanted to give it a try. I found ACX as a senior in college through my bff Daniel and have been reading on and off for a few years now. This blog brought me into to the worlds of Substack, rationalism, and EA, all of which helped shape my current principles and beliefs, so I'm eternally grateful for this community. My favorite posts are the book reviews from ACX readers-- I might ingest more new ideas during the book review contest than any other time of year.
I started blogging daily as an experiment and want to plug it here: https://splattern.substack.com/. I've had a lot of fun writing it. Currently all my readers are close friends, but I think it'd be interesting to share it more broadly. The content has no particular angle, it's whatever I feel like writing about. Thanks.
On some corners of the internet (e.g. reddit) there's commonly-cited advice that you should never, ever talk to the police about anything, and instead you should immediately call a lawyer. This video seems to come up pretty often as support https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE ... of course it's no surprise that the people most keen to promote this meme are criminal defence lawyers.
This seems to me like outstandingly bad advice, assuming you're either not guilty of anything or are guilty of some minor infraction. In the case where you're innocent, the police officer will usually ascertain this after a couple of questions and you'll be on your way. In the case where you're guilty of some minor infraction, if you're polite then you've got a good chance they'll warn you to stop it and send you on your way. Even in the case where they give you a ticket for something, you're much better off paying a few hundred dollars for a ticket than getting arrested and wasting the day in a cell while you pay a lawyer a few grand to stand around and tell them that you're not answering any questions. In all the videos I've seen where someone tries to be as uncooperative as legally possible, they usually wind up making things worse for themselves, not better.
The other day the police approached me to ask me what I was doing in a particular place at a particular time of night. I told them, and they went on their way. I hate to think what would have happened if I'd followed the internet's advice and refused to answer any questions.
Cops are no better than the citizenry that they're drawn from, and are more likely to be worse because of selection effects and job effects. Any plan that relies on a cop being kind or reasonable is more risky than the same plan involving a random citizen.
There's some probability/game theory math you could do. Cooperating with the police:
(1) Increases the chances that they correctly solve the crime at issue, which is good for you if you are somewhat altruistic and did not commit the crime.
(2) Increases the chances that they leave you alone, which reduces the hassle and legal expense you are likely to encounter if they don't.
On the other hand, if you (a) are guilty of a crime the police are interested in or (b) the police have a strong desire to find you guilty, cooperating can make your situation worse.
I pretty much always cooperate if I'm the only one involved. On the other hand, when the police really wanted in to my frat house in college following a noise complaint, I was very polite but absolutely didn't let them in because I didn't know how the other people in the house might be affected.
My brother in law took a field sobriety test (after two drinks!), which every lawyer will tell you not to do even when sober because it's too subjective, but the police let him go, and if he had refused, they would have held him until they could do a breathalyzer or blood test, so he saved himself a lot of hassle.
Well, if it's a 200$ ticket, who really cares, but what if it's something much more substantial?Scenario: you come home one day and find your wife dead, appearing to have slipped in the shower and hit her head. What do you do? I would call 911, report what happened, and then immediately lawyer up.
That's the most sociopathic rebuttal to "you're a sociopath" I have ever seen.
Michael Druggan's point was that neurotypical people would freak out when they unexpectedly find their loved ones dead at home – not because they're weighing their options and choosing the path which "makes them look good in front of others", but precisely BECAUSE they're NOT weighing their options and choosing the path with the highest utilitarian gain for all of society in such a situation.
What if you knew that there was someone out there who would love to frame you for a crime? What if you knew that there was systemic bias against a group of people of which you're a member?
I live in a pretty small community and actually know quite a few of the local police, including the chiefs of police for several local jurisdictions. It would be beyond weird if I just clammed up when around them. They're people, who operate like normal people. Acting weird and saying nothing is a great way to increase suspicion and start them looking when they weren't otherwise.
I think the advice from the internet can apply in many cases - when people are actually guilty or doing something that is suspicious. If you've committed a crime, then saying as little as possible ("I would like to speak with my lawyer") is actually really good advice. I guess it may be good advice if you're the kind of person that the cops would find suspicious even if you haven't done anything.
In a normal interaction with police, your best bet is to be friendly and polite. The trouble is that it is not always obvious that the police suspect you of some serious illegality. Then the very unequal nature of the situation becomes very important to understand. One of the few things you may have going for you is that the police are not permitted to act on any suspicion they have based on your refusal to answer questions or consent to a search.
Police interactions are often designed to encourage you to forget about these rights, or to think that waiving them could be to your advantage - you need to be aware that this is a trap.
Of course you should be polite to the police. And still you don't have to say anything.
They often start with the question: "Do you know why we stopped you?" If you do, and start to apologize: "Sorry, I drove too fast because [some sob story]", bang!, you did it on purpose, and the fine is higher.
Here's a story of a man who was standing alone on a field next to a warm car, drunk and without license --- and they couldn't prove that he had actually been driving because he said nothing.
The absolutism of "never ever say ANYTHING to the police" is primarily to help stupid Americans (eg criminals who bad at crime) remember to not confess their serious crimes to the police. It's not *really* intended for the soccer mom who just rolled a stop sign right in front of a traffic cop's dash cam. In her situation, saying she's sorry she rolled it, but that's little Savannah just projectile-vomited from the backseat onto the center console, might earn her a little grace.
That said, the general principle of "don't volunteer information" isn't exactly *terrible* if it helps regular folk avoid talking so much that they inadvertently introduce probable cause (to search a home, vehicle, etc).
In my jurisdiction, paying a Penalty Charge Notice isn't self-incrimination, and you don't get a criminal record, so in that case I agree it's best to just pay it and move on.
The claim is: in the US, during interrogation, the police can lie to you about why they are interviewing you, and in court, hearsay rules enable cherry picking of any statements you make.
I don't know how I'd react to a random convo with the police on the street, probably the urge to be polite would get the better of me.
It's legal advice, not practical advice. Meaning it has the best chance of getting you out of legal trouble.
But you've correctly pointed out that cops can impose lots of penalties without getting a conviction. As they say, "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
It is worth asking why we even have a right against self-incrimination in the first place. After all, it would make things a lot simpler - instead of harassing people who are "as uncooperative as legally possible", just make it criminal to be uncooperative. It's a much clearer and more defensible legal system than the one we currently have, wherein we give people a right that they invoke at their own peril.
The right was in place from the start, and should be in place. That [some of] the police have developed work-arounds to try to reduce the value of those rights is unfortunate but perhaps necessary in their line of work. Imagine working with career criminals who lie about everything all day long.
In Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) (which Scott also wrote an essay about here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures) David Chapman argues that as a subculture grows, "geeks" (the true fans) welcome "mops" (casual fans) as it validates their status as "cool" and makes the subculture grow. This seems to make sense on a rational level, as growth of a subculture also means there's a natural increase in The Thing the subculture cares about.
However, my experience is the opposite—as a subculture grows to the point where it's starting to become "mainstream" (i.e. it's starting to lose its status as a subculture), "geeks" usually start gatekeeping aggressively. (Chapman does mention this as well—"successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted"—but I don't think this really captures the spirit of the kind of gatekeeping I'm thinking of)
Here are some phenomena which, to me, all seem to stem from this effect:
* Eternal September - geeks complaining about "normies" invading the Internet.
* Music - back when people cared more about music than they do now, "casual fans" were derided as "posers" that didn't truly appreciate the music, or did something else that upset the status quo of the ingroup.
* Gamergate seems to have been an expression of this phenomenon, where admittance of women into a traditionally male-dominated hobby seemed to cross some kind of threshold.
Usually the "geeks" don't explicitly state that they're engaging in gatekeeping behaviour—instead of saying "we don't want to dilute our in-group, so you can't join" they usually use some other argument related to lack of skill or understanding, or not fulfilling some very specific set of criteria ("you're not a real X unless..."). To some extent they might not themselves be aware of what they're doing, as protecting the status quo of the in-group is probably a subconscious instinct.
Sorry, now I feel like I'm rambling. Anyhow, have you experienced similar phenomena? And do you agree / disagree that the examples I posted above are caused by the same social dynamic? If so, is there a common name for this phenomenon? (I think "gatekeeping" is a bit too broad to describe it)
I think the primary reason for gatekeeping any group is the preservation of status. For example, if I'm a member of an exclusive society of rich people, my membership alone grants me high social status. However, if they opened the club up to everyone I would lose the status boost my membership gave me, and so it is in my best interest to keep the group small.
I think the same phenomenon can be applied to the status roles within subcultures. Even if a person has low social status outside the subculture, they might still have a shot at high social status within it, by virtue of having skills, knowledge or other attributes that the subculture appreciates. However, as the group fills up with mops, members start caring less about special skills or knowledge, and possession of them no longer grants the same status. Eventually the in-group is completely assimilated into the mainstream and the status boost is gone.
A minority of "geeks" start gatekeeping aggressively, and for the most part ineffectually. Their occasional local victories do little to undermine Chapman's thesis.
Or are there examples of *successful* geek gatekeeping efforts, leading to something more than tiny irrelevant enclaves of geek purity? I can't think of any offhand, but presumably there must be some.
That's a good point; the gatekeeping is usually a lost cause, so you're right in that it doesn't undermine Chapman's ideas. However, what got me interested in this was the aggressive gatekeeping itself—as Chapman observed, growing the group should be in the group's best interest, but some social dynamic is prompting members to try to keep new members out.
They don't gatekeep in the beginning not because they won't gatekeep but because there's very few people to gatekeep against.
Imagine a society, the Chrekists, dedicated to the study of Chrekology, a new science. In the beginning nearly nobody cares about them. Some people drift in because they discover some basic chrekological principles and want to learn more. But most people aren't even aware they exist. Now, if someone showed up and said, "the primary goal of chrekology should be the advancement of American national interest" they'd likely shoo them out of the room. And this would be gatekeeping. But it also wouldn't happen very often because everyone there would be preselected for high interest in chrekology.
However, eventually a company (Woomazon) gets founded using chrekological principles and it becomes successful making a great many chrekologists billionaires and millionaires and giving them almost complete control over the refining of oil. (Turns out chrekology is great for refining oil.) Suddenly a bunch of people with a passing interest in chrekology but a HUGE interest in money or power or environmentalist or whatever will want to enter chrekist communities. And at this point the same gatekeeping behaviors that have always existed will be applied to many, many more people. Who will not like this and might even feel entitled to police chrekist communities in line with their moral values.
At this point there will be a battle for who is to blame: the chrekists for enforcing standards on the activists, journalists, new members, etc or the activists, journalists, new members etc for entering the space without due respect or investment in the existing culture? If the former wins then the space becomes assimilated to general culture. If the latter wins it remains a united subculture but this does limit its influence on the wider outside world. Your statement amounts to asserting the first view is correct: it's their fault for desiring to enforce community standards. Which is certainly a common position.
My real issue is that it's often held hypocritically. "When you come into my spaces you must respect my norms but when I come into your spaces then you must respect my norms." Which in turn makes it into a social power game.
Another counter-phenomenon that I've noticed personally is that once the subculture becomes popular enough I stop caring as much about it, even if I was originally a hardcore evangelist. There's no longer the hipster cache of telling people about the cool new thing that they're not privy to, because it's no longer new and they probably already know about it.
The most prominent recent example of this for me has been ML & neural nets, which I've been talking people's ears off about for over a decade now, but has become so mainstream at this point that it no longer feels special.
I know, right? Once upon a time I felt cutting-edge for using insights from neural networks to more accurately model my mental processes. But two decades later, and now everyone's doing it! At least it's still as accurate as ever. :-)
> Gamergate seems to have been an expression of this phenomenon, where admittance of women into a traditionally male-dominated hobby seemed to cross some kind of threshold.
That's a strawman written by one side of the conflict. It is easy to believe, because it follows the known stereotypes and blames the low-status people. It fails to explain facts, if you happen to know any -- for example, why did these allegedly gatekeeping misogynists organize a game development contest for female developers? Also, why the sudden explosion in 2014?
The story of the opposite side, if I remember it correctly after almost ten years, is that two seemingly unrelated things happened...
1) Gamers kept complaining that game reviews in mainstream media are completely unrelated to how good the games actually are. Like, the most popular game of the year would get an average score; and then a crappy piece of software, more like a proof of concept than an actual game, something that a skilled high-school student could produce over a weekend, got the highest score and the journalists couldn't stop writing about how awesome it was. For the gaming community this mattered a lot, among other reasons because game developers in large companies often had their bonuses tied to the score in mainstream media.
2) A random guy wrote a blog about his relationship with an incredibly jealous rich girl, describing how she prevented him from meeting any of his female friends, and how she kept reminding him that if he ever cheats on her, that would technically mean that he raped her, because she only gave consent to an exclusive relationship. One day he got suspicious too, and started following her, and found out that she was actually cheating on him, not with one, but with five guys simultaneously.
...and then someone noticed that the girl described in the blog happens to be the author of the crappy but highly rated game, and two or three of the guys she cheated on her ex with, were game journalists who wrote the stellar reviews. And the internet exploded -- except, it did not, because any mention of the connection (or even her name) was immediately deleted, across dozens of seemingly unrelated subreddits. Overnight, gaming subreddits became a nuclear wasteland. Which of course only made people more curious, and they started finding out other interesting details.
Long story short, the journalist guys started the story of "akschually, the gamers simply hate women, there is nothing else to see here"; the story was repeated by other media, and thus became the official version on Wikipedia. The rich girl called her family lawyers and achieved a gag order against her ex; a year or more later it was revoked as unconstitutional, but by that time the narrative was already established.
There was never a significant complaint against women playing computer games / developing computer games / being computer game protagonists (various people believe different versions of the libel). Despite utterly losing the PR war, an important victory of Gamergate was that FTC finally noticed that game development is no longer an insignificant nerdy hobby, but became a billion-dollar business, and therefore reporting on games is now regulated; for example, game journalists are now legally required to disclose the conflict of interest, so the same story could not happen again today without potential legal consequences.
I remember seeing the word mentioned in various places, looking it up to find out what the controversy was about, and being only able to find completely biased descriptions from either side, each with an entirely different set of facts and claims. You might say every political controversy is like this, but this was particularly bad; usually you can easily find at least one neutral description of the controversy that summarises both sides. In this case, after heaps of searching I couldn't find a single explanation along the lines of "gamergate is a controversy which started when this group claimed this happened, but that other group said that was a lie and this happened instead".
So, has anyone actually investigated the factual claims in a remotely neutral way? The fact that both sides are still apparently recylcing the same "clearly, this is what happened" with no substantive evidence, makes it seem like the answer is no. Which makes this seem like one of the most sterile things to argue about, until there's a judicial verdict in a defamation case, or a transparent investigation by an unbiased media outlet (if such a thing is even possible at the moment).
Until then, I wonder if a way to partially resolve an issue like this where the basic facts are in dispute, would be to ask both sides to affirm certain moral principles in the abstract: "do you both accept that cheating is always despicable, no matter who does it?", "do you both accept that people of any demographic should be accepted as members of an online community?", regardless of whether they think these things happened in this particular case. If one side isn't willing to make those declarations, then I'd feel comfortable dismissing their entire position.
Ah, this is complicated. I completely understand your desire for a neutral person to come and provide a neutral description. I wish for that, too.
The problem is that whenever something like this happens -- a formerly neutral person comes, investigates the claims impartially, and concludes that the facts mostly (although not perfectly, there is of course a lot of exaggeration and misinterpretation) support one side -- such person is no longer considered neutral, at least by the opposing side, right? The former neutral now becomes "one of them", and as such is no longer trustworthy.
(It's like asking for a neutral person to decide whether it is better that Democrats or Republicans should win the election. No matter what position the person starts with, as long as they conclude e.g. "there are good arguments for both sides, but all things considered, it is better for the country if the Democrats win", such person is now considered pro-Democrat, rather than neutral. And people will complain again: if only we had a neutral person to explore the situation neutrally and tell us whether we should trust the pro-Democrats or the pro-Republicans.)
I mean, just the fact that I wrote the previous comment probably made everyone conclude that I am not neutral. And such reasoning makes perfect sense; I am not blaming you! Similarly, anyone I would quote or link, by the same logic, would not be neutral. The only way to keep your neutral creds is to either say "I have no idea" or to conclude that "both sides are exactly 50% right and 50% wrong" (but what is the neutral supposed to say if they conclude that this is *not* the case?). Going with the mainstream is also a relatively safe choice, if people consider the mainstream reporting neutral by definition.
It seems like the solution is to abstain from commentary and only link facts. Problem is, sometimes the facts only make sense in context. For example, I could link the game-making competition for the female developers (google "The Fine Young Capitalists"), but it would not be obvious from the link that this is related to GG at all. To achieve that, I would also need to add links to e.g. tweets supporting the competition by pro-GG people, and tweets attacking the competition by anti-GG people. Except, you probably do not know the pro-GG and anti-GG people by name, so I would need to add even more links to prove that. (In other words, the information is fragmented.) And if I sent you a list of 50 links supporting all of this, you could dismiss me as a crazy conspiracy theorist, based on a reasonable heuristic that sane people usually do not need 50 links to prove a trivial claim. Possible replies include "well, these 5, or 10, or 20 people do not represent their entire side" and "yeah, maybe they did this one thing, but otherwise everything their opponents said is true, so they are still the bad guys".
> "do you both accept that people of any demographic should be accepted as members of an online community?"
This sounds a bit like asking Scott to publicly affirm that women are allowed to read his blog and comment on it. Yes, they are; they never needed a special permission to do that; and they have actually been here from the very beginning -- the fact that Scott never made this specific public statement is irrelevant. The situation with GG was analogical, women were a part (although a minority) of the gaming community (and GG) since ever, and at one time there was a popular hashtag "#notyourshield" to specifically express the idea that they resent the accusations made by journalists that the gaming community is excluding them. So, the declaration you would like to see kinda exists, but again it requires a bit more context to understand.
Yes, it's complicated. My main point is not that there *should* be a neutral resolution, but that absent one, something like this is pointless and destructive to talk much about, especially in a place like this. Debates about political and moral values can be constructive and illuminating, and debates about the interpretation of widely available facts and statistics can be constructive and illuminating (particularly in a rational space with strong norms of logically defending your positions)...it may be naive to expect any progress *would* be made on those debates, but it's perfectly theoretically possible it *can* be.
But in a debate like this centering entirely around differing claimed facts: who did what when, who said what in response to what, whether this person on the internet really represents this other vaguely defined group on the internet and what their true motivations were in writing this article at this particular time...it's all just a horrible mess. No one's ever going to come to an agreement, not even if everyone is completely rational, acting in good faith, and enthusiastically willing to change their mind. So what's the point?
Imagine someone reading this thread who supports the feminist side of this controversy, or who just assumed that side was correct. How are they supposed to react to your description above? There's no way for them evaluate the claims logically (because they're not logical arguments) nor to test or confirm them evidentially...they're just claims. I know you described yourself as just giving the other side of the story, but the feel of the thread (and a lot of similiar threads like this) is kind of "we all know this is what really happened". And maybe it did, maybe how you described it is exactly what happened...or maybe it's completely false, and a set of lies that have become widely accepted in certain circles as true, despite their lack of proof. I have no clue. None at all. Not in the sense that it would be too difficult to figure out, but in the sense that the answer seems basically unknowable.
So the account here is no different from the other side's "clearly this happened" account, with no real debate expected or even possible. It doesn't brazenly state that the matter is not up for debate the way the other side often does (and let there be no doubt that whoever does *that* is always without exception infinitely more contemptible than whoever doesn't) but it's still not much more enlightening.
Also, I don't think neutral investigations are impossible. Let's say two feminist-leaning people thoroughly investigated the pro-gamergate claims, concluded that they were substantively corrrect, and then continued being generally pro-feminist while maintaining the feminists were wrong about this. That would look pretty good for the pro- side. Or if multiple critics of feminism said, "look I have heaps of problems with feminism, but this gamergate stuff is just batshit, it's all crap, and it's embarassing" that would be pretty strong for the anti- side. (This is what has happened with Trump's stolen election claims I think). On the other hand if someone previously pro-feminist investigated gamergate, concluded it was true, and shortly afterwards switched their whole attitude and became anti-feminist on everything...people would underatandably be suspicious (that their real motivation was separate and had nothing to do with the facts). And the same if it happened vice-versa.
And finally, I think public affirmations denouncung your own side's worst elements are hugely underrated. Scott is suspected by some of supporting scientific race differences, I believe. If he hasn't already, it would surely make a lot of sense for him to either publically state he doesn't support those, or state that if he did they would have absolutely no impact on how people of any race should be treated in any practical context. Likewise, I can't possibly describe how much my sympathy for any given feminist would increase if she were to make the following two statements: "I don't believe anyone is being fired or ostracised for good-faith disagreement with feminism, but if that has happened I condemn it utterly and unequivocally stand with those people" and "I don't believe a fetus is at all sentient, but if I was convinced of that I would of course become pro-life".
The difference between "I'm not doing this, and if I were it would be contemptible" and "I'm not doing this, but even if I were who cares, because your rights don't matter" is the difference between someone who I can reasonably disagree with, and someone who I have no choice but to conclude is simply evil.
If they really cared about Ethics in Games Journalism, why did they spend all their time talking about the alleged relationships of one random woman who made a game they'd never heard of, instead of getting outraged at the rampant corruption in AAA games journalism (i.e. the games people actually play and care about)? Their battlecry should have been "Kane and Lynch", not "Five Guys".
Why did black people get outraged over Rosa Parks not allowed to sit in the bus? I am sure there were way more serious examples of discrimination happening at the same time. Why didn't they discuss those instead?
First, your question contains a false dilemma; people in GG discussed both those topics, and many others. The relationship itself was never a major topic for GG -- the opponents kept talking about it all the time, to keep the story simple and draw away attention from all the other topics. (The woman herself was a repeated topic of the debate, but for other things she allegedly did, such as embezzling money ostensibly collected to support female game developers, organizing Twitter mobs, abusing the legal system against her ex. Probably other things I forgot.)
Second, the straw that breaks the camel's back is not necessarily the heaviest straw in the cargo. Sometimes people's patience wears off at a random moment.
Third, there was Streisand effect in action; of course people enjoyed discussing the one topic they were not allowed to discuss anywhere else. But that was in the beginning; the debate soon turned to other topics.
Because that was what drew the over-the-top instaultrabanning.
The woman in question was a long-time lolcow (as were others that managed to jump in front of the parade and claim those sweet victim points) but until GG, those controversies flared up and died out. It was the response from reddit et. al. that made GG happen.
How are you supposed to counter when someone responds to an analogy of yours with "Did you *really* just compare X and Y?"
Related problem: when you *didn't* even make an analogy, but still someone responds the same way.
A: "Technology T needs to be banned, because people use it for a bad purpose X."
B: "It's complicated, because people also use technology T for a good purpose Y."
A: "Did you really just compare X and Y?"
I think this response can mean one of two things:
1. A good-faith shorthand for "surely it's *really* obvious to both of us why those two things are not at all comparable, and listing all those reasons would be a waste of time. Are you aware of this and you were just making a snarky comment that wasn't meant to be taken seriously, or do you honestly think it *is* a valid comparison and could you elaborate on why?"
2. A bad-faith response that's one of the most obnoxious ever in my opinion, that's basically trying to enforce a social taboo against your position instead of engaging rationally with it. Translates to "you've just crossed the line into Formal Heresy", with equivalents like "wow, just wow!" and "get a load of this guy". I've seen this used by almost every group and it makes my blood boil; does anyone know if it has a name? Of course if you really *were* breaking a widely-held and clearly-justified taboo (like defending slavery or paedophilia) then this response would be understandable, but it's invariably not a real taboo at all, just something they think should be one or that is one only in their political group.
If it might be the first case I'd respond with "yes I did, could you explain why you object to that?" If it's clearly the second, I'd probably repeat my previous paragraph to them if they seem otherwise reasonable and it's the first time they've done this, and if they do it again, never try to interact rationally with them again.
Depends what you're trying to counter. Typically I take that as a sign they aren't trying to engage in good faith and are just there for ego-inflating rabble-rousing. So if there's an audience (or if it's, like, a small child or something), you may want to stay dignified and make your point all classy-like, but if there isn't (or if it's an ego audience) then it's time to start flicking water in that stubborn horse's face.
Either way a simple "yes" acts as a return volley that will make them actually say something.
Looks like we lost trebuchet. :-(
Huh, I was interacting with him... I can only find responses on old email.
Maybe he'll be back?
I hope so, but I doubt it. :-/
It seemed as though he was having a bit of a meltdown - getting involved in a lot of culture war threads and being very direct in his responses. It was unusual for him to be that involved, though I wouldn't say that he hid his beliefs otherwise.
Maybe he gave himself a time out for getting too heated.
Scott doesn't tend to delete posts from people who got banned, especially those that didn't result in a ban.
I did a search and it appears all his comments are deleted. Was he banned? Or is this self imposed exile?
I tried searching the 4 most recent threads for "bann" and "treb", and didn't find anything. Usually Scott replies with something like "user was banned for this comment", if I remember right? It looks like from some of the responses other people made in this thread, that a discussion got a bit heated, so I'm guessing that had something to do with it.
Banned people get a big (banned) notification next to their screen name.
A) you keep speaking out of both sides of your mouth saying the _school_ is doing it to them. It's not clear what that would mean or that it's happening. Evidence please, and not of the anecdote variety.
B) Do you have literally any other examples? Anything at all? Are we really just in "extremism is anything I don't like" land? You say piles big - what else is in there? Evidence please.
Meant to be a reply not comment
Thanks. Mobile substack is really bad
ACXLW Longevity (special guest speaker) 9/2/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wu69N0x-dvEN3NImEDCEZfd0MOeCQe6cS4AolAdiCuc/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 41st 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
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Sept 2, 2023
Time: 2 PM
This Saturday we are fortunate to have a special guest speaker, Professor Michael Rose, one of the leading researchers in the world on the evolution of aging and scientific strategies for health and life extension. His experiments and analysis point towards a heterodox approach to human life extension that has immediate implications on lifestyle and that provides a new scientific paradigm to develop advanced life extension technologies.
Please read the following outline of his research and approach to healthy long life, and bring your questions, comments, and criticisms for the presentation and lively discussion that will follow.
This link is the summary:
https://55theses.org/the-55-theses/
The full text starts on this web page and continues on linked pages in the sidebar:
https://55theses.org/2011/03/18/thesis-1/
Or, if you want the 55 theses on evolutionary strategies for aging and commentary, a full-length PDF is here:
https://michaelroses55.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/55-theses-explained-final.pdf
A 20 minute audio is available here:
https://youtu.be/vd6Dm978dbg?si=_X6noVVrCKw9T-tD
Embracing the power of evolution to stop aging | Dr. Michael Rose
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.
Here is a summary from Claude 2:
Aging as a Decline in Adaptation
Aging reflects a progressive decline in adaptation due to weakening natural selection after the onset of reproduction, not inherent biochemical deterioration. Some organisms exhibit no senescence, demonstrating that aging is not inevitable.
Experimental Evolution of Aging
Shifting onset of reproduction in fruit flies quickly changes lifespan and aging rates, demonstrating the malleability of aging by altering natural selection.
Role of Natural Selection in Patterns of Aging
Comparative biology reveals correlations between ecological mortality factors and aging rates, evidencing the role of natural selection in shaping aging.
Human Aging in Evolutionary Context
Humans likely evolved slow aging due to reduced extrinsic mortality from tools, hunting, and sociality attenuating the age-dependent decline in the forces of natural selection.
Impact of Agriculture on Human Aging
Agriculture initially decreased health but populations adapted genetically to cereal and milk diets, primarily during high selection pressure juvenile phases. Older adults retain poor adaptation to agriculture.
Cessation of Aging
There is a late-life cessation of aging where mortality/fertility plateaus due to negligible natural selection. Some populations may exhibit early cessation, investigable with hunter-gatherer lifestyles and medicine. Experiments shifting cessation of reproduction alter timing of aging cessation in flies, demonstrating it is evolvable.
Antagonistic Pleiotropy
Trade-offs between early reproduction and late survival due to antagonistic pleiotropy of genetic variants accelerate senescence. Natural selection favors sacrificing later health for early fertility due to asymmetric forces of natural selection declining with age.
Evolutionary Basis for Life Extension
Evolutionary experimental research provides the strongest framework for understanding the plasticity of aging rates and cessation. Mainstream molecular damage theories inadequately explain aging. Aging should be understood as an evolvable decline in adaptation amenable to genetic and environmental manipulation.
If we look at the historical dramas/biographies that won Best Picture at the Oscars, it seems that some decades of history get a lot more love than other decades. If we look at the decade in which the movies' characters achieved their fame/greatest achievement/etc., it seems that the 1940s and 1960s are really well represented. (So I'd attribute Lawrence of Arabia with the 1910s, because that's when Lawrence when to Arabia even though the movie also includes his death in 1935. But that's not why he's famous).
By my unscientific calculations, no one has yet made a historical drama/biography that won Best Picture set in the 1980s or the 1990s. There have been winners in every other decade since 1910. (Lawrence of Arabia for the 1910s, Chariots of Fire for the 1920s, The King's Speech for the 1930s, Patton for the 1940s, A Beautiful Mind for the 1950s, Green Book for the 1960s, Argo for the 1970s, Spotlight for the 2000s, probably too early for the 2010s and yet we already have Nomadland).
So my first question is: will we ever get a historical drama/biography that wins Best Picture and is centered primarily around people who became famous in the 1980s or 1990s?
When should we expect this movie to come out? How long until we no longer expect this movie to come out?
From what I understand of the Oscar process, it will wait until a director makes a very good movie (in year N-1), which should have won Best Picture except that the Academy gave it to someone else, and then next year (N) makes a serious biopic which the Academy can then give Best Picture to, in order to make up for the previous year (N-1). Of course, that means that a more deserving movie of the current year (N) doesn't get it, but that's OK, they'll give it to that director next year (N+1).
This is mostly tongue in cheek, but having dated a film studies person for a few years, it seems entirely too plausible.
Entirely plausible - looking through the past few years of Best Picture nominees, I'm not seeing any big snubs. Moreover, the nominees seem to really tilt towards the 1940s and 1960s. In fact, there seem to have been more World War I movies getting Best Picture nominations than historical drama/biographies about the 1980s and 1990s.
So maybe we're moving in the opposite direction and we're going to have more movies about the distant past rather than the recent past.
Originally I was going to idly speculate on Fukuyama's "end of history", and the problem with setting things in the Information Age, where there's too much data that could be dug up to undermine a 2-hour narrative. And maybe wonder about polarization, and whether that's going to have an effect - the Academy is solidly left, but that might not prevent problems coming from the other half of the country being incentivized to attack whatever film it is. It might just be safer, in terms of getting a big hit, to set things back in a time when fewer keyboard warriors were alive, when there was less data to contradict a good story.
Hey, idly speculate away. That's what makes this fun!
I agree with your take that newer historical dramas/biographies are more prone to culture war battles. That may also play a role in the rise of nonfiction movies about products, rather than people. For example, in the last year there have been movies about Air Jordans, Tetris and Flaming Hot Cheetos. I doubt we would have seen such movies 20 years ago.
It's easier to make a movie about your favorite product than your favorite politician when the past isn't settled. So we should expect historical films to focus on something other than historical figures from here on out.
Hollywood feels no great need to get the facts right, even when they do know (or could find out) the facts.
I agree, but I also think that being faced with a large number of critical "all the things wrong with X" articles can diminish a movie's reception; take the sheen off, as they say. So part of my hunch (not even worthy of the name "theory") is that to avoid this effect, rather than improving accuracy, Hollywood instead sets movies in times and places where it's harder for people to be critical about them.
Well not always. Off the top of my head theres The Big Short and W, or in its day All the Presidents Men.
The 80s seems a tough sell for Hollywood because it would probably have to be pretty pro-Reagan, and that is like arsenic to most of the voters. Same with the 90s. Rudy Guiliani is like the seminal positive figure of that decade. I dont think there is much appetite to make a Clinton one either.
Yeah, Giuliani's rise and fall from competent mayor to incompetent lawyer is very Shakespearean actually, and intersects with many important figures of both times, but Hollywood's left-wing politics means they would see the 'rise' as bad. The liberals of the time hated Giuliani, I remember that.
And that fall is still in motion....
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/politics/rudy-giuliani-georgia-election-workers/index.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rudy-giuliani-jack-smith-donald-trump-jan6-1234814129/
A few 80s and 90s biopics (or otherwise historical pics based on real people) that were nominated but didn't win:
King Richard (2022)
American Sniper (2014)
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
The Queen (2006)
If we're restricted to US subjects, yea. But a good rich biopics could be made about, say,
Gorbachev
Bhutto
Desmond Tutu
Thatcher
Deng Xiaopeng
Maradona
I thought Maradona might have been a typo for Madonna.
Yea a US-centered list of 80s/90s candidates for big-budget biopics should include her. Also:
Michael Jordan
Bill Clinton
Ross Perot (calling Oliver Stone...)
Oprah Winfrey
I think that fits with some observations I've been reading that historical movies are more likely to center around products now than at any point in the past.
If you can't get behind Reagan, surely you can get behind Air Jordans, Tetris and Cheetos.
However, I'd wager these product-based movies are less likely to win a prestigious Oscar than a comparably well done biography.
> Same with the 90s. Rudy Guiliani is like the seminal positive figure of that decade.
I'm pretty sure I never heard of the guy until 2001.
The guy famously "cleaned up New York", but maybe it wasn't all that famous to people who weren't in the area? When I was nearby, it was getting noticeably less sketchy year by year, which was about how often I visited.
I have never lived in NY and have no particular reason to know anything about their mayors, and felt like it was common knowledge Rudy was instrumental in turning the city around from a really low point.
Maybe age of the viewer? I'm middle aged.
I left the state for good a decade before Giuliani, and never cared about the city even when I did live in upstate NY. But, yeah, Rudy was common knowledge even from my vantage point in LA.
It didn't win the Best Picture Oscar but The Social Network won 4 Golden Globes and 3 other Oscars. Winning best picture is a pretty arbitrary metric - the process is notoriously political and doesn't really select for quality. A less noisy analysis would probably use something like box office or award nominations. Really what you're looking for are mainstream serious movies. There have been big-budget films about George W Bush and Steve Jobs. The Devil Wears Prada was about Anna Wintour. Private Parts was about Howard Stern. I, Tonya was set in the 80s/90s. American Sniper was about a guy who did his stuff in the 2000's. Any of those films could conceivably have won Best Picture. It would be interesting to plot the trends over time though.
In truth, the reason I picked "Best Picture winner" as the metric was because the data set was small enough I could review it on my lunch break.
I also agree it'd be interesting to plot the trends over time - particularly in light of the 30-year nostalgia cycle I keep hearing about. I kinda feel like we should be expecting more 90s nostalgia and that we may have had less-than-normal amounts of 80s nostalgia. But that's just a vibe, and the data would be really cool to look at.... but not to assemble myself.
I don't have any metric to compare to others, but we've had a lot of 80s nostalgia recently. Peak probably in Stranger Things, but there's been others. Lots of movie remakes from that decade as well recently.
Is the U.S. uniquely positioned to survive a zombie outbreak? Consider its relevant advantages:
1) Large, strong military
2) Large government that is reasonably good at organizing things in emergencies
3) Widespread personal gun ownership
4) Common for people to have large amounts of food in their houses that doesn't quickly go bad (e.g. - boxes of pasta, canned foods)
Which countries are uniquely VULNERABLE to zombie outbreaks?
I would expect the countries that survive a zombie outbreak to be the ones that did well keeping Covid out. So that's New Zealand by virtue of geography, and China by virtue of a willingness to kill millions without hesitation.
The US doesn't stand a chance, sorry.
Realistically, *no* country would be at serious risk in the event of a zombie outbreak, because they just aren't much of a threat as commonly portrayed. The only reason they are even a threat is because they somehow outnumber humans 100:1 and can teleport around offscreen and half the humans are invariably traitors to boot. In order to get anything like the Stock Zombie Setting, you basically need to posit a Thanos Snap magically turning 95% of the population into zombies, and presumably, New Zealand is not any more reistant to Thanos Snapping than the US is.
New Zealand has Gandalf, they'll be fine.
95% probability that New Zealand has Zombie Gandalf. I don't think you've considered the implications of that.
I was implying he would Flame of Anor away the Thanos Snap, but even if he's zombified we all know Gandalf recovers from death after a couple of adventures. It's fine in the long run.
The question isn't which countries would be well positioned to survive zombies. The real question is *how do you make zombies into a threat in the first place?*
The stock pop cultural zombie apocalypse is a bit paradoxical, because the zombies are slow, weak and uncoordinated, making them less of a threat than say, a herd of angry cows. And yet they somehow took over the world and regularly kill red shirts and so on. The only reason they are even a threat is because they somehow outnumber humans 100:1 and can teleport around offscreen and half the humans are invariably traitors to boot.
There's also the issue of how the apocalypse comes about in the first place. In order to get anything like the Stock Zombie Setting, you basically need to posit a Thanos Snap magically turning 95% of the population into zombies. Pandemics Do Not Work That Way, especially when you're talking about a disease where carriers have obvious visual symptoms and which is harder to spread than Ebola.
Government and military are largely irrelevant because the Stock Zombie Setting assumes that they got Thanos Snapped away before the start of the story. If your setting still has a functioning government, it can barely even be considered a zombie story any more.
Lastly, I have no idea what gun ownership is supposed to do with anything, unless it's just meant as a proxy for other societal factors. Sure Pop Cultural Zombies take +200% damage from Shotgun To The Face like they're vampires against garlic and stakes or something, but from a physics perspective, there's no reason why you couldn't just go at the zombies with an ordinary sword or even improvised weaponry, unless you're fighting the kind of zombie with magical regeneration powers, in which case guns aren't going to help you either.
At the beginning many people turn to zombies because the infection spreads very quickly. You become a new zombie in a few minutes, sometimes in a few seconds, after getting bitten by a zombie. Compare to e.g. covid, where I think you start spreading the viruses on the third day. So the exponential curve goes more than 1000 times faster, initially, in places with high population density.
And there is the element of surprise: before people start to understand what is happening and how to defend themselves, many already got zombified. Imagine yourself as an armed soldier or a policeman, if your teammates suddenly started behaving strangely, right now, would you immediately start shooting them in the head? It would take some time for "this is actually a zombie apocalypse, I am not joking" to become common knowledge.
Public order can be maintained by the police and army because most of the population complies with their orders, at least when the guns are pointed in their general direction. And when you actually start shooting, it causes panic, and most of the wannabe revolutionaries disperse. None of this happens with zombies. You can't stop a zombie apocalypse by taking out the zombie leaders.
A military unit would be perfectly able to protect its own members (as long as it does not run out of ammo), but I doubt they could take control of a city. I think they could protect a few high-priority targets, but other than that, they would simply see the civilization collapse all around them, because they couldn't simultaneously protect the factories, the fields, the offices, the streets, the trains, etc.
I agree that it would be unlike the typical zombie movie. The government and the military would survive. But most of the population would probably die during the first week. Then the military would eliminate the zombie mobs, and teach the survivors some basic self-defense against zombies. Civilization would start again, but the economical situation would be dramatically worse; too many things disrupted. (Housing might become cheaper, though -- so maybe it's not so bad, all things considered.) Political changes would probably happen, too; most likely in a direction most of us would not approve of.
First off, most zombie fiction I'm aware of as conversion be a *much* slower process, since that lets you write those sweet drama plots about whether to kill your infected teammates or not.
Second, even if we grant that, you're *still* vastly overestimating the zombie threat. And while you may not *shoot* your friends if they start acting strangely, you're certainly going to try to dodge and run away if they suddenly shamble over to you and physically attack you.
If a bunch of angry chimpanzees were teleported into a crowded mall, I'm sure they'd kill a bunch of people just due to the surprise factor. But I'm also confident that most people would escape unscathed. And chimpanzees are *much* more dangerous than zombies.
You're also ignoring physical constraints. You can't just say "exponential, but 1000 times faster" because that's not how zombie outbreaks work. The zombies have to *physically* move to the location of their victims and physically bite them, which put sharp constraints on the rate of spread, especially as zombies are slow and easily avoided. They're also stupid and uncoordinated, so they're not going to systematically go door to door searching for victims like real life death squads do.
You might like "All of Us Are Dead", where zombies are about as fast as humans, and the military is competent (after overcoming the initial surprise).
The speed of zombification... I like to imagine that it depends on the initial virus load. If a zombie bites you to a neck, or ten zombies bite you all over the body, you die and zombify quickly; but if you only get a small bite or scratch to your hand or leg, you may merely feel pain for a few hours, and then suddenly you get fever and die and zombify quickly. This allows quick exponential zombification of crowded areas *and* infected people being in denial and infiltrating safe spaces.
I think that in movies, unrealistically many doors just happen to be locked at the wrong moment. Also the zombies, despite being completely stupid, usually happen to block the door. The walls are easily broken when the zombies need to get into the room, but the humans in the room cannot similarly break them to escape from the room. Without these factors... yes, if a zombie was randomly teleported to the middle of a school, probably less than ten people would actually die from the bites, ten to twenty might die in the stampede, and everyone else would probably leave the school alive (because the doors wouldn't be locked, or someone would just kick them out because they wouldn't be armored).
Most of continental Europe would be screwed. Too dense, lots of passenger rail and other transport, fractured politics but interconnected economies and social ties.
I’m not sure that the US is invulnerable but it would definitely bounce back more quickly than other countries. I greatly enjoyed HBOs The Last of Us, but found it crazy that after 20 years!! the country would still be over run with zombies, lacking any formalized economy, and without at least a semi functioning government (or multiple regional ones). This didn’t hurt the story but really jumped out to me.
Guns are a poor countermeasure against zombie outbreaks, aside from the bit where the whole point of imaginary zombie outbreaks is that they give us an excuse to fantasize about shooting lots of people. But taking the premise as given, headshots are too unreliable to count on, suppressive fire doesn't work, and you don't need much range to deal with attackers who can only engage hand-to-hand.
Ability to quickly produce improvised flamethrowers, armor both body and vehicular tailored to the zombie threat, and secure fortified compounds, will be much more important. And much more widespread.
Since the only reasonable explanation for a zombie outbreak is the Wrath of God, this question reduces to "which religion is correct?"
I'll grant 1, but 2-4 seem much less common in big US cities, which creates a worrying weak spot. Have you seen "All of Us Are Dead", a Korean high-school zombie series on Netflix?
But to answer your question, how about Haiti? (Putting aside the irony of Hollywood zombies in Haiti.)
Why should we fight the zombies and if one runs for president why shouldn't I vote for him?
A sufficiently strong outbreak along the southern border would probably stop and even reverse the immigration flow with Mexico, so that's half the country in favor right there. And once it's pointed out that eating brains is a simple application of equity, the other half would fall in line. I think we've got a winner!
Half the country?
Assuming that the United States is a spherical cow composed of two equal-sized, completely homogeneous parts which perfectly map to media stereotypes, yeah, I'll stand by the joke.
At any more detailed level of analysis it completely falls apart, of course.
Keep in mind the large oceans on either side, with limited population north of the US.
I think the worst candidates would be:
1) Large population, high density
2) Limited or no gun ownership
3) Geographic access to other populated areas (no oceans or mountains, etc.)
4) Lower levels of technology and/or infrastructure
From that list, I'm thinking that both India and China would be hard hit, though authoritarian willingness to kill their own citizens may help China. Places with smaller populations but more problems might include large African nations, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East.
Island nations would likely do better, as would very rural areas such as Siberia, the Sahara, and northern Canada.
I need help calculating how far from the Sun a Dyson Swarm would need to orbit to function efficiently. Assume the Swarm uses solar energy emitted by the Sun. The hotter the solar panels are, the less efficient they are at converting sunlight to energy.
At the Earth's distance from the Sun (93 million miles), a solar panel floating in space, receiving full sunlight, would heat up to 120°C. (If the solar panel were shaded by another object, it would cool down to only 3 Kelvin.)
At Mars' distance from the Sun (152 million miles), how hot would the solar panel get? Maybe the Dyson Swarm satellites should orbit at that distance.
Note that it's only 120 degrees if both a) you have the full swarm such that the effective area for reradiation is *only* the back, b) all the power generated by the panel is used onboard the satellite such that waste heat = sunlight striking the satellite (as opposed to waste heat = sunlight striking the satellite - power transferred off-satellite via laser).
With either of those not holding, it's significantly less than 120 degrees.
In any case, since both of those are simple multipliers, they don't complicate the question of moving things outward to Mars. Mars' orbit is actually substantially eccentric, so its distance from the Sun changes quite a lot (1.38-1.67 AU, or in Imperial units, 128-154 million miles). If you take Mars' average distance from the Sun (1.53 AU) as the distance of your sphere, then the temperature of a solar panel there is going to be sqrt(1/1.53) = 80.8% of the temperature (in Kelvin) of an equivalent solar panel at 1 AU (Earth orbit). Note, of course, that you will need 1.53^2 = 2.34x as much material in order to build a sphere in Mars orbit compared to Earth orbit, because the sphere will be larger.
Thank you. I also asked a NASA engineer about this, and to complicate things, he said different types of solar panels were optimized to work at different temperatures.
It seems like a big unknown is how well these solar panels can dissipate the energy that they're not capturing. The better they dissipate it, the closer you can keep them while still being efficient. It looks like the situation near earth may be worse than you thought, since this post says the ISS's solar panels get above 150C: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14256/what-is-the-temperature-of-solar-panels-used-in-space-missions-such-as-iss
No, it doesn't. It says they get to ~150F. 150F =/= 150C (it's about 66C, though he says 70C, so I'm not sure which way he buggered up the conversion).
Do note also that the ISS receives significant amounts of Earthlight and probably a little drag heating from the atmosphere (it's well inside the exobase).
Also, "how well the solar panels can dissipate the energy that they're not capturing" is not an unknown in space; conduction = convection = 0 because space is an approximately-perfect thermal insulator, and radiation is directly linked to temperature by the Stefan-Boltzmann law. There is *some* variability based on geometry of the collectors, but it's not especially large.
I didn't meant heat dissipation was an unknown in a physics sense, what I meant was that how big you're willing to make a heatsink matters. My (very low) understanding is that you could dissipate a ton of heat with a sufficiently large heatsink. Of course if you have a Dyson swarm you might be radiating that waste heat onto other satellites, so I guess you need some clever geometry? I definitely don't think the situation is as simple as "a solar panel at distance X will reach temperature Y"
A heat sink only stores heat; I think you're thinking of a radiator.
And yes, the issue is that the geometry of the system limits the useful area of your radiators. Any given outgoing sightline can only have one radiator radiating along it, because if there were two then one would block the other. For a full Dyson swarm with ~100% of the star's light absorbed, then unless your radiators extend outward by a significant distance *relative to the swarm size* (which would be thousands of kilometres, not happening), your effective radiator area is limited to the surface area of the sphere - and this limit is very nearly attained by simply making the satellites flat panels in synchronous rotation (the side opposite the star being the "radiator"), so there's no real room for getting clever.
It's not quite as simple as "a solar panel at distance X will reach temperature Y", no, because if the solar panel is transmitting energy somewhere else then that's energy it doesn't radiate as heat. It's more like "a solar panel at distance X with absorbed -> beamed power efficiency Y will reach temperature Z". But the setup really does impose hard limits (limits which would indeed not apply to a solar panel on its own, as it could extend a radiator behind the panel to increase effective radiating area and without all the other satellites this would actually work).
I mean, I suppose if you had multiple different geometries of satellites, then you could make some of them get slightly warmer than Z and some slightly cooler, but that doesn't seem amazingly useful.
I wonder what are y'all's favorite vowels.
(I like "A", as in "ah", because I'm boring.)
I like O, as in "oh say can you see."
I've never thought of this before, but I suppose "ɑ", the open back unrounded vowel. It's got a nice resonant quality to it.
U because it sounds pretentious.
The comfiest vowel, the one you get from "up" saying "surf's up" in an exaggerated California accent. Symbol is /ɐ/ I think
Consonants are more straight forward but they can be interesting too. I didn’t learn to distinguish the voiced alveolar stop ‘d’ from a voiced dental stop ‘d̪’ until I had a South Asian coworker who’s name used them.
I didn’t really pick up on the difference until she white boarded the respective tongue positions.
I've... never really thought about it, I like them all. Ah is hard to beat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlIz0q8aWpA "Perhaps he was dictating", indeed. 'oo' as in "Scooby Doo" is the heart of comedy. You can't find a funnier noise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo-qweh7nbQ
But I'll go with Chaucer's 'oo' pronounced 'oh', because "he was as wood" (woe-d) is supremely memorable.
Honorable mention to 'y', pronounced however the mood may strike at the moment.
Are you talking about the mid central vowel, schwa - ə - now?
Probably not. If I had to spell schwa I would go with something like ‘uh’. Vowels can be tricky though.
I like schwa okay. I’m probably pretty boring too though.
No I'm talking about /a/.
Ah, I see.
Huzzah, History for Atheists has a new post up and it's a book review!
https://historyforatheists.com/2023/08/the-closing-of-the-athenian-academy/
"In 529 AD Damascius, the last head of the Academy in Athens, closed down the philosophical school and, with several fellow scholars, went into exile in Persia. This is often portrayed as the final act in “the closing of the western mind” and the beginning of “the darkening age”; the symbolic closing of an institution founded by Plato himself almost a millennium earlier. It is regularly portrayed in popular writing and anti-theist polemic as the end of ancient science and rationalism in the west and the beginning of a one thousand year medieval dark age. But is this true? What was the Academy and why did it close? And what does this tell us about Christianity and intellectual history?"
Given this preliminary snippet, and given I detested Nixey's take, I'm hoping for a good old barney here, though maybe he might be a bit more sympathetic to Jones:
"In 2017 Jones gave newspaper arts journalist Catherine Nixey a glowing pre-publication review for her notorious book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017), which featured prominently on the book’s cover and in its publicity material. Jones announced enthusiastically that “Nixey’s debut challenges our whole understanding of Christianity’s earliest years and the medieval society that followed” and declared her “a formidable classicist and historian”. Actual experts in the relevant period and subject matter, on the other hand, were rather less than impressed with Nixey’s biased and polemical work, with Oxford Classicist Peter Thonemann pointing to her reliance on “quite a bit of nifty footwork” and Dame Averil Cameron calling it “overstated and unbalanced” and “a travesty” (see “Review – Catherine Nixey ‘The Darkening Age'” for my full critique of Nixey’s rather terrible book).
So perhaps Jones was depending on Nixey when he turned his attention to the subject of Christian responses to Classical philosophy and learning while writing Power and Thrones."
Hi, I've never posted but wanted to give it a try. I found ACX as a senior in college through my bff Daniel and have been reading on and off for a few years now. This blog brought me into to the worlds of Substack, rationalism, and EA, all of which helped shape my current principles and beliefs, so I'm eternally grateful for this community. My favorite posts are the book reviews from ACX readers-- I might ingest more new ideas during the book review contest than any other time of year.
I started blogging daily as an experiment and want to plug it here: https://splattern.substack.com/. I've had a lot of fun writing it. Currently all my readers are close friends, but I think it'd be interesting to share it more broadly. The content has no particular angle, it's whatever I feel like writing about. Thanks.
Olly’s writing smooth like honey with golden nuggets inside. AND he does it all while sleeping on the floor!
I have really been enjoying the latest series of posts, like your life is a Russian novel and each post is a new chapter
On some corners of the internet (e.g. reddit) there's commonly-cited advice that you should never, ever talk to the police about anything, and instead you should immediately call a lawyer. This video seems to come up pretty often as support https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE ... of course it's no surprise that the people most keen to promote this meme are criminal defence lawyers.
This seems to me like outstandingly bad advice, assuming you're either not guilty of anything or are guilty of some minor infraction. In the case where you're innocent, the police officer will usually ascertain this after a couple of questions and you'll be on your way. In the case where you're guilty of some minor infraction, if you're polite then you've got a good chance they'll warn you to stop it and send you on your way. Even in the case where they give you a ticket for something, you're much better off paying a few hundred dollars for a ticket than getting arrested and wasting the day in a cell while you pay a lawyer a few grand to stand around and tell them that you're not answering any questions. In all the videos I've seen where someone tries to be as uncooperative as legally possible, they usually wind up making things worse for themselves, not better.
The other day the police approached me to ask me what I was doing in a particular place at a particular time of night. I told them, and they went on their way. I hate to think what would have happened if I'd followed the internet's advice and refused to answer any questions.
Cops are no better than the citizenry that they're drawn from, and are more likely to be worse because of selection effects and job effects. Any plan that relies on a cop being kind or reasonable is more risky than the same plan involving a random citizen.
There's some probability/game theory math you could do. Cooperating with the police:
(1) Increases the chances that they correctly solve the crime at issue, which is good for you if you are somewhat altruistic and did not commit the crime.
(2) Increases the chances that they leave you alone, which reduces the hassle and legal expense you are likely to encounter if they don't.
On the other hand, if you (a) are guilty of a crime the police are interested in or (b) the police have a strong desire to find you guilty, cooperating can make your situation worse.
I pretty much always cooperate if I'm the only one involved. On the other hand, when the police really wanted in to my frat house in college following a noise complaint, I was very polite but absolutely didn't let them in because I didn't know how the other people in the house might be affected.
My brother in law took a field sobriety test (after two drinks!), which every lawyer will tell you not to do even when sober because it's too subjective, but the police let him go, and if he had refused, they would have held him until they could do a breathalyzer or blood test, so he saved himself a lot of hassle.
Well, if it's a 200$ ticket, who really cares, but what if it's something much more substantial?Scenario: you come home one day and find your wife dead, appearing to have slipped in the shower and hit her head. What do you do? I would call 911, report what happened, and then immediately lawyer up.
If your first thought in such a situation is making sure you don't look guilty in front of the police you truly are a sociopath
I tend to think of morality primarily in terms of behaving in ways that help people and avoiding behaviors that harm people.
Others think of morality in terms of "make sure I look good in front of my associates."
It's the dichotomy of "do good" vs "look good."
In the given situation, a normal person would not be thinking about morality or pragmatism in any way whatsoever.
That's the most sociopathic rebuttal to "you're a sociopath" I have ever seen.
Michael Druggan's point was that neurotypical people would freak out when they unexpectedly find their loved ones dead at home – not because they're weighing their options and choosing the path which "makes them look good in front of others", but precisely BECAUSE they're NOT weighing their options and choosing the path with the highest utilitarian gain for all of society in such a situation.
What if you knew that there was someone out there who would love to frame you for a crime? What if you knew that there was systemic bias against a group of people of which you're a member?
I had a really jumpy cop tell me there was a warrant on record for someone charged with murder with my given name and surname.
Fortunately our physical descriptions weren’t at all close.
I’m glad he wasn’t so jumpy that he didn’t stop to see the mismatch in age, height and eye color.
Whew. I'm glad you're OK. I have a unique enough name that that probably won't happen to me, but there are some out there, according to Google Alerts.
I live in a pretty small community and actually know quite a few of the local police, including the chiefs of police for several local jurisdictions. It would be beyond weird if I just clammed up when around them. They're people, who operate like normal people. Acting weird and saying nothing is a great way to increase suspicion and start them looking when they weren't otherwise.
I think the advice from the internet can apply in many cases - when people are actually guilty or doing something that is suspicious. If you've committed a crime, then saying as little as possible ("I would like to speak with my lawyer") is actually really good advice. I guess it may be good advice if you're the kind of person that the cops would find suspicious even if you haven't done anything.
In a normal interaction with police, your best bet is to be friendly and polite. The trouble is that it is not always obvious that the police suspect you of some serious illegality. Then the very unequal nature of the situation becomes very important to understand. One of the few things you may have going for you is that the police are not permitted to act on any suspicion they have based on your refusal to answer questions or consent to a search.
Police interactions are often designed to encourage you to forget about these rights, or to think that waiving them could be to your advantage - you need to be aware that this is a trap.
Of course you should be polite to the police. And still you don't have to say anything.
They often start with the question: "Do you know why we stopped you?" If you do, and start to apologize: "Sorry, I drove too fast because [some sob story]", bang!, you did it on purpose, and the fine is higher.
Here's a story of a man who was standing alone on a field next to a warm car, drunk and without license --- and they couldn't prove that he had actually been driving because he said nothing.
https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2019/07/24/wer-nichts-sagt-macht-jedenfalls-nichts-falsch/
On the other hand, even a minor utterance might have bad consequences.
https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2011/07/08/vier-worte-zu-viel/
(Google translate does quite a fine job on these)
The absolutism of "never ever say ANYTHING to the police" is primarily to help stupid Americans (eg criminals who bad at crime) remember to not confess their serious crimes to the police. It's not *really* intended for the soccer mom who just rolled a stop sign right in front of a traffic cop's dash cam. In her situation, saying she's sorry she rolled it, but that's little Savannah just projectile-vomited from the backseat onto the center console, might earn her a little grace.
That said, the general principle of "don't volunteer information" isn't exactly *terrible* if it helps regular folk avoid talking so much that they inadvertently introduce probable cause (to search a home, vehicle, etc).
In my jurisdiction, paying a Penalty Charge Notice isn't self-incrimination, and you don't get a criminal record, so in that case I agree it's best to just pay it and move on.
The claim is: in the US, during interrogation, the police can lie to you about why they are interviewing you, and in court, hearsay rules enable cherry picking of any statements you make.
I don't know how I'd react to a random convo with the police on the street, probably the urge to be polite would get the better of me.
It's legal advice, not practical advice. Meaning it has the best chance of getting you out of legal trouble.
But you've correctly pointed out that cops can impose lots of penalties without getting a conviction. As they say, "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
It is worth asking why we even have a right against self-incrimination in the first place. After all, it would make things a lot simpler - instead of harassing people who are "as uncooperative as legally possible", just make it criminal to be uncooperative. It's a much clearer and more defensible legal system than the one we currently have, wherein we give people a right that they invoke at their own peril.
The right was in place from the start, and should be in place. That [some of] the police have developed work-arounds to try to reduce the value of those rights is unfortunate but perhaps necessary in their line of work. Imagine working with career criminals who lie about everything all day long.
In Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) (which Scott also wrote an essay about here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures) David Chapman argues that as a subculture grows, "geeks" (the true fans) welcome "mops" (casual fans) as it validates their status as "cool" and makes the subculture grow. This seems to make sense on a rational level, as growth of a subculture also means there's a natural increase in The Thing the subculture cares about.
However, my experience is the opposite—as a subculture grows to the point where it's starting to become "mainstream" (i.e. it's starting to lose its status as a subculture), "geeks" usually start gatekeeping aggressively. (Chapman does mention this as well—"successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted"—but I don't think this really captures the spirit of the kind of gatekeeping I'm thinking of)
Here are some phenomena which, to me, all seem to stem from this effect:
* Eternal September - geeks complaining about "normies" invading the Internet.
* Music - back when people cared more about music than they do now, "casual fans" were derided as "posers" that didn't truly appreciate the music, or did something else that upset the status quo of the ingroup.
* Gamergate seems to have been an expression of this phenomenon, where admittance of women into a traditionally male-dominated hobby seemed to cross some kind of threshold.
Usually the "geeks" don't explicitly state that they're engaging in gatekeeping behaviour—instead of saying "we don't want to dilute our in-group, so you can't join" they usually use some other argument related to lack of skill or understanding, or not fulfilling some very specific set of criteria ("you're not a real X unless..."). To some extent they might not themselves be aware of what they're doing, as protecting the status quo of the in-group is probably a subconscious instinct.
Sorry, now I feel like I'm rambling. Anyhow, have you experienced similar phenomena? And do you agree / disagree that the examples I posted above are caused by the same social dynamic? If so, is there a common name for this phenomenon? (I think "gatekeeping" is a bit too broad to describe it)
My working theory is this:
I think the primary reason for gatekeeping any group is the preservation of status. For example, if I'm a member of an exclusive society of rich people, my membership alone grants me high social status. However, if they opened the club up to everyone I would lose the status boost my membership gave me, and so it is in my best interest to keep the group small.
I think the same phenomenon can be applied to the status roles within subcultures. Even if a person has low social status outside the subculture, they might still have a shot at high social status within it, by virtue of having skills, knowledge or other attributes that the subculture appreciates. However, as the group fills up with mops, members start caring less about special skills or knowledge, and possession of them no longer grants the same status. Eventually the in-group is completely assimilated into the mainstream and the status boost is gone.
A minority of "geeks" start gatekeeping aggressively, and for the most part ineffectually. Their occasional local victories do little to undermine Chapman's thesis.
Or are there examples of *successful* geek gatekeeping efforts, leading to something more than tiny irrelevant enclaves of geek purity? I can't think of any offhand, but presumably there must be some.
That's a good point; the gatekeeping is usually a lost cause, so you're right in that it doesn't undermine Chapman's ideas. However, what got me interested in this was the aggressive gatekeeping itself—as Chapman observed, growing the group should be in the group's best interest, but some social dynamic is prompting members to try to keep new members out.
They don't gatekeep in the beginning not because they won't gatekeep but because there's very few people to gatekeep against.
Imagine a society, the Chrekists, dedicated to the study of Chrekology, a new science. In the beginning nearly nobody cares about them. Some people drift in because they discover some basic chrekological principles and want to learn more. But most people aren't even aware they exist. Now, if someone showed up and said, "the primary goal of chrekology should be the advancement of American national interest" they'd likely shoo them out of the room. And this would be gatekeeping. But it also wouldn't happen very often because everyone there would be preselected for high interest in chrekology.
However, eventually a company (Woomazon) gets founded using chrekological principles and it becomes successful making a great many chrekologists billionaires and millionaires and giving them almost complete control over the refining of oil. (Turns out chrekology is great for refining oil.) Suddenly a bunch of people with a passing interest in chrekology but a HUGE interest in money or power or environmentalist or whatever will want to enter chrekist communities. And at this point the same gatekeeping behaviors that have always existed will be applied to many, many more people. Who will not like this and might even feel entitled to police chrekist communities in line with their moral values.
At this point there will be a battle for who is to blame: the chrekists for enforcing standards on the activists, journalists, new members, etc or the activists, journalists, new members etc for entering the space without due respect or investment in the existing culture? If the former wins then the space becomes assimilated to general culture. If the latter wins it remains a united subculture but this does limit its influence on the wider outside world. Your statement amounts to asserting the first view is correct: it's their fault for desiring to enforce community standards. Which is certainly a common position.
My real issue is that it's often held hypocritically. "When you come into my spaces you must respect my norms but when I come into your spaces then you must respect my norms." Which in turn makes it into a social power game.
Another counter-phenomenon that I've noticed personally is that once the subculture becomes popular enough I stop caring as much about it, even if I was originally a hardcore evangelist. There's no longer the hipster cache of telling people about the cool new thing that they're not privy to, because it's no longer new and they probably already know about it.
The most prominent recent example of this for me has been ML & neural nets, which I've been talking people's ears off about for over a decade now, but has become so mainstream at this point that it no longer feels special.
I know, right? Once upon a time I felt cutting-edge for using insights from neural networks to more accurately model my mental processes. But two decades later, and now everyone's doing it! At least it's still as accurate as ever. :-)
> Gamergate seems to have been an expression of this phenomenon, where admittance of women into a traditionally male-dominated hobby seemed to cross some kind of threshold.
That's a strawman written by one side of the conflict. It is easy to believe, because it follows the known stereotypes and blames the low-status people. It fails to explain facts, if you happen to know any -- for example, why did these allegedly gatekeeping misogynists organize a game development contest for female developers? Also, why the sudden explosion in 2014?
The story of the opposite side, if I remember it correctly after almost ten years, is that two seemingly unrelated things happened...
1) Gamers kept complaining that game reviews in mainstream media are completely unrelated to how good the games actually are. Like, the most popular game of the year would get an average score; and then a crappy piece of software, more like a proof of concept than an actual game, something that a skilled high-school student could produce over a weekend, got the highest score and the journalists couldn't stop writing about how awesome it was. For the gaming community this mattered a lot, among other reasons because game developers in large companies often had their bonuses tied to the score in mainstream media.
2) A random guy wrote a blog about his relationship with an incredibly jealous rich girl, describing how she prevented him from meeting any of his female friends, and how she kept reminding him that if he ever cheats on her, that would technically mean that he raped her, because she only gave consent to an exclusive relationship. One day he got suspicious too, and started following her, and found out that she was actually cheating on him, not with one, but with five guys simultaneously.
...and then someone noticed that the girl described in the blog happens to be the author of the crappy but highly rated game, and two or three of the guys she cheated on her ex with, were game journalists who wrote the stellar reviews. And the internet exploded -- except, it did not, because any mention of the connection (or even her name) was immediately deleted, across dozens of seemingly unrelated subreddits. Overnight, gaming subreddits became a nuclear wasteland. Which of course only made people more curious, and they started finding out other interesting details.
Long story short, the journalist guys started the story of "akschually, the gamers simply hate women, there is nothing else to see here"; the story was repeated by other media, and thus became the official version on Wikipedia. The rich girl called her family lawyers and achieved a gag order against her ex; a year or more later it was revoked as unconstitutional, but by that time the narrative was already established.
There was never a significant complaint against women playing computer games / developing computer games / being computer game protagonists (various people believe different versions of the libel). Despite utterly losing the PR war, an important victory of Gamergate was that FTC finally noticed that game development is no longer an insignificant nerdy hobby, but became a billion-dollar business, and therefore reporting on games is now regulated; for example, game journalists are now legally required to disclose the conflict of interest, so the same story could not happen again today without potential legal consequences.
I remember seeing the word mentioned in various places, looking it up to find out what the controversy was about, and being only able to find completely biased descriptions from either side, each with an entirely different set of facts and claims. You might say every political controversy is like this, but this was particularly bad; usually you can easily find at least one neutral description of the controversy that summarises both sides. In this case, after heaps of searching I couldn't find a single explanation along the lines of "gamergate is a controversy which started when this group claimed this happened, but that other group said that was a lie and this happened instead".
So, has anyone actually investigated the factual claims in a remotely neutral way? The fact that both sides are still apparently recylcing the same "clearly, this is what happened" with no substantive evidence, makes it seem like the answer is no. Which makes this seem like one of the most sterile things to argue about, until there's a judicial verdict in a defamation case, or a transparent investigation by an unbiased media outlet (if such a thing is even possible at the moment).
Until then, I wonder if a way to partially resolve an issue like this where the basic facts are in dispute, would be to ask both sides to affirm certain moral principles in the abstract: "do you both accept that cheating is always despicable, no matter who does it?", "do you both accept that people of any demographic should be accepted as members of an online community?", regardless of whether they think these things happened in this particular case. If one side isn't willing to make those declarations, then I'd feel comfortable dismissing their entire position.
Ah, this is complicated. I completely understand your desire for a neutral person to come and provide a neutral description. I wish for that, too.
The problem is that whenever something like this happens -- a formerly neutral person comes, investigates the claims impartially, and concludes that the facts mostly (although not perfectly, there is of course a lot of exaggeration and misinterpretation) support one side -- such person is no longer considered neutral, at least by the opposing side, right? The former neutral now becomes "one of them", and as such is no longer trustworthy.
(It's like asking for a neutral person to decide whether it is better that Democrats or Republicans should win the election. No matter what position the person starts with, as long as they conclude e.g. "there are good arguments for both sides, but all things considered, it is better for the country if the Democrats win", such person is now considered pro-Democrat, rather than neutral. And people will complain again: if only we had a neutral person to explore the situation neutrally and tell us whether we should trust the pro-Democrats or the pro-Republicans.)
I mean, just the fact that I wrote the previous comment probably made everyone conclude that I am not neutral. And such reasoning makes perfect sense; I am not blaming you! Similarly, anyone I would quote or link, by the same logic, would not be neutral. The only way to keep your neutral creds is to either say "I have no idea" or to conclude that "both sides are exactly 50% right and 50% wrong" (but what is the neutral supposed to say if they conclude that this is *not* the case?). Going with the mainstream is also a relatively safe choice, if people consider the mainstream reporting neutral by definition.
It seems like the solution is to abstain from commentary and only link facts. Problem is, sometimes the facts only make sense in context. For example, I could link the game-making competition for the female developers (google "The Fine Young Capitalists"), but it would not be obvious from the link that this is related to GG at all. To achieve that, I would also need to add links to e.g. tweets supporting the competition by pro-GG people, and tweets attacking the competition by anti-GG people. Except, you probably do not know the pro-GG and anti-GG people by name, so I would need to add even more links to prove that. (In other words, the information is fragmented.) And if I sent you a list of 50 links supporting all of this, you could dismiss me as a crazy conspiracy theorist, based on a reasonable heuristic that sane people usually do not need 50 links to prove a trivial claim. Possible replies include "well, these 5, or 10, or 20 people do not represent their entire side" and "yeah, maybe they did this one thing, but otherwise everything their opponents said is true, so they are still the bad guys".
> "do you both accept that people of any demographic should be accepted as members of an online community?"
This sounds a bit like asking Scott to publicly affirm that women are allowed to read his blog and comment on it. Yes, they are; they never needed a special permission to do that; and they have actually been here from the very beginning -- the fact that Scott never made this specific public statement is irrelevant. The situation with GG was analogical, women were a part (although a minority) of the gaming community (and GG) since ever, and at one time there was a popular hashtag "#notyourshield" to specifically express the idea that they resent the accusations made by journalists that the gaming community is excluding them. So, the declaration you would like to see kinda exists, but again it requires a bit more context to understand.
Yes, it's complicated. My main point is not that there *should* be a neutral resolution, but that absent one, something like this is pointless and destructive to talk much about, especially in a place like this. Debates about political and moral values can be constructive and illuminating, and debates about the interpretation of widely available facts and statistics can be constructive and illuminating (particularly in a rational space with strong norms of logically defending your positions)...it may be naive to expect any progress *would* be made on those debates, but it's perfectly theoretically possible it *can* be.
But in a debate like this centering entirely around differing claimed facts: who did what when, who said what in response to what, whether this person on the internet really represents this other vaguely defined group on the internet and what their true motivations were in writing this article at this particular time...it's all just a horrible mess. No one's ever going to come to an agreement, not even if everyone is completely rational, acting in good faith, and enthusiastically willing to change their mind. So what's the point?
Imagine someone reading this thread who supports the feminist side of this controversy, or who just assumed that side was correct. How are they supposed to react to your description above? There's no way for them evaluate the claims logically (because they're not logical arguments) nor to test or confirm them evidentially...they're just claims. I know you described yourself as just giving the other side of the story, but the feel of the thread (and a lot of similiar threads like this) is kind of "we all know this is what really happened". And maybe it did, maybe how you described it is exactly what happened...or maybe it's completely false, and a set of lies that have become widely accepted in certain circles as true, despite their lack of proof. I have no clue. None at all. Not in the sense that it would be too difficult to figure out, but in the sense that the answer seems basically unknowable.
So the account here is no different from the other side's "clearly this happened" account, with no real debate expected or even possible. It doesn't brazenly state that the matter is not up for debate the way the other side often does (and let there be no doubt that whoever does *that* is always without exception infinitely more contemptible than whoever doesn't) but it's still not much more enlightening.
Also, I don't think neutral investigations are impossible. Let's say two feminist-leaning people thoroughly investigated the pro-gamergate claims, concluded that they were substantively corrrect, and then continued being generally pro-feminist while maintaining the feminists were wrong about this. That would look pretty good for the pro- side. Or if multiple critics of feminism said, "look I have heaps of problems with feminism, but this gamergate stuff is just batshit, it's all crap, and it's embarassing" that would be pretty strong for the anti- side. (This is what has happened with Trump's stolen election claims I think). On the other hand if someone previously pro-feminist investigated gamergate, concluded it was true, and shortly afterwards switched their whole attitude and became anti-feminist on everything...people would underatandably be suspicious (that their real motivation was separate and had nothing to do with the facts). And the same if it happened vice-versa.
And finally, I think public affirmations denouncung your own side's worst elements are hugely underrated. Scott is suspected by some of supporting scientific race differences, I believe. If he hasn't already, it would surely make a lot of sense for him to either publically state he doesn't support those, or state that if he did they would have absolutely no impact on how people of any race should be treated in any practical context. Likewise, I can't possibly describe how much my sympathy for any given feminist would increase if she were to make the following two statements: "I don't believe anyone is being fired or ostracised for good-faith disagreement with feminism, but if that has happened I condemn it utterly and unequivocally stand with those people" and "I don't believe a fetus is at all sentient, but if I was convinced of that I would of course become pro-life".
The difference between "I'm not doing this, and if I were it would be contemptible" and "I'm not doing this, but even if I were who cares, because your rights don't matter" is the difference between someone who I can reasonably disagree with, and someone who I have no choice but to conclude is simply evil.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up; I haven't heard this side of the story before.
If they really cared about Ethics in Games Journalism, why did they spend all their time talking about the alleged relationships of one random woman who made a game they'd never heard of, instead of getting outraged at the rampant corruption in AAA games journalism (i.e. the games people actually play and care about)? Their battlecry should have been "Kane and Lynch", not "Five Guys".
Why did black people get outraged over Rosa Parks not allowed to sit in the bus? I am sure there were way more serious examples of discrimination happening at the same time. Why didn't they discuss those instead?
First, your question contains a false dilemma; people in GG discussed both those topics, and many others. The relationship itself was never a major topic for GG -- the opponents kept talking about it all the time, to keep the story simple and draw away attention from all the other topics. (The woman herself was a repeated topic of the debate, but for other things she allegedly did, such as embezzling money ostensibly collected to support female game developers, organizing Twitter mobs, abusing the legal system against her ex. Probably other things I forgot.)
Second, the straw that breaks the camel's back is not necessarily the heaviest straw in the cargo. Sometimes people's patience wears off at a random moment.
Third, there was Streisand effect in action; of course people enjoyed discussing the one topic they were not allowed to discuss anywhere else. But that was in the beginning; the debate soon turned to other topics.
Because that was what drew the over-the-top instaultrabanning.
The woman in question was a long-time lolcow (as were others that managed to jump in front of the parade and claim those sweet victim points) but until GG, those controversies flared up and died out. It was the response from reddit et. al. that made GG happen.