True, the blockade came before Hamas’s rise to power.
As your link attests to, though, it was a response to an Israeli soldier being kidnapped, with the rationale being to stymie the ability to move the kidnapped soldier internationally.
It would probably be interesting to ask in the following ACX survey whether people find their jobs meaningful and enjoyable. I suspect that most people in IT would respond negatively. But it would be interesting to compare it to other professions.
Good luck finding a better job, but I suggest also exploring the possibilities of early retirement as a Plan B.
Wasn't my initial comment suggesting that grads from Duke (as an Ivy) appeared to acquire 35% more privilege above that of similarly competent grads from public Uni through attendance at Duke?
I simply don't recall and have no interest in repeating points from the paper. I don't see the point (perhaps you correctly report what I wrote) of your nitpicking except to justify a belief of your own. I clearly stated that I looked at the paper in the context of my daughter's (actual grad>99.9%) move from NZ to the UK with the latter having a similar presence of prestigious uni.
Hey, folks. Substack engineering manager here. We deployed some performance improvements to the ACX comments section this week. We noticed that while scrolling content would sometimes just disappear and when switching tabs the page would just lock and not scroll. Super painful. We think we nailed these two symptoms, though we still have more work to do. Just wanted to let you know we're working to make this better and ask for your feedback. Let me know what you're seeing either here or feel free to shoot me a note at john.pignata at substackinc.com. Thanks!
Ironically enough when I tried to click on Scott's link to this comment in his next open thread, the page froze, and then froze again while I was writing this comment.
That said thank you for trying! Big fan of Substack's design in general, but it does seem to suffer from some bloat.
Hey Isaac. Bummer. Can you share some details about what kind of browser on what kind of system you were using? We want to eliminate all of the freezing and this feedback will help. Thanks.
I'm on Chrome 116.0.5845.187. I just tested on Firefox 15.11.0esr and had similar issues, I don't think it's limited to a specific browser. I'd recommend testing on Scott's Ivermectin post, I believe that one has the most comments of any of his articles, and consequently the most severe loading/freezing issues:
The problem was that we were re-rendering all the comments on the page any time something changed. This was extremely wasteful and blocked the browser from drawing more items as you scrolled. Now we only re-render the comments that need updates.
This is just the first improvement I could think to make. I’m going to investigate a little more and see what else we can do.
One problem is that when clicking footnotes (or otherwise navigating in-page, e.g. clicking back after clicking to a footnote) on a page with lots of comments, it's slow to navigate. Might be slightly less bad than it used to be, hard to say.
When I looked into this in the past, the cause seemed to be that every single comment had an event handler that would react to the URL fragment changing. (I don't remember exactly what event was being reacted to.) The point of the handler was to highlight whichever comment the URL fragment was pointed at, but it was implemented by every comment checking "is the URL fragment pointed at me?" So with hundreds of comments, that slowed things down.
(a) the page did not say "0 comments" before it has loaded the comments, and instead said something like "loading" so you don't think the comment list is empty and then close the page.
(b) after submitting a comment, if it would immediately render or at least put a placeholder where you put it, rather than the form just vanishing and leaving you wondering if your comment went through.
(c) after editing a comment, the comment was rendered with your edits shown instead of in its unedited form.
I believe I fixed B and C. I also can't reproduce A, but it's probably specific to a page I'm not finding. Are you on the `/p/slug` page or the `/p/slug/comments` page?
Thanks for this feedback! We'll take a look at this list. I don't see a), but I do see some weirdness where it sometimes changed post load (e.g. this post says 830 comments, and after loading it says 831... weird off by one error).
Eh, it's a React anti-pattern to do global state updates while scrolling. At minimum you throttle the updates to once per 100ms or something. Best case you don't do any at all, except possibly kicking off async background fetches if you need to load new data.
Administrative rulemaking is overlooked as an avenue to influence US policy change. The FTC's recent NPRM on deceptive fees would impact the vast majority of economic transactions across the country. It has received a few thousand comments, most of which are contentless "yay rule / boo rule" comments that have close to zero impact on this process. Even some of the professional comments from industry associations simply attack constitutionality, and seem to misunderstand the opportunity for influence. Effective comments would empathize with the rulemaker's dilemmas and propose minor, consensus-building modifications that spotlight ways to remove ambiguities or smooth implementation, while privately nudging things toward favorable interpretations.
My point is not that this particular rule is good or bad (some of the industries requesting carve outs have really tortured logic in order to continue to hide pricing details, others might have legitimate cases). My point is that there's enormous policy alpha in notice and comment periods and nobody takes advantage of it effectively because nobody really understands how.
I know one of Scott's recent passions is better understanding US policymaking, and if I recall correctly, someone who served on a legislative staff is writing about it? I think administrative rulemaking would be a good addition to that effort and I'd be happy to unpack my thoughts further in support of or in parallel to that effort.
One bias in this process is that only current players in an industry have the time and interest to comment. If there is a proposed rule that will clobber someone who would have entered into the industry in ten years, or that makes it very hard for new companies to compete with existing ones, there will usually be nobody commenting who has any incentive to bring these up as problems, and very often nobody will even notice. (Microsoft knows what rules will cost them a bunch of money, but doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about what rules will be a problem to some newcomer in ten years.)
People who are into X-risk: what are your takes on EMP effects from solar activity? I've been hearing about this more since the latest aurorae caused by a coronal mass ejection (CME). An "expert" claimed that the odds of a large portion of the electrical grid being knocked out were 1/8 per decade. This would be catastrophic on a large enough scale, as transformers take 1-3 years to be delivered from manufacturers.
The Carrington Event in 1859 probably had the power to do this. A CME directly collided with the Earth's atmosphere. The aurorae spanned the entire globe, and were so bright people could read in the middle of the night. I know some background on this due to my climate investigations: solar activity in the 19th century was in the 90th percentile of the last 10,000 years, and has been trending steadily downwards for the last 150 years.
I don't think anything the sun did in the last billion years qualifies as x-risk. Knocking out electricity world-wide would be bad, an ice age would be worse, but neither are things which would permanently hamstring humanity.
Also, while CME are travelling blazing fast compared to spacecrafts, they are not relativistic, so we would be able to spot them a few days before they arrive, giving us the opportunity to disconnect the transformers from the long overland lines.
And then transformers are likely subject to price elasticity of supply. At the moment, a lot of companies are likely not building transformers because they would not make money from them -- they are a mature product, and power companies can plan ahead how many they need and pick the cheapest supplier. If the alternative was sitting in the dark, humans would likely be willing to spend a lot more on transformers. At the moment, a few cents of my price per kWh pays for the cost of transformers. If the alternative was a life without electricity, I would eagerly accept a price of a few euros per kWh instead of I ditching my laptop and phone while using kerosene for lighting.
This would incentive a lot of companies to get into the transformer market and make big bucks by selling what would previously have been considered primitive and inefficient transformers -- just a piece of iron with insulating wires coiled around it in the most extreme case. Of course, they would also be hampered by a lack of electrical power, but some sources of power would likely be remain available.
Before 2020, particle filtering masks were an absolute niche product used by people working in construction and the like. When covid hit, the demand increased by orders of magnitude, quickly leading to a scarcity. But within half a year (IIRC), suppliers had adapted to the new situation and the markets were flooded masks. Today, they are cheaper than in 2019 because the increased demand makes for better economics of scale.
There is nothing to constructing a transformer which intrinsically takes half a year, like a step "after casting, let the device cool for five months". There would be some latency to the market reacting, but it would not be three years.
Ok, X-risk is not the right category, but I'm not sure what better term to use.
There is the concern that large scale disruption of the electrical grid would cause a lot of secondary disruptions in the supply chain. Obviously there would be a huge incentive to make new transformers quickly, but that doesn't make it easier to get everything together under unexpected and chaotic circumstances.
Does voluntary self-regulation by industry sometimes work?
What I mean is: Oftentimes, government tries to regulate an industry, and the end result is not enforced regulation but some sort of self-regulation agreements, where companies promise to limit their behavior without a legal framework. Whenever I read about this kind of setup, it’s because it failed. The companies say “sure we won’t do the thing, promise.” but then do it anyway.
I am curious if there’s a good empirical case for self-regulation: does this actually work more often than not, and we just hear about it when it fails?
One common case is that the government says "you must try to achieve goal X", and then leaves it to private industry to decide on the best way to do it. This is how KYC mostly works for example. Banks are required to have controls in place, but they get to decide what those controls are.
I don't know if this counts, but the way the UK legislates process safety vs how the US legislates process safety kind of lets the regulated entity write their own rules?
The UK has a suite of laws (mostly offshore) that mean certain operations (eg offshore oil rig) have to write a Safety Case, which is basically the suite of processes and rules that apply to that particular facility. The HSE authority approves the safety case (as well as any updates) and if anything goes wrong the company needs to prove they complied with the safety case.
The US kind of just writes a bunch of rules that govern the entire industry instead of letting each one write their own rules (subject to regulator approval).
In my view, the UK safety case approach is more efficient - you don't need the regulator to be on top of every little detail of all facilities in order to make effective rules.
I can remember several instances of large low-wage employers loudly announcing they are voluntarily raising wages in the face of pending legislation to raise minimum wages, which I believe has in some cases succeeded in reducing support for that legislation.
And did they actually raise the wages, or was it just some trick?
(Something like: yes, raise the wages, but only for one employee in a thousand, or only for a few months, etc. Or even, raise the wages now by 10%, but then keep them the same for the rest of the decade, until inflation catches up.)
The Hayes Code and the MPAA rating system are examples of self-regulation working (at least in the sense that the industry did what the govt wanted, without govt having to enact regulations. Not in the sense of being an improvement, at least not IMHO. But one can presumably say that about any limit on business activity).
> The second variety of the lidérc is as a tiny being, a temporal devil, földi ördög in Hungarian. It has many overlapping qualities with the miracle chicken form, and it may also be obtained from a black hen's egg, but more often it is found accidentally in rags, boxes, glass bottles, or in the pockets of old clothes. A person owning this form of the lidérc suddenly becomes rich and is capable of extraordinary feats, because the person's soul has supposedly been given to the lidérc, or even to the Devil.
Pokemon, Hungarian folklore, or servant of El Poio Diablo?
Has anyone gone to a psychedelic retreat in one of the 2 states where the stuff's legal -- Oregon and Colorado? If so, I'd appreciate it if you could share your impression of what it was like. I'm trying to help someone who wants to get legal psilocybin with a trained facilitator present, and as I look through the directory of facilitators in Oregon I'm drowning in woo. I have not found one person yet with conventional credentials. Seems odd to me since lots of psychiatrists and psychologists I know are quite interested in psychedelic-assisted therapy. I keep reminding myself that somebody who's into woo can still be quite good as a guide and facilitator but . . . https://ginagratza.com
Not sure about Colorado. Drug's legal there now, but I didn't have time to read around and find out the details. As for Gina -- if you click on the main page you soon get to a picture of her wading in the ocean with her butt crack visible through her gauzy dress. IMHO uploading your butt crack on the site touting your trip guiding expertise automatically disqualifies you.
But she has a Master's in Counselling, Eremolalos! This is all about empowering women to discover their inner Divine Feminine through getting blasted on magic mushrooms!
I have to admit that my cynicism around the whole topic is that it's most likely to be engaged in by woo types (see Gina) and those who want to find a legal loophole in order to get high. It'll be a while before the respectable types dare dip their toes in the water, given how medical marijuana was the same at first.
There is a woman in Minneapolis who bills herself as a facilitator / trip sitter / shaman. Her online photo shows her with a wolf pelt over her shoulders and the wolf head on top of her own. Jebus I think I’ll pass.
If asked to imagine a typical "conventionally attractive" heterosexual man (who can get any women he wants), I think most people would imagine a "Chad" type: a rich, muscular, masculine guy with plenty of confidence. And IRL those kind of men seem to do very well on the dating market.
If asked to imagine a typical "conventionally attractive" heterosexual women (who can get any man she wants), I think most people would imagine a young, smoking hot bombshell woman with feminine allure. And IRL these women also seem to do very well.
I know that there are some local optima as well: e.g. I'm told that the rare dominant woman has an easy time dating because submissive men outnumber them by a lot.
Now, my very hetero question: What's the correspondence for gay men and lesbians?
What does the super-attractive gay man look like? I know that there are some gay archetypes ("bear", "twink", "diva") but I have no idea who's most in demand. I would guess that young, somewhat androgynous but muscular, submissive gay men have the easiest time getting whatever partner they'd like, but that's just guessing.
Same for lesbians: I know that there are archetypes (ok, I know one: "butch"), but what does the ideal of an attractive lesbian women look like? What's the most dateable lesbian in my city like? Here I'm even more lost, I don't even have a guess.
Are there any gay and lesbian local optima like the dom woman?
Most guys I know who are the most popular with women aren't super muscular. Like, not ugly or unathletic, often a bit muscular, but mostly just gregarious and outgoing personalities.
Most guys I know who are the most popular with women aren't super muscular. Like, not ugly or unathletic, often a bit muscular, but mostly just gregarious and outgoing personalities.
All of these archetypes have more in common that you'd think. Symmetrical proportions. Appearance of physical fitness, average-slim build. Tall. Healthy.
The only difference with the gays is the open signals of potential reciprocation (though there are plenty of girls into Taylor Swift, but someone who might be into you is generally more attractive than someone who is basically fully incompatible with you)
Its kind of cheating to use celebrities, but I would guess Troye Sivan for gay men and Kirsten Stewart for lesbians. You may notice that they just look like... Attractive young people who signal that they're interested in the same sex.
> "I'm told that the rare dominant woman has an easy time dating because submissive men outnumber them by a lot."
Out of curiosity, who's telling you that?
I know a lot of dominant women - in addition to several kinky irl friends, I moderate one of the largest personal ads groups on Fetlife - and I've never heard one of them say it's "easy" to find a submissive man to date.
"Submissive" being the key word there.
Because most men who believe themselves to be in search of "dominant" women are in fact themselves quite dominant. The only difference from their vanilla counterparts is that they happen to want a woman to do things *to* them rather than be the person doing the things.
That manifests as hordes and hordes of men often very aggressively approaching "dominant" women with the hope of receiving BDSM topping services from them, no different than men who wish to receive blowjobs from women. Arguably "submissive" men are even worse, because at least blowjob seekers have no illusions they're seeking a service, whereas many pegging seekers (for example) assume the act of physically receiving *anything* in their body is *inherently* a submissive act. "I can't be a misogynist," these guys will say, "I'm willing to get fucked *just like a woman!* Why aren't these bitches replying to my unsolicited dick picks?!"
"...that doesn’t make [cuck porn] a fetish of weakness, an idea both empirically nonexistent and definitionally wrong. With e.g. femdom, the man’s weakness is balanced by a fetish for the strength of *HIS* dominatrix. He *COMMANDS* her power, even as it is directed at him."
Genuinely dominant women almost universally bemoan the vanishing rarity of genuinely submissive men. Many eventually give up hope because they're just that rare!
Very interesting! "Dom women has it easy" was just something I've picked up online, can't remember when or where. Your explanation makes more sense. Thanks for sharing! Does that mean that "good" sub guys do have an easy time finding a partner? (But then again it's hard to know if someone is one of the "good" subs or not...)
Off the top of my head I can't think of any chronically single "good" sub guys!
Many will observe that it can be difficult to get past the skepticism / cynicism of women who are used to being approached for fetish-dispensing services, but the bar for not being an entitled asshole is actually pretty low.
I think for gays "twinks" (slim, youthful appearance) and "hunks" (large, well-defined muscles, but not necessarily bodybuilder) are by far the most successful groups on the dating market. They have the easiest time to get lots of dates. Dating apps are overwhelmingly important to find dates in the gay world, so looks and outwards appearance play an even bigger role than in the straight world.
As Nobody Special mentions below, turning dates into relationships (if desired) probably required a different set of skills.
Seems weird that two opposites would be equally successful? Or would a "twink-hunk", who combined the best of both archetypes, be even more of an ideal?
They're not opposites at all, they're both young, fit, slim, with conventionally attractive faces and bodies. If you're looking for the opposite, you'll have to look at "bears" (hairy overweight biker types of any age) and "daddies" (oldish guys with a fatherly aura). Those are also popular, but less so than the twinks / hunks, and probably not with the same audience.
Just like straight people and butch / femme lesbians, some gay men look for someone with an opposite or complimentary gender expression, and others want someone similar to themselves.
If you buy into a theory of complementary genders, why would this be weird? A middle position might be all things to everyone, but not necessarily as attractive as an extreme. Or to put it another way, everyone's got their preferences, but if you can occupy the sweet spot of "good enough" across the whole spectrum, you can rack up a high score.
It's weird in the sense that if I poll 100 people about if they prefer apples or oranges, it's weird if I would get an exact 50:50 split. Some will prefer apples and some oranges, but it's unlikely that both are exactly equally popular?
And as demost_ said, there isn't! They aren't equally popular, but people work out their differences one way or another, through nonmonogamy, switchiness, sides, or just putting up with it. There's variability, IMO partly due to people being people, but also partly due to the lack of any biological Schelling point and the lack (so far) of overwhelming cultural reinforcement to a single role per point.
I guess mostly what I'm saying is that opposites can attract and make sparks, not to mention work together long-term, and in a genderqueer environment, those opposites can be on a lot of different axes. But when actually put into a society, people will gravitate toward poles in sort of the way political parties in a FPTP system do. Maybe given a few hundred years of open acceptance, there'd be two roughly balanced poles, but I dunno.
Actually, there is a continuum between twink and hunk, where the body has little body fat, but with varying amount of muscle mass. I think this whole spectrum is successful on the dating market, but the classical categories are twink and hunk.
>If asked to imagine a typical romantically successful heterosexual man (who can get any women he wants), I think most people would imagine a "Chad" type: a rich, muscular, masculine guy with plenty of confidence.
OMG. in my psychotherapy practice I listen to a bunch of 20-something guys who have a terrible time getting dates moan about how they're not tall and handsome enough -- also about how they're not rich enough to get anyone (though they're in grad school and will be able to earn a good living once they have the degree). There is *some* truth in that stuff, but not much. The things that moved me and my close women friends when we were in the dating years were (1) the guy was smart about things we considered important (and we varied some in what those things were). (2) he was a good conversationalist and fun to do things with. (3) He displayed genuine interest in us. If a guy had that triad we were willing to overlook his being short, chubby or the skinny gawky kind of tall and/or homely of face. Of course, 1, 2, & 3were not enough unless we also began magically to sprout a crush on him.
Can't confirm but have always heard that gay men, most of whom are submissive types, prefer masculine, dominant types. With lesbians I believe it's the reverse. But this is more of a ratio thing like your example of the dominant heterosexual woman.
I also believed that most gay men are submissive type (it's still my personal experience), but I was recently pointed to good statistics that show otherwise, some of them by Aella.
What definition of "romantically successful" are you operating on? Because if asked to imagine a 'typically romantically successful' heterosexual man or woman, my default image is "happily married."
*Sexually* successful might be a different thing, if you're asking me to optimize for gene-proliferation or something, but if we're talking *romantic* success, "dating lots of people" is not the end point I and most of the humans who've shared their dating goals with me (or, I think, 'typical' people) seem to be aiming for. Most of the men and women I know tend to be looking for one committed, happy, & stable relationship. There's definitely outlying swinger couples or forever-single-by-choicers, but the romantic success criteria most of the people I'm familiar with seems grounded in monogamy.
I thought I made it pretty clear in the post but I'll clarify: I'm using "romantically successful" as "dateable"/"high sexual market value"/"attractive"/"has an easy time finding dates and relationships, especially with other attractive people".
My loves, my doves, my chickadees, boys, girls, ladies, gentlemen and others - the day we long awaited has finally come! Many doubted it would ever happen, but the naysayers have been proven wrong.
Mark your calendars and clear your schedules for 29th August, because it is in the trees, it's coming! Yes, the second season of "The Rings of Power" will be upon us like the black oozy thing in the teaser trailer.
This trailer here which they just dropped and my oh my, it is chock-full of plummy goodness. Based on this, the second season is going to live up to the standards of the first. Careful, there will be SPOILERS so if you honestly don't want to know what's coming, don't read on. Or watch the trailer.
We've got Galadriel braiding up her hair around her head (remember the derivation of her name, "Maiden Crowned With A Radiant Garland"? yeah, throwing another bone to the book fans). Worry not, she's still Girlboss Glads who one-shots the monsters without mussing a hair. Plus we also get Galadriel on a horsie again, though at least this time it's not in disturbing slow-motion.
Poor old Celebrimbor is still stuck in the granny bathrobe, but he probably has a merciful (if horrible) death to look forward to this time at least. We might even get to see him somehow involved with ring-making, imagine that! Or at least with "shoving a pile of rings into the furnace", for whatever reasons he might have to do that. I'm hoping for the "using his tortured to death corpse as an Orc war-banner" scenes since the show is going for dark'n'gritty (citation needed) in the second season, but I fear they'll disappoint me on that front, too.
We have, of course, the CGI that should be better than it is, considering the money pumped into this turkey. Not enough view of the costumes to see if they still have the plastic armour, though now Elrond gets his turn to strap on a helmet, jump on a horse, and gallop into battle.
We have a shot of what I *think* is Tar-Miriel underwater, faced with a big toothy mouthy tentacly sea monster thingy. I have no idea what this is meant to be, unless it's another prophetic dream about the downfall of Númenor and how she ends up (spoilers for the book: drowned).
We get a quick shot of Dísa which made me go "Flip me, she actually looks good in this one!"
We have *more* Diverse Elves; one (1) Asian she-elf this time (she *could* be Chinese or Korean, not too sure). I'm actually not mad at all about this, to be honest; by now, it's just 🤷♀️ Unfortunately, the Diverse Elves means the return of Arondir (sigh) (that's "disappointed" sigh not "he's so dreamy" sigh, just to be absolutely clear on that) doing the improbable acrobatics on horseback that Action Glads did in the first season. That also means the return of Theo (double sigh). But on the bright side, he seems to be stuck in the middle of a siege, so there's every chance he bites the dust. We can but hope!
The Stranger and Nori are back, in what is probably meant to be Rhun (it's vaguely Middle-Eastern/North African desert oasis setting). And the three witches who got blasted into moths in the first season are probably back, too.
There's rings! Including a frankly awful cheap piece of tat that looks like it came from 80s TV shopping channels ring handed to Durin Senior (who the fudge is doing styling on this thing, they have no notion of beauty). "You too can own this blatantly fake hunk of blue glass masquerading as a sapphire and gold ring for the low, low price of thirty-six instalments of $99.99 each!" Don't be fooled by the spiel, Durin Senior!
There's the return of Adar, which is terribly unfair of me towards the new guy based on a quick shot of him in the trailer, but I dearly wish Joseph Mawle were returning in the part since he was the best thing in the first season. Alas, he proved he's got brains as well as acting talent and left after the first season.
We have the bit I really, *really*, REALLY want an explanation for and I may even fork out for Prime so I can watch this episode and see what silly rationalisation the scriptwriters pull out of their backsides for this - a giant eagle coming in like a 747 on the runway to be the background to a shot of Pharazon. Eagles of Manwe? In Númenor? In Pharazon's time? They better have one *heck* of a *doozy* of a *sockdolager* of a reason for this one! Just when my homicidal fury towards the showrunners had died down, they had to go and blow on the embers and fan the flames back to life!
Of course, it wouldn't be "Rings of Power" without a blatant rip-off - I mean, homage - to an iconic scene from the LOTR movies, so - remember the scene at the start of "The Fellowship of the Ring" where Cate Blanchett does a voice-over and we see the three Elven rings worn by their bearers? This show sure does, and it decides to go one better and 'improve' on it by making Gil-galad, at least, look like he's just updating his bling collection with Vilya.
But I've saved the best for last: Sauron. Or Halbrand. Or the Being Who Is Both. We get shots of Charlie Vickers looking moody, and I feel you, Chuck, I wouldn't fancy another six to eight episodes of this if I could get out of it. Okay, but the rumours about recasting for Annatar to be played by a completely different guy? They were all lies and diversions! I know, I'm as shocked as you are.
Since the showrunners belatedly realised they couldn't really *have* Rings of Power without Annatar, so that meant they *needed* Annator, they've given us Annatar - Charlie Vickers in a wig and elf-ears.
I dunno about you, but I don't find him particularly handsome. Tastes differ, I realise, and some may find him attractive. What he is not, however, is ethereally beautiful divine if fallen spirit looking. Remember what I said about not minding the Asian elf? That's because at least Chinese xianxia drama can do "ethereally beautiful like a divine if fallen spirit" in male and female versions. Sincerely, if they got a pretty young Chinese male actor to play Annatar? I'd be cheering *that* casting decision on!
Oh, and surprise, surprise: Isildur Ate'nt Dead. Sorry if I spoiled that for you! So I'm ready for August to follow the snarky reviews and, if prodded hard enough by "They did WHAT????", to spite-watch this truly unique(ly awful) adaptation of a fantasy classic.
OMG I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO...
...***VIDEO ESSAY REVIEWS!!!***
No exaggeration whatsoever, I am sincerely *that* excited for the forthcoming high-level criticism of this volcano dumpster fire of a show. The Little Platoon's essays on the topic are actual works of art. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6bIea7YMo)
The Little Platoon is indeed great. I found a whole slew of online video critics via reviews of the Rings of Power, including Erik Kain who started off with "hey this is pretty good, give it a chance" in response to all those complaining about the show two episodes in, but by the third episode he was "okay, this is not doing what it should be doing" and by the end he was One Of Us 😁
He writes for Forbes but also has a Youtube channel:
I also like Critical Drinker - a grumpy, boozy Scotsman who isn't too gruntled with much of what modern content is produced? Yeah, you can see why he appeals to me!
Critical Drinker's politics are 180 degrees away from mine, but I have actually watched and enjoyed some of his videos! He's very witty, and he's fair in his criticisms, not just negative for the sake of negativity. When he thinks something is well done, he'll say so. [Scottish accent] Anyway, that's all I've got for today. Go away now!
I'm likewise a fan of Critical Drinker, although he's drifted into shorter-form content these days which, while useful in deciding what to watch, I don't find as enjoyable as The Little Platoon's and MauLer's mega-criques. God bless MauLer, specifically, for so thoroughly recapping and critiquing MCU and Star Wars IPs that I don't need to watch them myself to have "seen" them.
I had a friend recommend Erik Kain's evolution from ROP shill to One of Us, but haven't followed it myself!
I would recommend Erik, I started off annoyed with "Oh God, not another media critic who is just parroting the Amazon press release on this" but he did review the show properly and his evolution into "this is a pile of crap, let's just skewer it" was fun. He also pointed out the flaws, as a professional media critic, that the show had and where it could have improved, so it couldn't be dismissed as Just Another Racist Fascist-Adjacent Tolkien Fanboy complaining.
I think "House of the Dragon" is going to eat "Rings of Power"'s lunch once again, I haven't seen the new HoD trailer but they dropped it immediately after the RoP one and I'm betting it looks better, must go and watch it 😀
I haven't watched HoD myself since I'm allergic to GRR Martin's fantasy series (tried the first ASoIAF novel when it came out, bounced off hard) but I understand it was well-done and Paddy Considine did a stellar turn in his part.
One of the benefits of having the author still be alive and around to prevent you "improving" on the books, I guess? Also helps if you hire more than one (1) decent actor, and give them good lines to say. There are a few decent actors in RoP but they're reduced to standing around doing nothing while Galadriel, Miriel and Disa girl-boss their ways; the Dwarves are pretty much the best bits of the show (what they did to the Hobbits aka Harfoots is not). Poor Elendil just gets to have a useless son, a newly invented drippy daughter, and to be shouted at by both Galadriel and Miriel. A shame, because for fractions of a second at a time, there are indications the guy could do something with the part if permitted to say more than "yes sir no sir three bags full sir".
You piqued my curiosity to the point that I actually watched the trailer!
Re: Sauron/Annatar: never mind if he's handsome or not, de gustibus non disputandum est, my question is, how in the name of Eru does the continuity work here? We found out at the end of Season 1 that Galadriel's moody friend Halbrand was really Sauron in disguise. And here, in this trailer, it's treated like some big revelation! How? Why? "He's been among us all along," Galadriel says, yeah, no kidding, lady, you found that out in Season 1! What am I missing? Also, that creepy black goo looks like Venom from Raimi-verse Spider-Man.
I love Tolkien and I really, really hope they'll manage not to mess up Season 2 as much as they did Season 1. What can I say? I strive to be an optimist.
To use the quaint American phrasing, they really screwed the pooch on this one. The showrunners, being JJ Abrams-alumni, went for the stupid mystery box approach - no we can't follow the canonical storyline and have Annatar, people who read the books will know in advance, we want it to be a big surprise revelation!
So they teased Big Surprise Revelations in season one about "is this guy Sauron? could this guy be him? or this guy?" but viewers twigged fairly early on that it was Halbrand. I didn't want it to be Halbrand because I went "Surely they can't be this dumb".
They were that dumb.
Well now we're into season two and it turns out we *do* need the maker of magical mystical rings after all, you can't just sqoosh the ring-making into the last ten minutes of the season finale. Which means they need Annatar. Which means they effed it up with the mystery box season one approach, since if Glads *knows* "scruffy mortal dude who just wants to smith and deffo is *not* the long-lost king of Da Southside, I mean Southlands = Semi-Big Bad I've been hunting for centuries", then even she can't keep her yap shut about "hey guys, so - this ring-crafting dude?"
Okay, I just remembered: they *are* that dumb. But Elrond has also figured it out, and he has been permitted to retain two functional brain cells, so if Glads doesn't want to talk about her rebound romance, he certainly will tell everyone.
Which means no ring-forging. So now crap we've got four seasons to go (pfft - I very much doubt it) and no magic rings? Hence they *need* Annatar.
I think they might be trying to do it in flashback form - Annatar *did* turn up just like Tolkien said, in fair form pretending to be an emissary of the Valar, back previously (that is going to require one *heck* of a flamin' recap when they introduce him in Maiar form but whatever) and that's what Galadriel's hysterical rendition of the line refers to - oh no, that guy we thought was maybe sus but seemed to be another Elf from Valinor was really - dun-dun-dun!!!
How they're going to reconcile that with "And then he *also* turns up as scruffy mortal on a raft in the middle of the ocean, claiming to want to reform and just do some smithing and be good", I have no idea. Because if they have Annatar working with Celebrimbor to already make "essays in the craft" of magic ring-making (hence the scene of Celebrimbor desperately dumping a load of rings into the furnace?) but he was then run out of town - that makes nonsense of the first season where Celebrimbor has to be told about the secret hyper-advanced technique of "alloys" by said scruffy mortal. I also like the Cunning Disguise of "if I take off the pointy ears and cut my hair from what I looked like back then, nobody will recognise me now!" which seems to have worked, so the Elves are as stupid as the showrunners.
I think that's what they'll try to do: Annatar showed up before, was run out of Eregion, then turns up mumble-mumble years later as the mortal Halbrand for a second try at seducing the Elves into darkness. Or a redemption arc, gee honest this time. Though the showrunners apparently think he should be Walter White/Tony Soprano, so better to bet on "he was Evul all along!"
It'll be nonsense, but these are the blokes who thought mithril needed an origin story. They tried "improving" on Tolkien's story, messed it up, and now have to patch a fix-it together. Nobody's fault but their own.
EDIT: It also makes Galadriel even *more* oblivious than in the first season: "Grr that Sauron I hate him grrr I'm gonna track him down and take my revenge - oh, hi, Annatar - grrr hate that Sauron hate hate" and then *centuries later* "Grrr that Sauron still tracking him down - oh, hi, Halbrand - grrr where can he be hiding?"
Truth. It's as if they suddenly realized, Oh no, we've got one episode left, we have to shoehorn the revelation that Halbrand is Sauron and the forging of the Three Rings into this one episode! And yes, the idea that Celebrimbor the grandson of Feanor did not know what alloys were was an extra dose on facepalm on top of a pile of fail.
The showrunners should hire you to be a consultant, and I would pay money to be a fly on the wall during meetings in which you explained Tolkien lore to them and beseeched them not to be so dumb.
There's not enough money even in Jeffy Bezos' hip pocket to pay off all the people they pissed off with mangling the lore.
Compressing the timeline? Sure, I understand the necessity in a show or movie, they're different media to books. Even the Diversity and Inclusion needn't have been as bad as they did it; Miriel is bi-racial? Okay, I can roll with that, it's Numenor. That's ignoring casting an actress who is a good foot shorter than canonical Galadriel and directing her to have the default expression "bulldog licking piss off a nettle".
But putting all that aside, their response to criticism was "it's all racist sexist homophobic trolls" as a one-size-fits-all defence.
No, it was the writing. Ai Eru Melme, the writing. "Why does a stone sink and a boat float?" Principle of buoyancy? Don't be silly, it's because of some fake-profound gibberish. After Galadriel's scene with Adar, I was Team Orc-Father all the way due to a combination of Joseph Mawle being able to out-act the socks off pretty much everyone else in the show, and the fortuitous opportunity of some half-decent writing for him for once.
A sadistic, genocidal, psychopathic torturer. And her half-Orc prisoner:
You should *not* be convincing me to cheer on the Orcs as they blow up a volcano and set everyone in the village on fire.
Well, Amazon are going to get the views whether I watch it because I love it or hate it. But I don't see any way this is going to go five seasons. They had already committed to a second season during the broadcast of the first one, so they were stuck with that, but getting it renewed for a third? And Nazgul will fly! On the Eagles! Into Valinor! Before swimming all the way home across an entire ocean!
>That also means the return of Theo (double sigh).
I decided fairly early on that my headcanon is going to be that Theo is the future Witch King of Angmar. I think it's pretty unlikely that this is where they're actually going with him, but assuming it in my head makes the character more interesting and tolerable.
I thought they were going that way with the Magic Sword Blood Addiction, but then the Magic Sword turned out to be the dam-bursting key and they don't seem to have done anything with it.
Maybe it'll turn out that Theo sneaked off and reclaimed the Magic Sword Hilt after it was used as a key (unlikely, given that everything was covered in volcano ash, but inconsistency has not stopped the show so far) and he'll continue his Blood Addiction with it and eventually become the Witch King.
Though that would be a lot more coherent than the showrunners have demonstrated they intend to be, so far.
That's almost exactly my logic. The blood sword was what got me thinking Witch King, and I'm refusing to abandon the idea after the payoff for that subplot turned out to be stupid.
One of my many major gripes about the series is that Season 1 at least has heavily relied upon Lost-style "Mystery Box" plots, and I'm finding myself liking the theories I came up with a lot better than what the writers actually wound up going with. If they'd for some reason handed me the show to finish after wrapping the first few episodes but leaving no scripts or notes for the rest, I probably would have gone with:
1. Theo is the Witch King.
2. Halbrand is the king of the Oath-Breakers of Dunharrow
3. Meteor Man is Tilion, the Maia of the Moon, and the Harfoot plotline is the origin of the folklore that Bilbo drew on in composing the "Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" song that Frodo sang in Bree.
4. The Nazgirls are Thuringwethil and her crew.
5. Annatar has been hanging out in a back room in Eregion the whole time. He wants Celebrimbor to himself for now and keeps coming up with excuses to send Elrond off to Moria to keep him out of the way.
The only problem is that having Halbrand be king of the oath-breakers is that it's in the wrong place and too soon.
I do like the idea of that being Tilion! And it makes more sense than what the scriptwriters have done, but they've boxed themselves in by changing everything to be "Okay so it can't officially be LOTR Part Deux but we also need the name recognition characters from the movies, hence it's Elrond and Durin IV the great Elf-Dwarf friendship and not Celebrimbor-Narvi, so we need Elrond and Galadriel and Hobbits and that means it's gotta be Gandalf".
So Meteor Man is going to be Gandalf, and never mind all the guessing and hoping that maybe it's one of the Blue Wizards.
One of the Nazgirls is *definitely* meant to be Thuringwethil, see the 'bat ears' on her headdress:
But that has me guessing at who the other two are meant to be, and I think one of them (possibly the one in the military helmet) must be meant to be *a* werewolf (she can't be Draugluin or Carcharoth). That leaves Feminem, and I think the staff she carries is clearly meant to evoke the "Eye of Sauron" so that must have been misdirection on the showrunners' parts ("could *she* be Sauron? Giggle!")
From the new trailer, looks like Annatar has indeed been hanging out and promising all kinds of sweet, sweet ring-making to Celebrimbor, only to break his heart and besiege Eregion. "Halbrand" was just some scruffy yokel he found lurking around Da Southside and he set him up to distract Glads. Hard to get a relationship going when the psycho cousin is hanging around giving you the scowly face and muttering about revenge all the time!
Honestly, the amount of stupid in season one was face-to-desk impact stupid. They didn't want Annatar since that would mean people who read the books/knew the story would immediately know who that really was and it would ruin the surprise. Well they managed to ruin their own surprise by revealing who Sauron was in the season finale, so now what? And it turns out that Tolkien knew what he was doing and they *do* need Annatar for the ring-making and giving, especially after they mucked it up by having the three Rings crafted in a rush during said finale. Now they have to shoe-horn Annatar in by sticking Charlie Vickers in a wig and pointy ears.
I can't wait for the new season. It will be one glorious dumpster fire as they try to get out of the corners they've written themselves into and struggle with this alien concept called "continuity" so characters don't do X in one episode, then go off and do Y, directly contradictory to X, in the next.
> struggle with this alien concept called "continuity" so characters don't do X in one episode, then go off and do Y, directly contradictory to X, in the next.
Forget episode-to-episode continuity, they can't even handle *scene-to-scene* continuity, like that one battle where the army magically transforms from orcs into humans, respawns from the dead several times, and people teleport all over the place.
Ah, yes: the battle where it was night in the Southlands village, day when the Numenoreans were riding to the rescue, and the cutting between both sets left it very unclear if all this was supposed to be happening at the same time or if there was an interval of "the Southlands village was fighting all the night and just in the nick of time at the dawn the Numenoreans turned up to save them".
The Orcs able to fight in daylight now as well. And why weren't you impressed with the Cunning Plan to send in the human cannon-fodder first to deceive the villagers they were fighting Orcs? Didn't it seem on a grand scale of tragedy to have the villagers be fighting their former neighbours instead of the Orcish monsters they thought they were fighting? 😁
Things happened in that season purely because they were convenient. Oh no, Halbrand has a mortal wound that can only be healed by Elvish healing! So he's now able to get up and walk around with it, so he can be put on a horse to ride a vague number of days to Eregion to get healed! Instead of it being tense and nerve-racking (is he going to make it, will he survive the horse ride to get to the place of healing?) I was just laughing at the poor actor flopping forward over the horse's neck to try and convey "argh, ouch, I am in bad health, my wound my wound" - yeah well you should be dead by now because jolting around on a horse at full gallop is going to burst that wound right open and since you're in the middle of nowhere you're going to bleed to death.
The worst part though definitely was Galadriel in that episode going full-on rant about her planned campaign of Orc genocide and then in the very *next* episode lecturing Theo about putting aside hatred and giving up on his desire for revenge. That was ridiculous. Why did she suddenly have a change of heart? No reason, except maybe having a volcano literally blow up in her face?
I am eager to see the second season to see what other jewels of crassness and idiocy this lot present to us.
I don't think the Southlands were firmly established to be Mordor until the volcano. Before that, the region could also have encompassed what would later be Gondor and Rohan. It is too soon, but RoP is already compressing the hell out of the Second Age timeline.
Good point about them desperately clawing for name recognition. That also explains why Morfydd Clark's character is Galadriel when her daughter Celebrían is a much better fit for the stuff they seem to be trying to do with her. Especially the "young hothead" characterization, which is a little implausible when given to a character who is literally older than the Sun.
Good catch on the headdresses. I'd completely overlooked that. Not sure who Feminem is, either, unless she's a small-n necromancer (with Sauron of course as the big-N Necromancer).
Yes, Annatar definitely has to be there. There are seventeen more Great Rings to craft, after all, and Sauron needs to be there to rootkit them. Also, Celebrimbor needs all the help he can get since RoP has established that he was sick the day Aulë taught the Noldor about alloys. It'll be interesting to see how they retcon Halbrand.
I'm looking forward to the new season in much the same spirit as you are.
"Good catch on the headdresses. I'd completely overlooked that."
It was only when I finally got a good look at the trio, from the side, in the episode where they catch up with the Stranger and think he's Sauron or Morgoth or somebody, and then it hit me like a truck - "hey, that looks like bat ears - OH MY LORD SHE'S THURINGWETHIL".
We should be kinder to Celebrimbor; maybe Grandpa Feanor neglected to teach this super-duper secret high-level technique to Curufin before he spontaneously combusted and so Curufin could not teach it in turn to Celebrimbor 😁 Grandpa was running around being psychopathically crazy before ending up in a one-on-one with a force of Balrogs, so smith-crafting lessons were probably the last thing on his mind at the time.
The ACX Meetup (Berkeley's Spring Schelling) will be June 5th, Wednesday, doors open at 6:30pm. Admission is free, If you aren't sure it's okay to come because you're new to the blog or you're not a typical ACX reader or you disagree with the blog about lots of things you are explicitly invited anyway! Details are here: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mXd8aQ8FDYCXhMusx/berkeley-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024
Source: I'm the organizer for the ACX meetup, and also Scott's Meetup Czar.
Are there any media that is suitable for children and/or younger teens that show realistic, healthy ways to engage with the opposite gender and have romantic relationships? Popular culture seems to teach some pretty unhealthy lessons: there's either Disney-style magic romance or the red-pill reaction to that message which also isn't healthy IMO. Is there a film or book or whatever that I can give a 12-year old boy to show how people date in the real world and that women (generally) are different from men in what they find attractive?
I haven't read it, but Peggy Orenstein's "Boys and Sex" might fit the bill. As I understand it, is based on numerous interviews with high school and college boys/men about their views, experience and desires re dating, sex, intimacy, etc,, which seems like just the ticket for a 12-year-old boy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45730106-boys-sex She also has a previous book called "Girls and Sex."
Classic Loveline episodes (from the Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla era)?
The content might be a little mature for a 12-year-old (although plenty of 12-year-olds listened live at the time, and it's certainly less explicit than the internet porn he's almost certainly already encountering).
Also, I suspect its chief value is the pattern-recognition that comes with consuming a tremendous volume of content about human behavior.
(I went back through like 8 years of archives and got almost as good as Dr. Drew and Adam at guessing what age a female caller was sexually abused based solely on the "little girl" quality of her voice when beginning the call.
Unfortunately, Dr. Drew and Adam's current show is mostly focused on self-congratulations and complaining about California politics, not people's problems.
But classic Loveline had a lot of people calling with a lot of dating, relationship, and sex questions, and I learned a lot from it, even as an adult.
There's definitely room for improvement — but hasn't popular culture always taught unhealthy lessons? And if I were a wee bit cynical, I'd say that the majority of people have always favored sentimental pap that over-romanticizes and obscures the reality of relationships. Not that I'm suggesting kids be fed a steady diet of Tenessee Williams, either. But there's very little in the middle ground.
That's kind of my point: pop culture has always been idealistic to the point of unhealthiness and I'm trying to find the haystack needles where this isn't the case.
My apologies. I thought you were implying it was a new phenomenon. However, at least five generations of happy, healthy, and *productive* Americans have been raised on this pap. And look at how wonderful the world is!
But on the red pill side, there's some damn good high-art cinema that's deliciously raw. Films like Godard's Contempt, Mike Figgis's The Loss of Sexual Innocence, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dangerous Liaisons come immediately to mind.
Yes, but would a 12-year-old boy, or a 16-year-old, be interested in such movies? Aren't there any movies which are a bit more attractive to young people and teach good dating behavior? Or is the only hope in those advice subreddits?
I had not thought there would be such a distinct lack of this, in what I remember reading. I've got a nephew of a similar age, who's being raised in fairly traditional household, and now I'm wondering about this question, too. There's not a lot of "what to do when you meet someone and are attracted" that isn't "everything magically works out" or "everything goes horribly wrong". The most I've got are books that have role models or positive and negative examples, but that don't cross over into one-true-wayism.
Jack Vance's "Araminta Station" might count (first of a trilogy, all great space opera). Later in the series, there are a couple of excellent bits of fatherly advice, from two different people: "Remain honest, steadfast and true! Adopt no weird philosophies. Avoid exotic cults and intellectual miasma." and "My only specific instructions are these: do not allow well-meaning but impractical theoreticians to exert any control over you; make sure that your associates are competent experienced and tolerant folk, without ideological axes to grind."
Lois McMaster Bujold's "Memory"-"Komarr"-"A Civil Campaign" sequence might work. They're in the middle of another great space opera series, and have a number of buried lessons about integrity, different ways of dealing with your roots, relationships with no future, and what exactly you can trade for your heart's desire. "Komarr" in particular has alternating POV chapters that capture the initial stages of a romance, although it's more "Persuasion" than "Pride and Prejudice".
You might try John C. Wright's "The Golden Age" trilogy (again, great space opera, wow am I predictable). The author has strong gender-essentialist opinions, but they don't interfere with his artistry of writing.
It's been a long time since I read it, but possibly Erich Segal's "Love Story".
It's been a long time since I saw it, but the film "Groundhog Day" might have some important lessons, too.
Classic movies might be a good place to look. "Casablanca" comes to mind, in terms of "making yourself into someone worthy of love is itself worthwhile". But I don't know whether something like this scene might be too much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgVPnWmUqd4&t=177s (I almost need to fan myself after watching it at that timestamp.)
In Groundhog Day the Bill Murray character starts out as a complete jerk. He does evolve into a pretty decent specimen of humanity over time.
Not technically over time I suppose because he is somehow cursed to live the same day repeatedly. The curse is lifted when he finally lives the day perfectly. Perfectly for the purposes of the story anyway. It does involve a lot of selfless behavior.
The U.K. Buddhist Society likes to show the film for the lesson it presents
Oh hooray, finally I have the opportunity to complain about this little thing that has always been bothering me!
We saw him visiting an old piano teacher and obviously asking for lessons and offering a ridiculous remuneration, because she instantly kicks out the poor child that was sitting at the piano, and then we hear him playing his first C major scale. Then on his final perfect day, when he's in that bar playing the piano, the old piano teacher proudly announces that he is her pupil. This means that on his "perfect day", he found time to have a piano lesson, he made her kick out the poor child, and she sees him as her pupil although he'd only had one lesson with her and must have learned most of it elsewhere!
> He does evolve into a pretty decent specimen of humanity over time.
Yes, that's the aspect I was thinking of. It demonstrates a lot of reasons why the guy is deservedly rejected. But once he starts working on making himself a better person, he eventually succeeds. I think it would have been better, from a pedagogical standpoint, to have him find romance with someone else who wasn't even on his radar initially, but oh well.
If you completely strike out, maybe a stopgap would be to find positive examples of masculinity and femininity, and then later explicitly point to them and say "be like that" or "look for that".
For masculinity, "Captains Courageous" by Kipling stands out in my mind.
I'm interested in this too, but with the caveat that I won't need this information for the next five or ten years - at which point there's no way I'll remember this one forum post (or even the .txt file I copy/pasted any leads from it into.)
I have this problem with the broader parallel society/right wing bridgehead conceit in general. I'm interested in for eg. homeschooling, but without an obvious homeschooling syllabus, endorsed by someone I trust, I have no way to filter (for general quality as well as non-wokeness) without doing all of it myself. Which is not a sensible division of labour.
Re: your media, one naïve answer is just draw a cutoff and declare anything pre 2010 "probably fine. Ish."
A better answer would be for some talented and enterprising young chaps to write us some better media to consume. That would be nice but I don't see it happening.
If I think of any good specific titles for your boy I'll come back and post them.
I once chatted to a girl in a pub and she turned out to be a nanny to two seven year old children, a boy and a girl. She boasted about how she was encouraging and building the girl up, but with the boy she was making sure he was "aware of his privilege" and teaching him not to challenge or disbelieve women. She was obviously used to receiving praise and adulation from people when she told them this. When I instead said something to the effect of, "this kid is growing up in a totally different world to the one you're talking about, won't what you're doing achieve nothing and just destroy his self esteem?" it was like talking to a brick wall. She wasn't able to comprehend that the seven year old boy wasn't one of the evil oppressive rapists-in-waiting she had been taught about.
If this girl were making films instead of nannying kids directly, I might try to put in words what messages I think should and shouldn't be allowed. It would be a worthwhile exercise and well suited to a forum like this one.
But my real answer is simply, people like that girl should not be allowed access to children.
If she comes out with a film, the things I object to about it would likely be small and incredibly petty. I would object to them not just in themselves but because they reveal who she is.
Whatever form her ideas take, whatever wording she uses, whatever constraints or guidelines she is asked to follow - it doesn't matter, because her intent will shine through. Anything that fits with her sensibilities is going to be destructive to young children.
That's my non-answer to your question. I'm writing in a hurry and could probably come up with something better later on.
2x Kaggle champ & AI guy Jeremy Howard has done a couple podcast interviews about homeschooling his daughter. It's going really well, and he describes his approach. I recommend checkin that out.
I'm not trying to avoid woke stuff (ok, I'm trying to avoid woke stuff but plenty of other stuff as well). Like, I don't want my children to grow up thinking romance works like in Disney's Snow White: you just lull around and live your life and then suddenly your perfect match will appear and you will be happy ever after without any effort. Snow White doesn't teach you how to be the kind of person boys or girls would want to date, or how to take someone on a date, or how sexual attraction and seduction work.
Same goes for most of the classics. Maybe Pride and Prejudice could work? But it's a bit too indulgent and the social mores a bit too old. Like, I don't think the Victorians had dating figured out.
Plenty of millennials who were raised on pre-2010 media were on red pill subs complaining about how the media they grow up with (and the broader culture) made them totally unprepared for the realities of dating. And I don't blame them. I was raised to believe that women and men are mostly the same, that you should be nice to girls and befriend them to make them want to date you, that you should just be yourself and love will happen, and that caring about your appearance is superficial and stupid. I realized it was bullshit pretty quickly but I can see how that could do harm. But as I said, the red pill reaction is plenty of unhealthy as well, and no-one has made any red-pill media for kids anyway.
Seems like most movies already start at the point where the protagonist is attractive (or almost attractive... just needs to remove the glasses and change the hairstyle), and the problem is lack of communication or being an asshole, and once you solve that, happy end.
Not helpful when one's actual problem is how to get *to* that point.
If you were asking for a girl, I’d say the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. It’s
conceivable a boy could get into it. It’s a well-told story, and there are guy characters intelligently depicted, but it’s very clear that the center of the book is the relationship between the 4 girls. A book about guys for a guy — I’ll see if I can think of anything.
I'm interested in media for both boys and girls! But just to clarify: I want media that shows how to engage with the opposite gender and how to do hetero dating, not how to have strong same-sex friendships.
Yeah, I get it. The series of 4 books follows the 4 friends from about age 16 to about age 30. All have boyfriends, & while career stuff and relationship with family of origin are important, I'd say the romantic relationships each young woman has get the most air time. The 4 main characters have both good and bad relationships, and reflect on and talk with each other about sense of self, quality of relationships, disagreements and crises with boyfriends and husbands, etc. I'd say it's all quite realistic. I don't think anyone meets their honey via online dating -- books are 10-15 years old, so take place in a slightly less online world.
Another excellent source of info is Dan Savage, who does a podcast about sex and relationships. He is smart, realistic, well-informed, kind and funny. BUT I think his content is too intense for a 12 year old. Many of his callers are asking about fetishes, for instance, and even in the modern world I think 12 year olds should have a gentler education than Dan gives. to those matters. I introduced my daughter to Savage when she was around 16. By then she seemed to have heard of every sex act and fetish and gender variant. She talked about all that stuff in a matter of fact way, but I could tell she was still pretty naive about a lot of things. So we listened to Dan together, often on long car trips. That side of life worked out well for her. She's got a wonderful boyfriend, seems very in love, and has friends all over the gender spectrum.
I just learned there is a significant Albanian minority in southern Italy, and that they first started arriving in the 1400s. Has anyone done genetic testing on the population of immigrants who came from southern Italy to the U.S. to determine how many of them are actually of Albanian blood?
I found this poem about Gaza, written jointly by - according to the credits - Dieter Hallervorden and Diether Dehm (no relation), a German actor and a left-wing politician, respectively.
Gaza Gaza https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duHA3wq3hFA. There are English subtitles on, but I thought of using this as an opportunity to revive my fragile A1 German and transcribed/translated myself it with much help from AI services. Deutsch and English text follow, its slightly different from the English translation on the clip but uses it as basis. All corrections from better speakers of German welcome.
=====
D> Ein Mann drückt zerfetzte Fingerchen
--- E> A man pushes shredded little fingerlets
D> an seinem Bart beim flüstern [?...?] dran
--- E> against his beard, while whispering about this:
D> "Was haben denn die zarten Dingechen... den Herren generell getan?"
--- E> "What, pray tell, could have those delicate little things... done to the esteemed generals?"
D> Dann hebt er den Rumpf seiner kleinen Zu Allah...
--- E> Then he raises the torso of his little one towards Allah
D> in die Sonne, zum Mond
--- E> in the sun, towards the moon
D> Und wieder haben wir da einen, der nichts und niemand mir schont
--- E> [and thinks] And here again, we have those from which nothing and no one is spared
=====
D> Soll ich diesem Vater empfehlen...
--- E> Should I then advise this father...
D> so cool wie Talkgast zu sein
--- E> to be as cool as a guest in a talk show?
D> sich bloß in keinem Wort zu verfehlen, das antisemitisch erscheint
--- E> Just so he won't slip into using any word, possibly interpreted as antisemitic?
D> Sie geloben apart die Treue von Ampel bis afd.
--- E> They all swear faith to Apartheid: From the Traffic Lights coalition [1] to AfD [2]
D> Sie liefern Granaten aufs Neue bittend Zahl, damit umzugehen
--- E> They all supply grenades again and again, asking, pretty please, "to be handled with care"
D> beim Menschen, wie Viecher vertreiben, mit Hunger und mit drohnen
--- E> As people, like cattle, are driven away with hunger and drones
D> Dieser Kinderfriedhof wird bleiben als Albtraum für Generationen
--- E> This graveyard of children will remain, for generations to come, a nightmare
=====
D> Die aus Ohnmacht brodelnde Kraft, hat sich nie jemand selbst ausgesucht
--- E> The helplessness in the face of brute force, was never chosen by anyone
D> doch die Macht, die die Bestien schafft... aus kalten Kalkülen, sei verflucht
-- E> But this power, that which creates beasts... out of cold computation, may it be cursed
++ D,E> Gaza, Gaza
D> Ich schlage meine Augen nieder vor dem ohnmächtigen Geschrei
-- E> I gaze down [in shame], before your powerless screeches
D> vor deinen zerfetzen Liedern,
-- E> Before your torn limbs
D> und ich frage mich da immer wieder
-- E> And I ask myself again and always:
D> "und das... soll kein Völkermord sein?"
-- E> "And this... is not supposed to be Genocide?"
=====
[1] The Traffic Lights coalition: a coalition of mainstream German parties whose combined colors resemble that of a traffic light
[2] AfD: Short for Alternative für Deutschland, or "Alternative for Germany" in German, a far-right party that is not mainstream and considered extreme, focused on combating immigration
=====
~|~ Dedicated to the soul of Hend Rajab, 2017|2018 – 29 January 2024, killed by criminals driving tanks.
Some translation errors, e.g. "generell" means "in general" and has nothing to do with military generals. Also "apart" means "fancy" and has nothing to do with Apartheid (which is Afrikaans and not German). Besides, it has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Must_Be_Said
I've been thinking about what I call relationship revulsion campaigns. If there's a better or more standard term, let me know.
I'm talking about prejudices which are specifically saying that people from some demographic are too revolting for sex and/or bad marriage choices.
Such prejudices are pretty pervasive, though they vary in how much grip they get. There are prejudices against fat people, old people, homosexuals, black women, Asian men, disabled people, (in America) people of the other political persuasion, Jewish women (though I think that's faded)...
I think one of the nasty side effects, in addition to presumably good pairings which are presumably prevented, is that if people say they don't want to be targeted by relationship revulsion, they can be taken to say they're entitled to a relationship. Perhaps sometimes they mean that, but I think mostly not.
Part of the mess is that people living in a society with relationship revulsion can actually be revolted, so if they hear pushback against the prejudice, they think they're being pushed into a relationship they don't want.
Downthread, Martin Blank was talking about definitions of "racism", and I think this is similar. It's not just that someone feels some way, they have a need to explain it and justify it and make it righteous and good, to embed it in the social fabric as "the way things should be". It is not allowable to have personal preferences, every preference one has must be objectively correct, and if that means redefining what is "correct" to suit one's preferences, so be it. It may relate to the creeping politicization of life, where totalitarian ideologies wriggle their tentacles into every private orifice of the mind.
Campaign implies a level of intentional coordination that I don't think exist. This seems just being on the wrong side of a heuristic, which sucks.
I do think that the current discourse environment (or current-ish, you know, vibe-shift and all that) is particularly cruel to people belonging to the people belonging to these groups:
- Right-thinking people will denounce these stereotypes loudly, but are likely to still not date within those categories if they can avoid it.
- Contrarians/dissidents often over-index to the heuristic as a reaction to the stifling norms.
- Complaining about the stereotypes is often seen as entitlement.
- Signaling that you do not fit the stereotypes is seen as traitorous/pick-me/desperate.
My advice for individuals looking out for themselves would be to lean into the latter point anyway and ignore the noise. It's a hard balancing act, but people won't know your worth if you don't tell them.
In one of the classified threads, maybe a year ago, a guy linked to a long, frank profile of himself with multiple photos. He was a moderately overweight guy in his 30's, and I think also balding. But he was articulate and funny, and sounded active, with a lot of interests. Anyhow, I remember one line from his profile was "I'm not everyone's cup of tea. I'm fat. On the other hand . . . "[and he described some positive stuff about himself -- interests, achievements, can't remember now.]
I am totally not in a dating mode, and he's too young for me anyhow. But if it were his age and dating, he's the person from that dating thread I would have contacted. Like pretty much everyone, I think hair looks better than partial baldness and normal weight looks better than fat. But that stuff is just not that important. I know from experience that whether a man is handsome or homely, he will soon just look like himself to me.
And besides, all you people who have their hearts set on finding a beautiful mate: Do you *get* that your partner is going to age? Time and having babies make various things soften and slide south. Pregnancy and motherhood often cause weight gain, and the pounds are hard to lose. Time, sun and smiling give you crow's feet and smile lines. People get busy with their careers and don't want to take out time to work out and have their teeth whitened. I you can't face that, sign up for some permanent feed of 23 year olds. It's like getting all the Mac desktop models as they come out. Once the bloom is off one, the agency will send another.
But that applies to both the more attractive and the less attractive people. And I would naively expect that the older version of the more attractive person will still be nicer to look at than the older version of the less attractive person.
There are some exceptions to this. For example, it seems that some people simply "age more slowly", which can make them less attractive as teenagers, but more attractive after the peak age for their gender. But I still think you probably can make a reasonable guess about how your potential partner will age. And "he is already partially bald and overweight in his 30s" probably doesn't result in an optimistic prediction.
ISTM that one thing people want from a stable permanent relationship is not to have to worry that they're going to lose their partner by going gray, gaining weight, acquiring stretch marks, etc. That can be bad (why do I need to bathe regularly now that I'm married?) but also is a pretty important benefit in a world where younger people are usually more attractive than older people, where pregnancy has a substantial impact on your body, etc.
Hmmm... 'campaign' is tricky - makes me think of something centrally organized, which I'm not sure matches your phenomenon. Maybe "Mate Revulsion?" "Revulsion Culture?"
It's definitely a thing - people generally want 'desirable' partners, and every society has its undesirables.
>>if people say they don't want to be targeted by relationship revulsion, they can be taken to say they're entitled to a relationship. Perhaps sometimes they mean that, but I think mostly not.
Yeah, I'm reminded of some of Scott's past posts about shy, bullied young men frustrated at their lack of prospects who say something to the effect of "it sucks that this is happening to me" and society responds "so you're saying your *entitled* to women? Because that's pretty despicable of you." See also, the mockery that trans-people or fat people get in similar circumstances - "dating sucks because I'm not seen as desireable" is a fairly common opinion, but that ask for empathy often gets rewarded with a mallot-to-the-face response along the lines of "are you saying people who don't want to date you are transphobes/fatphobes/whateverphobes? Because that's pretty despicable of you."
I'm sure there are some small number of people (probably struggling with mental health issues) who genuinely mean things in the "I am entitled to be considered sexually desired" kind of way, but most strike me as just meaning something along the lines of "dating sucks because 'm not seen as desirable," and honestly, dating in the internet age tends to suck a lot generally, so it'd be nice if we could all just kvetch without getting punched in the face for it.
How do you distinguish a campaign from just what people prefer/don't prefer?
Like, if you ask a large set of men whether they're more attracted to a fit 23 year old yoga instructor or a 53 year old overweight mom of three, nearly all of them are going to find the yoga instructor more attractive. (Even the older guys who suspect that they'd be more likely to have a meaningful relationship with the mom of three thanks to shared experiences.) I'm not convinced this is the result of a campaign, exactly.
If you look across art and cultures, you'll see that there's variation on body composition, facial features, and height, at least.
There's a preference for youth. There may be a male preference for lighter skin. (See _The Curse of Ham_.)
The thing is, it's one thing to have a preference, and another thing to go on and on about how much you're disgusted by what doesn't match your preference. Public disgust has effects, and I'm inclined to think the real revealed preference is for malice . This isn't about everyone, but definitely a large enough fraction to make a difference.
>Public disgust has effects, and I'm inclined to think the real revealed preference is for malice .
That sounds very plausible. Weaponized disgust is a classic element of xenophobia.
I could see someone being startled and turned off by an unexpected characteristic of someone they met on a first date, but I'd thing a decent response in such a case would be more like "Oops, <X> happens to be a turnoff for me, no offense, but could we cut this short?"
OK, but how does any of that make the person you're replying to wrong? All they said was that in their culture, people tend to prefer X, and that this doesn't necessarily imply a "campaign."
There is a difference between "most people prefer X to Y" and "most people prefer X to Y and they keep reminding everyone that X is more attractive to Y, therefore only losers choose Y".
In the former scenario, if there is a sufficiently large minority of people who prefer Y to X, or at least are indifferent, and there are not too many Y people... it still can have a happy ending.
In the latter scenario, people indifferent between X and Y will still choose X for status reasons, and even people who genuinely prefer Y to X will be tempted to do so. So it would be nicer if the people who prefer X to Y act on their preferences but stop preaching about them. (Most of them probably do exactly this, but sometimes it only takes one loud asshole.)
At least from the purely sexual angle, if the mom of 3 had non-white hair, and a certain softness in voice, I will be almost as sexually interested in her as in the 23 year old yoga instructor, if not ***more***. As an actual matter of fact, I find myself getting quite aroused just thinking about the traditional qualities associated with your description right now, **no matter** what ethnicity or general body plan I mentally assign to the "53 year old overweight mom of three".
I kind of like bigger (in both meanings of the word, older and chubbier) women so that's not typical, perhaps, but "nearly all" strikes me as so obviously wrong. After all, I DO find free porn featuring chubby respectable moms seducing twenty-somethings. Nothing which you can find free porn for is ever niche. Perhaps a reasonable ratio is like 90%, 10% of all men is still a pretty huge portion.
There is also a big difference between just stating what you want, rejecting what you don't want, and declaring that **everyone** should or would or must reject what you don't want (or is stupid not to). Each step of the way is more hurtful to what you don't want.
And this is still not the total rejectionism of movements like 4th wave feminism and Andrew-Tate-ism, which assert that **all** people of a certain gender has this and that qualities, and that you would be a fool not to assume maximum bad faith and act accordingly. That's the apex of what OP is talking about. I personally call it "Gender Separatism", they talk about marriage and love using terminology taken from independence movements, and explicitly invoke the metaphor of political subordination of one people to another when they describe the current status quo.
Maybe Nancy is getting more at (b) when she talks about revulsion, rather than just lack of interest.
I think statistically you will find most people with broadly similar tastes, but with substantial outliers. And you definitely have loud internet voices demanding that people find them attractive. Depending on the context, that can be single men, transwomen, fat people, old people, disabled people, etc. Demanding people find you attractive will never ever work, but the internet is about clicks/attention, not about what makes sense or can work.
Entertainingly, you can also get loud internet voices demanding that you stop finding some people attractive, or denouncing you for finding them attractive for the wrong reasons. (Maybe you only find that black woman attractive because you're exotifying her.) Because the internet is about getting clicks via outrage/anger/eyeball grabbing, not about anything sensible.
>Entertainingly, you can also get loud internet voices demanding that you stop finding some people attractive, or denouncing you for finding them attractive for the wrong reasons.
Yup! Reddit has a huge amount of strident demands to "Stop sexualizing <group>/<body part>!!!" I find busybodies who issue such demands to be obnoxious.
It seems a little odd that your list mentions homosexuals, even though they usually don't want relationships with heterosexuals, but doesn't mentions bisexual men and transgender people (especially transgender women I think).
I see enough from conservatives that homosexuals are obviously revolting. I think the idea and to some extent the effect (much more in the past) is that they aren't supposed to want each other.
Conservative (and straight) here. I don’t think homosexuals belong in this list. Homosexuality as revolting, sure. Homosexuals revolting for engaging in homosexuality, possibly. But the stereotype about (male) homosexuals is that they are better looking and more attractive than heterosexual men - and this is broadly true IME.
You can also think about whether the revoltingness is contagious.
Absent any concerns about STDs, would it matter to you if your girlfriend had been in a previous relationship with another girl? A transwoman? A black guy?
None of these seem important to me, but there are people for whom each of those three would be a deal breaker.
This post is about risks in the development of increasingly capable AI, in particular the risk of losing control to AI and extinction risk. I'll suggest that a key question is, "When do we need to take this kind of risk seriously?"
We'll look at the issue of 'agency overhang', which suggests that adding agent-like abilities to AI could result in a sudden and surprising increase in these kinds of risks.
I'll draw on intuitions about humans taking administrative and political control (with reference to the 'Dictator Book Club') and rephrase agency overhang as 'power play overhang'.
I'll finish by suggesting that a lot of people may be making a subtle but important mistake in imagining just one fairly specific path to dangerous AI.
(Interested to hear any thoughts and comments, from people here.)
When governments subsidize things like high-speed particle accelerators or giant space telescopes to look at distant galaxies from the past, is there generally hope that it will lead to new knowledge that has a practical value for the world or is it mostly "science for science's sake"? Percentagewise, how much is the former vs the latter?
To the extent it is the latter, why don't we subsidize the arts as much?
When there's any pushback on funding science, the proponents will absolutely trot out "This could bring us vast practical benefits, like cheap clean abundant energy! Or maybe not, no way to know in advance, but we'd all be living in caves if we didn't try!". This argument is usually rather overstated, and it's unclear how sincere the proponents are about it.
But it's definitely a weapon in their arsenal, one that the arts can't use. And it is at least somewhat effective.
The problem with drawing a distinction between the two is that it's very difficult to assess what projects are practical and what projects are just for prestige before you actually do the damn thing. For example, you might fund a materials science lab with the hopes of getting a superconductor and get nothing out of them five years later beyond a lot of papers explaining why it didn't work and a new kind of talc. Alternatively, you might fund a new exoplanet telescope and find out that, in addition to a lot of pretty pictures, they invented a new form of glass that revolutionizes fiberoptics and the patent will shortly be worth trillions.
>Its purpose is to produce intense beams of light whose special characteristics are useful in many areas of scientific research. In particular it can be used to investigate the structure and properties of a wide range of materials from proteins (to provide information for designing new and better drugs), and engineering components (such as a fan blade from an aero-engine[1]) to conservation of archeological artifacts (for example Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose[2][3]).
It isn't the LHC (which operates at >1000X the energy), but it is a high-speed particle accelerator.
The question you are asking is based on a bad model. "Government" is just a big bunch of people in a room. The government doesn't "hope" for anything. Decisions are generally not taken based on careful analysis where the benefits are broken down in percentages. A good historical example is that Iraq War: There was no big meeting were it was decided to invade Iraq, instead some people said "maybe we should invade Iraq" and it slowly morphed into "we should invade Iraq" without anyone ever making the decision.
For science funding, some parliament or similar typically assigns a big pile of money to "science" each year as part of the budget process. Why do they do this? Because that's what they always have done and if someone opposed it they would be painted as "bad for science" and no-one wants that and there are some members who are really into science and working hard to increase the amount and they are kind of nice to have lunch with so you don't want to make them angry and also they scratch your back sometimes as well so whatever. Then the big pile of money get's fought over by different science institutions and bureaucracies which also mostly run on inertia.
That's a fair point. My question was more of a "Ideally, what should we fund?" not "How does our political process determine what we fund?" But you are right to make the point.
Like, this space is filled with rat libertarians and I'm one of them so my answer to "ideally, what should we fund?" is "burn the current system to the ground and then do something that is based on the facts that 1. we're trying to create public goods and 2. incentives matter. Definitely enforce pre-registration and open access. Maybe do something with dominant assurance contracts and/or prediction markets, that would be cool."
Having a big central committee trying to decide what's Good Science That Should Be Funded and what's not is doomed to be terribly ineffective. Having a big central committee trying to decide how much resources to dedicate to science may be harder to avoid but it is also a fundamentally bad idea.
There's a good Substack by a guy who really cares about science funding here, it has ideas that are a tad bit more practical: https://goodscience.substack.com/
We subsidize "culture" in the broader sense by a staggering amount: keeping historical buildings intact, pushing knowledge and use of niche languages and dialects (a lot of this in Europe, less so in the US I guess), keeping landscapes pretty, etc etc. Heck, even sports might go on this list. All of this is fine since these things enjoy very broad support.
The arts are also subsidized by the public purse quite a lot. But (a particular breed of) artists do their utmost to make art exclusionary. They take public money on one hand, and refuse to make things the public enjoys on the other. Architects often do this as well.
A lot of individual artist have done their best to alienate the public while also demanding that the public fund them. I have no sympathy for those types. But things like symphonies, operas and ballets are much less controversial, and they do require a lot of money to exist. I wish more money were given to symphonies to perform Strauss and Mahler so they wouldn't have to pay the rent buy performing "The Music of David Bowie."
There's usually a hope that blue sky research will result in discoveries that benefit society. But these big projects also push the limits of engineering, so work on them can result in improved optics, magnets or other technologies that can be applied in other areas.
Governments do subsidize arts a lot, it's just that any individual art (or humanities research) project needs much less expensive equipment and manpower than the projects you've mentioned.
As for the motivation, I think it's hard to separate. Scientific success brings a government prestige, but there's always a chance that even the most abstract projects will produce useful things as a result.
Incidentally, prestige and the hope of positive (social) effects is also why governments fund art.
With architects, at least, I think it's partly Stockholm Syndrome. They're forced to keep their designs inexpensive, and eventually they brainwash themselves into believing that the designs forced upon them are in fact objectively good. To do otherwise would involve admitting that they're "sellouts" who compromise their artistic vision for filthy lucre.
There are only 3.2 orders of magnitude in star mass (0.075-120 solar masses), and there's a multiple-comparisons problem where the progenitor masses reaching those limits are *not* all that close to solar mass.
More generally, since stars are "things that collapsed hard enough to do nuclear fusion", the Chandrasekhar limit is "things that collapsed hard enough to do electron capture" and the TOV limit is "things that collapsed hard enough to break physics", it makes sense for them to be fairly similar.
But why? Naively I would have expected that neutron degeneracy pressure would be *much* stronger than electron degeneracy pressure or something. After all, the particles have very different properties.
As Erica said, because gravity increases with density, once you start to get gravity that can actually overcome repulsion forces it needs less and less of a push to overcome the next, stronger set of repulsion forces (high-pressure polymorphs start at something like 0.00000005 solar masses, Coulomb pressure fails at ~0.05 solar masses, electron degeneracy at ~1.4 solar masses for C-O - more for hydrogen, less for elements heavier than calcium - and neutron degeneracy at 2-3 solar masses).
This is, incidentally, why there's a sharp divide between white dwarfs and neutron stars and why the formation of the latter from the former invariably blows up a star rather than powering one smoothly; once the electron-degenerate core comes under enough pressure that electron capture becomes favourable, it starts shrinking because of the decrease in electron degeneracy pressure, and the increase in density increases the gravity and thus pressure further, making electron capture *more* favourable, so while the first few electron captures are near equilibrium and release negligible energy the later stages of the process release incredible amounts of energy and it will self-accelerate until completion - the core doesn't "get stuck" partway.
Your intuition is correct as far as it goes: max neutron degeneracy pressure is many orders of magnitude more than electron degeneracy pressure. But you don't need to add a whole lot more mass to get there because there's an insanely large positive feedback effect where adding enough mass to overcome electron degeneracy pressure means you squeeze out all the empty space between atomic nuclei and wind up with a neutron star whose core is something like 8-9 orders of magnitude denser than the core of a white dwarf. A neutron star is on the order of 10 km in radius, while a white dwarf is on the order of 5000 km.
Internal pressure at the core due to gravity of an ideal star works out to being proportionate to M^2 / R^4, so increasing mass by roughly a factor of 2 and decreasing radius by roughly a factor of 500 (i.e. going from a white dwarf just under the C limit to a neutron star just under the TOV limit) means your pressure is a bit more than 11 orders of magnitude higher.
It's a subject that fascinates me. In the first half of my life, male novelists were the kings of the intellectual world. Since 2000, they barely register in American culture. Why?
Barkan suggests the usual suspects: video games and social media. His thesis is that young men simply aren't exposed to the gateway drugs of literary fiction anymore because they don't have empty time to fill anymore. I know that in my day writers like Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller were gateways to more literary fiction. But he also suggests that there is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's been a long time since an under-40 literary male novelist writing in English was popular (since the 1990's and DFW). Males don't read literary fiction because males no longer write literary fiction and vice-versa. That analysis doesn't get at the root cause, but there may be some truth in it. The root cause, of course, may be political correctness: how can a heterosexual male novelist exist in today's social climate?
Pistelli suggests a more interesting root cause: gentrification. Heterosexual men don't want to write fiction anymore because it's higher status to be a literary theorist than a writer of literary fiction. I.e., real American men don't want to be Hemingway or Pynchon anymore; they want to be Nick Land.
I myself wonder if there isn't an economic explanation that is congruent with
The top 10 bestselling novels in the US by year since 2000, by gender of author(s):
2000: 8 by men, 2 by women
2001: 8 by men, 2 by women
2002: 7 by men, 3 by women
2003: 8 by men, 2 by women
2004: 9 by men, 1 by women
2005: 5 by men, 5 by women
2006: 9 by men, 1 by women
2007: 7 by men, 3 by women
2008: 6 by men, 4 by women
2009: 7 by men, 3 by women
2010: 7 by men, 3 by women
2011: 7 by men, 3 by women
2012: 2 by men, 8 by women
2013: 8 by men, 2 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2014: 5 by men, 5 by women
2015: 5 by men, 5 by women (note: one of the female authors was long deceased)
2016: 4 by men, 6 by women (note: one of the female authors was long deceased)
2017: 6 by men, 4 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2018: 8 by men, 2 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2019: 7 by men, 3 by women
2020: 5 by men, 5 by women
2021: 7 by men, 3 by women (note: two of the male authors were long deceased)
2022: 2 by men, 8 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2023: 2 by men, 8 by women
Male authors dominated through the first decade of this century, as they more or less always had previously. Then it balanced out somewhat. The last two years it's mostly women or, more precisely, woman: Colleen Hoover, the Michael Jordan of romance novelists, wrote 6 of the 10 best-selling novels published in 2022 and then 3 of the ones published in 2023. Romance novels started cracking the annual all-types-of-novels top ten list only during the past decade or so. That genre has always been overwhelmingly written by women and read by women, so its growth is a factor in the overall shift.
(Also while putting together this comment I noticed that in that entire 24 years there hasn't been one instance of a top-10 US bestselling novel in any genre co-authored by a man and a woman. There are some male duos and some female duos, but no mixed duos. Not sure what means if anything.)
The NYT best-seller lists are organized by category, one of which is "literary". (Others are "romance", "adventure", "horror", etc.) For the decade starting with 2000, 53% of the books that made the NYT's annual top-10 in the literary category were written by men. For the decade starting with 2010 it was 54%.
Library Journal's list of the "Best Literary Fiction of 2023" included 11 books of which 8 were written by men.
Literary Hub's 2019 list of "The 20 Best Novels of the Decade" included 9 books written by men.
The Guardian's 2019 list of the "100 best books of the 21st century" included 28 literary novels of which 15 were written by men. (If you include poetry collections and short-story collections those totals become 35 and 19.)
Sounds like a dangerous kind of thing to write for a man today, because if the story is not plot-driven, then it will probably contain opinions on the general society (as seen by the protagonist), and that could be problematic.
But maybe it's just a mater of fashion, and men don't write this kind of stories these days because they write different kinds of stories.
Or maybe it's the audience that has changed. Maybe the kind of person who would read this kind of stories in the past has either moved to a different kind of stories or stopped reading completely. Twenty years ago, this kind of fiction would sell much better than sci-fi/fantasy, but I suspect that while sci-fi/fantasy fans still keep reading books, the more mainstream audience has switched to watching Netflix.
Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the last couple decades. There used to be very hard limits on what you could film in a way that is decreasingly true. Why read a war novel when you could fight in one? Of course, abstract concepts aren’t as easy to visualize, which is why you see the shift to nonfiction. Because no movie is really going to be as effective at teaching philosophy than a book.
It’s kind of weird because I’m an avid movie watcher/nonfiction reader who decided to write fiction and I find fiction harder to read than most nonfiction, mostly because of descriptions. I’m not used to taking characterizations from words and visualizing them in my mind.
I'd lay this at the feet of the decline of "literary fiction" as a genre. It's relevant to less and less of the population, and the portion it's still relevant to tends to be moderately to aggressively anti-masculine.
It's a pity. I view litfic as being like a paleo diet, in that it does without the added sugar and processed ingredients of, well, actually being exciting. (I remember the hand-wringing over Donna Tartt.) But these days, they don't realize that they've been using another artificial stimulant, political correctness. And so the effort to prioritize craft uber alles is fading away.
People go into writing for three reasons: because they're highly motivated, because they want to make money, or because they want the mystique of being a writer.
It's hard to make money being a writer. If you do want to make money, it's easier to write genre fiction. This has always been true to a degree, but I think it's now truer than ever. In genre fiction, there are still many cishet male writers.
As for the prestige, I think that's dwindling. Literary fiction is becoming a "for girls" thing which makes people look down on it. Genre fiction "for women", like romance, has more thematic overlap with litfic than genre fiction "for men" like hard sci-fi. So it's more likely for a female genre fiction author to be "elevated" into litfic than a male one.
And as for sheer interest, I think boys don't really read much. If they're into solitary pursuits, they're more likely to watch shows and play video games. There's many reasons for that, but in the end it leads to fewer cishet men with a great interest in fiction writing.
Couldn't finish my thought because of the shitty software here. Was going to say Baumol Effect. Would an 18-year-old Thomas Pynchon or William Shakespeare even want to be a novelist today or would they go into tech to make a living?
I think the same thing about contemporary classical music. Wouldn't a clone of Mozart or Beethoven today either choose to make more popular music or---because they are smart and ambitious---perhaps choose a career other than music?
Another reason I think there aren't more male heterosexual novelists -- along the lines of Pistelli's suggestion that it is about status -- is American politics. Apolitical times are best for art, whereas politics ruins it. Just look at what politics does to comedy. Mid-century America was a great time for bipartisanship and thus art. When artist have to choose a side they stop making art and start making propaganda.
EDIT: What are the odds the 21st century would produce the greatest writer in history considering that the smartest minds in that century would be drawn to something more productive?
>>Apolitical times are best for art, whereas politics ruins it. Just look at what politics does to comedy.
I disagree with this completely. In the first place, there's no time in human history whose inhabitants would look around and say "we are living in apolitical times." Conflicts may be forgotten to us, but they were always present.
Plus some of the best art has "political" statements behind it.
Totalitarianism and 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheight 451. The Red Scare and the Crucible. Abolitionism and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Civil Rights Movement and To Kill a Mockingbird. WW1 and Guernica. Jacques-Louis David's paintings of Napoleon and the French Revolution.
To be fair, art doesn't always have to say something political to be interesting - lots of western art, historically, said nothing more than "my patron and/or the church is wealthy and awesome," and still was amazing. And plenty of good art has been made out of non-political statements - "I have issues with my dad," "I'm obsessed with my mistress" have made been every bit as fertile statements to center interesting art around as their "political" alternatives have been. But at the end of the day, statements about *something* are what make most forms of art interesting, and I don't see any reason to carve political statements out of that quilt when they account for many of our most interesting squares.
There's a bias when we look back at "the best art" and see political statements in it - if we're still reading it, it's probably good. Your examples do show that it's perfectly possible to have politically motivated art...
...but I think that a big problem with looking for good politically motivated art is that it removes a filter. If I write a poem about going outside on a cold winter day, and it's trash, nobody will read it. If I write a poem about going outside on a cold winter day to storm the US Capitol Building, lots of people won't care whether it's trash or not - they'll review it entirely based on whether it agrees with their politics. Seeing that a work of art can receive attention its creator could possibly want just by "sending the right message", it is natural for artists to skip the step where they try to make it any good.
I'd say that the attention can also be gained by "big explosions" or "superhero fights" or "hot naked people" or other stuff like that, with similar effects.
Some people love those novels you mention but they are the kind of preachy stuff they force you to read in school that I hate. I loathe art that makes statements.
It's more than just "some people" though - we're talking about some of the most influential works of fiction of the last 200 years.
Plenty of less explicitly 'preachy' novels can be considered as if not more successful - I'm not trying to argue that art *must* make political statements to be good. However, regardless of your or my personal taste, "apolitical times" (if such times can be said to exist) can't be said to be "best" for art if "political" pieces routinely run among the most popular and impactful works.
One certainly could say "such-and-such a time or cultural moment is best suited producing art that I personally prefer," and I'd have no quibble with a statement that apolitical times, whatever that may mean, are best suited for producing art that is to your tastes, but that's a very different statement from "such-and-such a time or cultural moment is best for art."
But books like 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Crucible are as popular as they are only because public schools made them assigned reading. I mean, maybe they would have been read widely for a long time if they hadn't been assigned reading, but that's a counterfactual we can't examine. As it is they are popular political works precisely because the politics of the time was "We need to ram these political messages down kids' throats" and they did. They were 20th century American political propaganda: 1 against the Soviets, 1 against racism, and 1 against being too anti-Soviet.
I'll 50% disagree, and say that the problem is the way the books were rammed down kids' throats. The messages are very important, but when they're presented as having a single reference, too many kids come out thinking "now I'm warned, so I'll never do that specific bad thing to those specific people". And then they go on to recreate the pattern elsewhere.
I wonder how much of this is related to modern literary fiction being so focused on internal emotional states, like the classic short story in the New Yorker with no plot but lots of elliptical dialogue. Male writers seem to be doing a lot better in genre fiction of all kinds.
I am so sick of hearing being supersmart equated with working in tech. Shakespeare was a genius, but he *wrote* all the time and when he wasn't writing sonnets and plays he was problem thinking about doing so. And he didn't, you know, get the royalties from all the modern film adaptations of his plays. He was not wealthy and successful in his own time. He could probably have made more money owning a pub, and he probably knew that. Mozart and Beethoven may have been smart and ambitious, but they were not particularly practical and they were *in love* with music. I know someone who is a 23 year old bona fide math prodigy and they are getting an advanced degree in something other than tech. David Foster Wallace was supersmart and he did not work in tech. SCOTT is supersmart, and he is not working in tech. Zvi is supersmart, and he is not working in tech. Each of them is/was in love with some kind of mental activity that is not a tech one.
I'm sure there are people working in tech who are in love with their jobs, but my impression from the people I know, including people on here, is that most have a practical, workaday attitude and are pleased to be getting prosperous at something they are good at. If anything what stands out for me about people in tech is not that they are smarter but that they have more common sense and less passion than the kind of smart person who produces things because they're in love with the process.
On the other hand: I'm arguably one of those people who's in tech but probably would be one of those obsessive intellectuals in an earlier time. Don't get me wrong -- I like programming, it's fun, and I'm pretty good at it. But my real first love is mathematics. I did math all the time, wanted to be a mathematician, did original research as a high school and college student, went to a high-ranked PhD program in math.... and then the pressure burnt me out on academic research and I wasn't a good fit for the teaching college where I got a job instead (and was overworked and underpaid and didn't have the energy to do research anyway). So I went into software, which is less stressful and pays more, and now I do things like Project Euler (which is like 80% math and 20% programming) for fun in my free time. And I know several other people with similar trajectories.
My point is, it's not just that tech pays more (though that's not trivial), it's that tech, unlike most intellectual jobs today, is not an absolutely brutal meatgrinder to actually have a career in, so lots of would-be intellectuals who can't handle the meatgrinder but are ambitious and good at tech stuff too end up in tech. Are they "more productive" in tech? Well, Society Writ Large seems to have decided so. I'm not so sure, but here I am anyway.
(I will probably retire early and do lots of math then, though "early" is less early because I spent 10 years in PhD + tenure track trying to make the academic math thing work.)
Also tech, well IT anyway, has a fairly low entry barrier. So it is ideal for people lacking the funds or the patience and perserverance to spend several years studying vocational specialities such as medicine or law.
Yeah, that makes sense, and good for you! I have nothing against people working in tech, just tired of hearing it talked about as "something more productive" that "the smartest minds in the century would be drawn to."
I think this is a ridiculously over-phrased claim. What do you mean by "masculinity"? Do you simply mean "male writers" or do you mean "no He-Man Rough Tough Characters"?
That reminds me of my reaction to Jack London's "The Sea-Wolf" where the big mean rough'n'tough character is named Wolf Larsen. Well, okay. But then it turns out that Wolf has an even meaner, rougher'n'tougher big brother called... Death Larsen.
At which point I found it hard to repress my giggles. I enjoyed the book, but that's a bit *too* gilding the lily to be taken seriously. I get the impression, Hank, that you think we need Moar Death Larsen! in the contemporary novel?
I really just mean heterosexual male novelists. The Ross Barkin post goes into much more detail about what he means. He mostly makes the point about how in the mid-60s American novelists were overwhelmingly male whereas now they are overwhelmingly female and the ones who are male are mostly writing from a racial/sexual-orientation minority perspective. (The emphasis being the perspective not whether the author happens to be a minority). With the recent deaths of Roth, Mcarthy and Amis, the only male novelists alive I can name who write in English are Pynchon and Franzen.
Do you mean the decline of masculinity or the decline of male writers? They're not the same, right? Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett -- none was exactly a swashbuckler. Of course, they were from a different era, but even by the standards of their era they were not particularly masculine. As for now -- well, there was John Updike and Philip Roth, both of whom died in the last decade. Oh, right, you said writers under 40. I can't think of any, but I don't keep up with new books the way I used to. Like many people, I read far fewer books now than I used to. Lots of my reading is online -- blogs, etc. Are there female writers under 40 who are a big deal these days?
To me it seems as though forms like the novel are dying because so few people these days sit down with nice fat long books. I'm a psychologist, and used to recommend books to my patients -- novels that touched on issues important to them, nonfiction books about their disorder, self-help books. Nowadays they sigh at the idea and ask if I know of a podcast or a YouTube video. I have had several tell me they just cant stick with reading a book these days. And 2 people that I can think of have told me they *have never read an entire book in their lives.*. They're STEM professionals, and quite smart, but they just cannot understand how someone can face sitting down with several hundred pages of print and persevere to the end. They got through high school using Spark Notes.
It's weird that people these days simultaneously have issues with shortened attention span and yet there are also extremely long fantasy series and movie universes.
To be more clear, I think there's a casual link in the other direction. Increased exposure to addictive stimuli makes us less capable of paying attention to non-addictive things. Probably there's a neurological explanation somewhere, but I'm just taking about the outcome that I see.
Excitement, adventure, a literary artist craves not these things.
They're artificial superstimuli, like porn or slot machines or fentanyl or power fantasies. Look at the mystery/thriller genre, it's full of long running series that hit the same notes reliably, over and over and over. The book may be new, but you already know exactly why you'll like it.
I think there's a distinction to be made between modern *literary* fiction and *contemporary* fiction; the latter is the one where the bestsellers lurk and is chock-full of women writers writing mysteries, dramas, romance, and other genre books. At the moment I think male authors still have the edge in horror, but I find it interesting that in this list it's majority male - 13 men out of the top 20:
It sounds like The Gaurdian used a bit of affirmative action for men this year: "We’ve ushered nearly 80 authors into the spotlight since 2014, from Sally Rooney to Douglas Stuart – one of only 20 men ever to have made the cut, incidentally. (We’ve got five more men this year – for anyone wondering “where are the new male hotshot novelists?”, as one newspaper asked a couple of years ago, you can call off the search.)"
> but they just cannot understand how someone can face sitting down with several hundred pages of print and persevere to the end
Sometimes I think that my greatest life hack was being born with mild OCD. Just enough to give me the push to see projects through, and value doing them well.
Many years ago, I had an HSA with HSABank. When I left my job, I rolled over the entire balance to another HSA provider and closed my account. However, ever since, HSABAnk has still be emailing my monthly statements and periodically sending me physical mail as well.
Unfortunately, there is no way to unsubscribe, because my account is closed! I even tried contacting customer support a few times, but never got anywhere.
Practicing Mormon. I abstain from alcohol, tobacco, tea leaves (green and black), coffee, and recreational drugs. Church leadership is united in those specific areas. I drink herbal tea, and use caffeine sparingly to avoid dependency.
Do you have any thoughts on why the Word of Wisdom instructs Mormons not to drink tea and coffee? If it's not caffeine (which I understand is allowed) or hot drinks per se (since herbal teas are allowed), then why doesn't God want Mormons to drink tea and coffee in particular? The interpretation of Joseph Smith's original "hot drinks" to mean specifically tea and coffee seems a very deliberate choice, but I don't understand why that exact choice was made.
As a follow up question, do Mormons see dietary observance as a matter of pure obedience, or do you think it's a practical matter leading to material or spiritual wellness?
Deiseach's comment about tea below was something I wasn't even aware of, but I can see how the counsel against tea could be seen as a push-back against what people considered vices at the time. I'm not sure drinks like hot chocolate were even a thing in North America at the time.
To give a bit of history, our "Word of Wisdom" as we call these dietary instructions, came about when Joseph's wife Emma was getting tired of cleaning up tobacco spit after meetings, and the tobacco smoke was stifling as well. The result of Joseph Smith praying about it led to Doctrine & Covenants Section 89: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/89?lang=eng
A few things worth noting: Verse 4 in Section 89 states "Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation" Other than that the section doesn't get into detail WHY some things are not good, but promises we'll be better off following its precepts. The dangers of tobacco were not known at the time, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that people just smoked straight tobacco then, mostly out of pipes, instead of manufactured cigarettes and cigars with all the nasty additives they have today. So history's vindicated that at least. While I don't believe there was any outright forbidding of alcohol in the Bible, Daniel 1 starts with Daniel and his friends refusing to drink wine and "the king's meat", and looking better than the other captives brought to Babylon as a result. Then you've got Proverbs 20:1 "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise."
Around the time of Prohibition, the Word of Wisdom went from mere counsel to a requirement. In order to perform ordinances in the temple (a temple recommend is the primary benchmark for activity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) we are asked if we "keep the Word of Wisdom", which means at the very least to specifically stay away from tobacco, alcohol, tea and coffee. A church leader might deny a temple recommend for drug abuse as well.
I can't say that history has vindicated the restriction on coffee and tea specifically, but I believe there's a reason for it, and I'm sticking to it. Therefore I would say it's a matter of obedience first and foremost. From D&C 29:34 34 "Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither any man, nor the children of men; neither Adam, your father, whom I created." In other words, the Lord doesn't just give "good advice" for material wellness. His counsel is and always has been for the welfare of our souls.
The Bible, well Proverbs ch 23, v 31-32, warns against drinking fortified wine, such as port:
"Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like an adder."
Here "moving itself aright" refers to the tendency of "wine legs" to creep up the inside of a cup full of wine, via the Gibbs-Marangoni effect. This is more pronounced and noticeable in fortified wines.
I'm going off vague recollections here, but I think that if alcohol and tobacco were considered the vices of men, tea was considered the vice of women. Excessive consumption of tea was held to be bad for health, affecting the nerves - see LeFanu's story "Green Tea" where that brew is held to be the cause of the victim's nervous system getting out of order:
"According to various authorities from at least the eighteenth century, women were especially susceptible to the effects of tea. Thus Frost asserted that: “A moderate use of tea of a due strength seems better adapted to the fair sex than men ... naturally being of a more lax and delicate make ... as also because they have less exercise or head-labours”. Women were said to be especially prone to psychological problems enhanced by excessive tea-drinking (Miller 2013, p.433). The Kildare Observer in 1882, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, discussed a report in the Daily News about the effects of tea drinking on women’s habits and constitution:
An Atrabilious [melancholy] writer in the Daily News almost alarms me. He declares that afternoon teas are the curse of the country; that mother and sisters are tea-stricken ... After painting a distressing picture of the feebleness of the average lady at dinner, he goes on to explain that this is to be attributed to the large quantity of tea and cakes and crumpets consumed but a couple of hours before. Nothing, says the writer but the abolition of afternoon tea as an institution in this country will remedy the evil (1 July 1882, p.3).
However, if such reports mock women of the upper and middle classes, the main targets of the ill-effects of tea-drinking were working class and poor women, whose craving for tea was claimed to destroy family life. The Dean of Bangor typically preached that excessive tea-drinking was “acting as a dangerous revolutionary force among us”, because tea-drinking led to the gin bottle “and the physical and nervous weakness, that had its origin in the bad cookery of an ignorant wife, ended in ruin, intemperance, and disease” (Reade 1884, p.127). Poor women were destroyed by their tea habit.
...The upper and middle classes represented themselves as refined and moderate in their tea habits, while the poorer classes were characterised as careless in their preparation of tea, and excessive in its consumption. Whilst tea for the elite classes was associated with civility, moderation and decorum, the discourse around working class tea drinking became one of excess, ill-health, and wifely neglect (Miller 2013, 5 pp.419-21, 425, 428, 431-2). Tea might be taken by all, but the time and manner of its taking were quite distinctive.
...The vocabulary of excess applied to poor and working-class tea habits is impressive. Thomas King Chambers, a London physician, in 1870 claimed that “[m]uch ill-health arises among women of the lower orders in this country from the custom of sluicing themselves with tea” (Miller 2013, p.428; my emphasis). According to John Thomas Arlidge (1872), who initiated the practice of occupational medicine, declining health amongst the working class was due to their habit of tea-drinking, tea being “a form of animal indulgence which is as distinctly sensual, extravagant and pernicious as any beer-swilling or gin drinking” (Miller 2013, p.429). The Dean of Bangor in 1883 asserted that “if a woman does not know how to cook and to make the best of the resources within her reach, she boils the kettle forever, and enfeebles her husband and sons by drenching them with oceans of tea, morning, noon and night” (Miller 2013, p.431; my emphasis). Such habits were said to result in vulnerability to disease, general ill-health, nervousness, psychological disturbance and familial neglect. An inquiry in Ireland of 1894 concluded that the consumption of inferior stewed tea among the poorer classes contributed to a large increase in psychological problems and admissions to asylums (Miller 2013, p.434).
The tea habits of the poorer classes were therefore viewed as unhealthy but also as inimical to family life. Tea was foreign to the traditional rural diet which symbolised stability and provided the men of the house with nourishing food. Furthermore,tea-drinking among women was associated with idleness, and indulgence in the addictive pleasure of tea was seen as a dangerous sign of indiscipline which undermined their duties as wives and mothers (O’Connell 2012, pp.32-3, 36-7, 43)."
Presumably coffee, as the American alternative to tea for all classes, was deemed equally as bad!
In the early 18th century, when tea first became popular in the UK, its consumption by schoolboys and men was frowned on, in some circles, as an effeminate vice compared with the virtues of good old traditional ale!
I once read somewhere, possibly in a book called "Boys Together"
of a comical incident at a school called Winchester, in which some boys in the early 1700s were having afternoon tea in the room of one, when a master with firm views against tea rushed in and started laying about with his cane, sending cups and pots flying everywhere, and shouting "William of Wykeham [the school founder] knew nothing, I think, of TEA!!"
I generally liked it, particularly his points about how working hard is valuable even if the result of the work is crap. At least I like the notion of it being true even if it isn't. To what extent is it true? I also agree with what he has to say about the value of humor in life.
But it strikes me he plays a slick trick when he says early on "Don't follow your passion!" and later "Don't worry about money, just try to find a cool job." Semantic quibbles aside, in the context of a commencement speech, isn't saying "Don't worry about money, just try to find a cool (cool to you, whatever that means, as he clarifies) job" the exact same thing as saying "Follow your passion!"?
Does general advice like that even mean anything or have any value?
Seinfeld is presuming Duke 'priviledge' is real ie Duke grads will be offered cool jobs even though they may not be one's passion. I recently saw a ref to a study that attendance at a private selective Uni (I am not from the USA) confers something like a 35% increase in salary over an equally qualified (selective STEM? State school) grad 10 years after grad.
It was a paper Tyler Cowen linked to in the Marginal Revolution blog. Maybe a month ago. Probably Raj Chetty (Harvard economist) was one of the authors (has access to annonomised USA tax data). It seemed good quality work. If memory serves me the 35% was an estimate I did in my head.
I was curious as one of my (newly graduated) kids has been applying for jobs in the UK where enrolment at a prestigious Uni is an important signal for employers. In NZ we don't have prestigious Universities so national uniformity in grading/course content difficulty is rather important for employers evaluating grad job applications. ie I suggested she 'reframe' her job applications. I only say "rather important" because in NZ the small job market means that successful internships and personal contacts are most important.
It says, "We estimate that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of a highly selective state flagship increases a student’s predicted chance of reaching the top 1% from 10.4% to 15.0%" However, "we find very small impacts of attending an Ivy-Plus on average earnings" and "we find a small and statistically insignificant impact of admission from the waitlist on mean earning ranks and the probability of reaching the top quartile of the income distribution; the causal impacts of Ivy-Plus colleges are concentrated entirely in reaching the upper tail of the distribution, consistent with the predominance of students from such colleges in positions of leadership that motivated this study."
I can't seem to edit. The actual figure of a 35% gain comes from Table 1: 7.7% of grads at Flagship Public College (reach income of the 1% at age 33) is raised to 10.4% if they had instead gone to an Ivy-Plus College.
The most recent temperature increase seems steeper and larger than the previous temperature increases. Also, eyeballing the graph, I would have said the biggest and steepest increases (apart from the recent ones) were around 11.2-10.8 thousand years ago, followed by the first highlighted bit. Have you seen any statistics showing that the highlighted ones are actually bigger/steeper than the others?
Could a civil war actually happen in the US? I haven't seen the new movie, but it's got me thinking.
At first glance, it seems pretty unlikely. States no longer have their own armies, and the federal army seems pretty centralized and cohesive -- why would one fraction of the army follow some rogue states or generals?
I guess you could imagine a chaotic scenario like during the Russian revolution -- officers just losing all control of their enlisted men. Though its worth noting that this didn't really start a full-blown civil war until later, since all the factions had to rebuilt armies from scratch.
It seems to me like the worst-case scenario would be a coup or a revolution that the military ends of backing (which is a bit comforting, since at those are much less bloody). But curious to hear y'all's thoughts.
My understanding is there's basically no chance of an internal conventional conflict but something like the Irish Troubles is pretty viable and, frankly, a security nightmare. Imagine small, American guerilla and terrorist groups and you've got the start of a complete breakdown. I mean, just imagine Timothy Mcveigh except he inspires copycats because it's not the insanely stable 1990s. Scale that up to a few thousand individuals, about what Al Qaeda had through it's history, and you've got the makings of a security nightmare.
I dunno, out of 300+ million, imagine the most radical 10,000 decide on anti-government violence through terrorism and guerilla methods. Happened in Ireland, happened for 40+ years. And, honestly, I'd bet on the US equivalent being so, so much worse. I like what I've seen of the Irish, they're charming people, but...this is America.
We could have militias fighting in the streets, but that would require an economic depression because it's hard to work a full-time job and fight in the streets. So it depends on what happens to the economy, IMO.
There aren't dividing lines that really make sense for a civil war. Blue America is mostly concentrated in dense urban areas and Red America is spread out across large rural swathes. There is no North vs South dichotomy any more. If Texas seceded, would Austin secede from Texas? The NYC metro area and Albany are deep blue, but the rest of the state leans red. Maybe conflict would break out across county lines, but that would be too messy to coordinate an actual war.
Further, the military isn't designed to operate without local support. Military bases in the US aren't self-contained fortresses but convenient training and deployment points. It's nice to have F-22s, but how do you operate an air base surrounded by hostile territory? Where does your food and fuel and ammo and plane components come from?
The political divide also disfavors outright war. Most rank and file soldiers are solidly in the red camp, with the officer corps getting steadily bluer the closer they get to D.C. and the Pentagon. Progressives are the ones who care the most about politics and tend to be more activist. Yet the conservatives are the ones who own five guns and like to spend time shooting.
I think the most realistic outlook for severe civil unrest in America is something like the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Car bombings and lone snipers are far more probable than Civil War 2.0.
I'd say the worst case scenario is that the military decide they need to put down a coup, but they're divided regarding which side is the coup and which is legitimate.
The main scenario that comes to mind is, what happens if a future President Trump gives the military an order that some of them feel is unconscionable and illegal? Putting aside what the order actually is, and assuming that Trump once again manages to hit the sweet spot with a "scissor statement" that seems obviously right to some and obviously wrong to others.
IIRC enlisted men swear an oath to obey orders of superior officers, including the Commander in Chief, along with an oath to support the Constitution.
Officers, I believe, swear an oath just to the Constitution, something that Trump seems to have little knowledge of or regard for.
If Trump finds amoral toadies who are clever enough to come up with orders that are on the very edge of legality/constitutionality - yeah, scissor orders, - things could conceivably get pretty dark.
I don’t see anything resembling a civil war coming out of it though.
If the US military starts shooting each other in an organized way, with factions that correspond to political divisions of the USA, I'm comfortable calling that a civil war, but I understand if other people aren't.
Yes, definitely, but not in the forseeable future.
I am 100% confident that there will not be a civil was in the US unless it changes almost beyond recognisability first, but if it hasn't changed beyond almost beyond recognisability in 200 years I'd be amazed.
States do have their own armies, sort of. National Guard units below a certain level (Brigades, I think) are recruited from a particular state and are under the command of that state's government except when they're called into federal service. About 20 states also have their own organized militias or "state defense forces" separate from the National Guard and exclusively reporting to the state.
Still, the regular Army and federal Army Reserve units outnumber the National Guard by quite a bit and (especially active-duty Army units) are probably a lot more combat capable. Also, in a few incidents during the Civil Rights era when the Federal government and State governments gave contradictory orders to National Guard units, the Federal orders were always the ones that wound up getting obeyed after the units were called into Federal service.
The most likely scenario in a modern civil war probably isn't secession by entire states followed by division-on-division combat, but rather something more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland on a larger scale where terrorist cells and/or private militias are waging a covert war of bombings and assassinations.
The various State National Guards are very dependent on, and integrated with, the regular Army and Air Force for their high-intensity warfighting capability and for the logistical support for any extended campaign. They can do riot control, disaster relief, and probably even counterinsurgency warfare on their own, but there's approximately zero chance that e.g. Texas is going to day "Hey, we have a mechanized infantry division and a tactical fighter wing; if Oklahoma and New Mexico pitch in, we could hold our own against the Feds!"
And it's not just military forces; states have ceded an awful lot of the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to run a modern state, to the Federal government. Almost every air traffic control facility in the country, is run by the FAA. In I think most states, the local tax collectors start with "Hey, give us a copy of your Form 1040, we'll check with the IRS to see if you're fibbing, and that's how we'll know how much you owe us".
So, if anyone's model of a "Civil War" is like the one in 1861, where states formally secede from the Union and form their own functional nation-state because they're already nation-states in miniature, then no, that doesn't work any more. And I think that's the model the recent movie is working from, though I haven't seen it (because I couldn't stop giggling about Texas and California being on the same side).
But, as you and the OP both note, there are other ways for civil wars to happen. Much uglier ones.
>The various State National Guards are very dependent on, and integrated with, the regular Army and Air Force for their high-intensity warfighting capability and for the logistical support for any extended campaign.
Interesting. I'd been going off the possibly-outdated understanding that support functions for sustained warfighting were overrepresented in Guard and Reserve units in order to not have to pay for full-time wartime support units except when we're using them, although even if it is still true, that doesn't mean there aren't dependencies going in both directions.
Perhaps whole branches of the military could rebel? So the Army and the Air Force could fight the Navy and the Marines?
It still doesn't seem likely, no matter what the war is "about" you'd expect to have supporters of either side at every level of every branch, you're not going to get the Army collectively deciding that Biden should be President and the Marines collectively deciding the other way. But perhaps you could imagine a future in which the branches of the military get slowly polarised with the Marines (say) slowly becoming known as the Republican-leaning branch and the Army drifting towards the Democrats.
Great, now my brain is trying to come up with a scenario where the Army and Air Force declare for Biden, the Navy and Marines declare for Biden, and the Space Force and Coast Guard declare for RFK, Jr.
Try the (just released) GPT-4o on your bet with Vitor on image model capabilities. When I tested it, it got #2, 4, and 5 (but not 1 and 3), so you may have just won the bet!
If you're using the ChatGPT interface, the image generation model is probably just the older DALL-E 3, even when GPT-4o is selected. It's supposed to roll out gradually.
Which are 1 & 3? Are they the raven with key in mouth and llama with bell on tail? They were the hard-to-get ones with other versions. One thing to keep in mind if that part of the agreement was that the prompt would be delivered as the words Scott used in the original statement of the bet. (I was a able to get both of those images from an earlier GPT, can't remember now whether 3.5 or 4, but I used different words and different order of presenting the different aspects of each image, so those don't count.)
Well, that is an improvement then. I'm in the process of testing it out on images GPT-4 flunked: I giant wave 100 feet high coming straight towards the viewer (4 always insisted on showing dramatic waves from the side). A seahorse made out of seahorses. The selfie someone gets if they hold the camera up to their eye and look down at their body (so equivalent of view you have of your own body). A middle-aged man in a bathing suit (GPT4 could not give me one who was not musclebound and handsome.). A person in a closet with only candle for the light source (4 gave me the candle but always lit the room with an unseen bulb.)
I was thinking about mortal combat for some reason over the last few days. You know, the era when two men would face off hand to hand and everyone knew only one of them was coming out of it. I was thinking about this purely in a practical sense; what would make me a better fighter assuming it was something I wanted to get good at? It isn't, but it became an exercise in managing my emotions. I start to feel the fear that would inevitably come with me facing such a decisive moment in my life. It's precisely the same kind of fear I experience when I imagine myself running across the beach at Normandy in 1944. But it's not the same thing as a man to man fight to the death is it? I am not speaking of some random encounter, (like getting mugged for instance,) but a considered and scheduled battle that will take place with another man and only one of us will walk out. That is a whole different question than the man on the beach, but I feared them equally, which I thought was interesting.
Anyway, with my puzzling about the whole question, I started thinking about what would give me advantage in a fight like that, and I remembered hearing once, that men could teach themselves to retract their testicles (which I consider a major vulnerability in a fight to the death, which is probably why it's been outlawed in any competitive martial art that I know of..) and I suddenly decided I should investigate it. For all I knew it was just an urban legend. So I googled it; "Can men retract their testicles at will?" I really thought I was diving down some obscure Internet rabbit hole. ..
.... but was I surprised! Perhaps it's one of those things that everybody Knew but me, but I found it pretty fascinating: a multitude of stories of men at their most vulnerable. I laughed and I cried.
For a long, long time now, humans have been having those fights with weapons. Our main striking implements are ill-suited to the purpose (it's easy to break a hand or a wrist punching someone, or to break a toe kicking someone), our jaws and skulls have gotten less thick over time, etc.
Yes. I think in retrospect I over emphasized the martial arts backstory because what I was really interested in was the human interest story I stumbled into.
There was this 14th century Italian guy named Fiore dei Liberi who wrote a book about civilian combat, armed and unarmed, for exactly the sort of scenarios you describe. I don't recall it going in to testicle-kicking, though.
In my experience, for either sex, getting hit in the genitalia or gonads can range from a minor inconvenience to a fight-ending injury. It's not something to rely on.
I study Fiore. He definitely advocates for kicking people in the nuts, especially when you've grappled their sword. Other fun bits include kicking your opponent in the side of the knee.
Yes I totally get your point. My main interest in this was the human interest stories. I stumbled into about being able to elevate your testicles at will. Or having them elevate when you really don't want them to. I just thought it was really interesting, but I'm a sucker for human interest stories.
Yes that totally makes sense. I was more interested in the human interest stories told by all the men who apparently can do this on purpose or have it just happen to them spasmodically. It was rather touching to read the stories that men tell about such a vulnerable part of their anatomy.
It suffers from the same fundamental problem: a "one weird trick" to end the fight, typically professed by people who haven't really trained in any realistic fighting art. Same thing: why do you think I'll let you kick my knee ("you" here is a general, not personally directed pronoun)? Now, the knee is more exposed than testicles are, but it's much harder (literally - it's a bone structure), and much more mobile. The hardness goes both ways: attackers' tibia / feet bones have been broken by defenders use of knees for blocking.
There are no shortcuts. If one wants to get good at fighting, one needs to spend the time learning a complex skill. It's tedious, tiring, frustrating, sometimes boring, and above all just hard work. Just like anything worth learning in life.
It was just more effective, not a definitive win. But yes, I know barely enough about fighting to be aware that every tactic has a countertactic, so there's no one weird trick.
Yeah, it's not so hard to see ways that "I've just managed to inflict an *infuriating* amount of pain on this dude I'm in a fight with" could end badly for you....
The funny thing is that the most effective strikes - the ones that knock the opponent out by rattling the brain - don't hurt at all, the lights just go out.
The only strike I can think of that reliably causes truly debilitating pain is that to the liver. The pain is deep and wide, and the body just shuts down, there's no amount of will and grit that can overcome this physiological reaction. Solar plexus is good, too, but it's protected by the abs, so your mileage will vary; the liver is behind the lower ribs that offer surprisingly little protection.
I think it's a pretty effective move in a fight between two weak people who don't really know how to fight -- e.g. young boys. And that's the context in which most of us had our last fight.
Maybe. I did not get into a lot of fights when I was young, but I got into a few and the idea of kicking my opponent in the nuts never occurred to me. As others have pointed out it is not so easy to do when you are in a brawl. It's more of a surprise attack tactic. I over emphasized the martial arts musings that got me into this because what I was really interested in was the human interest stories around this subject. It was quite fascinating.
Most of us who had fights when we were young were having fights within an assumed structure of rules. When you insult me in the locker room and I punch you, we're not going to fight to the death, nobody's going to pull a knife or gun out, I'm not going to kick you to death once you're down, etc. Part of that was that kicking in the groin, poking eyes, etc. was "fighting dirty" and would get social pushback from everyone.
This was appropriate for schoolyard fights, just as it's appropriate for combat sports fights to have rules and such. Even MMA isn't a fight to the death. OTOH, you're surely better prepared for the no-holds-barred prison yard fight if you've spent some time with a real combat sport, where the other guy is resisting and you're doing your techniques at something close to full power, like you mean it.
I studied karate for a few years, and we sparred, but even with pads we were always pulling everything. Which is surely still better than no training, but in a fight, I think you're going to instinctively pull your punches/kicks, or you're not going to be prepared for how things work wrt balance and recovery and such when you're really trying to kick the guy hard rather than trying to touch him with your foot.
"All the research on transfer shows it basically doesn’t exist. The only way anyone ever gets good at anything is by doing that specific thing."
Pretty much. The only thing I find to be mildly transferable is conditioning - jumping rope, hard rowing, kettlebell lifting do help to keep up during sparring.
Or maybe I'm delusional even about that - I'm always surprised how out-of-breath I am for the first swim of the season, the body/mind doesn't seem to care that I haven't slacked off conditioning during the colder seasons.
I don't know if you have ever seen the television series Deadwood but somewhere in it is a fight scene between two men, with their bare hands, to the death. It's very well done.
I totally agree with you that the only way to good good at anything is by doing it. as I said, I am not really that interested in getting better at fighting. I'm approaching 70 years of age and there doesn't seem to be a lot of point in it for me. But as I said, thinking about a fight to the death is an interesting way to explore a lot of emotions that come up. There was a famous Japanese samurai Warrior who wrote a book in which he laid down his method and strategy. It's called "the book of five rings" and you probably have heard of it already. Near the beginning of the book he stated that a warrior when faced with a choice between life and death must choose death. Rationally that makes perfect sense but it took me a while to get there. If you are concerned with your survival, it will do nothing but cloud your mind and slow you down,
A lot of people in the ESA Racket thread had pretty low opinions of AI art. My experience in the subject is most people expect the AI to do everything for them and are either ignorant of the means to improve the art or not motivated enough to do so. There are actually a multitude of methods to create high quality AI art. I'm going to talk about Stable Diffusion because a) that is what I use, and b) the fact it can be run locally on a home PC has led to development of many tools to improve it. It's entirely possible other AI like DALL-E doesn't have nearly as much user customization.
Skip to the last paragraph if you don't care about any of the technical bits.
1. The Prompt. The text prompt used to generate the image has a profound impact on results. Sometimes this is really stupid. 'Arms crossed' produces horrible disfigured mutants, but 'crossed arms' generates a person in the expected pose correctly 90% of the time. People are actually being hired as prompt consultants because they know about stuff like this. Generally, think of prompting as a struggle between allowing the AI to be creative and exhaustively specifying every little detail. See Scott's post about stained glass for more detail on this, with example images.
2. Workflow Settings. There are different checkpoints that can be used, which are models trained on several thousand images. Think of this as an overall style choice for the image. Some checkpoints create flat 2D images like cartoons, some create photorealistic images, and some create horrifying uncanny valley images where things look doll-like and plasticky. There are different samplers, which affect how quickly and cleanly latent noise is converted into an image. You can also choose how many sampling steps to take. There are image resolution settings. Generally, these are square, 512x512 pixels for SD 1.5 or 1024x1024 for SDXL. You can stretch this to 512x768 or vice versa, but going too far beyond the base resolution or too far away from a square results in tiling. Think of tiling as copy/pasting bits from the square to fill out the rest of the image. This is bad and reduces the image quality.
3. Upscaling. What if you don't want a tiny 1K image, or a square resolution? This is where upscaling comes in. There are different mathematical samplers to carry out upscaling, which mainly balance speed and image quality. The most important part of upscaling is the denoising strength. This measures how much the image will be changed by upscaling. Low values might not change the image enough, so it ends up looking blocky and pixelated. High values might change the image so much it no longer resembles what you were trying to make in the first place. Upscaling can also smooth out the flaws in an image, correcting a 4 finger hand to a 5 finger hand. Then again, too much denoising and you get 8 fingers instead of 4. Like a lot of processes in AI art, there is a balance to maintain here.
4. LoRA. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a tool to refine specific parts of a LLM. Think of these as specific trainers for a certain part of the image. Maybe you really don't like the way trees look, or want to create a specific species of tree that the LLM doesn't understand. You can use a Larix laricina LoRA, and now all of your trees look like larches. LoRAs are trained on a much smaller set of images than the LLM checkpoints, so you have to be careful. This might be 40 images vs 2,000. If some of those 40 images happen to have an orange sky for whatever reason, now you get stuck with an orange sky if you want nice larch trees. This has more to do with the ability of the person curating the image training set for the LoRA than any technical limitations.
5. Inpainting. This is a post-production method to improve images. The user paints a mask over the part of the image they want to change and adds positive/negative prompts. Going with #4 again for a bit, maybe I don't like the orange sky. So I mask the sky, add blue sky as a positive prompt, and orange sky as a negative prompt. The settings from #2 also apply here, as well as denoising strength. Inpainting is also an iterative process. If you want to change a hand from 10 fingers to 5, the AI might not be able to change that much without making the hand look separate from the rest of the image. But if you get a good 7 finger hand, you can use that image as the new base and get to 5 fingers cleanly.
6. Manual Editing. Photoshop is your biggest friend here. Sometimes the AI just refuses to do what you want. This is especially true for removing something from an image. I find it's often much easier to erase a bad bit and recreate it from scratch rather than try to transform it. Keep in mind that AI can also create images using another image as input, rather than text. Even something like a crude 60 second sketch in MS Paint can often produce better results than trying to brute force the LLM to understand what your prompts mean.
7. Special Tools. There are a lot of extensions for Stable Diffusion that flesh out parts of the creation process. OpenPose lets the user manipulate a 2D stick figure, and translate this into different poses for people in your images. There are some issues with perspective and body proportions, but this is still often more useful than trying to describe a pose in words. Regional prompting is a huge advance for images with multiple subjects. Say you want a picture with a blue pickup on the left and a red racecar on the right. Before, you might end up with two blue racecars and a red road, or two racing pickups with red and blue stripes. With the extension, prompts can divide the image into columns and rows, cleanly separating the prompts for different subjects.
There are a lot of different tools to make high quality AI art. I think a lot of people don't understand how to properly use these tools or that such tools even exist. The biggest problem is expecting the AI to do all of the work for you. A lot of bad images I see people post could have been dramatically better if they had bothered to do minimal inpainting or photoshopping. If you think AI art is crap because it looks plastic or fake, you're looking at output from a poorly designed model. Also, AI image generators are weird and alien. They can make really unique and creative art, while simultaneously failing to do things a child would find basic.
I use midjourney extensively and think it’s amazing. I agree with the other commenter that it’s basically a problem with the operator, not the machine. Most people making ai art images simply don’t have any artistic knowledge. And so instead of getting a beautifully composed image, you get that cartoony marvel film look.
I wanted to ask you - I have been meaning to investigate SD but I don’t know where to begin. I’m also less than impressed with the images shown off, compared to what I’ve been able to get with Midjourney. The one thing that does seem compelling to me, though, is the idea of creating a model based on a corpus of a particular artist’s works. For example, reading every drawing by Dürer and then using that model to create drawings of other items. Is this something that SD can easily do?
You certainly can do it, I don't think model training is hard per se. It does require a lot of time. And also a lot of money, for the dedicated GPUs and compute power. I run Stable Diffusion 1.5 on a $2000 PC, which is fairly fast for image generation. I wouldn't be able to train my own model though. Newer Stable Diffusion models will require even more compute than SD 1.5, which is two years old now.
What is ESA? Electronic Security Association? (European Space Agency?)
But I have three objections to AI art...
1. My first objection to AI art is most people don't really understand what makes a compelling image. They might get something "more realistic" than if they drew, painted, or photographed it themselves — but without any aesthetic training on the part of the operator, most of what comes out from AI is pretty schlocky. Of course, I have some pretty cool AI "photographs" but AI doesn't seem to have solved the problem of my hands with the proper number of fingers and joints. ;-)
2 My second objection, is that the training material for AI is mostly copyrighted material. So AI is making money off the work of human artists and photographers without compensating them.
3. My third objection to AI art, is that people are using it to make fakes of their favorite artists' works — and they're contaminating our knowledge base of art. For instance, people are contributing AI-generated Rothko's to the Rothko Facebook appreciation group that I belong to — many are without attribution to their AI origins. The Facebook group "Abandoned Beauties" (decaying buildings) has been heavily contaminated with AI "photographs" of imaginary buildings. Some say, "Oh, but they're pretty!" I'm not looking for imaginary pretty. I'm looking for decaying architecture that I can visit and photograph. And recently I was going to post some Nicolai Astrup paintings on Reddit's /r/museum group and I discovered that two of them had been generated by AI.
Regarding (1). AI doesn't even know about the "rule of thirds," a principle of composition: Imagine dividing image into 9 parts using two horizontal and 2 vertical lines. Main subject should be at the intersection of one horizontal and one vertical line. Obviously not all compelling images comply with that design rule, but many do. And AI's reason for not doing it isn't that it's beyond such simple principles, but that it doesn't fucking know them. An even worse thing AI does is make symmetrical images -- not all the time, but way too often. Half of the space you have to thrill the viewer is thrown away, because it's a backwards duplicate of the other half.
The vast majority of famous paintings don't follow the rule of thirds, and I don't think it should be treated as more than one of many possible tools in your toolbox.
Yeah, I agree. In fact I said something like that. Point isn't that test-to-image AI doesn't follow the rules of thirds slavishly, it's that it seems never to have heard of it. In general, you get the feeling that overall composition is not a dimension it takes into consideration.
Maybe I'm less particular, but I find a lot of the AI images are quite stunning. Have you seen the Midjourney showcase? https://www.midjourney.com/showcase
I have more trouble getting it to draw images that don't have nonsensical details.
First of all, I want to make clear that I'm not an art snob. I've been to art museums and galleries maybe 3 times in my whole life. I don't know a thing about which artists are currently much admired. As for the rule of 3rds, I just learned it myself in the course of learning photoshop (but after I learned it, I then looked at a bunch of images I liked, and could see that many followed it, and I saw how placing important parts of the image acc/ to the rule tended to make details pop.). So I really do not walk around with a head full of shoulds when it comes to art. But I seem to be pretty visual -- I'm very picky about fabric and paint colors, and I've spent a lot of time online looking at images of photos and paintings, often with great pleasure. So when I say I'm not thrilled by AI images in general, I really am telling you my natural, innocent reaction to them, not spouting off a bunch of shit I've learned about how art is supposed to look.
OK, so I looked at the Midjourney showcase and those pictures really do not give me the kind of pleasure I get from looking online at 19th century Japanese prints, Hockney paintings, Beardsley, to name some of my favorites. The images are stunning in the sense that it's stunning that a machine could make them, but they are not stunningly attractive to me. Notice how many of them are symmetrical, for instance. The problem with that isn't that it Breaks a Rule, it's that the artist has thrown away its main opportunity to enrich the image. After you've seen the left side, you're done, because the right side is just a mirror image. If there were some asymmetry there would be a sort of dialog between the 2 sides.
I actually liked Dall-e 2 much better than Dall-e3. Even though the images were crappy and blotchy, there were crazy unexpected details that enriched them. I have a whole collection of favorite sublimely grotesque images from Dall-e2!
Emotional Support Animal, the article from a few days ago. Scott used an AI picture of a woman hugging a lizard as the cover.
(1) is a valid criticism of art as a whole. A lot of human artists don't know what makes compelling art, so they produce junk instead. This is especially funny in conjunction with (2). If AI is ripping off human artwork but also it's crap, what does that say? For (3), I definitely understand your view. I think this is mostly an issue of people not having proper filters to exclude AI works from certain domains.
Hypothetically — if I search for "woman hugging a monitor lizard" on Google Images, I'll get a bunch of results. Which are real, though? I may not care if they're real and post one of them on the cover of my annual Monitor Lizard Preservation Society Report. Suddenly that image gets more weight in search engines. Well, it's just a pic of woman hugging monitor lizard, you might say. But someone from the Monitor Lizard Extermination Society sees that the lizard has the wrong number of claws. The MLES can now cast doubt on the MLPS report.
But the real problem is that all this crap will be sucked up into the next generation of AI training sets. Phony images plus all the hallucinatory bullshit data that is being incorporated into AI-generated reports and studies will contaminate our knowledge base. How long before pics of the monitor lizards with the wrong number of claws get included in a Wikipedia article that references monitor lizards? I predict, that in the next few years, we'll discover that a significant number of articles in Wikipedia reference the hallucinatory data and images generated by AI. Heck, I bet there are dodgy articles written by AI up on Wikipedia right now.
It's just a hobby. A lot of the tools I used are made by other hobbyists and released free and open source. I don't know if the licenses even allow profiting off them.
My objection to AI art isn't that it looks plastic and fake. I don't think the photorealistic images from Dall-e3 look fake or plastic. (I never use other styles). And it also isn't that it sometimes makes deformed appendages and wall-eyed faces and various other flaws. Those aren't hard to fix, and, as you say, there are convenient options for doing that. What I object to is the feeling I get when I look at the images that the pool of images and ideas Dall-e3 draws on is small, limited and commercial.
I actually preferred Dall-e2, because even though most images looked sort of crappy, interesting things seemed to go on between my verbal prompt and the AI -- some stuff that was under poor algorithmic control. So I got images that were flawed and wacko in ways that were often ridiculous, but also richer with unexpected associations. I have a whole collection of crazy but delightful Dall-e2 images, and for some I also have the much tamer and more conventional Dall-e3 images for the same prompt. I can give you links if you like, but people don't usually look at Imgur links I put here so I'm going to hold off unless you actually want to see them.
Another example of Dall-e3's icky commercial quality is that all the people are hot. The women have jugs and big round booties in tight jeans. The men have big muscles. Everyone has conventionally attractive features and clean fluffy shiny-as-hell hair. I once asked for an image of a woman leaned back in her chair, with her feet up on the table. Included a sketch in which she was not a bit sexy, wearing plain ordinary clothes, just a relaxed slob kind of image. What I got back was a woman sitting in a chair with one leg up on table and one still on chair seat, head tilted provocatively, and 10 long red fingernails. Asked for images of middle-aged men in bathing suits. All the images Dall-e3 gave me had enormous muscles with veins like hoses under the skin & 6 packs. Except for gray hair, they looked exactly like 20 year old weight lifters. I tried at least 20 times to get a typical man in his 50's, adding to the prompt things like "out of shape," "no muscle definition" "muffin top over swimsuit elastic," and it made no difference whatever.
Midjourney I have used much less, but I have looked at a lot of the images made with it, and they all look like each other -- like sci-fi and fantasy images I've seen elsewhere. And in fact seen everywhere. There's no quirkiness, no odd touches that give you a random shiver and give you the feeling you're looking at something that's alienly alien or magically magical.
I think a lot of your issues boil down to the lack of model diversity. This is a big reason I'm a fan of Stable Diffusion, you can find a lot of models people trained on their own image sets.
The average AI person is definitely a 20 something professional model. Most AI checkpoints physically can't make ugly or old or fat people. Some can though! Which is kind of odd to be excited about but still.
Has anyone trained their AI on fine art, photorealistic paintings, or some of the really gifted caricaturists or cartoonists? Once read an article about some cartoonist from I think the 50's, how inventive he was at finding ways to present things. There was a list from him of a dozen ways to show something or other -- something like a setting then vs. now, or a character's hopes for an event vs. the reality. I was blown away by his inventiveness. So yeah, Stable Diffusion used on a set of really good, inventive stuff.
It would be more aesthetically pleasing in an alphabetical way if those meetups could be listed as Athens, Brooklyn, Chicago, ..., Grass Valley, Houston. Then you should add meetups in Detroit, Edinburgh, and Fredricksburg to fill the gap.
Could someone kindly steel man, or provide the strongest good faith argument for supporting the actions of Hamas on Oct 7?
For context, in my media consumption I live in the Sam Harris & co information echo chamber where he and his guests are very firmly condemning everything that happened on the Hamas/Gazan/Palestinian side on Oct 7 and beyond. But then I will regularly bump into other Internet bubbles, and claims like Judith Butler's, where the actions of Oct 7 are depicted as a desperate act of rebellion, as a righteous and justified reaction to oppressive settler colonialism.
Because of my own information diet, I always hear this latter position immediately dismissed as supporting islamism/leftism/terrorism/somethingelseism from a bunch of out of touch far left loonies, but I'd actually love to hear strong good faith arguments in favor of it, if they exist, to perhaps see a different perspective on this. E.g. I've lightly read about the horrific conditions of everyday life in Gaza before the events of Oct 7 that led to the armed insurrection. However I've also heard the other side describe them as totally fine and in fact regularly improving and in no way justifying anything that happened in the last six months. At this point I have no idea what's actually going on, there's so much information warfare happening about the basic facts that it feels like you can't get to the ground truth without "picking a side" in this tug of war.
I hadn't heard of Judith Butler's statements about October 7. I've generally found them (I think Butler uses they/them pronouns these days, though some people still use she/her pronouns) to be quite reasonable about a lot of things lately (and less extreme than they were in the 1990s) so I was a bit surprised.
It looks like Butler said the actions of October 7 were a desperate act of rebellion, but didn't seem to say the actions were "righteous and justified". In fact, the specific quote is:
“The Hamas attack in October came from the armed faction of a political party that administers Gaza and I remain willing to describe this attack as a form of armed resistance to colonization and the ongoing siege and dispossession. This is not to glorify their atrocities. And this in no way means that I support Hamas’s actions or that I consider their actions to be justified. Not all forms of ‘resistance’ are justified, and some, like these, truly call for condemnation. The sexual violence committed by Hamas and documented by the UN report is serious and inexcusable.”
This seems to be a clarification they made a few days after their initial statement, so perhaps their initial statement did go overboard, in a way that probably couldn't be properly supported.
In any case, as another commenter said, if one ever can justify invasion, then whatever that justification is might just as well be applied to the Hamas attack as to an Israeli attack on Rafah. (I doubt it could be applied to the Russian attack on Ukraine. So far, Ukrainian resistance to the Russian attack hasn't seemed to lead to any substantial offensive attacks by Ukraine on Russian soil, so the justification of the Ukrainian side of the war wouldn't need a justification for invasion.)
Somehow I get the impression that her objection is largely rooted in the sexual violence, and if that didn't happen, she'd have stuck with the first sentence you quoted. There's a reading where "atrocities" don't include the killing, or at least, the killing of men.
There is a form of "Motte and Bailey" going on with likes of Butler where they insist on describing the actions of Hamas in morally-charged words ("Resistance", "Liberation", ...) but also insist that this doesn't mean condoning. Resistance has been used to describe - most famously - the French guerilla in Vichy France and Nazi-occupied Paris, as well as the human faction in man-vs-machine war of extermination in fiction.
If someone wants to say "What Hamas is doing **is** fighting Israel, it's not particularly good way of fighting Israel and I don't agree but it's one way of fighting Israel" I can find no reason why they wouldn't say exactly this. English has borrowed from countless languages and there are no shortages of synonyms for the overly romanticized "Resistance": "Struggle", "War", "Battle", "Hostility", "Insurgency", "Militants", "Guerillas", "Asymmetric Warfare".
Butler, however, has specialized in saying nonsense. I don't believe she is actually acting in good faith, she is treating this in the standard social-science-academia way: just one more opportunity to say nothing in massive metric tons of words and get praise for it.
That's typically my stance as well on topics I don't know anything about, but you often then hear a criticism that goes as follows: "It's got to be nice to not have to choose a side, goes to show your privilege, while so many are suffering. Silence equals violence. You're either with us, or you're complicit" or perhaps a more charitable phrasing of the same concept.
My (internal) retort is that this person has suddenly chosen to really care about moral issue #100, while arbitrarily forgetting, or de prioritizing, or ignoring the remaining 99 ones that are equally as awful or worse, and they're suddenly expecting others to drop everything they're doing and focus on that one as well. It's almost as if moral issues come in waves like fashion.
To me, to say that I don't have a stance on hot button moral issue #100 is akin to the atheist stance of "you choose not to believe in 1000s of gods, I just happened to go one god further". Which is to say that you should feel free to make your identity around that issue, I have zero problem with that, go pluralism, but that doesn't mean that I have to be converted into your cause through shaming.
Or is this a very uncharitable bad faith read of those stances?
> "It's got to be nice to not have to choose a side, goes to show your privilege, while so many are suffering. Silence equals violence. You're either with us, or you're complicit"
The part that gets to me is when these people are themselves ignoring various injustices, or picking sides based on superficial specious reasoning, or redefining the injustices as not actually a problem.
No, I think you are entirely correct. There's a certain amount of entitlement that comes with so much modern activism, an attempt to not persuade but bully people into cooperating. Usually morally and socially, but sometimes physically too. We'd be better off to be less cooperative with that.
Cheering on October 7th is structurally equivalent to supporting the war of Israel on Gaza, so if there is someone in your information diet or echo chamber who supports the war on Gaza, it's very easy to mechanically transform their argument into support for October 7th.
The general form of the argument goes something like this:
(1) Murder is bad, Murder is the most horrific thing in the Universe [Unsaid: when it happens to $ingroup]
(2) However, not all Murder is created equal, sometimes Murder is justified
(3) Since $outgroup won't stop murdering $ingroup, and since only $ingroup has $reason for what it does and only retaliates when attacked, never attacks, then
(4) Murder of $outgroup is fully justified, and $outgroup's leaders are entirely to blame for anything that can't be justified
The structure of the arguments for October 7th and the arguments for the war on Gaza has this exact same general structure, they both fall down out of it as specific instantiations by choosing particular values for $ingroup and $outgroup and $reason.
The supporter of Israel's war on Gaza chooses Israelis (or, for maximum sympathy points, "Jews") as $ingroup, Palestinians (or, for maximum racism points, "Arabs") for $outgroup, and the $reason being that Israel is only defending itself and never ever killing Arabs in vain.
The supporter of Hamas massacres on October 7th chooses reverse polarities for $ingroup and $outgroup, and the $reason being that Palestine is only liberating itself from Colonization and never ever killing Jews/Israelis in vain.
The common point in the general structure, the fundamental rhetorical trick, is that it conditions a moral question on a historical/political question. The position derisively known as "Both Side-ism" is trying to do the opposite, it's usually trying to start the discourse by agreeing on the common hinge point that is "Murder of innocents is bad". But the form of the argument above is trying to do exactly the opposite of this, it invents a $label for those innocents whose political and historical beliefs the $ingroup doesn't like, and then says that the $label implies that those innocents aren't innocents. For the Pro-October-7th-Massacare side, that $label is "Zionist", "Colonizer", or "Settler". For Pro-Gaza-Genocide, that $label is usually "Terrorist", "Antisemite", or "Hamas". This $label is applied liberally and freely, so even the 7-year-old of the distant cousin of the wife of a brother of a Hamas member is a "Terrorist" in deed and consequences if not in explicit name for the Pro-Genocide camp, and even a pre-weaning Israeli baby is a "Settler" in deed and in consequences if not in explicit name for the Pro-Massacre camp.
If you want to read a good analysis of the Pro-Hamas-yet-non-Islamist mentality, read this recent Haaretz story [1][2] about the writer's argument with someone from this camp on Reddit. Here's a relevant quote:
>>>> Here's a tough one to digest for ppl raised under intense liberal propaganda [...] Sometimes justice is not peaceful. Turning Palestine back into Palestine & putting it back under the rule of Palestinians is what is just. If people living in homes stolen from Palestinians, growing gardens out of soil watered with the blood of thousands of Palestinians, refuse to return the land to its rightful people, then their removal from the land is also just. What was it Malcolm X said; if you stab me in my back, pulling the knife out a few inches isn't progress or justice. We can begin to discuss progress & justice when the knife has been fully removed
People from this camp use "Liberal" as a derogatory label to refer to anyone who advocates fpr the principles of Sanctity of Life above anything else, and refer back to the violent history of liberation movements - the Haaretz reporter's interlocuter supports the Haitian massacres against the French colonists - as evidence that it's a fundamentally delusional view, for extra strawman points they also usually identify those "Liberals" with American Liberals and all their other positions on countless other issues (i.e. if you argue for the Sanctity of Life of Israelis and have no other views on how should American Blacks conduct themselves in American society, you will usually be grouped with the subset of American Liberals who think that Blacks should not rock the American boat culturally and take gradual non-radical non-violent steps to combat racism, even if you never mentioned America or Blacks or Racism in your defense).
As speculation, my personal assessment of the kind of people who are drawn into this position is that - for lack of better words - they believe in the "Supernaturalness of Evil". This is a clumsy negation of the "Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt. "Banality" means something boring and everyday, every undercover atheist knows the Banality of Evil, it's the force that makes the closest people to them turn into mindless piranha fish whenever they smell a whiff of someone who doesn't believe in flimsy physically-impossible stories. Every vegetarian and vegan also knows the Banality of Evil by heart. The point being that it doesn't take much to be evil, the average person lives amidst 20 or 30 or 50 moral question, but only has brain power and moral courage to settle at most only 5 or 7, the rest is simply (non-consciously) ignored, in effect adopting whatever position the majority around that person has chosen to adopt.
In contrast, the two camps I described above tends to implicitly view Evil as something special, **if** only they were born in Gaza in 2010 they wouldn't be a Hamas-supporting 14 years old today, **if** only they were born in a West Bank settlement in 2006 they wouldn't be a hilltop youth burning Palestinians alive or an army reservist filming his war crimes on TikTok for all the world to see, no, it takes special things to be Evil, it's not simply an inertial phenomena that is the default fate for anyone who doesn't want to spend his life thinking about moral questions (that is to say, the majority of people).
There are auxiliary reasons here and there. Some on the Pro-Hamas camp usually strongly thinks in "soil and blood" terms: "indigenous" vs "settler", "colonization" vs "liberation", etc.... This is distinct but often complementary to the way of thinking outlined above. Others are Islamists, who think primarily in Islamic terms: "Shehada" (martyrdom), Ummah (Nation), Muslims can't commit war crimes because the prophet ordered them not to 1400 years ago, all evidence of war crime is either fabrications by Zionists or a few bad apple here and there, etc....
I strongly disagree with your argument. You're missing an important distinction, which is that of *terminal* violence vs *instrumental* violence, if you will. I cannot possibly support Hamas' actions, not because they're the outgroup or not oppressed enough for my taste or anything like that, but because their actions achieved *nothing*, except the massacre of civilians. There is no plausible way in which Oct 7 advances the cause of Palestine (any military or political objective), unless the actual, terminal goal is to kill as many Jews as possible.
> but because their actions achieved nothing, except the massacre of civilians. There is no plausible way in which Oct 7 advances the cause of Palestine
I disagree. Look at world public opinion regarding Israel, and that's after sacrificing less than 40,000 Gazans, only 1/4 to 1/3 of which are Hamas. Imagine what sacrificing another 40,000 Gazans might accomplish! Forget Scott's writing, this is literally Moloch, except that the Israelis are also tossing Gazans into the fire.
I strongly suspect that if you plot public opinion re Israel/Gaza over time, against the Palestinian death toll over time, the correlation will not be large. The things that matter are, A: Israel is fighting a war against Palestine, and B: It's not surgically precise, and C: it's dragging on and everybody wants it to stop but Hamas cleary can't be expected to stop it so Boo Israel for not stioopping it.
Public opinion is not linear with body count, and "if 40,000 dead Palestinians moved the PR needle to 40% Boo Israel so 80,000 will get us to 80%!" is going to lead you astray.
The idea that world public opinion will lead to anything that the non-fanatical Palestinian population would consider a victory, will also lead you astray. And possibly Hamas, though I think they're working to a different concept of victory than you are.
It is possible that Israel can be pressured into suspending this operation before removing Hamas from Gaza, and it's possible that Hamas would consider "we killed a bunch of Jews and we're still standing!" to be a victory. That still leaves 20,000+ Palestinian civilians dead, Gaza in ruins, the blockade tighter than before, and the IDF extremely trigger-happy along the border and in the skies. Where is the victory for the people of Gaza in that?
I don't really think it's linear, but I think if the excess body count were twice as much, we'd see more pressure, and it were half as much, we'd see less. To the extent I have a mental model, it's something like "every day that deaths are over some threshold, foreign activism increases, foreign resistance to that activism weakens, and Israel's ties to its allies weaken".
I don't think the non-fanatical Palestinian (or Israeli) population is going to get any result they'd (or I'd) like. I don't think the interests of Hamas are aligned with those of the people of Gaza, or Palestinians in general. Since Hamas failed in their goal to start another pan-Arab war against Israel, my guess is that their fallback goal is to isolate Israel the way South Africa was, and North Korea is (except for China). I don't know how far they can take that, but that's what I see as their best realistic outcome. It creates an opportunity that a future campaign can exploit.
But maybe it works out somehow. Maybe Israel gets isolated, they kick Netanyahu out, the new government uses this as a justification to remove settlements and crack down on the anti-Amalekite faction, sensible foreign countries resume their connections to Israel, and life picks up in a way that's better for West Bank Palestinians and Israeli Palestinians. But like you say, the damage to Gaza and Gazans will still be there.
If actual "self-defense" is not possible—if a party can see no course of action which will put an end to oppression—then the moral decision is then between "accept your fate" and "express your rage, however ineffectually". This is probably closer to the actual emotional choice Hamas made—not some "instrumental" calculation, but an expression of pure destructive anger.
It's easy to condemn: the liberal "principle of Sanctity of Life" overrides the "liberation politics" again. That anger does not read to someone sitting at a desk far away as a valid reason to kill is the same point (3) again—"$other_group is just mindlessly massacring"!
I think it's fairly close to the truth of human nature that anger arises to defend people against injustice and abuse, and if you are prevented from expressing your anger—by other's power, or by talking yourself out of it on the basis of any principle, including "it won't accomplish anything" (because you don't have power!), the state of injustice becomes a permanent hierarchy. We look back on slave revolts with approval, seeing them as rightly resisting an unjust subjugation. Well, Hamas sees Palestine the same way, and the right way to disabuse them of that notion would have been to treat Palestine justly beforehand.
Not to say what Hamas did wasn't stupid, and probably based on a bad model of the state of things. But the justness of violence cannot merely come down to whether it accomplishes anything—some consideration must be made of the emotion and reality which lead to the violence. If a *person* lashed out murderously, we would give them a fair trial and consider the aggravating circumstances, at least when considering the sentence if not the verdict. To take any expression of anger as grounds for unbounded retaliation, on the grounds that it's pure supernatural evil, irrational murderous rage, is a reversion to justice as practiced in the Bronze Age.
Look, I'm willing to make relatively tiny concessions in that direction. But at the very least, the *target* of the ineffectual rage would need to be responsible somehow. Slaughtering civilians is collective punishment, a war crime. Israel's actions after 10/7 are also in that territory, even if we accepted their casus belli as legitimate. I for one am glad that the west finally started effectively pressuring Israel regarding the Rafah offensive.
Different example on the same topic. I'm very, very against attacking some random western cargo ship in the Suez canal to express your rage against the injustices in Gaza. Apparently, traffic in the Suez canal is down by almost half over the last 6 months. The security situation down there has really deteriorated, and this hurts everyone.
Similar phenomenon on a different issue: I'm against climate protestors gluing themselves to highways. This can be justified in the exact same way! Impotent rage, the world is ending, there's nothing we can do directly, so let's just do some random damage *somewhere*. As a sibling comment brought up, Moloch rears its ugly head; if we tolerate this, why wouldn't every single social movement start claiming that their particular issue is an existential one, and thus norms about where and how to protest can't possibly apply to them?
Yeah, I mean, I'm with you re ineffectual rage. Not saying it's good or just; it's a reversion to a pre-justice world where death and unfairness are the norm. Bad things still have to bad.
Roughly what keeps anger in check is legitimate institutions, and leaders listening to people, and everyone treating each other with grace such that this is the norm (in sentencing, anyway) Roughly what makes one's anger *work* is to narrowly target it at the source of the problem, and not giving oneself a greenlight to do harm just to teach others or get attention, and not asking more of others than you ask of yourself. All the examples you cite do indeed fail to express anger legitimately, and Hamas did too. My position is that Israel's retribution is just more of the same bronze-age justice. The "terminal violence" argument is more of the same—another way to give Israel permission to overreach.
It seems like this goes both ways. Hamas murders a bunch of Israelis as an expression of rage, then Israel murders a bunch of Gazans as an expression of rage. It's hard to see why one of these is more wrong than the other.
I get why people have big concerns about Israel being too willing to kill Gazan civilians in order to kill Hamas members and protect their own soldiers. I get why people worry that Israel's actions are partly intended to convince as many Palestinians as possible to go somewhere else. But I don't get why anyone goes from there to supporting Hamas, rather than just saying "yes, Hamas is terrible but your response is too brutal to be justified by the threat they pose."
Well, this is exactly what I mean by point (3): only $group has an actual reason to kill, the $other_group is just mindlessly massacring. Therefore the murder that $group does is morally justified or at least entirely blamable on $other_group, while the murder that $other_group does is indefensible.
Why would the instrumentality of violence or the lack thereof matter? If someone were killed, would it change your view of the killer if you knew that he killed for pleasure rather than for the money in the victim's pockets?
It would certainly change my view if they killed in self-defense rather than for pleasure. I don't mean that as a metaphor of any kind, just a simple example that contradicts your claim.
Sure thing, Self Defense is one of the very few $Reason for which Murder is actually justifiable. But Self Defense also has conditions that have to apply before courts can rule that it happened, one of the condition is a credible case of imminent destruction/death by the party claiming self defense.
Assuming Israel hadn't began its war on Gaza on October 10-13th, would Israel have been destroyed or in the process of being destroyed right now? If no, then Self Defense doesn't apply, and Self Defense is the only valid $Reason (or the only one I can think of) that actually justified murder.
> The point being that it doesn't take much to be evil, the average person lives amidst 20 or 30 or 50 moral question, but only has brain power and moral courage to settle at most only 5 or 7, the rest is simply (non-consciously) ignored, in effect adopting whatever position the majority around that person has chosen to adopt.
Ouch. That's ... something I don't want to be true, in the way I've come to recognize as meaning that it probably is true.
It's something that comes more naturally to you once you adopt radically different moralities from the people you love, like close friends and family. You say killing animals is barbaric and wrong, they say it's an extremely normal thing to do that God gave an explicit green light for ("are you more merciful than Allah, anon?").
You have but 3 choices: (1) The people you love are evil (2) The people you love are stupid (3) Some types of evil are banal and don't require any special maliciousness or stupidity, and - by the sheer statistics of most people falling into those types of evil when they're popular social beliefs - the people you love are among the fallen.
This is an alien way of thinking to people on both camps I described above, where "Most Gazans support Hamas" or "Most Israelis serve in the IDF and support the Gaza war" are gotchas that - they think - should end the discussion to their favor. To someone who has accepted long ago that Most People Are Evil, those 2 observations are not ground-shaking surprises, just two more slaps to the face. To people who think that Evil Is Special, those 2 observations are hard to explain by anything except "$outgroup is supernaturally evil and must be exterminated".
If Vegetarians thought like those 2 camps, the maximum-security prisons and execution chambers would fill with people who killed their parents, siblings, and husbands and wives for the crime of repeated mass murder of innocent beings. But controversial and persecuted ideologies like Vegetarianism and Atheism teaches you that "Fiat justitia ruat caelum"[1] is perhaps good if you want a sick thing to say in Latin and feel massively cool, not much else. If Justitia wants to destroy the world, then Lady Justitia is kindly requested to take a seat and shut up, no disrespect intended, I personally like spicy crazy ladies too.
> It's something that comes more naturally to you once you adopt radically different moralities from the people you love, like close friends and family.
I'm there, but from a different direction, and this will probably explain a lot about me, to you. I didn't choose to have a radically different morality, it was thrust upon me. And now I'm cut off, and can't go back, and would be unwilling to go back, but it **wasn't an active choice of mine** . It would almost certainly have been better for me if I had taken more of a stand first, but the topic was way down on that list of 50 topics, and there seemed like more important battles to fight. But at least I'd taken the position much earlier, in discussions with friends in forums like this, so it wasn't as much of a shock to my system.
> "Fiat justitia ruat caelum"
That's one of my PTSD's favorite aphorisms. It's also a big fan of this lady:
One beautiful comment that feels undeserved because all too often I have let myself get angry, and I posted toxoplasma things about this.
Thanks Turtle, starting a blog feels too much of a hassle and a new thing that requires being eased into, and when (inevitably) it's read by the barely 5 people or so I will feel like a clown and/or that I'm wasting my breath. Posting on ACX is lesser friction and more people reading, abandoning an account also feels easier, abandoning a blog feels like a huge deal. The plan is to abandon that account when the war ends, which is not that easy to do to an entire blog, I will just feel guilty about people who wanted to read more.
> One beautiful comment that feels undeserved because all too often I have let myself get angry, and I posted toxoplasma things about this.
I've noticed you going back and forth, and I've assumed that it's because of (understandable) anger, and it's nice to see periodic confirmations from you that this is what's going on. Personally, I don't mind too much, although it does make it difficult to know how to interact with you at those times. (I'm familiar with overwhelming rage, and have myself been guilty of occasionally posting things that would have gotten me banned if anyone had read it in the correct tone and wanted to report it.)
But there's at least one good commenter here who thinks you're a troll because of the differing opinions you express. I don't have a solution to offer, but I thought I should call that to your attention.
>One beautiful comment that feels undeserved because all too often I have let myself get angry, and I posted toxoplasma things about this.
Loath to join a cuddle-pile, but the fact that you managed to get so angry about the subject makes your even-handedness all the more commendable. It's easy to be calm when you have no horse in the race.
Starting a blog is probably not worth your time, but I think a single, easy to link, post/essay summing up your views and evolution on this subject would be a great service to people. As someone who has people all over the spectrum on this conflict, it would be great to have something to point to that's more contained than "a series of scattered comments in the open thread of a blog about psychiatry made by a bunch of different but easily linked accounts".
There’s so much toxicity about this particular conflict on both sides that it’s hard not to feel angry and frustrated sometimes. Just continue telling your truth and know that there’s people who appreciate you for it
The dollar signs actually date back to Perl. They might be earlier, I suspect their earliest uses were in mid to late 1970s in shell languages that are the ancestor of Bash, where they were likely just crutches to ease parsing (parsing becomes massively easier if all variables start with the exact same letter).
Perl had a principled reason for why you should prefix variables with '$': Grammatical agreement. The designer of Perl is a natural language linguist, he was inspired by how human languages put prefixes and suffixes to words in order to indicate additional context info (for example, in Hebrew as well as Arabic, verbs, adjectives, and plural nouns are modified by gender and number. "Play" is different when it's a boy playing, vs. a girl playing, vs. a group of boys playing, vs. a group of girls playing. Arabic even distinguishes **Pairs** as separate from both singular and plural senses).
So in Perl, you say $X if you want to mention X in a "Scalar context", think of $ as the "S" in Scalar. You say @X if you want to mention X in a "Array context", think of @ as the "A" in Array. You say %X if you want to mention X a "Hash context", think of the 2 circles in the % percent as a KV pair in a Hash. There is also the & sigil to denote a "Closure context" but I'm not very familiar with its usage in Perl 5. Perl's successor, Perl 6 or Raku, takes those notions and extend them extremely uniformly to very far places.
From Perl, the $ sign propagated into TCL and PHP. In TCL they once again served an extremely important purpose: Dereference. Everything in TCL is a string, if you write the bare word Cat, that's the string "Cat" to a TCL parser, it's okay that you didn't write quotes, it got you. So variables can't just be Foo, that would be the literal string Foo. Variables has to be $Foo, the $ is "Dereferencing" the content of the variable. There is rhyme and reason behind this, TCL is an extraordinarily beautiful language if you take the time to understand it.
PHP, however, is an unmitigated and dumb disaster. I can find no good reason why its designer chose to use what Perl and TCL has extremely valid reasons to use. It's just one dumpster fire of a language overall.
So in other words... Larry Wall copied the idea of a signifier prefix from natural languages into Perl.. and then (via $ingroup etc.) you copied the idea of a signfier prefix from Perl back into natural language..?
Hehehe, yeah.. that's a very... **accurate** depiction of how dev teams choose programming languages: they dance to badly-rhyming rap and whatever faction is most sick wins and gets to impose their programming language on the rest of the team.
No wait, what happens in reality is almost worse.
-----
For me, shitting on PHP is justified because it's a badly designed standard-less language that offers no deep ideas and nothing new to the Programming Languages Design world. It's literally just an overgrown templating language (Personal Home Page). Python and Ruby offers beautiful everything-is-an-object paradigm, Java is ugly and bland but it stumbled into the idea of an Open Source VM implementation and VM standard that made its VM a hotbed of innovation and gave us Groovy and Scala and Kotlin. TCL and Perl both has utter gems hidden deep inside their worldviews and ways of thinking. What is PHP doing? Why it exists other than "Perl is too hard"? I'm prepared to be wrong on this but I haven't seen till now someone who argues convincingly that PHP is an important addition to the Programming Languages hall.
The only defenses I have heard is "Elegance is not that important, PHP brought more billions [via FB and WordPress] into the global economy than possibly any single programming language with the exception of C [Linux and Windows] and C++ [Games and High-Frequency Trading]", which is convincing enough for people who don't enjoy Programming Languages and their design and implementation, unfortunately that's not me, I hate it when the lang I'm using is not teaching me something new about programming and programming languages.
PHP as a language is worthless. The success of PHP is due to its design as an Apache mod and thus the triviality of setting it up and running scri.in the age of CGI, that was revolutionary.
I also have no experience in Perl or TCL. It just caught me as very clear, even in English, the specific meaning of things like $ingroup (which coincidentally almost looks like Singroup, except that nothing is ever a coincidence) which clearly means the same thing everywhere it is used.
I remember my BASIC programming, where a variable that ends with $ is a string, but you still needed quotes to assign a string. If you didn't, you were assigning a number value to a string variable, which produced a type mismatch error, since an undefined variable defaulted to 0 ( or a zero-length string).
Interesting summary. I think the thing the intellectual debate often misses is the emotional root that perpetuates cycles of violence. The outgroup/ingroup dynamics are mutually reinforced by deaths on each side. The lines are drawn through violence, which is why the conflict becomes life-or-death for the individuals on each side.
Gaza had been in a perpetual state of low-level humanitarian crisis for many years, owing to the Israeli blockade (Consider the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, where a humanitarian aid ship was sunk by Israel).
Ineffectual rocket attacks were not changing this and Israel under Netanyahu has demonstrated zero willingness to engage in any sort of good faith peace negotiations in the absence of external pressure. So Hamas believed a dramatic military response was required to shake up Israeli politics and force it to negotiate and lift said blockade.
It misread things badly and instead gave the Israeli right an excuse for ethnic cleansing.
I have to wonder what they thought Israel would do about their attack. I cannot imagine any invaded country's response would be any different under similar circumstances.
Likud's justification for its harsh policies towards Palestinians, dating back to the West Bank wall, was that they could be implemented with no physical danger to the Israeli people and that Palestinian opinion was fundamentally irrelevant.
And indeed, the attack's reverberations has led to a lot of people very angry at Netanyahu, note Scott's surprise that he'd survive the year.
October 7th did manage to falsify that; the problem was that instead of a resurgence of some kind of moderate Zionism and a popular repudiation of Likud, it led to Israeli society (which pre-war had been very divided around constitutional issues) uniting around this war and agreeing to deal with Netanyahu later.
I'm assuming you're asking for MORAL justifications, not strategic ones?
Background: I think life in Gaza WAS pretty bad even before the ongoing unpleasantness, and those who say it wasn't conflate it with the West Bank (where things are better) or worse, with "Arab citizens of Israel" (who are basically fine). Sure, some of that could be blamed on Hamas itself instead of Israel, but with Israel explicitly supporting Hamas against its political rivals for control over Gaza (I don't think this is even disputed), blaming Israel for their poor conditions is reasonable, as is characterizing it as oppressing them pretty brutally.
If you accept this premise, what more do you want? Justifications for the rape and pillage? That kind of thing happens in every war, and I know of no one who has been able to effectively stop his men doing that kind of thing, so I consider "Gaza waging war against Israel without anything like that occurring" a fabricated option.
Also, Hamas IS an Islamist organization, but that's not actually all that relevant to their stance against Israel.
>Israel explicitly supporting Hamas against its political rivals for control over Gaza
Accepting for the sake of argument that this is an accurate description of the situation, then surely everyone saying this should be delighted that Israel is finally making up for past mistakes by clearing out Hamas. After all, if it's bad for Israel to support Hamas in the past, then it's bad for Hamas to stay in power today -- can't have it both ways.
>If you accept this premise, what more do you want? Justifications for the rape and pillage? That kind of thing happens in every war
I don't recall mass rape by American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. For that matter, the Israelis have managed to refrain from mass rape in any of the wars they've been involved in, to the extent that some leftists were elevating that as yet another example of Israeli racism.
You're right that those who criticize Israel for supporting Hamas can't consistently say it's good for Hamas to remain in power. The difference is a question of how many Palestinians one is willing to kill to achieve the goal of clearing them out: I estimate Israel's threshold to be at least two orders of magnitude higher than that of those now criticizing it.
There WAS rape and pillage in Iraq. If you don't recall it, that wouldn't be surprising. If you DO, but argue that it isn't MASS rape, that discussion doesn't interest me.
It should interest you, because if you get hundreds of thousands of young men in one place some of them will do bad things. That applies to every army that has ever existed in history. If you want to say that _all_ of those armies are bad if even one single soldier did something bad, that's fine, but it's also not clear where that takes us given that armies and wars aren't going away.
> "if you get hundreds of thousands of young men in one place some of them will do bad things. That applies to every army that has ever existed in history."
>"That kind of thing happens in every war, and I know of no one who has been able to effectively stop his men doing that kind of thing"
You're missing my point. I'm criticizing the point of view which assigns to all armies the exact same moral equivalence because you can always find at least one person in any army that does something bad.
If we're going to go down this road, then we shouldn't even be arguing about who's morally in the right because everyone is morally the same. And in _that_ case, there's no grounds to complain about anything Israel does in Gaza (or vice versa), so we can all pack up and talk about sports or something instead and let them thrash it out.
I think a lot of it relies on the "spider web" theory. This is something that is almost certainly wrong in every respect, is easily falsified in many of its main particulars, but that many Palestinians and their allies believe.
The theory is that if Israelis' lives are made sufficiently unpleasant by "resistance" attacks directed at random civilians, they will pack up *en masse* and leave for Europe or the US. In support of this, activists cite the actions of the FLN in Algeria, which succeeded in getting the French (including the *pieds-noirs* who had been born there, often to families who had been there for several generations) to leave. The name comes from the idea that the Israeli presence in the Land is fragile and can be easily swept away like a spider's web.
Of course, Israelis are not the same as pieds-noirs (even though some of them are the same people!). As well as important differences in their emotional attitude to where they live, the Palestinian and activist view of Israeli demographics is very different from reality.
They hugely underestimate the Jewish population of Israel- the average Palestinian estimates that there are fewer than a million Israeli Jews- which makes it seem more similar to situations like Algeria or Rhodesia where an oppressive minority ruled over the native population until they were induced to leave by violence. They also overestimate the percentage of Israelis who were born elsewhere and/or have dual citizenship- you often hear the claim that most Israelis are dual nationals, when in fact the number is IIRC under 10%, and many of those don't live in Israel!
If the demographic (and other) assumptions that the spider web theory is based on were true, then Hamas' actions would fit more into the typical framework of anti-colonial violence that activists are trying to shoehorn it into.
Yes. I kind of went over this in the last open thread. The Algerian independence movement was very influential on the formation of anti-Israel groups like the PLO or Hamas. Their motto was "a suitcase or a coffin." The idea was that if they terrorized and bloodied the French settlers enough, they would pack up and head home for France. And it was a very effective strategy. But there is no France or any other parent nation for the Israelis. Israel is their home, and committing atrocities against Israel won't make them pack up and leave. It just causes Israel to retaliate and kill more Palestinians.
Yeah, making the conflict into a fight to the death just means the stronger side is sooner or later going to ignore domestic/international public opinion and see to it that it's the other side that does the dying.
So this is my current hobby horse that is just driving me up a wall and i have posted about a couple places: How crazy medieval studies and academia has gotten on race.
So I have encountered the odd mention on this in the media or reading abstracts/books (discussions of say the importance of the “black experience” in medieval England or whatever). Yet, mostly I haven’t noticed it too much, as I am not a professional academic and often read books from a decade or more ago.
But recently I attended an hour-long talk+Q&A a medieval studies professor was giving about his book. Great talk overall…but about ~60% of the way through his talk, he just sort of slips in 5 minutes of CRT/”woke” nonsense to the effect that:
"there is this misconception that (minorities) wouldn't do well in medieval Europe. Medieval people were surely a lot less racist. It was not like today where racism is everywhere and a lot of whites think blacks are dumber/less capable than whites".
Not a direct quote but close.
Ok…that is weird and kind of shocking, why would he say that nonsense? He sort of goes on to defend what he clearly thinks is a controversial take by pointing out:
a) Merchants were used to people from many different places
b) Diplomats from foreign lands were well often well received (when not say conned or detained).
c) Parts of Europe just saw foreigners and people of distant locations as slaves not as racially beneath them (How is this an argument against it being racist?)?
He went on to minimize and downplay the slavery and says it was nothing like later American slavery (without really supporting/defending that claim). Surely it was different, just as all things that are different are different in their particulars. But it is not clear to me why medieval slavery gets a moral pass (which is clearly what he was doing).
He then goes so far as to also say the Middle Easterners also weren't racist and had good feelings towards Africans (not my general understanding at all as a *general statement*).
But then we get to I think the real source of these weird claims. He argues briefly that "racism" really was only invented in the 1600s by Europeans looking to justify the Atlantic slave trade. States it with a sort of axiomatic truth, where it seems like this is a lodestone, and most of his comments are working backwards form this belief.
My uncharitable reaction when hearing this is that apparently, he has never read any classical literature, or Chinese histories, or talked to actual humans.
The especially weird thing, is a huge amount of the rest of his presentation was about how much more fractured and local/provincial the medieval world was. That most places the national language was not at all standardized, and most villages people all knew each other and outsiders were greeted with suspicion and say "French" people didn't necessary like the "French" people one county away because they were different and might be part of a different polity and had previously fought against each other in wars etc. That you really needed to stick to your "kind of people, and the guild structures" and that society was much more communal and less individualistic and people fit into a role and a known identity.
Yes, I am sure that is an environment where they would just love strange people...
He also defended said some dumb shit about how “Medieval people wouldn't make all these assumptions or prejudgments of people based on race, unlike today”, which ummm yeah....
I was encouraged that even among the (assuredly very lefty) college students, there was some pushback during Q&A some people and he retreated a fair bit. Though I would say most of them just ate it up and some defended his points.
I am also very curious about this defense both their, and that I have seen online as I have posted on this a couple times this week.
So on just the superficial surface you want to say what I said above. ‘WTF dude, people throughout many historical documents are hugely racist/tribalists about other people’s groups, especially groups that are arbitrarily different from them. Often treating the most different groups they are in contact with a subhuman’.
One of his main defenses/theories seemed to be:
"well of course the people had beliefs about different places. For instance, they had this whole theory of different parts of the world produced different kinds of people suited to them (I assume referencing the medieval/muslim (but originally Greek theory of climes)), and so people in different places had different strengths and weaknesses"
Isn't this exactly what racism and prejudging are? There seemed to be a constant description of what is clearly racism…but then claiming this wasn’t in fact *real* racism as practiced by whites/Europeans in the modern times, but instead just some random scattered cultural practices or something.
He also generally just hugely backtracked to a position of "sure they would have been a ton more racists than we are today but that wouldn't be RACISM it would be something else (not clear what it would have been)". He also sort of lumped in the later muslim world of the Ottoman’s into real racism, but seemed to want to defend to pre Ottoman muslims from that charge.
I said something to the effect of "given how nasty even interstate or say sports based rivalries can get I would assume tribalism and ‘othering of others’ is a pretty standard human thought process and that as such it likely existed in the medieval world too and with their limited horizons and contacts they would be intensely tribal and maybe even "racist" against people with the same color skin from 100 miles away, much less people from 1000 miles away is that what you are trying to get at?"
And he sort of said "yeah, but also they weren't racist and loved people of different skin colors and found them super interesting".
Which umm sure they found them interesting, that isn't the same as being "not racist". Anyway, just thought it was weird to see these little CRT/”woke” talking points and worldview popping up in something I thought was going to be totally DEI politics free.
Online I have seen a wide variety of defenses. Some claiming that the obsession with “skin color” is what makes it “real racism”, and if people in say France hate people in the Balkans in 1100, that isn’t racism because they are both white. And that earlier things that look like racism weren’t really racism because they were not so skin color focused. To which I would just want to say that this is a pretty narrow impoverished view of what racism is and what makes it bad, while also being pretty ignorant of the actual historical record which includes plenty o prejudging and dehumanizing of people based on skin color alone.
Hilariously I also found books where you have the reverse, and medieval studies professors arguing “no you dummy modern historians, racism wasn’t invented in 1600 real racism was invented in medieval England and its antisemitic laws, medieval England was the first truly racist state”. Which is also hilariously bad history.
Then you have some classical historians who are like “no you dummy medieval historians, racism stretches back to the period I research too”.
Anyway I could just go on about it forever, it was so bizarre and infuriating, but this is already too long. I shudder for current students and how religious/ideological their education is getting.
I suspect this is a kind of "motte and bailey" situation. Most things in the past were *different* from things today. So if you make this (true) statement selectively about bad things that exist today, it may seem like the past was a *better* place to live.
Medieval people hated each other for many reasons, and the color of skin was relatively unimportant. Speaking a different language, believing in a different religion, or living in a different village were probably way more important.
If you came to a medieval village somewhere in central Europe as a black person, you would probably be the first black person anyone in the village has ever seen. Racism? On one hand, they might doubt whether you were actually a human, or some kind of a monster. On the other hand, they probably didn't have any *stereotypes* about your race, because "stereotype" assumes previous experience. If you survived the first contact and learned their language and joined their religion, you could become "one of them".
On the other hand, if two visibly different ethnic groups lived near each other, they probably had all kinds of stereotypes about each other. And if you had a society that owned and traded slaves from different ethnic groups, they probably also had stereotypes about what each of these groups is like.
Modern racism, for example the kind that assumes the unity of all white people, is simply too large for the medieval society. It would be too large even for the American society 100 years ago, when various groups of people who we would consider obviously white today were not considered white back then.
And the thing that was new 100 years ago in America was establishing slavery based on race. Previously, your race and your status as a free person or slave were *independent*. You became a slave when you were captured in a military conflict. (And a few more centuries ago, you could be sold to slavery if you were too poor to pay your debts.)
For example, one of the Three Magi is traditionally depicted as black, and the medieval Christians who started this tradition clearly didn't mean any disrespect. A high-status person is a high-status person, no matter their race.
> He then goes so far as to also say the Middle Easterners also weren't racist and had good feelings towards Africans
Haha, this guy definitely needs to read One Thousand and One Nights.
Well exactly, that individuals sometimes treat others of different skin tones well definitely isn't some knock down case there isn't "racism". People sometimes certainly treat each others of different skin tones well today, that isn't some knock down example of there not being racism today.
The medieval world may have been racist in the colloquial sense of being prejudiced, what he's getting at is that race in the way that we understand it is biological, it can't really be separated from science. That's the part that the medievals were lacking.
There was an Arab historian called Ibn Khaldun who wrote some stuff about Africans that reads pretty bad in retrospect. He wasn't a racist in the same way as, say, Hitler, because he thought it was the result of climate, not heredity.
The anti-Semitism example shows the difficulty of these distinctions. Nazi antisemitism was based in (pseudo)biology, they thought Jews were parasites by nature. Christian antisemitism was based in theology, Jews were conceived as agents of Satan. The difficulty is this is also an inherited status, but it isn't biological. If you're Jewish, I admit the distinction probably seems academic. You could make a whole career arguing about one or the other side of this.
There's a good book about the Dark Ages called "The Inheritance of Rome", there's a funny line in the conclusion to the effect that there was no racism in the dark ages but only because there was such a generalized sense of chauvinism towards any kind of difference that specifically focusing on race would be meaningless. Even if it's pedantry to point this out, it is the job of academics to be pedants.
This sort of feels plausible because more-or-less every movie and TV show set in the past has all the good guys have modern attitudes toward race, religion, and sexuality.
I mean, there probably wasn't a lot of formal or organized anti-black racism in England in 1600, since hardly anyone had ever seen a black guy. But it's not like there wasn't plenty of bigotry on differences that people encountered in their daily lives, eg against Catholics, against Jews in places where they lived, etc.
Yeah, there's some nonsense there. Among other things, a lot of the examples given are of aristocratic or wealthy people, not commoners. You could point to senior officials in the Biden administration not being racist (according to themselves), and then use that to say that America isn't racist.
But there's a particular definition of "racism" which refers to an Enlightenment-style version of bigotry that tries to justify bigotry with science, and I think that's what is being referred to here. It's of concern to the academics because, as far as they can tell, it's the version of bigotry that's most likely to infect people today, and that's why they care about it so much. (Putting aside politics, and putting aside the question of whether there are newer versions of bigotry that go unnoticed by said academics, because they've already been infected.) I wish they'd pick another world for "racism"; they seem to change their words for everything else so often. But I suppose it's like "genocide": once everyone agrees that the word means something bad, they try to change the definition rather than the word.
Regarding slavery, as far as I'm aware, the racial aspect was an American innovation, and that did make our version unique, and in a way uniquely bad. Although sometimes my PTSD is tempted to say that anyone whitewashing non-American slavery just volunteered. I wish modern activists wouldn't back-project features of American racial slavery onto other forms of slavery. It makes for bad history.
And regarding xenophobia, there's an old phenomenon where our neighbors are the enemy, but the stranger from far away is an honored guest. The Arabs were a great example - they might treat a traveler from a distant land with incredible hospitality, but might kill members of neighboring tribes on sight. This is one of the bits of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan that sometimes gets overlooked. The Samaritans were like Palestinians: the people who had been living in the land when Cyrus the Great rescinded the Babylonian exile. AFAIK, they were all ethnically similar, but the Samaritans had gone one way with their ancestral religion, and the exiled Jews had gone another. Samaritans were the go-to example for neighbors that you would fuck over if you got the chance, because of course they'd do the same to you.
Also, if you haven't read this, you need to, right now:
I mean I have read the book itself. But I’ll take a look at the review.
I really am not buying that our racism was “science” and that makes it different angle.
Especially when the people whose racist thoughts they are claiming are not racist from history are people like Aristotle, Ptolemy and Ibn Khaldun who were literally the leading scientists of their time.
Also ancient peoples were well aware of heredity. They had animals, they watched people have kids. Not understanding Mendelian genetics is not the remotely same thing as not understanding heredity.
> I really am not buying that our racism was “science” and that makes it different angle.
I'm frustrated, because I remember that there was a good and subtle argument for this position, but I have completely forgotten it. I can't seem to reconstruct it, and it's hopeless trying to locate that sort of nuance on the modern web. Oh well.
I think I'd start by asking this guy just what definition of "race" he's using. Like, are Spaniards and Algerians members of different "races"?
Because ethnic bigotry goes *way* back; it partially merged into nationalistic bigotry when we invented nations, but bigotry is older than nations. But to many modern academics and activists, "racism" is taken to mean something qualitatively different, not just an extension of whatever it is medieval Spaniards thought about the people just south of them and vice versa.
And really, what they mean by it is "bigotry by white people against black people". And maybe in some contexts against red or yellow or very dark brown people, but mostly it's bigotry against black people.
It is debatable that bigotry by white people against black people is qualitatively different than bigotry between Spaniards and Moors; both led to a fair bit of slavery, so that's not a slam dunk, but there may be differences that matter. But what isn't really debatable, is that bigotry by white people against black people didn't really take off until the 16th century, because that's when white people invented ships capable enough to bring white and black people together as more than basically exotic novelties.
There's no need for bigotry against people that you only ever encounter as diplomats and merchant-adventurers from a far-off land. That's mostly what black people were in Europe (and white people in sub-Saharan Africa), until the 16th century. Everyone else a medieval European would have encountered, would have been either white or very light brown, so if that's not enough to cry "racism!", well, OK, someone has just defined racism as a thing that was demographically impossible in pre-16th century Europe.
I would also note that very white Nordic-type people were quite willing to take and sell very white Slavic-type people as slaves (hence the name), without needing to justify it via skin-color definitions of "race". Meanwhile, African-American soldiers deployed to Korea in 1950-53, often experienced bigotry from the locals that cannot plausibly be explained by South Korea's wanting to enslave them. So, yes, this particular type of racism started in the 1500s. But I don't think it was about slavery, so much as it was about better ships.
But that’s just it, it is a particular form of racism, not some special archetypical breed of it. It is absolutely a universal cultural phenomenon, pretty much as soon as there are writings about other places and people, there are justifications about why our people are the best, and why those people from far away are inferior and good for slavery.
It’s literally in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece. Pretty much anywhere we have a written record.
> He argues briefly that "racism" really was only invented in the 1600s by Europeans looking to justify the Atlantic slave trade.
There’s some truth to that. He’s talking about the concept of race, rather than just skin colour or ethnicity. And he’s specifically talking about attitudes to black skin. From that point of view he has a point.
There were definitely plenty of cultures and peoples with specific attitudes towards certain skin colors prior to European slavery of Africans. This is such a weirdly myopic and culturally narcissistic view of the phenomenon. Talk about your eurocentrism.
Some of what he says isn't completely wrong, but he misses the bigger picture. Stepping back from a European focus...
Medieval West African kingdoms (12th - 14th Centuries) were slave-owning. They were largely interior kingdoms that raided coastal tribes for slaves and gold, and they traded slaves, gold and ivory with Arab kingdoms around the southern Med and Egypt. Slaves and gold didn't transport well across the Sahara, though. So black slaves were not the majority of slaves in the Muslim world. And a slave could become free by converting to Islam. Many took that route to freedom. OTOH, the Islamic world imported captured slaves from Europe and Central Asia. So slavery in the Muslim world was not predominantly black.
Slaves were also present in Medieval European society, but I'm less certain about the wheres and whyfors of those slaves. However, it's worth noting that there was a large Muslim expat community in medieval London. And trade with the Islamic world was the only way that the medieval Europeans could get silks and spices. So, yes there was a cosmopolitan aspect to European trading centers.
Because the Ottoman Empire, monopolized and stifled trade between Europe and the Indies, the Portuguese started, looking for a way to get to the Indies by going around Africa. They encountered the kingdoms of West Africa. The kingdoms of West Africa traded gold and ivory with them for European luxury goods. Slaves were less important as a trade item until the New World was discovered. Then in 1537, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull, the Sublimis Deus, that said indigenous Americans had souls — implying, they couldn't be slaves. Suddenly, the Portuguese in Spanish needed a source of cheap labor to work in the mines and to work the sugar plantations (sugar becoming as important as gold). So the West African kingdoms started brisk trade in slaves from their conquered tribes. In exchange, they received luxury, trade, goods, and weapons from the Europeans. The West African kingdoms sent ambassadors to European courts (especially Spain and the Vatican) to facilitate this trade, and the rulers of these kingdoms became tremendously wealthy.
I think we can safely say the 17th century 18th was when *Europeans* began to confuse the idea of slaves with blacks. And BTW, the Muslim kingdoms of Africa and the Ottomans were enslaving Europeans right up to the 19th century as well as purchasing African slaves across the trans-Sahara trade routes. It wasn't until Great Britain effectively banned the African slave trade in the early 1800s that the West African kingdoms collapsed economically and militarily. Leaving them ripe for colonization and exploitation later in the 19th Century.
>I think we can safely say the 17th century 18th was when *Europeans* began to confuse the idea of slaves with blacks.
Well some Europeans. Some people always dissented. They also didn't have much problem making natives into slaves either. i don't think it was some hyper specific anti-black thing, plenty of racism against Asians too at the time.
The modern concept of "racism" simply doesn't make any sense when you wind things far enough back into the past. It has a ton of modern cultural baggage that would be incoherent to someone in, say, Haiti in the late 18th century, even though ethnic tensions were enormous there, never mind a medieval German or a Roman. It's impossible to really argue for or against these academics' positions because it's completely unrelated to anything that was actually happening in those places and times.
(I will say that thing about people in the Middle East having "good feelings" towards Africans is quite something, given how many of them they enslaved.)
Oh I agree it is a "braided" concept with a lot of strands and like a rope not all of them extend all the way through.
But I would argue almost whichever strands you want to focus on, you will find that same strand 1000, 2000, 5000 years ago in whatever writings we have, and would find them all back then if we had like a time machine and could go talk to people instead of just read the writing of a few elites.
Well I think it mostly doesn't make sense because everyone was extremely racist. Not because they were somehow not racist. Its just a very specific and small minded sense of what racism is.
No, they really weren't "racist" any more than Plato was "gay". They did a lot of the same things that modern racists (or modern gay people) do, but they do so as part of a very different ideology. They're not treating *race* (or sexual orientation) as a relevant variable, so much as "outsider" or "foreigner" or something else that would cross-cut the modern racial categories.
I just don’t understand how people can think like this. It is the exact same thing.
A). They definitely were viewing “types of
people” or “geographic origins of people”, or “skin colors of people”, as guides to what to expect and possible rubrics for discrimination. Sure not everyone, but definitely the people interested in geography and foreign peoples.
B). It’s not like that way of viewing “races” is/was some dominant exclusive mode today or 300 years ago. There were plenty of people who saw crosscutting categories as more important.
I don’t know I just find this whole position bonkers. Like someone who would claim “wars” did not exist before the treaty of Westphalia because they meant something slightly different before that. Such an obviously counterfactual statement that it becomes crystal clear it is part of some religion/ideology and not part of an actual taking of the world as it is.
What I'm saying is that asking whether a medieval peasant was "racist" or "not racist" doesn't even make sense in that context. It would be like asking if he was a Republican or a Democrat. Yeah, he might have social views that line up more with one or the other so you could shoehorn it in if you really tried, but fundamentally what's meaningful about the concepts of "Republican" or "Democrat" just doesn't translate.
Well I think yes and no. Is he "racist" in the sense that he thinks there are 4 (5?) main races on the earth (whites/asians/blacks/reds/other) and he has modern prejudices about them?
No almost certainly not. But that seems a weirdly hyper specific concept of what "racism" is.
He almost certainly has A LOT of beliefs about how his people are good, and other people in nearby and especially distant lands are inferior in this or that way and has prejudices and mistaken beliefs about groups of people. Sometimes even based on skin color if that is so important to your conception of racism.
The be like the dude in southern France in 900 who hates the "moors" (despite maybe barely knowing what they are exactly) and sees them akin to devils isn't actually "racist" because he what doesn't know about Asian people, seems beyond silly.
And the position of someone who is desperate to make racism some modern thing instead of recognizing is a natural human extension of tribalism/othering and pattern recognition.
Seems odd to have this word *racism* that has a well understood definition:
Treating people poorly or with prejudice based on their skin tone/ethnicity.
And then be like "well there are hundreds/thousands of examples of that prior to European colonialism but none of that is racism because reasons".
Especially when the reasons are like "our racism was pseudo-scientific attempts to classify people", and then the racism of the past was the exact same thing.
Or "our racism was used as a justification for treating different people as means instead of ends in themselves"...and then their racism was literally used in that exact same way.
Its jsut changing the definition so you can say with a straight face that racism started when the current villains came on the scene (European colonialists) and not when it really came on the scene (when the first human met another human who looked significantly different form them), because then it is not some special cultural original sin the west needs to atone for and instead something that happens everywhere.
Like do these people *really* think the 11th century Chinese weren't "racists"?
If the skin tone element is so important is it impossible for me to be racist against light skinned Latino or black people? It is just nonsense.
I'm not sure who you're referring to, but my understanding is that people were historically more "ethno-nationalist" (although the term is freighted with it's own baggage) than racist historically.
The Roman's, for instance, were hugely bigoted against, well, everyone that wasn't Roman. But their bigotry wasn't rooted in an idea of races as these distinct biological delineations between superior and inferior breeds. And it wasn't rooted in any sort of superiority of technology - a barbarian people could still make fine goods and build impressive monuments.
Racism as we understand it today really was a product of a divergence in technology and economy (which allowed Europeans to see themselves as materially superior to non-Europeans), an idea of biology which separated the world into immutable kinds (of greater and lesser development) locked into a zero-sum struggle for survival, and the experience of slavery as marking some people out as inherently degraded and inferior.
The good (?) news is that, as material conditions change, bigotry is returning to it's ur-state of hating other people because they look different, talk different, and have different customs and beliefs instead of hating them because of their melanin levels and cranial features.
1) On the one hand yes, people were much more tribalist and "ethno nationalist" as you say. On the other hand isn't that really just racism against everyone? Rather than "not being racist". If I behave in racist ways against people just 500 miles form me, because my level of geographic knowledge and worldview is much more limited than say a European in 1600, am I really any less "racist".
I am still othering the people who I see as maximally different than me as "subhuman" (which was quite common).
2) If you actually read the historic documents they absolutely did have "an idea of races as these distinct biological delineations between superior and inferior breeds". Like very explicitly. It wasn't always exactly the categories we would have, but the thought is almost identical to the sort of hierarchal "quadroon" racism of the colonial powers everyone so despises.
(I have seen this claim that their wasn't this "classification and hierarchy" in ancient racism, but that is just plainly false).
The Greeks and Muslims had a system of 7 "climes", where people living in different climes had different natures and strengths/weaknesses. The Mediterranean clime of course being the best which produced the best people. meanwhile the "far north" produced vigorous and spirited, but "stupid" people, and the "far south" black lazy people who make good slaves.
That certainly sounds EXACTLY like the racism you say they didn't have.
It is in fucking Aristotle, not invented in 1600, and I am sure it was in ancient fucking Sumer 5000 years ago too. It absolutely was in ancient Egypt and China.
3) "And it wasn't rooted in any sort of superiority of technology - a barbarian people could still make fine goods and build impressive monuments."
I would love to introduce you to Greek/Chinese/Mesopotamian writings on peoples with lower levels of technology.
4) Racism as we understand it today really was a product of a divergence in technology and economy (which allowed Europeans to see themselves as materially superior to non-Europeans), an idea of biology which separated the world into immutable kinds (of greater and lesser development) locked into a zero-sum struggle for survival, and the experience of slavery as marking some people out as inherently degraded and inferior.
See I think this is just exactly the FALSE bullshit I am arguing against. An attempt to sort of brand 1600s or 1700 Europe as particular racist or particularly interested in slavery and its justification. I just think this is a wildly incorrect reading of history in pursuit of a religious/ideological need to have the "colonialists" be the big bads of history.
To the extent if matched our more modern categories of people, well it was closer to our modern time and they had more interaction with a broader swath of the world than past groups.
To the extent their system was more detailed and documented than earlier systems, that is because we both have more detailed and documented records from that time, and because their society was more sophisticated. In fact one could easily argue that their relative level of ethical openness and non-racism is what necessitated the creation of such hierarchies. But they definitely were not a new thing (all people are equal...well except those people).
5)"the experience of slavery as marking some people out as inherently degraded and inferior."
Once again I would love to refer you to pretty much any writings anywhere about slaves, they are almost always treated this way.
6) The good (?) news is that, as material conditions change, bigotry is returning to it's ur-state of hating other people because they look different, talk different, and have different customs and beliefs instead of hating them because of their melanin levels and cranial features.
i just don't think this actually represents any real change at all. I think other peoples absolutely had the same sort of pseudoscientific thoughts (appropriate to their time) about "others", and literally the exact same racism.
This seems like so much intellectual work and rewriting/ignoring of history jsut so you can mark out the colonialists as "extra bad" and the source of *the racism*.
IDK this drives me up a wall. I would be like seeing arguments that like Stalin invented use famine as weapon from someone who wanted to shit on Stalin. It is just so historically ignorant.
I thought Romans thought being a slave was a matter of getting conquered/bad luck rather than inborn inferiority. Slaves could become free and get Roman citizenship.
>Slaves could become free and get Roman citizenship.
This was true in lots of places times in Europe people called "racist"? is there no racism today (or in 1840?) because blacks can get citizenship?
>I thought Romans thought being a slave was a matter of getting conquered/bad luck rather than inborn inferiority.
I really really don't think this was the sum total of their thoughts on the matter, they definitely had LOTS of ideas about which people's were superior/inferior and which people from which places made better or worse slaves.
This isn't even that different from say 1700s Europe anyway, where you jsut like in Rome might find people from the majority culture doing hard labor in chains if they had say committed crimes or had debts, which is pretty much when you would see that in Rome too.
But Romans were not generally enslaving people they saw as Roman, just like Spaniards were not generally enslaving Spaniards.
As an aside, Medieval China had slavery, but it wasn't particularly common, and it didn't play a major role in the economy.
> 2) If you actually read the historic documents they absolutely did have "an idea of races as these distinct biological delineations between superior and inferior breeds".
Can you give me some links to those documents from Classical and Medieval sources. Or are you talking about after the Atlantic slave trade revved up?
> The Greeks and Muslims had a system of 7 "climes", where people living in different climes had different natures and strengths/weaknesses.
Granted, but for the Ancient Greeks anyone who wasn't a Greek was a barbarian, and any barbarian could be slave. The Celts ended up slaves in the Greek colonies of southern France. Black Africans were relatively uncommon in the ancient world, but I think the Ptolemies imported black slaves from Upper Nile.
> 4) Racism as we understand it today really was a product of a divergence in technology and economy (which allowed Europeans to see themselves as materially superior to non-Europeans)...
Agreed.
> Once again I would love to refer you to pretty much any writings anywhere about slaves, they are almost always treated this way.
Agreed. Except didn't the Romans end up making laws about the proper treatment of slaves? And slaves could purchase their freedom. And in the Muslim world, Muslims couldn't be enslaved. So if you convert to Islam you became free. And in the ancient Jewish tradition, if a slave converted to Judaism they were freed.
It's worth noting that China was thriving economically when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. By the 5th and 6th Centuries, they had built a canal system that linked all the east-flowing rivers of the empire with north-south connections. One could travel by boat across the empire. Technically and economically China was at a level not reached in Europe until the 12th Century and the High Middle Ages. They practiced a feudalism that was similar to the European model. And 7th- or 8th-century Chinese peasants probably lived as well as European peasants in the 12th Century (which wasn't that bad for pre-modern agriculturalists). Of course, it all came crashing down at the end of the Tang Dynasty — first with the Lushan Rebellion and then with the Huang Chao Rebellion. Some sources estimate that a third of the population died due to famine and war. And all the noble families of the Tang were either exterminated or impoverished to extinction. It took about a century for China to stabilize and for a new nobility to appear.
Oh yeah China is super interesting and amazing, but aside from a few interludes the peasants never seemed to have any rights or political power (not that they did in Europe either).
On #4, I think this viewpoint stems from a lack of familiarity with the historical record. It's a failing of an availability heuristic. "I've not seen technological racism in the past, so I don't think it exists." Yet we see plenty of examples of exactly that, except that often it's the backward Europeans who're the target of the racism. For example, during the glory days of Islam when they saw Europeans as hopelessly backward. I remember reading a letter from the then-Calif who mocked the Roman/Byzantian emperor as being effectively a ruler of forest savages, while the Calif was so obviously leader of the civilized world. There was, perhaps, an element of religious supremacy to that letter, but there was a racial element as well. I don't think this is something the Europeans made up, it's just that they were late to the technological supremacy game overall, so they hadn't had a chance to use it until recently.
My understanding of the American context for racism is that it was a natural reaction to the demands of enlightenment principles and some Christian principles put forward by abolitionists. "All men are created equal" and all of Jesus' admonitions about the second great commandment needed a good counterargument - especially after people could read the Bible for themselves. Though racism wasn't invented as that counterargument, it was adopted to fill that space. "They're not really 'people' in the same sense as you and me," and the especially offensive, "They need to be shepherded by their betters or else they'll hurt themselves," directly counter those two arguments and allow the slave owner to live with himself.
Again, I'm not saying that even those arguments are unique to that period. Just that they were useful to those who made them as part of the conversation that was happening at the time.
Calm down, my guy. You're going to have an aneurism.
All I can say besides just disagreeing with you, and not being a historian (although it appears that you disagree with actual historians), is that there's a definite difference in pre-modern vs modern bigotry. I think the closest I can come to explicating it is in how Tuchman describes the virulent hatred that medieval nobles had for the peasantry. Like, you might not like poor people, but you'll never feel what these people feel about peasants. Because your worldview and identity is so different, and because the material circumstances of your life and your relation to your fellows is so different. This is not to excuse ancient bigotry in favour of damning modern bigotry, but it is to say that it is different because the time and place were different.
I can absolutely believe that the medieval yokels of Vukolyubovina would look at a black guy and say "sure, he's black, but at least he's not from Packovac, and he agrees with our claim to that orchard we've been feuding over for the last six hundred years." Nothing engenders hatred like proximity.
Yeah but that is still true today. Some of the most racist people i have even met were from the Balkans, but their racism paled in comparison to the ethnic/religious hatred of their near neighbors. but I don't think that somehow magically makes them *not racist*.
If I hate black people and discriminate against them at work "I also hate Packer fans from *sconnie*" isn't a defense.
The whole point of the post is I am not calm about it. It really grinds my gears and frankly seems kind of crazy and a historical to me in a way that is an example of how this religious ideology around "racism" has blinded people to obvious truths.
In the last Open Thread, Hank Wilbon asked about using LLMs for etymologies. I decided to try it out by asking ChatGPT(3.5) "Can you give some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French?" ChatGPT gave ten examples: four correct, six hallucinations.
If anyone has access to more recent LLMs, I'd be curious to know if they do any better on this question.
Here are the examples and etymologies given by ChatGPT(3.5) (identifying which ones are correct is left as an exercise for the reader):
Beef - The meat of a cow. This word comes from Old French "boef," which traces back to Germanic bōk.
Chase - To pursue or hunt. Derived from Old French "chacier," which has its roots in the Frankish language, a Germanic language.
Catch - To seize or capture. From Old Northern French "cachier," ultimately from a Germanic source.
Garden - An enclosed area for cultivation. It comes from Old North French "gardin," which has Germanic origins.
Warden - A person responsible for the supervision of a particular place or group of people. Derived from Old Northern French "wardein," influenced by the Germanic word wardōn.
Wicket - A small door or gate, often found within a larger one. From Old North French "wiket," which has its roots in a Germanic language.
Wine - The alcoholic beverage made from fermented grapes. Comes from Old North French "wine," ultimately from Germanic winam.
Wish - A desire or hope for something to happen. Derived from Old North French "wis," influenced by the Germanic wunsch.
Watch - To observe or monitor closely. From Old North French "wachier," influenced by the Germanic wahten.
War - Armed conflict between different nations or groups. Comes from Old North French "werre," ultimately from a Germanic source.
...and here is ChatGPT(4o) [6 hits, 2 hallucinations; I'm counting "dance" and "embassy" as hits, since there are human-authored sources that make these claims, but the Germanic derivations are speculative]:
War: Originates from the Old High German word "werra," which means "confusion" or "strife." It entered English through Old French "werre."
Garden: Comes from the Old High German "gart," meaning "enclosure" or "yard." It was borrowed into Old French as "jardin" and then entered Middle English.
Catch: Derived from the Latin "captiare" via Old French "cachier," the Old High German equivalent is "kaccan," meaning "to catch" or "to hunt."
Court: Comes from the Latin "cohors" meaning "enclosure" or "court," and passed into Old French as "cort." The Frankish word "hof," meaning "courtyard" or "enclosure," influenced the French term before it entered English.
Dance: Originates from the Old High German "dansôn," meaning "to draw" or "to pull," and came into English via Old French "dancier."
Embassy: Comes from the Old High German "ambaht," meaning "service" or "office." It entered Middle English through Old French "ambassade."
Warranty: Derives from the Old High German "warjan," meaning "to protect" or "to defend." It entered English through Old French "garantie."
Guard: Comes from the Old High German "wartēn," meaning "to watch" or "to guard." It was borrowed into Old French as "garde."
Tyler Cowen wrote recently about how LLMs are good at telling you who a famous person's children (Assuming they are also famous) are but horrible at telling you who a famous person's parents are. I'd guess that you are describing an analogous problem, although with words it's reversed: good at knowing the ancestry, bad at figuring out the progeny.
The explanation for this seems intuitive: it can learn a word's etymology from reading online dictionaries but must reason (which it is bad at) to do what you are asking it. I'd guess that with famous people the situation is similar: it "learns" who the children are but must try to reason/remember who the parents are.
The mysterious "im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot" on LMSys Arena returns:
Certainly! The English language has many words of Germanic origin that were reintroduced into English after undergoing changes in Old or Middle French. These words often came into English during the Norman Conquest and the centuries that followed, when Norman French had a significant influence on the English language.
Here are some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French:
Warden (from Norman French warden, from Old French gardien, from Frankish warding - a Germanic root meaning "guard" or "watch").
Guard (from Old French garder, from Frankish wardon, from the Germanic root ward- meaning "to watch" or "to protect").
War (from Old North French werre (variant of Old French guerre), from Frankish werra, meaning "confusion, strife," from a Germanic source akin to Old High German werra "strife, conflict").
Warranty (from Old North French warantie, from a variant of Old French guarantie, from guarant, from Frankish warjand, a derivative of warjan, meaning "to defend, protect").
Garden (from Old North French gardin, from Frankish gard, from Proto-Germanic gardaz, meaning "enclosure, garden").
Banner (from Old French baniere, from Frankish bann, from Proto-Germanic bannan, meaning "to command, forbid, banish").
Wage (from Old North French wage, from Old French gage, from Frankish waddi, meaning "pledge" - from Proto-Germanic wadi).
March (as in the border region, from Old French marche, from Frankish marka, meaning "boundary" - from Proto-Germanic marko).
Gain (from Old French gain, from Frankish waidanjan, meaning "to hunt for, acquire" - from Proto-Germanic waidanjan).
Quarry (in the sense of a stone pit, from Old French quarriere, from Frankish quader, from Proto-Germanic kwadraz, meaning "stone").
These examples show how words from Germanic roots entered French (often as a result of Frankish influence) and then were borrowed back into English, sometimes with significant changes in form and meaning influenced by their passage through French.
This list has a lot of overlap with GPT-4, with a different hallucination stuck on at the end. (I'll be generous and count "gain" as a hit, since the Old French word does seem to have influenced Middle English usage even if the cognate was already present in Old English.)
It's interesting that both here and in the GPT-4 list, the hallucinations come at the end of the respective lists. I wonder whether this happens for similar reasons to older LLMs habit of starting off coherently then degenerating into gibberish after a paragraph or two.
(Edit: On the other hand, Microsoft Copilot gives its only correct answer at the end of its list, so maybe I'm the one hallucinating here.)
Can you give some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French
Copilot
Certainly! Many words in the English language have entered via French, which itself has Germanic origins. Here are some examples of words that came into English from French but ultimately have Germanic roots:
Ally (from Old French alier, derived from Frankish hlaiban): Originally meant “to bind by treaty,” and its Germanic root means “to adhere.”
Adventure (from Old French aventure, from Latin adventura, influenced by Frankish āventiure): Meaning “a daring undertaking,” it traces back to the Germanic concept of “chance” or “fortune.”
Affair (from Old French affaire, influenced by Frankish afar): Refers to a matter or business, with its roots in the Germanic word for “work” or “task.”
Ambush (from Old French embusche, influenced by Frankish busk): Originally meant “to place in a bush,” and its Germanic origin relates to “shrubbery” or “underbrush.”
Banner (from Old French baniere, influenced by Frankish bannum): Derived from the Germanic term for a “proclamation” or “summons.”
These words demonstrate the intricate interplay between Germanic and Romance languages in shaping English vocabulary. 🌟
For more examples, you can explore the list of English Latinates of Germanic origin and the list of German words of French origin.1234
(I think your hyperlinks might be disappearing when you copy-paste into Substack — all of those just link to the domains.)
The correct one is "banner," although it fudges the details a bit. (The history of the word is complicated and difficult to trace clearly, but "influenced by Frankish bannum" looks like a random stab in the dark. In general, it seems way too keen to give cognates in "Frankish," which is a very poorly attested language.)
For the others: "ally," "adventure," and "affair" are all pure Latin; "bush" is plausibly Germanic in origin, but the prefixed form "ambush" only appeared in French, so it isn't exactly example of what is being asked for. (Maybe I could have given it half a point for that one.)
And "French, which itself has Germanic origins" is like an exam answer by a student who really wasn't paying attention during class...
I have the same problem when I ask for links to papers discussing specific aspects of SARS2 research. Frequently there are lots of bullshit (er hallucinatory) references in the answer. I keep hearing that LLMs are helping researchers search the literature. That frigging scares me!
User: Can you give some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French?
Certainly! The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 had a profound impact on the English language, introducing many words of Old Norse and Old French origin, which themselves were influenced by Germanic roots due to the Frankish and other Germanic tribes. Here are some examples of words that have Germanic origins, entered Old French, and then came into English:
1. **Warranty** - This word comes from the Old French "garantie," from "garant," a derivative of the Frankish *warjant-, a present participle of *warjan, meaning "to defend, protect." The root *warjan is of Germanic origin.
2. **Garden** - Derived from the Old North French "gardin," which itself comes from the Frankish *gard or *gardo, meaning "enclosure" or "fenced in place." This word traces back to the Proto-Germanic *gardaz, ultimately contributing to the English word "garden."
3. **Guard** - Coming from the Old French "garder," meaning "to keep, protect, watch," influenced by the Frankish *wardon, meaning "to guard, watch." This is from the Proto-Germanic *wardaz, meaning ""guard" or "watchman," found in modern German as "*warten*" (to wait or watch).
4. **Wage** - Originating from the Old North French "wage," which itself is derived from the Frankish *waddi. This term came into French and then English meaning payment, especially for labor.
5. **War** - From Old North French "werre" (modern French "guerre"), from the Frankish *werra or *werran, meaning "confusion, strife, or conflict." The Proto-Germanic root likely had a similar meaning related to confusion or entanglement.
6. **Gauge** - Through the French "jauge" from Old North French "gage," which in turn, comes from the Frankish *galgo meaning "measuring rod, measuring stick," directly from the Germanic root *galg- meaning a pole or stick for measuring.
7. **Banner** - Entering English from Old French "baniere," from Frankish *bann, a capture from the Proto-Germanic *bannan, "to command." This term is also connected to the English "ban."
8. **Duke** - Coming into English from the Old French "duc," from Latin "dux," which in turn comes from the Frankish *duka, derived from Proto-Germanic *dukaz meaning "leader," which itself is from the Proto-Germanic root *duganą meaning "to be useful, to help."
Thanks! That seems to be one hallucination, seven genuine examples, much better than 3.5. (Although I find it surprising how *obviously* wrong the hallucination is — I would have expected the hallucinations to become not just rarer, but also more difficult to spot.)
"Duke" — from Latin "dux," via French "duc" (cf. Mussolini = "Il Duce," and also the "Doge" of Venice). It has nothing to do with Frankish or Proto-Germanic.
I'd like to probe a little bit into the pain medicine question from the Hanson thread. It was stunning to learn that there was a real practicing doctor who thought that "nobody died of pain", AND that there were multiple commenters who were like, yeah! all doctors should be like this!
Like does anyone - really - sincerely believe that?
How far would you go - should anesthesiology not be covered? not practiced?
Do you refuse Novocaine shots for dental work?
Would you have a knee reconstruction surgery without anesthesiology? Have you 12 y.o. child have a surgery without anesthesiology?
I think most of the discussion is around pain not related to medical procedures - ie if someone comes into the hospital with an infection, do you just treat the infection, or also give them painkillers for the pain caused by the infection? What if they don't respond to non-opioid painkillers and want opioids?
And some of this is influenced by the fact that lots of opioid addicts come into hospitals claiming to have various painful conditions in the hopes that someone will give them opioids. And by the fact that opioid companies pushed a line of "treating pain (with our products) is really important, so important that you can't worry about addiction risk" for many years, and after that went wrong the pendulum swung the other direction and now if you worry too much about pain you're suspected of being an opioid company stooge.
Oh god... that was 2019 and you had to write this paragraph:
"[...]think about this for a second like a normal human being. You have a kid with a very painful form of cancer. His doctor guesses at what the right dose of painkillers should be. After getting this dose of painkillers, the kid continues to “engage in pain behaviors ie moaning, crying, grimacing, and complaining about various aches and pains”, and begs for a higher dose of painkillers.
I maintain that the normal human thought process is “Since this kid is screaming in pain, looks like I guessed wrong about the right amount of painkillers for him, I should give him more.”"
By the time of Mary's story I had to stop reading. I feel I just need to buy a gun now in case I get an incurable cancer or something and the doctors decide I'm a drug-seeker.
Guess how fun it is to be someone whose *genetics* have decided to withhold the efficacy of opioid painkillers!
I initiated and paid out of pocket for pharmacogenomic lab testing which confirmed I have a mutation of CYP2D6, a gene involved in metabolizing a number of medications, but most notably opioids, after a wisdom tooth surgery and two separate abdominal surgeries left me wondering, "why do people claim opioids feel like anything?"
It's really that bad. For example, the day after my third surgery (a weight loss procedure: I had the "sleeve," which removes about two-thirds of the stomach, aka stomach stapling), the non-opioid surgical anesthesia drugs had fully worn off and I was in so much pain that I was *sincerely* contemplating building a time machine out of medical equipment to go back in time two days and tell myself to cancel the surgery.
At one point, a nurse came into my hospital room and injected dilaudid into my IV. "Don't worry, honey, you're going to feel just fine in about ten minutes," she promised.
When she returned fifteen minutes later, I said, "I'm sorry this is a dumb question, but what is this supposed to feel like? I mean, I definitely felt the injection go into my arm, it felt like a weird cold pressure, but what *exactly* should the medication itself feel like? Should I be feeling tingly or warm or something?"
"How are you even *talking* right now?" The nurse asked, round-eyed.
I ended up pacing and pacing and *pacing* to cope with the pain, pacing so much in my hospital socks on hard linoleum that I actually cramped up my calves, and so a few years I later paid $700 to get a piece of paper certifying that, NO REALLY, opioids don't work, use something else!
Then my primary care doctor consulted with the company's chief pharmacist who said there isn't really anything else, sorry!
Yeah, I've included notes about the genetic testing in my medical advance directive, with instructions to not believe doctors who say my pain is being adequately treated after a major accident (or whatever).
I'm old enough to have lived through a few swings of this pendulum. We are in one nutty extreme right now. It makes me wonder if humans are capable of taking one step back from the current moment to take in a larger historical perspective.
I usually decline opiates now unless I'm in serious distress simply because doctors can only write so many prescriptions for them so I just figure save it for someone who really needs it.
Things like passing a kidney stone or some oral surgeries are pretty terrible without a bit of codeine. The last time I accepted them was when one of my rotator cuff tendons snapped. I was getting to the point where I was wondering if I really *needed* two arms after all. <Only somewhat joking>
I do enjoy the sensation though and will usually indulge in some guilty pleasure like staying up all night reading Dashelle Hammet novels or maybe watching Robert Mitchum movies while under the influence. Too bad that carefree (F*ck the crabgrass and the creeping charlie, I'm enjoying myself!) state is so addictive,
I noticed that opiates make my PTSD go away (temporarily), so I acquire them wherever possible, but then never use them for the actual pain. They sit in my shelf, unused, waiting for a moment when it gets bad enough. So far, alcohol and THC have been working OK, although I could do without the side effects.
I had basket case, terrible, OCD for more than a decade before I read about OCD being a thing, with a treatment and all that. They started to talk about it quite a bit in the late 1980s. “If you or anyone you know has this sort of problem… We’ve just patented Prozac. Please make our stock price soar.” Or maybe I’m being too cynical. ;)
As an undergrad, at its worst there were times when I was reading only odd numbered pages in my text. Made things more challenging than they needed to be.
During that period if a percodan or something similar came my way I would use it the same way. It somehow quelled what was a transparently defective thought process. I drank too much during that period too. If i made a crude guess I’d say there was a self reinforcing link between the anxiety and OCD and the anxiolytic effects gave me some relief.
I’m very lucky in that I respond well to SSRIs that have put the OCD into remission and my hankering for that sort of consciousness alteration dropped off a cliff.
I *think* I’d be okay if I could go to CVS and buy a 500 count bottle of Percocet the way I buy Tylenol now. I’d only do the Robert Mitchum movie binge thing say once a month. Or at least that would be my intent. Hmmm… probably a good thing I can’t do that.
Be careful with the opiates. With fentanyl out there taking in something from the street is pretty risky
Oh, wow, that sounds bad. I'm glad something common took care of it, though.
Don't worry, I'm not getting stuff from the street, I'm just stockpiling what doctors give me, and I'm not doing things to intentionally get prescribed opiates, either.
I think you edited the part about Dashiel Hammett novels. I was going to ask you how you rank Hammet's novels against each other. I'm currently reading The Maltese Falcon for the first time. Have seen the movie numerous times. So far the novel reads exactly like the movie. John Huston famously wrote the screenplay adaptation, but that must have been one of the easiest adaptations to write ever!
IMO, The Thin Man is probably the funniest movie from the 1930's. The humor doesn't feel dated at all, somehow. Maybe it's the blase recklessness? But somewhere recently I read someone claim that was one of Hammet's worst novels. Have you read it? Do you have an opinion?
As someone who is generally very anti-drugs, and anti-coddling people, I can report that the two main painful accidents I had in my life where I ended up having surgical procedures, in both cases while the pain medication was *mostly* quite effective, there were times during day 1-3 where I was in agony for literal hours and was told I couldn't have more pain medication.
And in both cases I was a teen with zero history of drug use/abuse.
Meanwhile on other occasions I have had like a root canal or wisdom teeth pulled and barely needed Tylenol, but was offered opiates (I turned them down).
The inconsistency was jarring. Fingers mangled in accident and you whole hand feels like it is on fire for hours: You need to be screaming in agony for 2 hours before we will consider upping your dose.
Mild tooth ache: Here take all the opiates you want!
Interesting how the doctors just assume their initial dose is "just right". Despite never having even met the patient before in many cases.
I go through this charade with my dentist every time some drilling needs to be done: I seem to have very high tolerance for the Novocaine or whatever they shoot to numb the area. He starts with two shots, and I f-ng know it's not enough, every time. By the time he gets to drill, I inevitably tap out, he stops, etc., half an hour is wasted, and I get my 5-6 shots I need. At least he doesn't think I'm an addict :)
Local anesthethics are not exactly addictive, though the mother substance cocaine is. Dentists put these at spots you'd expect to be the nerves for the intended region. I'd guess you either have some variant innervation or the dentist misses.
He indeed thinks I have some anatomical variation, but I guess still forgets about it the next time - it's not like I get dental work done every few weeks. It's ok, worse things happen, e.g., Christina's case.
>Interesting how the doctors just assume their initial dose is "just right". Despite never having even met the patient before in many cases.
Snarky suspicion: Do they even adjust for the patient's _weight_?
( Come to think of it, "low dose" aspirin _is_ 81 mg. That's the only dose I've ever seen for it. I have a _very_ hard time believing that this is the correct dose for every patient from 50 kg to 150 kg. )
It might not vary as much as you think, given that it affects blood platelets. There is probably not so much variation in blood platelet count between people are there is in mass.
Personally I just eat half a Disprin daily. A bit extra, but aspirin doesn't bother me. Except if I get in a fight and bleed like a stuck pig :D
I think the "low dose" aspirin is in fact baby aspirin, so that's where the dose comes from.
I wonder (but not enough to look it up :) ) if the low-dose aspirin effect is highly nonlinear: a small dose makes most of the difference, and adjusting it further to the size of the patient isn't worth the added benefit...
Any practicing Mormons here? I am wondering what you do when you want to meet somewhere to chat with a friend or date, but you don't want to drink alcohol or caffeine. I guess going to a restaurant and not drinking is an option, but that would get expensive...have heavily-Mormon areas developed businesses to cater to this need? Would you be comfortable going to a coffeeshop and not ordering coffee?
We go to coffeeshops and I order herbal tea. If that's not available (which is rare) I usually order a glass of water and some snack like a small sandwich or a bun.
I'm not Mormon, but I've never drunk alcohol or coffee anyway, as I don't see the point. But I'm also too socially oblivious to help with the "what are the social norms around hanging out at coffee shops?" question.
I generally avoid going to bars or alcohol-centric occasions as much as possible, but if I have to go, I'll just get water or apple juice or something.
When it comes to coffee, maybe sometime you could go by a good coffee shop and try an espresso. Hold it to your nostrils and savor the smell, then take a small sip and hold it for a few seconds in your mouth to savor some more before swallowing, and then repeat with the rest. One sign that it's a good coffee place is if they give you seltzer or mineral water on the side, to drink before and afterwards to "cleanse the palate".
The only thing I can compare it to is a fine steak, but they're nothing alike aside from the heat and fire used in creating them.
I had to laugh at a line in a recent book I read where one character, who has been turned into a vampire, says that the upside is that coffee now tastes how it smells 😀
(It's not a very good book but that line was worth it).
Espresso isn't really the entry-level coffee drink for someone who doesn't like coffee...a person is more likely to be drawn in by a mocha or coffee with lots of milk and sugar. Not that I want to pressure this person into drinking coffee!
It's been a long time for me, but I think those are more for people trying to develop a habit, or who want a caffeine infusion? I'm with you in not trying to pressure this person into drinking coffee, in the sense of being a regular drinker of coffee. (The habitual aspect, as in "he be drinking coffee" in AAVE.)
Not a mormon/LDS, but someone who basically doesn't drink alcohol and, until recently, didn't drink coffee: I would get seltzer water in a bar and hot chocolate or mint tea in a cafe. If I were in a large enough group where there wasn't a real need to have a drink for reciprocal sociality, I would be fine without a beverage.
Caffeine isn't prohibited by the religion, though many won't touch it culturally. What's officially prohibited are coffee (though not coffee substitutes), tea from black or green tea leaves, alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs like marijuana and heroin.
No. Because caffeine isn't actually prohibited. Being decaf doesn't make it not coffee or tea.
The bright-line rule is quite simply this: did it come from the coffee plant (any variety) or the tea plant (any variety)? Don't drink it (there are variations about coffee flavored non drinks that have small amounts, but I personally think that's too close to the line). Did it come from the tobacco plant? Don't smoke it. Is it alcoholic? Don't drink it as a beverage (again, variations on using things like alcohol based extracts or alcohol in cooked goods; I don't care about the former but avoid the latter where possible). Similarly, is it a drug being used for non medical purposes? Don't.
Edit: I don't consume caffeine. Because I don't like it--religion is irrelevant here. Similarly, I don't like being around people who are drinking, mostly because the smell is nasty. And to the OP...I have no clue. If I did, I probably wouldn't be hopelessly single at over 40. So no help there.
>Most Latter Day Saints trace the beginnings of Mormonism to Joseph Smith's First Vision, which he said he had in about 1820 in the woods near his home.
A core doctrinal principle of the Church of Jesus Christ is that commandments are given by God, who knows way more (understatement) than we do. We are instructed to look for eternal principles in commandments, but to avoid trying to find loopholes. The spirit of the law is always *stricter* than the letter, at least when it comes to God's commandments. So while people have tried to say "well, the greater principle is to avoid addictive substances, and without caffeine coffee isn't addictive, so I can drink decaf", the official position of the church is that decaf is still coffee and is still covered, and that people who do so are reading in things not written to try to weasel out of actually obeying with a glad heart.
Another is continuing modern revelation--the leaders of the church are entitled to receive ongoing revelation. And they've made it clear in modern days that the core prohibitions are exactly as they read, plus an extension to recreational (legal or not) drugs in general.
On a side note, the Word of Wisdom (the name for the entire set of diet-related commandments) covers more than just prohibitions, although those are the bright-line matters--if you're not doing *at least* that, you can't in good conscience say you're obeying the Word of Wisdom[1]. There is counsel in there to eat a *mostly* plant-based diet, with meat said to be eaten "sparingly, in times of winter or hunger". Other commandments make a good case that *proselyting veganism* ("commanding to abstain from meat") is not in keeping with the will of the Lord--this does not mean that all vegetarians or vegans are sinners *in that regard* (as everyone's a sinner in *some* regard). Different people end up in different places as to exactly what they personally are willing to eat or drink, and we've been counseled to not judge others based on that.
[1] which, to be clear, is not a matter for church discipline. Someone who is not obeying the Word of Wisdom should not hold a temple recommend (there's a question that's literally "Do you obey the Word of Wisdom", but it's all self-certified unless the bishop has personal knowledge on the matter) and probably isn't going to be holding a leadership calling, but that's about it.
I'm going to register a guess that they are prohibited because they might make it look as though you are disobeying the prohibitions, and thus tempt others into disobedience.
As bell tower says above, it's not caffeine that's prohibited, but the coffee/tea/tobacco plants themselves. The relevant text is that they're "not for the body or the belly".
There's also language in there about using "prudence", i.e. good judgement. Not many things are strictly prohibited. Smith preferred guidance to structures. He hated creeds, preferring to edit as he went along.
The WoW (where the food prohibitions come from) came because he'd have meetings about church matters and the men liked to chew and smoke and whatnot. His wife, Emma, hated cleaning up after them and told him so.
Much of the caffeine in soda (and energy drinks, and no-doze etc) is produced by the decaffeination of coffee. Would this also make the end product that its added to substantially “coffee” enough to also prohibit it?
Is it permissible for Mormons to drink non-caffeinated drinks? If I go by Wikipedia:
"There is generally thought to be no prohibition against drinking herbal tea, coffee substitutes such as Pero and Postum, hot chocolate, malt drinks such as Ovaltine and Milo, mate, or hot water."
So they could go to a coffee shop and get herbal tea?
Usually go get some treat to eat if not a full meal. For example in Utah you have a lot of cookie places (e.x. Crumbl, dirty dough, crave) and I think there are more soda shops than Starbucks in Utah.
Yes, there are popular soda and cookie shops in Utah, but they're not meet-and-greet locations. The most popular soda place is a drive-thru only shop, and the cookie places usually don't have any seating either (or they might have a chair). These aren't locations you'd go on a date or do work on their wifi or whatever. They're not a coffee shop replacement, in other words.
There are a few standalone shops that kind of serve this function. People do go to coffee shops and get hot chocolate, shakes, soda, etc. There are coffee shops in Utah, since there are plenty of people who drink coffee. For dating, it's a significantly different culture, such that I'm not sure that aspect of coffee shops has as strong a demand in Utah.
The soda fountain used to be very common in the US until the 1950s- either as a counter in a drugstore, or as a standalone establishment. AIUI they would almost always sell soda, ice cream, and drinks that were based on combinations of soda and dairy ingredients (like ice cream sodas, milkshakes, and egg creams). Some of them would also sell sandwiches or snacks/light meals.
I have heard that the ice cream sundae was invented in a place where blue laws made it illegal to sell soda on Sundays, so the drugstore soda fountains would have something to sell.
Goodwill industries does a lot of help with job placement and applying for benefits. In practice, they work with immigrant populations when situated in communities where such populations are high.
I don't believe the US government has any funds that are dedicated to illegal immigrants. It has some funds that are dedicated to parents, or to drivers, or to people in poverty, not all of which illegal immigrants are excluded from. But it doesn't have any that are specifically directed to illegal immigrants, which is what this person is interested in.
I think FEMA has some grants for temporary shelter to house illegal immigrants, but that's probably not what the OP is thinking of, and the amounts involved are tiny.
If you pay taxes, you're already effectively donating to facilitating illegal immigration. The U.S. gov grants billions of dollars to nonprofits aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Follow @RandoLand_us on X for countless examples. That's without even talking about all the social services and state-level programs.
Only in the sense that you're also facilitating basically every activity that goes on inside the United States, both legal and illegal and otherwise.
My point was that none of this money is specifically dedicated to aiding and abetting illegal immigration, the way some of it is dedicated to aiding and abetting people who live in poverty, or aiding and abetting the construction of semiconductor facilities.
Can someone explain the military aspects of the war in Gaza?
I only have two schema for thinking about war. In one, it's a shooting war, where both sides are out in the open and try to kill each other, eg WWI, WWII, Russia/Ukraine, the first "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq War against Saddam's army. But Israel has 100x more firepower than Hamas. If Gaza were like this, Israel should have won a hundred times over by now.
In the other, it's a "counter-insurgency", where one side controls the territory and the other side is a terrorist/guerilla group hidden among the local population, eg the second phase of the Iraq War where American occupiers were trying to stamp out terrorism. But Israel doesn't seem to be occupying Gaza, there's still talk of "invasion" (eg the invasion of Rafah), and some sources say Israeli bombing has destroyed more than half the buildings in Gaza, which seems excessive for ferretting out hidden terrorists.
So Gaza must be something in between, but I don't have a good sense of what. Does Israel know where Hamas is, or not? What prevents them from eliminating them? What is the day of the average IDF soldier in Gaza like? What about the average Hamas soldier? Are they generally shooting at each other, or not? What does Israel hope to accomplish by bombing all those buildings? What is the strategy of both sides?
I will delete any comment that digresses into which side is in the right, find some other comment subthread for that.
Hi Scott, I got here having read "Links for May" and saw you said "and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame, and it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. "
As a matter of fact, this is incorrect as a matter of "IDF Policy" which is separate from "Israeli Government" policy. (You might ask - how do I know?. The answer is that I can easily explain while providing proof of this but would prefer not to in a public forum that can be signal boosted, but if eg Scott or someone else I can verify the identity of and trust wants to verify we can figure something out).
The IDF is (broadly speaking) trying to defeat Hamas (as in, remove its military capabilities and its ability to govern Gaza) while, in this order, (1) not occupying Gaza de-facto, (2) having as few Israeli soldiers killed and (3) having as few Gazan non-combatants killed (and all this while staying in line with international rules of war). It does this by identifying where Hamas combatants and commanders are and then killing them, even if there is damage to buildings or a limited loss of life non-combatant life.
If the IDF had its way, it would just be allowed to continue to operate in Gaza until materially every single Hamas operative, infrastructure and weapon were destroyed or captured.
Obviously, with many in the Gazan street supporting Hamas and with no alternative government this is a very difficult, if not impossible target. However, surprisingly, it seems this is working:
1. Hamas' ability to operate is being reduced daily (one example- no more rockets)
2. Israeli combat losses are about 260 after Oct 7, which is high for Israel but (and I'm not sure here, but its what my research shows) very low compared to other similar engagements
3. The combatant/civilian casualty ratio is best in the world, if you trust IDF numbers (which the IDF does, even if you, the reader, do not)
4. Israel is complying with the rules of war to an extreme extent (this is a very politically charged topic so potentially a reader may disagree but honestly, the level of compliance and legal to enforce this in the IDF is ridiculously high although there isn't any real way for me to prove that to a reader)
or look for counterterrorist experts on Twitter/X.
However- this (1) this takes a very long time and (2) looks very bad while its happening. Current assessments are that it'll take the IDF at least 6 months, if not more to pursue this strategy.
The "Israeli Government", and specifically, the currently governing coalition, its anyone's guess what their strategy is, and it is pretty clear for Binyamin Netanyahu continuing the war is politically expedient and for some of his far-right partners killing everyone in Gaza is both politically expedient and what they probably actually want to happen.
Thankfully the IDF is a very independent and non-political organization which is filled with professional soldiers and commanders who grew up in it and the government's ability to make it do really bad things is limited. Additionally, the IDF's forces are mostly reservist soldiers, which skew towards left-wing high-tech employees. This is especially true the more you go up into intelligence and strategy.
This is to say - for the IDF to pursue a "bomb as many houses" strategy, it would first face the problem that many of its own officers have a moral objection to that strategy and will follow up on that objection. The IDF teaches its officers to be critical of the system (longer post, no space here) and as many officers are reservists they aren't worried about not getting promoted.
Additionally - the IDF is filled with actually very smart people (so they tend to try to not pursue obviously dumb strategies) and if you track what generals due after they leave the IDF, you'll see that the ones who go into politics tend to be left-wing.
All this to say:
The IDF's strategy is trying to capture or kill Hamas members even at the price of limited civilian deaths and large damage to infrastructure. Its a very difficult task, and its actually doing a pretty good job compared to other similar efforts worldwide. (It may be a bad task to embark on, but thats a different discussion).
Here's a very good video by John Mearsheimer who also said a lot of very relevant (imo) things about the Russian/Ukraine war. He's a political scientist and belongs to offensive realism school of thought. After doing a lot of my own research on both conflicts (I'm a russian israeli with very humanistic views but also open to various interpretations), I found to his work and mostly share his views.
Take this with a grain of salt since I don't have first-handed knowledge, but what makes you believe that it's different from other counter-insurgencies? The crucial thing is that you can't discriminate Hamas from civilians, apart from some exceptional situations.
1) If a Hamas fighter wears a uniform, which makes no sense except for making videos.
2) If a Hamas fighter carries a weapon, which they probably only do if they plan to shoot at you in the next minute. I assume they don't wear their weapons for the remaining 23:59 hours of the day (slightly exaggerated), and have them carefully hidden in some closet/attic, or tunnel if available.
So, no, Israel does not know where Hamas is except for the general heuristic "where everyone else of the Gaza population is". Since this is currently in Rafah, Hamas must also be there. Plus something like "if there is a weapon hidden in a house, then the men in that house are probably Hamas" and "people in tunnels are Hamas".
Now, there is some strategic value for Israel in driving the Gaza population from Rafah to other places. Each time such a displacement happens, it creates the problem for Hamas to bring their weapons (and their hostages) to the new location. They have to do this partially via tunnels and partially by hiding in a crowd of a million people. This is not impossible, but not easy either.
So my model is: the average day of Hamas members is to stay among civilians and do nothing. If there is an opportunity (like a handful of IDF members strolling through the street in a part which is seemingly under control, but where they overlooked a tunnel), then get a few comrades and your weapons and shoot them. But this usually doesn't happen, only once every few days in all of Gaza. So far 272 members of IDF have fallen in combat, a bit more than 1 per day, and such event often bring more than one dead soldier. This list gives you an idea:
For IDF days it's probably more mixed. I think that most of them will not go into areas with people at all. But for those who do: Israel's strategy is to announce that a house will be bombed so that people leave it, then it is bombed, and only after that will IDF forces search the debris for weapons and entrances to tunnels and so on. I imagine that this is closest to "contact with enemies" that IDF members usually come. (It's still dangerous because Hamas fighter could launch a surprise attack from a tunnel, one of the rare occasion that they wear their weapons.) And of course some special units actually go into the discovered tunnels and search them, which is by far the most dangerous task.
Overall, I'd describe the conflict as a pissing contest between Israel and Hamas, a game of chicken over who is more willing to cause the deaths of Gazans.
As I see it, Hamas' strategy is the one that's currently controlling the conflict. They're attempting to de-legitimize Israel, and turn the rest of the world against it. To this end, they try to provoke Israel into committing acts that the rest of the world condemns. (And Israel has taken the bait.) This involves committing acts that Israel will feel the need to retaliate for, and then taking Gazans (and Gazan infrastructure like hospitals) hostage to make sure that any Israeli retaliation against Hamas will kill enough civilian Gazans to activate the disgust of outsiders. Also, Hamas took hostages to exacerbate internal Israeli political divisions, and to provide some leverage against IDF operations.
Hamas failed in their maximal objective, which was to mobilize Israel's neighbors into declaring war on Israel. (I think a lot of credit goes to the Biden administration, here.) But the rest of their strategy appears to be working, and they've still got millions of Gazans to put in harm's way.. However, they're starting to run out of non-destroyed Gaza to operate from, and they've only got a limited number of hostages to exchange, so something might change when those factors run out.
I have no idea what a sensible endgame for Israel looks like. I think LearnsHebrewHatesIP did a better analysis of the internal side than I could. I don't think it's possible to prevent Gazans from supporting Hamas or Hamas-like entities, other than by gulag-style repression, ethnic cleansing (forced removal, but to where?), or genocide.
It might just be possible for Israel to pull off some sort of long-term occupation, after killing most of Hamas and destroying almost all of their infrastructure. If the internal Israeli faction of terrorists (as in, rule by terror) is suppressed, and the occupation is relatively peaceful for long enough, maybe Gaza will eventually turn out like the West Bank. (Which is not objectively good, but it's a lot better than Gaza right now.) I think this will fail because Hamas' successor organization will not let it go peacefully for long enough, and I don't think Israelis have, collectively, displayed enough restraint to avoid escalating while retaliating.
Israel does not have 100x Hamas's firepower in the specific sense of infantry soldiers who can go into a building and, if it's full of Hamas soldiers shoot them, but if it's full of civilians probably not shoot them. Taking into account the need to cover their other borders, rotate troops for R&R, and the bit where they can't afford to keep all the reservists deployed for many months on end, it's doubtful they even have 10x advantage in that area.
And when it comes to removing an enemy deeply entrenched in an urban area, anything less than a 10:1 advantage is decidedly underwhelming, and I think looks pretty much like what you are seeing - especially if it's a casualty-averse western army doing the removing. You want to gather as much intelligence as possible before sending your men to kick down a door, and you want to do it at the perfect time with all the right support available. And that will be to kick down a door and clear a building, not "...and if you've got them on the run, chase them into the next building", because you've got no idea what sort of ambush is in the next building.
When it comes to the "demolish buildings and kill everyone in them, military or civilian alike" kind of firepower, yes, Israel has probably a 100x advantage over Hamas. But, while Israel may be waging total war against Hamas, they are not in fact willing to commit actual genocide along the way. So, while they could have destroyed every building in Gaza by now, and killed every person if they wanted, that's not the kind of war they're fighting. They did destroy an awful lot of buildings, particularly in the early weeks of the war, but they also frequently delivered warnings to the people in those buildings(*).
Which spared many civilian lives, but meant that Hamas's soldiers would also escape. Now Israel has to clear them out the hard way, from wherever they've found to hide. Which is to say Rafa, with slow deliberation and with as many civilians as possible enticed to relocate to relatively open camps.
(*) Even if you don't kill the Hamas soldiers, destroying the building denies them a strongpoint, possibly destroys some of their supplies or collapses an entrance to their tunnel network and so forth. If it's also perceived as gratuitously punishing Palestinian civilians I suspect that Israel doesn't mind that so much these days even if that aspect would be a strategic and ethical mistake.
It is indeed something in between, because Hamas is something in between. It is a terrorist group with all the resources and institutions of a (small, failing) state, that fight a guerrilla war that it was planning for years, in an area that it used to control for years. Imagine if imperial Japan didn't have a normal army, and instead put the resources into( preparing the first strike and) making Tokio a Hell to occupy.
> What prevents them from eliminating them?
Hamas members may be found in 3 main kinds of places: tunnels, private houses, or places like hospitals/schools. Private houses may be destroyed if we have enough reason to think that there is a Hamas member there, and not too many civilians (depending on the rank of the Hamas member, and the threshold is not public). Bombing a hospital is of course harder to justify, so it requires ground invasion (which is nightmare, because every house may contain enemy combatants, and be connected to other houses via tunnels). Last are the tunnels - we probably know where some of them are, but destroying a tunnel is not that easy - especially if its enterance is in a hospital. I Personally don't know of any terrorist organization that used such an impressive tunnel system, and it may be part of the difference.
My understanding is that the 15-20 threshold does not mean "don't worry about collateral demage as long a it is below that number" but more like "your commander's commander will anyway have to approve it after consulting a lawyer. He is not authorized to approve more than 20 without his own commander's approval, so don't bother suggesting it unless it is super fucking important"
> some sources say Israeli bombing has destroyed more than half the buildings in Gaza, which seems excessive for ferretting out hidden terrorists.
More than that in parts. Northern Gaza is pretty much a moonscape. There are no universities left and most hospitals are gone, except in southern Gaza which is being attacked now.
I think there is precedent for this in history but it would be taking sides to spell it out.
Dresden and Coventry come to mind, though I haven't really seen extensive photography of any of these places to see how the bombings really compare in destructiveness.
One major difference of WW2 era bombing is that it was extremely inaccurate. You just dump bombs in the general area of the target and hope that some of them land nearby (and they usually didn't).
Whereas nowadays, Israel can see everything and hit exactly what they're aiming at in real time, every time.
The US has bombs that can target *a specific floor* of a building, or even blow up a car without hurting pedestrians on the sidewalk. I assume Israel has similar technology (whether they care is a much different question).
> I assume Israel has similar technology (whether they care is a much different question).
How many high-precision munitions Israel has is another matter altogether. If the Ukraine war has taught you anything, let it be that the West is incapable of producing munitions on the scale needed for actual war. I wouldn't be surprised if Israel burned through all the guided bombs in the first few months and is now reduced to dumb weapons systems. Alas, I can't find any good technical reporting on Israel like I can for Ukraine.
Essentially none of Israel's behavior in this war actually makes sense in a vacuum without considering the extreme amount of pressure from outside groups, many of which consider an actual defeat of Hamas to be problematic or are even outright sympathetic to Hamas. Egypt has leverage due to the peace treaty, America has leverage due to a dependence on its high-tech weaponry, Europe and the UN can cause grave diplomatic damage, et cetera, and all of those powers have things at the top of their minds which are much higher than the welfare of Israel. This in turn has led to such directly self-sabotaging behavior as dropping the tempo of the war during the entire first half of this year, holding off on Rafah for months, taking moral responsibility for providing food, water, electricity, and Internet to a hostile enemy population, agreeing to wildly uneven hostage deals, and so forth.
I don't think America, Europe, or even the UN would consider defeat of Hamas to be problematic. America and Europe have actively aided in attempts to destroy Hamas, and have even ended humanitarian operations when there were worries that members of Hamas might be involved.
As far as the UN is concerned, it is definitely on the Palestinian side, which includes at least tolerating and often supporting the various terrorist organizations that actually run that state -- remember, the General Assembly is basically controlled by a consortium of every nasty dictatorship in the world, including Hamas's founders and backers as well as powers such as Russia and China which just enjoy seeing anything West-aligned getting taken down a peg.
America and Europe don't go that far, but even then you have to have noticed a weird preference on that side for "frozen conflicts." Take one side in a fight, deliver soaring rhetoric about how your commitment to them is ironclad, but don't give them enough weapons and freedom of action to win, just to reach a stalemate. If I were to be generous I'd suggest that's because they believe a negotiated compromise is better in all situations than victory, even when the faction that would win is unambiguously on our side and the faction which would lose is unambiguously an enemy. Or, they fear that the enemy side would escalate against the West after taking a genuine loss. There are less generous suggestions I could make here.
You must admit the frozen conflict approach explains a lot, not just about Israel-Palestine, but about the Ukraine-Russia conflict too.
This is totally off base for Ukraine. The US and NATO have done everything they can to support Ukraine short of entering the war themselves. To the extent that they don't have enough material, it's because the West doesn't have any more to give. All of the NATO arms infrastructure has been conditioned by decades of low-intensity counter insurgency fighting. The annual production quota for a lot of US weapons systems is enough for a few weeks in Ukraine. No one in NATO wants to incur the economic and social costs of retooling to a war economy, and no one in the private sector wants to invest billions of dollars in new factories when Ukraine could collapse in a few years. It's not that the West wants a frozen Ukraine-Russia war, that's just the best possible outcome with their current resources.
The only exception to this is very long range weapon systems that can strike deep into the Russian interior. Things like German Taurus missiles or US ATACMs. NATO has been very reluctant to give these to Ukraine, and gives them range-limited export models when they give any at all. I expect these are off the table due to diplomatic channels with Russia and a desire to avoid escalation.
"The US and NATO have done everything they can to support Ukraine short of entering the war themselves."
Then why aren't there hundreds of F-16s and other 4th-generation fighters filling the skies over Ukraine? That's a thing the West could have done; we've got the planes sitting idle and two years is enough time to train Ukrainian pilots and ground crews from scratch, The US and NATO haven't done that, therefore it is false to say that they have done everything they can. And many other examples I could name.
*During the first six months of the war*, the US and NATO did pretty close to everything they could, with the exception that they didn't think the war would last more than six months so they didn't do things that would take six months to pay off - like starting to train Ukrainians to fly F-16s.
Then the Ukrainians started winning fairly spectacular victories; the kind that could have led to Ukrainian tank brigades rolling into Russia if the Ukrainians hadn't decided to stop at the border. At which point the US, and to a lesser extent NATO, dialed the aid back from "do everything we can" to "drip-feed just enough weapons to maintain a stalemate". Which appears to be where we are now.
We have not done everything we could. We have not even done everything that we cheaply could. That is shameful, and it does raise the question of why.
It really does look to me like the Biden administration, and too many other Western governments, think the only morally acceptable or geopolitically prudent way to end a war is with a bloody military stalemate and a cease-fire that merely postpones the inevitable.
I would be careful ascribing some kind of hyper competency to the US military adventurism complex. Afghanistan was pretty much a repudiation of everything the Pentagon and American elites believed about fighting a war. The now ex-President of Afghanistan had a PhD from Columbia. He published *Fixing Failed States.* You can't make this stuff up.
The USAF takes 2-3 years to train pilots before it lets them fly unsupervised. This is under ideal conditions and without a language barrier. Whether Ukraine could have its own functional air force by now is debatable. But it doesn't matter because no one thought of it in time. Another possibility for withholding aircraft is a fear that the Russians will end up stealing our technology. They already have captured/salvaged Abrams tanks and Bradley APCs.
The NATO/US tried to help as much as they could within their ability. Frankly I don't know if there is actually an amount of aid that would prevent Ukraine from losing. Russia has a much larger population and industrial base, which is what matters in a long grinding war of attrition. At this point, I expect the military community has seen the writing on the wall. No one wants to start WWIII over Ukraine, which is what I expect it would take to save it.
In the early days of the war after Russia's failed blitz on Kiev, Ukraine did win some impressive victories. Russia had too few boots on the ground for the amount of territory they controlled. Ukraine was adept at exploiting these weaknesses and punched through the enemy lines in multiple places. But it's a misunderstanding of the strategic situation to think they could have just rolled into Moscow if they wanted to. Overly aggressive thrusts into enemy territory have a large risk of getting surrounded and destroyed without sufficient support, which Ukraine was not in a position to provide. Look at what happened to the Wehrmacht in the Falaise pocket if you want to know what I'm talking about.
The next time a foreign conflict ends in a bitter stalemate, wonder if that's the best anyone could do.
The "desire to avoid escalation" by preventing Ukraine from attacking targets within Russia is exactly what I'm talking about. If you are only allowed to fight the nearby military forces and are prevented from hitting strategic targets in the rear you are not going to win, especially against a much stronger foe. You are only permitted to feed your men into meat grinder trench warfare until, I dunno, Russia gets bored of killing them and gives up?
When I say long range I mean something like 300km within Russia. There is hardly a lack of targets in occupied Ukraine and the near Russian border regions. Not that it would make any difference to the war if Ukraine did have deep strike capability.
The frozen conflict point is an interesting one. Though I don’t think it describes their behavior in Afghanistan, Libya, Kosovo, Syria, and various other conflicts they’ve been involved in. All of them involved the same sort of partial support but some ended more or less successfully than this frozen conflict.
They are against using *any means necessary* to defeat Hamas, which I'm pretty sure is what they meant by that. Obviously there are more... efficient ways of going about this, which they can't really do because it would be a PR disaster for the US.
If the disallowed "any means necessary" includes entering the city where the enemy's remaining armed divisions are, then that is equivalent to not wanting the enemy to be defeated, regardless of rhetoric. I'd also point out the deafening cries from Europe and, increasingly, the US for a permanent "ceasefire," which is also not exactly congruent with victory.
Sure, but then the objection isn't to "defeat Hamas" but rather to "defeat Hamas in a way that involves X number of civilian deaths and Y amount of collateral damage."
Morally, it seems like the civilian deaths and misery would be justifiable if the current campaign was likely to end up with some kind of lasting peace. OTOH, if this is just an extended beatdown to intimidate the Palestinians so the next attack happens in 10 years instead of 5 years, it's not so easy to justify. But I don't think you can evaluate the Gaza war without some idea about what the long-term effects of it will be.
Lasting peace is unfeasible, the legitimate goal that would justify the current campaign is a lasting military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip such that preventing further attacks or arresting a terrorist only take something on the scale of a police raid, rather than a bloody bombing campaign and a months-long invasion.
Five additional years of peace is a pretty good justification, especially when a "lasting peace" right now is quite definitely off the table under any circumstance -- there is no timeline where, left battered but intact with a plausible win under their belt, Hamas evolves into a peaceful organization willing to coexist with Israel. I'd be surprised if they went even a week before launching more rockets.
Indeed, ten years of peace thanks to a thorough beatdown of Hamas would be greatly promising for Israeli-Arab normalization in general, if not resolving Palestine in particular. The Sunni states are clearly not interested in fighting and they're willing to make peace in a context where the Palestinian issue isn't inflaming the world situation, as we saw with the Abraham Accords.
Gaza is a counter-insurgency, you just have a flawed model of "Controlling Territory" where it's always like that in the West Bank.
What you're seeing in Gaza is what "Controlling Territory" has looked like in most counter-insurgencies, Israel **does** control the territory, it doesn't have X soldiers per every Y square kilometers of Gaza but that's completely irrelevant, it has F15s and F16s and Merkavas that can cross all of Gaza in time ranges from 5 minutes to 2 hours.
The problem is, who laid the rule of "Territory is Life, seize my Territory and I will roll up and die on the floor"? States. The obsession with territory is entirely a self-inflicted fetish owing to the origins of States as evolutions of feudal social contracts.
When Israel was fighting states, seizing territories in a Blitz Krieg fashion was devastatingly successful, it acted as a force multiplier for what is - realistically - a nation that would be crushed by any prolonged pre-WW2 conflict of attrition. But armor and modern airpower act as the core primitives from which Israel constructs its military superiority.
But conflicts of attrition are literally what Guerrillas are all about. Israel wants a single grand showdown, a single Battle of Endor, just like the Empire wanted in Star Wars. In contrast, Hamas is the Rebel Alliance, they **would** be crushed in any remotely direct confrontation, but: Catch Them If You Can. Their mere presence challenges Israeli image, their mere existence is a continues win for them and a continues loss for Israel. It's a "Capture The Flag" and the side that has the flag is Hamas, they seek to prolong this state of affairs for as long as possible, possibly forever.
> Does Israel know where Hamas is, or not?
Which Hamas? It's extremely easy to know where a random Hamas militant is: They shoot at Israeli soldiers with AK-47s, Yassin 105s (RPGs) and snipers, and film themselves doing so.
But Yahya Al Sinwar, roughly the equivalent of Yoav Gallant for Hamas? Mohammed Al Daif, also a Yoav Gallant figure? No. Hostages and their entourage of guards? Still no.
What about the political leadership of Hamas, like Ismail Haniyah? My **Impression** is that Israel does know where they are, but the only problem is that where they are is in Qatar, Egypt or Turkey, an assassination in any single one of them would have the effect of pouring all the Middle East's gasoline on an Amazon rain forest fire.
> What does Israel hope to accomplish by bombing all those buildings?
Making Gazans' lives so hell that they join the war on Hamas, here's an investigation by +972 (the telephone prefix for phones in Israel and Palestine) magazine, A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/. The tldr; is that Israel has 4 classification for targets in Gaza, and only 1 or at most 2 of them are actually credibly "This will immediately and physically hurt Hamas if we hit it". The other 2 are so called "Power Targets", that is, a euphuism for bombing civilians in the hope that they will revolt on Hamas.
> What is the strategy of both sides?
The strategy of Hamas is that common meme among online gamers: Objective -> Survive. There is no strategy beyond that, just survive and keep driving Israel crazy, every moment Israel is at war is one more moment it's killing civilians, losing allies, masturbating away its economic might, and drawing Iranian and Proxy-Iranian fire. In addition to deepening social unrest and political polarization. Not to mention the 80K-100K citizens displaced from the North under gunpoint from Hezbollah, and the much smaller number from Gaza's envelope (the area around Gaza which the victims of October 7th were primarily from).
The strategy of Israel is incoherent. The declared aim is "Bring back hostages" AND "militarily dismantle Hamas", both at the same time. That's - in any realistic book - impossible. You will understand Israel's war conduct better if you decompose its state vector as the sum of multiple competing forces:
(1) Netanyahu and his crowd: Those don't want anything except the political survival of Netanyahu and his camp, as well as massive, 100x-if-possible casualties on the Palestinian side. The hostages are a nice-to-have but not a priority.
(2) So called Neo-Zionists and/or Religious Zionists: Those believe in a "Greater Israel", West Bank, Gaza, some of them even Southern Lebanon. To them, the Gaza war is a fundamental vindication for their view: Settlers bring security. The West Bank is settled and didn't have October 7th, Gaza was de-settled and launched October 7th, therefore, the reasoning goes, Settlement Is All You Need. They want to settle Gaza and expel severely reduce the Palestinians from Gaza, they also want to hasten and accelerate the ethnic violence against Arabs in the West Bank, both as payback for October 7th and as insurance policy and a practical demo for what Settlement can do to Israeli security. They tend to actively despise the hostages and their families, inciting police against them behind closed doors, but they don't dare yet to engage with them in the open.
(3) The Pro-War-After-Hostages side: This is not a single political party or side, it's a loose informal coalition of all those who do support the war and do want it to continue but only after whatever it takes for Hamas to return the hostages, including a temporary ceasefire that might last months and releasing Palestinian prisoners. This camp tends to **strongly** call for early elections and to dispose of Netanyahu before continuing the war under a more competent leadership.
(4) The Anti-War side: Those tend to be reviled and surrounded on all sides, but they are rapidly growing. They include orgs like Standing Together and Bereaved Families Forum, their take on October 7th is that it's the natural consequence of occupation and other Israeli policies, and that continuing the war in Gaza is just digging the hole further.
Those 4 camps and potentially more are all riding in a single trench coat which is post-2023-October Israel. More aid into Gaza? That's camp 3 or 4 taking the wheel. Gaza Settlement Conference right after the first ICJ trial of genocide? That's camp 2. "Total Victory" even though the war has dragged on for 8 months? That's camp 1.
Here's a couple of sources on the military side of the war which I'm not very familiar with, I haven't watched most of those things because I'm more focused and interested in the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, but I can vouch for their neutrality from other topics I watched them on, they **might** have been radicalized by this particular war - any one of them at any rate - but that would be surprising news:
Trust in those sources doesn't mean they won't be biased or misleading, just that they won't be intentionally so. Everything is colored by what sources used to make it, and you may find bias here and there.
At the risk of "digressing into which side is right", I would argue something similar to what Sam Kriss has in his pieces on Gaza: the IDF doesn't really have a clear strategy for victory (Hamas is a little more goal oriented, I think, but their strategy is political rather than military). There's no way of saying that which isn't a condemnation, but it also can't be ignored because tactics are derived from strategy; rational tactics assumes a rational strategy.
Israel's stated goal is to destroy Hamas, which is credible, but their strategy is not really geared to achieve this. The Gaza war is a guerilla war where the occupier is avoiding occupation; hence your confusion, it's a hybrid of the two forms. Normally you need to occupy territory in order to destroy the political infrastructure of an insurgency. Israel is casualty averse and can't afford long wars at a high degree of mobilization, and occupation is manpower intensive and tedious, so they want to avoid this.
Instead, Israel's strategy revolves around raids, temporary occupations and bombing. Charitably, they're targeting the weapons caches that Hamas needs to fight. This is futile given the dense urban environment and Hamas' vast network of tunnels that negates many of Israel's advantages in technology and firepower. Israel has withdrawn from large areas of Gaza that it previously occupied, presumably leaving them for Hamas to re-occupy them.
Historically successful counterinsurgency strategies have revolved around separating the insurgency from the population it draws from. Israel has done this to the extent that it can, but there's really nowhere for the population to go within the small territory of the strip.
Returning to the original point, occupiers in guerilla wars often lose track of what they're doing (cf. The USA in Vietnam). Without clear objectives, their alternative is to wear the insurgency down through attrition. After a certain point, that's just fighting for the sake of fighting, redoubling ones efforts after having forgotten ones aim.
(For the sake of completeness, some will argue that the strategy is to be "bring pressure" on Hamas to release the hostages. If Hamas isn't existentially threatened by Israel's war, then it isn't bringing pressure on them, so the same applies.)
Re Hamas, they have no hope of defeating Israel through force alone, but neither can they be rooted out. Effectively they're waiting the Israelis out, inflicting casualties where they can. Their strategy to the extent they have one is long-term and political: for as long as Israel inflicts disproportionate casualties (whether there is a way to fight that avoids this or not) the international situation will shift against them. Remember, that's not only in true for the West, but even more so in the Middle East. The more violence occurs in Palestine, the more the Middle Eastern governments Israel has been hoping for rapprochement with have to stand against Israel for domestic reasons. Egypt's recent turn to support South Africa's ICJ case could be big on that front, they are by far the most important country for Israel to keep on side. But again, lacking a clear military objective (other than survival) in its own way this too is violence for the sake of violence.
So perhaps the optimal thing for Israel to do is to carry on for a few more weeks or months, give the whole strip a quick once-over, degrade Hamas's capabilities as much as possible in that time, and then fuck off back home?
Getting rid of Hamas entirely isn't possible, nor is ensuring the election of a new peace-loving pro-Israeli government in Gaza. But what they can reasonably hope for is to massively degrade Hamas's capabilities while teaching a lesson that any future attacks on Israel will be met with a massively punitive response.
What they have to do is destroy the tunnels and take control of the border to prevent future imports of weapons and equipment. No new weapons, no new tunnels = Hamas loses.
Because it doesn't make sense. "Degrade Hamas's capabilities, and then fuck off back home", was Israel's policy from 2006 to 10/6/2023. They called it "mowing the grass". That's how they got 10/7/2023.
They're not mowing the grass any more. They're rooting out the weeds.
The policy of the Israeli government prior to 10/7/2023 was to assume that Hamas didn’t want to attack Israel. Hamas has not been coy about expressing their views--their 2017 charter said “armed resistance” was the “strategic choice”--but apparently the Israeli government preferred to believe otherwise.
Negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians, if even possible (Hamas hinted at a willingness to accept a two state solution in its 2017 charter, but I don’t know whether it actually would), would mean Israel giving up territory that it now controls. On the other hand, <em>not</em> having a peace agreement means that Israel is at war, and needs to remain on a war footing even if no fighting is happening at the moment. But if you are an authoritarian, you don’t have to choose between those two options. Instead, you can live in a fantasy world where no choice is necessary. If something dramatic happens that makes the fantasy unsustainable (like the Oct. 7 attack), you then pivot to arguing that you must remain in power to protect the country from the mess you created.
Hamas and/or PIJ has attacked Israel on multiple occasions in every calendar year since Hamas took power in Gaza. It is not plausible that Israeli government policy assumed that "Hamas didn't want to attack Israel".
Israeli government policy assumed that, so long as they maintained strict control of the border and periodically "mowed the lawn", Hamas's attacks would remain tolerably ineffective. That's what lead to 10/7.
I've used the term "ethnic cleansing" a lot regarding this war, and I'm not convinced anything else is going on. I apologize if, accordingly, you need to delete said comment, but I believe the military goals of ethnic cleansing differ from those of both conventional and counter-insurgent warfare, so this distinction is relevant.
Israel's government wants to depopulate Gaza, reasoning that Palestinians living there are all Hamas supporters who can't fight back if they're dead, and desires the land for resettlement of Israelis. It's not governing anything, just killing and killing.
With regard to Rafah, international and domestic pressure seems to have forced it earlier in the conflict to allow people in the rest of Gaza somewhere to flee, which was the city in the southernmost portion of the strip, furthest from Israeli population centers. But it's been going on for months, the IDF isn't mutinying, Israel's neighbors aren't invading, and the US is giving Israel a blank check, so Netanyahu and his government are trying to finish it.
At the risk of posting in troll thread, what exactly is making you believe that destroying Hamas is not the main objective? By the same reasoning, you could call the British bombing campaign on WW2 Germany "genocide" (unlike Israel, they were not even dropping leaflets).
Resettlement suggestions appear from time to time on the margins of Israeli society, but I have yet to hear one from any IDF top brass. Not to mention that 30K of 1+ million in half a year does not make a very successful genocide campaign.
I believe that 30k in one year is by this point a significant undercount, as the statistic originates with reports from Gaza's (now largely destroyed) hospital network, which is no longer able to provide updates.
Britain did bomb German cities during World War II, but did nothing remotely like the deliberate targeting of hospitals seen in this conflict. Britain did not evacuate cities at gunpoint, either. And when Britain (or even America, in the Pacific War, which imo had a way more brutal bombing campaign) did take territory, it set up its own occupying administration, instead of expelling the population.
They are already not listing names. Nothing would keep them from counting the dead in the rubble they've cleared and extrapolating accordingly. The idea that the Gaza health ministry is undercounting dead is one of the most inane theories I've heard over the last couple years, on par with Krokus City Hall being a Ukrainian op.
Maybe the Nazis didn't use hospitals as barracks? It's not often that I end up handing it to the Nazis, but sometimes you get to appreciate things in comparison. (Well, not counting the fact that they did some forcible euthanasia in asylums.)
Because even if "Hamas" was destroyed, another equivalent group would just replace them unless the conditions changed. And Israel is completely uninterested in improving the situation down there. So that only leaves them with one method of solving this problem.
The Marshall Plan was proposed in 1947. Before that, the most widely discussed (I think?) proposal was the Morgenthau Plan, which ended up ditched as Hoover realized that it would cause half Germany to starve (and Europe to be overrun by the Soviets). Give the Israelis some time.
I have to agree. What is to prevent a new "Samah" party from arising with the same goals as before, but without Israeli hostages and without having attacked Israel?
>So Gaza must be something in between, but I don't have a good sense of what. Does Israel know where Hamas is, or not? What prevents them from eliminating them? What is the day of the average IDF soldier in Gaza like? What about the average Hamas soldier? Are they generally shooting at each other, or not? What does Israel hope to accomplish by bombing all those buildings? What is the strategy of both sides?
I will delete any comment that digresses into which side is in the right, find some other comment subthread for that.
I think the big think to understand is there is no clear boundary between "Hamas fighter" and "civilian". I tis a continuum, where people can be on a wide array of involvement, and so you really need to go building to building and root out all the infrastructure/weapons/traps/etc, and then shoot people who try and stop you. There isn't special "Hamas goggles" you can wear.
Maybe tangential to your question, but this article describes how the lack of a post-war plan means that the Israeli army is fighting to retake the same areas over and over.
My understanding is that Hamas is following the 9/11 playbook here. After the 2001 attacks, Al-Qaeda saw significant recruitment to their cause. This was in part because they were able to demonstrate a 'successful' attack, but also because it provoked an American response localized to the ME that affected previously unaligned parties. But they didn't just attack once and then disappear. They continued fighting using standard asymmetric warfare tactics, like hiding among the civilian population, not using official uniforms, etc. This ensured that the US backlash produced civilian casualties, angered unaligned parties, and produced continuous recruitment opportunities. By the time the US pulled out of Afghanistan, soldiers were fighting people who weren't even born when 9/11 happened.
In the Arab communities, there have always been disparate views on the Palestinian conflict. Provoking Israel to invade and bomb Gaza neatly consolidated many of those factions/viewpoints toward Hamas' way of thinking. The argument Hamas is making isn't to the US or Israel, really, but to other Arabs. The point Hamas are trying to make is to say, "Look at what's happening in Gaza. You can't negotiate with Israel, they just want to take the land. The only way to win this is through armed resistance in asymmetric warfare."
To make that argument, they only have to be seen still fighting in Gaza. They don't have to be winning, just still fighting. They're counting on Israel to kill non-combatants, which will further promote recruitment to Hamas. If someone's grandma dies, Hamas is there saying, "Do you want revenge? We're the only ones fighting against the people who killed grandma." When Israel 'finishes up' in the north and moves south, Hamas has an incentive to pop back up in the north to demonstrate that they haven't been beaten.
This also means that the Israeli strategy is as doomed to failure as the American strategy in Afghanistan early in that war. A direct military invasion is a necessary component of Hamas' strategy. The whole point of 10/7 was a recruitment drive, and that's what they're getting right now - not just in Gaza but throughout the Arab world. There are almost certainly more Hamas and Hamas-aligned groups today than at this time last year, or even last month. The current war will have long-term effects on people throughout the region as a down payment on recruitment for the next 20 years. In short, Hamas is capitalizing on cycles of violence to achieve their political objective - not of peace and security in Gaza - but of growing their movement.
More concerning is how well the pyrrhic backlash strategy of major terrorist attacks seems to work. If a malicious actor can manage to provoke a stronger power with a sufficiently powerful single event, they can use the reaction as a powerful recruitment tool for years to come. This is because the single event is only unforgettable in the minds of sympathizers, while the ongoing reaction is played continuously for neutral and hostile actors.
A better response to both 9/11 and 10/7 might have been an extended policing action. Both CIA and Mossad have reputations. If they were able to infiltrate and destroy individual terrorists cells in highly targeted ways, they could reduce the incentive to join terrorist orgs, eliminate the perception that terrorists are 'fighting battles' (since there wouldn't be pitched battles to fight), and demonstrate to the victims of the attack that they're responding appropriately. Indeed, in making it a police action, they would reduce the clout given to the terrorist organization for conducting the attack and thereby reduce the incentive for conducting future attacks to drive recruitment.
> Both CIA and Mossad have reputations. If they were able to infiltrate and destroy individual terrorists cells in highly targeted ways, they could reduce the incentive to join terrorist orgs
That might work in areas that are part of Israel proper or at least actively occupied by Israel. It doesn't work in pre-war Gaza because in pre-war Gaza, Hamas was the police and they weren't particularly keen to help Israel arrest their terror cells.
IDK what's feasible or not. I do know both organizations have conducted high-profile killings of major figures in hostile territory on numerous occasions. Maybe that's not reliable enough to, say, put out a hit on the organizers of 9/11 and 10/7 to get the kind of results that would dissuade people from conducting that kind of attack. It's an empirical question, and one that's not possible for someone like me who is outside the intelligence community to assess.
It can't be worse than the military responses that enhance recruitment for these terrorist organizations. It's an ingroup/outgroup problem, where people will rally against the outgroup if they perceive themselves as part of the ingroup that's under attack. And the violent reaction of major powers to this kind of attack absolutely reinforces that strategy. It's ironically inviting this kind of attack, but only after we get back to peacetime and the terrorist recruitment drive is over. That makes peace impossible. So if it's a question of an imperfect solution versus a counterproductive one, I say why not try the experiment? Or maybe anything other than what we know doesn't work.
Israel originally invaded Northern Gaza and then Khan Yunis. During this period, they briefly occupied some of the territory while trying to destroy infrastructure and clear things out but mostly set up on the ground to the extent necessary to search through specific sites. Otherwise, they stationed themselves and resources outside of harm's way (at first, within protected areas of Gaza, and now, inside Israel).
In February, Israel left all of Gaza except for a small road they constructed which bisects Gaza between the North and the South. Prior to this, Israel had searched through/destroyed infrastructure in all of Gaza except for Rafah (where nearly all Palestinians are seeking refuge) and two former refugee camp villages in central Gaza. Since then, Israel has conducted a small number of raids/missions in areas they previously left but mostly are not in Gaza anymore.
To enter an area of Gaza, a huge amount of work needs to be done.
First, it's targeted from the air to destroy existing infrastructure, followed by being swept by vehicles for IEDs, then plowed through with infantry, etc., all of which requires significant protective and logistical support.
Hamas mostly isn't fighting the IDF head-on.
There are two specific strategies at play.
A large chunk of Hamas fighters flee and migrate to areas where they are out of harm's way. Another group will hide, often in tunnel shafts, until they can fire at IDF soldiers.
Sometimes Israel specifically launches a raid into an areas where Hamas fighters are actively gathering, in which case they engage in a firefight (mostly, they are destroyed with things other than guns though)
Israel has essentially no tolerance for dead soldiers. It's not impossible for the IDF to control territory, but it's more dangerous than what they want to sacrifice, so they essentially try to minimize territorial control and actually being visible in Gaza, to the extent possible. If they need to control territory or be visible, they use a huge amount of support to protect themselves, which is very costly.
Because Israel finds it too dangerous to hold territory, once they sweep through an area, they give it back, which is then taken over again by a degraded Hamas (there is nobody else vying for control and Hamas still has weapons/support, so they de-facto control any territory Israel leaves).
The other aspect of this is that Israel isn't trying to remove Hamas from power. It would be possible for Israel to sweep through an area and then hand it off to a new power. But Israel doesn't want to provide any alternative form of government to Hamas, because they are worried that any alternative to Hamas will make a Palestinian state more likely to materialize, which they view as a much worse alternative to Hamas.
This war is going catastrophically bad for Israel based on what I think they should be trying to achieve (removing Hamas from power), solely due to Netanyahu's objectives being very different than mine. FWIW, Netanyahu's objectives are not aligned with the IDF or the majority of Israelis, but unfortunately, what he says, goes.
>"Israel has essentially no tolerance for dead soldiers."
Do you have a good explanation for this? Obviously any army wants to protect its own soldiers, but typically that desire will be balanced against the military objectives that justify the soldiers being there in the first place. Is it because the various factions of Israeli leadership can't agree on what the military objectives are, so avoiding dead soldiers ends up being the only objective by default?
Maybe because of the mandatory service. The soldiers are not citizens from different class and different parts of the country that we care about in the abstract . Those are our literal friends and family members.
I suspected this is what would happen, but do you have any sources for this? The US media doesn't really have any good sources inside Gaza, and non-paywalled Israeli media (i.e. Jerusalem Post) seem mostly focused on the Israeli reaction and world reaction to the Gaza operation. What sources am I missing?
I suspect the "day in the life" situations will be hard to come by and/or anti-inductive on the open internet, for reasons between "this would give information to the other side and make it easier for them to counter our tactics" and "the people actually doing this day-to-day are not looking at this particular part of the internet, because they have more urgent things to do with each hand".
Just an observation, but I think people are wayyyy overindexed on 'AI taking all teh jobs' and way underindexed on 'middle class jobs in rich countries are gradually offshored in the coming decades'. Take a look at the careers page of any mid-sized to large company, and you'll see that a lot of software development, back office, and other traditionally middle class jobs are now located in India, Eastern Europe, or to a lesser extent Latin America. I almost don't know of any company of a decent size that doesn't have some of their programming functions done in India now.
I'm aware that this was attempted in the early 2000s and didn't work out, but I'm seeing the shift happening now. Remote work has undoubtedly accelerated the change- if you can program remotely from within the US, why can't the company just hire remote developers in Poland who are willing to work US hours, and save themselves a bunch of money? But it's not just software, it's really any office job, including lower-wage stuff like middle and back office functions. Anyways, this is what I'm seeing in corporate America and I feel like this is very underdiscussed, especially compared to AI hype. Of course some jobs cannot be done remotely- for those of us with a couple few decades of working life left, might be worth considering what those are
I am unable to find any good data on rates of white collar jobs that are offshored. Do you have any?
Right now, unemployment in the US is at historical lows and has been for a long time. If offshoring of jobs is picking up, it's likely because there are more jobs in total and not Americans losing jobs. This seems like a good indication for the economy to me.
Also remember that offshoring is done to reduce costs, which will, in the long run, produce surplus for US consumers (through cheaper goods and services). While its easy to see an office worker who lost their job to someone overseas, it's much harder to see the benefits of reduced costs which are spread across many people.
My observation was meant to be descriptive and not normative. With that being said, your last paragraph is so ridiculous it's hard for me to grock that people actually believe this kind of thing. Can you think through what might be some of the consequences to the US economy of not having high-end employment? Advanced industries?
What have the consequences been of US farming employment dropping by 90% from its peak? "This time it's different" Why? What about white collar jobs makes them different when they are eliminated (either through outsources or technological progress)?
Outsourcing is downstream of other political, economic, and technological dynamics. Labor for some function can be performed more cheaply elsewhere, so the labor is outsourced. But the effect that has can only be determined by know *why* the labor is more expensive in the US.
There may be negative consequences of complete industries being outsourced out of the US. You only asked about specific jobs. But again, to understand the consequences we have to know why the industry was outsourced (though i can't think of a single *industry* that has been outsourced or eliminated from the US, mostly specific parts of an industry or a job function within an industry).
Low value manufacturing was outsourced because the products are low value and don't support the necessary wages in the US. Bring back those jobs would lead to low wages for those workers or those goods becoming more expensive - neither of which is a good outcome.
Cutting edge microchip processing was "outsourced" because firms outside of the US developed new technologies that were better. US firms and US consumers have greatly benefited from those developments. Bringing that manufacturing to the US is hard, as we are seeing, and may be a net positive for the US (we'll see).
It's also hard to define outsourcing. Many people used to use iTunes to listen to music, but now they use Spotify. So they went from a product made by a US firm by (primarily) US developers to a product made by a Swedish firm made by non-US developers. Is this outsourcing? Should the US have put tariffs on Spotify? Should we have subsidized development of iTunes?
I doubt any of this is persuasive to you. And it probably doesn't even address your comment, I am mostly just adding more of my thoughts. Overall, I think it's impossible to say what the impact of your hypothetical is, the economy is too dynamic and has proved very resilient to this type of change in the past.
We still have the same amount of agricultural output as when the sector employed vastly more workers (well, actually probably a lot more output). That's not at all the same thing as not having food grown in the US at all! Also, agriculture was obviously never a highly skilled technical field- I would like to preserve that knowledge & human capital here in the US.
I'm not into preserving low-value manufacturing, but I am into retaining high-value manufacturing. To your point, cutting edge microchip processing was outsourced because other governments sank investment into attracting the sector via a very deliberate state intervention strategy- not some kind of Adam Smith vision where different countries are good at different things.
Is there any industry or technical knowledge that we shouldn't outsource in exchange for lower prices for consumers? How about if all of our tech giants, Meta, Google et al were Chinese and the US had as any many smart software engineers as say Peru or Morocco has today- do you think that would be a good trade for the US? How about fighter jet technology- currently the US is still the global leader, you'd be OK if another country took all of our technical knowhow here and we lost the ability to build the F-35, you think that'd be OK? If Wall Street closed up shop and all of the world's major banks were Chinese- totally cool with you? US consumers could have lower credit card & ATM fees, in exchange the yuan is the world's reserve currency and Wall Street is now located in Beijing- sound like a good deal? C'mon man.
Countries become rich & powerful by leading the technological frontier of key industries. Giving that away for lower prices is insanely destructive.
(Spotify is a US-listed company with the large majority of its employees here. The World Wide Web was invented by a Brit working on a European scientific project but who commercialized it and made themselves the world technology leader, and became insanely wealthy in the process? Obviously not Europe. That's all I care about)
>i can't think of a single *industry* that has been outsourced or eliminated from the US
> why can't the company just hire remote developers in Poland who are willing to work US hours, and save themselves a bunch of money?
on one hand: same reason it failed in the early 2000s: different cultures. (managers and engineer already don't understand each other. If all your managers are american, and all your engineers are polish, the friction increases significantly).
on the other hand: there are many people who work remotely, then move to a cheaper place, and continue to work remotely for the same brutto income. This really does happen (at least in my circles, which is corporate europe, not america). But in these cases, there is no cultural barrier to begin with.
As my original comment notes, hiring white collar workers offshore cannot 'fail' because that's the reality of what's happening now. This is not a projection about the future, it's a statement about the present day. So clearly the cultural issues are not enough of a barrier
I've worked for multiple big tech companies, and they have had offices in many other countries including India and Eastern Europe for a long time now. But these offices have grown in the context of the US, Canada, and Western Europe offices also growing, not really in terms of laying off people in high wage countries and replacing them with people in cheap countries.
I think what's actually going on, at least in the software industry, is that investment and hiring are intensely cyclical. This is probably the third big wave in my career of all the big tech companies having at least partial hiring freezes and a lot of startups shutting down and not being
replaced, leading to a bleak job-hunting situation for unemployed programmers.
It is striking how recent the rise of the tech giants is. As recently as 2009, there was only one tech company in the group: Microsoft. By 2021, there were eight, assuming we count Tesla and TSMC as tech companies.
It was interesting watching Japan briefly dominate the top ten, and later on China made some incursions into the top ten. But US companies kept coming back. At least when it comes to acquiring market capital the US companies seem to dominate. What are the factors that allow this? Our currency stability? Large pools of investment capital? I wonder what it would have looked like if we had run that from 1900 onward?
My guess is that at least part of the answer is a large, wealthy home market without much in the way of internal trade barriers, whether formal or informal. You can set up in the US and serve a population of more than 300 million consumers using a consistent set of laws (mostly) and a single language (mostly) before thinking about doing anything internationally. That means that by the time a US company has to deal with international issues at all, it is already large.
>You can set up in the US and serve a population of more than 300 million consumers using _a consistent set of laws (mostly)_ and a single language (mostly) before thinking about doing anything internationally.
[emphasis added]
This is a large chunk of why I am unenthusiastic about "states' rights". ( I tend to phrase it as the parts of the US being too tightly coupled for large interstate differences to be reasonable or realistic, red/blue differences notwithstanding. )
What's really remarkable about their growth is that the underlying technology that pushed them to the top has a very small footprint in many cases. Facebook, if we're looking at the minimum size needed to run it, could have been an extremely small company making ludicrous profits. It, and many of the other tech giants, grew *after* their huge success and then spent the money doing other things. Google's moonshot research group, or Facebook's Metaverse, and many of them have added thousands of employees with questionable worth to the core organization.
A Google with just the original search engine is a viable company that's a small fraction of the size of the current Google but makes similar amounts of money (maybe much more without the added costs).
It makes sense that companies try to grow by spreading into areas adjacent to their original core expertise. And Google, to take one example, has certainly tried to do that many times. But they have never found anything even remotely as lucrative as search. I suppose it is to their credit that they are willing to shut down these failed expansions eventually, rather than continuing to pour money into them indefinitely.
Perhaps the recently announced layoffs and stock buybacks are signs that they are shifting course, delivering profits to shareholders, and refocusing on their profitable segments.
Re last paragraph: I your view, what incentivised Google to keep adding stuff without additional value (insofar as it was without additional value back then, too)? What keeps Google from pruning some of its useless branches? Especially considering that Google is not exactly known for keeping all products alive indefinitely: https://killedbygoogle.com/
For a while, there was a sense that Google was willing to hire any sufficiently good software engineer. Not so much because they could use the engineers most efficiently, but mostly because it would keep the engineers from working for a competitor.
Google seems unwilling to accept that it's time to grow up and be a blue-chip company with a steady search business that can produce hefty dividends to its stockholders. And, yes, maintain a large and vibrant R&D department, probably more so than most blue-chip companies, but consider e.g. General Electric in its heyday, or Xerox's PARC.
If they're not willing to do that, if they're going to continue to think of themselves as the scrappy startup that is going to Change The World, then they've got to keep adding stuff - preferably innovative stuff that they can imagine will change the world, but enough of it to soak up literally all of that search money, because what else are they going to do with it? Pay it out in *dividends*, like grandpa's stodgy blue-chip?
OK, it turns out that Google/Alphabet announced its very first ever dividend a couple weeks ago. I suspect that was a big psychological step for them, and it will be interesting to see how it happens next.
Google with large profits has a few options: 1) profits for shareholders/owners, 2) investments in the market (or buying other companies), or 3) creating its own internal investments in potential but untested ideas (like the original search).
It turns out that Google had such incredibly high profits that it could essentially do all three at the same time. In fact, the profits were so high that it could do all three with basically no pressure not to, or to limit the extremes.
All companies have pressure to expand with more employees - limiting current employee stress, fixing problems, hiring your brother's son, whatever. Most companies have natural limits that push the other direction, such as reduced profits or even bankruptcy. When a company has such huge profits as Google and those limits are nearly impossible to reach, it leads to filling many more of those positions no matter how careful the company tries to be. An intelligent Google, which seems to be the case, aims for things that may pay off in the future at higher rates than if the money was just invested in the stock market. That's a decent long term business strategy, though it's not possible to accurately gauge the real benefits since every attempt may fail. Comparing the potential for gain compared to search is difficult, because search was so unusually profitable. There are very few businesses in the history of the world that reached even close to how profitable search has been, so my paragraph holds even if Google's research divisions or whatever had been very successful.
Google has been pruning things, just slower and later than most companies would. Google's leadership is very intelligent, and they can see some areas are never going to pan out, so they can be removed. The incentives are just lined up such that doing so is harder and therefore happens less and later, when it's more obviously wasteful or harmful.
> An intelligent Google, which seems to be the case, aims for things that may pay off in the future at higher rates than if the money was just invested in the stock market.
Exactly. Effectively they are angel investors in their own internal startups. Most of these startups will fail, as they would externally.
An overview of the Eurovision songs-- official video versions. I missed the show broadcast. Are the official videos much different?
Here we have the tradition of rock songs having evocative lyrics rather than exact meanings.
Some were excellent, but I think the majority were no more than fair to middling. It might be mostly that it's really hard to write and produce an excellent song, and for all I know, a lot of countries aren't knocking themselves out to win.
Are there themes that show up in specific years? Are there trends with some types of songs becoming more or less common?
There were a remarkable number of "I've gotta be me" songs.
Albania--Titan in Disguise-- not bad but there's a lot like that
Armenia-- Folk themed, Get Up and Dance, cheerful and fun
Austria-- Rum de dum dum, We Will Rave-- another anthem about not being broken by the end of a relationship. It looks like the video might have a story line, but I can't figure out what it is. Why is the body-building there?
Australia-- It's Raining Love, we may be dreaming but the atoms are awake-- vague New Age stuff, unambitious musically, but it's restful
Azerbaijan-- The sound was a little muddy and I didn't catch all the lyrics. I liked the blue fire in the rocks effect.
Belgium-- Are You Still Playing the Game?-- apparently something is wrong, but I can't figure out what. There's a pretty young man
Croatia-- Rim Tim Tagi Dim-- fun and energetic. Has a coherent story line
Cyprus-- Liar-- a woman is angry at a man who chose someone else-- best dancing so far, music better than the previous but not all that great
Czechia-- Pedestal-- woman ends a bad relationship, is planning to value herself more. It's not a bad message, but I'm feeling like I'm being lectured.
Denmark-- Shouldn't be so hard, like breathing under water-- woman looking a t a bad relationship-- emotionally complex, good singing, good lyrics
Estonia-- Needed subtitles, but cheerful and energetic
Finland-- No Rules-- I'm torn because total freedom from rules isn't a good idea, but the song is a decent (indecent?) representation of a mood
France-- Mon Amour-- a man wants to revive a relationship that's probably over-- operatic and well-done
Germany-- Who am I fighting for?-- a man sings about desperation-- this song hits emotionally
Georgia-- Rising from the ashes-- Did we build empires just to watch them burn?-- the best "I will prevail" anthem so far
Italy-- I Roll Like Dice-- I think it's a woman trying to restart a relationship, but it's hard to tell what's going on-- striking voice and good use of variety
Iceland-- I Feel It Coming-- a woman who's scared but excited about what might be a good relationship-- the fear is in the lyrics, the excitement is in the music-- good tune, I hear echoes of Motown
Ireland-- Doomsday Blue-- I have no idea what this is about, but I appreciate that little echo of "They're Coming to Take Me Away"-- I'm not the audience for this one
Israel-- I'm still broken from this hurricane-- emotionally effective lyrics and singing
Italy-- La Nola-- needed subtitles, but enthusiastic and varied. Cross between near-rap and opera
Latvia-- Hollow-- The singer is real, and the world seems so fake. Good presentation. This is probably worth discussion-- I'm used to seeing this theme handled through science fiction, but it's literal in the song.
Lithuania-- Luktelk-- needed subtitles, but enjoyable-- seems to be about being on your own side "I'll never let you down, I know you're a fighter"-- better music than most
Malta-- Got Me On, But the Blame's on You-- scary, sexy woman-- consent is dubious, but the song is well presented
Moldova-- I Want You to Be Happy-- choral singing, and I couldn't make out most of it-- not bad, not wonderful
Netherlands-- Europa-pa-- cheerful silly song about liking Europe, ends with a sad tribute to his parents-- the singer was disqualified, and the punishment may be excessive, but I don't think the song is a great loss
Poland-- I'm the One Who Built the Tower-- another song about having capability to run one's own life-- chipper tune, pleasant enough
Portugal-- Grito-- needs subtitles, but the best singing I've heard so far. It's gorgeous.
San Marino-- Give Me a Reason to Want to Change-- scaring the straights, defeating the straights-- It isn't spectacular, but it made me realize that this is the first song with actual rock music
Serbia-- Ramonda-- Something is missing from the world, it can barely be found-- this is the loveliest so far
Spain-- Picture-Perfect Vixen-- empowered woman who's a performer with an enthusiastic audience of mostly older people
Sweden-- Unforgettable-- from the point of view of a man who's hooked on a vampire or somesuch and he loves it-- this song isn't a good influence, but you could dance to it
Switzerland-- I Broke the Code-- operatic song about becoming oneself. Impressive production, but I don't think the music is very interesting.
Ukraine-- I'm Not Holy, I'm Alive-- needed subtitles, but some of the best singing and music. Classical with some rap. They actually look strong instead of just singing about being strong.
United Kingdom-- Would You Make Me Dizzy From Your Kisses?-- A man looking forward to delirious times with someone-- not magnificent music, but pleasant
Norway-- Ulveham-- needed subtitles-- I'd seen a subtitled version previously, and I wonder whether it was based on an existing fairy tale or ballad. I don't know whether I'd lost focus, or whether the music just isn't interesting.
My off-the-cuff low-effort takes, of the finalist performances, in order:
1 - Sweden - OK song, but rubbed me the wrong way.
2 - Ukraine - Nice song, didn't like the rap much but it was OK, cool armor, girl on hill in robes and metal thing in hand gave me a vibe of "The Motherland Calls". Probably intentional.
3 - Germany - Soulful but boring. The lyrics are ostensibly about the rat-race, but also work as an indictment of totalizing ideologies, which is probably unintentional but still cool.
4 - Luxembourg - OK, poppy, but doesn't stand out.
5 - Netherlands - It's interesting how the talk before the show assumed that he'd been removed for being anti-Israel, and I suppose technically we still don't know if that's the case.
6 - Israel - Good song, nice voice, they look like they came out of a Stargate. It's a shame about the censorship, but I agree that I'd rather keep politics out of my song contests, because it's a distorting force, just as elsewhere in this open thread we discuss the effect on literature. The audience reaction sounded odd, and I wonder if they were editing out the booing.
7 - Lithuania - Eh song, inoffensive but soothing. I like hearing other languages.
8 - Spain - OK song, older singer, simple message, nothing wrong with it. I saw a description that described it as "camp", and I don't know what they meant.
9 - Estonia - Cool folk-rap fusion, but not quite to my taste. I love the non-Indo-European language exposure.
10 - Ireland - Evil witch breakup song. Good music, great presentation, but while I see people talking about positive messages in the lyrics, to me it reads very very differently. I was amused that the clip they kept showing could easily have had Force Lightning edited into it. Also I would appreciate a signed statement (in blood, if necessary) that there were no attempts to influence the audience through magic.
11 - Latvia - Decent ballad, goofy presentation, but I liked how the lyrics can be read as being against ideological recruitment.
12 - Greece - Silly pop-rap, but at least in was in the native language.
13 - United Kingdom - Meh boy band. Gayness of the choreography was off the charts (not a complaint, just an appreciation of Olympic-level performance).
14 - Norway - Metallic, fairy-tale lyrics in the native language, great presentation. Pretty good, but I feel like I should like this more than I do. It seemed more like an actual concert than most, with the musicians seemingly very into their performance.
15 - Italy - Meh, musical native language rap. Body-positive backup dancers were an interesting tactic.
16 - Serbia - OK, melancholy goth ballad.
17 - Finland - OK, silly pop song, good theatricality. Giant egg and pyrotechnics! It looked like the T-shirt was "pre-blurred", instead of what they did for the video.
18 - Portugal - Meh. I respect the effort, at least, but they seemed way too serious somehow.
19 - Armenia - Good, extremely enthusiastic folk, but self-conscious, self-referential, and almost solipsistic?
20 - Cyprus - Eh, very American production, maybe looked like a slightly sexed-up Taylor Swift?
21 - Switzerland - Good, theatrical, draggy, polymorphic, at one point it almost seemed like it turned into a James Bond song.
22 - Slovenia - Meh song, great singer. Literally operatic vocals, but they weren't incorporated into the song itself. Skinsuit and mostly naked backup dancers writhing in skinsuits, is not what I consider adequate presentation. (All hail Lordi.)
23 - Croatia - YES, closest thing to good I've heard so far, kinda folk fusion, with audience participation. Folk visuals and enthusiasm and fire.
24 - Georgia - OK pop song, good voice. Decently cool visuals and costuming, and fire. I liked some of the lyrics: "Put out the fire, put out the fire, did we build empires, just to watch them burn?"
25 - France - OK standard love song, great vocals and great range. Impressed that he backed off of the microphone briefly. But looks like he was wearing super-loose-weave muslin or something.
26 - Austria - OK technopop. Bad lyrics: "Rum-de-dum-dum-da" is what Winnie the Pooh sings because he has too little brain to think of anything better. The video made me think of a ST:TNG episode where Dr. Crusher goes on a first contact mission to the Planet of the Space Sluts, and gets knocked on the head and goes native. The performance made me think of Barbarella.
Switzerland won. And as you said, not bad but not impressive. And yet it got maximum votes from most juries, although it wasn’t that popular with the televoters.
There’s two competitions here really. It’s a song contest in theory - the singer and production is not that important to the juries. It’s a singing competition to the television voters.
I believe you're getting this precisely backwards. It's the juries, composed of industry professionals, who reward vocal and production virtuosity - which is precisely how Switzerland won. In contrast, public voting tends to reward songwriting even in absence of artistry, and usually boosts catchy tunes like this year's Croatia's and Netherlands' entries.
(There are two counterexamples this year, France with a difficult vocal line that got a better audience than jury score, and UK with a catchy tune that did better with juries, but both can be explained by the fact that the public and the juries score different performances. The French singer's voice reportedly broke down during the jury-scored final rehearsal, while the UK's singer really bungled his performance in the public concert.)
since it’s a live competition the song can’t fully be separated from the performance, of course. However it is a song, not a singing, contest and the song writer is awarded a prize as well.
Jury votes tend to be for the better, rather than the catchier song - which isn’t the same thing. Tattoo was clearly a better song than the cha cha cha song. I’m not so sure about the Swiss song this year though, but I’m not a music expert but the public were in favour again, of a fairly quirky entry. France might have won if performed better at the jury selection.
Glad to see my taste is not as isolated as I feared. Have watched about half the songs to about half-time -- yes, most of them were too boring for me to finish. Gåte (Norway) is nice but that song is completely unremarkable (this here is a lot better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkHFJN7qBfU ). Serbia had wonderful fantasy RPG visuals but the song hardly fits them. San Marino and Italy were at least fun and somewhat headbangable. Croatia is offensively minimalist (2 tones in the entire song); I'd have appreciated it for the idea alone but not like that. Ukraine is the only one that is catchy enough that I would want to hear it again.
"Are there themes that show up in specific years? Are there trends with some types of songs becoming more or less common?"
There definitely are; there's the trope of the "Eurovision ballad" and with the two semi-finals, the organisers try to spread these out so the final won't be one ballad after another. Some thing is very spectacular one year and then the next year it gets copied (generally lots of things on fire). France pretty much always sends a chanson, because that's what they do best and even if they don't win, a winsome waif warbling in The Language of Love will place at the end in a position that doesn't disgrace them.
There's even parody video about it, coming from when Sweden last hosted it in 2016:
The final was on Saturday, they reduced it down to 25 countries (it says 26 but the Dutch entry was disqualified under controversial and nebulous circumstances involving, allegedly, "a complaint of inappropriate behaviour made by a female member of the production crew" - he didn't want to be photographed and pushed the camera away, or made a ' threatening gesture' towards the camera; it's murky which is why a lot of rumours were going around).
The official performances were indeed different to the videos in most cases. The UK was terrible, which is why it did alright in the voting but didn't win. I've been saying all along the Irish entry was terrible, but it got sixth place.
The end winner was Switzerland, beating out Croatia (seems to have been a favourite). As ever, there was a lot of divergence between the jury vote and the popular vote, which is how Switzerland won. Mostly everyone is glad Israel didn't win, for various reasons (it would be one hell of a headache organising it next year in Tel Aviv if the Gaza situation has not been resolved, as far as the EBU is concerned, and there were the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests going on so they're glad it didn't win).
The full four hours of the final is on Youtube, though I don't know if you can get it from a US address (may need a VPN):
I liked the Estonian performance, and yes Croatia was lots of energy. Finland? Well I liked the jorts with showers of sparks 😀 Spain was very.... eh, let's just say this wouldn't be out of place in a Drag Queen Story Hour for your local kids' library or primary school.
A song about the Blessed Virgin and Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Well after the demon-summoning (the Irish entry wasn't the only one calling the spirits) and degenerate goings-on with the other acts, we needed some decency 😁
How familiar are you with Eurovision? You say you were surprised that most were mediocre, but you seem to have thought quite a few were at least ok, which seems pretty good to me. It's such a festival of the outré and often ridiculous, that it really varies how much is invested in it, musically.
Besides, there are all kinds of tricky factors involved in the scoring. For example, the public often votes for their neighbors. The juries aren't free of bias either: this year the official juries apparently systematically ignored Israel (which gives some credence to the idea that last year they were biased in favor of Sweden.). Meanwhile, the Israeli jury gave the top number of points to Luxembourg's entry, who was born in Israel.
Singers from the big countries are at a disadvantage in the scoring, and also anyone already successful in a bigger country also has the least to gain from winning.
>this year the official juries apparently systematically ignored Israel
It just isn't true. Israel got about as many jury points as pre-competition expert/enthusiast opinions and bookmaker odds would predict. I realize it's impossible to prove it wasn't being (unfairly) disregarded from the get-go, but it was simply never considered a contender on music terms.
I realize there is an epistemic bubble that believed it could win, and it made a big push to brute-force the audience vote (a failed one, because it went against a voting system that is explicitly designed, and then honed for decades, to prevent this kind of intrusions and make sure the winner has a truly universal appeal). But the bubble was wrong. If I were to guess, it misunderstood Israel's position and expected an [Ukraine, 2022] treatment (which, a legit example of systematic bias - borne out of genuine populaton-wide pro- sentiment that just isn't there for Israel). What it was actually getting was a [Russia, 2014-15] treatment of (almost) everyone keeping up appearances and pretending nothing out of the ordinary ever happened outside so that everyone can have a song contest in peace. (And it has now undermined this arrangement to such extent that it's hard to imagine it being allowed in again any soon. Especially with organisers under immense fire after the event turned out to be a disaster in general.)
>Singers from the big countries are at a disadvantage in the scoring
This hasn't really been true for a while, performances during semi-finals in particular seem to be doing their job.
The voting is generally the best bit. They curtailed it a lot this year (due to potential for protests or the jury foreman saying something Unfortunate re: Gaza) but you can pretty much bet on neighbour votes for neighbour, neighbour DOESN'T vote for neighbour (particularly scandalous when X has voted for Y but Y fails to reciprocate), one country very pointedly does NOT vote for another (a lot of score-settling) - Greece and Cyprus used to do a lot of mutual "we give you maximum points", particularly when Turkey was competing, because of the whole 1964-1974 hostilities.
Juries vote 1-12 points to songs and it's always exciting to see "who will get 12 points here?" and of course, "what entry will end the night with no points?"
I would recommend watching the whole show instead – it's a whole different experience than watching music videos. If you're in the wrong country, you might need a VPN to access it on YouTube.
I found one difference. I've seen a clip from "Dizzy". The song is about looking forward to extremely enjoyable sex. The official video is of a man in various locations by himself. I admit that when I set out to write about it, I assumed a girlfriend, but then I realized there was no partner in sight, so the gender wasn't specified.
The show video makes it clear that this is from a homosexual viewpoint, which I don't mind.
Even if I had an issue about that, I would still defend the song because it has a catchy tune. Almost none of the other entries do.
Well, the UK vacillates between the glory days when they used to win it, so they take it seriously enough to send an established act, and offence from their entry not doing well in the previous contest so they pretend they don't care and it's all nonsense. As one of the Big Five countries which funds the show, they automatically qualify for the final so don't have to go through the semis to be voted in (UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy are the Big Five).
They seem to have taken it seriously this year, by sending Olly Alexander who is an established act, and of course this was another year they hoped to/expected to win (so I'm anticipating complaining for next year's show):
"The staging is also distinctive, described by Olly Alexander’s own team as “a post-apocalyptic dystopian boxing gym locker room, aboard a spaceship hurtling towards Earth through a black hole in 1985”. It features a shower, and homoerotic dance moves that will make the Daily Mail flush with anger. Oh, and camera tricks will make Olly look as if he’s flying from the ceiling. “I think it’s a home run,” says Gustaph. “I’m telling you.”
Yeah, no. The staging was *too* clever and didn't come across well for the final. The backing dancers just looked to be sliding into one another and the performer didn't get much of a chance to belt it out, given that he was "on the ceiling" in a pile of limbs.
The music is the same, unless the artist is a bad singer or messes up somehow, in which case it is worse. But watching a music competition is a different experience from watching a set of music videos, I suppose, as you say, because of the excitement. And many of the individual live performances as such are also interesting – I don't often see anything like them outside Eurovision, whereas the music videos are just regular music videos.
Trolley-experiment in real life: How many pulled the lever? - Taking 110 bucks or saving a life: what feels better 4 weeks later? - Leading German behavioral economist did the studies. Yours truly scorches his book - graphs included: https://doppelkorn.substack.com/p/would-you-save-a-life-for-100-should disclosure: my first review ever, too late and too inferior for the contest.
I'm probably too stupid, but I found it unclear what was going on - how many Indians were being treated for what?
"The participants were informed, that a) the institute had earmarked a donation of 350€ (nearly 400 $) to save the life of an Indian in Uttar Pradesh (paying for the treatment of 5 Indians suffering from tuberculosis, which should save all of them - else 1 in 5 would die). But the institute would cancel that donation and instead donate 1050€ to treat 3*5 people in Bihar. Thereby preventing ca. 3 tuberculosis deaths."
Is that €350 for 5 in Uttar Pradesh versus €1,050 for 15 in Bihar?
As for the rest of it, I'm probably brain-dead after work because I tried reading through and Mr. Brain just went "That is indeed a lot of words, plus graphs. Always with the graphs". So, it may be a great post, but I'm sorry, I have no idea what your conclusion is.
Thanks for the feedback! You got it right, perfectly. Maybe I should add another graph from the book? (There is one about the issue, you had. A. Falk is reader-friendly.)
Tuberculose mortality is around 20% without the proper treatment, it seems. So only after having given 5 sick-ones the proper treatment can you take pride in "saving one life". So either 5 in U.P. get treated - as was planned without an intervention by the participant - or 3*5=15 in Bihar. Saving one life or 3 lifes. (Curing the other 4 resp. 12 comes extra, tuberculosis really hurts. Kafka knew.) -
It is not a great post, obviously - and deteriorates in the 2nd half. I do not recommend to go further after the "evil lottery". The graphs are from the book, thus in German.
Okay, that clears it up. But it doesn't seem to be the classic trolley problem; it's 5 people for 1 life or 15 people for 3 lives, which comes out the same (1 in 5).
If you don't choose UP then that one guy dies, but he's going to die anyway. In the trolley problem, the guy on the track will live if you let the other five die. In this case, both 'tracks' involve death, so it's "3 versus 1" and the rest die, so of course the best choice is to pick the 3 who will live.
In the trolley problem, I have to actively kill the one guy. If I pick Bihar instead of UP, I'm not killing someone who would live otherwise. That makes the difference, and I think it's a real difference: one death versus five, where I intervene to kill the one, for the trolley problem. Four lives and one death versus twelve lives and three deaths, where the deaths will happen regardless of what I choose to do about the TB patients.
My brain is aching now. If the 5 in UP do not get their treatment, there will be 4 still sick and soon one corpse. (And in Bihar 12 will remain sick and 3 will die.). If the participants decides: "Leave those 5 in UP untreated, treat instead 15 in Bihar" - then the 5 in UP remain untreated and one of them will most likely die. - I am too much of an utilitarian to understand why 25% of people would NOT switch from treating 5 to treating 15 - but I am too dumb for most of Kant.
In this real-life version of the trolley - if you do NOT 'pull the lever' 15 sick people in Bihar will remain untreated (3 of them will even die). If you 'pull the lever', only then the 15 will get treatment, but the 5 guys in UP (earmarked for treatment) will NOT get the treatment, they would have got, if no one had intervened.
Okay, it sounds like the set-up is unnecessarily complicated, those researchers need a good boot up the backside.
So they committed to treating 5 people in UP - without treatment, the fatality rate for TB is 1 in 5, yes? So if they treat the UP people, all 5 will live. If they don't, 1 person will die.
But then they made the proposal: "If you agree, we won't give the money to UP, we'll give it to 15 people in Bihar instead".
So now the set-up is: treat 5, save 1 versus treat 15, save 3. And this is a real switch, not the thought-experiment one.
In that case, I still think people would take "treat the 15" because you're saving more lives, but it's a bit shitty of the researchers to play games with real lives like this - now the 5 people won't be treated and 1 will probably die.
The fact remains, though, that this is not like the trolley problem where one person dies versus five people die and if you don't intervene, the one person lives. This is real disease, real people, and out of 20 all told, there is the chance of 4 dying for real. You're just reducing deaths by saving 3 rather than saving 1.
If I do nothing in the trolley problem, yes, those 5 people die (not flipping the switch). But I did not deliberately kill 1 person (flipping the switch) who would have lived otherwise had I not flipped the switch. But if I do nothing for the TB patients, 4 people die anyway. Whichever I pick, someone will die for real, it's not like the guy in UP would have lived if I didn't choose to give the money to Bihar (not flipping the switch).
Let me clarify:
Trolley problem - flip the switch, 1 person dies. Don't flip the switch - 5 people die. If I don't flip the switch, the 1 person lives because now they're not in danger of being killed by a runaway trolley.
TB real world problem - flip the switch, 1 person dies. Don't flip the switch - 3 people die. But those people would have died anyway, regardless of me flipping the switch or not. There is no way that person in UP lives or the 3 persons in Bihar live because they have a deadly disease which, if untreated, will kill them.
Trolley problem requires me to actively kill someone. The TB problem requires me to pick who, out of the guaranteed fatalities, dies. That's not a great choice, but it's not "this person would live if you didn't kill them". That's why I don't think it's the same as the classic trolley problem.
As I wrote, I believe budget constraints allowed the study to only offer 15 treatments for each turn - not 25; indeed, it was 3 vs 1 instead of 5 vs 1. But there are many variations of the classic idea. The worst ones are on smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/trolley-7
Still. the study paid to treat 5 real humans, actually sick with tuberculosis, facing real death. Or treat instead 15 other humans in another region. For each turn. If a participant decided "switch to cure 15 instead of 5" real people got treated who would not have been treated otherwise. (Sure, having a real trolley run over real people would have been more straightforward! Shame on them to over-complicate.)
That specific study turned out actually BORING - besides curing some hundred poor folks from tuberculosis. In pretty much all trolley-scenarios, some people prefer not to touch the lever. In all cases that number is lower if the kill-ratio is 10+ instead of one (compared to 2 instead of 1). Around a quarter in the control group who were offered the TB-case as a thought-experiment said: "I would not touch the lever". And in real life, it was about the same. Meh.
The FUN part comes when people can choose: take €100 or have us donate €350 to cure 5 Indians, preventing ca. one death by TB.
The hilarious part comes, when - after a lottery - people tell how they feel about the outcomes: "The money would have been better".
Since we are all headed to the gulag in the near future, Canadians volunteered to go first - thank you - I thought it would be fun to write a review of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-one-day-in-the-life-of. Ivan remembers his life before the Soviet when there were pans full of fried potatoes. Life in the gulag featured no such luxuries, so I wrote a post about how to fry potatoes properly: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/mondays-food-tip-best-fried-potatoes. Enjoy before the inevitable midnight knock on the door.
I was surprised by the grating, but that's because generally I'm in too much of a hurry and too lazy to go to the extent of grating the spuds when I can just chop them up, throw them in the pan with some onion, maybe fry them in the fat from frying rashers beforehand, and then have delicious (and carb-laden, alas!) meal ready fast 😁
If you're in communication with the suspected AI (e.g. messages on social media), you could try to "hack" them by sending out-of-context prompts that an AI will respond to very differently than a human. Of course, if they ARE human they'll probably be confused or offended. And there's no guarantee an AI might not have patched those loopholes.
If it's a text, I don't think there's a surefire way to tell. Yes, AI has certain stylistic quirks, but some humans do write like that sometimes, and the "AI tone" can be avoided by specifying a tone in the prompt. I guess if it's a long text that makes a coherent argument, it's most likely by a human. And if it starts with "as a large language model, I..." It's probably by an AI.
For images, check how many fingers the figures have, how the hair looks, whether patterns like lace, text or textures make any sense, and just generally whether the picture has an AI vibe. There will be some false positives and false negatives, but generally speaking it's still possible to tell.
But ultimately you just have to trust your judgement about whether the place where you found the material is likely to serve you AI generated content.
Yeah, almost everything will be outdated in a while and I guess the best tell will be context but right now there could still be pretty reliable signs, I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where testing someone for "AIness" in an online chat will be the norm.
This article does a good job of explaining some of the more subtle things to look for, beyond fingers or text. It also points out the importance of looking at context and provenance - how did the sender claim to *get* this image?
...for now, that is. I bet it won't work for long. The near future is a dystopia in which we will have to assume that every piece of media of any kind is AI generated.
Thanks, now it's way easier to fake something but we already had photoshop so I assume it's not really a change that drastic, you can use context and trust when there's nothing else left. Like for people lying in text, you don't assume a random headline you read online is real but it still isn't a dystopian world.
Provenance is still unfakeable, not matter how good your AI is. You can fake up a photo and claim it was taken by a New York Times journalist, but you can't cause your photo to appear on the actual New York Times website.
Being AI generated doesn't make it a dystopia. Motives are crucial. (Currently, of course, the motives are generally malicious to one degree or another, but the same it true of human generated media. I get around 50 spam phone calls a day, and they're not AI generated.)
In the future, when demonstrating your humanity is a daily requirement, it will be commonplace to introduce yourself in an email by calling the other party a n****r.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 4 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 47/45/49/46 (43/46/50/49)
Biden: 40/45/50/52 (42/45/50/49)
RFK: 3/3/1/1 (4/4/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 2/5/1/0 (3/2/1/0)
Newsom: 1/0/1/0 (2/0/1/0)
Harris: 1/1/1/0 (1/1/1/0)
Betfair is anomalous here in seeing Biden as unfavoured and I have switched my Trump bet back to Biden.
Polymarket is anomalous in putting Obama as high as 5%. This seems wrong to me, and I'm not sure (a) why Polymarket participants rate her chances this highly or (b) what has changed in the last month.
Good point. My knee-jerk reaction, on seeing the near-agreement between the 4 markets 4 weeks ago, and the 7 point disagreement now was "Wake up, arbitrageurs! Wake up!". But, as you pointed out, there isn't a real arbitrage opportunity here. ( And, as Scott pointed out in the latest Mantic Monday, the CFTC isn't helping... )
Would anyone of you be interested in watching a documentary hosted by a closeted rationalist who visits NGOs across Greenland, collaborates with them to try our hands at tactical urbanism, and provides commentary relating to the car infrastructure of the US, the biking infrastructure of Oulu in Finland, and figures such as Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl and James C. Scott?
There is quite a selection pressure for published books to meet a reasonable standard, and it is rare to see a less than glowing review, with maybe a few caveats such as it being a shame the book under review has no index.
But on rare occasions, a book generally agreed to be bad slips through the net and reviewers are much more critical. Although I respect the effort and commitment an author must make to write a book and get it published, a really bad review can be quite funny, and of course is useful for indicating books it may be best to avoid. I'll give a couple of examples I've come across over the years.
First, "Gwynne's Grammar" (2014) received mixed reviews, according to:
* Linguist Geoffrey Pullum called Gwynne a "preposterous old fraud" with a "lack of any grasp of the subject" and was quoted in the New Zealand Herald saying, "I've never seen a book so bad on my subject".
* Oliver Kamm, a leader writer for The Times newspaper, in Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage, described Gwynne’s Grammar as "a work of titanic silliness" and in The Times in January 2017 as "the worst book I have read on language and perhaps on anything".
I found a bootleg ebook copy, and on a brief skim it seems far more wordy than I would expect a simple grammar book to be. But not having studied it in detail, it would be unfair of me to comment on its qualities good or bad.
My next example is "The Garden of Ediacara". I bought a copy of this many years ago in a thrift shop, thinking it would be an interesting account of the weird and wonderful life forms around in the early Cambrian period:
But its diagrams were very poor, as I recall, and the prose had a strange dream-like quality. So much so that I couldn't really get into it and realised I was gaining nothing by persevering with it. Only years later did I find out that it was generally regarded as a badly written book:
Probably does not count - but I just posted a rant-review of a book by the leading German behavioral economist, Prof. Armin Falk. Published 2022, aimed at the broader public "Why it is so hard to be good". It presents the first real-life version of the trolley-experiment - shows that taking the bucks make one happier than healing the sick - and other worthy stuff. Still, one wishes to send him back to ECON 101 + to an introduction how (not) to interpret dictator games. https://doppelkorn.substack.com/p/would-you-save-a-life-for-100-should
Me just not a pro-reviewer. In fact, that is my first. ;) Fun-fact: The most popular reviews are scorchers. In German literature, the bestseller is Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Lauter Verrisse ("nothing but scorchers") - while his collection: "Nothing but praise" is mostly ignored. ;)
I cohost a podcast about inner mental experiences - how things like using imagination, experiencing emotion, proprioception and so on vary between individuals and societies.
It's called "Imagine an apple" - find it in any podcast app.
Would love feedback on the episodes there are so far and suggestions of good people to interview!
Anyone who's fascinated by Sartre's Psychology of Imagination would be good too.
Or anyone who's doing thought sampling research. There's someone who's been doing it for years, so many that I'm not even sure they're alive -- last name is Hurlburt.
Lucid dreamers.
Some Buddhist meditators. Interesting factoid: As mind training for kids some Buddhists sound a gong and ask them to listen to the sound getting fainter and fainter and listen for the very last super-subtle sound.
Gaming addicts. IMO even the best game is a very impoverished, simple environment compared to real life, and I think a lot about the impact on the mind and brain of spending most waking time gaming.
There's a researcher at one of the big California universities studying child consciousness, and wondering if there are ways to enable adults to again access "lantern consciousness."
People who feel profoundly changed by a psychedelic drug experience. Read a study about a smoking cessation program where subjects took 2 psilocybin trips as part of a brief -- something like 8 weeks -- smoking cessation program. Program had a much higher success rate than most. Article includes what subjects' said about the impact of the drug experience. Can locate link for you later today if you're interested.
> IMO even the best game is a very impoverished, simple environment compared to real life, and I think a lot about the impact on the mind and brain of spending most waking time gaming.
Have you heard of the term "legibility" from the book "Seeing Like a State"? I think games tend to have environments that are very legible.
I've read "Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic" by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel, and found I liked Hurlburt's take more. Really good that Schwitzgebel did that test case with him, I'm impressed!
This sounds super interesting but my particular variety of inner mental experience means that I cannot listen to podcasts. Do you also have a way of providing a transcript?
Youtube does it automatically but it's the same quality as the automated subtitles, meaning it's not very good, especially if you use a lot of jargon. I usually go to wherever the podcast is hosted and see if I can find the transcript in the description, sometimes there's a dedicated 'show transcript' button but I don't keep up with any podcasts so I couldn't tell you which service has it.
This is such a wonderfully niche idea for an entire podcast (not just a series or an episode, but a dedicated podcast!) that I will definitely be listening. Any Merleau-Ponty content would be very much appreciated.
I haven't dug into all the phenomenology philosophers - do you know if any of them got into *inner* experience, rather than just sensory experience? And actually formed language for describing it - imagination, inner speech, unsymbolized conceptual thinking, emotion etc?
It would be good to do an episode with a philosopher going through that - covering Mearleau-Ponty and also Husserl. But generally giving the history. Good idea!
As Eremolalos mentioned, Sartre did a lot of emotional descriptiveness stuff, as well as a lot of theorising about the meta cognition aspects (all consciousness is self-consciousness and so forth). The centring of 'otherness' and theory of mind and so forth in the vignettes and how that plays a role is also important. Sartre on dreaming is also interesting. The three post-Husserlians all use a baseline from Hegel/Husserl and then invent their own jargon which then gets translate from German/French back into English, which can cause confusion. Merleau-Ponty is probably the most straightforward and engages with brain damage victims, proprioception, etc etc.
Tim Crane is someone currently flying the flag for the intentionalist viewpoint (rather than the qualia view, although I think he has a hybrid stance).
I think that the 'footlights of your consciousness' thing that DES talks about is just the same thing as intentionality as discussed by those 4. The what it is like is less important than the literal content- but that is only from a couple of hours flicking through Hurlburt's videos yesterdays, which I found fascinating.
I assume because this is how legislation often works - there will be the main body of the text of the law, divided into numbered clauses or paragraphs, and then there will be Schedules at the end which contain relevant information that can be referred to in the main body of the text simply by referencing the relevant Schedule. In this case, that is what has happened - the main body of the text sets out what the law is in respect of the various categories of drug, but it references the Schedules for a list of which drugs are in which category.
I think it's a lesser-used meaning of the word, which sounds odd because we mostly only see it in very specific places. Like how some income tax forms are "schedules", and India has "scheduled tribes".
Possibly our modern sense is a derivation. If it originally meant something like "a list", then if it started to be mostly used for "lists that include times", we'd end up in the current situation?
Announcing the release of my book "Taming the Apocalypse" which explores the potential for low tech biotechnology (hybridisation and facilitated random horizontal gene transfer) to produce a vastly larger array of domesticated plants, animals and microbes than the small handful accidentally stumbled upon at the dawn of agriculture and civilisation. Available in ebook and audiobook on kobo.
If anyone is interested, I did a deeper dive in the gender salary gap of Berlin's startup & tech scene and the results are pretty bad (12-15% almost across the board).
This is a weird conversation, because everyone on all sides of the topic agree that women are expected (by general societal expectations) to take care of children and the elderly far more than men. Feminists complain about it, others laud it, but everyone agrees it's true. With it being true, we should definitely expect more women (not all, maybe not a majority, but some and more than men) to take part time work with lesser requirements. For instance working less overtime, or shorter commutes, or more predictable hours, or less responsibility. Something that gives them freedom and flexibility to care for children and the elderly, as we all agree they are expected to do more often than men. This has the obvious effect of lowering the wages of women who take lesser responsibility/hours/whatever.
If those numbers hold true across different areas, then we should *expect* a 10% difference in pay, even if zero other factors were included whatsoever. That doesn't even factor into questions about leaving the workforce and stalling a career or whatever completely obvious results would come from decisions made to prioritize careers less.
We could certainly talk about whether that's good that women prioritize family over work, or if there's ways to make that better without harming other areas.
If I were a man working 8.1 hours a day and a female coworker was working 7.3 for the same pay, I would be upset by that. I would be even more upset if I decided to work 7.3 and my pay got reduced. And I think everyone in this conversation would agree that would be bad. So why are we upset when women work less hours and get less pay? Even people who hate that outcome should not focus on individual jobs (which are legally required to pay the same for the same work), but instead whatever societal factors cause women to choose to work less hours. And if it turns out that women prefer working less hours and they are happier when working less, then I'm thinking there isn't a problem at all.
Thanks for writing this so I didn't have to. OP's article finds the results "sad" without considering even the most basic of obvious explanations? What's "sad" is leaving the reader of your article with a completely false interpretation that the tech industry pays women less because they are women.
Working full time is only part of the consideration. Overtime is much more common for men than women, for instance. Men also prioritize jobs that force them to be available and respond to situations at odd hours more than women, which can result in direct pay or possibly promotions to higher paying careers.
All of this stuff is pretty obvious if you think about the incentives that flow from early career choices.
Again, we can discuss whether it's good or bad that women prioritize family differently, but it seems really weird to me that we try to ignore it and wonder why women make less money (on average) than men.
Another piece of the situation is that, since women might be less available for work, they get paid less, so it can make financial sense for the husband to work the long hours even if it would work out better for both of them and their employers for the man to do the shorter hours and the woman to do the longer hours.
I did compensation management as a consultant for many years. In the US positions like nursing and teaching K - 12 have defined pay grades based on years of service etc.. Until you move into management, then it's up to individuals to negotiate their salary. Likewise, most tech positions, at least in the US, are based on individual negotiations between the employer and the candidate, who likely has a degree or certificate. It us unreasonable to suggest that these negotiated salaries be converted to a pay grade scale. There would be a revolution if you suggested this. Men and women with a degree or cert have the responsibility to negotiate their salary.
if anyone is interested i did a deeper dive in the gender gap of open source work, and the results are pretty bad. women are 20% of devs but <0.1% of contributors!!
There’s something odd about a society that’s ok with huge differences in individual compensation and, at the end of all that, certain subclasses within that society are expected to be compensated exactly the same.
A difference in individual salary can be explained away by a difference in individual ability, but between whole subclasses those random differences should disappear.
If there is a significant difference between the average salary of two different subclasses, then there must be a difference in their average ability or a difference in their average perceived ability (prejudice). If it's not the first, then it's the second, which is bad because it means that subclass is being discriminated against (e.g. racism or sexism).
That's the basic idea, anyway. I know this is oversimplified but I think it explains away the contradiction you're proposing.
>A difference in individual salary can be explained away by a difference in individual ability, but between whole subclasses those random differences should disappear.
Unless the subclasses are specifically chosen to be random samples (as in randomized controlled trials), it would be a strange coincidence for the means of the distributions of their abilities to exactly coincide. There are _many_ pathways that can introduce correlations (with causality going in several possible directions).
Everyone is different, which means some are worth more than others. Rarely is the production of two people doing the same job worth the same. The subclasses thing is an example of double-think, from this standpoint. Always remember, you're unique, just like everybody else.
IIRC Thomas Sowell's work back in the 1990s suggested that the real gap wasn't between men and women, it was between MARRIED women - especially those with kids - and everyone else. Women who never marry and stay in the work force continuously tend to make about as much or more than their male counterparts doing the same work for the same number of years.
Married women have an *extra opportunity* - a socially approved option that most men don't feel they have - the women can *choose* to work less, switch to an easier, more enjoyable job with shorter hours, or take a few years off entirely to have and raise kids while their husband pays most of the bills. Some married women *choose freely* to avail themselves of that option which obviously brings down the average salary of whatever group you're putting them in. And good for them! They are choosing happiness and family over money. That is a GOOD result, not a bad (or even "pretty bad") one! A society which allows/encourages some people to work less and others more depending on their interests and abilities and opportunity set is a *better society* than one that forces everyone to do work with the exact same level of difficulty and time investment and salary payback.
If any two groups had no "pay gap" at all, THAT would constitute a "pretty bad" result. :-)
They're only "choosing" to work less if by that you mean "paid employment". If they're having and raising children, running the household, and/or looking after elderly parents on top of that, that is not "no work". I think this is often a point of contention between men and women - "I'm out there all day working hard as the breadwinner while you do nothing" "Yes, but I'm looking after the kids and the house and your mother" "Well, you're my wife, that's your job".
If it's someone's "job" to do all that, then it is not "not working".
Ask Scott if he thinks taking care of his twins is not "work" or that he would be "working less" if he cut his work hours to spend more time at home?
Re your first sentence: I think if ANY two groups of people whom, for the sake of argument, we would expect to be earning the same (minus random differences), were earning up to 15% less (1/6! as upper bound in this specific case). That sounds like an incredibly unfair system (whatever that system is). Put another way: if you were switching jobs, and you had a choice between new job A paying 1*X$ and job B paying 1.001X$, both being otherwise pretty equal, you may well ignore the difference and decide based on vibes or whatever (let's not think about round numbers etc). Clearly there are salary differences that don't bother us. If however job B payed 15% less, I think it would need to provide you with some reaaally heavy alternative incentives (free fruit at the entrance!) for you to choose it. Numerical example: A pays 50k, B pays 43k. What additional compensation must B provide for you to choose it over A? Let's assume for the sake of argument that the "basics" are good in both - productive work environment, interesting day to day, friendly colleagues.
Should we include overtime (required, offered, whatever) in the calculation? 5 hours a week of overtime is equivalent to 7.5 hours of regular pay, or almost 19% higher wage for a pretty minimal investment of time - one extra hour per day for a five day workweek.
Even among two people working identical jobs for identical pay, someone willing to put more time in will make significantly more money. This is just one example where pay can vary based on individual choices, and not just varying by small amounts.
I hope you wouldn't suggest that all jobs equally require overtime of employees in order to keep pay rates similar.
Of course, your hourly wage would be almost doubled. I should have clarified that the hourly wage is the focus, or that parttime vs full-time is not the focus here (other wise the jobs are very far from comparable). I'll update the comment, thanks.
If A and B have the same work hours and weeks in the year and are the same in all other details, then of course I'll choose A. If A is a horrible stressful job, then I'll choose B.
Bad conditions in both jobs - need to be compensated more to work there, so more pay.
Less pay but better conditions - I'll choose that, I've worked in the shitty stressful jobs and unless you're paying me millions a year it's not damn well worth it.
Using hourly wage merely removes one difference where a lower salary is fully justified because women work fewer hours on average. But there are plenty of differences left that also are provably linked with salary differences, like choice of profession, commute duration/distance, willingness to work overtime, the structure of the compensation scheme (worker can be paid in more than salary), etc.
The more variables you look at, the more of the wage gap can be explained by factors that have a gender-independent effect on individual wages, but have a gendered effect on the average because men and women make different choices on the whole.
The remainder of the wage gap can potentially be explained by other behaviors that are very hard, impossible, or expensive to measure (accurately), or that no one has attempted to correlate. I can come up with measurements that I've not seen anyone attempt to correlate with salary differences, even though I would consider them viable candidates, like the effect of thing-oriented vs. people-oriented personalities.
The thing is, I don’t expect ANY two groups to be earning the same “minus random differences”. Different groups of people *are different*, and they’re different in every conceivable way. Different interests, different aptitudes, different backgrounds…and this SHOULD naturally translate into different salaries.
Look, forget about sex differences for a minute. Pick any OTHER structural difference between groups. Say, rival sports team fans. Or residents of different cities. Why would we NOT expect a difference of 15% between two groups of entirely different people?
If fans of the Knicks earn more than fans of the Celtics that doesn’t mean they’re earning more BECAUSE they’re fans of the Knicks and it doesn’t mean YOUR personal salary would change at all if tomorrow you switched to root for the other team. It just means you’re statistically being bundled in with a group that made certain choices that happened to impact the group average in one direction or the other. So long as those choices were freely made we should celebrate them and not worry too much about it - viva la difference!
UPDATE: as for your "numerical example", the difference in group average comes from some fraction of the group taking an even bigger cut than that; what job B (which pays, say, 40% less) offers is often *schedule flexibility*. Shorter hours and the ability to take time off as needed. Whereas job A is long hours, high stress and not much expected vacation time - if you want to budget time off to deal with a sick kid or parent (and can afford it via dual paychecks) it can be good for somebody in the family to take job B.
>The thing is, I don’t expect ANY two groups to be earning the same “minus random differences”. Different groups of people _are different_, and they’re different in every conceivable way.
"It just means you’re statistically being bundled in with a group that made certain choices that happened to impact the group average in one direction or the other."
The only way I can make that make sense (fans of one sports team earning more than another) is the prawn sandwich brigade:
Obviously, fans of a team in the 'posh' part of London are probably going to be wealthier on average than fans of a team in a former industrial Northern city, though this 2018 survey had some surprising results:
First addressing your update: Let me confirm - did you orginally mean that a gap of 15% (max in this case) is small and thus not "pretty bad", generally? Or did you mean it ONLY referring to groups and not including causality? Regarding the second question: If switching from group 1 to group 2 caused(!) me to earn 15% less at my next job than I otherwise would have, would you view this as problematic?
In that part, I mainly took issue with you ssemingly claiming that 15% is small and thus not really bad. And then also explaining why you thought the *Existence* of the gap is okay. Put another way: What if the gap was 40%? 80? 99.9? You argument regarding its origins would apply regardless, bur surely your first sentence would not make sense in such a world.
The disparity here is significantly smaller than class gaps.
When you consider that some individuals earn hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times more than the median, simply due to genetics, birthplace, or nationality, a 15% difference between groups doesn’t seem that much of a problem.
There is an underlying assumption here that gender prejudice is causing the 15% gap. What if, as Glen implied, it is correlated with something else? Perhaps Knicks fans earn more because the cities in which they live have a higher cost of living.
The question to be answered is WHY women make less, which is a hard question to answer without bias.
I think a gap of 15% between groups isn't enough to be notable - it's surprisingly small. Hence I don't understand the "pretty bad" comment. What would a "good" difference amount be, as far as this writer is concerned? Maybe my expectations are skewed by remembering the old feminist talking point of claiming men make "59 cents" to the man's dollar. 85-90 cents is a whole lot better than that, no?
Switching from one group to another makes NO difference in your salary, it just gives you a different comparison set. If some women are slowing down their career to have kids it doesn't change the fact that women who AREN'T doing that are earning as much as the men. Nobody earns the "average salary" of their group, we only earn our particular individual salaries. One guy winning the lottery doesn't raise all the other men's income, merely the male average; one woman taking time off for kids doesn't lower all the other women's income, merely the female average.
...um, why would switching groups *cause* you to earn less? I suppose if it happened because switching groups *changed your preferences* such that you made different choices, that'd be fine. So no, even that wouldn't be *inherently* problematic.
You are correct that a difference of 40% or 80% would also be fine so far as I'm concerned. Different groups are different!
The "Greater Male Variability" hypothesis also probably deserves mention in this context - if a few people are (or have been in the past) brilliant insane workaholics making vast amounts of money at the expense of everything else in their life and people like that drag up the average of their group, and men happen to be more likely than women to have that trait cluster, then "average male income" will be higher for it - and that's okay too.
[side note: I currently am working (by choice) at a job that pays on the order of *75%* less than my prior job. I made that choice *because I could afford to* so my having made it reflects well, not poorly, on my overall life circumstance. Feel free to extrapolate that to the circumstance of women who choose to "slow down" to have kids.]
I don't know about "no valid medical prescription", but there is a Canadian case of someone seeking - well, look, read the article, I don't think I can properly describe what they want without inadvertently being offensive, because I have no idea what terminology to use, never mind what is the approved phrasing:
I wonder how the plumbing will work! But it isn't public money entirely wasted, because expertise in arcane procedures like that might benefit people who need surgery for genital injuries, for example caused by anti-personnel mines.
But some of these surgeries are getting weird. It can only be a matter of time before some "furry" wants surgery to acquire a fully functioning waggable tail! :-)
If it is a procedure such as an amputation, which reduces bodily functionality, then a surgeon performing that solely to cater for a bizarre urge (not unheard of) but no physical benefit would be breaking their Hippocratic oath. So they would risk being struck off the medical register, and lose their livelihood, if their operation became public knowledge.
I was going to object to the description of "bizarre fetishistic urge" since that's not in line with what I know of body integrity dysphoria, but looking into it, I see it's now considered an acquired rather than an innate disorder. So I still object to the wording but I'm aware that some cases of BID can be fetishistic.
Yes, I removed that f-word because in view of your comment and on reflection it sounded a bit judgemental. But I still think it's reasonable to describe the urge to have elective amputations (if that is what the OP was referring to) as bizarre.
I know someone who went to Thailand for sex changes, anecdotally I have heard of people going to Russia to to get their legs broken and then healed with small stents to lengthen them, but not sure if the latter is an urban myth.
A while back, the Instagram algorithm recommended me the account of a man who was spending several months in Turkey healing from a procedure like this. (I think he was trying to go from 5'10" to 6'2"). There's a whole community of men documenting this process online. Weird rabbit hole.
In the 1983 novel by Fay Weldon, "The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil", the character Ruth undergoes a series of surgeries - including operations to have her legs shortened - in order to physically resemble her ex-husband's mistress (all part of her plan to ruin them both, take over the mistress's life, and torment her ex-husband).
Jerry Seinfeld's commencement address to Duke's graduating class of '24...
> AI, on the other hand, is the most embarrassing we've ever invented in mankind's time on earth. Oh, so you can't do the work. Is that what you're telling me? You can't figure it out. This seems to be the justification of AI — I couldn't do it. This is something to be embarrassed about. The ad campaign for ChatGPT should be the opposite of Nike. "You just can't do it."
No, I was sincere - I was trying to point out that almost every tool does something that you can't do unassisted. Even something as simple as a hammer or screwdriver is doing something you can't do. Most tools are not simply labor-saving devices but things that open up entirely new categories of task.
(Although the argument works just as well for tools that only save time and labor. I could use the OP's argument to say that you ought to be washing your clothes by hand, and using a washing machine is an admission that you aren't willing to put in the work to do it properly.)
Full disclosure: Since this group has many members who are interested in AI, I put that quote up there to see what the response would be.
But I don't think Seinfeld intended anyone to take him seriously. But what's weird *is* that people do. Seinfeld believes that PC sensibilities (whatever those are) are stifling the humor of the younger generation. From a historical perspective, there's always been out-of-bounds humor. The boundaries of what's acceptably funny have changed as culture has changed. Although the culture warriors on both sides are finding objectional things about AI, AI in general as a subject of humor seems pretty innocuous. Yet some people on this thread are not amused by his joke.
The line between mockery and humor is often pretty thin, and I have seen enough people online making this argument sincerely that I didn't really parse it as joking.
It's basically a version of the "you're not a *real* artist unless you do it the hard way" argument, an argument that hasn't made sense since the invention of the camera.
1. Say I really couldn't write a Shakespeare sonnet about the misery of being a washing mashine which I desperately want to put on my wall. Why must I feel embarrassed about this? Or maybe my reading comprehension is poor/slow - should I be ashamed for letting AI summarize a long essay in complex language? What if I'm a non-native speaker and struggle because of that, but would like to read a specific piece of text? Should I be ashamed that I ask an AI to translate Swahili to English rather than first learning the language well, or bothering my Swahili-speaking friends each time? And that's just for text. It definitely *is* the case that current AI can create vastly more beautiful pictures than most of us could, simply for lack of skills. It's a fair debate to ask if and when it would be good to let an AI do this versus a human artist etc. But it's clear that I shouldn't be embarrassed asking the AI merely because I lack the skills. Or perhaps it's just about coming up with creative inspiration.
2. Reducing AI to things you couldn't do is obviously restrictive. What about all the things I could, but don't want to? Boring formal letters (or maybe just many letters!), getting the gist of a long text I'm not deeply interested in, digitizing all of my 784 hand-written poems, ... (If you think OCR is "not reeeally AI", you should see my handwriting.)
I kind of disagree with the idea that we should just be happy and stop worrying about problems, but I do agree that the left has a despair problem.
And honestly, I am furious with them. There's no reason why the climate change topic has to be filled with so much despair, and it's actively counterproductive. Greenpeace and the like need to stop the dumb stunts like climbing oil rigs and throw their support behind getting money to build the future - the renewable energy half of the equation.
We should be living in the most exciting time in human history. We've learned to harness the raw elemental power of the universe, basically for free, and we can use this energy to flourish. But no, these idiots want the government to shut down the existing energy industry without having already built the new one.
I think Mark Judge is basically correct, though the causality (along with the origins of woke itself) is complicated and arguable. As a term, I think "punitive liberalism" should really be "punitive leftism".
There really are surviving people who uphold liberal Enlightenment values such as freedom of speech, and are not part of the punitive left, with the left's language policing and censorious speech codes.
I agree with Nancy Lebovitz's characterization of a large chunk of it as:
>If you're white, and especially if you're male and white, everything good in your life was taken from someone more worthy.
It drives me up the wall too.
Personally I do _*NOT*_ apologize for my race, my sex, or my savings. I _celebrate_ my luck.
One contributor to this crap was Peter Singer. His "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" in 1972 was an attempt to ram unbounded obligations down the throats of everyone in the industrialized world. My view on him is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-272/comment/14859849
The woke oppressor/oppressed dynamic seems similar. I don't know which is more responsible for our current state. In fairness, Singer had many similarly poisonous predecessors, making similarly risible demands.
Kudos to beowulf888 for the analysis of the factions on the left. Yeah, most of the poison seems to be centered in the woke/CRT guiltmongers.
Again, the causality is complex! I would like to hear more details about
>In a 2022 article about the death of social life at Stanford University, Ginevra Davis described the purge of happiness: “Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting. Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.”
Was this woke/CRT, or title XI, or something else?
I would indeed like to see happiness made cool again. We have a working industrial society. Let us celebrate it!
I think he's largely correct about the problem on the left, but his image of the earlier right is inaccurate. He's taking the bits he likes most, from the selection of bits that he saw, and drawing conclusions from there.
One specific place I think he goes wrong is that I think the "happiness" extended from Reagan through the neoliberal Clinton, and might have survived Bush v Gore, but took a fatal hit in 9/11. The unhappy-left was marginalized, and stayed marginalized through that entire time. It might even go back to Carter and Ford, I'm not sure. I wasn't around for all of this, but my sense was that the unhappiness started picking up in the 60s, hit a peak in the early 70s, and then faded into the background. I think the fading was due to the silent majority and the media oligarchy realizing that things had gotten bad, and that a course change was needed. And Reagan was the first politician who really tapped into that sentiment, and it took until Bill Clinton for a left-wing politician to figure out how to do the same thing.
I remember hearing after JFK's assassination that we were all responsible. Admittedly, it was only one source, but it was awful enough that I still remember it. I don't know why anyone would say that, but it did seem like a way of making people feel bad for no good reason.
Since then, I've seen a progressive left with anti-happiness habits. In particular, everything is an emergency. No one is allowed to specialize, so they're worried about everything all the time. This one may have gotten better, but for quite a while, any victory for your political goals was met with "don't feel good, there's still work to be done". If you're white, and especially if you're male and white, everything good in your life was taken from someone more worthy.
I'm not sure how much of this is me having a rather autistic reaction of taking what people say literally, while actual progressives aren't that rough on themselves and each other, but it's driven me up the wall.
There's a weird line in Sympathy For the Devil that I'd never really understood: "I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys', when after all it was you and me". I've never thought of the Stones as being the voice of the American Left, but I guess they existed in a cultural stew that was downstream of it.
What's really odd, now I come to look it up, is that the song was first recorded the same week that RFK was assassinated; the lyric was originally just about John F but got changed at the last minute.
Either way, I can't comprehend the mindset of someone who looks at a couple of assassinations committed by (a) a Communist and (b) a Palestinian, and thinks "Whoa, you know who's really guilty here? All Americans!"
Film maker Antonioni filmed the Stones in their studio working on Sympathy For the Devil, and included the footage in his movie Zabriskie Point. The rest of the movie is pretentious arty crap, but the Stones footage is a fascinating look at the band creating one of their better songs. Their first version is a ballad, with the singular "Kennedy" line. On the 2nd take the next day they added the conga drum jungle rhythm, and since Bill was a no-show, Keith did a better more energetic bass line, this changed the whole feel. Also some nice guitar licks from Mick Taylor. And the line was updated to plural. The 2nd take (the released version) is much improved compared to the 1st.
And yes, Nancy, you were misled by the devil to feel bad. Maybe a dubious case could be made that "you and me" means American gun culture, since they were both shot. But the Stones and the devil aren't American.
I think what would-be 'progressives' promote is a sort of mindless conformity to Neomarxist norms via pop ideologies like genderism and wokery.
Lyndon Johnson's civil rights reforms helped culture immensely, but they were so successful they carried racialist mistakes like 'affirmative action' with them. We're still living with the excesses.
The protest against Israel's response to Hamas's assault is a prime example. Hamas must be rejoicing with every news report of student protests. Conventional 'progressive' dogma disassociates the Palestinian Hamas assault of October 7 from Israel's attempt to neutralize Hamas where it lives. Yet, when protesters call for the murder of Jews, they're not arrested and prosecuted for a hate crime.
For killing Jews to be a hate crime, they'd apparently have to chuck them off the roofs of the tallest buildings on campus -- as Hamas does to protesters in Gaza.
It seems to be a delusion of the Right that the Left is a unified entity with unified goals and agendas. Off the top of the brain are seven distinct ideological attractors within the Left — which sometimes form alliances with others, but most of the time they're feuding with each other.
1. Old Guard Marxists: reached maximum influence in 70s & 80s—lost it with collapse of Sov Union—now fighting a bitter rearguard battle against the CRT (whom they regard as heretics because they use Marxist dialectics but substitute race for class).
2. Old Style Socialists: went into eclipse during the Red Scares of the 50s and early 60s (mostly because their livelihoods in academia were canceled by successful campaign blacklisting by the right). Marxist never trusted them, because they were too wishywashy—but with the success of social democratic parties in Europe the Socialists had a revival that peaked with the Bernie candidacy. But with the failure of Bernie and the success of Biden, they've been eclipsed by the CRT (aka the "woke" folks). Socialists (aka social democrats, democratic socialists) are the group that called themselves "Progressives" during the Bernie vs Hillary civil war. Nowadays the Woke have appropriated the Progressive moniker.
3. Old style civil rights groups: They're still active, doing community organizing and voter turnout. They may pay lip-service to the CRT woken, but they're less about ideology and more about practical results. Obama tapped into this group very successfully during his campaigns. A lot of the BLM activists came from that camp. But they are only partially contiguous with the CRT woken.
4. The CRT Woken: Critical Race theorists used Marxist dialectics to argue that that race (instead of class) was the driving force of inequality in the world. The gender warriors latched on to this system of thinking. Initially, old-guard feminists appropriated this system of thought. Then the LGBTQ+ hijacked the conversation (called the old-style feminists TERFs because the old-style feminists didn't tolerate women with penises). Now Woke is combination of PoC and LGBTQ+, anyone not down with their agenda(s) are reactionaries. As an interesting side-note, while the right thinks Woke has been driven by university professors and the administrators in academia, the source of its power originates in education departments who train teachers. While the general liberal arts professoriate are not particularly woke, they've been confronted by a younger generation students and now grad students inculcated the CRT and CGT elements in the educational praxis.
5. Old style trade unionists: although there are Marxist and socialist elements within trade unionism, there's always been tension between the boots on the ground, organizers, and the ideologues. Unions have been declining for the last 50 years (and thus their power has been declining) mostly because Union management has become fat and lazy. However, unions are making a resurgence under younger generation of organizers. I suspect their power base is going to grow within the Left in the next decade.
Some smaller attractors on the Left:
6. Old-style feminists: largely eclipsed by LGBTQ+ Woke activists.
7. Old-style gay activists: largely eclipsed by LGBTQ+ Woke activists.
To win elections, Democrats have to turn out the vote. So Dems try to be inclusive of these groups. Marxists have always considered mainstream Dems to be the identical to Rightwing candidates, so they don't count when it comes to turning out the vote. And the Progressives usually defect because usually more moderate Democratic candidates get chosen for the presidential campaigns (because radical Dem candidates can't win elections at the national level—but they can win at the district level). But to win a national election the Dems have to turn out the black vote and women (who predominately registered Democrats). Latinos are important in some states.
Hope this helps you understand the dynamics of the Left. ;-)
The only politically sound solution is for Jews to declare themselves 'Transsexuals', then October 7 can be declared a Hate Crime and Jews will have the same protections we give toilet trolls.
Oh, my. Thanks! I totally forgot about the environmentalists. This is another group that the Right sees as some sort of a monolithic entity but in reality, is a fractured movement of which there are at least half a dozen feuding factions. Animal rights activists and food activists are also some peripheral groups to environmentalists.
> They may pay lip-service to the CRT woken, but they're less about ideology and more about practical results
To me, it looks like these have mostly been taken over by woke, not just in the Sense where I know it when I see it, but in the sense that effectiveness takes a back seat to having the correct rhetoric and ideology. Would you mind going into more detail about why you think differently?
> the source of its power originates in education departments who train teachers.
The last experience I with with community organizers was with people I knew in the Portland BLM protests. These were all peeps who were veteran activists. In the past, they trained protestors in non-violent resistance (but a lot of the protestors who showed up at the Portland protests were not trained). Though there was a lot of "defund the police" talk, the organizers I knew just wanted to get rid of the Neanderthals who were ensconced in the Portland PD. I admit I can't speak for other community organizers.
As for Education departments, OMG! Phillip Lemoine (who is a Leftie BTW) wrote an essay (now I can't find the link to it) where his experience has been that it's his students who are leading the woke charge, rather than the liberal arts professoriate. But he points his finger at the Education Departments of Universities who have been pushing this ideology down to the current crop of teachers and school administrators. And I believe it!
Did you hear about the California Math Framework craziness? It applies "social justice principles" to math lessons. As a Leftie I'm all for social justice. But math is not a subject where social justice or any other ideology should distort its teaching.
Then there was the Oakland Unified School District that sponsored a playdate meetup for PoC kids. This was in clear violation of Title IX laws yet they did it anyway. And then they were shocked that they received death threats and bomb threats from the Rightwing extremists.
I admit I'm out of step with the younger generation of Lefties. OTOH, I am totally out of step with any of the Rightwing crazies who seem to calling the shots in Congress and the GOP. I'll tolerate my crazies if it wins us control of Congress and the Presidency. Unfortunately, I think it turns off moderate Dems and Independents — which we need to win elections.
Thanks! I bumped into a few of those during my own city's BLM experience, but my impression was that they were most effective in the early days, in keeping the focus on BLM and policing, and that as the number of people involved grew, the situation got completely out of their control. Which I suppose is exactly what your theory would predict. :-)
"In particular, everything is an emergency. No one is allowed to specialize, so they're worried about everything all the time." That's a really great string of sentences. I think of that a lot in the context of choosing a career (which I'm still in the process of to some degree). There are so many effective choices that choosing seems to be turning your back on too much, even though to get good at anything requires that sort of choice. On top of that, the modern world runs on small jobs -- there's no shame in being a cog in a good machine. Maybe it's projection, but that seems to be a specific problem this community propagates with its focus on maximization.
The article sure seems that way. At least, it's anti "modern identitarian left", and pro "the self-selected good bits of older versions of the right". (The author was apparently born in 1964.)
What made me laugh is his rose-colored glasses about the "wholesome fun" people were having during the Reagan economic "boom". I remember a disco culture fueled by cocaine and a punk culture with lots of heroin.
Hey, it was a time of no fentanyl or zenes, which has basically dectupled overdose deaths in both cocaine and heroin users today. Coke was coke and dope was dope back then, neither of which is true any more.
That pretty much counts as a halcyon and wholesome time in MY book!
My impression is that "morning in America" is a bit like "America is the most racist country in the world", in that if you repeat it often enough and loudly enough, a bunch of people will uncritically accept it, including a lot of kids who don't have the perspective to know better.
If you're up for even more writing, I'd be up for something on the Ford-Carter-Reagan dynamic. :-)
There's good research that conservatives are, on average, happier. This makes perfect sense when you consider that they are more religious and less likely to endorse victimhood.
Are these studies normalized for age distribution? Older people generally track happier than younger people (probably due to older people having better incomes than younger people), and there happens to be a higher proportion of oldsters among conservatives.
There is also research that shows that median Conservative IQs are approximately ten points lower than median Liberal IQs. I suspect that difference would go away if one normalized for age.
This came up when I googled it. Yes normalised for age. As far as I’m aware it’s a relatively uncontroversial, well replicated finding - the only controversy is in the interpretation (liberals may argue that this finding is because conservatives turn a blind eye to social injustice)
What's happening with the book review contest? As several people have said in the announcement post comments, it's not clear how to confirm if our submissions have been received. What's the timeline for when to expect the next stage in the contest? I'm also not clear if I can edit my submission for typos or if that's against the rules. I'm *also* not clear if I should even be publically acknowledging that I've submitted something or if that partially breaks the rule of anonymity (I'm guessing it doesn't since I'm just a random commenter, but I'm unclear), but there's no other way to ask these questions.
And sorry if I sound impatient, but I'm very surprised there hasn't been a single word from either Scott or a single commenter about the contest in the last two open threads.
It's always been like this, complete public silence until the next stage of the contest. I did some math to cope with the lack of information.
2023:
announcement: feb 2nd
deadline: april 5th
start reviewing: may 1st
book review 1: may 20th
book review 16: september 1st
2024:
announcement: mar 2nd
deadline: may 5th
start reviewing: june 1st??
book review 1: june 20th????
book review 16: october 1st???????
All times subject to further delays or new discoveries in "putting a bunch of links in a google docs" efficiency.
PS: Also, I did see Scott saying editing for typos after the deadline is fine, but I think you have a practical time limit (maybe he duplicates the document at some point?).
Following up on my post from last week, I have an adventure in dodgy climate science to share. I was browsing through some info on solar cycle fluctuations when I came across a comment from a V. Zharkova. I searched the name, and apparently she published a very controversial paper, Zharkova et al 2019. Intrigued, I set off.
The main focus of the paper was on fluctuations in the Sun's magnetic field. That was completely overshadowed by a comparatively very minor point, however. As aficionados of orbital mechanics probably know and the rest of us don't, nothing in the solar system actually orbits around a fixed central point. Every solar body, including the Sun, orbits around the solar system barycenter. This is basically the center of gravity of all the solar bodies at that given point in time. Mostly this means just the Sun and Jupiter for practical purposes.
Anyway, Zharkova's paper made the extraordinary claim that the Sun orbited the barycenter, but the Earth did not. This implied that the distance between the Earth and Sun would vary by up to 0.02 AU (on top of the variation due to Earth's elliptical orbit). If true, it would mean the distance between the Earth and Sun varied by ~50% more than previous orbital mechanics would dictate. For those not familiar with the subject, this difference would be astronomical (sorry).
Naturally the paper caused a stir after this came to light. The publisher has all of the comments on the paper archived and available to the public. Initially, another PhD chimed in wondering how the orbital distances could possibly be so far off. Zharkova responded, and PhD 2 was astounded that she didn't think the Earth also followed the barycenter along with the Sun. They argue past each other for a while. Then PhD 3 intervenes and claims that the barycenter is actually fake, and just a mathematical artefact or something. This went on for a while and I admit I don't fully understand everything. Apparently it was a serious enough error that the paper was retracted by the publisher, even though the majority of Zharkova's work had nothing to do with it.
Wondering about the rest of the paper, I watched Zharkova give a youtube lecture about it. A little background for the audience - there are long term fluctuations in solar activity, and periods of historically high/low solar activity generally correlate with temperature proxies for anomalous temperature. One of these periods is the Medieval Warm Period. After going through her model of electromagnetic solar activity, Zharkova hit a bit of a snag: her model had this period about 300 years too late.
Carbon dating works by measuring the decay of radioactive carbon-14. Carbon-14 is typically created by cosmic rays lopping a proton off of nitrogen atoms. Cosmic ray activity is not constant, so there is a calibration curve to compensate for this. A disruption in the model of cosmic rays would mean the calibration curve gave wrong dating results. So Vela Junior comes to the rescue! Vela Jr. is a remnant of a nearby supernova that was recently detected. A supernova creates a massive flux of cosmic rays, easily explaining how the model was off by 300+ years. But wait - alas, the dating of Vela Jr. to 600 years ago was based on a contested spectroscopic analysis that couldn't be replicated. The dating is now thought to put the supernova over 1500 years ago.
This whole debacle is a classic case of trying to find post-hoc rationalizations about data to fit the model. Lots of good lessons here. As an amusing aside, Zharkova has a thick Russian accent and I turned on the youtube auto subtitles to help understand her. On "eigenvalues", it just kind of gave up and transcribed "aan". The best one by far was transcribing "antiphase" to "antifa".
I think it would be pretty inaccurate to describe the inner planets, including Earth, as orbiting around the solar system's barycentre. A single Earth orbit takes 1/12 of a Jupiter orbit, so for the purpose of the basic shape of Earth's orbit, the sun is pretty much fixed, and the attraction to Jupiter takes a very different form (and is much weaker) than that of a mass inside Earth's orbit. You could describe the Earth-Sun system and Jupiter as orbiting around each other, but that leads to a very different overall shape for the Earth's orbit than it simply orbiting the barycentre.
I don't really know anything about orbital mechanics. My impression is the Earth-Sun system orbits its own barycenter, which for all practical purposes is just the Sun due to the enormous mass difference. The Earth-Sun system also orbits the Earth-Sun-Jupiter barycenter. The other planets also impact this, but their masses are very tiny in comparison and the time horizon for these effects are 100K+ years.
Is there a difference between Lighthaven and Lightcone in the last sentence? Is Lightcone distinct from the Lighthaven event venue? Does one own the other? I haven't heard of Lightcone
WTF is up with the Dems on the commission trying to outlaw real money based election prediction markets in the name of preventing election "interference"?!?
Seems like large companies already effectively have huge bets on who wins the election as a result of policy exposure. Hell, a truly large and liquid betting market would actually do a fair bit to reduce the incentive of large corporations to net donate to one side of an election because that action itself is a PR/regulation risk (u piss ppl off and may lose) and the market lets them hedge w/o that.
And the few individuals who can really move those markets are the canidates and their close advisors. But surely it's a huge win for the country if we can bribe the people who are willing to take money to cause a certain political outcome to throw their own elections!!
Are we really at the point where even the people on the expert committees are seeing this fully through a signalling lens? Or is there some less negative psychological explanation of the partisan breakdown of this vote?
There are lots of betting markets that are banned. I can't buy fire insurance on my neighbor's house. I can't take out life insurance for a stranger's life. Doctors can't place bets on which patients will live and which patients will die. Heck - it's (probably) still illegal to pay someone to maintain a lawsuit in exchange for a cut of the proceeds (unless you're the lawyer doing it on contingency). That one's even got its own term - champerty.
All of that is to say nothing of actual gambling. That's banned almost everywhere in the United States, even though most people don't think that the outcome of a roulette wheel is nearly as important as the odds of the Presidential election.
You really underestimate how much people really, really, really hate the idea of someone making a profit from matters of chance.
> I can't buy fire insurance on my neighbor's house. I can't take out life insurance for a stranger's life. Doctors can't place bets on which patients will live and which patients will die.
> You really underestimate how much people really, really, really hate the idea of someone making a profit from matters of chance.
Those three examples don't support the following conclusion; they are banned not because fires and deaths happen by chance but because it's so easy to get them to happen on purpose.
That's fair, although I think there's an element of that fear in this election market thing. Look at George Santos and how easy it was for him to lie his way into the House of Representatives. If he could have cashed in on his lies, or allowed his donors to cash in on his lies, that would probably make the story worse, not better. Likewise for the New York Times and the Hunter Biden story - if they had been able to bet on Joe Biden and then bury stories unfavorable to him, that doesn't seem like a good thing.
So yeah, I can totally see people worried that major players will start betting on elections and then using their power to influence the elections. They already do it now and they don't make nearly as much money as they could.
Ok, that's the first explanation that makes psychological sense to me. They aren't just banning this relatively obscure thing out of vague moral concern but really think there might be big bad effects,
But then it raises the question of how they believe this despite the absence of such shenanigans in the UK.
I want to make the case to you that law is the product of experience, not reason. (That's Oliver Wendell Holmes' quote).
The U.S., for example, bans futures trading on onions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act Why? Because once upon a time, two bad people tried to corner the market on onions futures. So the U.S. banned it. No other country, to my knowledge, bans the trading of onions futures.
But the U.S. had a bad experience, and then enacted a law to prevent that experience from repeating. That's not a matter of logic, but, rather, experience.
Truthfully, there probably aren't going to be big bad effects in the U.S. from election market betting. The same way no one would corner the market in onion futures today. But the law doesn't work that way. It's not at all based on reason and purely based on experience. The U.S. has had a rough go of elections (and onion contracts) and thus the law reflects our shared experience.
Seems like your quote doesn't support your conclusion...we don't have experience suggesting it creates an issue.
However, this whole discussion has been rendered moot because Scott explained that adding a general ban actually reduces their work so we no longer need an explanation of why they would waste limited time on this and it's enough for them to just think it's better to not allow than allow.
> You really underestimate how much people really, really, really hate the idea of someone making a profit from matters of chance.
I think the opposition to gambling in general is mostly motivated by the opposite case, where some stupid people lose all their money, and then their families starve, or they then go steal something -- in case of offline gambling, if you live near the gambling house, expect people trying to break in your house at least once a month, that creates a lot of anger.
That's the problem that "stupid people lose their money" sounds nice in theory, but less nice in practice, when you see their children begging on the street, and everything you don't carefully lock gets immediately stolen.
In the US, I believe champerty is called maintenance, and no-win-no-fee lawyers have to tread carefully to avoid falling into that trap. The problem with bank-rolling someone's case is that if they lose then anyone who had made those champertous contributions will be called upon to fork out a commensurate proportion of the costs!
Right, look if this was the issue coming up asking for a change to positively approve them this is a more than sufficient explanation. However, it's not really an explanation for why to bother fussing with it at all -- and as a member of the commodity futures trading commission it's not at all clear how this is more like gambling than any other market I oversee.
I still think you need something more to explain why they aren't just doing the easy thing and making no changes.
They probably wanted to change it from the moment they heard about it, but it takes forever to do notice-and-comment rulemaking?
It took 12 years and 100,000+ pages for the FDA to decide what percentage of peanuts it takes to make peanut butter. PredictIt got started 10 years ago, so we're moving pretty fast for government.
My confusion isn't why they didn't do it earlier but why it seemed important enough for them to invest limited time and influence into. The fact that it's so hard to change rules just sharpens the question.
I mean, it's like finding out that Biden has spent 100 days as president trying to ban federal police from swearing or require warning labels on products with xantham gum . Ok, maybe he doesn't like those things but he has 4 years and can only do so much and unless he has a personal motive (dog died bc of xantham gum) or a political one (wants to seen pro trad morals) that would be an odd use of limited resources.
I don't think the guys at the CFTC board are just twiddling their thumbs wondering what they can ban. I'm sure they have many pressing issues so what elevated this to one?
"I'm sure they have many pressing issues so what elevated this to one?"
Call me crazy, call me paranoid, tell me to wrap myself in tin-foil but I have to wonder: is this more fall-out from the Sam Bankman-Fried affair? Regulatory bodies being more hyper than usual around things these (looks at notes) "Rationalists" are involved with? Hmmm - sums of money being solicited from the public for things to do with maths and statistics and those guys involved again, let's nip this in the bud before we get another FTX on our hands?
I don't understand the anti-gambling position, but trying hard to steelman it:
Aside from the consequentialist worries (encouraging corruption and cheating, causing addiction, etc), it seems to be something like: your money isn't *doing* anything useful. Unlike an investment, it's not actually growing the economy or contributing to production of goods or services in some way. It's not incentivising productive action by others. It's just sitting there, being traded on the rules of artificial games (whether that be cards, dice, horses or predictions).
And therefore...it should be banned? No, I don't understand the last part, or really the first part either. But there's got to be *some* apparently good reason for the opposition, right? Can anyone help?
Your money in a prediction market IS doing something useful - it's generating information! It is helping produce a current best estimate of the odds of something happening. And the more people are putting their bets into that market the faster the estimate converges and responds to new information over time. The market is doing much the same thing the New York Times does - giving us time-sensitive info that's useful today but will be near-worthless tomorrow. Is that not a form of "contributing to production"?
1. There's an air of riskiness about allowing gambling on elections. Even if I can't think of exactly what could go wrong, it just seems like inviting trouble. Look at all the sports gambling scandals. You say that it's too our benefit if we can bribe out people who are bribeable- but what if they get in the primaries and win them purely to setup this scheme, then they're taking a spot away from a better candidate. (I think this is plausibly true and a legitimate consideration- it does have an air of "risk from something I haven't thought of yet")
2. Gambling is bad for people anyway. There's too much gambling. We should turn down the dial on the gambling knob (very plausibly true especially in a broad sense)
3. There's no clear benefit to this (you and I know this is false, but to someone uninitiated, even someone bright, it could seem true)
4. Given I'm going to oppose it, might as well throw a bit of meat to the base about rUsSiA etc.
That's a compelling case if I was forced to vote up or down or had nothing else important to do but it doesn't explain why I wouldn't just decide to not bother fucking with it at all and go deal with one of the many other important issues in my remit.
What's odd here is they are taking positive action to shut it down not merely failing to remove a barrier.
What's happening at the frontier of your field / a field you're excited about?
Could be highly niche which means people outside the field may not understand the rate of progress happening right now. Add links to blogs / sites that may help us find out more.
I'm interested in fashion counterfeiting because it's kind of a crime that feels more victimless than usual (IP crime but with physical products) and also because there's now some incredibly good fakes. The supply chain part is also interesting. There's an interesting article in The Cut about this topic.
Also, the more similar to the genuine article they look, the more they kind of throw into question of what product, exactly, is the genuine retailer selling. If you can get a practically identical luxury handbag at 10% the cost of a real one, and yet the real store still exists, it's not actually in the business of selling handbags. On the other hand, the brands do spend a hell of a lot of money trying to fight counterfeiting.
The part I'm kind of at a loss for is why governments even bother defending the IP of say, Chanel. Is there a bounty? It can't be cheap to go through so much mail, so why exactly is this getting funded?
I don't know it you're going to get good answers. For example, I can't talk about what's happening at the frontier of my field: this stuff is all trade secret, vendor-customer relationship secret, or in the process of being patented. The last one at least will give you a chance to read it 18 months after the application.
If I post any of this publicly I risk losing my job at a minimum.
I am starting to think that “time” doesn’t actually exist, only “motion”. It seems to me impossible to make reference to the passage of time without reference to motion, whether that be motion of the sun, a clock hand or the radioactive decay of an atom. And conversely, if all motion were to stop, how would that be distinguishable from time stopping?
If what we generally think of as “time stamps” are just ways to keep denote different configurations of matter and energy in the universe, then, for example, it solves all time travel paradoxes — the reason we haven’t seen any time travelers is because there is no such thing as “time” to travel in. If some Cartesian demon were to reset the universe to some configuration of matter and energy that had occurred previously, it would look the same as traveling back in time but no paradoxes involved. And although I am not a physicist, based on my layperson’s understanding of relativity, the reason for time dilation would be that motion gets slower as your mass increases as you approach the speed of light, etc.
Of course, these are all just shower thoughts, hopefully someone smarter than me can weigh in.
Seems related to Immanuel Kant's belief that time is our 'inner sense' (in contrast to space, the 'outer sense'), which seems based on the idea that the only way we have a sense of time is through our memory and inner ability to stitch the various positions of space together
I suggest you check out Lee Smolin's discussions of time. I've bookmarked this video. Unfortunately, Lee's speech and motion is starting to be affected by his Parkinsons and it can be distracting. The serious discussion starts about 4 minutes in.
Just an undergrad in physics here but it's very common to supress dimensions in which there is no variation, since they most often make no difference to the results--which is exactly what you're doing. Motion is just variation in the time dimension, so without it it does make sense to have "no time"--ie everything would behave the same whether or not you had a time dimension.
It works with spatial dimensions, too--solving the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom involves separating out all the angular dependencies (which you can do because the problem is invariant under rotations ;ie, there is no variation along angular directions, only radial) and solving for the radial part of the solution. Them you can go back and tack on the angular solutions. But careful! The angular solutions can break angular symmetry, which seems odd/unphysical until you notice that the ground state is perfectly symmetric, and getting an electron out of the ground state would require breaking the symmetry of the situation with some input of energy.
Another example comes from an interesting problem in my general relativity class last semester--we were to calculate the TOV equation in two (spatial) dimensions (ie, for a flat circle star) which the textbook mentioned was equivalent to calculating it for an infinite cylindrical star. This is the same suprwssion of a dimension with no variation--if you right down the cylindrical star in cylindrical coordinates, nothing varies along the z direction, and you can supress it and get back the 2-d circular star.
Anyways, bottom line is that I think you're catching onto a well known thing in physics, which is that dimensions with no variation can be surpressed--usually. I think there are cases where the results are non-trivially different with added constant dimensions, like the higher energy levels of the hydrogen atom. Additional righting something down in full with multiple dimensions and then surpressing can sometimes yield different results due to the topology/geometry of the higher dimensional space you introduced--again looking at the problem of the hydrogen atom, the radial equation looks like the Schrodinger equation, but the potential includes an extra term that behaves like a "centrifugal" force due to the way polar coordinates work.
I think about this by imagining a 2d system with time, represented in 3 dimensions (and then trying to imagine a 3d system with time, represented in 4 dimensions). For the 2d system, it'd be like a series of chessboards, stacked on one another. The pieces would move continuously, and so would trace out a path in 3d, moving ever upward until they were removed from play or the game ended. You can imagine the "current time" being a horizontal slice moving continuously upward, or you could just imagine the entire thing as a solid whole, that all exists at once. It might look like a lot of strings arranged in a vertical bundle, all tangled together, but loosely oriented in the same direction.
If all motion were to stop somehow, all of it, everywhere, I don't think there'd be an observer left in the system. But an entity standing outside could observe and see, and possibly restart the system by reaching in somehow.
This doesn't really address your point, but if the chess game is between two outside players, and one has to take a bathroom break, and the time scale of the 3d representation is in real time rather than in moves, then yes, it could stop and then restart, and the time might not matter in the representation in terms of moves, but it would matter to the outside players. But that's not quite what you're asking about, I don't think.
I like this idea of a perspective outside the stopped System. From this perspective, the question is sensible: "For how long has all motion in the System been on pause?" Even when there's no actual observer outside the System, since there's always a conceivable observer, time does continue even when the pieces are all paused.
And the concept of outside time might be unrelated to the concept of time within the System. It might be like playing a video. The video exists, and can be played straight through in real-time. But it can be paused, and jumped around in, and sped up or slowed down, and none of that actually changes the video itself.
In City of God St Augustine argued the same thing, God exists out of time which only starts with the creation of the heavens on earth and the subsequent movement. Augustine argues that if nothing were moving, then time would effectively cease to exist because there would be no change to measure.
This was in order to argue that God wasn’t a procrastinator who waited around for an eternity to create the cosmos. God exists outside of time which didn’t exist until he created it, along with the universe.
(Augustine believed in the 6000 year old earth if I recall correctly. he was trying to explain why a God that was always there waited until recently - by the standards of infinity - to do anything useful).
That's true, but I think that space also falls prey to the same reasoning. Motion is distance over time. So just like you can't make reference to the passage of time without distance, you really can't make reference to distance without time. (E.g., when I look out my window and see into the distance, it's fixed at a particular place in time. I can't look out my window and see the Triassic Era).
You can abstract distance and time (e.g., a mile in the abstract, a minute in the abstract) but you can only ever observe them together. They're intrinsically linked.
But even for motion, time does appear to be weird. We can return to the same spaces at different times, but (it seems) we can never go back to a previous time no matter what space we occupy. That's pretty weird!
I don’t think motion is distance over time, it’s just distance. You can say “This thing moved from Point A to Point B” with no reference to time required. The reason you can’t look out your window and see the Triassic Era is because the current configuration of matter and energy is not the same as it was in the Triassic Era. If it were identical to the Triassic Era there would be no way to distinguish that from time traveling back to the Triassic Era, kind of the same way that acceleration is indistinguishable from gravitation. I don’t think the concept of time is necessary to describe motion, but the concept of motion is necessary to describe time.
> the current configuration of matter and energy is not the same as it was
The words "current" and "was" already imply some kind of... time.
We can say that there is no time only motion, but then the question is how is that motion synchronized? If time is merely the movement of the particles, what mechanism allows us to predict which particle will hit the target first, or whether the particles will hit each other?
I’m only using those terms for convenience because much of our language presumes that time exists. You could posit a reference system that numbered every possible state of matter and energy in the universe and instead refer to those numbers rather than “time stamps” and it would work just as well to identify any particular “time period”. Again, an organization of matter and energy identical to that of what we commonly call the Triassic Era would be indistinguishable from the Triassic Era, so you could just as easily call something “Configuration 8736191022” or whatever rather than “8:59PM on June 11, 100 Million BCE”. No reference to time required.
Now you have organizations of matter and energy, and the mystery of "what is time" was replaced by the mystery of "why are these organizations such that e.g. the law of inertia works".
Odd. I was also pondering this week about whether it's possible to define time without reference to motion.
That sure would be a much more intuitive explanation for time dilation if it were true. Even my 4 year old could get the idea that they will move slower if I make them hold a backpack filled with rocks.
Very much hoping someone smarter than both of us will weigh in especially if they bring in Zeno's paradoxes! (About which I would love to do a podcast if I could find the right person!)
Zeno's Paradox is very easy to explain. It arises simply because the clearly false conclusion is stated without a necessary qualifying condition, but inclusion of that condition makes the statement true.
The way it is stated is that the runner Achilles gives the tortoise a head start, and then they both run and crawl respectively ever shorter successive distances so the tortoise always seems to stay ahead. But the conclusion doesn't consider that the sum of those distances run by Achilles converges to a particular value, say 140 yards (depending on the distances). So the conclusion should be not simply that Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise, as traditionally stated which gives rise to the paradox, but that "Achilles won't catch up with the tortoise _before_he_has_run_140_yards_" (or one could express the conclusion equivalently in terms of time, based on Achilles's running speed)
TBH, I've never understood the tremendous fuss people have always made about this so-called paradox, when it can be so trivially explained!
I’ve heard people say that calculus explains Zeno’s paradox but based on my (dim) recollection of college calculus it mainly deals with into how things approach the limit via infinitesimals, not how things actually exceed the limit. I always figured that moving objects must eventually reach their destination because space is quantized and it is impossible for an object to go half a Planck’s length, so eventually you can’t keep further subdividing the interval. But I am also not a mathematician :-).
It does explain it. The whole point of calculus and other mathematics on sequences and series is to work out if a sequence converges to a value or not. So the sum of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 can be shown to converge to 1, while just adding it up on an infinite calculator will never get there.
Did you read the article though. It has some interesting points to make that suggest calculus isn’t the answer (or at least not the whole answer). And remember there are a series of paradoxes and they feed off each other.
It’s interesting. So far as I understand it the art seems to be saying that the paradoxes are only paradoxes if our understanding of reality is correct. Therefore our understanding of reality needs to change!
I particularly love this article about the paradoxes as it much less dismissive than most stuff I read on them. I feel there is still stuff to be wrestled with here though as a non mathemetician I really wouldn't know. Anyway I gather the author of the paper is hard to find so if anyone knows about them I'd love to know.
The example with the mirrors merely shows that discontinuous motion is not well-behaved, and that the behaviour of light that the example implicitly assumes (in which the motion is discontinuous) cannot be physically realistic. Drawing the conclusion that space and/or time must be discrete from this is an incorrect inference.
In Zeno's paradox, as it is usually stated, the conclusion that motion is impossible is simply a non-sequitur, but if we take it to be making a slightly different point, that the future cannot be deduced from the past and does not follow from it because in between any two moments there was always time for something else to happen (there is no previous moment), then here calculus offers a solution: the laws of physics are differential equations, which include an assumption of continuity (in the technical mathematical sense).
Has reading any of Robin Hansons material changed the way you interact with the world? I’m not sure it has made my life any better, just occasionally I notice that a status game is happening or maybe I should be more critical of some medicine
That most political discussions are just signalling tribal membership, and that the 1/300,000,000 chance that one of us peons actually gets to decide something is not worth the energy that goes into the discussion.
It reminds me that sometimes things do not make sense because they were actually never supposed to make sense, only to send a signal.
For example, if someone says "I want X", and you say "okay, here is X", and they say "no thanks", this can be quite confusing... until you consider the hypothesis that perhaps they do not really want X, they just want to be perceived as "the *kind of person* who wants X", because there are some advantages of that which are unrelated to whether they actually get X or don't.
If anything, reading Robin Hanson's archives has made me much more skeptical that because someone is internet famous with smart people that they are themselves worth reading. Hanson rarely cites his sources, makes very firm claims about uncertain things (e.g. claims that dropping fertility *caused* the decline of the Greeks and Romans, which, to put it mildly, is contested), casually extends trend lines to infinity (which gets both interesting ideas like grabby aliens but also statements like the Amish will take over the USA in three hundred years because they currently have higher birth rates so we better mollify them and their values). Hanson also practices the kind of armchair evolutionary psychology that always seems to end with the conclusion that the social structure which prevailed in the time of his childhood just so happens to be optimally aligned.
> the Amish will take over the USA in three hundred years because they currently have higher birth rates
This may be true if current trends continue, but they can't. Eventually the Amish will occupy all the available* farmland and will not be able to expand further. Since the rural population is dwarfed by the urban population, they will still be a minority. It's interesting to speculate what they will do when this happens, all their options (not living on farms, too high population density on their farms, reducing breeding) are in conflict with their values.
*available means for sale. Corporate owned farms will go cheaper than family owned, so at some point I expect there will be mostly Amish owned, a few family owned, and no corporate owned. This may be an improvement compared to now.
> but also statements like the Amish will take over the USA in three hundred years because they currently have higher birth rates so we better mollify them and their values
The premise is reasonable; the conclusion would normally be something more like "we should *adopt* their values".
If they're going to take over in the future, they can impose their values then; if we don't want them, why would we do the same thing in advance?
It can be wise to mollify people who may not forever be powerless and in fact may become more powerful than you or at least strong enough to hurt you, to prevent them from taking revenge.
For example, the 'extract reparations' strategy imposed on Germany after WW I seemed a lot less wise than the 'Marshall plan' strategy after WW II.
The argument assumes nothing meaningful changes for a period of time equivalent to the start of the industrial revolution; it's a big jump from "this is the direction of travel, what lessons can we learn" to "this will happen, we should prepare for it".
I don't think anyone predicted the birthrate collapsing. All the worry was about the population bomb, and that did it's bit to cause the collapse, though I don't think it was the primary factor.
Agree on both counts; actions which require assumptions about steady human culture and behaviour over hundreds of years are intrinsically suspect in my view.
I haven't plugged my podcast here for a bit so I thought I'd mention my latest episode. Recently I have been getting interested in the Byzantine Empire and its extraordinary longevity - seeing off any number of enemies in a history of over a thousand years until finally going down to the Ottomans in 1453. Anthony Kaldellis is a great speaker and I enjoyed this one as much as any I have done. He is considered by some to have controversial ideas on the subject but probably only in a way that specialists in the field would notice. Anyway - please give it a go!
Like many amateur history enthusiasts, when I first started studying Roman history, and later (Byzantine) Roman history, I was curious how the empire collapsed; what caused Rome to “fall”. As I learned more the question eventually shifted to “how did they manage to make it this long?!”
True, the blockade came before Hamas’s rise to power.
As your link attests to, though, it was a response to an Israeli soldier being kidnapped, with the rationale being to stymie the ability to move the kidnapped soldier internationally.
I have a tech job that treats and pays me well but I don't find fulfilling, meaningful, or fun. I'm looking for a job that:
1 - I find the mission of the company fulfilling and meaningful
2 - I enjoy
3 - Pays really well
I know this is vague but curious what advice people have to offer.
It would probably be interesting to ask in the following ACX survey whether people find their jobs meaningful and enjoyable. I suspect that most people in IT would respond negatively. But it would be interesting to compare it to other professions.
Good luck finding a better job, but I suggest also exploring the possibilities of early retirement as a Plan B.
Initial advice is, figure out what fulfilling and meaningful means to you. Grocery stores feed the hungry. Is that fulfilling or meaningful?
Good luck with fun. The more fun it is the less it'll pay.
The solution to the fun/pay part is ‘what do I find fun that others would not find fun?’
Wasn't my initial comment suggesting that grads from Duke (as an Ivy) appeared to acquire 35% more privilege above that of similarly competent grads from public Uni through attendance at Duke?
I simply don't recall and have no interest in repeating points from the paper. I don't see the point (perhaps you correctly report what I wrote) of your nitpicking except to justify a belief of your own. I clearly stated that I looked at the paper in the context of my daughter's (actual grad>99.9%) move from NZ to the UK with the latter having a similar presence of prestigious uni.
Hey, folks. Substack engineering manager here. We deployed some performance improvements to the ACX comments section this week. We noticed that while scrolling content would sometimes just disappear and when switching tabs the page would just lock and not scroll. Super painful. We think we nailed these two symptoms, though we still have more work to do. Just wanted to let you know we're working to make this better and ask for your feedback. Let me know what you're seeing either here or feel free to shoot me a note at john.pignata at substackinc.com. Thanks!
Ironically enough when I tried to click on Scott's link to this comment in his next open thread, the page froze, and then froze again while I was writing this comment.
That said thank you for trying! Big fan of Substack's design in general, but it does seem to suffer from some bloat.
Hey Isaac. Bummer. Can you share some details about what kind of browser on what kind of system you were using? We want to eliminate all of the freezing and this feedback will help. Thanks.
I'm on Chrome 116.0.5845.187. I just tested on Firefox 15.11.0esr and had similar issues, I don't think it's limited to a specific browser. I'd recommend testing on Scott's Ivermectin post, I believe that one has the most comments of any of his articles, and consequently the most severe loading/freezing issues:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
Thanks so much for working on this!
Awesome! What was the problem/change?
Web dev here.
The problem was that we were re-rendering all the comments on the page any time something changed. This was extremely wasteful and blocked the browser from drawing more items as you scrolled. Now we only re-render the comments that need updates.
This is just the first improvement I could think to make. I’m going to investigate a little more and see what else we can do.
One problem is that when clicking footnotes (or otherwise navigating in-page, e.g. clicking back after clicking to a footnote) on a page with lots of comments, it's slow to navigate. Might be slightly less bad than it used to be, hard to say.
When I looked into this in the past, the cause seemed to be that every single comment had an event handler that would react to the URL fragment changing. (I don't remember exactly what event was being reacted to.) The point of the handler was to highlight whichever comment the URL fragment was pointed at, but it was implemented by every comment checking "is the URL fragment pointed at me?" So with hundreds of comments, that slowed things down.
Good find. I’m removing these listeners since the highlight only ever has to be appear when the components mount.
Nice, thank you! It seems fast now. I'm happy I could help from the sidelines.
It would be really nice if
(a) the page did not say "0 comments" before it has loaded the comments, and instead said something like "loading" so you don't think the comment list is empty and then close the page.
(b) after submitting a comment, if it would immediately render or at least put a placeholder where you put it, rather than the form just vanishing and leaving you wondering if your comment went through.
(c) after editing a comment, the comment was rendered with your edits shown instead of in its unedited form.
I believe I fixed B and C. I also can't reproduce A, but it's probably specific to a page I'm not finding. Are you on the `/p/slug` page or the `/p/slug/comments` page?
Thanks for this feedback! We'll take a look at this list. I don't see a), but I do see some weirdness where it sometimes changed post load (e.g. this post says 830 comments, and after loading it says 831... weird off by one error).
Putting React where it doesn't belong? :)
Eh, it's a React anti-pattern to do global state updates while scrolling. At minimum you throttle the updates to once per 100ms or something. Best case you don't do any at all, except possibly kicking off async background fetches if you need to load new data.
Thank you for the improvements, and also thank you for the explanation! :-)
This is amazing!
It scrolls like a breeze with all content visible. And no freezing. Thanks!
This changes everything :D
So no more need for the app?
Not quite there yet, I think… go to the archive, sort by top posts (so we get something with lots of comments), and try to load it on your phone
Sssssh... or they may revert the changes. :D
Administrative rulemaking is overlooked as an avenue to influence US policy change. The FTC's recent NPRM on deceptive fees would impact the vast majority of economic transactions across the country. It has received a few thousand comments, most of which are contentless "yay rule / boo rule" comments that have close to zero impact on this process. Even some of the professional comments from industry associations simply attack constitutionality, and seem to misunderstand the opportunity for influence. Effective comments would empathize with the rulemaker's dilemmas and propose minor, consensus-building modifications that spotlight ways to remove ambiguities or smooth implementation, while privately nudging things toward favorable interpretations.
My point is not that this particular rule is good or bad (some of the industries requesting carve outs have really tortured logic in order to continue to hide pricing details, others might have legitimate cases). My point is that there's enormous policy alpha in notice and comment periods and nobody takes advantage of it effectively because nobody really understands how.
I know one of Scott's recent passions is better understanding US policymaking, and if I recall correctly, someone who served on a legislative staff is writing about it? I think administrative rulemaking would be a good addition to that effort and I'd be happy to unpack my thoughts further in support of or in parallel to that effort.
One bias in this process is that only current players in an industry have the time and interest to comment. If there is a proposed rule that will clobber someone who would have entered into the industry in ten years, or that makes it very hard for new companies to compete with existing ones, there will usually be nobody commenting who has any incentive to bring these up as problems, and very often nobody will even notice. (Microsoft knows what rules will cost them a bunch of money, but doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about what rules will be a problem to some newcomer in ten years.)
This sounds like a great point, although ain't nobody got the time (which may help explain part of the effect of why things are how they are).
People who are into X-risk: what are your takes on EMP effects from solar activity? I've been hearing about this more since the latest aurorae caused by a coronal mass ejection (CME). An "expert" claimed that the odds of a large portion of the electrical grid being knocked out were 1/8 per decade. This would be catastrophic on a large enough scale, as transformers take 1-3 years to be delivered from manufacturers.
The Carrington Event in 1859 probably had the power to do this. A CME directly collided with the Earth's atmosphere. The aurorae spanned the entire globe, and were so bright people could read in the middle of the night. I know some background on this due to my climate investigations: solar activity in the 19th century was in the 90th percentile of the last 10,000 years, and has been trending steadily downwards for the last 150 years.
I don't think anything the sun did in the last billion years qualifies as x-risk. Knocking out electricity world-wide would be bad, an ice age would be worse, but neither are things which would permanently hamstring humanity.
Also, while CME are travelling blazing fast compared to spacecrafts, they are not relativistic, so we would be able to spot them a few days before they arrive, giving us the opportunity to disconnect the transformers from the long overland lines.
And then transformers are likely subject to price elasticity of supply. At the moment, a lot of companies are likely not building transformers because they would not make money from them -- they are a mature product, and power companies can plan ahead how many they need and pick the cheapest supplier. If the alternative was sitting in the dark, humans would likely be willing to spend a lot more on transformers. At the moment, a few cents of my price per kWh pays for the cost of transformers. If the alternative was a life without electricity, I would eagerly accept a price of a few euros per kWh instead of I ditching my laptop and phone while using kerosene for lighting.
This would incentive a lot of companies to get into the transformer market and make big bucks by selling what would previously have been considered primitive and inefficient transformers -- just a piece of iron with insulating wires coiled around it in the most extreme case. Of course, they would also be hampered by a lack of electrical power, but some sources of power would likely be remain available.
Before 2020, particle filtering masks were an absolute niche product used by people working in construction and the like. When covid hit, the demand increased by orders of magnitude, quickly leading to a scarcity. But within half a year (IIRC), suppliers had adapted to the new situation and the markets were flooded masks. Today, they are cheaper than in 2019 because the increased demand makes for better economics of scale.
There is nothing to constructing a transformer which intrinsically takes half a year, like a step "after casting, let the device cool for five months". There would be some latency to the market reacting, but it would not be three years.
Ok, X-risk is not the right category, but I'm not sure what better term to use.
There is the concern that large scale disruption of the electrical grid would cause a lot of secondary disruptions in the supply chain. Obviously there would be a huge incentive to make new transformers quickly, but that doesn't make it easier to get everything together under unexpected and chaotic circumstances.
Catastrophic risk is often used to describe things that may not lead to extinction but are still very bad
Does voluntary self-regulation by industry sometimes work?
What I mean is: Oftentimes, government tries to regulate an industry, and the end result is not enforced regulation but some sort of self-regulation agreements, where companies promise to limit their behavior without a legal framework. Whenever I read about this kind of setup, it’s because it failed. The companies say “sure we won’t do the thing, promise.” but then do it anyway.
I am curious if there’s a good empirical case for self-regulation: does this actually work more often than not, and we just hear about it when it fails?
One common case is that the government says "you must try to achieve goal X", and then leaves it to private industry to decide on the best way to do it. This is how KYC mostly works for example. Banks are required to have controls in place, but they get to decide what those controls are.
I don't know if this counts, but the way the UK legislates process safety vs how the US legislates process safety kind of lets the regulated entity write their own rules?
The UK has a suite of laws (mostly offshore) that mean certain operations (eg offshore oil rig) have to write a Safety Case, which is basically the suite of processes and rules that apply to that particular facility. The HSE authority approves the safety case (as well as any updates) and if anything goes wrong the company needs to prove they complied with the safety case.
The US kind of just writes a bunch of rules that govern the entire industry instead of letting each one write their own rules (subject to regulator approval).
In my view, the UK safety case approach is more efficient - you don't need the regulator to be on top of every little detail of all facilities in order to make effective rules.
I can remember several instances of large low-wage employers loudly announcing they are voluntarily raising wages in the face of pending legislation to raise minimum wages, which I believe has in some cases succeeded in reducing support for that legislation.
And did they actually raise the wages, or was it just some trick?
(Something like: yes, raise the wages, but only for one employee in a thousand, or only for a few months, etc. Or even, raise the wages now by 10%, but then keep them the same for the rest of the decade, until inflation catches up.)
The Hayes Code and the MPAA rating system are examples of self-regulation working (at least in the sense that the industry did what the govt wanted, without govt having to enact regulations. Not in the sense of being an improvement, at least not IMHO. But one can presumably say that about any limit on business activity).
Margarita posting:
> The second variety of the lidérc is as a tiny being, a temporal devil, földi ördög in Hungarian. It has many overlapping qualities with the miracle chicken form, and it may also be obtained from a black hen's egg, but more often it is found accidentally in rags, boxes, glass bottles, or in the pockets of old clothes. A person owning this form of the lidérc suddenly becomes rich and is capable of extraordinary feats, because the person's soul has supposedly been given to the lidérc, or even to the Devil.
Pokemon, Hungarian folklore, or servant of El Poio Diablo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lid%C3%A9rc
Hi! Anyone know a good apartment locator in SF? I tried calling up realtors but they don't seem to deal with apartment rentals. Thank you!
Has anyone gone to a psychedelic retreat in one of the 2 states where the stuff's legal -- Oregon and Colorado? If so, I'd appreciate it if you could share your impression of what it was like. I'm trying to help someone who wants to get legal psilocybin with a trained facilitator present, and as I look through the directory of facilitators in Oregon I'm drowning in woo. I have not found one person yet with conventional credentials. Seems odd to me since lots of psychiatrists and psychologists I know are quite interested in psychedelic-assisted therapy. I keep reminding myself that somebody who's into woo can still be quite good as a guide and facilitator but . . . https://ginagratza.com
Is Colorado even operating with psilocybin therapy yet? Last I read they were expected to be up and running EOY 2024.
The link to Gina rings some serious BS bells with my personal spidey sense.
Not sure about Colorado. Drug's legal there now, but I didn't have time to read around and find out the details. As for Gina -- if you click on the main page you soon get to a picture of her wading in the ocean with her butt crack visible through her gauzy dress. IMHO uploading your butt crack on the site touting your trip guiding expertise automatically disqualifies you.
But she has a Master's in Counselling, Eremolalos! This is all about empowering women to discover their inner Divine Feminine through getting blasted on magic mushrooms!
I have to admit that my cynicism around the whole topic is that it's most likely to be engaged in by woo types (see Gina) and those who want to find a legal loophole in order to get high. It'll be a while before the respectable types dare dip their toes in the water, given how medical marijuana was the same at first.
There is a woman in Minneapolis who bills herself as a facilitator / trip sitter / shaman. Her online photo shows her with a wolf pelt over her shoulders and the wolf head on top of her own. Jebus I think I’ll pass.
In these degenerate days, we could hope it was a fake wolf pelt.
I’m afraid it looked pretty real. :(
Maybe she also had the tail glued to the seat of her pants?
That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
It would keep her ass crack from showing, thus avoiding being instantly disqualified by Eremolos....
If asked to imagine a typical "conventionally attractive" heterosexual man (who can get any women he wants), I think most people would imagine a "Chad" type: a rich, muscular, masculine guy with plenty of confidence. And IRL those kind of men seem to do very well on the dating market.
If asked to imagine a typical "conventionally attractive" heterosexual women (who can get any man she wants), I think most people would imagine a young, smoking hot bombshell woman with feminine allure. And IRL these women also seem to do very well.
I know that there are some local optima as well: e.g. I'm told that the rare dominant woman has an easy time dating because submissive men outnumber them by a lot.
Now, my very hetero question: What's the correspondence for gay men and lesbians?
What does the super-attractive gay man look like? I know that there are some gay archetypes ("bear", "twink", "diva") but I have no idea who's most in demand. I would guess that young, somewhat androgynous but muscular, submissive gay men have the easiest time getting whatever partner they'd like, but that's just guessing.
Same for lesbians: I know that there are archetypes (ok, I know one: "butch"), but what does the ideal of an attractive lesbian women look like? What's the most dateable lesbian in my city like? Here I'm even more lost, I don't even have a guess.
Are there any gay and lesbian local optima like the dom woman?
Most guys I know who are the most popular with women aren't super muscular. Like, not ugly or unathletic, often a bit muscular, but mostly just gregarious and outgoing personalities.
Most guys I know who are the most popular with women aren't super muscular. Like, not ugly or unathletic, often a bit muscular, but mostly just gregarious and outgoing personalities.
All of these archetypes have more in common that you'd think. Symmetrical proportions. Appearance of physical fitness, average-slim build. Tall. Healthy.
The only difference with the gays is the open signals of potential reciprocation (though there are plenty of girls into Taylor Swift, but someone who might be into you is generally more attractive than someone who is basically fully incompatible with you)
Its kind of cheating to use celebrities, but I would guess Troye Sivan for gay men and Kirsten Stewart for lesbians. You may notice that they just look like... Attractive young people who signal that they're interested in the same sex.
Tangent!
> "I'm told that the rare dominant woman has an easy time dating because submissive men outnumber them by a lot."
Out of curiosity, who's telling you that?
I know a lot of dominant women - in addition to several kinky irl friends, I moderate one of the largest personal ads groups on Fetlife - and I've never heard one of them say it's "easy" to find a submissive man to date.
"Submissive" being the key word there.
Because most men who believe themselves to be in search of "dominant" women are in fact themselves quite dominant. The only difference from their vanilla counterparts is that they happen to want a woman to do things *to* them rather than be the person doing the things.
That manifests as hordes and hordes of men often very aggressively approaching "dominant" women with the hope of receiving BDSM topping services from them, no different than men who wish to receive blowjobs from women. Arguably "submissive" men are even worse, because at least blowjob seekers have no illusions they're seeking a service, whereas many pegging seekers (for example) assume the act of physically receiving *anything* in their body is *inherently* a submissive act. "I can't be a misogynist," these guys will say, "I'm willing to get fucked *just like a woman!* Why aren't these bitches replying to my unsolicited dick picks?!"
Nobody has described this better than Last Psychiatrist knockoff and/or secret second identity, Hotel Concierge (https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/173526578129/shame-society):
"...that doesn’t make [cuck porn] a fetish of weakness, an idea both empirically nonexistent and definitionally wrong. With e.g. femdom, the man’s weakness is balanced by a fetish for the strength of *HIS* dominatrix. He *COMMANDS* her power, even as it is directed at him."
Genuinely dominant women almost universally bemoan the vanishing rarity of genuinely submissive men. Many eventually give up hope because they're just that rare!
Very interesting! "Dom women has it easy" was just something I've picked up online, can't remember when or where. Your explanation makes more sense. Thanks for sharing! Does that mean that "good" sub guys do have an easy time finding a partner? (But then again it's hard to know if someone is one of the "good" subs or not...)
Off the top of my head I can't think of any chronically single "good" sub guys!
Many will observe that it can be difficult to get past the skepticism / cynicism of women who are used to being approached for fetish-dispensing services, but the bar for not being an entitled asshole is actually pretty low.
I think for gays "twinks" (slim, youthful appearance) and "hunks" (large, well-defined muscles, but not necessarily bodybuilder) are by far the most successful groups on the dating market. They have the easiest time to get lots of dates. Dating apps are overwhelmingly important to find dates in the gay world, so looks and outwards appearance play an even bigger role than in the straight world.
As Nobody Special mentions below, turning dates into relationships (if desired) probably required a different set of skills.
Seems weird that two opposites would be equally successful? Or would a "twink-hunk", who combined the best of both archetypes, be even more of an ideal?
They're not opposites at all, they're both young, fit, slim, with conventionally attractive faces and bodies. If you're looking for the opposite, you'll have to look at "bears" (hairy overweight biker types of any age) and "daddies" (oldish guys with a fatherly aura). Those are also popular, but less so than the twinks / hunks, and probably not with the same audience.
Just like straight people and butch / femme lesbians, some gay men look for someone with an opposite or complimentary gender expression, and others want someone similar to themselves.
If you buy into a theory of complementary genders, why would this be weird? A middle position might be all things to everyone, but not necessarily as attractive as an extreme. Or to put it another way, everyone's got their preferences, but if you can occupy the sweet spot of "good enough" across the whole spectrum, you can rack up a high score.
It's weird in the sense that if I poll 100 people about if they prefer apples or oranges, it's weird if I would get an exact 50:50 split. Some will prefer apples and some oranges, but it's unlikely that both are exactly equally popular?
And as demost_ said, there isn't! They aren't equally popular, but people work out their differences one way or another, through nonmonogamy, switchiness, sides, or just putting up with it. There's variability, IMO partly due to people being people, but also partly due to the lack of any biological Schelling point and the lack (so far) of overwhelming cultural reinforcement to a single role per point.
I guess mostly what I'm saying is that opposites can attract and make sparks, not to mention work together long-term, and in a genderqueer environment, those opposites can be on a lot of different axes. But when actually put into a society, people will gravitate toward poles in sort of the way political parties in a FPTP system do. Maybe given a few hundred years of open acceptance, there'd be two roughly balanced poles, but I dunno.
Welcome to the concept of twunks. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twunk . Sometimes they are also called "muscle twinks".
Actually, there is a continuum between twink and hunk, where the body has little body fat, but with varying amount of muscle mass. I think this whole spectrum is successful on the dating market, but the classical categories are twink and hunk.
>If asked to imagine a typical romantically successful heterosexual man (who can get any women he wants), I think most people would imagine a "Chad" type: a rich, muscular, masculine guy with plenty of confidence.
OMG. in my psychotherapy practice I listen to a bunch of 20-something guys who have a terrible time getting dates moan about how they're not tall and handsome enough -- also about how they're not rich enough to get anyone (though they're in grad school and will be able to earn a good living once they have the degree). There is *some* truth in that stuff, but not much. The things that moved me and my close women friends when we were in the dating years were (1) the guy was smart about things we considered important (and we varied some in what those things were). (2) he was a good conversationalist and fun to do things with. (3) He displayed genuine interest in us. If a guy had that triad we were willing to overlook his being short, chubby or the skinny gawky kind of tall and/or homely of face. Of course, 1, 2, & 3were not enough unless we also began magically to sprout a crush on him.
Can't confirm but have always heard that gay men, most of whom are submissive types, prefer masculine, dominant types. With lesbians I believe it's the reverse. But this is more of a ratio thing like your example of the dominant heterosexual woman.
I also believed that most gay men are submissive type (it's still my personal experience), but I was recently pointed to good statistics that show otherwise, some of them by Aella.
What definition of "romantically successful" are you operating on? Because if asked to imagine a 'typically romantically successful' heterosexual man or woman, my default image is "happily married."
*Sexually* successful might be a different thing, if you're asking me to optimize for gene-proliferation or something, but if we're talking *romantic* success, "dating lots of people" is not the end point I and most of the humans who've shared their dating goals with me (or, I think, 'typical' people) seem to be aiming for. Most of the men and women I know tend to be looking for one committed, happy, & stable relationship. There's definitely outlying swinger couples or forever-single-by-choicers, but the romantic success criteria most of the people I'm familiar with seems grounded in monogamy.
I thought I made it pretty clear in the post but I'll clarify: I'm using "romantically successful" as "dateable"/"high sexual market value"/"attractive"/"has an easy time finding dates and relationships, especially with other attractive people".
My loves, my doves, my chickadees, boys, girls, ladies, gentlemen and others - the day we long awaited has finally come! Many doubted it would ever happen, but the naysayers have been proven wrong.
Mark your calendars and clear your schedules for 29th August, because it is in the trees, it's coming! Yes, the second season of "The Rings of Power" will be upon us like the black oozy thing in the teaser trailer.
This trailer here which they just dropped and my oh my, it is chock-full of plummy goodness. Based on this, the second season is going to live up to the standards of the first. Careful, there will be SPOILERS so if you honestly don't want to know what's coming, don't read on. Or watch the trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCwmXY_f-e0
We've got Galadriel braiding up her hair around her head (remember the derivation of her name, "Maiden Crowned With A Radiant Garland"? yeah, throwing another bone to the book fans). Worry not, she's still Girlboss Glads who one-shots the monsters without mussing a hair. Plus we also get Galadriel on a horsie again, though at least this time it's not in disturbing slow-motion.
Poor old Celebrimbor is still stuck in the granny bathrobe, but he probably has a merciful (if horrible) death to look forward to this time at least. We might even get to see him somehow involved with ring-making, imagine that! Or at least with "shoving a pile of rings into the furnace", for whatever reasons he might have to do that. I'm hoping for the "using his tortured to death corpse as an Orc war-banner" scenes since the show is going for dark'n'gritty (citation needed) in the second season, but I fear they'll disappoint me on that front, too.
We have, of course, the CGI that should be better than it is, considering the money pumped into this turkey. Not enough view of the costumes to see if they still have the plastic armour, though now Elrond gets his turn to strap on a helmet, jump on a horse, and gallop into battle.
We have a shot of what I *think* is Tar-Miriel underwater, faced with a big toothy mouthy tentacly sea monster thingy. I have no idea what this is meant to be, unless it's another prophetic dream about the downfall of Númenor and how she ends up (spoilers for the book: drowned).
We get a quick shot of Dísa which made me go "Flip me, she actually looks good in this one!"
We have *more* Diverse Elves; one (1) Asian she-elf this time (she *could* be Chinese or Korean, not too sure). I'm actually not mad at all about this, to be honest; by now, it's just 🤷♀️ Unfortunately, the Diverse Elves means the return of Arondir (sigh) (that's "disappointed" sigh not "he's so dreamy" sigh, just to be absolutely clear on that) doing the improbable acrobatics on horseback that Action Glads did in the first season. That also means the return of Theo (double sigh). But on the bright side, he seems to be stuck in the middle of a siege, so there's every chance he bites the dust. We can but hope!
The Stranger and Nori are back, in what is probably meant to be Rhun (it's vaguely Middle-Eastern/North African desert oasis setting). And the three witches who got blasted into moths in the first season are probably back, too.
There's rings! Including a frankly awful cheap piece of tat that looks like it came from 80s TV shopping channels ring handed to Durin Senior (who the fudge is doing styling on this thing, they have no notion of beauty). "You too can own this blatantly fake hunk of blue glass masquerading as a sapphire and gold ring for the low, low price of thirty-six instalments of $99.99 each!" Don't be fooled by the spiel, Durin Senior!
There's the return of Adar, which is terribly unfair of me towards the new guy based on a quick shot of him in the trailer, but I dearly wish Joseph Mawle were returning in the part since he was the best thing in the first season. Alas, he proved he's got brains as well as acting talent and left after the first season.
We have the bit I really, *really*, REALLY want an explanation for and I may even fork out for Prime so I can watch this episode and see what silly rationalisation the scriptwriters pull out of their backsides for this - a giant eagle coming in like a 747 on the runway to be the background to a shot of Pharazon. Eagles of Manwe? In Númenor? In Pharazon's time? They better have one *heck* of a *doozy* of a *sockdolager* of a reason for this one! Just when my homicidal fury towards the showrunners had died down, they had to go and blow on the embers and fan the flames back to life!
Of course, it wouldn't be "Rings of Power" without a blatant rip-off - I mean, homage - to an iconic scene from the LOTR movies, so - remember the scene at the start of "The Fellowship of the Ring" where Cate Blanchett does a voice-over and we see the three Elven rings worn by their bearers? This show sure does, and it decides to go one better and 'improve' on it by making Gil-galad, at least, look like he's just updating his bling collection with Vilya.
But I've saved the best for last: Sauron. Or Halbrand. Or the Being Who Is Both. We get shots of Charlie Vickers looking moody, and I feel you, Chuck, I wouldn't fancy another six to eight episodes of this if I could get out of it. Okay, but the rumours about recasting for Annatar to be played by a completely different guy? They were all lies and diversions! I know, I'm as shocked as you are.
Since the showrunners belatedly realised they couldn't really *have* Rings of Power without Annatar, so that meant they *needed* Annator, they've given us Annatar - Charlie Vickers in a wig and elf-ears.
I dunno about you, but I don't find him particularly handsome. Tastes differ, I realise, and some may find him attractive. What he is not, however, is ethereally beautiful divine if fallen spirit looking. Remember what I said about not minding the Asian elf? That's because at least Chinese xianxia drama can do "ethereally beautiful like a divine if fallen spirit" in male and female versions. Sincerely, if they got a pretty young Chinese male actor to play Annatar? I'd be cheering *that* casting decision on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-KRAd3EJqU
Oh, and surprise, surprise: Isildur Ate'nt Dead. Sorry if I spoiled that for you! So I'm ready for August to follow the snarky reviews and, if prodded hard enough by "They did WHAT????", to spite-watch this truly unique(ly awful) adaptation of a fantasy classic.
OMG I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO...
...***VIDEO ESSAY REVIEWS!!!***
No exaggeration whatsoever, I am sincerely *that* excited for the forthcoming high-level criticism of this volcano dumpster fire of a show. The Little Platoon's essays on the topic are actual works of art. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6bIea7YMo)
I'd highly recommend ACOUP's reviews of Rings of Power. I wonder if he'll bother writing anything about season 2.
The Little Platoon is indeed great. I found a whole slew of online video critics via reviews of the Rings of Power, including Erik Kain who started off with "hey this is pretty good, give it a chance" in response to all those complaining about the show two episodes in, but by the third episode he was "okay, this is not doing what it should be doing" and by the end he was One Of Us 😁
He writes for Forbes but also has a Youtube channel:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kth8WdPWjrY
I also like Critical Drinker - a grumpy, boozy Scotsman who isn't too gruntled with much of what modern content is produced? Yeah, you can see why he appeals to me!
Critical Drinker's politics are 180 degrees away from mine, but I have actually watched and enjoyed some of his videos! He's very witty, and he's fair in his criticisms, not just negative for the sake of negativity. When he thinks something is well done, he'll say so. [Scottish accent] Anyway, that's all I've got for today. Go away now!
I'm likewise a fan of Critical Drinker, although he's drifted into shorter-form content these days which, while useful in deciding what to watch, I don't find as enjoyable as The Little Platoon's and MauLer's mega-criques. God bless MauLer, specifically, for so thoroughly recapping and critiquing MCU and Star Wars IPs that I don't need to watch them myself to have "seen" them.
I had a friend recommend Erik Kain's evolution from ROP shill to One of Us, but haven't followed it myself!
I would recommend Erik, I started off annoyed with "Oh God, not another media critic who is just parroting the Amazon press release on this" but he did review the show properly and his evolution into "this is a pile of crap, let's just skewer it" was fun. He also pointed out the flaws, as a professional media critic, that the show had and where it could have improved, so it couldn't be dismissed as Just Another Racist Fascist-Adjacent Tolkien Fanboy complaining.
From a year ago (before he cut his hair):
(1) Hey, I like this new show!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDu7LrdQD0w
(2) The gloss has worn off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9Fdwh94hq0
I think "House of the Dragon" is going to eat "Rings of Power"'s lunch once again, I haven't seen the new HoD trailer but they dropped it immediately after the RoP one and I'm betting it looks better, must go and watch it 😀
I was enjoying "House of the Dragon" when it came out. It seemed to be getting better and better every episode.
I haven't watched HoD myself since I'm allergic to GRR Martin's fantasy series (tried the first ASoIAF novel when it came out, bounced off hard) but I understand it was well-done and Paddy Considine did a stellar turn in his part.
One of the benefits of having the author still be alive and around to prevent you "improving" on the books, I guess? Also helps if you hire more than one (1) decent actor, and give them good lines to say. There are a few decent actors in RoP but they're reduced to standing around doing nothing while Galadriel, Miriel and Disa girl-boss their ways; the Dwarves are pretty much the best bits of the show (what they did to the Hobbits aka Harfoots is not). Poor Elendil just gets to have a useless son, a newly invented drippy daughter, and to be shouted at by both Galadriel and Miriel. A shame, because for fractions of a second at a time, there are indications the guy could do something with the part if permitted to say more than "yes sir no sir three bags full sir".
You piqued my curiosity to the point that I actually watched the trailer!
Re: Sauron/Annatar: never mind if he's handsome or not, de gustibus non disputandum est, my question is, how in the name of Eru does the continuity work here? We found out at the end of Season 1 that Galadriel's moody friend Halbrand was really Sauron in disguise. And here, in this trailer, it's treated like some big revelation! How? Why? "He's been among us all along," Galadriel says, yeah, no kidding, lady, you found that out in Season 1! What am I missing? Also, that creepy black goo looks like Venom from Raimi-verse Spider-Man.
I love Tolkien and I really, really hope they'll manage not to mess up Season 2 as much as they did Season 1. What can I say? I strive to be an optimist.
To use the quaint American phrasing, they really screwed the pooch on this one. The showrunners, being JJ Abrams-alumni, went for the stupid mystery box approach - no we can't follow the canonical storyline and have Annatar, people who read the books will know in advance, we want it to be a big surprise revelation!
So they teased Big Surprise Revelations in season one about "is this guy Sauron? could this guy be him? or this guy?" but viewers twigged fairly early on that it was Halbrand. I didn't want it to be Halbrand because I went "Surely they can't be this dumb".
They were that dumb.
Well now we're into season two and it turns out we *do* need the maker of magical mystical rings after all, you can't just sqoosh the ring-making into the last ten minutes of the season finale. Which means they need Annatar. Which means they effed it up with the mystery box season one approach, since if Glads *knows* "scruffy mortal dude who just wants to smith and deffo is *not* the long-lost king of Da Southside, I mean Southlands = Semi-Big Bad I've been hunting for centuries", then even she can't keep her yap shut about "hey guys, so - this ring-crafting dude?"
Okay, I just remembered: they *are* that dumb. But Elrond has also figured it out, and he has been permitted to retain two functional brain cells, so if Glads doesn't want to talk about her rebound romance, he certainly will tell everyone.
Which means no ring-forging. So now crap we've got four seasons to go (pfft - I very much doubt it) and no magic rings? Hence they *need* Annatar.
I think they might be trying to do it in flashback form - Annatar *did* turn up just like Tolkien said, in fair form pretending to be an emissary of the Valar, back previously (that is going to require one *heck* of a flamin' recap when they introduce him in Maiar form but whatever) and that's what Galadriel's hysterical rendition of the line refers to - oh no, that guy we thought was maybe sus but seemed to be another Elf from Valinor was really - dun-dun-dun!!!
How they're going to reconcile that with "And then he *also* turns up as scruffy mortal on a raft in the middle of the ocean, claiming to want to reform and just do some smithing and be good", I have no idea. Because if they have Annatar working with Celebrimbor to already make "essays in the craft" of magic ring-making (hence the scene of Celebrimbor desperately dumping a load of rings into the furnace?) but he was then run out of town - that makes nonsense of the first season where Celebrimbor has to be told about the secret hyper-advanced technique of "alloys" by said scruffy mortal. I also like the Cunning Disguise of "if I take off the pointy ears and cut my hair from what I looked like back then, nobody will recognise me now!" which seems to have worked, so the Elves are as stupid as the showrunners.
I think that's what they'll try to do: Annatar showed up before, was run out of Eregion, then turns up mumble-mumble years later as the mortal Halbrand for a second try at seducing the Elves into darkness. Or a redemption arc, gee honest this time. Though the showrunners apparently think he should be Walter White/Tony Soprano, so better to bet on "he was Evul all along!"
It'll be nonsense, but these are the blokes who thought mithril needed an origin story. They tried "improving" on Tolkien's story, messed it up, and now have to patch a fix-it together. Nobody's fault but their own.
EDIT: It also makes Galadriel even *more* oblivious than in the first season: "Grr that Sauron I hate him grrr I'm gonna track him down and take my revenge - oh, hi, Annatar - grrr hate that Sauron hate hate" and then *centuries later* "Grrr that Sauron still tracking him down - oh, hi, Halbrand - grrr where can he be hiding?"
🤦♀️
"they really screwed the pooch on this one"
Truth. It's as if they suddenly realized, Oh no, we've got one episode left, we have to shoehorn the revelation that Halbrand is Sauron and the forging of the Three Rings into this one episode! And yes, the idea that Celebrimbor the grandson of Feanor did not know what alloys were was an extra dose on facepalm on top of a pile of fail.
The showrunners should hire you to be a consultant, and I would pay money to be a fly on the wall during meetings in which you explained Tolkien lore to them and beseeched them not to be so dumb.
There's not enough money even in Jeffy Bezos' hip pocket to pay off all the people they pissed off with mangling the lore.
Compressing the timeline? Sure, I understand the necessity in a show or movie, they're different media to books. Even the Diversity and Inclusion needn't have been as bad as they did it; Miriel is bi-racial? Okay, I can roll with that, it's Numenor. That's ignoring casting an actress who is a good foot shorter than canonical Galadriel and directing her to have the default expression "bulldog licking piss off a nettle".
But putting all that aside, their response to criticism was "it's all racist sexist homophobic trolls" as a one-size-fits-all defence.
No, it was the writing. Ai Eru Melme, the writing. "Why does a stone sink and a boat float?" Principle of buoyancy? Don't be silly, it's because of some fake-profound gibberish. After Galadriel's scene with Adar, I was Team Orc-Father all the way due to a combination of Joseph Mawle being able to out-act the socks off pretty much everyone else in the show, and the fortuitous opportunity of some half-decent writing for him for once.
A sadistic, genocidal, psychopathic torturer. And her half-Orc prisoner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWgzEBQq8gU
You should *not* be convincing me to cheer on the Orcs as they blow up a volcano and set everyone in the village on fire.
Well, Amazon are going to get the views whether I watch it because I love it or hate it. But I don't see any way this is going to go five seasons. They had already committed to a second season during the broadcast of the first one, so they were stuck with that, but getting it renewed for a third? And Nazgul will fly! On the Eagles! Into Valinor! Before swimming all the way home across an entire ocean!
>That also means the return of Theo (double sigh).
I decided fairly early on that my headcanon is going to be that Theo is the future Witch King of Angmar. I think it's pretty unlikely that this is where they're actually going with him, but assuming it in my head makes the character more interesting and tolerable.
I thought they were going that way with the Magic Sword Blood Addiction, but then the Magic Sword turned out to be the dam-bursting key and they don't seem to have done anything with it.
Maybe it'll turn out that Theo sneaked off and reclaimed the Magic Sword Hilt after it was used as a key (unlikely, given that everything was covered in volcano ash, but inconsistency has not stopped the show so far) and he'll continue his Blood Addiction with it and eventually become the Witch King.
Though that would be a lot more coherent than the showrunners have demonstrated they intend to be, so far.
That's almost exactly my logic. The blood sword was what got me thinking Witch King, and I'm refusing to abandon the idea after the payoff for that subplot turned out to be stupid.
One of my many major gripes about the series is that Season 1 at least has heavily relied upon Lost-style "Mystery Box" plots, and I'm finding myself liking the theories I came up with a lot better than what the writers actually wound up going with. If they'd for some reason handed me the show to finish after wrapping the first few episodes but leaving no scripts or notes for the rest, I probably would have gone with:
1. Theo is the Witch King.
2. Halbrand is the king of the Oath-Breakers of Dunharrow
3. Meteor Man is Tilion, the Maia of the Moon, and the Harfoot plotline is the origin of the folklore that Bilbo drew on in composing the "Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" song that Frodo sang in Bree.
4. The Nazgirls are Thuringwethil and her crew.
5. Annatar has been hanging out in a back room in Eregion the whole time. He wants Celebrimbor to himself for now and keeps coming up with excuses to send Elrond off to Moria to keep him out of the way.
The only problem is that having Halbrand be king of the oath-breakers is that it's in the wrong place and too soon.
I do like the idea of that being Tilion! And it makes more sense than what the scriptwriters have done, but they've boxed themselves in by changing everything to be "Okay so it can't officially be LOTR Part Deux but we also need the name recognition characters from the movies, hence it's Elrond and Durin IV the great Elf-Dwarf friendship and not Celebrimbor-Narvi, so we need Elrond and Galadriel and Hobbits and that means it's gotta be Gandalf".
So Meteor Man is going to be Gandalf, and never mind all the guessing and hoping that maybe it's one of the Blue Wizards.
One of the Nazgirls is *definitely* meant to be Thuringwethil, see the 'bat ears' on her headdress:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/33d2b5869d9f14de3b60914346732788/d40c37840b0b7a53-34/s1280x1920/3484610cae0060fa59b8c3e78a65bf9230d7ea47.jpg
But that has me guessing at who the other two are meant to be, and I think one of them (possibly the one in the military helmet) must be meant to be *a* werewolf (she can't be Draugluin or Carcharoth). That leaves Feminem, and I think the staff she carries is clearly meant to evoke the "Eye of Sauron" so that must have been misdirection on the showrunners' parts ("could *she* be Sauron? Giggle!")
From the new trailer, looks like Annatar has indeed been hanging out and promising all kinds of sweet, sweet ring-making to Celebrimbor, only to break his heart and besiege Eregion. "Halbrand" was just some scruffy yokel he found lurking around Da Southside and he set him up to distract Glads. Hard to get a relationship going when the psycho cousin is hanging around giving you the scowly face and muttering about revenge all the time!
Honestly, the amount of stupid in season one was face-to-desk impact stupid. They didn't want Annatar since that would mean people who read the books/knew the story would immediately know who that really was and it would ruin the surprise. Well they managed to ruin their own surprise by revealing who Sauron was in the season finale, so now what? And it turns out that Tolkien knew what he was doing and they *do* need Annatar for the ring-making and giving, especially after they mucked it up by having the three Rings crafted in a rush during said finale. Now they have to shoe-horn Annatar in by sticking Charlie Vickers in a wig and pointy ears.
I can't wait for the new season. It will be one glorious dumpster fire as they try to get out of the corners they've written themselves into and struggle with this alien concept called "continuity" so characters don't do X in one episode, then go off and do Y, directly contradictory to X, in the next.
> struggle with this alien concept called "continuity" so characters don't do X in one episode, then go off and do Y, directly contradictory to X, in the next.
Forget episode-to-episode continuity, they can't even handle *scene-to-scene* continuity, like that one battle where the army magically transforms from orcs into humans, respawns from the dead several times, and people teleport all over the place.
Ah, yes: the battle where it was night in the Southlands village, day when the Numenoreans were riding to the rescue, and the cutting between both sets left it very unclear if all this was supposed to be happening at the same time or if there was an interval of "the Southlands village was fighting all the night and just in the nick of time at the dawn the Numenoreans turned up to save them".
The Orcs able to fight in daylight now as well. And why weren't you impressed with the Cunning Plan to send in the human cannon-fodder first to deceive the villagers they were fighting Orcs? Didn't it seem on a grand scale of tragedy to have the villagers be fighting their former neighbours instead of the Orcish monsters they thought they were fighting? 😁
Things happened in that season purely because they were convenient. Oh no, Halbrand has a mortal wound that can only be healed by Elvish healing! So he's now able to get up and walk around with it, so he can be put on a horse to ride a vague number of days to Eregion to get healed! Instead of it being tense and nerve-racking (is he going to make it, will he survive the horse ride to get to the place of healing?) I was just laughing at the poor actor flopping forward over the horse's neck to try and convey "argh, ouch, I am in bad health, my wound my wound" - yeah well you should be dead by now because jolting around on a horse at full gallop is going to burst that wound right open and since you're in the middle of nowhere you're going to bleed to death.
The worst part though definitely was Galadriel in that episode going full-on rant about her planned campaign of Orc genocide and then in the very *next* episode lecturing Theo about putting aside hatred and giving up on his desire for revenge. That was ridiculous. Why did she suddenly have a change of heart? No reason, except maybe having a volcano literally blow up in her face?
I am eager to see the second season to see what other jewels of crassness and idiocy this lot present to us.
I don't think the Southlands were firmly established to be Mordor until the volcano. Before that, the region could also have encompassed what would later be Gondor and Rohan. It is too soon, but RoP is already compressing the hell out of the Second Age timeline.
Good point about them desperately clawing for name recognition. That also explains why Morfydd Clark's character is Galadriel when her daughter Celebrían is a much better fit for the stuff they seem to be trying to do with her. Especially the "young hothead" characterization, which is a little implausible when given to a character who is literally older than the Sun.
Good catch on the headdresses. I'd completely overlooked that. Not sure who Feminem is, either, unless she's a small-n necromancer (with Sauron of course as the big-N Necromancer).
Yes, Annatar definitely has to be there. There are seventeen more Great Rings to craft, after all, and Sauron needs to be there to rootkit them. Also, Celebrimbor needs all the help he can get since RoP has established that he was sick the day Aulë taught the Noldor about alloys. It'll be interesting to see how they retcon Halbrand.
I'm looking forward to the new season in much the same spirit as you are.
"Good catch on the headdresses. I'd completely overlooked that."
It was only when I finally got a good look at the trio, from the side, in the episode where they catch up with the Stranger and think he's Sauron or Morgoth or somebody, and then it hit me like a truck - "hey, that looks like bat ears - OH MY LORD SHE'S THURINGWETHIL".
We should be kinder to Celebrimbor; maybe Grandpa Feanor neglected to teach this super-duper secret high-level technique to Curufin before he spontaneously combusted and so Curufin could not teach it in turn to Celebrimbor 😁 Grandpa was running around being psychopathically crazy before ending up in a one-on-one with a force of Balrogs, so smith-crafting lessons were probably the last thing on his mind at the time.
You actually make me look forward to it. :-)
Oh, I'm looking forward to it, too.
With a big sharp cleaver 😈
The ACX Meetup (Berkeley's Spring Schelling) will be June 5th, Wednesday, doors open at 6:30pm. Admission is free, If you aren't sure it's okay to come because you're new to the blog or you're not a typical ACX reader or you disagree with the blog about lots of things you are explicitly invited anyway! Details are here: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mXd8aQ8FDYCXhMusx/berkeley-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024
Source: I'm the organizer for the ACX meetup, and also Scott's Meetup Czar.
Are there any media that is suitable for children and/or younger teens that show realistic, healthy ways to engage with the opposite gender and have romantic relationships? Popular culture seems to teach some pretty unhealthy lessons: there's either Disney-style magic romance or the red-pill reaction to that message which also isn't healthy IMO. Is there a film or book or whatever that I can give a 12-year old boy to show how people date in the real world and that women (generally) are different from men in what they find attractive?
I haven't read it, but Peggy Orenstein's "Boys and Sex" might fit the bill. As I understand it, is based on numerous interviews with high school and college boys/men about their views, experience and desires re dating, sex, intimacy, etc,, which seems like just the ticket for a 12-year-old boy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45730106-boys-sex She also has a previous book called "Girls and Sex."
Thank you, I'll look into it!
Hesitantly:
Classic Loveline episodes (from the Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla era)?
The content might be a little mature for a 12-year-old (although plenty of 12-year-olds listened live at the time, and it's certainly less explicit than the internet porn he's almost certainly already encountering).
Also, I suspect its chief value is the pattern-recognition that comes with consuming a tremendous volume of content about human behavior.
(I went back through like 8 years of archives and got almost as good as Dr. Drew and Adam at guessing what age a female caller was sexually abused based solely on the "little girl" quality of her voice when beginning the call.
Unfortunately, Dr. Drew and Adam's current show is mostly focused on self-congratulations and complaining about California politics, not people's problems.
But classic Loveline had a lot of people calling with a lot of dating, relationship, and sex questions, and I learned a lot from it, even as an adult.
There's definitely room for improvement — but hasn't popular culture always taught unhealthy lessons? And if I were a wee bit cynical, I'd say that the majority of people have always favored sentimental pap that over-romanticizes and obscures the reality of relationships. Not that I'm suggesting kids be fed a steady diet of Tenessee Williams, either. But there's very little in the middle ground.
That's kind of my point: pop culture has always been idealistic to the point of unhealthiness and I'm trying to find the haystack needles where this isn't the case.
My apologies. I thought you were implying it was a new phenomenon. However, at least five generations of happy, healthy, and *productive* Americans have been raised on this pap. And look at how wonderful the world is!
Are the classic romance movies out? "When Harry Met Sally", "Must Love Dogs", "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", etc?
I'm partial to Gregory's Girl, myself.
But on the red pill side, there's some damn good high-art cinema that's deliciously raw. Films like Godard's Contempt, Mike Figgis's The Loss of Sexual Innocence, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dangerous Liaisons come immediately to mind.
Yes, but would a 12-year-old boy, or a 16-year-old, be interested in such movies? Aren't there any movies which are a bit more attractive to young people and teach good dating behavior? Or is the only hope in those advice subreddits?
I had not thought there would be such a distinct lack of this, in what I remember reading. I've got a nephew of a similar age, who's being raised in fairly traditional household, and now I'm wondering about this question, too. There's not a lot of "what to do when you meet someone and are attracted" that isn't "everything magically works out" or "everything goes horribly wrong". The most I've got are books that have role models or positive and negative examples, but that don't cross over into one-true-wayism.
Jack Vance's "Araminta Station" might count (first of a trilogy, all great space opera). Later in the series, there are a couple of excellent bits of fatherly advice, from two different people: "Remain honest, steadfast and true! Adopt no weird philosophies. Avoid exotic cults and intellectual miasma." and "My only specific instructions are these: do not allow well-meaning but impractical theoreticians to exert any control over you; make sure that your associates are competent experienced and tolerant folk, without ideological axes to grind."
Lois McMaster Bujold's "Memory"-"Komarr"-"A Civil Campaign" sequence might work. They're in the middle of another great space opera series, and have a number of buried lessons about integrity, different ways of dealing with your roots, relationships with no future, and what exactly you can trade for your heart's desire. "Komarr" in particular has alternating POV chapters that capture the initial stages of a romance, although it's more "Persuasion" than "Pride and Prejudice".
You might try John C. Wright's "The Golden Age" trilogy (again, great space opera, wow am I predictable). The author has strong gender-essentialist opinions, but they don't interfere with his artistry of writing.
It's been a long time since I read it, but possibly Erich Segal's "Love Story".
It's been a long time since I saw it, but the film "Groundhog Day" might have some important lessons, too.
Classic movies might be a good place to look. "Casablanca" comes to mind, in terms of "making yourself into someone worthy of love is itself worthwhile". But I don't know whether something like this scene might be too much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgVPnWmUqd4&t=177s (I almost need to fan myself after watching it at that timestamp.)
In Groundhog Day the Bill Murray character starts out as a complete jerk. He does evolve into a pretty decent specimen of humanity over time.
Not technically over time I suppose because he is somehow cursed to live the same day repeatedly. The curse is lifted when he finally lives the day perfectly. Perfectly for the purposes of the story anyway. It does involve a lot of selfless behavior.
The U.K. Buddhist Society likes to show the film for the lesson it presents
Oh hooray, finally I have the opportunity to complain about this little thing that has always been bothering me!
We saw him visiting an old piano teacher and obviously asking for lessons and offering a ridiculous remuneration, because she instantly kicks out the poor child that was sitting at the piano, and then we hear him playing his first C major scale. Then on his final perfect day, when he's in that bar playing the piano, the old piano teacher proudly announces that he is her pupil. This means that on his "perfect day", he found time to have a piano lesson, he made her kick out the poor child, and she sees him as her pupil although he'd only had one lesson with her and must have learned most of it elsewhere!
I’m glad you feel better. That’s what I’m here for. :)
> He does evolve into a pretty decent specimen of humanity over time.
Yes, that's the aspect I was thinking of. It demonstrates a lot of reasons why the guy is deservedly rejected. But once he starts working on making himself a better person, he eventually succeeds. I think it would have been better, from a pedagogical standpoint, to have him find romance with someone else who wasn't even on his radar initially, but oh well.
If you completely strike out, maybe a stopgap would be to find positive examples of masculinity and femininity, and then later explicitly point to them and say "be like that" or "look for that".
For masculinity, "Captains Courageous" by Kipling stands out in my mind.
I'm interested in this too, but with the caveat that I won't need this information for the next five or ten years - at which point there's no way I'll remember this one forum post (or even the .txt file I copy/pasted any leads from it into.)
I have this problem with the broader parallel society/right wing bridgehead conceit in general. I'm interested in for eg. homeschooling, but without an obvious homeschooling syllabus, endorsed by someone I trust, I have no way to filter (for general quality as well as non-wokeness) without doing all of it myself. Which is not a sensible division of labour.
Re: your media, one naïve answer is just draw a cutoff and declare anything pre 2010 "probably fine. Ish."
A better answer would be for some talented and enterprising young chaps to write us some better media to consume. That would be nice but I don't see it happening.
If I think of any good specific titles for your boy I'll come back and post them.
I'm curious what kinds of "woke" stuff you're trying to avoid there? Any particular messages you see as most harmful to children in particular?
I once chatted to a girl in a pub and she turned out to be a nanny to two seven year old children, a boy and a girl. She boasted about how she was encouraging and building the girl up, but with the boy she was making sure he was "aware of his privilege" and teaching him not to challenge or disbelieve women. She was obviously used to receiving praise and adulation from people when she told them this. When I instead said something to the effect of, "this kid is growing up in a totally different world to the one you're talking about, won't what you're doing achieve nothing and just destroy his self esteem?" it was like talking to a brick wall. She wasn't able to comprehend that the seven year old boy wasn't one of the evil oppressive rapists-in-waiting she had been taught about.
If this girl were making films instead of nannying kids directly, I might try to put in words what messages I think should and shouldn't be allowed. It would be a worthwhile exercise and well suited to a forum like this one.
But my real answer is simply, people like that girl should not be allowed access to children.
If she comes out with a film, the things I object to about it would likely be small and incredibly petty. I would object to them not just in themselves but because they reveal who she is.
Whatever form her ideas take, whatever wording she uses, whatever constraints or guidelines she is asked to follow - it doesn't matter, because her intent will shine through. Anything that fits with her sensibilities is going to be destructive to young children.
That's my non-answer to your question. I'm writing in a hurry and could probably come up with something better later on.
2x Kaggle champ & AI guy Jeremy Howard has done a couple podcast interviews about homeschooling his daughter. It's going really well, and he describes his approach. I recommend checkin that out.
I'm not trying to avoid woke stuff (ok, I'm trying to avoid woke stuff but plenty of other stuff as well). Like, I don't want my children to grow up thinking romance works like in Disney's Snow White: you just lull around and live your life and then suddenly your perfect match will appear and you will be happy ever after without any effort. Snow White doesn't teach you how to be the kind of person boys or girls would want to date, or how to take someone on a date, or how sexual attraction and seduction work.
Same goes for most of the classics. Maybe Pride and Prejudice could work? But it's a bit too indulgent and the social mores a bit too old. Like, I don't think the Victorians had dating figured out.
Plenty of millennials who were raised on pre-2010 media were on red pill subs complaining about how the media they grow up with (and the broader culture) made them totally unprepared for the realities of dating. And I don't blame them. I was raised to believe that women and men are mostly the same, that you should be nice to girls and befriend them to make them want to date you, that you should just be yourself and love will happen, and that caring about your appearance is superficial and stupid. I realized it was bullshit pretty quickly but I can see how that could do harm. But as I said, the red pill reaction is plenty of unhealthy as well, and no-one has made any red-pill media for kids anyway.
Seems like most movies already start at the point where the protagonist is attractive (or almost attractive... just needs to remove the glasses and change the hairstyle), and the problem is lack of communication or being an asshole, and once you solve that, happy end.
Not helpful when one's actual problem is how to get *to* that point.
If you were asking for a girl, I’d say the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. It’s
conceivable a boy could get into it. It’s a well-told story, and there are guy characters intelligently depicted, but it’s very clear that the center of the book is the relationship between the 4 girls. A book about guys for a guy — I’ll see if I can think of anything.
I'm interested in media for both boys and girls! But just to clarify: I want media that shows how to engage with the opposite gender and how to do hetero dating, not how to have strong same-sex friendships.
Yeah, I get it. The series of 4 books follows the 4 friends from about age 16 to about age 30. All have boyfriends, & while career stuff and relationship with family of origin are important, I'd say the romantic relationships each young woman has get the most air time. The 4 main characters have both good and bad relationships, and reflect on and talk with each other about sense of self, quality of relationships, disagreements and crises with boyfriends and husbands, etc. I'd say it's all quite realistic. I don't think anyone meets their honey via online dating -- books are 10-15 years old, so take place in a slightly less online world.
Another excellent source of info is Dan Savage, who does a podcast about sex and relationships. He is smart, realistic, well-informed, kind and funny. BUT I think his content is too intense for a 12 year old. Many of his callers are asking about fetishes, for instance, and even in the modern world I think 12 year olds should have a gentler education than Dan gives. to those matters. I introduced my daughter to Savage when she was around 16. By then she seemed to have heard of every sex act and fetish and gender variant. She talked about all that stuff in a matter of fact way, but I could tell she was still pretty naive about a lot of things. So we listened to Dan together, often on long car trips. That side of life worked out well for her. She's got a wonderful boyfriend, seems very in love, and has friends all over the gender spectrum.
Thanks for the clarification, both suggestions sound excellent!
I just learned there is a significant Albanian minority in southern Italy, and that they first started arriving in the 1400s. Has anyone done genetic testing on the population of immigrants who came from southern Italy to the U.S. to determine how many of them are actually of Albanian blood?
I found this poem about Gaza, written jointly by - according to the credits - Dieter Hallervorden and Diether Dehm (no relation), a German actor and a left-wing politician, respectively.
Gaza Gaza https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duHA3wq3hFA. There are English subtitles on, but I thought of using this as an opportunity to revive my fragile A1 German and transcribed/translated myself it with much help from AI services. Deutsch and English text follow, its slightly different from the English translation on the clip but uses it as basis. All corrections from better speakers of German welcome.
=====
D> Ein Mann drückt zerfetzte Fingerchen
--- E> A man pushes shredded little fingerlets
D> an seinem Bart beim flüstern [?...?] dran
--- E> against his beard, while whispering about this:
D> "Was haben denn die zarten Dingechen... den Herren generell getan?"
--- E> "What, pray tell, could have those delicate little things... done to the esteemed generals?"
D> Dann hebt er den Rumpf seiner kleinen Zu Allah...
--- E> Then he raises the torso of his little one towards Allah
D> in die Sonne, zum Mond
--- E> in the sun, towards the moon
D> Und wieder haben wir da einen, der nichts und niemand mir schont
--- E> [and thinks] And here again, we have those from which nothing and no one is spared
=====
D> Soll ich diesem Vater empfehlen...
--- E> Should I then advise this father...
D> so cool wie Talkgast zu sein
--- E> to be as cool as a guest in a talk show?
D> sich bloß in keinem Wort zu verfehlen, das antisemitisch erscheint
--- E> Just so he won't slip into using any word, possibly interpreted as antisemitic?
D> Sie geloben apart die Treue von Ampel bis afd.
--- E> They all swear faith to Apartheid: From the Traffic Lights coalition [1] to AfD [2]
D> Sie liefern Granaten aufs Neue bittend Zahl, damit umzugehen
--- E> They all supply grenades again and again, asking, pretty please, "to be handled with care"
D> beim Menschen, wie Viecher vertreiben, mit Hunger und mit drohnen
--- E> As people, like cattle, are driven away with hunger and drones
D> Dieser Kinderfriedhof wird bleiben als Albtraum für Generationen
--- E> This graveyard of children will remain, for generations to come, a nightmare
=====
D> Die aus Ohnmacht brodelnde Kraft, hat sich nie jemand selbst ausgesucht
--- E> The helplessness in the face of brute force, was never chosen by anyone
D> doch die Macht, die die Bestien schafft... aus kalten Kalkülen, sei verflucht
-- E> But this power, that which creates beasts... out of cold computation, may it be cursed
++ D,E> Gaza, Gaza
D> Ich schlage meine Augen nieder vor dem ohnmächtigen Geschrei
-- E> I gaze down [in shame], before your powerless screeches
D> vor deinen zerfetzen Liedern,
-- E> Before your torn limbs
D> und ich frage mich da immer wieder
-- E> And I ask myself again and always:
D> "und das... soll kein Völkermord sein?"
-- E> "And this... is not supposed to be Genocide?"
=====
[1] The Traffic Lights coalition: a coalition of mainstream German parties whose combined colors resemble that of a traffic light
[2] AfD: Short for Alternative für Deutschland, or "Alternative for Germany" in German, a far-right party that is not mainstream and considered extreme, focused on combating immigration
=====
~|~ Dedicated to the soul of Hend Rajab, 2017|2018 – 29 January 2024, killed by criminals driving tanks.
Some translation errors, e.g. "generell" means "in general" and has nothing to do with military generals. Also "apart" means "fancy" and has nothing to do with Apartheid (which is Afrikaans and not German). Besides, it has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Must_Be_Said
Thanks for taking the time, those are transcription errors, most likely, as the translation on the video agrees on the meaning.
> it has been done before
I can't understand this, are you implying this poem is basically the same as the poem in the link?
I've been thinking about what I call relationship revulsion campaigns. If there's a better or more standard term, let me know.
I'm talking about prejudices which are specifically saying that people from some demographic are too revolting for sex and/or bad marriage choices.
Such prejudices are pretty pervasive, though they vary in how much grip they get. There are prejudices against fat people, old people, homosexuals, black women, Asian men, disabled people, (in America) people of the other political persuasion, Jewish women (though I think that's faded)...
I think one of the nasty side effects, in addition to presumably good pairings which are presumably prevented, is that if people say they don't want to be targeted by relationship revulsion, they can be taken to say they're entitled to a relationship. Perhaps sometimes they mean that, but I think mostly not.
Part of the mess is that people living in a society with relationship revulsion can actually be revolted, so if they hear pushback against the prejudice, they think they're being pushed into a relationship they don't want.
Downthread, Martin Blank was talking about definitions of "racism", and I think this is similar. It's not just that someone feels some way, they have a need to explain it and justify it and make it righteous and good, to embed it in the social fabric as "the way things should be". It is not allowable to have personal preferences, every preference one has must be objectively correct, and if that means redefining what is "correct" to suit one's preferences, so be it. It may relate to the creeping politicization of life, where totalitarian ideologies wriggle their tentacles into every private orifice of the mind.
Or at least, that's my personal opinion. ;-)
Campaign implies a level of intentional coordination that I don't think exist. This seems just being on the wrong side of a heuristic, which sucks.
I do think that the current discourse environment (or current-ish, you know, vibe-shift and all that) is particularly cruel to people belonging to the people belonging to these groups:
- Right-thinking people will denounce these stereotypes loudly, but are likely to still not date within those categories if they can avoid it.
- Contrarians/dissidents often over-index to the heuristic as a reaction to the stifling norms.
- Complaining about the stereotypes is often seen as entitlement.
- Signaling that you do not fit the stereotypes is seen as traitorous/pick-me/desperate.
My advice for individuals looking out for themselves would be to lean into the latter point anyway and ignore the noise. It's a hard balancing act, but people won't know your worth if you don't tell them.
In one of the classified threads, maybe a year ago, a guy linked to a long, frank profile of himself with multiple photos. He was a moderately overweight guy in his 30's, and I think also balding. But he was articulate and funny, and sounded active, with a lot of interests. Anyhow, I remember one line from his profile was "I'm not everyone's cup of tea. I'm fat. On the other hand . . . "[and he described some positive stuff about himself -- interests, achievements, can't remember now.]
I am totally not in a dating mode, and he's too young for me anyhow. But if it were his age and dating, he's the person from that dating thread I would have contacted. Like pretty much everyone, I think hair looks better than partial baldness and normal weight looks better than fat. But that stuff is just not that important. I know from experience that whether a man is handsome or homely, he will soon just look like himself to me.
And besides, all you people who have their hearts set on finding a beautiful mate: Do you *get* that your partner is going to age? Time and having babies make various things soften and slide south. Pregnancy and motherhood often cause weight gain, and the pounds are hard to lose. Time, sun and smiling give you crow's feet and smile lines. People get busy with their careers and don't want to take out time to work out and have their teeth whitened. I you can't face that, sign up for some permanent feed of 23 year olds. It's like getting all the Mac desktop models as they come out. Once the bloom is off one, the agency will send another.
Jeez!
> Do you *get* that your partner is going to age?
But that applies to both the more attractive and the less attractive people. And I would naively expect that the older version of the more attractive person will still be nicer to look at than the older version of the less attractive person.
There are some exceptions to this. For example, it seems that some people simply "age more slowly", which can make them less attractive as teenagers, but more attractive after the peak age for their gender. But I still think you probably can make a reasonable guess about how your potential partner will age. And "he is already partially bald and overweight in his 30s" probably doesn't result in an optimistic prediction.
ISTM that one thing people want from a stable permanent relationship is not to have to worry that they're going to lose their partner by going gray, gaining weight, acquiring stretch marks, etc. That can be bad (why do I need to bathe regularly now that I'm married?) but also is a pretty important benefit in a world where younger people are usually more attractive than older people, where pregnancy has a substantial impact on your body, etc.
Hmmm... 'campaign' is tricky - makes me think of something centrally organized, which I'm not sure matches your phenomenon. Maybe "Mate Revulsion?" "Revulsion Culture?"
It's definitely a thing - people generally want 'desirable' partners, and every society has its undesirables.
>>if people say they don't want to be targeted by relationship revulsion, they can be taken to say they're entitled to a relationship. Perhaps sometimes they mean that, but I think mostly not.
Yeah, I'm reminded of some of Scott's past posts about shy, bullied young men frustrated at their lack of prospects who say something to the effect of "it sucks that this is happening to me" and society responds "so you're saying your *entitled* to women? Because that's pretty despicable of you." See also, the mockery that trans-people or fat people get in similar circumstances - "dating sucks because I'm not seen as desireable" is a fairly common opinion, but that ask for empathy often gets rewarded with a mallot-to-the-face response along the lines of "are you saying people who don't want to date you are transphobes/fatphobes/whateverphobes? Because that's pretty despicable of you."
I'm sure there are some small number of people (probably struggling with mental health issues) who genuinely mean things in the "I am entitled to be considered sexually desired" kind of way, but most strike me as just meaning something along the lines of "dating sucks because 'm not seen as desirable," and honestly, dating in the internet age tends to suck a lot generally, so it'd be nice if we could all just kvetch without getting punched in the face for it.
How do you distinguish a campaign from just what people prefer/don't prefer?
Like, if you ask a large set of men whether they're more attracted to a fit 23 year old yoga instructor or a 53 year old overweight mom of three, nearly all of them are going to find the yoga instructor more attractive. (Even the older guys who suspect that they'd be more likely to have a meaningful relationship with the mom of three thanks to shared experiences.) I'm not convinced this is the result of a campaign, exactly.
You're not entirely wrong, just mostly wrong.
If you look across art and cultures, you'll see that there's variation on body composition, facial features, and height, at least.
There's a preference for youth. There may be a male preference for lighter skin. (See _The Curse of Ham_.)
The thing is, it's one thing to have a preference, and another thing to go on and on about how much you're disgusted by what doesn't match your preference. Public disgust has effects, and I'm inclined to think the real revealed preference is for malice . This isn't about everyone, but definitely a large enough fraction to make a difference.
There are fat yoga teachers.
>Public disgust has effects, and I'm inclined to think the real revealed preference is for malice .
That sounds very plausible. Weaponized disgust is a classic element of xenophobia.
I could see someone being startled and turned off by an unexpected characteristic of someone they met on a first date, but I'd thing a decent response in such a case would be more like "Oops, <X> happens to be a turnoff for me, no offense, but could we cut this short?"
OK, but how does any of that make the person you're replying to wrong? All they said was that in their culture, people tend to prefer X, and that this doesn't necessarily imply a "campaign."
There is a difference between "most people prefer X to Y" and "most people prefer X to Y and they keep reminding everyone that X is more attractive to Y, therefore only losers choose Y".
In the former scenario, if there is a sufficiently large minority of people who prefer Y to X, or at least are indifferent, and there are not too many Y people... it still can have a happy ending.
In the latter scenario, people indifferent between X and Y will still choose X for status reasons, and even people who genuinely prefer Y to X will be tempted to do so. So it would be nicer if the people who prefer X to Y act on their preferences but stop preaching about them. (Most of them probably do exactly this, but sometimes it only takes one loud asshole.)
At least from the purely sexual angle, if the mom of 3 had non-white hair, and a certain softness in voice, I will be almost as sexually interested in her as in the 23 year old yoga instructor, if not ***more***. As an actual matter of fact, I find myself getting quite aroused just thinking about the traditional qualities associated with your description right now, **no matter** what ethnicity or general body plan I mentally assign to the "53 year old overweight mom of three".
I kind of like bigger (in both meanings of the word, older and chubbier) women so that's not typical, perhaps, but "nearly all" strikes me as so obviously wrong. After all, I DO find free porn featuring chubby respectable moms seducing twenty-somethings. Nothing which you can find free porn for is ever niche. Perhaps a reasonable ratio is like 90%, 10% of all men is still a pretty huge portion.
There is also a big difference between just stating what you want, rejecting what you don't want, and declaring that **everyone** should or would or must reject what you don't want (or is stupid not to). Each step of the way is more hurtful to what you don't want.
And this is still not the total rejectionism of movements like 4th wave feminism and Andrew-Tate-ism, which assert that **all** people of a certain gender has this and that qualities, and that you would be a fool not to assume maximum bad faith and act accordingly. That's the apex of what OP is talking about. I personally call it "Gender Separatism", they talk about marriage and love using terminology taken from independence movements, and explicitly invoke the metaphor of political subordination of one people to another when they describe the current status quo.
Yeah, there's definitely a difference between:
a. I don't find X attractive.
b. I don't think anyone should find X attractive.
Maybe Nancy is getting more at (b) when she talks about revulsion, rather than just lack of interest.
I think statistically you will find most people with broadly similar tastes, but with substantial outliers. And you definitely have loud internet voices demanding that people find them attractive. Depending on the context, that can be single men, transwomen, fat people, old people, disabled people, etc. Demanding people find you attractive will never ever work, but the internet is about clicks/attention, not about what makes sense or can work.
Entertainingly, you can also get loud internet voices demanding that you stop finding some people attractive, or denouncing you for finding them attractive for the wrong reasons. (Maybe you only find that black woman attractive because you're exotifying her.) Because the internet is about getting clicks via outrage/anger/eyeball grabbing, not about anything sensible.
>Entertainingly, you can also get loud internet voices demanding that you stop finding some people attractive, or denouncing you for finding them attractive for the wrong reasons.
Yup! Reddit has a huge amount of strident demands to "Stop sexualizing <group>/<body part>!!!" I find busybodies who issue such demands to be obnoxious.
Yes, I mean (b).
It seems a little odd that your list mentions homosexuals, even though they usually don't want relationships with heterosexuals, but doesn't mentions bisexual men and transgender people (especially transgender women I think).
I see enough from conservatives that homosexuals are obviously revolting. I think the idea and to some extent the effect (much more in the past) is that they aren't supposed to want each other.
You've got a point about transgender people.
Conservative (and straight) here. I don’t think homosexuals belong in this list. Homosexuality as revolting, sure. Homosexuals revolting for engaging in homosexuality, possibly. But the stereotype about (male) homosexuals is that they are better looking and more attractive than heterosexual men - and this is broadly true IME.
You can also think about whether the revoltingness is contagious.
Absent any concerns about STDs, would it matter to you if your girlfriend had been in a previous relationship with another girl? A transwoman? A black guy?
None of these seem important to me, but there are people for whom each of those three would be a deal breaker.
Linking to this article I posted recently on my personal blog, for more visibility: https://upcoder.com/21/is-there-a-power-play-overhang
Introduction, copied from the post:
This post is about risks in the development of increasingly capable AI, in particular the risk of losing control to AI and extinction risk. I'll suggest that a key question is, "When do we need to take this kind of risk seriously?"
We'll look at the issue of 'agency overhang', which suggests that adding agent-like abilities to AI could result in a sudden and surprising increase in these kinds of risks.
I'll draw on intuitions about humans taking administrative and political control (with reference to the 'Dictator Book Club') and rephrase agency overhang as 'power play overhang'.
I'll finish by suggesting that a lot of people may be making a subtle but important mistake in imagining just one fairly specific path to dangerous AI.
(Interested to hear any thoughts and comments, from people here.)
When governments subsidize things like high-speed particle accelerators or giant space telescopes to look at distant galaxies from the past, is there generally hope that it will lead to new knowledge that has a practical value for the world or is it mostly "science for science's sake"? Percentagewise, how much is the former vs the latter?
To the extent it is the latter, why don't we subsidize the arts as much?
When there's any pushback on funding science, the proponents will absolutely trot out "This could bring us vast practical benefits, like cheap clean abundant energy! Or maybe not, no way to know in advance, but we'd all be living in caves if we didn't try!". This argument is usually rather overstated, and it's unclear how sincere the proponents are about it.
But it's definitely a weapon in their arsenal, one that the arts can't use. And it is at least somewhat effective.
> vast practical benefits
Our space program gave us tang and velcro.
The problem with drawing a distinction between the two is that it's very difficult to assess what projects are practical and what projects are just for prestige before you actually do the damn thing. For example, you might fund a materials science lab with the hopes of getting a superconductor and get nothing out of them five years later beyond a lot of papers explaining why it didn't work and a new kind of talc. Alternatively, you might fund a new exoplanet telescope and find out that, in addition to a lot of pretty pictures, they invented a new form of glass that revolutionizes fiberoptics and the patent will shortly be worth trillions.
>When governments subsidize things like high-speed particle accelerators
Do you include e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Light_Source, which is a 3 Gev electron synchrotron?
>Its purpose is to produce intense beams of light whose special characteristics are useful in many areas of scientific research. In particular it can be used to investigate the structure and properties of a wide range of materials from proteins (to provide information for designing new and better drugs), and engineering components (such as a fan blade from an aero-engine[1]) to conservation of archeological artifacts (for example Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose[2][3]).
It isn't the LHC (which operates at >1000X the energy), but it is a high-speed particle accelerator.
Sure.
Thanks!
The question you are asking is based on a bad model. "Government" is just a big bunch of people in a room. The government doesn't "hope" for anything. Decisions are generally not taken based on careful analysis where the benefits are broken down in percentages. A good historical example is that Iraq War: There was no big meeting were it was decided to invade Iraq, instead some people said "maybe we should invade Iraq" and it slowly morphed into "we should invade Iraq" without anyone ever making the decision.
For science funding, some parliament or similar typically assigns a big pile of money to "science" each year as part of the budget process. Why do they do this? Because that's what they always have done and if someone opposed it they would be painted as "bad for science" and no-one wants that and there are some members who are really into science and working hard to increase the amount and they are kind of nice to have lunch with so you don't want to make them angry and also they scratch your back sometimes as well so whatever. Then the big pile of money get's fought over by different science institutions and bureaucracies which also mostly run on inertia.
That's a fair point. My question was more of a "Ideally, what should we fund?" not "How does our political process determine what we fund?" But you are right to make the point.
Like, this space is filled with rat libertarians and I'm one of them so my answer to "ideally, what should we fund?" is "burn the current system to the ground and then do something that is based on the facts that 1. we're trying to create public goods and 2. incentives matter. Definitely enforce pre-registration and open access. Maybe do something with dominant assurance contracts and/or prediction markets, that would be cool."
Having a big central committee trying to decide what's Good Science That Should Be Funded and what's not is doomed to be terribly ineffective. Having a big central committee trying to decide how much resources to dedicate to science may be harder to avoid but it is also a fundamentally bad idea.
There's a good Substack by a guy who really cares about science funding here, it has ideas that are a tad bit more practical: https://goodscience.substack.com/
We subsidize "culture" in the broader sense by a staggering amount: keeping historical buildings intact, pushing knowledge and use of niche languages and dialects (a lot of this in Europe, less so in the US I guess), keeping landscapes pretty, etc etc. Heck, even sports might go on this list. All of this is fine since these things enjoy very broad support.
The arts are also subsidized by the public purse quite a lot. But (a particular breed of) artists do their utmost to make art exclusionary. They take public money on one hand, and refuse to make things the public enjoys on the other. Architects often do this as well.
A lot of individual artist have done their best to alienate the public while also demanding that the public fund them. I have no sympathy for those types. But things like symphonies, operas and ballets are much less controversial, and they do require a lot of money to exist. I wish more money were given to symphonies to perform Strauss and Mahler so they wouldn't have to pay the rent buy performing "The Music of David Bowie."
There's usually a hope that blue sky research will result in discoveries that benefit society. But these big projects also push the limits of engineering, so work on them can result in improved optics, magnets or other technologies that can be applied in other areas.
Governments do subsidize arts a lot, it's just that any individual art (or humanities research) project needs much less expensive equipment and manpower than the projects you've mentioned.
As for the motivation, I think it's hard to separate. Scientific success brings a government prestige, but there's always a chance that even the most abstract projects will produce useful things as a result.
Incidentally, prestige and the hope of positive (social) effects is also why governments fund art.
With architects, at least, I think it's partly Stockholm Syndrome. They're forced to keep their designs inexpensive, and eventually they brainwash themselves into believing that the designs forced upon them are in fact objectively good. To do otherwise would involve admitting that they're "sellouts" who compromise their artistic vision for filthy lucre.
Does anyone else find it weird that the Chandrasekhar limit and Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit are both very close to the solar mass?
https://xkcd.com/2707/
There are only 3.2 orders of magnitude in star mass (0.075-120 solar masses), and there's a multiple-comparisons problem where the progenitor masses reaching those limits are *not* all that close to solar mass.
More generally, since stars are "things that collapsed hard enough to do nuclear fusion", the Chandrasekhar limit is "things that collapsed hard enough to do electron capture" and the TOV limit is "things that collapsed hard enough to break physics", it makes sense for them to be fairly similar.
But why? Naively I would have expected that neutron degeneracy pressure would be *much* stronger than electron degeneracy pressure or something. After all, the particles have very different properties.
As Erica said, because gravity increases with density, once you start to get gravity that can actually overcome repulsion forces it needs less and less of a push to overcome the next, stronger set of repulsion forces (high-pressure polymorphs start at something like 0.00000005 solar masses, Coulomb pressure fails at ~0.05 solar masses, electron degeneracy at ~1.4 solar masses for C-O - more for hydrogen, less for elements heavier than calcium - and neutron degeneracy at 2-3 solar masses).
This is, incidentally, why there's a sharp divide between white dwarfs and neutron stars and why the formation of the latter from the former invariably blows up a star rather than powering one smoothly; once the electron-degenerate core comes under enough pressure that electron capture becomes favourable, it starts shrinking because of the decrease in electron degeneracy pressure, and the increase in density increases the gravity and thus pressure further, making electron capture *more* favourable, so while the first few electron captures are near equilibrium and release negligible energy the later stages of the process release incredible amounts of energy and it will self-accelerate until completion - the core doesn't "get stuck" partway.
Your intuition is correct as far as it goes: max neutron degeneracy pressure is many orders of magnitude more than electron degeneracy pressure. But you don't need to add a whole lot more mass to get there because there's an insanely large positive feedback effect where adding enough mass to overcome electron degeneracy pressure means you squeeze out all the empty space between atomic nuclei and wind up with a neutron star whose core is something like 8-9 orders of magnitude denser than the core of a white dwarf. A neutron star is on the order of 10 km in radius, while a white dwarf is on the order of 5000 km.
Internal pressure at the core due to gravity of an ideal star works out to being proportionate to M^2 / R^4, so increasing mass by roughly a factor of 2 and decreasing radius by roughly a factor of 500 (i.e. going from a white dwarf just under the C limit to a neutron star just under the TOV limit) means your pressure is a bit more than 11 orders of magnitude higher.
Both Ross Barkan https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/from-misogyny-to-no-mans-land?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 and John Pistelli https://substack.com/home/post/p-144554840 have interesting posts this week on the decline of masculinity in literary fiction.
It's a subject that fascinates me. In the first half of my life, male novelists were the kings of the intellectual world. Since 2000, they barely register in American culture. Why?
Barkan suggests the usual suspects: video games and social media. His thesis is that young men simply aren't exposed to the gateway drugs of literary fiction anymore because they don't have empty time to fill anymore. I know that in my day writers like Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller were gateways to more literary fiction. But he also suggests that there is a chicken-and-egg problem: it's been a long time since an under-40 literary male novelist writing in English was popular (since the 1990's and DFW). Males don't read literary fiction because males no longer write literary fiction and vice-versa. That analysis doesn't get at the root cause, but there may be some truth in it. The root cause, of course, may be political correctness: how can a heterosexual male novelist exist in today's social climate?
Pistelli suggests a more interesting root cause: gentrification. Heterosexual men don't want to write fiction anymore because it's higher status to be a literary theorist than a writer of literary fiction. I.e., real American men don't want to be Hemingway or Pynchon anymore; they want to be Nick Land.
I myself wonder if there isn't an economic explanation that is congruent with
The top 10 bestselling novels in the US by year since 2000, by gender of author(s):
2000: 8 by men, 2 by women
2001: 8 by men, 2 by women
2002: 7 by men, 3 by women
2003: 8 by men, 2 by women
2004: 9 by men, 1 by women
2005: 5 by men, 5 by women
2006: 9 by men, 1 by women
2007: 7 by men, 3 by women
2008: 6 by men, 4 by women
2009: 7 by men, 3 by women
2010: 7 by men, 3 by women
2011: 7 by men, 3 by women
2012: 2 by men, 8 by women
2013: 8 by men, 2 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2014: 5 by men, 5 by women
2015: 5 by men, 5 by women (note: one of the female authors was long deceased)
2016: 4 by men, 6 by women (note: one of the female authors was long deceased)
2017: 6 by men, 4 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2018: 8 by men, 2 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2019: 7 by men, 3 by women
2020: 5 by men, 5 by women
2021: 7 by men, 3 by women (note: two of the male authors were long deceased)
2022: 2 by men, 8 by women (note: one of the male authors was long deceased)
2023: 2 by men, 8 by women
Male authors dominated through the first decade of this century, as they more or less always had previously. Then it balanced out somewhat. The last two years it's mostly women or, more precisely, woman: Colleen Hoover, the Michael Jordan of romance novelists, wrote 6 of the 10 best-selling novels published in 2022 and then 3 of the ones published in 2023. Romance novels started cracking the annual all-types-of-novels top ten list only during the past decade or so. That genre has always been overwhelmingly written by women and read by women, so its growth is a factor in the overall shift.
(Also while putting together this comment I noticed that in that entire 24 years there hasn't been one instance of a top-10 US bestselling novel in any genre co-authored by a man and a woman. There are some male duos and some female duos, but no mixed duos. Not sure what means if anything.)
I'm not talking about popular fiction. I'm talking about literary fiction.
The NYT best-seller lists are organized by category, one of which is "literary". (Others are "romance", "adventure", "horror", etc.) For the decade starting with 2000, 53% of the books that made the NYT's annual top-10 in the literary category were written by men. For the decade starting with 2010 it was 54%.
Library Journal's list of the "Best Literary Fiction of 2023" included 11 books of which 8 were written by men.
Literary Hub's 2019 list of "The 20 Best Novels of the Decade" included 9 books written by men.
The Guardian's 2019 list of the "100 best books of the 21st century" included 28 literary novels of which 15 were written by men. (If you include poetry collections and short-story collections those totals become 35 and 19.)
Etc etc.
I had to find out what it means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
Sounds like a dangerous kind of thing to write for a man today, because if the story is not plot-driven, then it will probably contain opinions on the general society (as seen by the protagonist), and that could be problematic.
But maybe it's just a mater of fashion, and men don't write this kind of stories these days because they write different kinds of stories.
Or maybe it's the audience that has changed. Maybe the kind of person who would read this kind of stories in the past has either moved to a different kind of stories or stopped reading completely. Twenty years ago, this kind of fiction would sell much better than sci-fi/fantasy, but I suspect that while sci-fi/fantasy fans still keep reading books, the more mainstream audience has switched to watching Netflix.
Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the last couple decades. There used to be very hard limits on what you could film in a way that is decreasingly true. Why read a war novel when you could fight in one? Of course, abstract concepts aren’t as easy to visualize, which is why you see the shift to nonfiction. Because no movie is really going to be as effective at teaching philosophy than a book.
It’s kind of weird because I’m an avid movie watcher/nonfiction reader who decided to write fiction and I find fiction harder to read than most nonfiction, mostly because of descriptions. I’m not used to taking characterizations from words and visualizing them in my mind.
I'd lay this at the feet of the decline of "literary fiction" as a genre. It's relevant to less and less of the population, and the portion it's still relevant to tends to be moderately to aggressively anti-masculine.
It's a pity. I view litfic as being like a paleo diet, in that it does without the added sugar and processed ingredients of, well, actually being exciting. (I remember the hand-wringing over Donna Tartt.) But these days, they don't realize that they've been using another artificial stimulant, political correctness. And so the effort to prioritize craft uber alles is fading away.
People go into writing for three reasons: because they're highly motivated, because they want to make money, or because they want the mystique of being a writer.
It's hard to make money being a writer. If you do want to make money, it's easier to write genre fiction. This has always been true to a degree, but I think it's now truer than ever. In genre fiction, there are still many cishet male writers.
As for the prestige, I think that's dwindling. Literary fiction is becoming a "for girls" thing which makes people look down on it. Genre fiction "for women", like romance, has more thematic overlap with litfic than genre fiction "for men" like hard sci-fi. So it's more likely for a female genre fiction author to be "elevated" into litfic than a male one.
And as for sheer interest, I think boys don't really read much. If they're into solitary pursuits, they're more likely to watch shows and play video games. There's many reasons for that, but in the end it leads to fewer cishet men with a great interest in fiction writing.
Couldn't finish my thought because of the shitty software here. Was going to say Baumol Effect. Would an 18-year-old Thomas Pynchon or William Shakespeare even want to be a novelist today or would they go into tech to make a living?
I think the same thing about contemporary classical music. Wouldn't a clone of Mozart or Beethoven today either choose to make more popular music or---because they are smart and ambitious---perhaps choose a career other than music?
Another reason I think there aren't more male heterosexual novelists -- along the lines of Pistelli's suggestion that it is about status -- is American politics. Apolitical times are best for art, whereas politics ruins it. Just look at what politics does to comedy. Mid-century America was a great time for bipartisanship and thus art. When artist have to choose a side they stop making art and start making propaganda.
EDIT: What are the odds the 21st century would produce the greatest writer in history considering that the smartest minds in that century would be drawn to something more productive?
>>Apolitical times are best for art, whereas politics ruins it. Just look at what politics does to comedy.
I disagree with this completely. In the first place, there's no time in human history whose inhabitants would look around and say "we are living in apolitical times." Conflicts may be forgotten to us, but they were always present.
Plus some of the best art has "political" statements behind it.
Totalitarianism and 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheight 451. The Red Scare and the Crucible. Abolitionism and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Civil Rights Movement and To Kill a Mockingbird. WW1 and Guernica. Jacques-Louis David's paintings of Napoleon and the French Revolution.
To be fair, art doesn't always have to say something political to be interesting - lots of western art, historically, said nothing more than "my patron and/or the church is wealthy and awesome," and still was amazing. And plenty of good art has been made out of non-political statements - "I have issues with my dad," "I'm obsessed with my mistress" have made been every bit as fertile statements to center interesting art around as their "political" alternatives have been. But at the end of the day, statements about *something* are what make most forms of art interesting, and I don't see any reason to carve political statements out of that quilt when they account for many of our most interesting squares.
There's a bias when we look back at "the best art" and see political statements in it - if we're still reading it, it's probably good. Your examples do show that it's perfectly possible to have politically motivated art...
...but I think that a big problem with looking for good politically motivated art is that it removes a filter. If I write a poem about going outside on a cold winter day, and it's trash, nobody will read it. If I write a poem about going outside on a cold winter day to storm the US Capitol Building, lots of people won't care whether it's trash or not - they'll review it entirely based on whether it agrees with their politics. Seeing that a work of art can receive attention its creator could possibly want just by "sending the right message", it is natural for artists to skip the step where they try to make it any good.
Yes, this.
I'd say that the attention can also be gained by "big explosions" or "superhero fights" or "hot naked people" or other stuff like that, with similar effects.
Some people love those novels you mention but they are the kind of preachy stuff they force you to read in school that I hate. I loathe art that makes statements.
It's more than just "some people" though - we're talking about some of the most influential works of fiction of the last 200 years.
Plenty of less explicitly 'preachy' novels can be considered as if not more successful - I'm not trying to argue that art *must* make political statements to be good. However, regardless of your or my personal taste, "apolitical times" (if such times can be said to exist) can't be said to be "best" for art if "political" pieces routinely run among the most popular and impactful works.
One certainly could say "such-and-such a time or cultural moment is best suited producing art that I personally prefer," and I'd have no quibble with a statement that apolitical times, whatever that may mean, are best suited for producing art that is to your tastes, but that's a very different statement from "such-and-such a time or cultural moment is best for art."
Your last point is fair. It is just my opinion.
But books like 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Crucible are as popular as they are only because public schools made them assigned reading. I mean, maybe they would have been read widely for a long time if they hadn't been assigned reading, but that's a counterfactual we can't examine. As it is they are popular political works precisely because the politics of the time was "We need to ram these political messages down kids' throats" and they did. They were 20th century American political propaganda: 1 against the Soviets, 1 against racism, and 1 against being too anti-Soviet.
I'll 50% disagree, and say that the problem is the way the books were rammed down kids' throats. The messages are very important, but when they're presented as having a single reference, too many kids come out thinking "now I'm warned, so I'll never do that specific bad thing to those specific people". And then they go on to recreate the pattern elsewhere.
I wonder how much of this is related to modern literary fiction being so focused on internal emotional states, like the classic short story in the New Yorker with no plot but lots of elliptical dialogue. Male writers seem to be doing a lot better in genre fiction of all kinds.
I am so sick of hearing being supersmart equated with working in tech. Shakespeare was a genius, but he *wrote* all the time and when he wasn't writing sonnets and plays he was problem thinking about doing so. And he didn't, you know, get the royalties from all the modern film adaptations of his plays. He was not wealthy and successful in his own time. He could probably have made more money owning a pub, and he probably knew that. Mozart and Beethoven may have been smart and ambitious, but they were not particularly practical and they were *in love* with music. I know someone who is a 23 year old bona fide math prodigy and they are getting an advanced degree in something other than tech. David Foster Wallace was supersmart and he did not work in tech. SCOTT is supersmart, and he is not working in tech. Zvi is supersmart, and he is not working in tech. Each of them is/was in love with some kind of mental activity that is not a tech one.
I'm sure there are people working in tech who are in love with their jobs, but my impression from the people I know, including people on here, is that most have a practical, workaday attitude and are pleased to be getting prosperous at something they are good at. If anything what stands out for me about people in tech is not that they are smarter but that they have more common sense and less passion than the kind of smart person who produces things because they're in love with the process.
On the other hand: I'm arguably one of those people who's in tech but probably would be one of those obsessive intellectuals in an earlier time. Don't get me wrong -- I like programming, it's fun, and I'm pretty good at it. But my real first love is mathematics. I did math all the time, wanted to be a mathematician, did original research as a high school and college student, went to a high-ranked PhD program in math.... and then the pressure burnt me out on academic research and I wasn't a good fit for the teaching college where I got a job instead (and was overworked and underpaid and didn't have the energy to do research anyway). So I went into software, which is less stressful and pays more, and now I do things like Project Euler (which is like 80% math and 20% programming) for fun in my free time. And I know several other people with similar trajectories.
My point is, it's not just that tech pays more (though that's not trivial), it's that tech, unlike most intellectual jobs today, is not an absolutely brutal meatgrinder to actually have a career in, so lots of would-be intellectuals who can't handle the meatgrinder but are ambitious and good at tech stuff too end up in tech. Are they "more productive" in tech? Well, Society Writ Large seems to have decided so. I'm not so sure, but here I am anyway.
(I will probably retire early and do lots of math then, though "early" is less early because I spent 10 years in PhD + tenure track trying to make the academic math thing work.)
Also tech, well IT anyway, has a fairly low entry barrier. So it is ideal for people lacking the funds or the patience and perserverance to spend several years studying vocational specialities such as medicine or law.
Yeah, that makes sense, and good for you! I have nothing against people working in tech, just tired of hearing it talked about as "something more productive" that "the smartest minds in the century would be drawn to."
Yeah I don’t understand this “I’d write/play music, but there’s more money to be made in tech” thing. I play music because I can’t not to.
What do you think the decline in masculinity in contemporary literary fiction is about?
I think this is a ridiculously over-phrased claim. What do you mean by "masculinity"? Do you simply mean "male writers" or do you mean "no He-Man Rough Tough Characters"?
That reminds me of my reaction to Jack London's "The Sea-Wolf" where the big mean rough'n'tough character is named Wolf Larsen. Well, okay. But then it turns out that Wolf has an even meaner, rougher'n'tougher big brother called... Death Larsen.
At which point I found it hard to repress my giggles. I enjoyed the book, but that's a bit *too* gilding the lily to be taken seriously. I get the impression, Hank, that you think we need Moar Death Larsen! in the contemporary novel?
I'm curious how old you were when you read it? If you don't mind me asking.
I read it at around 10? or so. Needless to say I gobbled it up, starry-eyed, of course wanting to be the badass Wolf Larsen.
I doubt I'd be able to read it as an adult.
I really just mean heterosexual male novelists. The Ross Barkin post goes into much more detail about what he means. He mostly makes the point about how in the mid-60s American novelists were overwhelmingly male whereas now they are overwhelmingly female and the ones who are male are mostly writing from a racial/sexual-orientation minority perspective. (The emphasis being the perspective not whether the author happens to be a minority). With the recent deaths of Roth, Mcarthy and Amis, the only male novelists alive I can name who write in English are Pynchon and Franzen.
"'I am Grimm Shaddo,' said Grimm Shaddo, his triple wand-claws extending. 'And I am here to take it to the limit.'"
Truly, one of the pinnacles of literature.
Although the Star Wars EU character "Savage Opress" comes mighty close.
Super Turbocharged Sweet Meteor of Death Larsen
I honestly did laugh at the part where it's more or less "Oh, you think *I'm* bad? Well just wait until you meet my brother.... Death!"
I think that was a touch *too* much masculinity 😁
Do you mean the decline of masculinity or the decline of male writers? They're not the same, right? Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett -- none was exactly a swashbuckler. Of course, they were from a different era, but even by the standards of their era they were not particularly masculine. As for now -- well, there was John Updike and Philip Roth, both of whom died in the last decade. Oh, right, you said writers under 40. I can't think of any, but I don't keep up with new books the way I used to. Like many people, I read far fewer books now than I used to. Lots of my reading is online -- blogs, etc. Are there female writers under 40 who are a big deal these days?
To me it seems as though forms like the novel are dying because so few people these days sit down with nice fat long books. I'm a psychologist, and used to recommend books to my patients -- novels that touched on issues important to them, nonfiction books about their disorder, self-help books. Nowadays they sigh at the idea and ask if I know of a podcast or a YouTube video. I have had several tell me they just cant stick with reading a book these days. And 2 people that I can think of have told me they *have never read an entire book in their lives.*. They're STEM professionals, and quite smart, but they just cannot understand how someone can face sitting down with several hundred pages of print and persevere to the end. They got through high school using Spark Notes.
It's weird that people these days simultaneously have issues with shortened attention span and yet there are also extremely long fantasy series and movie universes.
To be more clear, I think there's a casual link in the other direction. Increased exposure to addictive stimuli makes us less capable of paying attention to non-addictive things. Probably there's a neurological explanation somewhere, but I'm just taking about the outcome that I see.
Excitement, adventure, a literary artist craves not these things.
They're artificial superstimuli, like porn or slot machines or fentanyl or power fantasies. Look at the mystery/thriller genre, it's full of long running series that hit the same notes reliably, over and over and over. The book may be new, but you already know exactly why you'll like it.
Here's a Guardian list of 10 best new novelists from 2023 and five of them are men:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/08/meet-the-10-best-new-novelists-for-2023
I think there's a distinction to be made between modern *literary* fiction and *contemporary* fiction; the latter is the one where the bestsellers lurk and is chock-full of women writers writing mysteries, dramas, romance, and other genre books. At the moment I think male authors still have the edge in horror, but I find it interesting that in this list it's majority male - 13 men out of the top 20:
https://today.yougov.com/ratings/entertainment/popularity/contemporary-fiction-writer/all
It sounds like The Gaurdian used a bit of affirmative action for men this year: "We’ve ushered nearly 80 authors into the spotlight since 2014, from Sally Rooney to Douglas Stuart – one of only 20 men ever to have made the cut, incidentally. (We’ve got five more men this year – for anyone wondering “where are the new male hotshot novelists?”, as one newspaper asked a couple of years ago, you can call off the search.)"
> but they just cannot understand how someone can face sitting down with several hundred pages of print and persevere to the end
Sometimes I think that my greatest life hack was being born with mild OCD. Just enough to give me the push to see projects through, and value doing them well.
Is there a way to filter for fiction, like there was on SSC (<https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/fiction/>)?
Many years ago, I had an HSA with HSABank. When I left my job, I rolled over the entire balance to another HSA provider and closed my account. However, ever since, HSABAnk has still be emailing my monthly statements and periodically sending me physical mail as well.
Unfortunately, there is no way to unsubscribe, because my account is closed! I even tried contacting customer support a few times, but never got anywhere.
Practicing Mormon. I abstain from alcohol, tobacco, tea leaves (green and black), coffee, and recreational drugs. Church leadership is united in those specific areas. I drink herbal tea, and use caffeine sparingly to avoid dependency.
Do you have any thoughts on why the Word of Wisdom instructs Mormons not to drink tea and coffee? If it's not caffeine (which I understand is allowed) or hot drinks per se (since herbal teas are allowed), then why doesn't God want Mormons to drink tea and coffee in particular? The interpretation of Joseph Smith's original "hot drinks" to mean specifically tea and coffee seems a very deliberate choice, but I don't understand why that exact choice was made.
As a follow up question, do Mormons see dietary observance as a matter of pure obedience, or do you think it's a practical matter leading to material or spiritual wellness?
Deiseach's comment about tea below was something I wasn't even aware of, but I can see how the counsel against tea could be seen as a push-back against what people considered vices at the time. I'm not sure drinks like hot chocolate were even a thing in North America at the time.
To give a bit of history, our "Word of Wisdom" as we call these dietary instructions, came about when Joseph's wife Emma was getting tired of cleaning up tobacco spit after meetings, and the tobacco smoke was stifling as well. The result of Joseph Smith praying about it led to Doctrine & Covenants Section 89: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/89?lang=eng
A few things worth noting: Verse 4 in Section 89 states "Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation" Other than that the section doesn't get into detail WHY some things are not good, but promises we'll be better off following its precepts. The dangers of tobacco were not known at the time, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that people just smoked straight tobacco then, mostly out of pipes, instead of manufactured cigarettes and cigars with all the nasty additives they have today. So history's vindicated that at least. While I don't believe there was any outright forbidding of alcohol in the Bible, Daniel 1 starts with Daniel and his friends refusing to drink wine and "the king's meat", and looking better than the other captives brought to Babylon as a result. Then you've got Proverbs 20:1 "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise."
Around the time of Prohibition, the Word of Wisdom went from mere counsel to a requirement. In order to perform ordinances in the temple (a temple recommend is the primary benchmark for activity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) we are asked if we "keep the Word of Wisdom", which means at the very least to specifically stay away from tobacco, alcohol, tea and coffee. A church leader might deny a temple recommend for drug abuse as well.
I can't say that history has vindicated the restriction on coffee and tea specifically, but I believe there's a reason for it, and I'm sticking to it. Therefore I would say it's a matter of obedience first and foremost. From D&C 29:34 34 "Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither any man, nor the children of men; neither Adam, your father, whom I created." In other words, the Lord doesn't just give "good advice" for material wellness. His counsel is and always has been for the welfare of our souls.
The Bible, well Proverbs ch 23, v 31-32, warns against drinking fortified wine, such as port:
"Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like an adder."
Here "moving itself aright" refers to the tendency of "wine legs" to creep up the inside of a cup full of wine, via the Gibbs-Marangoni effect. This is more pronounced and noticeable in fortified wines.
I'm going off vague recollections here, but I think that if alcohol and tobacco were considered the vices of men, tea was considered the vice of women. Excessive consumption of tea was held to be bad for health, affecting the nerves - see LeFanu's story "Green Tea" where that brew is held to be the cause of the victim's nervous system getting out of order:
https://www.oldstyletales.com/single-post/2020/02/22/j-sheridan-le-fanus-green-tea-a-two-minute-summary-and-analysis-of-the-classic-horror-sto
Indeed, some claimed tea-drinking inevitably led to gin and ruination:
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=dgs
"According to various authorities from at least the eighteenth century, women were especially susceptible to the effects of tea. Thus Frost asserted that: “A moderate use of tea of a due strength seems better adapted to the fair sex than men ... naturally being of a more lax and delicate make ... as also because they have less exercise or head-labours”. Women were said to be especially prone to psychological problems enhanced by excessive tea-drinking (Miller 2013, p.433). The Kildare Observer in 1882, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, discussed a report in the Daily News about the effects of tea drinking on women’s habits and constitution:
An Atrabilious [melancholy] writer in the Daily News almost alarms me. He declares that afternoon teas are the curse of the country; that mother and sisters are tea-stricken ... After painting a distressing picture of the feebleness of the average lady at dinner, he goes on to explain that this is to be attributed to the large quantity of tea and cakes and crumpets consumed but a couple of hours before. Nothing, says the writer but the abolition of afternoon tea as an institution in this country will remedy the evil (1 July 1882, p.3).
However, if such reports mock women of the upper and middle classes, the main targets of the ill-effects of tea-drinking were working class and poor women, whose craving for tea was claimed to destroy family life. The Dean of Bangor typically preached that excessive tea-drinking was “acting as a dangerous revolutionary force among us”, because tea-drinking led to the gin bottle “and the physical and nervous weakness, that had its origin in the bad cookery of an ignorant wife, ended in ruin, intemperance, and disease” (Reade 1884, p.127). Poor women were destroyed by their tea habit.
...The upper and middle classes represented themselves as refined and moderate in their tea habits, while the poorer classes were characterised as careless in their preparation of tea, and excessive in its consumption. Whilst tea for the elite classes was associated with civility, moderation and decorum, the discourse around working class tea drinking became one of excess, ill-health, and wifely neglect (Miller 2013, 5 pp.419-21, 425, 428, 431-2). Tea might be taken by all, but the time and manner of its taking were quite distinctive.
...The vocabulary of excess applied to poor and working-class tea habits is impressive. Thomas King Chambers, a London physician, in 1870 claimed that “[m]uch ill-health arises among women of the lower orders in this country from the custom of sluicing themselves with tea” (Miller 2013, p.428; my emphasis). According to John Thomas Arlidge (1872), who initiated the practice of occupational medicine, declining health amongst the working class was due to their habit of tea-drinking, tea being “a form of animal indulgence which is as distinctly sensual, extravagant and pernicious as any beer-swilling or gin drinking” (Miller 2013, p.429). The Dean of Bangor in 1883 asserted that “if a woman does not know how to cook and to make the best of the resources within her reach, she boils the kettle forever, and enfeebles her husband and sons by drenching them with oceans of tea, morning, noon and night” (Miller 2013, p.431; my emphasis). Such habits were said to result in vulnerability to disease, general ill-health, nervousness, psychological disturbance and familial neglect. An inquiry in Ireland of 1894 concluded that the consumption of inferior stewed tea among the poorer classes contributed to a large increase in psychological problems and admissions to asylums (Miller 2013, p.434).
The tea habits of the poorer classes were therefore viewed as unhealthy but also as inimical to family life. Tea was foreign to the traditional rural diet which symbolised stability and provided the men of the house with nourishing food. Furthermore,tea-drinking among women was associated with idleness, and indulgence in the addictive pleasure of tea was seen as a dangerous sign of indiscipline which undermined their duties as wives and mothers (O’Connell 2012, pp.32-3, 36-7, 43)."
Presumably coffee, as the American alternative to tea for all classes, was deemed equally as bad!
In the early 18th century, when tea first became popular in the UK, its consumption by schoolboys and men was frowned on, in some circles, as an effeminate vice compared with the virtues of good old traditional ale!
I once read somewhere, possibly in a book called "Boys Together"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boys-Together-English-Schools-1800-1864/dp/0300032153
of a comical incident at a school called Winchester, in which some boys in the early 1700s were having afternoon tea in the room of one, when a master with firm views against tea rushed in and started laying about with his cane, sending cups and pots flying everywhere, and shouting "William of Wykeham [the school founder] knew nothing, I think, of TEA!!"
So that's where this scene comes from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7_wOrZC48
Here's Jerry Seinfeld's Duke commencement speech, posted on MR. Presumably Tyler likes it, although he posted it without comment. I'm curious what people here think about the content of it: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/05/jerry-seinfeld-duke-commencement-speech.html
I generally liked it, particularly his points about how working hard is valuable even if the result of the work is crap. At least I like the notion of it being true even if it isn't. To what extent is it true? I also agree with what he has to say about the value of humor in life.
But it strikes me he plays a slick trick when he says early on "Don't follow your passion!" and later "Don't worry about money, just try to find a cool job." Semantic quibbles aside, in the context of a commencement speech, isn't saying "Don't worry about money, just try to find a cool (cool to you, whatever that means, as he clarifies) job" the exact same thing as saying "Follow your passion!"?
Does general advice like that even mean anything or have any value?
Seinfeld is presuming Duke 'priviledge' is real ie Duke grads will be offered cool jobs even though they may not be one's passion. I recently saw a ref to a study that attendance at a private selective Uni (I am not from the USA) confers something like a 35% increase in salary over an equally qualified (selective STEM? State school) grad 10 years after grad.
I would be interested in seeing that study. I can think of some methodological problems that they would have to address. For example, based on this list, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/hardest-colleges-to-get-into/20/, there are very few public universities among the most selective in the US. Moreover, at least when it comes to prestige, which I think correlates highly with selectivity, there are no highly prestigious public universities in the entire Northeast. https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2023 Plus, prestigious private institutions have historically enrolled a far smaller pct of poor students than prestigious public institutions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2019/01/21/top-colleges-and-the-pell-student-part-i/?sh=4f9465735b10
It was a paper Tyler Cowen linked to in the Marginal Revolution blog. Maybe a month ago. Probably Raj Chetty (Harvard economist) was one of the authors (has access to annonomised USA tax data). It seemed good quality work. If memory serves me the 35% was an estimate I did in my head.
I was curious as one of my (newly graduated) kids has been applying for jobs in the UK where enrolment at a prestigious Uni is an important signal for employers. In NZ we don't have prestigious Universities so national uniformity in grading/course content difficulty is rather important for employers evaluating grad job applications. ie I suggested she 'reframe' her job applications. I only say "rather important" because in NZ the small job market means that successful internships and personal contacts are most important.
Oh, it must be this one: https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf
It says, "We estimate that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of a highly selective state flagship increases a student’s predicted chance of reaching the top 1% from 10.4% to 15.0%" However, "we find very small impacts of attending an Ivy-Plus on average earnings" and "we find a small and statistically insignificant impact of admission from the waitlist on mean earning ranks and the probability of reaching the top quartile of the income distribution; the causal impacts of Ivy-Plus colleges are concentrated entirely in reaching the upper tail of the distribution, consistent with the predominance of students from such colleges in positions of leadership that motivated this study."
Yes. Thanks for finding it.
Why do most of Britain's leaders come from Eton?
I can't seem to edit. The actual figure of a 35% gain comes from Table 1: 7.7% of grads at Flagship Public College (reach income of the 1% at age 33) is raised to 10.4% if they had instead gone to an Ivy-Plus College.
Also for your consideration. Javier Vinós argues that the sun plays a greater role in climate than CO2...
https://judithcurry.com/2024/04/18/how-we-know-that-the-sun-changes-the-climate-part-i-the-past/#more-31168
The most recent temperature increase seems steeper and larger than the previous temperature increases. Also, eyeballing the graph, I would have said the biggest and steepest increases (apart from the recent ones) were around 11.2-10.8 thousand years ago, followed by the first highlighted bit. Have you seen any statistics showing that the highlighted ones are actually bigger/steeper than the others?
For your consideration. Sabine Hossenfelder on the decline of science...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBT9vFrV6yQ
Could a civil war actually happen in the US? I haven't seen the new movie, but it's got me thinking.
At first glance, it seems pretty unlikely. States no longer have their own armies, and the federal army seems pretty centralized and cohesive -- why would one fraction of the army follow some rogue states or generals?
I guess you could imagine a chaotic scenario like during the Russian revolution -- officers just losing all control of their enlisted men. Though its worth noting that this didn't really start a full-blown civil war until later, since all the factions had to rebuilt armies from scratch.
It seems to me like the worst-case scenario would be a coup or a revolution that the military ends of backing (which is a bit comforting, since at those are much less bloody). But curious to hear y'all's thoughts.
...define "civil war"
My understanding is there's basically no chance of an internal conventional conflict but something like the Irish Troubles is pretty viable and, frankly, a security nightmare. Imagine small, American guerilla and terrorist groups and you've got the start of a complete breakdown. I mean, just imagine Timothy Mcveigh except he inspires copycats because it's not the insanely stable 1990s. Scale that up to a few thousand individuals, about what Al Qaeda had through it's history, and you've got the makings of a security nightmare.
I dunno, out of 300+ million, imagine the most radical 10,000 decide on anti-government violence through terrorism and guerilla methods. Happened in Ireland, happened for 40+ years. And, honestly, I'd bet on the US equivalent being so, so much worse. I like what I've seen of the Irish, they're charming people, but...this is America.
We could have militias fighting in the streets, but that would require an economic depression because it's hard to work a full-time job and fight in the streets. So it depends on what happens to the economy, IMO.
There aren't dividing lines that really make sense for a civil war. Blue America is mostly concentrated in dense urban areas and Red America is spread out across large rural swathes. There is no North vs South dichotomy any more. If Texas seceded, would Austin secede from Texas? The NYC metro area and Albany are deep blue, but the rest of the state leans red. Maybe conflict would break out across county lines, but that would be too messy to coordinate an actual war.
Further, the military isn't designed to operate without local support. Military bases in the US aren't self-contained fortresses but convenient training and deployment points. It's nice to have F-22s, but how do you operate an air base surrounded by hostile territory? Where does your food and fuel and ammo and plane components come from?
The political divide also disfavors outright war. Most rank and file soldiers are solidly in the red camp, with the officer corps getting steadily bluer the closer they get to D.C. and the Pentagon. Progressives are the ones who care the most about politics and tend to be more activist. Yet the conservatives are the ones who own five guns and like to spend time shooting.
I think the most realistic outlook for severe civil unrest in America is something like the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Car bombings and lone snipers are far more probable than Civil War 2.0.
I'd say the worst case scenario is that the military decide they need to put down a coup, but they're divided regarding which side is the coup and which is legitimate.
The main scenario that comes to mind is, what happens if a future President Trump gives the military an order that some of them feel is unconscionable and illegal? Putting aside what the order actually is, and assuming that Trump once again manages to hit the sweet spot with a "scissor statement" that seems obviously right to some and obviously wrong to others.
IIRC enlisted men swear an oath to obey orders of superior officers, including the Commander in Chief, along with an oath to support the Constitution.
Officers, I believe, swear an oath just to the Constitution, something that Trump seems to have little knowledge of or regard for.
If Trump finds amoral toadies who are clever enough to come up with orders that are on the very edge of legality/constitutionality - yeah, scissor orders, - things could conceivably get pretty dark.
I don’t see anything resembling a civil war coming out of it though.
That would be a further slide towards constitutional crisis, but it wouldn't constitute a civil war.
If the US military starts shooting each other in an organized way, with factions that correspond to political divisions of the USA, I'm comfortable calling that a civil war, but I understand if other people aren't.
You know, ten years ago I’d say that’s about as likely as a cruel and ignorant former reality TV star being elected president.
Now I’d have to go farther and say it much less likely than even the reality TV president.
Yes, definitely, but not in the forseeable future.
I am 100% confident that there will not be a civil was in the US unless it changes almost beyond recognisability first, but if it hasn't changed beyond almost beyond recognisability in 200 years I'd be amazed.
States do have their own armies, sort of. National Guard units below a certain level (Brigades, I think) are recruited from a particular state and are under the command of that state's government except when they're called into federal service. About 20 states also have their own organized militias or "state defense forces" separate from the National Guard and exclusively reporting to the state.
Still, the regular Army and federal Army Reserve units outnumber the National Guard by quite a bit and (especially active-duty Army units) are probably a lot more combat capable. Also, in a few incidents during the Civil Rights era when the Federal government and State governments gave contradictory orders to National Guard units, the Federal orders were always the ones that wound up getting obeyed after the units were called into Federal service.
The most likely scenario in a modern civil war probably isn't secession by entire states followed by division-on-division combat, but rather something more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland on a larger scale where terrorist cells and/or private militias are waging a covert war of bombings and assassinations.
The various State National Guards are very dependent on, and integrated with, the regular Army and Air Force for their high-intensity warfighting capability and for the logistical support for any extended campaign. They can do riot control, disaster relief, and probably even counterinsurgency warfare on their own, but there's approximately zero chance that e.g. Texas is going to day "Hey, we have a mechanized infantry division and a tactical fighter wing; if Oklahoma and New Mexico pitch in, we could hold our own against the Feds!"
And it's not just military forces; states have ceded an awful lot of the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to run a modern state, to the Federal government. Almost every air traffic control facility in the country, is run by the FAA. In I think most states, the local tax collectors start with "Hey, give us a copy of your Form 1040, we'll check with the IRS to see if you're fibbing, and that's how we'll know how much you owe us".
So, if anyone's model of a "Civil War" is like the one in 1861, where states formally secede from the Union and form their own functional nation-state because they're already nation-states in miniature, then no, that doesn't work any more. And I think that's the model the recent movie is working from, though I haven't seen it (because I couldn't stop giggling about Texas and California being on the same side).
But, as you and the OP both note, there are other ways for civil wars to happen. Much uglier ones.
>The various State National Guards are very dependent on, and integrated with, the regular Army and Air Force for their high-intensity warfighting capability and for the logistical support for any extended campaign.
Interesting. I'd been going off the possibly-outdated understanding that support functions for sustained warfighting were overrepresented in Guard and Reserve units in order to not have to pay for full-time wartime support units except when we're using them, although even if it is still true, that doesn't mean there aren't dependencies going in both directions.
Perhaps whole branches of the military could rebel? So the Army and the Air Force could fight the Navy and the Marines?
It still doesn't seem likely, no matter what the war is "about" you'd expect to have supporters of either side at every level of every branch, you're not going to get the Army collectively deciding that Biden should be President and the Marines collectively deciding the other way. But perhaps you could imagine a future in which the branches of the military get slowly polarised with the Marines (say) slowly becoming known as the Republican-leaning branch and the Army drifting towards the Democrats.
Great, now my brain is trying to come up with a scenario where the Army and Air Force declare for Biden, the Navy and Marines declare for Biden, and the Space Force and Coast Guard declare for RFK, Jr.
Hi Scott,
Try the (just released) GPT-4o on your bet with Vitor on image model capabilities. When I tested it, it got #2, 4, and 5 (but not 1 and 3), so you may have just won the bet!
If you're using the ChatGPT interface, the image generation model is probably just the older DALL-E 3, even when GPT-4o is selected. It's supposed to roll out gradually.
I ran this test using ImageFX, and it passed: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-315?r=plg9b&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49364729
Which are 1 & 3? Are they the raven with key in mouth and llama with bell on tail? They were the hard-to-get ones with other versions. One thing to keep in mind if that part of the agreement was that the prompt would be delivered as the words Scott used in the original statement of the bet. (I was a able to get both of those images from an earlier GPT, can't remember now whether 3.5 or 4, but I used different words and different order of presenting the different aspects of each image, so those don't count.)
Well, that is an improvement then. I'm in the process of testing it out on images GPT-4 flunked: I giant wave 100 feet high coming straight towards the viewer (4 always insisted on showing dramatic waves from the side). A seahorse made out of seahorses. The selfie someone gets if they hold the camera up to their eye and look down at their body (so equivalent of view you have of your own body). A middle-aged man in a bathing suit (GPT4 could not give me one who was not musclebound and handsome.). A person in a closet with only candle for the light source (4 gave me the candle but always lit the room with an unseen bulb.)
I was thinking about mortal combat for some reason over the last few days. You know, the era when two men would face off hand to hand and everyone knew only one of them was coming out of it. I was thinking about this purely in a practical sense; what would make me a better fighter assuming it was something I wanted to get good at? It isn't, but it became an exercise in managing my emotions. I start to feel the fear that would inevitably come with me facing such a decisive moment in my life. It's precisely the same kind of fear I experience when I imagine myself running across the beach at Normandy in 1944. But it's not the same thing as a man to man fight to the death is it? I am not speaking of some random encounter, (like getting mugged for instance,) but a considered and scheduled battle that will take place with another man and only one of us will walk out. That is a whole different question than the man on the beach, but I feared them equally, which I thought was interesting.
Anyway, with my puzzling about the whole question, I started thinking about what would give me advantage in a fight like that, and I remembered hearing once, that men could teach themselves to retract their testicles (which I consider a major vulnerability in a fight to the death, which is probably why it's been outlawed in any competitive martial art that I know of..) and I suddenly decided I should investigate it. For all I knew it was just an urban legend. So I googled it; "Can men retract their testicles at will?" I really thought I was diving down some obscure Internet rabbit hole. ..
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=can+some+men+intentionally+retract+their+testicles&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
.... but was I surprised! Perhaps it's one of those things that everybody Knew but me, but I found it pretty fascinating: a multitude of stories of men at their most vulnerable. I laughed and I cried.
For a long, long time now, humans have been having those fights with weapons. Our main striking implements are ill-suited to the purpose (it's easy to break a hand or a wrist punching someone, or to break a toe kicking someone), our jaws and skulls have gotten less thick over time, etc.
Yes. I think in retrospect I over emphasized the martial arts backstory because what I was really interested in was the human interest story I stumbled into.
There was this 14th century Italian guy named Fiore dei Liberi who wrote a book about civilian combat, armed and unarmed, for exactly the sort of scenarios you describe. I don't recall it going in to testicle-kicking, though.
In my experience, for either sex, getting hit in the genitalia or gonads can range from a minor inconvenience to a fight-ending injury. It's not something to rely on.
I study Fiore. He definitely advocates for kicking people in the nuts, especially when you've grappled their sword. Other fun bits include kicking your opponent in the side of the knee.
I guess we never got into that side of it. :-)
I am familiar with the side of the knee kick. I did study martial arts a little bit over my life.
Yes, it seems it’s overstated.
Just want to point out that the significance / vulnerability of testicles in combat is overrated. I’ve had this kind of a conversation more than once:
He (never trained in combat): what if I just kick you in the balls?
Me (trained in MMA/etc): why do you think you can just kick me in balls?
It’s a small and an obvious target so it’s both hard to get to in a scramble, and is well-defended :)
Also, differences in pain tolerance plus the fight adrenaline rush make even a successful strike not always as debilitating as one’d imagine.
Yes I totally get your point. My main interest in this was the human interest stories. I stumbled into about being able to elevate your testicles at will. Or having them elevate when you really don't want them to. I just thought it was really interesting, but I'm a sucker for human interest stories.
I've been told that a kick to the knee is more effective. Pain tolerance isn't a factor in structural damage, and knees are easier to get at.
Yes that totally makes sense. I was more interested in the human interest stories told by all the men who apparently can do this on purpose or have it just happen to them spasmodically. It was rather touching to read the stories that men tell about such a vulnerable part of their anatomy.
It suffers from the same fundamental problem: a "one weird trick" to end the fight, typically professed by people who haven't really trained in any realistic fighting art. Same thing: why do you think I'll let you kick my knee ("you" here is a general, not personally directed pronoun)? Now, the knee is more exposed than testicles are, but it's much harder (literally - it's a bone structure), and much more mobile. The hardness goes both ways: attackers' tibia / feet bones have been broken by defenders use of knees for blocking.
There are no shortcuts. If one wants to get good at fighting, one needs to spend the time learning a complex skill. It's tedious, tiring, frustrating, sometimes boring, and above all just hard work. Just like anything worth learning in life.
It was just more effective, not a definitive win. But yes, I know barely enough about fighting to be aware that every tactic has a countertactic, so there's no one weird trick.
Yeah, it's not so hard to see ways that "I've just managed to inflict an *infuriating* amount of pain on this dude I'm in a fight with" could end badly for you....
The funny thing is that the most effective strikes - the ones that knock the opponent out by rattling the brain - don't hurt at all, the lights just go out.
The only strike I can think of that reliably causes truly debilitating pain is that to the liver. The pain is deep and wide, and the body just shuts down, there's no amount of will and grit that can overcome this physiological reaction. Solar plexus is good, too, but it's protected by the abs, so your mileage will vary; the liver is behind the lower ribs that offer surprisingly little protection.
I was wondering about that. Thank you. I suppose that really is the urban legend because you hear so much about it.
I think it's a pretty effective move in a fight between two weak people who don't really know how to fight -- e.g. young boys. And that's the context in which most of us had our last fight.
Maybe. I did not get into a lot of fights when I was young, but I got into a few and the idea of kicking my opponent in the nuts never occurred to me. As others have pointed out it is not so easy to do when you are in a brawl. It's more of a surprise attack tactic. I over emphasized the martial arts musings that got me into this because what I was really interested in was the human interest stories around this subject. It was quite fascinating.
Most of us who had fights when we were young were having fights within an assumed structure of rules. When you insult me in the locker room and I punch you, we're not going to fight to the death, nobody's going to pull a knife or gun out, I'm not going to kick you to death once you're down, etc. Part of that was that kicking in the groin, poking eyes, etc. was "fighting dirty" and would get social pushback from everyone.
This was appropriate for schoolyard fights, just as it's appropriate for combat sports fights to have rules and such. Even MMA isn't a fight to the death. OTOH, you're surely better prepared for the no-holds-barred prison yard fight if you've spent some time with a real combat sport, where the other guy is resisting and you're doing your techniques at something close to full power, like you mean it.
I studied karate for a few years, and we sparred, but even with pads we were always pulling everything. Which is surely still better than no training, but in a fight, I think you're going to instinctively pull your punches/kicks, or you're not going to be prepared for how things work wrt balance and recovery and such when you're really trying to kick the guy hard rather than trying to touch him with your foot.
It’s true, it was not acceptable. The funny thing is, I can’t remember exactly when I learned it, or even if I learned it explicitly.
Yep, this makes sense.
"All the research on transfer shows it basically doesn’t exist. The only way anyone ever gets good at anything is by doing that specific thing."
Pretty much. The only thing I find to be mildly transferable is conditioning - jumping rope, hard rowing, kettlebell lifting do help to keep up during sparring.
Or maybe I'm delusional even about that - I'm always surprised how out-of-breath I am for the first swim of the season, the body/mind doesn't seem to care that I haven't slacked off conditioning during the colder seasons.
I don't know if you have ever seen the television series Deadwood but somewhere in it is a fight scene between two men, with their bare hands, to the death. It's very well done.
I totally agree with you that the only way to good good at anything is by doing it. as I said, I am not really that interested in getting better at fighting. I'm approaching 70 years of age and there doesn't seem to be a lot of point in it for me. But as I said, thinking about a fight to the death is an interesting way to explore a lot of emotions that come up. There was a famous Japanese samurai Warrior who wrote a book in which he laid down his method and strategy. It's called "the book of five rings" and you probably have heard of it already. Near the beginning of the book he stated that a warrior when faced with a choice between life and death must choose death. Rationally that makes perfect sense but it took me a while to get there. If you are concerned with your survival, it will do nothing but cloud your mind and slow you down,
A lot of people in the ESA Racket thread had pretty low opinions of AI art. My experience in the subject is most people expect the AI to do everything for them and are either ignorant of the means to improve the art or not motivated enough to do so. There are actually a multitude of methods to create high quality AI art. I'm going to talk about Stable Diffusion because a) that is what I use, and b) the fact it can be run locally on a home PC has led to development of many tools to improve it. It's entirely possible other AI like DALL-E doesn't have nearly as much user customization.
Skip to the last paragraph if you don't care about any of the technical bits.
1. The Prompt. The text prompt used to generate the image has a profound impact on results. Sometimes this is really stupid. 'Arms crossed' produces horrible disfigured mutants, but 'crossed arms' generates a person in the expected pose correctly 90% of the time. People are actually being hired as prompt consultants because they know about stuff like this. Generally, think of prompting as a struggle between allowing the AI to be creative and exhaustively specifying every little detail. See Scott's post about stained glass for more detail on this, with example images.
2. Workflow Settings. There are different checkpoints that can be used, which are models trained on several thousand images. Think of this as an overall style choice for the image. Some checkpoints create flat 2D images like cartoons, some create photorealistic images, and some create horrifying uncanny valley images where things look doll-like and plasticky. There are different samplers, which affect how quickly and cleanly latent noise is converted into an image. You can also choose how many sampling steps to take. There are image resolution settings. Generally, these are square, 512x512 pixels for SD 1.5 or 1024x1024 for SDXL. You can stretch this to 512x768 or vice versa, but going too far beyond the base resolution or too far away from a square results in tiling. Think of tiling as copy/pasting bits from the square to fill out the rest of the image. This is bad and reduces the image quality.
3. Upscaling. What if you don't want a tiny 1K image, or a square resolution? This is where upscaling comes in. There are different mathematical samplers to carry out upscaling, which mainly balance speed and image quality. The most important part of upscaling is the denoising strength. This measures how much the image will be changed by upscaling. Low values might not change the image enough, so it ends up looking blocky and pixelated. High values might change the image so much it no longer resembles what you were trying to make in the first place. Upscaling can also smooth out the flaws in an image, correcting a 4 finger hand to a 5 finger hand. Then again, too much denoising and you get 8 fingers instead of 4. Like a lot of processes in AI art, there is a balance to maintain here.
4. LoRA. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a tool to refine specific parts of a LLM. Think of these as specific trainers for a certain part of the image. Maybe you really don't like the way trees look, or want to create a specific species of tree that the LLM doesn't understand. You can use a Larix laricina LoRA, and now all of your trees look like larches. LoRAs are trained on a much smaller set of images than the LLM checkpoints, so you have to be careful. This might be 40 images vs 2,000. If some of those 40 images happen to have an orange sky for whatever reason, now you get stuck with an orange sky if you want nice larch trees. This has more to do with the ability of the person curating the image training set for the LoRA than any technical limitations.
5. Inpainting. This is a post-production method to improve images. The user paints a mask over the part of the image they want to change and adds positive/negative prompts. Going with #4 again for a bit, maybe I don't like the orange sky. So I mask the sky, add blue sky as a positive prompt, and orange sky as a negative prompt. The settings from #2 also apply here, as well as denoising strength. Inpainting is also an iterative process. If you want to change a hand from 10 fingers to 5, the AI might not be able to change that much without making the hand look separate from the rest of the image. But if you get a good 7 finger hand, you can use that image as the new base and get to 5 fingers cleanly.
6. Manual Editing. Photoshop is your biggest friend here. Sometimes the AI just refuses to do what you want. This is especially true for removing something from an image. I find it's often much easier to erase a bad bit and recreate it from scratch rather than try to transform it. Keep in mind that AI can also create images using another image as input, rather than text. Even something like a crude 60 second sketch in MS Paint can often produce better results than trying to brute force the LLM to understand what your prompts mean.
7. Special Tools. There are a lot of extensions for Stable Diffusion that flesh out parts of the creation process. OpenPose lets the user manipulate a 2D stick figure, and translate this into different poses for people in your images. There are some issues with perspective and body proportions, but this is still often more useful than trying to describe a pose in words. Regional prompting is a huge advance for images with multiple subjects. Say you want a picture with a blue pickup on the left and a red racecar on the right. Before, you might end up with two blue racecars and a red road, or two racing pickups with red and blue stripes. With the extension, prompts can divide the image into columns and rows, cleanly separating the prompts for different subjects.
There are a lot of different tools to make high quality AI art. I think a lot of people don't understand how to properly use these tools or that such tools even exist. The biggest problem is expecting the AI to do all of the work for you. A lot of bad images I see people post could have been dramatically better if they had bothered to do minimal inpainting or photoshopping. If you think AI art is crap because it looks plastic or fake, you're looking at output from a poorly designed model. Also, AI image generators are weird and alien. They can make really unique and creative art, while simultaneously failing to do things a child would find basic.
I use midjourney extensively and think it’s amazing. I agree with the other commenter that it’s basically a problem with the operator, not the machine. Most people making ai art images simply don’t have any artistic knowledge. And so instead of getting a beautifully composed image, you get that cartoony marvel film look.
I wanted to ask you - I have been meaning to investigate SD but I don’t know where to begin. I’m also less than impressed with the images shown off, compared to what I’ve been able to get with Midjourney. The one thing that does seem compelling to me, though, is the idea of creating a model based on a corpus of a particular artist’s works. For example, reading every drawing by Dürer and then using that model to create drawings of other items. Is this something that SD can easily do?
You certainly can do it, I don't think model training is hard per se. It does require a lot of time. And also a lot of money, for the dedicated GPUs and compute power. I run Stable Diffusion 1.5 on a $2000 PC, which is fairly fast for image generation. I wouldn't be able to train my own model though. Newer Stable Diffusion models will require even more compute than SD 1.5, which is two years old now.
You may want to wait for Stable Diffusion 3 (https://stability.ai/news/stable-diffusion-3). It's already available through the API. I find it significantly improved.
What is ESA? Electronic Security Association? (European Space Agency?)
But I have three objections to AI art...
1. My first objection to AI art is most people don't really understand what makes a compelling image. They might get something "more realistic" than if they drew, painted, or photographed it themselves — but without any aesthetic training on the part of the operator, most of what comes out from AI is pretty schlocky. Of course, I have some pretty cool AI "photographs" but AI doesn't seem to have solved the problem of my hands with the proper number of fingers and joints. ;-)
2 My second objection, is that the training material for AI is mostly copyrighted material. So AI is making money off the work of human artists and photographers without compensating them.
3. My third objection to AI art, is that people are using it to make fakes of their favorite artists' works — and they're contaminating our knowledge base of art. For instance, people are contributing AI-generated Rothko's to the Rothko Facebook appreciation group that I belong to — many are without attribution to their AI origins. The Facebook group "Abandoned Beauties" (decaying buildings) has been heavily contaminated with AI "photographs" of imaginary buildings. Some say, "Oh, but they're pretty!" I'm not looking for imaginary pretty. I'm looking for decaying architecture that I can visit and photograph. And recently I was going to post some Nicolai Astrup paintings on Reddit's /r/museum group and I discovered that two of them had been generated by AI.
Regarding (1). AI doesn't even know about the "rule of thirds," a principle of composition: Imagine dividing image into 9 parts using two horizontal and 2 vertical lines. Main subject should be at the intersection of one horizontal and one vertical line. Obviously not all compelling images comply with that design rule, but many do. And AI's reason for not doing it isn't that it's beyond such simple principles, but that it doesn't fucking know them. An even worse thing AI does is make symmetrical images -- not all the time, but way too often. Half of the space you have to thrill the viewer is thrown away, because it's a backwards duplicate of the other half.
The vast majority of famous paintings don't follow the rule of thirds, and I don't think it should be treated as more than one of many possible tools in your toolbox.
Yeah, I agree. In fact I said something like that. Point isn't that test-to-image AI doesn't follow the rules of thirds slavishly, it's that it seems never to have heard of it. In general, you get the feeling that overall composition is not a dimension it takes into consideration.
,
Maybe I'm less particular, but I find a lot of the AI images are quite stunning. Have you seen the Midjourney showcase? https://www.midjourney.com/showcase
I have more trouble getting it to draw images that don't have nonsensical details.
First of all, I want to make clear that I'm not an art snob. I've been to art museums and galleries maybe 3 times in my whole life. I don't know a thing about which artists are currently much admired. As for the rule of 3rds, I just learned it myself in the course of learning photoshop (but after I learned it, I then looked at a bunch of images I liked, and could see that many followed it, and I saw how placing important parts of the image acc/ to the rule tended to make details pop.). So I really do not walk around with a head full of shoulds when it comes to art. But I seem to be pretty visual -- I'm very picky about fabric and paint colors, and I've spent a lot of time online looking at images of photos and paintings, often with great pleasure. So when I say I'm not thrilled by AI images in general, I really am telling you my natural, innocent reaction to them, not spouting off a bunch of shit I've learned about how art is supposed to look.
OK, so I looked at the Midjourney showcase and those pictures really do not give me the kind of pleasure I get from looking online at 19th century Japanese prints, Hockney paintings, Beardsley, to name some of my favorites. The images are stunning in the sense that it's stunning that a machine could make them, but they are not stunningly attractive to me. Notice how many of them are symmetrical, for instance. The problem with that isn't that it Breaks a Rule, it's that the artist has thrown away its main opportunity to enrich the image. After you've seen the left side, you're done, because the right side is just a mirror image. If there were some asymmetry there would be a sort of dialog between the 2 sides.
I actually liked Dall-e 2 much better than Dall-e3. Even though the images were crappy and blotchy, there were crazy unexpected details that enriched them. I have a whole collection of favorite sublimely grotesque images from Dall-e2!
Emotional Support Animal, the article from a few days ago. Scott used an AI picture of a woman hugging a lizard as the cover.
(1) is a valid criticism of art as a whole. A lot of human artists don't know what makes compelling art, so they produce junk instead. This is especially funny in conjunction with (2). If AI is ripping off human artwork but also it's crap, what does that say? For (3), I definitely understand your view. I think this is mostly an issue of people not having proper filters to exclude AI works from certain domains.
Hypothetically — if I search for "woman hugging a monitor lizard" on Google Images, I'll get a bunch of results. Which are real, though? I may not care if they're real and post one of them on the cover of my annual Monitor Lizard Preservation Society Report. Suddenly that image gets more weight in search engines. Well, it's just a pic of woman hugging monitor lizard, you might say. But someone from the Monitor Lizard Extermination Society sees that the lizard has the wrong number of claws. The MLES can now cast doubt on the MLPS report.
But the real problem is that all this crap will be sucked up into the next generation of AI training sets. Phony images plus all the hallucinatory bullshit data that is being incorporated into AI-generated reports and studies will contaminate our knowledge base. How long before pics of the monitor lizards with the wrong number of claws get included in a Wikipedia article that references monitor lizards? I predict, that in the next few years, we'll discover that a significant number of articles in Wikipedia reference the hallucinatory data and images generated by AI. Heck, I bet there are dodgy articles written by AI up on Wikipedia right now.
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1734772533373939784
Do you take commissions?
It's just a hobby. A lot of the tools I used are made by other hobbyists and released free and open source. I don't know if the licenses even allow profiting off them.
Then might you want to help me as a fun hobby? :) I don’t mean to be a schnorrer and would be happy to pay you, if you’re interested at all!
My objection to AI art isn't that it looks plastic and fake. I don't think the photorealistic images from Dall-e3 look fake or plastic. (I never use other styles). And it also isn't that it sometimes makes deformed appendages and wall-eyed faces and various other flaws. Those aren't hard to fix, and, as you say, there are convenient options for doing that. What I object to is the feeling I get when I look at the images that the pool of images and ideas Dall-e3 draws on is small, limited and commercial.
I actually preferred Dall-e2, because even though most images looked sort of crappy, interesting things seemed to go on between my verbal prompt and the AI -- some stuff that was under poor algorithmic control. So I got images that were flawed and wacko in ways that were often ridiculous, but also richer with unexpected associations. I have a whole collection of crazy but delightful Dall-e2 images, and for some I also have the much tamer and more conventional Dall-e3 images for the same prompt. I can give you links if you like, but people don't usually look at Imgur links I put here so I'm going to hold off unless you actually want to see them.
Another example of Dall-e3's icky commercial quality is that all the people are hot. The women have jugs and big round booties in tight jeans. The men have big muscles. Everyone has conventionally attractive features and clean fluffy shiny-as-hell hair. I once asked for an image of a woman leaned back in her chair, with her feet up on the table. Included a sketch in which she was not a bit sexy, wearing plain ordinary clothes, just a relaxed slob kind of image. What I got back was a woman sitting in a chair with one leg up on table and one still on chair seat, head tilted provocatively, and 10 long red fingernails. Asked for images of middle-aged men in bathing suits. All the images Dall-e3 gave me had enormous muscles with veins like hoses under the skin & 6 packs. Except for gray hair, they looked exactly like 20 year old weight lifters. I tried at least 20 times to get a typical man in his 50's, adding to the prompt things like "out of shape," "no muscle definition" "muffin top over swimsuit elastic," and it made no difference whatever.
Midjourney I have used much less, but I have looked at a lot of the images made with it, and they all look like each other -- like sci-fi and fantasy images I've seen elsewhere. And in fact seen everywhere. There's no quirkiness, no odd touches that give you a random shiver and give you the feeling you're looking at something that's alienly alien or magically magical.
I think a lot of your issues boil down to the lack of model diversity. This is a big reason I'm a fan of Stable Diffusion, you can find a lot of models people trained on their own image sets.
The average AI person is definitely a 20 something professional model. Most AI checkpoints physically can't make ugly or old or fat people. Some can though! Which is kind of odd to be excited about but still.
Has anyone trained their AI on fine art, photorealistic paintings, or some of the really gifted caricaturists or cartoonists? Once read an article about some cartoonist from I think the 50's, how inventive he was at finding ways to present things. There was a list from him of a dozen ways to show something or other -- something like a setting then vs. now, or a character's hopes for an event vs. the reality. I was blown away by his inventiveness. So yeah, Stable Diffusion used on a set of really good, inventive stuff.
It would be more aesthetically pleasing in an alphabetical way if those meetups could be listed as Athens, Brooklyn, Chicago, ..., Grass Valley, Houston. Then you should add meetups in Detroit, Edinburgh, and Fredricksburg to fill the gap.
Could someone kindly steel man, or provide the strongest good faith argument for supporting the actions of Hamas on Oct 7?
For context, in my media consumption I live in the Sam Harris & co information echo chamber where he and his guests are very firmly condemning everything that happened on the Hamas/Gazan/Palestinian side on Oct 7 and beyond. But then I will regularly bump into other Internet bubbles, and claims like Judith Butler's, where the actions of Oct 7 are depicted as a desperate act of rebellion, as a righteous and justified reaction to oppressive settler colonialism.
Because of my own information diet, I always hear this latter position immediately dismissed as supporting islamism/leftism/terrorism/somethingelseism from a bunch of out of touch far left loonies, but I'd actually love to hear strong good faith arguments in favor of it, if they exist, to perhaps see a different perspective on this. E.g. I've lightly read about the horrific conditions of everyday life in Gaza before the events of Oct 7 that led to the armed insurrection. However I've also heard the other side describe them as totally fine and in fact regularly improving and in no way justifying anything that happened in the last six months. At this point I have no idea what's actually going on, there's so much information warfare happening about the basic facts that it feels like you can't get to the ground truth without "picking a side" in this tug of war.
I hadn't heard of Judith Butler's statements about October 7. I've generally found them (I think Butler uses they/them pronouns these days, though some people still use she/her pronouns) to be quite reasonable about a lot of things lately (and less extreme than they were in the 1990s) so I was a bit surprised.
Google found me this discussion of Butler's statement: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-791928
It looks like Butler said the actions of October 7 were a desperate act of rebellion, but didn't seem to say the actions were "righteous and justified". In fact, the specific quote is:
“The Hamas attack in October came from the armed faction of a political party that administers Gaza and I remain willing to describe this attack as a form of armed resistance to colonization and the ongoing siege and dispossession. This is not to glorify their atrocities. And this in no way means that I support Hamas’s actions or that I consider their actions to be justified. Not all forms of ‘resistance’ are justified, and some, like these, truly call for condemnation. The sexual violence committed by Hamas and documented by the UN report is serious and inexcusable.”
This seems to be a clarification they made a few days after their initial statement, so perhaps their initial statement did go overboard, in a way that probably couldn't be properly supported.
In any case, as another commenter said, if one ever can justify invasion, then whatever that justification is might just as well be applied to the Hamas attack as to an Israeli attack on Rafah. (I doubt it could be applied to the Russian attack on Ukraine. So far, Ukrainian resistance to the Russian attack hasn't seemed to lead to any substantial offensive attacks by Ukraine on Russian soil, so the justification of the Ukrainian side of the war wouldn't need a justification for invasion.)
Somehow I get the impression that her objection is largely rooted in the sexual violence, and if that didn't happen, she'd have stuck with the first sentence you quoted. There's a reading where "atrocities" don't include the killing, or at least, the killing of men.
I may be too cynical about her, though.
There is a form of "Motte and Bailey" going on with likes of Butler where they insist on describing the actions of Hamas in morally-charged words ("Resistance", "Liberation", ...) but also insist that this doesn't mean condoning. Resistance has been used to describe - most famously - the French guerilla in Vichy France and Nazi-occupied Paris, as well as the human faction in man-vs-machine war of extermination in fiction.
If someone wants to say "What Hamas is doing **is** fighting Israel, it's not particularly good way of fighting Israel and I don't agree but it's one way of fighting Israel" I can find no reason why they wouldn't say exactly this. English has borrowed from countless languages and there are no shortages of synonyms for the overly romanticized "Resistance": "Struggle", "War", "Battle", "Hostility", "Insurgency", "Militants", "Guerillas", "Asymmetric Warfare".
Butler, however, has specialized in saying nonsense. I don't believe she is actually acting in good faith, she is treating this in the standard social-science-academia way: just one more opportunity to say nothing in massive metric tons of words and get praise for it.
You're under no obligation to "pick a side" if you don't want to, you know.
That's typically my stance as well on topics I don't know anything about, but you often then hear a criticism that goes as follows: "It's got to be nice to not have to choose a side, goes to show your privilege, while so many are suffering. Silence equals violence. You're either with us, or you're complicit" or perhaps a more charitable phrasing of the same concept.
My (internal) retort is that this person has suddenly chosen to really care about moral issue #100, while arbitrarily forgetting, or de prioritizing, or ignoring the remaining 99 ones that are equally as awful or worse, and they're suddenly expecting others to drop everything they're doing and focus on that one as well. It's almost as if moral issues come in waves like fashion.
To me, to say that I don't have a stance on hot button moral issue #100 is akin to the atheist stance of "you choose not to believe in 1000s of gods, I just happened to go one god further". Which is to say that you should feel free to make your identity around that issue, I have zero problem with that, go pluralism, but that doesn't mean that I have to be converted into your cause through shaming.
Or is this a very uncharitable bad faith read of those stances?
> "It's got to be nice to not have to choose a side, goes to show your privilege, while so many are suffering. Silence equals violence. You're either with us, or you're complicit"
The part that gets to me is when these people are themselves ignoring various injustices, or picking sides based on superficial specious reasoning, or redefining the injustices as not actually a problem.
No, I think you are entirely correct. There's a certain amount of entitlement that comes with so much modern activism, an attempt to not persuade but bully people into cooperating. Usually morally and socially, but sometimes physically too. We'd be better off to be less cooperative with that.
Very much agreed! My point of view is that, if I'm neutral on some issue, but one side tries to bully me, _that_ side is now my enemy.
Cheering on October 7th is structurally equivalent to supporting the war of Israel on Gaza, so if there is someone in your information diet or echo chamber who supports the war on Gaza, it's very easy to mechanically transform their argument into support for October 7th.
The general form of the argument goes something like this:
(1) Murder is bad, Murder is the most horrific thing in the Universe [Unsaid: when it happens to $ingroup]
(2) However, not all Murder is created equal, sometimes Murder is justified
(3) Since $outgroup won't stop murdering $ingroup, and since only $ingroup has $reason for what it does and only retaliates when attacked, never attacks, then
(4) Murder of $outgroup is fully justified, and $outgroup's leaders are entirely to blame for anything that can't be justified
The structure of the arguments for October 7th and the arguments for the war on Gaza has this exact same general structure, they both fall down out of it as specific instantiations by choosing particular values for $ingroup and $outgroup and $reason.
The supporter of Israel's war on Gaza chooses Israelis (or, for maximum sympathy points, "Jews") as $ingroup, Palestinians (or, for maximum racism points, "Arabs") for $outgroup, and the $reason being that Israel is only defending itself and never ever killing Arabs in vain.
The supporter of Hamas massacres on October 7th chooses reverse polarities for $ingroup and $outgroup, and the $reason being that Palestine is only liberating itself from Colonization and never ever killing Jews/Israelis in vain.
The common point in the general structure, the fundamental rhetorical trick, is that it conditions a moral question on a historical/political question. The position derisively known as "Both Side-ism" is trying to do the opposite, it's usually trying to start the discourse by agreeing on the common hinge point that is "Murder of innocents is bad". But the form of the argument above is trying to do exactly the opposite of this, it invents a $label for those innocents whose political and historical beliefs the $ingroup doesn't like, and then says that the $label implies that those innocents aren't innocents. For the Pro-October-7th-Massacare side, that $label is "Zionist", "Colonizer", or "Settler". For Pro-Gaza-Genocide, that $label is usually "Terrorist", "Antisemite", or "Hamas". This $label is applied liberally and freely, so even the 7-year-old of the distant cousin of the wife of a brother of a Hamas member is a "Terrorist" in deed and consequences if not in explicit name for the Pro-Genocide camp, and even a pre-weaning Israeli baby is a "Settler" in deed and in consequences if not in explicit name for the Pro-Massacre camp.
If you want to read a good analysis of the Pro-Hamas-yet-non-Islamist mentality, read this recent Haaretz story [1][2] about the writer's argument with someone from this camp on Reddit. Here's a relevant quote:
>>>> Here's a tough one to digest for ppl raised under intense liberal propaganda [...] Sometimes justice is not peaceful. Turning Palestine back into Palestine & putting it back under the rule of Palestinians is what is just. If people living in homes stolen from Palestinians, growing gardens out of soil watered with the blood of thousands of Palestinians, refuse to return the land to its rightful people, then their removal from the land is also just. What was it Malcolm X said; if you stab me in my back, pulling the knife out a few inches isn't progress or justice. We can begin to discuss progress & justice when the knife has been fully removed
People from this camp use "Liberal" as a derogatory label to refer to anyone who advocates fpr the principles of Sanctity of Life above anything else, and refer back to the violent history of liberation movements - the Haaretz reporter's interlocuter supports the Haitian massacres against the French colonists - as evidence that it's a fundamentally delusional view, for extra strawman points they also usually identify those "Liberals" with American Liberals and all their other positions on countless other issues (i.e. if you argue for the Sanctity of Life of Israelis and have no other views on how should American Blacks conduct themselves in American society, you will usually be grouped with the subset of American Liberals who think that Blacks should not rock the American boat culturally and take gradual non-radical non-violent steps to combat racism, even if you never mentioned America or Blacks or Racism in your defense).
As speculation, my personal assessment of the kind of people who are drawn into this position is that - for lack of better words - they believe in the "Supernaturalness of Evil". This is a clumsy negation of the "Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt. "Banality" means something boring and everyday, every undercover atheist knows the Banality of Evil, it's the force that makes the closest people to them turn into mindless piranha fish whenever they smell a whiff of someone who doesn't believe in flimsy physically-impossible stories. Every vegetarian and vegan also knows the Banality of Evil by heart. The point being that it doesn't take much to be evil, the average person lives amidst 20 or 30 or 50 moral question, but only has brain power and moral courage to settle at most only 5 or 7, the rest is simply (non-consciously) ignored, in effect adopting whatever position the majority around that person has chosen to adopt.
In contrast, the two camps I described above tends to implicitly view Evil as something special, **if** only they were born in Gaza in 2010 they wouldn't be a Hamas-supporting 14 years old today, **if** only they were born in a West Bank settlement in 2006 they wouldn't be a hilltop youth burning Palestinians alive or an army reservist filming his war crimes on TikTok for all the world to see, no, it takes special things to be Evil, it's not simply an inertial phenomena that is the default fate for anyone who doesn't want to spend his life thinking about moral questions (that is to say, the majority of people).
There are auxiliary reasons here and there. Some on the Pro-Hamas camp usually strongly thinks in "soil and blood" terms: "indigenous" vs "settler", "colonization" vs "liberation", etc.... This is distinct but often complementary to the way of thinking outlined above. Others are Islamists, who think primarily in Islamic terms: "Shehada" (martyrdom), Ummah (Nation), Muslims can't commit war crimes because the prophet ordered them not to 1400 years ago, all evidence of war crime is either fabrications by Zionists or a few bad apple here and there, etc....
[1] Opinion | Not Antisemites, nor anti-Zionists: A More Precise Term for Protesters Who Want Israel Gone: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/anti-zionists-a-more-precise-term-for-pro-palestinian-protesters-who-want-israel-gone/0000018f-63b5-d284-adaf-77fda2890000
[2] https://archive.ph/BqnJy
I strongly disagree with your argument. You're missing an important distinction, which is that of *terminal* violence vs *instrumental* violence, if you will. I cannot possibly support Hamas' actions, not because they're the outgroup or not oppressed enough for my taste or anything like that, but because their actions achieved *nothing*, except the massacre of civilians. There is no plausible way in which Oct 7 advances the cause of Palestine (any military or political objective), unless the actual, terminal goal is to kill as many Jews as possible.
> but because their actions achieved nothing, except the massacre of civilians. There is no plausible way in which Oct 7 advances the cause of Palestine
I disagree. Look at world public opinion regarding Israel, and that's after sacrificing less than 40,000 Gazans, only 1/4 to 1/3 of which are Hamas. Imagine what sacrificing another 40,000 Gazans might accomplish! Forget Scott's writing, this is literally Moloch, except that the Israelis are also tossing Gazans into the fire.
I strongly suspect that if you plot public opinion re Israel/Gaza over time, against the Palestinian death toll over time, the correlation will not be large. The things that matter are, A: Israel is fighting a war against Palestine, and B: It's not surgically precise, and C: it's dragging on and everybody wants it to stop but Hamas cleary can't be expected to stop it so Boo Israel for not stioopping it.
Public opinion is not linear with body count, and "if 40,000 dead Palestinians moved the PR needle to 40% Boo Israel so 80,000 will get us to 80%!" is going to lead you astray.
The idea that world public opinion will lead to anything that the non-fanatical Palestinian population would consider a victory, will also lead you astray. And possibly Hamas, though I think they're working to a different concept of victory than you are.
It is possible that Israel can be pressured into suspending this operation before removing Hamas from Gaza, and it's possible that Hamas would consider "we killed a bunch of Jews and we're still standing!" to be a victory. That still leaves 20,000+ Palestinian civilians dead, Gaza in ruins, the blockade tighter than before, and the IDF extremely trigger-happy along the border and in the skies. Where is the victory for the people of Gaza in that?
I don't really think it's linear, but I think if the excess body count were twice as much, we'd see more pressure, and it were half as much, we'd see less. To the extent I have a mental model, it's something like "every day that deaths are over some threshold, foreign activism increases, foreign resistance to that activism weakens, and Israel's ties to its allies weaken".
I don't think the non-fanatical Palestinian (or Israeli) population is going to get any result they'd (or I'd) like. I don't think the interests of Hamas are aligned with those of the people of Gaza, or Palestinians in general. Since Hamas failed in their goal to start another pan-Arab war against Israel, my guess is that their fallback goal is to isolate Israel the way South Africa was, and North Korea is (except for China). I don't know how far they can take that, but that's what I see as their best realistic outcome. It creates an opportunity that a future campaign can exploit.
But maybe it works out somehow. Maybe Israel gets isolated, they kick Netanyahu out, the new government uses this as a justification to remove settlements and crack down on the anti-Amalekite faction, sensible foreign countries resume their connections to Israel, and life picks up in a way that's better for West Bank Palestinians and Israeli Palestinians. But like you say, the damage to Gaza and Gazans will still be there.
This did cross my mind! It's very perverse and I shudder to even talk about it. Arguably Iran is tossing *even more* Gazans into the fire.
Obviously, we shouldn't accept this as a legitimate "military goal" when assessing the proportionality of an action.
If actual "self-defense" is not possible—if a party can see no course of action which will put an end to oppression—then the moral decision is then between "accept your fate" and "express your rage, however ineffectually". This is probably closer to the actual emotional choice Hamas made—not some "instrumental" calculation, but an expression of pure destructive anger.
It's easy to condemn: the liberal "principle of Sanctity of Life" overrides the "liberation politics" again. That anger does not read to someone sitting at a desk far away as a valid reason to kill is the same point (3) again—"$other_group is just mindlessly massacring"!
I think it's fairly close to the truth of human nature that anger arises to defend people against injustice and abuse, and if you are prevented from expressing your anger—by other's power, or by talking yourself out of it on the basis of any principle, including "it won't accomplish anything" (because you don't have power!), the state of injustice becomes a permanent hierarchy. We look back on slave revolts with approval, seeing them as rightly resisting an unjust subjugation. Well, Hamas sees Palestine the same way, and the right way to disabuse them of that notion would have been to treat Palestine justly beforehand.
Not to say what Hamas did wasn't stupid, and probably based on a bad model of the state of things. But the justness of violence cannot merely come down to whether it accomplishes anything—some consideration must be made of the emotion and reality which lead to the violence. If a *person* lashed out murderously, we would give them a fair trial and consider the aggravating circumstances, at least when considering the sentence if not the verdict. To take any expression of anger as grounds for unbounded retaliation, on the grounds that it's pure supernatural evil, irrational murderous rage, is a reversion to justice as practiced in the Bronze Age.
Look, I'm willing to make relatively tiny concessions in that direction. But at the very least, the *target* of the ineffectual rage would need to be responsible somehow. Slaughtering civilians is collective punishment, a war crime. Israel's actions after 10/7 are also in that territory, even if we accepted their casus belli as legitimate. I for one am glad that the west finally started effectively pressuring Israel regarding the Rafah offensive.
Different example on the same topic. I'm very, very against attacking some random western cargo ship in the Suez canal to express your rage against the injustices in Gaza. Apparently, traffic in the Suez canal is down by almost half over the last 6 months. The security situation down there has really deteriorated, and this hurts everyone.
Similar phenomenon on a different issue: I'm against climate protestors gluing themselves to highways. This can be justified in the exact same way! Impotent rage, the world is ending, there's nothing we can do directly, so let's just do some random damage *somewhere*. As a sibling comment brought up, Moloch rears its ugly head; if we tolerate this, why wouldn't every single social movement start claiming that their particular issue is an existential one, and thus norms about where and how to protest can't possibly apply to them?
Yeah, I mean, I'm with you re ineffectual rage. Not saying it's good or just; it's a reversion to a pre-justice world where death and unfairness are the norm. Bad things still have to bad.
Roughly what keeps anger in check is legitimate institutions, and leaders listening to people, and everyone treating each other with grace such that this is the norm (in sentencing, anyway) Roughly what makes one's anger *work* is to narrowly target it at the source of the problem, and not giving oneself a greenlight to do harm just to teach others or get attention, and not asking more of others than you ask of yourself. All the examples you cite do indeed fail to express anger legitimately, and Hamas did too. My position is that Israel's retribution is just more of the same bronze-age justice. The "terminal violence" argument is more of the same—another way to give Israel permission to overreach.
It seems like this goes both ways. Hamas murders a bunch of Israelis as an expression of rage, then Israel murders a bunch of Gazans as an expression of rage. It's hard to see why one of these is more wrong than the other.
I get why people have big concerns about Israel being too willing to kill Gazan civilians in order to kill Hamas members and protect their own soldiers. I get why people worry that Israel's actions are partly intended to convince as many Palestinians as possible to go somewhere else. But I don't get why anyone goes from there to supporting Hamas, rather than just saying "yes, Hamas is terrible but your response is too brutal to be justified by the threat they pose."
Well, this is exactly what I mean by point (3): only $group has an actual reason to kill, the $other_group is just mindlessly massacring. Therefore the murder that $group does is morally justified or at least entirely blamable on $other_group, while the murder that $other_group does is indefensible.
Why would the instrumentality of violence or the lack thereof matter? If someone were killed, would it change your view of the killer if you knew that he killed for pleasure rather than for the money in the victim's pockets?
It would certainly change my view if they killed in self-defense rather than for pleasure. I don't mean that as a metaphor of any kind, just a simple example that contradicts your claim.
Sure thing, Self Defense is one of the very few $Reason for which Murder is actually justifiable. But Self Defense also has conditions that have to apply before courts can rule that it happened, one of the condition is a credible case of imminent destruction/death by the party claiming self defense.
Assuming Israel hadn't began its war on Gaza on October 10-13th, would Israel have been destroyed or in the process of being destroyed right now? If no, then Self Defense doesn't apply, and Self Defense is the only valid $Reason (or the only one I can think of) that actually justified murder.
Self defense can apply even if you're not under threat of complete destruction.
> The point being that it doesn't take much to be evil, the average person lives amidst 20 or 30 or 50 moral question, but only has brain power and moral courage to settle at most only 5 or 7, the rest is simply (non-consciously) ignored, in effect adopting whatever position the majority around that person has chosen to adopt.
Ouch. That's ... something I don't want to be true, in the way I've come to recognize as meaning that it probably is true.
It's something that comes more naturally to you once you adopt radically different moralities from the people you love, like close friends and family. You say killing animals is barbaric and wrong, they say it's an extremely normal thing to do that God gave an explicit green light for ("are you more merciful than Allah, anon?").
You have but 3 choices: (1) The people you love are evil (2) The people you love are stupid (3) Some types of evil are banal and don't require any special maliciousness or stupidity, and - by the sheer statistics of most people falling into those types of evil when they're popular social beliefs - the people you love are among the fallen.
This is an alien way of thinking to people on both camps I described above, where "Most Gazans support Hamas" or "Most Israelis serve in the IDF and support the Gaza war" are gotchas that - they think - should end the discussion to their favor. To someone who has accepted long ago that Most People Are Evil, those 2 observations are not ground-shaking surprises, just two more slaps to the face. To people who think that Evil Is Special, those 2 observations are hard to explain by anything except "$outgroup is supernaturally evil and must be exterminated".
If Vegetarians thought like those 2 camps, the maximum-security prisons and execution chambers would fill with people who killed their parents, siblings, and husbands and wives for the crime of repeated mass murder of innocent beings. But controversial and persecuted ideologies like Vegetarianism and Atheism teaches you that "Fiat justitia ruat caelum"[1] is perhaps good if you want a sick thing to say in Latin and feel massively cool, not much else. If Justitia wants to destroy the world, then Lady Justitia is kindly requested to take a seat and shut up, no disrespect intended, I personally like spicy crazy ladies too.
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_justitia_ruat_caelum
> It's something that comes more naturally to you once you adopt radically different moralities from the people you love, like close friends and family.
I'm there, but from a different direction, and this will probably explain a lot about me, to you. I didn't choose to have a radically different morality, it was thrust upon me. And now I'm cut off, and can't go back, and would be unwilling to go back, but it **wasn't an active choice of mine** . It would almost certainly have been better for me if I had taken more of a stand first, but the topic was way down on that list of 50 topics, and there seemed like more important battles to fight. But at least I'd taken the position much earlier, in discussions with friends in forums like this, so it wasn't as much of a shock to my system.
> "Fiat justitia ruat caelum"
That's one of my PTSD's favorite aphorisms. It's also a big fan of this lady:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alrVx6K9C4k
> We do pray for mercy.
There's a quote from somewhere I don't know:
"Justice is when we get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get what we deserve. Grace is when we get what we do not deserve."
I consistently find you to provide among the most balanced and insightful commenters on this topic. You should consider starting a blog
Very much agreed (except for the blog, for the reasons LearnsHebrewHatesIP explained below)!
One beautiful comment that feels undeserved because all too often I have let myself get angry, and I posted toxoplasma things about this.
Thanks Turtle, starting a blog feels too much of a hassle and a new thing that requires being eased into, and when (inevitably) it's read by the barely 5 people or so I will feel like a clown and/or that I'm wasting my breath. Posting on ACX is lesser friction and more people reading, abandoning an account also feels easier, abandoning a blog feels like a huge deal. The plan is to abandon that account when the war ends, which is not that easy to do to an entire blog, I will just feel guilty about people who wanted to read more.
Would also agree. Have enjoyed reading your comments.
> One beautiful comment that feels undeserved because all too often I have let myself get angry, and I posted toxoplasma things about this.
I've noticed you going back and forth, and I've assumed that it's because of (understandable) anger, and it's nice to see periodic confirmations from you that this is what's going on. Personally, I don't mind too much, although it does make it difficult to know how to interact with you at those times. (I'm familiar with overwhelming rage, and have myself been guilty of occasionally posting things that would have gotten me banned if anyone had read it in the correct tone and wanted to report it.)
But there's at least one good commenter here who thinks you're a troll because of the differing opinions you express. I don't have a solution to offer, but I thought I should call that to your attention.
>One beautiful comment that feels undeserved because all too often I have let myself get angry, and I posted toxoplasma things about this.
Loath to join a cuddle-pile, but the fact that you managed to get so angry about the subject makes your even-handedness all the more commendable. It's easy to be calm when you have no horse in the race.
Starting a blog is probably not worth your time, but I think a single, easy to link, post/essay summing up your views and evolution on this subject would be a great service to people. As someone who has people all over the spectrum on this conflict, it would be great to have something to point to that's more contained than "a series of scattered comments in the open thread of a blog about psychiatry made by a bunch of different but easily linked accounts".
There’s so much toxicity about this particular conflict on both sides that it’s hard not to feel angry and frustrated sometimes. Just continue telling your truth and know that there’s people who appreciate you for it
I suspect someone uses PHP. I don't, but the internet says that's the language that uses dollar signs to indicate variable names.
The dollar signs actually date back to Perl. They might be earlier, I suspect their earliest uses were in mid to late 1970s in shell languages that are the ancestor of Bash, where they were likely just crutches to ease parsing (parsing becomes massively easier if all variables start with the exact same letter).
Perl had a principled reason for why you should prefix variables with '$': Grammatical agreement. The designer of Perl is a natural language linguist, he was inspired by how human languages put prefixes and suffixes to words in order to indicate additional context info (for example, in Hebrew as well as Arabic, verbs, adjectives, and plural nouns are modified by gender and number. "Play" is different when it's a boy playing, vs. a girl playing, vs. a group of boys playing, vs. a group of girls playing. Arabic even distinguishes **Pairs** as separate from both singular and plural senses).
So in Perl, you say $X if you want to mention X in a "Scalar context", think of $ as the "S" in Scalar. You say @X if you want to mention X in a "Array context", think of @ as the "A" in Array. You say %X if you want to mention X a "Hash context", think of the 2 circles in the % percent as a KV pair in a Hash. There is also the & sigil to denote a "Closure context" but I'm not very familiar with its usage in Perl 5. Perl's successor, Perl 6 or Raku, takes those notions and extend them extremely uniformly to very far places.
From Perl, the $ sign propagated into TCL and PHP. In TCL they once again served an extremely important purpose: Dereference. Everything in TCL is a string, if you write the bare word Cat, that's the string "Cat" to a TCL parser, it's okay that you didn't write quotes, it got you. So variables can't just be Foo, that would be the literal string Foo. Variables has to be $Foo, the $ is "Dereferencing" the content of the variable. There is rhyme and reason behind this, TCL is an extraordinarily beautiful language if you take the time to understand it.
PHP, however, is an unmitigated and dumb disaster. I can find no good reason why its designer chose to use what Perl and TCL has extremely valid reasons to use. It's just one dumpster fire of a language overall.
So in other words... Larry Wall copied the idea of a signifier prefix from natural languages into Perl.. and then (via $ingroup etc.) you copied the idea of a signfier prefix from Perl back into natural language..?
Can't help finding that terribly neat!
(But - you're entirely wrong about PHP.. https://youtu.be/V5jHHYFqt9o )
Hehehe, yeah.. that's a very... **accurate** depiction of how dev teams choose programming languages: they dance to badly-rhyming rap and whatever faction is most sick wins and gets to impose their programming language on the rest of the team.
No wait, what happens in reality is almost worse.
-----
For me, shitting on PHP is justified because it's a badly designed standard-less language that offers no deep ideas and nothing new to the Programming Languages Design world. It's literally just an overgrown templating language (Personal Home Page). Python and Ruby offers beautiful everything-is-an-object paradigm, Java is ugly and bland but it stumbled into the idea of an Open Source VM implementation and VM standard that made its VM a hotbed of innovation and gave us Groovy and Scala and Kotlin. TCL and Perl both has utter gems hidden deep inside their worldviews and ways of thinking. What is PHP doing? Why it exists other than "Perl is too hard"? I'm prepared to be wrong on this but I haven't seen till now someone who argues convincingly that PHP is an important addition to the Programming Languages hall.
The only defenses I have heard is "Elegance is not that important, PHP brought more billions [via FB and WordPress] into the global economy than possibly any single programming language with the exception of C [Linux and Windows] and C++ [Games and High-Frequency Trading]", which is convincing enough for people who don't enjoy Programming Languages and their design and implementation, unfortunately that's not me, I hate it when the lang I'm using is not teaching me something new about programming and programming languages.
PHP as a language is worthless. The success of PHP is due to its design as an Apache mod and thus the triviality of setting it up and running scri.in the age of CGI, that was revolutionary.
It's an old geek practice, from the dark days before Python, when Perl was all that stood between us and shell scripts.
I also have no experience in Perl or TCL. It just caught me as very clear, even in English, the specific meaning of things like $ingroup (which coincidentally almost looks like Singroup, except that nothing is ever a coincidence) which clearly means the same thing everywhere it is used.
I remember my BASIC programming, where a variable that ends with $ is a string, but you still needed quotes to assign a string. If you didn't, you were assigning a number value to a string variable, which produced a type mismatch error, since an undefined variable defaulted to 0 ( or a zero-length string).
Interesting summary. I think the thing the intellectual debate often misses is the emotional root that perpetuates cycles of violence. The outgroup/ingroup dynamics are mutually reinforced by deaths on each side. The lines are drawn through violence, which is why the conflict becomes life-or-death for the individuals on each side.
This is amazing, thank you so much for that perspective and analysis.
Gaza had been in a perpetual state of low-level humanitarian crisis for many years, owing to the Israeli blockade (Consider the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, where a humanitarian aid ship was sunk by Israel).
Ineffectual rocket attacks were not changing this and Israel under Netanyahu has demonstrated zero willingness to engage in any sort of good faith peace negotiations in the absence of external pressure. So Hamas believed a dramatic military response was required to shake up Israeli politics and force it to negotiate and lift said blockade.
It misread things badly and instead gave the Israeli right an excuse for ethnic cleansing.
I have to wonder what they thought Israel would do about their attack. I cannot imagine any invaded country's response would be any different under similar circumstances.
Likud's justification for its harsh policies towards Palestinians, dating back to the West Bank wall, was that they could be implemented with no physical danger to the Israeli people and that Palestinian opinion was fundamentally irrelevant.
And indeed, the attack's reverberations has led to a lot of people very angry at Netanyahu, note Scott's surprise that he'd survive the year.
October 7th did manage to falsify that; the problem was that instead of a resurgence of some kind of moderate Zionism and a popular repudiation of Likud, it led to Israeli society (which pre-war had been very divided around constitutional issues) uniting around this war and agreeing to deal with Netanyahu later.
I'm assuming you're asking for MORAL justifications, not strategic ones?
Background: I think life in Gaza WAS pretty bad even before the ongoing unpleasantness, and those who say it wasn't conflate it with the West Bank (where things are better) or worse, with "Arab citizens of Israel" (who are basically fine). Sure, some of that could be blamed on Hamas itself instead of Israel, but with Israel explicitly supporting Hamas against its political rivals for control over Gaza (I don't think this is even disputed), blaming Israel for their poor conditions is reasonable, as is characterizing it as oppressing them pretty brutally.
If you accept this premise, what more do you want? Justifications for the rape and pillage? That kind of thing happens in every war, and I know of no one who has been able to effectively stop his men doing that kind of thing, so I consider "Gaza waging war against Israel without anything like that occurring" a fabricated option.
Also, Hamas IS an Islamist organization, but that's not actually all that relevant to their stance against Israel.
>Israel explicitly supporting Hamas against its political rivals for control over Gaza
Accepting for the sake of argument that this is an accurate description of the situation, then surely everyone saying this should be delighted that Israel is finally making up for past mistakes by clearing out Hamas. After all, if it's bad for Israel to support Hamas in the past, then it's bad for Hamas to stay in power today -- can't have it both ways.
>If you accept this premise, what more do you want? Justifications for the rape and pillage? That kind of thing happens in every war
I don't recall mass rape by American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. For that matter, the Israelis have managed to refrain from mass rape in any of the wars they've been involved in, to the extent that some leftists were elevating that as yet another example of Israeli racism.
You're right that those who criticize Israel for supporting Hamas can't consistently say it's good for Hamas to remain in power. The difference is a question of how many Palestinians one is willing to kill to achieve the goal of clearing them out: I estimate Israel's threshold to be at least two orders of magnitude higher than that of those now criticizing it.
There WAS rape and pillage in Iraq. If you don't recall it, that wouldn't be surprising. If you DO, but argue that it isn't MASS rape, that discussion doesn't interest me.
It should interest you, because if you get hundreds of thousands of young men in one place some of them will do bad things. That applies to every army that has ever existed in history. If you want to say that _all_ of those armies are bad if even one single soldier did something bad, that's fine, but it's also not clear where that takes us given that armies and wars aren't going away.
> "if you get hundreds of thousands of young men in one place some of them will do bad things. That applies to every army that has ever existed in history."
>"That kind of thing happens in every war, and I know of no one who has been able to effectively stop his men doing that kind of thing"
I don't see any disagreement.
You're missing my point. I'm criticizing the point of view which assigns to all armies the exact same moral equivalence because you can always find at least one person in any army that does something bad.
If we're going to go down this road, then we shouldn't even be arguing about who's morally in the right because everyone is morally the same. And in _that_ case, there's no grounds to complain about anything Israel does in Gaza (or vice versa), so we can all pack up and talk about sports or something instead and let them thrash it out.
I think a lot of it relies on the "spider web" theory. This is something that is almost certainly wrong in every respect, is easily falsified in many of its main particulars, but that many Palestinians and their allies believe.
The theory is that if Israelis' lives are made sufficiently unpleasant by "resistance" attacks directed at random civilians, they will pack up *en masse* and leave for Europe or the US. In support of this, activists cite the actions of the FLN in Algeria, which succeeded in getting the French (including the *pieds-noirs* who had been born there, often to families who had been there for several generations) to leave. The name comes from the idea that the Israeli presence in the Land is fragile and can be easily swept away like a spider's web.
Of course, Israelis are not the same as pieds-noirs (even though some of them are the same people!). As well as important differences in their emotional attitude to where they live, the Palestinian and activist view of Israeli demographics is very different from reality.
They hugely underestimate the Jewish population of Israel- the average Palestinian estimates that there are fewer than a million Israeli Jews- which makes it seem more similar to situations like Algeria or Rhodesia where an oppressive minority ruled over the native population until they were induced to leave by violence. They also overestimate the percentage of Israelis who were born elsewhere and/or have dual citizenship- you often hear the claim that most Israelis are dual nationals, when in fact the number is IIRC under 10%, and many of those don't live in Israel!
If the demographic (and other) assumptions that the spider web theory is based on were true, then Hamas' actions would fit more into the typical framework of anti-colonial violence that activists are trying to shoehorn it into.
Yes. I kind of went over this in the last open thread. The Algerian independence movement was very influential on the formation of anti-Israel groups like the PLO or Hamas. Their motto was "a suitcase or a coffin." The idea was that if they terrorized and bloodied the French settlers enough, they would pack up and head home for France. And it was a very effective strategy. But there is no France or any other parent nation for the Israelis. Israel is their home, and committing atrocities against Israel won't make them pack up and leave. It just causes Israel to retaliate and kill more Palestinians.
Yeah, making the conflict into a fight to the death just means the stronger side is sooner or later going to ignore domestic/international public opinion and see to it that it's the other side that does the dying.
So this is my current hobby horse that is just driving me up a wall and i have posted about a couple places: How crazy medieval studies and academia has gotten on race.
So I have encountered the odd mention on this in the media or reading abstracts/books (discussions of say the importance of the “black experience” in medieval England or whatever). Yet, mostly I haven’t noticed it too much, as I am not a professional academic and often read books from a decade or more ago.
But recently I attended an hour-long talk+Q&A a medieval studies professor was giving about his book. Great talk overall…but about ~60% of the way through his talk, he just sort of slips in 5 minutes of CRT/”woke” nonsense to the effect that:
"there is this misconception that (minorities) wouldn't do well in medieval Europe. Medieval people were surely a lot less racist. It was not like today where racism is everywhere and a lot of whites think blacks are dumber/less capable than whites".
Not a direct quote but close.
Ok…that is weird and kind of shocking, why would he say that nonsense? He sort of goes on to defend what he clearly thinks is a controversial take by pointing out:
a) Merchants were used to people from many different places
b) Diplomats from foreign lands were well often well received (when not say conned or detained).
c) Parts of Europe just saw foreigners and people of distant locations as slaves not as racially beneath them (How is this an argument against it being racist?)?
He went on to minimize and downplay the slavery and says it was nothing like later American slavery (without really supporting/defending that claim). Surely it was different, just as all things that are different are different in their particulars. But it is not clear to me why medieval slavery gets a moral pass (which is clearly what he was doing).
He then goes so far as to also say the Middle Easterners also weren't racist and had good feelings towards Africans (not my general understanding at all as a *general statement*).
But then we get to I think the real source of these weird claims. He argues briefly that "racism" really was only invented in the 1600s by Europeans looking to justify the Atlantic slave trade. States it with a sort of axiomatic truth, where it seems like this is a lodestone, and most of his comments are working backwards form this belief.
My uncharitable reaction when hearing this is that apparently, he has never read any classical literature, or Chinese histories, or talked to actual humans.
The especially weird thing, is a huge amount of the rest of his presentation was about how much more fractured and local/provincial the medieval world was. That most places the national language was not at all standardized, and most villages people all knew each other and outsiders were greeted with suspicion and say "French" people didn't necessary like the "French" people one county away because they were different and might be part of a different polity and had previously fought against each other in wars etc. That you really needed to stick to your "kind of people, and the guild structures" and that society was much more communal and less individualistic and people fit into a role and a known identity.
Yes, I am sure that is an environment where they would just love strange people...
He also defended said some dumb shit about how “Medieval people wouldn't make all these assumptions or prejudgments of people based on race, unlike today”, which ummm yeah....
I was encouraged that even among the (assuredly very lefty) college students, there was some pushback during Q&A some people and he retreated a fair bit. Though I would say most of them just ate it up and some defended his points.
I am also very curious about this defense both their, and that I have seen online as I have posted on this a couple times this week.
So on just the superficial surface you want to say what I said above. ‘WTF dude, people throughout many historical documents are hugely racist/tribalists about other people’s groups, especially groups that are arbitrarily different from them. Often treating the most different groups they are in contact with a subhuman’.
One of his main defenses/theories seemed to be:
"well of course the people had beliefs about different places. For instance, they had this whole theory of different parts of the world produced different kinds of people suited to them (I assume referencing the medieval/muslim (but originally Greek theory of climes)), and so people in different places had different strengths and weaknesses"
Isn't this exactly what racism and prejudging are? There seemed to be a constant description of what is clearly racism…but then claiming this wasn’t in fact *real* racism as practiced by whites/Europeans in the modern times, but instead just some random scattered cultural practices or something.
He also generally just hugely backtracked to a position of "sure they would have been a ton more racists than we are today but that wouldn't be RACISM it would be something else (not clear what it would have been)". He also sort of lumped in the later muslim world of the Ottoman’s into real racism, but seemed to want to defend to pre Ottoman muslims from that charge.
I said something to the effect of "given how nasty even interstate or say sports based rivalries can get I would assume tribalism and ‘othering of others’ is a pretty standard human thought process and that as such it likely existed in the medieval world too and with their limited horizons and contacts they would be intensely tribal and maybe even "racist" against people with the same color skin from 100 miles away, much less people from 1000 miles away is that what you are trying to get at?"
And he sort of said "yeah, but also they weren't racist and loved people of different skin colors and found them super interesting".
Which umm sure they found them interesting, that isn't the same as being "not racist". Anyway, just thought it was weird to see these little CRT/”woke” talking points and worldview popping up in something I thought was going to be totally DEI politics free.
Online I have seen a wide variety of defenses. Some claiming that the obsession with “skin color” is what makes it “real racism”, and if people in say France hate people in the Balkans in 1100, that isn’t racism because they are both white. And that earlier things that look like racism weren’t really racism because they were not so skin color focused. To which I would just want to say that this is a pretty narrow impoverished view of what racism is and what makes it bad, while also being pretty ignorant of the actual historical record which includes plenty o prejudging and dehumanizing of people based on skin color alone.
Hilariously I also found books where you have the reverse, and medieval studies professors arguing “no you dummy modern historians, racism wasn’t invented in 1600 real racism was invented in medieval England and its antisemitic laws, medieval England was the first truly racist state”. Which is also hilariously bad history.
Then you have some classical historians who are like “no you dummy medieval historians, racism stretches back to the period I research too”.
Anyway I could just go on about it forever, it was so bizarre and infuriating, but this is already too long. I shudder for current students and how religious/ideological their education is getting.
I suspect this is a kind of "motte and bailey" situation. Most things in the past were *different* from things today. So if you make this (true) statement selectively about bad things that exist today, it may seem like the past was a *better* place to live.
Medieval people hated each other for many reasons, and the color of skin was relatively unimportant. Speaking a different language, believing in a different religion, or living in a different village were probably way more important.
If you came to a medieval village somewhere in central Europe as a black person, you would probably be the first black person anyone in the village has ever seen. Racism? On one hand, they might doubt whether you were actually a human, or some kind of a monster. On the other hand, they probably didn't have any *stereotypes* about your race, because "stereotype" assumes previous experience. If you survived the first contact and learned their language and joined their religion, you could become "one of them".
On the other hand, if two visibly different ethnic groups lived near each other, they probably had all kinds of stereotypes about each other. And if you had a society that owned and traded slaves from different ethnic groups, they probably also had stereotypes about what each of these groups is like.
Modern racism, for example the kind that assumes the unity of all white people, is simply too large for the medieval society. It would be too large even for the American society 100 years ago, when various groups of people who we would consider obviously white today were not considered white back then.
And the thing that was new 100 years ago in America was establishing slavery based on race. Previously, your race and your status as a free person or slave were *independent*. You became a slave when you were captured in a military conflict. (And a few more centuries ago, you could be sold to slavery if you were too poor to pay your debts.)
For example, one of the Three Magi is traditionally depicted as black, and the medieval Christians who started this tradition clearly didn't mean any disrespect. A high-status person is a high-status person, no matter their race.
> He then goes so far as to also say the Middle Easterners also weren't racist and had good feelings towards Africans
Haha, this guy definitely needs to read One Thousand and One Nights.
My impression is that people can be hospitable to occasional strangers. The problems happen when there are chances for group conflict.
Well exactly, that individuals sometimes treat others of different skin tones well definitely isn't some knock down case there isn't "racism". People sometimes certainly treat each others of different skin tones well today, that isn't some knock down example of there not being racism today.
The medieval world may have been racist in the colloquial sense of being prejudiced, what he's getting at is that race in the way that we understand it is biological, it can't really be separated from science. That's the part that the medievals were lacking.
There was an Arab historian called Ibn Khaldun who wrote some stuff about Africans that reads pretty bad in retrospect. He wasn't a racist in the same way as, say, Hitler, because he thought it was the result of climate, not heredity.
The anti-Semitism example shows the difficulty of these distinctions. Nazi antisemitism was based in (pseudo)biology, they thought Jews were parasites by nature. Christian antisemitism was based in theology, Jews were conceived as agents of Satan. The difficulty is this is also an inherited status, but it isn't biological. If you're Jewish, I admit the distinction probably seems academic. You could make a whole career arguing about one or the other side of this.
There's a good book about the Dark Ages called "The Inheritance of Rome", there's a funny line in the conclusion to the effect that there was no racism in the dark ages but only because there was such a generalized sense of chauvinism towards any kind of difference that specifically focusing on race would be meaningless. Even if it's pedantry to point this out, it is the job of academics to be pedants.
This sort of feels plausible because more-or-less every movie and TV show set in the past has all the good guys have modern attitudes toward race, religion, and sexuality.
I mean, there probably wasn't a lot of formal or organized anti-black racism in England in 1600, since hardly anyone had ever seen a black guy. But it's not like there wasn't plenty of bigotry on differences that people encountered in their daily lives, eg against Catholics, against Jews in places where they lived, etc.
Yeah I think that is just literally false. It is not pedantry when you are wrong.
Yeah, there's some nonsense there. Among other things, a lot of the examples given are of aristocratic or wealthy people, not commoners. You could point to senior officials in the Biden administration not being racist (according to themselves), and then use that to say that America isn't racist.
But there's a particular definition of "racism" which refers to an Enlightenment-style version of bigotry that tries to justify bigotry with science, and I think that's what is being referred to here. It's of concern to the academics because, as far as they can tell, it's the version of bigotry that's most likely to infect people today, and that's why they care about it so much. (Putting aside politics, and putting aside the question of whether there are newer versions of bigotry that go unnoticed by said academics, because they've already been infected.) I wish they'd pick another world for "racism"; they seem to change their words for everything else so often. But I suppose it's like "genocide": once everyone agrees that the word means something bad, they try to change the definition rather than the word.
Regarding slavery, as far as I'm aware, the racial aspect was an American innovation, and that did make our version unique, and in a way uniquely bad. Although sometimes my PTSD is tempted to say that anyone whitewashing non-American slavery just volunteered. I wish modern activists wouldn't back-project features of American racial slavery onto other forms of slavery. It makes for bad history.
And regarding xenophobia, there's an old phenomenon where our neighbors are the enemy, but the stranger from far away is an honored guest. The Arabs were a great example - they might treat a traveler from a distant land with incredible hospitality, but might kill members of neighboring tribes on sight. This is one of the bits of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan that sometimes gets overlooked. The Samaritans were like Palestinians: the people who had been living in the land when Cyrus the Great rescinded the Babylonian exile. AFAIK, they were all ethnically similar, but the Samaritans had gone one way with their ancestral religion, and the exiled Jews had gone another. Samaritans were the go-to example for neighbors that you would fuck over if you got the chance, because of course they'd do the same to you.
Also, if you haven't read this, you need to, right now:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights
Thanks for recommending the review, it was amusing.
I mean I have read the book itself. But I’ll take a look at the review.
I really am not buying that our racism was “science” and that makes it different angle.
Especially when the people whose racist thoughts they are claiming are not racist from history are people like Aristotle, Ptolemy and Ibn Khaldun who were literally the leading scientists of their time.
Also ancient peoples were well aware of heredity. They had animals, they watched people have kids. Not understanding Mendelian genetics is not the remotely same thing as not understanding heredity.
> I really am not buying that our racism was “science” and that makes it different angle.
I'm frustrated, because I remember that there was a good and subtle argument for this position, but I have completely forgotten it. I can't seem to reconstruct it, and it's hopeless trying to locate that sort of nuance on the modern web. Oh well.
I think I'd start by asking this guy just what definition of "race" he's using. Like, are Spaniards and Algerians members of different "races"?
Because ethnic bigotry goes *way* back; it partially merged into nationalistic bigotry when we invented nations, but bigotry is older than nations. But to many modern academics and activists, "racism" is taken to mean something qualitatively different, not just an extension of whatever it is medieval Spaniards thought about the people just south of them and vice versa.
And really, what they mean by it is "bigotry by white people against black people". And maybe in some contexts against red or yellow or very dark brown people, but mostly it's bigotry against black people.
It is debatable that bigotry by white people against black people is qualitatively different than bigotry between Spaniards and Moors; both led to a fair bit of slavery, so that's not a slam dunk, but there may be differences that matter. But what isn't really debatable, is that bigotry by white people against black people didn't really take off until the 16th century, because that's when white people invented ships capable enough to bring white and black people together as more than basically exotic novelties.
There's no need for bigotry against people that you only ever encounter as diplomats and merchant-adventurers from a far-off land. That's mostly what black people were in Europe (and white people in sub-Saharan Africa), until the 16th century. Everyone else a medieval European would have encountered, would have been either white or very light brown, so if that's not enough to cry "racism!", well, OK, someone has just defined racism as a thing that was demographically impossible in pre-16th century Europe.
I would also note that very white Nordic-type people were quite willing to take and sell very white Slavic-type people as slaves (hence the name), without needing to justify it via skin-color definitions of "race". Meanwhile, African-American soldiers deployed to Korea in 1950-53, often experienced bigotry from the locals that cannot plausibly be explained by South Korea's wanting to enslave them. So, yes, this particular type of racism started in the 1500s. But I don't think it was about slavery, so much as it was about better ships.
But that’s just it, it is a particular form of racism, not some special archetypical breed of it. It is absolutely a universal cultural phenomenon, pretty much as soon as there are writings about other places and people, there are justifications about why our people are the best, and why those people from far away are inferior and good for slavery.
It’s literally in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece. Pretty much anywhere we have a written record.
> He argues briefly that "racism" really was only invented in the 1600s by Europeans looking to justify the Atlantic slave trade.
There’s some truth to that. He’s talking about the concept of race, rather than just skin colour or ethnicity. And he’s specifically talking about attitudes to black skin. From that point of view he has a point.
There were definitely plenty of cultures and peoples with specific attitudes towards certain skin colors prior to European slavery of Africans. This is such a weirdly myopic and culturally narcissistic view of the phenomenon. Talk about your eurocentrism.
> There were plenty of cultures and peoples with perspective attitudes towards certain skin colors prior to European slavery of Africans
Sure. But then i said that in the “rather than skin colour or
Some of what he says isn't completely wrong, but he misses the bigger picture. Stepping back from a European focus...
Medieval West African kingdoms (12th - 14th Centuries) were slave-owning. They were largely interior kingdoms that raided coastal tribes for slaves and gold, and they traded slaves, gold and ivory with Arab kingdoms around the southern Med and Egypt. Slaves and gold didn't transport well across the Sahara, though. So black slaves were not the majority of slaves in the Muslim world. And a slave could become free by converting to Islam. Many took that route to freedom. OTOH, the Islamic world imported captured slaves from Europe and Central Asia. So slavery in the Muslim world was not predominantly black.
Slaves were also present in Medieval European society, but I'm less certain about the wheres and whyfors of those slaves. However, it's worth noting that there was a large Muslim expat community in medieval London. And trade with the Islamic world was the only way that the medieval Europeans could get silks and spices. So, yes there was a cosmopolitan aspect to European trading centers.
Because the Ottoman Empire, monopolized and stifled trade between Europe and the Indies, the Portuguese started, looking for a way to get to the Indies by going around Africa. They encountered the kingdoms of West Africa. The kingdoms of West Africa traded gold and ivory with them for European luxury goods. Slaves were less important as a trade item until the New World was discovered. Then in 1537, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull, the Sublimis Deus, that said indigenous Americans had souls — implying, they couldn't be slaves. Suddenly, the Portuguese in Spanish needed a source of cheap labor to work in the mines and to work the sugar plantations (sugar becoming as important as gold). So the West African kingdoms started brisk trade in slaves from their conquered tribes. In exchange, they received luxury, trade, goods, and weapons from the Europeans. The West African kingdoms sent ambassadors to European courts (especially Spain and the Vatican) to facilitate this trade, and the rulers of these kingdoms became tremendously wealthy.
I think we can safely say the 17th century 18th was when *Europeans* began to confuse the idea of slaves with blacks. And BTW, the Muslim kingdoms of Africa and the Ottomans were enslaving Europeans right up to the 19th century as well as purchasing African slaves across the trans-Sahara trade routes. It wasn't until Great Britain effectively banned the African slave trade in the early 1800s that the West African kingdoms collapsed economically and militarily. Leaving them ripe for colonization and exploitation later in the 19th Century.
>I think we can safely say the 17th century 18th was when *Europeans* began to confuse the idea of slaves with blacks.
Well some Europeans. Some people always dissented. They also didn't have much problem making natives into slaves either. i don't think it was some hyper specific anti-black thing, plenty of racism against Asians too at the time.
The word originally meant "slav", which were the people from which germanic folks at least in scandinavia took a few as servants.
The modern concept of "racism" simply doesn't make any sense when you wind things far enough back into the past. It has a ton of modern cultural baggage that would be incoherent to someone in, say, Haiti in the late 18th century, even though ethnic tensions were enormous there, never mind a medieval German or a Roman. It's impossible to really argue for or against these academics' positions because it's completely unrelated to anything that was actually happening in those places and times.
(I will say that thing about people in the Middle East having "good feelings" towards Africans is quite something, given how many of them they enslaved.)
The modern concept of "racism" is a whole bunch of entirely different concepts which have been smushed together, e.g.
1. You totally hate Group X
2. You don't actually hate Group X, but you do think they're inferior to your own group
3. You tend to make massive generalisations about the way Group X behaves
4. You have nothing against Group X, but you think they should stay in X-land
5. You believe scientific studies that show that Group X tends to differ from Group Y on certain measurable attributes, on average.
6. You try really hard to be nice to Group X, but you're only human and you have in-group biases which sometimes affect your behaviour
and a lot of other things besides. For some reason we put the same word on all of them and round them off to definition 1, the worst of the lot.
I think it would be fair to say that people rarely bother to develop prejudice against groups they're rarely exposed to.
Oh I agree it is a "braided" concept with a lot of strands and like a rope not all of them extend all the way through.
But I would argue almost whichever strands you want to focus on, you will find that same strand 1000, 2000, 5000 years ago in whatever writings we have, and would find them all back then if we had like a time machine and could go talk to people instead of just read the writing of a few elites.
> if we had like a time machine and could go talk to people instead of just read the writing of a few elites.
This sort of thing is why I love Herodotus. I don't know if you've read him already, but he's my favorite ancient author.
Yeah a couple times.
I really want a Conan fanfic where someone does a Herodotus, wandering around the kingdoms of the Hyborian age and swapping tales in taverns.
Well I think it mostly doesn't make sense because everyone was extremely racist. Not because they were somehow not racist. Its just a very specific and small minded sense of what racism is.
No, they really weren't "racist" any more than Plato was "gay". They did a lot of the same things that modern racists (or modern gay people) do, but they do so as part of a very different ideology. They're not treating *race* (or sexual orientation) as a relevant variable, so much as "outsider" or "foreigner" or something else that would cross-cut the modern racial categories.
I just don’t understand how people can think like this. It is the exact same thing.
A). They definitely were viewing “types of
people” or “geographic origins of people”, or “skin colors of people”, as guides to what to expect and possible rubrics for discrimination. Sure not everyone, but definitely the people interested in geography and foreign peoples.
B). It’s not like that way of viewing “races” is/was some dominant exclusive mode today or 300 years ago. There were plenty of people who saw crosscutting categories as more important.
I don’t know I just find this whole position bonkers. Like someone who would claim “wars” did not exist before the treaty of Westphalia because they meant something slightly different before that. Such an obviously counterfactual statement that it becomes crystal clear it is part of some religion/ideology and not part of an actual taking of the world as it is.
What I'm saying is that asking whether a medieval peasant was "racist" or "not racist" doesn't even make sense in that context. It would be like asking if he was a Republican or a Democrat. Yeah, he might have social views that line up more with one or the other so you could shoehorn it in if you really tried, but fundamentally what's meaningful about the concepts of "Republican" or "Democrat" just doesn't translate.
Well I think yes and no. Is he "racist" in the sense that he thinks there are 4 (5?) main races on the earth (whites/asians/blacks/reds/other) and he has modern prejudices about them?
No almost certainly not. But that seems a weirdly hyper specific concept of what "racism" is.
He almost certainly has A LOT of beliefs about how his people are good, and other people in nearby and especially distant lands are inferior in this or that way and has prejudices and mistaken beliefs about groups of people. Sometimes even based on skin color if that is so important to your conception of racism.
The be like the dude in southern France in 900 who hates the "moors" (despite maybe barely knowing what they are exactly) and sees them akin to devils isn't actually "racist" because he what doesn't know about Asian people, seems beyond silly.
And the position of someone who is desperate to make racism some modern thing instead of recognizing is a natural human extension of tribalism/othering and pattern recognition.
Would it make sense to call that bigotry or chauvinism rather than racism?
No? Not at all.
Seems odd to have this word *racism* that has a well understood definition:
Treating people poorly or with prejudice based on their skin tone/ethnicity.
And then be like "well there are hundreds/thousands of examples of that prior to European colonialism but none of that is racism because reasons".
Especially when the reasons are like "our racism was pseudo-scientific attempts to classify people", and then the racism of the past was the exact same thing.
Or "our racism was used as a justification for treating different people as means instead of ends in themselves"...and then their racism was literally used in that exact same way.
Its jsut changing the definition so you can say with a straight face that racism started when the current villains came on the scene (European colonialists) and not when it really came on the scene (when the first human met another human who looked significantly different form them), because then it is not some special cultural original sin the west needs to atone for and instead something that happens everywhere.
Like do these people *really* think the 11th century Chinese weren't "racists"?
If the skin tone element is so important is it impossible for me to be racist against light skinned Latino or black people? It is just nonsense.
I'm not sure who you're referring to, but my understanding is that people were historically more "ethno-nationalist" (although the term is freighted with it's own baggage) than racist historically.
The Roman's, for instance, were hugely bigoted against, well, everyone that wasn't Roman. But their bigotry wasn't rooted in an idea of races as these distinct biological delineations between superior and inferior breeds. And it wasn't rooted in any sort of superiority of technology - a barbarian people could still make fine goods and build impressive monuments.
Racism as we understand it today really was a product of a divergence in technology and economy (which allowed Europeans to see themselves as materially superior to non-Europeans), an idea of biology which separated the world into immutable kinds (of greater and lesser development) locked into a zero-sum struggle for survival, and the experience of slavery as marking some people out as inherently degraded and inferior.
The good (?) news is that, as material conditions change, bigotry is returning to it's ur-state of hating other people because they look different, talk different, and have different customs and beliefs instead of hating them because of their melanin levels and cranial features.
1) On the one hand yes, people were much more tribalist and "ethno nationalist" as you say. On the other hand isn't that really just racism against everyone? Rather than "not being racist". If I behave in racist ways against people just 500 miles form me, because my level of geographic knowledge and worldview is much more limited than say a European in 1600, am I really any less "racist".
I am still othering the people who I see as maximally different than me as "subhuman" (which was quite common).
2) If you actually read the historic documents they absolutely did have "an idea of races as these distinct biological delineations between superior and inferior breeds". Like very explicitly. It wasn't always exactly the categories we would have, but the thought is almost identical to the sort of hierarchal "quadroon" racism of the colonial powers everyone so despises.
(I have seen this claim that their wasn't this "classification and hierarchy" in ancient racism, but that is just plainly false).
The Greeks and Muslims had a system of 7 "climes", where people living in different climes had different natures and strengths/weaknesses. The Mediterranean clime of course being the best which produced the best people. meanwhile the "far north" produced vigorous and spirited, but "stupid" people, and the "far south" black lazy people who make good slaves.
That certainly sounds EXACTLY like the racism you say they didn't have.
It is in fucking Aristotle, not invented in 1600, and I am sure it was in ancient fucking Sumer 5000 years ago too. It absolutely was in ancient Egypt and China.
3) "And it wasn't rooted in any sort of superiority of technology - a barbarian people could still make fine goods and build impressive monuments."
I would love to introduce you to Greek/Chinese/Mesopotamian writings on peoples with lower levels of technology.
4) Racism as we understand it today really was a product of a divergence in technology and economy (which allowed Europeans to see themselves as materially superior to non-Europeans), an idea of biology which separated the world into immutable kinds (of greater and lesser development) locked into a zero-sum struggle for survival, and the experience of slavery as marking some people out as inherently degraded and inferior.
See I think this is just exactly the FALSE bullshit I am arguing against. An attempt to sort of brand 1600s or 1700 Europe as particular racist or particularly interested in slavery and its justification. I just think this is a wildly incorrect reading of history in pursuit of a religious/ideological need to have the "colonialists" be the big bads of history.
To the extent if matched our more modern categories of people, well it was closer to our modern time and they had more interaction with a broader swath of the world than past groups.
To the extent their system was more detailed and documented than earlier systems, that is because we both have more detailed and documented records from that time, and because their society was more sophisticated. In fact one could easily argue that their relative level of ethical openness and non-racism is what necessitated the creation of such hierarchies. But they definitely were not a new thing (all people are equal...well except those people).
5)"the experience of slavery as marking some people out as inherently degraded and inferior."
Once again I would love to refer you to pretty much any writings anywhere about slaves, they are almost always treated this way.
6) The good (?) news is that, as material conditions change, bigotry is returning to it's ur-state of hating other people because they look different, talk different, and have different customs and beliefs instead of hating them because of their melanin levels and cranial features.
i just don't think this actually represents any real change at all. I think other peoples absolutely had the same sort of pseudoscientific thoughts (appropriate to their time) about "others", and literally the exact same racism.
This seems like so much intellectual work and rewriting/ignoring of history jsut so you can mark out the colonialists as "extra bad" and the source of *the racism*.
IDK this drives me up a wall. I would be like seeing arguments that like Stalin invented use famine as weapon from someone who wanted to shit on Stalin. It is just so historically ignorant.
I thought Romans thought being a slave was a matter of getting conquered/bad luck rather than inborn inferiority. Slaves could become free and get Roman citizenship.
>Slaves could become free and get Roman citizenship.
This was true in lots of places times in Europe people called "racist"? is there no racism today (or in 1840?) because blacks can get citizenship?
>I thought Romans thought being a slave was a matter of getting conquered/bad luck rather than inborn inferiority.
I really really don't think this was the sum total of their thoughts on the matter, they definitely had LOTS of ideas about which people's were superior/inferior and which people from which places made better or worse slaves.
This isn't even that different from say 1700s Europe anyway, where you jsut like in Rome might find people from the majority culture doing hard labor in chains if they had say committed crimes or had debts, which is pretty much when you would see that in Rome too.
But Romans were not generally enslaving people they saw as Roman, just like Spaniards were not generally enslaving Spaniards.
My impression is that there were a lot of Greek slaves, and that Romans had a stereotype of Greeks as being smart and cultured.
Indeed, and like it was even a true stereotype given what we know.
I didn't mean to say the Romans weren't racist, but they were less extreme than places that didn't permit slaves to become citizens.
As an aside, Medieval China had slavery, but it wasn't particularly common, and it didn't play a major role in the economy.
> 2) If you actually read the historic documents they absolutely did have "an idea of races as these distinct biological delineations between superior and inferior breeds".
Can you give me some links to those documents from Classical and Medieval sources. Or are you talking about after the Atlantic slave trade revved up?
> The Greeks and Muslims had a system of 7 "climes", where people living in different climes had different natures and strengths/weaknesses.
Granted, but for the Ancient Greeks anyone who wasn't a Greek was a barbarian, and any barbarian could be slave. The Celts ended up slaves in the Greek colonies of southern France. Black Africans were relatively uncommon in the ancient world, but I think the Ptolemies imported black slaves from Upper Nile.
> 4) Racism as we understand it today really was a product of a divergence in technology and economy (which allowed Europeans to see themselves as materially superior to non-Europeans)...
Agreed.
> Once again I would love to refer you to pretty much any writings anywhere about slaves, they are almost always treated this way.
Agreed. Except didn't the Romans end up making laws about the proper treatment of slaves? And slaves could purchase their freedom. And in the Muslim world, Muslims couldn't be enslaved. So if you convert to Islam you became free. And in the ancient Jewish tradition, if a slave converted to Judaism they were freed.
>As an aside, Medieval China had slavery, but it wasn't particularly common, and it didn't play a major role in the economy.
Why have slavery when the vast majority of peasants already live like slaves...
It's worth noting that China was thriving economically when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. By the 5th and 6th Centuries, they had built a canal system that linked all the east-flowing rivers of the empire with north-south connections. One could travel by boat across the empire. Technically and economically China was at a level not reached in Europe until the 12th Century and the High Middle Ages. They practiced a feudalism that was similar to the European model. And 7th- or 8th-century Chinese peasants probably lived as well as European peasants in the 12th Century (which wasn't that bad for pre-modern agriculturalists). Of course, it all came crashing down at the end of the Tang Dynasty — first with the Lushan Rebellion and then with the Huang Chao Rebellion. Some sources estimate that a third of the population died due to famine and war. And all the noble families of the Tang were either exterminated or impoverished to extinction. It took about a century for China to stabilize and for a new nobility to appear.
Oh yeah China is super interesting and amazing, but aside from a few interludes the peasants never seemed to have any rights or political power (not that they did in Europe either).
On #4, I think this viewpoint stems from a lack of familiarity with the historical record. It's a failing of an availability heuristic. "I've not seen technological racism in the past, so I don't think it exists." Yet we see plenty of examples of exactly that, except that often it's the backward Europeans who're the target of the racism. For example, during the glory days of Islam when they saw Europeans as hopelessly backward. I remember reading a letter from the then-Calif who mocked the Roman/Byzantian emperor as being effectively a ruler of forest savages, while the Calif was so obviously leader of the civilized world. There was, perhaps, an element of religious supremacy to that letter, but there was a racial element as well. I don't think this is something the Europeans made up, it's just that they were late to the technological supremacy game overall, so they hadn't had a chance to use it until recently.
My understanding of the American context for racism is that it was a natural reaction to the demands of enlightenment principles and some Christian principles put forward by abolitionists. "All men are created equal" and all of Jesus' admonitions about the second great commandment needed a good counterargument - especially after people could read the Bible for themselves. Though racism wasn't invented as that counterargument, it was adopted to fill that space. "They're not really 'people' in the same sense as you and me," and the especially offensive, "They need to be shepherded by their betters or else they'll hurt themselves," directly counter those two arguments and allow the slave owner to live with himself.
Again, I'm not saying that even those arguments are unique to that period. Just that they were useful to those who made them as part of the conversation that was happening at the time.
Calm down, my guy. You're going to have an aneurism.
All I can say besides just disagreeing with you, and not being a historian (although it appears that you disagree with actual historians), is that there's a definite difference in pre-modern vs modern bigotry. I think the closest I can come to explicating it is in how Tuchman describes the virulent hatred that medieval nobles had for the peasantry. Like, you might not like poor people, but you'll never feel what these people feel about peasants. Because your worldview and identity is so different, and because the material circumstances of your life and your relation to your fellows is so different. This is not to excuse ancient bigotry in favour of damning modern bigotry, but it is to say that it is different because the time and place were different.
I can absolutely believe that the medieval yokels of Vukolyubovina would look at a black guy and say "sure, he's black, but at least he's not from Packovac, and he agrees with our claim to that orchard we've been feuding over for the last six hundred years." Nothing engenders hatred like proximity.
Yeah but that is still true today. Some of the most racist people i have even met were from the Balkans, but their racism paled in comparison to the ethnic/religious hatred of their near neighbors. but I don't think that somehow magically makes them *not racist*.
If I hate black people and discriminate against them at work "I also hate Packer fans from *sconnie*" isn't a defense.
The whole point of the post is I am not calm about it. It really grinds my gears and frankly seems kind of crazy and a historical to me in a way that is an example of how this religious ideology around "racism" has blinded people to obvious truths.
In the last Open Thread, Hank Wilbon asked about using LLMs for etymologies. I decided to try it out by asking ChatGPT(3.5) "Can you give some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French?" ChatGPT gave ten examples: four correct, six hallucinations.
If anyone has access to more recent LLMs, I'd be curious to know if they do any better on this question.
Here are the examples and etymologies given by ChatGPT(3.5) (identifying which ones are correct is left as an exercise for the reader):
Beef - The meat of a cow. This word comes from Old French "boef," which traces back to Germanic bōk.
Chase - To pursue or hunt. Derived from Old French "chacier," which has its roots in the Frankish language, a Germanic language.
Catch - To seize or capture. From Old Northern French "cachier," ultimately from a Germanic source.
Garden - An enclosed area for cultivation. It comes from Old North French "gardin," which has Germanic origins.
Warden - A person responsible for the supervision of a particular place or group of people. Derived from Old Northern French "wardein," influenced by the Germanic word wardōn.
Wicket - A small door or gate, often found within a larger one. From Old North French "wiket," which has its roots in a Germanic language.
Wine - The alcoholic beverage made from fermented grapes. Comes from Old North French "wine," ultimately from Germanic winam.
Wish - A desire or hope for something to happen. Derived from Old North French "wis," influenced by the Germanic wunsch.
Watch - To observe or monitor closely. From Old North French "wachier," influenced by the Germanic wahten.
War - Armed conflict between different nations or groups. Comes from Old North French "werre," ultimately from a Germanic source.
...and here is ChatGPT(4o) [6 hits, 2 hallucinations; I'm counting "dance" and "embassy" as hits, since there are human-authored sources that make these claims, but the Germanic derivations are speculative]:
War: Originates from the Old High German word "werra," which means "confusion" or "strife." It entered English through Old French "werre."
Garden: Comes from the Old High German "gart," meaning "enclosure" or "yard." It was borrowed into Old French as "jardin" and then entered Middle English.
Catch: Derived from the Latin "captiare" via Old French "cachier," the Old High German equivalent is "kaccan," meaning "to catch" or "to hunt."
Court: Comes from the Latin "cohors" meaning "enclosure" or "court," and passed into Old French as "cort." The Frankish word "hof," meaning "courtyard" or "enclosure," influenced the French term before it entered English.
Dance: Originates from the Old High German "dansôn," meaning "to draw" or "to pull," and came into English via Old French "dancier."
Embassy: Comes from the Old High German "ambaht," meaning "service" or "office." It entered Middle English through Old French "ambassade."
Warranty: Derives from the Old High German "warjan," meaning "to protect" or "to defend." It entered English through Old French "garantie."
Guard: Comes from the Old High German "wartēn," meaning "to watch" or "to guard." It was borrowed into Old French as "garde."
Tyler Cowen wrote recently about how LLMs are good at telling you who a famous person's children (Assuming they are also famous) are but horrible at telling you who a famous person's parents are. I'd guess that you are describing an analogous problem, although with words it's reversed: good at knowing the ancestry, bad at figuring out the progeny.
The explanation for this seems intuitive: it can learn a word's etymology from reading online dictionaries but must reason (which it is bad at) to do what you are asking it. I'd guess that with famous people the situation is similar: it "learns" who the children are but must try to reason/remember who the parents are.
The mysterious "im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot" on LMSys Arena returns:
Certainly! The English language has many words of Germanic origin that were reintroduced into English after undergoing changes in Old or Middle French. These words often came into English during the Norman Conquest and the centuries that followed, when Norman French had a significant influence on the English language.
Here are some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French:
Warden (from Norman French warden, from Old French gardien, from Frankish warding - a Germanic root meaning "guard" or "watch").
Guard (from Old French garder, from Frankish wardon, from the Germanic root ward- meaning "to watch" or "to protect").
War (from Old North French werre (variant of Old French guerre), from Frankish werra, meaning "confusion, strife," from a Germanic source akin to Old High German werra "strife, conflict").
Warranty (from Old North French warantie, from a variant of Old French guarantie, from guarant, from Frankish warjand, a derivative of warjan, meaning "to defend, protect").
Garden (from Old North French gardin, from Frankish gard, from Proto-Germanic gardaz, meaning "enclosure, garden").
Banner (from Old French baniere, from Frankish bann, from Proto-Germanic bannan, meaning "to command, forbid, banish").
Wage (from Old North French wage, from Old French gage, from Frankish waddi, meaning "pledge" - from Proto-Germanic wadi).
March (as in the border region, from Old French marche, from Frankish marka, meaning "boundary" - from Proto-Germanic marko).
Gain (from Old French gain, from Frankish waidanjan, meaning "to hunt for, acquire" - from Proto-Germanic waidanjan).
Quarry (in the sense of a stone pit, from Old French quarriere, from Frankish quader, from Proto-Germanic kwadraz, meaning "stone").
These examples show how words from Germanic roots entered French (often as a result of Frankish influence) and then were borrowed back into English, sometimes with significant changes in form and meaning influenced by their passage through French.
This list has a lot of overlap with GPT-4, with a different hallucination stuck on at the end. (I'll be generous and count "gain" as a hit, since the Old French word does seem to have influenced Middle English usage even if the cognate was already present in Old English.)
It's interesting that both here and in the GPT-4 list, the hallucinations come at the end of the respective lists. I wonder whether this happens for similar reasons to older LLMs habit of starting off coherently then degenerating into gibberish after a paragraph or two.
(Edit: On the other hand, Microsoft Copilot gives its only correct answer at the end of its list, so maybe I'm the one hallucinating here.)
Microsoft Copilot
me
Can you give some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French
Copilot
Certainly! Many words in the English language have entered via French, which itself has Germanic origins. Here are some examples of words that came into English from French but ultimately have Germanic roots:
Ally (from Old French alier, derived from Frankish hlaiban): Originally meant “to bind by treaty,” and its Germanic root means “to adhere.”
Adventure (from Old French aventure, from Latin adventura, influenced by Frankish āventiure): Meaning “a daring undertaking,” it traces back to the Germanic concept of “chance” or “fortune.”
Affair (from Old French affaire, influenced by Frankish afar): Refers to a matter or business, with its roots in the Germanic word for “work” or “task.”
Ambush (from Old French embusche, influenced by Frankish busk): Originally meant “to place in a bush,” and its Germanic origin relates to “shrubbery” or “underbrush.”
Banner (from Old French baniere, influenced by Frankish bannum): Derived from the Germanic term for a “proclamation” or “summons.”
These words demonstrate the intricate interplay between Germanic and Romance languages in shaping English vocabulary. 🌟
For more examples, you can explore the list of English Latinates of Germanic origin and the list of German words of French origin.1234
Four hallucinations, one hit — not great!
What's the bit about "you can explore the list..."? Is it giving Wikipedia links?
Which is the correct hit? All of these *sound* convincing, but I'm not about to crack open my dad's old unabridged OED to check them. ;-)
The links are...
1
en.wikipedia.org
2
en.wikipedia.org
3
en.wikipedia.org
4
wikimili.com
5
linguistics.stackexchange.com
6
ezglot.com
7
en.wikipedia.org
8
readable.com
9
word-lists.com
10
proofed.com
(I think your hyperlinks might be disappearing when you copy-paste into Substack — all of those just link to the domains.)
The correct one is "banner," although it fudges the details a bit. (The history of the word is complicated and difficult to trace clearly, but "influenced by Frankish bannum" looks like a random stab in the dark. In general, it seems way too keen to give cognates in "Frankish," which is a very poorly attested language.)
For the others: "ally," "adventure," and "affair" are all pure Latin; "bush" is plausibly Germanic in origin, but the prefixed form "ambush" only appeared in French, so it isn't exactly example of what is being asked for. (Maybe I could have given it half a point for that one.)
And "French, which itself has Germanic origins" is like an exam answer by a student who really wasn't paying attention during class...
I have the same problem when I ask for links to papers discussing specific aspects of SARS2 research. Frequently there are lots of bullshit (er hallucinatory) references in the answer. I keep hearing that LLMs are helping researchers search the literature. That frigging scares me!
Model: gpt-4-turbo
System Prompt: You are an expert in etymology.
User: Can you give some examples of words of Germanic origin that entered English via French?
Certainly! The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 had a profound impact on the English language, introducing many words of Old Norse and Old French origin, which themselves were influenced by Germanic roots due to the Frankish and other Germanic tribes. Here are some examples of words that have Germanic origins, entered Old French, and then came into English:
1. **Warranty** - This word comes from the Old French "garantie," from "garant," a derivative of the Frankish *warjant-, a present participle of *warjan, meaning "to defend, protect." The root *warjan is of Germanic origin.
2. **Garden** - Derived from the Old North French "gardin," which itself comes from the Frankish *gard or *gardo, meaning "enclosure" or "fenced in place." This word traces back to the Proto-Germanic *gardaz, ultimately contributing to the English word "garden."
3. **Guard** - Coming from the Old French "garder," meaning "to keep, protect, watch," influenced by the Frankish *wardon, meaning "to guard, watch." This is from the Proto-Germanic *wardaz, meaning ""guard" or "watchman," found in modern German as "*warten*" (to wait or watch).
4. **Wage** - Originating from the Old North French "wage," which itself is derived from the Frankish *waddi. This term came into French and then English meaning payment, especially for labor.
5. **War** - From Old North French "werre" (modern French "guerre"), from the Frankish *werra or *werran, meaning "confusion, strife, or conflict." The Proto-Germanic root likely had a similar meaning related to confusion or entanglement.
6. **Gauge** - Through the French "jauge" from Old North French "gage," which in turn, comes from the Frankish *galgo meaning "measuring rod, measuring stick," directly from the Germanic root *galg- meaning a pole or stick for measuring.
7. **Banner** - Entering English from Old French "baniere," from Frankish *bann, a capture from the Proto-Germanic *bannan, "to command." This term is also connected to the English "ban."
8. **Duke** - Coming into English from the Old French "duc," from Latin "dux," which in turn comes from the Frankish *duka, derived from Proto-Germanic *dukaz meaning "leader," which itself is from the Proto-Germanic root *duganą meaning "to be useful, to help."
Thanks! That seems to be one hallucination, seven genuine examples, much better than 3.5. (Although I find it surprising how *obviously* wrong the hallucination is — I would have expected the hallucinations to become not just rarer, but also more difficult to spot.)
Just for my edification, which is the hallucination?
"Duke" — from Latin "dux," via French "duc" (cf. Mussolini = "Il Duce," and also the "Doge" of Venice). It has nothing to do with Frankish or Proto-Germanic.
As usual, I want to tout my new Substack post, "Debtpocalypse" and invite new subscribers.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/debtpocalypse
I'd like to probe a little bit into the pain medicine question from the Hanson thread. It was stunning to learn that there was a real practicing doctor who thought that "nobody died of pain", AND that there were multiple commenters who were like, yeah! all doctors should be like this!
Like does anyone - really - sincerely believe that?
How far would you go - should anesthesiology not be covered? not practiced?
Do you refuse Novocaine shots for dental work?
Would you have a knee reconstruction surgery without anesthesiology? Have you 12 y.o. child have a surgery without anesthesiology?
I think most of the discussion is around pain not related to medical procedures - ie if someone comes into the hospital with an infection, do you just treat the infection, or also give them painkillers for the pain caused by the infection? What if they don't respond to non-opioid painkillers and want opioids?
And some of this is influenced by the fact that lots of opioid addicts come into hospitals claiming to have various painful conditions in the hopes that someone will give them opioids. And by the fact that opioid companies pushed a line of "treating pain (with our products) is really important, so important that you can't worry about addiction risk" for many years, and after that went wrong the pendulum swung the other direction and now if you worry too much about pain you're suspected of being an opioid company stooge.
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
Oh god... that was 2019 and you had to write this paragraph:
"[...]think about this for a second like a normal human being. You have a kid with a very painful form of cancer. His doctor guesses at what the right dose of painkillers should be. After getting this dose of painkillers, the kid continues to “engage in pain behaviors ie moaning, crying, grimacing, and complaining about various aches and pains”, and begs for a higher dose of painkillers.
I maintain that the normal human thought process is “Since this kid is screaming in pain, looks like I guessed wrong about the right amount of painkillers for him, I should give him more.”"
By the time of Mary's story I had to stop reading. I feel I just need to buy a gun now in case I get an incurable cancer or something and the doctors decide I'm a drug-seeker.
You think that's bad?
Guess how fun it is to be someone whose *genetics* have decided to withhold the efficacy of opioid painkillers!
I initiated and paid out of pocket for pharmacogenomic lab testing which confirmed I have a mutation of CYP2D6, a gene involved in metabolizing a number of medications, but most notably opioids, after a wisdom tooth surgery and two separate abdominal surgeries left me wondering, "why do people claim opioids feel like anything?"
It's really that bad. For example, the day after my third surgery (a weight loss procedure: I had the "sleeve," which removes about two-thirds of the stomach, aka stomach stapling), the non-opioid surgical anesthesia drugs had fully worn off and I was in so much pain that I was *sincerely* contemplating building a time machine out of medical equipment to go back in time two days and tell myself to cancel the surgery.
At one point, a nurse came into my hospital room and injected dilaudid into my IV. "Don't worry, honey, you're going to feel just fine in about ten minutes," she promised.
When she returned fifteen minutes later, I said, "I'm sorry this is a dumb question, but what is this supposed to feel like? I mean, I definitely felt the injection go into my arm, it felt like a weird cold pressure, but what *exactly* should the medication itself feel like? Should I be feeling tingly or warm or something?"
"How are you even *talking* right now?" The nurse asked, round-eyed.
I ended up pacing and pacing and *pacing* to cope with the pain, pacing so much in my hospital socks on hard linoleum that I actually cramped up my calves, and so a few years I later paid $700 to get a piece of paper certifying that, NO REALLY, opioids don't work, use something else!
Then my primary care doctor consulted with the company's chief pharmacist who said there isn't really anything else, sorry!
o_O :-(
This is terrifying. You, like, won a genetic anti-lottery.
Yeah, I've included notes about the genetic testing in my medical advance directive, with instructions to not believe doctors who say my pain is being adequately treated after a major accident (or whatever).
I'm old enough to have lived through a few swings of this pendulum. We are in one nutty extreme right now. It makes me wonder if humans are capable of taking one step back from the current moment to take in a larger historical perspective.
I usually decline opiates now unless I'm in serious distress simply because doctors can only write so many prescriptions for them so I just figure save it for someone who really needs it.
Things like passing a kidney stone or some oral surgeries are pretty terrible without a bit of codeine. The last time I accepted them was when one of my rotator cuff tendons snapped. I was getting to the point where I was wondering if I really *needed* two arms after all. <Only somewhat joking>
I do enjoy the sensation though and will usually indulge in some guilty pleasure like staying up all night reading Dashelle Hammet novels or maybe watching Robert Mitchum movies while under the influence. Too bad that carefree (F*ck the crabgrass and the creeping charlie, I'm enjoying myself!) state is so addictive,
I noticed that opiates make my PTSD go away (temporarily), so I acquire them wherever possible, but then never use them for the actual pain. They sit in my shelf, unused, waiting for a moment when it gets bad enough. So far, alcohol and THC have been working OK, although I could do without the side effects.
I had basket case, terrible, OCD for more than a decade before I read about OCD being a thing, with a treatment and all that. They started to talk about it quite a bit in the late 1980s. “If you or anyone you know has this sort of problem… We’ve just patented Prozac. Please make our stock price soar.” Or maybe I’m being too cynical. ;)
As an undergrad, at its worst there were times when I was reading only odd numbered pages in my text. Made things more challenging than they needed to be.
During that period if a percodan or something similar came my way I would use it the same way. It somehow quelled what was a transparently defective thought process. I drank too much during that period too. If i made a crude guess I’d say there was a self reinforcing link between the anxiety and OCD and the anxiolytic effects gave me some relief.
I’m very lucky in that I respond well to SSRIs that have put the OCD into remission and my hankering for that sort of consciousness alteration dropped off a cliff.
I *think* I’d be okay if I could go to CVS and buy a 500 count bottle of Percocet the way I buy Tylenol now. I’d only do the Robert Mitchum movie binge thing say once a month. Or at least that would be my intent. Hmmm… probably a good thing I can’t do that.
Be careful with the opiates. With fentanyl out there taking in something from the street is pretty risky
Oh, wow, that sounds bad. I'm glad something common took care of it, though.
Don't worry, I'm not getting stuff from the street, I'm just stockpiling what doctors give me, and I'm not doing things to intentionally get prescribed opiates, either.
I think you edited the part about Dashiel Hammett novels. I was going to ask you how you rank Hammet's novels against each other. I'm currently reading The Maltese Falcon for the first time. Have seen the movie numerous times. So far the novel reads exactly like the movie. John Huston famously wrote the screenplay adaptation, but that must have been one of the easiest adaptations to write ever!
IMO, The Thin Man is probably the funniest movie from the 1930's. The humor doesn't feel dated at all, somehow. Maybe it's the blase recklessness? But somewhere recently I read someone claim that was one of Hammet's worst novels. Have you read it? Do you have an opinion?
As someone who is generally very anti-drugs, and anti-coddling people, I can report that the two main painful accidents I had in my life where I ended up having surgical procedures, in both cases while the pain medication was *mostly* quite effective, there were times during day 1-3 where I was in agony for literal hours and was told I couldn't have more pain medication.
And in both cases I was a teen with zero history of drug use/abuse.
Meanwhile on other occasions I have had like a root canal or wisdom teeth pulled and barely needed Tylenol, but was offered opiates (I turned them down).
The inconsistency was jarring. Fingers mangled in accident and you whole hand feels like it is on fire for hours: You need to be screaming in agony for 2 hours before we will consider upping your dose.
Mild tooth ache: Here take all the opiates you want!
Interesting how the doctors just assume their initial dose is "just right". Despite never having even met the patient before in many cases.
I go through this charade with my dentist every time some drilling needs to be done: I seem to have very high tolerance for the Novocaine or whatever they shoot to numb the area. He starts with two shots, and I f-ng know it's not enough, every time. By the time he gets to drill, I inevitably tap out, he stops, etc., half an hour is wasted, and I get my 5-6 shots I need. At least he doesn't think I'm an addict :)
Local anesthethics are not exactly addictive, though the mother substance cocaine is. Dentists put these at spots you'd expect to be the nerves for the intended region. I'd guess you either have some variant innervation or the dentist misses.
He indeed thinks I have some anatomical variation, but I guess still forgets about it the next time - it's not like I get dental work done every few weeks. It's ok, worse things happen, e.g., Christina's case.
>Interesting how the doctors just assume their initial dose is "just right". Despite never having even met the patient before in many cases.
Snarky suspicion: Do they even adjust for the patient's _weight_?
( Come to think of it, "low dose" aspirin _is_ 81 mg. That's the only dose I've ever seen for it. I have a _very_ hard time believing that this is the correct dose for every patient from 50 kg to 150 kg. )
It might not vary as much as you think, given that it affects blood platelets. There is probably not so much variation in blood platelet count between people are there is in mass.
Personally I just eat half a Disprin daily. A bit extra, but aspirin doesn't bother me. Except if I get in a fight and bleed like a stuck pig :D
I think the "low dose" aspirin is in fact baby aspirin, so that's where the dose comes from.
I wonder (but not enough to look it up :) ) if the low-dose aspirin effect is highly nonlinear: a small dose makes most of the difference, and adjusting it further to the size of the patient isn't worth the added benefit...
In the "Mistakes" list, is the date of 5. correct?
Any practicing Mormons here? I am wondering what you do when you want to meet somewhere to chat with a friend or date, but you don't want to drink alcohol or caffeine. I guess going to a restaurant and not drinking is an option, but that would get expensive...have heavily-Mormon areas developed businesses to cater to this need? Would you be comfortable going to a coffeeshop and not ordering coffee?
We go to coffeeshops and I order herbal tea. If that's not available (which is rare) I usually order a glass of water and some snack like a small sandwich or a bun.
I'm not Mormon, but I've never drunk alcohol or coffee anyway, as I don't see the point. But I'm also too socially oblivious to help with the "what are the social norms around hanging out at coffee shops?" question.
I generally avoid going to bars or alcohol-centric occasions as much as possible, but if I have to go, I'll just get water or apple juice or something.
Ditto for my kids. At a bar they'll tend to get a 'fizzy drink' and at a cafe a 'hot chocolate' as that is what they have at home.
When it comes to coffee, maybe sometime you could go by a good coffee shop and try an espresso. Hold it to your nostrils and savor the smell, then take a small sip and hold it for a few seconds in your mouth to savor some more before swallowing, and then repeat with the rest. One sign that it's a good coffee place is if they give you seltzer or mineral water on the side, to drink before and afterwards to "cleanse the palate".
The only thing I can compare it to is a fine steak, but they're nothing alike aside from the heat and fire used in creating them.
I'm amused because I don't like seltzer water or fine steak either (those, I have *tried* though, many times).
What do you like, as far as tastes?
I had to laugh at a line in a recent book I read where one character, who has been turned into a vampire, says that the upside is that coffee now tastes how it smells 😀
(It's not a very good book but that line was worth it).
Maybe it isn't for you, then! But since a good espresso should only take a few minutes, and costs under $10, well, I'd be curious. :-)
Espresso isn't really the entry-level coffee drink for someone who doesn't like coffee...a person is more likely to be drawn in by a mocha or coffee with lots of milk and sugar. Not that I want to pressure this person into drinking coffee!
It's been a long time for me, but I think those are more for people trying to develop a habit, or who want a caffeine infusion? I'm with you in not trying to pressure this person into drinking coffee, in the sense of being a regular drinker of coffee. (The habitual aspect, as in "he be drinking coffee" in AAVE.)
Not a mormon/LDS, but someone who basically doesn't drink alcohol and, until recently, didn't drink coffee: I would get seltzer water in a bar and hot chocolate or mint tea in a cafe. If I were in a large enough group where there wasn't a real need to have a drink for reciprocal sociality, I would be fine without a beverage.
The Mormons I knew would drink coke and pepsi... cold caffeine is alright I guess.
Caffeine isn't prohibited by the religion, though many won't touch it culturally. What's officially prohibited are coffee (though not coffee substitutes), tea from black or green tea leaves, alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs like marijuana and heroin.
Corner case curiosity: Are decaf coffee or teas allowed or prohibited?
No. Because caffeine isn't actually prohibited. Being decaf doesn't make it not coffee or tea.
The bright-line rule is quite simply this: did it come from the coffee plant (any variety) or the tea plant (any variety)? Don't drink it (there are variations about coffee flavored non drinks that have small amounts, but I personally think that's too close to the line). Did it come from the tobacco plant? Don't smoke it. Is it alcoholic? Don't drink it as a beverage (again, variations on using things like alcohol based extracts or alcohol in cooked goods; I don't care about the former but avoid the latter where possible). Similarly, is it a drug being used for non medical purposes? Don't.
Edit: I don't consume caffeine. Because I don't like it--religion is irrelevant here. Similarly, I don't like being around people who are drinking, mostly because the smell is nasty. And to the OP...I have no clue. If I did, I probably wouldn't be hopelessly single at over 40. So no help there.
Many Thanks!
>No. Because caffeine isn't actually prohibited. Being decaf doesn't make it not coffee or tea.
Interesting! Historically, the isolation of caffeine was in 1819
>Runge changed the course of history in 1819 with a chemistry experiment that led to the first-ever isolation of caffeine.
( from https://www.techlinkcenter.org/news/friedlieb-ferdinand-runge-was-the-first-chemist-to-isolate-caffeine ), just about concurrent with
>Most Latter Day Saints trace the beginnings of Mormonism to Joseph Smith's First Vision, which he said he had in about 1820 in the woods near his home.
( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latter_Day_Saint_movement )
so it would be unreasonable to expect Joseph Smith to have known about it so soon after its discovery.
A core doctrinal principle of the Church of Jesus Christ is that commandments are given by God, who knows way more (understatement) than we do. We are instructed to look for eternal principles in commandments, but to avoid trying to find loopholes. The spirit of the law is always *stricter* than the letter, at least when it comes to God's commandments. So while people have tried to say "well, the greater principle is to avoid addictive substances, and without caffeine coffee isn't addictive, so I can drink decaf", the official position of the church is that decaf is still coffee and is still covered, and that people who do so are reading in things not written to try to weasel out of actually obeying with a glad heart.
Another is continuing modern revelation--the leaders of the church are entitled to receive ongoing revelation. And they've made it clear in modern days that the core prohibitions are exactly as they read, plus an extension to recreational (legal or not) drugs in general.
On a side note, the Word of Wisdom (the name for the entire set of diet-related commandments) covers more than just prohibitions, although those are the bright-line matters--if you're not doing *at least* that, you can't in good conscience say you're obeying the Word of Wisdom[1]. There is counsel in there to eat a *mostly* plant-based diet, with meat said to be eaten "sparingly, in times of winter or hunger". Other commandments make a good case that *proselyting veganism* ("commanding to abstain from meat") is not in keeping with the will of the Lord--this does not mean that all vegetarians or vegans are sinners *in that regard* (as everyone's a sinner in *some* regard). Different people end up in different places as to exactly what they personally are willing to eat or drink, and we've been counseled to not judge others based on that.
[1] which, to be clear, is not a matter for church discipline. Someone who is not obeying the Word of Wisdom should not hold a temple recommend (there's a question that's literally "Do you obey the Word of Wisdom", but it's all self-certified unless the bishop has personal knowledge on the matter) and probably isn't going to be holding a leadership calling, but that's about it.
I'm going to register a guess that they are prohibited because they might make it look as though you are disobeying the prohibitions, and thus tempt others into disobedience.
Jewish practice (Orthodox?) can be like that, but it doesn't necessarily carry over to other religions.
Many Thanks!
As bell tower says above, it's not caffeine that's prohibited, but the coffee/tea/tobacco plants themselves. The relevant text is that they're "not for the body or the belly".
There's also language in there about using "prudence", i.e. good judgement. Not many things are strictly prohibited. Smith preferred guidance to structures. He hated creeds, preferring to edit as he went along.
The WoW (where the food prohibitions come from) came because he'd have meetings about church matters and the men liked to chew and smoke and whatnot. His wife, Emma, hated cleaning up after them and told him so.
Much of the caffeine in soda (and energy drinks, and no-doze etc) is produced by the decaffeination of coffee. Would this also make the end product that its added to substantially “coffee” enough to also prohibit it?
Thanks!
Is it permissible for Mormons to drink non-caffeinated drinks? If I go by Wikipedia:
"There is generally thought to be no prohibition against drinking herbal tea, coffee substitutes such as Pero and Postum, hot chocolate, malt drinks such as Ovaltine and Milo, mate, or hot water."
So they could go to a coffee shop and get herbal tea?
>hot chocolate
Interesting! The stimulant in cocoa, theobromine, _is_ a bit weaker than caffeine. Structurally, it is caffeine with one methyl group amputated.
Usually go get some treat to eat if not a full meal. For example in Utah you have a lot of cookie places (e.x. Crumbl, dirty dough, crave) and I think there are more soda shops than Starbucks in Utah.
Interesting! A soda shop is a place that only sells soda, no meals or alcohol? Don't think I've ever been to one
Yes, there are popular soda and cookie shops in Utah, but they're not meet-and-greet locations. The most popular soda place is a drive-thru only shop, and the cookie places usually don't have any seating either (or they might have a chair). These aren't locations you'd go on a date or do work on their wifi or whatever. They're not a coffee shop replacement, in other words.
What is the coffee shop replacement then? Or is it still coffee shops?
There are a few standalone shops that kind of serve this function. People do go to coffee shops and get hot chocolate, shakes, soda, etc. There are coffee shops in Utah, since there are plenty of people who drink coffee. For dating, it's a significantly different culture, such that I'm not sure that aspect of coffee shops has as strong a demand in Utah.
The soda fountain used to be very common in the US until the 1950s- either as a counter in a drugstore, or as a standalone establishment. AIUI they would almost always sell soda, ice cream, and drinks that were based on combinations of soda and dairy ingredients (like ice cream sodas, milkshakes, and egg creams). Some of them would also sell sandwiches or snacks/light meals.
I have heard that the ice cream sundae was invented in a place where blue laws made it illegal to sell soda on Sundays, so the drugstore soda fountains would have something to sell.
Are there any well-regarded charities that direct money more-or-less directly to illegal immigrants in the US?
Edit: or immigrants in general
Goodwill industries does a lot of help with job placement and applying for benefits. In practice, they work with immigrant populations when situated in communities where such populations are high.
Source: friend used to work for them.
(Same org but not same as Goodwill thrift stores)
Does anyone know any well-regarded charities that effectively direct funds to projects supporting home invaders in this woman's neighborhood?
The US Government? (For certain values of well-regarded, that is)
I don't believe the US government has any funds that are dedicated to illegal immigrants. It has some funds that are dedicated to parents, or to drivers, or to people in poverty, not all of which illegal immigrants are excluded from. But it doesn't have any that are specifically directed to illegal immigrants, which is what this person is interested in.
I think FEMA has some grants for temporary shelter to house illegal immigrants, but that's probably not what the OP is thinking of, and the amounts involved are tiny.
If you pay taxes, you're already effectively donating to facilitating illegal immigration. The U.S. gov grants billions of dollars to nonprofits aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Follow @RandoLand_us on X for countless examples. That's without even talking about all the social services and state-level programs.
Only in the sense that you're also facilitating basically every activity that goes on inside the United States, both legal and illegal and otherwise.
My point was that none of this money is specifically dedicated to aiding and abetting illegal immigration, the way some of it is dedicated to aiding and abetting people who live in poverty, or aiding and abetting the construction of semiconductor facilities.
Can someone explain the military aspects of the war in Gaza?
I only have two schema for thinking about war. In one, it's a shooting war, where both sides are out in the open and try to kill each other, eg WWI, WWII, Russia/Ukraine, the first "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq War against Saddam's army. But Israel has 100x more firepower than Hamas. If Gaza were like this, Israel should have won a hundred times over by now.
In the other, it's a "counter-insurgency", where one side controls the territory and the other side is a terrorist/guerilla group hidden among the local population, eg the second phase of the Iraq War where American occupiers were trying to stamp out terrorism. But Israel doesn't seem to be occupying Gaza, there's still talk of "invasion" (eg the invasion of Rafah), and some sources say Israeli bombing has destroyed more than half the buildings in Gaza, which seems excessive for ferretting out hidden terrorists.
So Gaza must be something in between, but I don't have a good sense of what. Does Israel know where Hamas is, or not? What prevents them from eliminating them? What is the day of the average IDF soldier in Gaza like? What about the average Hamas soldier? Are they generally shooting at each other, or not? What does Israel hope to accomplish by bombing all those buildings? What is the strategy of both sides?
I will delete any comment that digresses into which side is in the right, find some other comment subthread for that.
Hi Scott, I got here having read "Links for May" and saw you said "and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame, and it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. "
As a matter of fact, this is incorrect as a matter of "IDF Policy" which is separate from "Israeli Government" policy. (You might ask - how do I know?. The answer is that I can easily explain while providing proof of this but would prefer not to in a public forum that can be signal boosted, but if eg Scott or someone else I can verify the identity of and trust wants to verify we can figure something out).
The IDF is (broadly speaking) trying to defeat Hamas (as in, remove its military capabilities and its ability to govern Gaza) while, in this order, (1) not occupying Gaza de-facto, (2) having as few Israeli soldiers killed and (3) having as few Gazan non-combatants killed (and all this while staying in line with international rules of war). It does this by identifying where Hamas combatants and commanders are and then killing them, even if there is damage to buildings or a limited loss of life non-combatant life.
If the IDF had its way, it would just be allowed to continue to operate in Gaza until materially every single Hamas operative, infrastructure and weapon were destroyed or captured.
Obviously, with many in the Gazan street supporting Hamas and with no alternative government this is a very difficult, if not impossible target. However, surprisingly, it seems this is working:
1. Hamas' ability to operate is being reduced daily (one example- no more rockets)
2. Israeli combat losses are about 260 after Oct 7, which is high for Israel but (and I'm not sure here, but its what my research shows) very low compared to other similar engagements
3. The combatant/civilian casualty ratio is best in the world, if you trust IDF numbers (which the IDF does, even if you, the reader, do not)
4. Israel is complying with the rules of war to an extreme extent (this is a very politically charged topic so potentially a reader may disagree but honestly, the level of compliance and legal to enforce this in the IDF is ridiculously high although there isn't any real way for me to prove that to a reader)
If you want analysis around this, see:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-succeeding-gaza
or look for counterterrorist experts on Twitter/X.
However- this (1) this takes a very long time and (2) looks very bad while its happening. Current assessments are that it'll take the IDF at least 6 months, if not more to pursue this strategy.
The "Israeli Government", and specifically, the currently governing coalition, its anyone's guess what their strategy is, and it is pretty clear for Binyamin Netanyahu continuing the war is politically expedient and for some of his far-right partners killing everyone in Gaza is both politically expedient and what they probably actually want to happen.
Thankfully the IDF is a very independent and non-political organization which is filled with professional soldiers and commanders who grew up in it and the government's ability to make it do really bad things is limited. Additionally, the IDF's forces are mostly reservist soldiers, which skew towards left-wing high-tech employees. This is especially true the more you go up into intelligence and strategy.
This is to say - for the IDF to pursue a "bomb as many houses" strategy, it would first face the problem that many of its own officers have a moral objection to that strategy and will follow up on that objection. The IDF teaches its officers to be critical of the system (longer post, no space here) and as many officers are reservists they aren't worried about not getting promoted.
Additionally - the IDF is filled with actually very smart people (so they tend to try to not pursue obviously dumb strategies) and if you track what generals due after they leave the IDF, you'll see that the ones who go into politics tend to be left-wing.
All this to say:
The IDF's strategy is trying to capture or kill Hamas members even at the price of limited civilian deaths and large damage to infrastructure. Its a very difficult task, and its actually doing a pretty good job compared to other similar efforts worldwide. (It may be a bad task to embark on, but thats a different discussion).
Here's a very good video by John Mearsheimer who also said a lot of very relevant (imo) things about the Russian/Ukraine war. He's a political scientist and belongs to offensive realism school of thought. After doing a lot of my own research on both conflicts (I'm a russian israeli with very humanistic views but also open to various interpretations), I found to his work and mostly share his views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfIYtpcBxo&ab_channel=CentreforIndependentStudies
Take this with a grain of salt since I don't have first-handed knowledge, but what makes you believe that it's different from other counter-insurgencies? The crucial thing is that you can't discriminate Hamas from civilians, apart from some exceptional situations.
1) If a Hamas fighter wears a uniform, which makes no sense except for making videos.
2) If a Hamas fighter carries a weapon, which they probably only do if they plan to shoot at you in the next minute. I assume they don't wear their weapons for the remaining 23:59 hours of the day (slightly exaggerated), and have them carefully hidden in some closet/attic, or tunnel if available.
So, no, Israel does not know where Hamas is except for the general heuristic "where everyone else of the Gaza population is". Since this is currently in Rafah, Hamas must also be there. Plus something like "if there is a weapon hidden in a house, then the men in that house are probably Hamas" and "people in tunnels are Hamas".
Now, there is some strategic value for Israel in driving the Gaza population from Rafah to other places. Each time such a displacement happens, it creates the problem for Hamas to bring their weapons (and their hostages) to the new location. They have to do this partially via tunnels and partially by hiding in a crowd of a million people. This is not impossible, but not easy either.
So my model is: the average day of Hamas members is to stay among civilians and do nothing. If there is an opportunity (like a handful of IDF members strolling through the street in a part which is seemingly under control, but where they overlooked a tunnel), then get a few comrades and your weapons and shoot them. But this usually doesn't happen, only once every few days in all of Gaza. So far 272 members of IDF have fallen in combat, a bit more than 1 per day, and such event often bring more than one dead soldier. This list gives you an idea:
https://www.gov.il/en/pages/swords-of-iron-idf-casualties
For IDF days it's probably more mixed. I think that most of them will not go into areas with people at all. But for those who do: Israel's strategy is to announce that a house will be bombed so that people leave it, then it is bombed, and only after that will IDF forces search the debris for weapons and entrances to tunnels and so on. I imagine that this is closest to "contact with enemies" that IDF members usually come. (It's still dangerous because Hamas fighter could launch a surprise attack from a tunnel, one of the rare occasion that they wear their weapons.) And of course some special units actually go into the discovered tunnels and search them, which is by far the most dangerous task.
Overall, I'd describe the conflict as a pissing contest between Israel and Hamas, a game of chicken over who is more willing to cause the deaths of Gazans.
As I see it, Hamas' strategy is the one that's currently controlling the conflict. They're attempting to de-legitimize Israel, and turn the rest of the world against it. To this end, they try to provoke Israel into committing acts that the rest of the world condemns. (And Israel has taken the bait.) This involves committing acts that Israel will feel the need to retaliate for, and then taking Gazans (and Gazan infrastructure like hospitals) hostage to make sure that any Israeli retaliation against Hamas will kill enough civilian Gazans to activate the disgust of outsiders. Also, Hamas took hostages to exacerbate internal Israeli political divisions, and to provide some leverage against IDF operations.
Hamas failed in their maximal objective, which was to mobilize Israel's neighbors into declaring war on Israel. (I think a lot of credit goes to the Biden administration, here.) But the rest of their strategy appears to be working, and they've still got millions of Gazans to put in harm's way.. However, they're starting to run out of non-destroyed Gaza to operate from, and they've only got a limited number of hostages to exchange, so something might change when those factors run out.
I have no idea what a sensible endgame for Israel looks like. I think LearnsHebrewHatesIP did a better analysis of the internal side than I could. I don't think it's possible to prevent Gazans from supporting Hamas or Hamas-like entities, other than by gulag-style repression, ethnic cleansing (forced removal, but to where?), or genocide.
It might just be possible for Israel to pull off some sort of long-term occupation, after killing most of Hamas and destroying almost all of their infrastructure. If the internal Israeli faction of terrorists (as in, rule by terror) is suppressed, and the occupation is relatively peaceful for long enough, maybe Gaza will eventually turn out like the West Bank. (Which is not objectively good, but it's a lot better than Gaza right now.) I think this will fail because Hamas' successor organization will not let it go peacefully for long enough, and I don't think Israelis have, collectively, displayed enough restraint to avoid escalating while retaliating.
Israel does not have 100x Hamas's firepower in the specific sense of infantry soldiers who can go into a building and, if it's full of Hamas soldiers shoot them, but if it's full of civilians probably not shoot them. Taking into account the need to cover their other borders, rotate troops for R&R, and the bit where they can't afford to keep all the reservists deployed for many months on end, it's doubtful they even have 10x advantage in that area.
And when it comes to removing an enemy deeply entrenched in an urban area, anything less than a 10:1 advantage is decidedly underwhelming, and I think looks pretty much like what you are seeing - especially if it's a casualty-averse western army doing the removing. You want to gather as much intelligence as possible before sending your men to kick down a door, and you want to do it at the perfect time with all the right support available. And that will be to kick down a door and clear a building, not "...and if you've got them on the run, chase them into the next building", because you've got no idea what sort of ambush is in the next building.
When it comes to the "demolish buildings and kill everyone in them, military or civilian alike" kind of firepower, yes, Israel has probably a 100x advantage over Hamas. But, while Israel may be waging total war against Hamas, they are not in fact willing to commit actual genocide along the way. So, while they could have destroyed every building in Gaza by now, and killed every person if they wanted, that's not the kind of war they're fighting. They did destroy an awful lot of buildings, particularly in the early weeks of the war, but they also frequently delivered warnings to the people in those buildings(*).
Which spared many civilian lives, but meant that Hamas's soldiers would also escape. Now Israel has to clear them out the hard way, from wherever they've found to hide. Which is to say Rafa, with slow deliberation and with as many civilians as possible enticed to relocate to relatively open camps.
(*) Even if you don't kill the Hamas soldiers, destroying the building denies them a strongpoint, possibly destroys some of their supplies or collapses an entrance to their tunnel network and so forth. If it's also perceived as gratuitously punishing Palestinian civilians I suspect that Israel doesn't mind that so much these days even if that aspect would be a strategic and ethical mistake.
> So Gaza must be something in between
It is indeed something in between, because Hamas is something in between. It is a terrorist group with all the resources and institutions of a (small, failing) state, that fight a guerrilla war that it was planning for years, in an area that it used to control for years. Imagine if imperial Japan didn't have a normal army, and instead put the resources into( preparing the first strike and) making Tokio a Hell to occupy.
> What prevents them from eliminating them?
Hamas members may be found in 3 main kinds of places: tunnels, private houses, or places like hospitals/schools. Private houses may be destroyed if we have enough reason to think that there is a Hamas member there, and not too many civilians (depending on the rank of the Hamas member, and the threshold is not public). Bombing a hospital is of course harder to justify, so it requires ground invasion (which is nightmare, because every house may contain enemy combatants, and be connected to other houses via tunnels). Last are the tunnels - we probably know where some of them are, but destroying a tunnel is not that easy - especially if its enterance is in a hospital. I Personally don't know of any terrorist organization that used such an impressive tunnel system, and it may be part of the difference.
FYI: the ratios of allowable civilian to Hamas deaths are quite extreme. See https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
I agree.
My understanding is that the 15-20 threshold does not mean "don't worry about collateral demage as long a it is below that number" but more like "your commander's commander will anyway have to approve it after consulting a lawyer. He is not authorized to approve more than 20 without his own commander's approval, so don't bother suggesting it unless it is super fucking important"
But yes, 20 is a lot of people
> some sources say Israeli bombing has destroyed more than half the buildings in Gaza, which seems excessive for ferretting out hidden terrorists.
More than that in parts. Northern Gaza is pretty much a moonscape. There are no universities left and most hospitals are gone, except in southern Gaza which is being attacked now.
I think there is precedent for this in history but it would be taking sides to spell it out.
Dresden and Coventry come to mind, though I haven't really seen extensive photography of any of these places to see how the bombings really compare in destructiveness.
One major difference of WW2 era bombing is that it was extremely inaccurate. You just dump bombs in the general area of the target and hope that some of them land nearby (and they usually didn't).
Whereas nowadays, Israel can see everything and hit exactly what they're aiming at in real time, every time.
The US has bombs that can target *a specific floor* of a building, or even blow up a car without hurting pedestrians on the sidewalk. I assume Israel has similar technology (whether they care is a much different question).
> I assume Israel has similar technology (whether they care is a much different question).
How many high-precision munitions Israel has is another matter altogether. If the Ukraine war has taught you anything, let it be that the West is incapable of producing munitions on the scale needed for actual war. I wouldn't be surprised if Israel burned through all the guided bombs in the first few months and is now reduced to dumb weapons systems. Alas, I can't find any good technical reporting on Israel like I can for Ukraine.
That's a good point.
Essentially none of Israel's behavior in this war actually makes sense in a vacuum without considering the extreme amount of pressure from outside groups, many of which consider an actual defeat of Hamas to be problematic or are even outright sympathetic to Hamas. Egypt has leverage due to the peace treaty, America has leverage due to a dependence on its high-tech weaponry, Europe and the UN can cause grave diplomatic damage, et cetera, and all of those powers have things at the top of their minds which are much higher than the welfare of Israel. This in turn has led to such directly self-sabotaging behavior as dropping the tempo of the war during the entire first half of this year, holding off on Rafah for months, taking moral responsibility for providing food, water, electricity, and Internet to a hostile enemy population, agreeing to wildly uneven hostage deals, and so forth.
I don't think America, Europe, or even the UN would consider defeat of Hamas to be problematic. America and Europe have actively aided in attempts to destroy Hamas, and have even ended humanitarian operations when there were worries that members of Hamas might be involved.
I genuinely don't think that's the case.
As far as the UN is concerned, it is definitely on the Palestinian side, which includes at least tolerating and often supporting the various terrorist organizations that actually run that state -- remember, the General Assembly is basically controlled by a consortium of every nasty dictatorship in the world, including Hamas's founders and backers as well as powers such as Russia and China which just enjoy seeing anything West-aligned getting taken down a peg.
America and Europe don't go that far, but even then you have to have noticed a weird preference on that side for "frozen conflicts." Take one side in a fight, deliver soaring rhetoric about how your commitment to them is ironclad, but don't give them enough weapons and freedom of action to win, just to reach a stalemate. If I were to be generous I'd suggest that's because they believe a negotiated compromise is better in all situations than victory, even when the faction that would win is unambiguously on our side and the faction which would lose is unambiguously an enemy. Or, they fear that the enemy side would escalate against the West after taking a genuine loss. There are less generous suggestions I could make here.
You must admit the frozen conflict approach explains a lot, not just about Israel-Palestine, but about the Ukraine-Russia conflict too.
This is totally off base for Ukraine. The US and NATO have done everything they can to support Ukraine short of entering the war themselves. To the extent that they don't have enough material, it's because the West doesn't have any more to give. All of the NATO arms infrastructure has been conditioned by decades of low-intensity counter insurgency fighting. The annual production quota for a lot of US weapons systems is enough for a few weeks in Ukraine. No one in NATO wants to incur the economic and social costs of retooling to a war economy, and no one in the private sector wants to invest billions of dollars in new factories when Ukraine could collapse in a few years. It's not that the West wants a frozen Ukraine-Russia war, that's just the best possible outcome with their current resources.
The only exception to this is very long range weapon systems that can strike deep into the Russian interior. Things like German Taurus missiles or US ATACMs. NATO has been very reluctant to give these to Ukraine, and gives them range-limited export models when they give any at all. I expect these are off the table due to diplomatic channels with Russia and a desire to avoid escalation.
"The US and NATO have done everything they can to support Ukraine short of entering the war themselves."
Then why aren't there hundreds of F-16s and other 4th-generation fighters filling the skies over Ukraine? That's a thing the West could have done; we've got the planes sitting idle and two years is enough time to train Ukrainian pilots and ground crews from scratch, The US and NATO haven't done that, therefore it is false to say that they have done everything they can. And many other examples I could name.
*During the first six months of the war*, the US and NATO did pretty close to everything they could, with the exception that they didn't think the war would last more than six months so they didn't do things that would take six months to pay off - like starting to train Ukrainians to fly F-16s.
Then the Ukrainians started winning fairly spectacular victories; the kind that could have led to Ukrainian tank brigades rolling into Russia if the Ukrainians hadn't decided to stop at the border. At which point the US, and to a lesser extent NATO, dialed the aid back from "do everything we can" to "drip-feed just enough weapons to maintain a stalemate". Which appears to be where we are now.
We have not done everything we could. We have not even done everything that we cheaply could. That is shameful, and it does raise the question of why.
It really does look to me like the Biden administration, and too many other Western governments, think the only morally acceptable or geopolitically prudent way to end a war is with a bloody military stalemate and a cease-fire that merely postpones the inevitable.
I would be careful ascribing some kind of hyper competency to the US military adventurism complex. Afghanistan was pretty much a repudiation of everything the Pentagon and American elites believed about fighting a war. The now ex-President of Afghanistan had a PhD from Columbia. He published *Fixing Failed States.* You can't make this stuff up.
The USAF takes 2-3 years to train pilots before it lets them fly unsupervised. This is under ideal conditions and without a language barrier. Whether Ukraine could have its own functional air force by now is debatable. But it doesn't matter because no one thought of it in time. Another possibility for withholding aircraft is a fear that the Russians will end up stealing our technology. They already have captured/salvaged Abrams tanks and Bradley APCs.
The NATO/US tried to help as much as they could within their ability. Frankly I don't know if there is actually an amount of aid that would prevent Ukraine from losing. Russia has a much larger population and industrial base, which is what matters in a long grinding war of attrition. At this point, I expect the military community has seen the writing on the wall. No one wants to start WWIII over Ukraine, which is what I expect it would take to save it.
In the early days of the war after Russia's failed blitz on Kiev, Ukraine did win some impressive victories. Russia had too few boots on the ground for the amount of territory they controlled. Ukraine was adept at exploiting these weaknesses and punched through the enemy lines in multiple places. But it's a misunderstanding of the strategic situation to think they could have just rolled into Moscow if they wanted to. Overly aggressive thrusts into enemy territory have a large risk of getting surrounded and destroyed without sufficient support, which Ukraine was not in a position to provide. Look at what happened to the Wehrmacht in the Falaise pocket if you want to know what I'm talking about.
The next time a foreign conflict ends in a bitter stalemate, wonder if that's the best anyone could do.
The "desire to avoid escalation" by preventing Ukraine from attacking targets within Russia is exactly what I'm talking about. If you are only allowed to fight the nearby military forces and are prevented from hitting strategic targets in the rear you are not going to win, especially against a much stronger foe. You are only permitted to feed your men into meat grinder trench warfare until, I dunno, Russia gets bored of killing them and gives up?
When I say long range I mean something like 300km within Russia. There is hardly a lack of targets in occupied Ukraine and the near Russian border regions. Not that it would make any difference to the war if Ukraine did have deep strike capability.
The frozen conflict point is an interesting one. Though I don’t think it describes their behavior in Afghanistan, Libya, Kosovo, Syria, and various other conflicts they’ve been involved in. All of them involved the same sort of partial support but some ended more or less successfully than this frozen conflict.
They are against using *any means necessary* to defeat Hamas, which I'm pretty sure is what they meant by that. Obviously there are more... efficient ways of going about this, which they can't really do because it would be a PR disaster for the US.
If the disallowed "any means necessary" includes entering the city where the enemy's remaining armed divisions are, then that is equivalent to not wanting the enemy to be defeated, regardless of rhetoric. I'd also point out the deafening cries from Europe and, increasingly, the US for a permanent "ceasefire," which is also not exactly congruent with victory.
Sure, but then the objection isn't to "defeat Hamas" but rather to "defeat Hamas in a way that involves X number of civilian deaths and Y amount of collateral damage."
Morally, it seems like the civilian deaths and misery would be justifiable if the current campaign was likely to end up with some kind of lasting peace. OTOH, if this is just an extended beatdown to intimidate the Palestinians so the next attack happens in 10 years instead of 5 years, it's not so easy to justify. But I don't think you can evaluate the Gaza war without some idea about what the long-term effects of it will be.
Lasting peace is unfeasible, the legitimate goal that would justify the current campaign is a lasting military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip such that preventing further attacks or arresting a terrorist only take something on the scale of a police raid, rather than a bloody bombing campaign and a months-long invasion.
Five additional years of peace is a pretty good justification, especially when a "lasting peace" right now is quite definitely off the table under any circumstance -- there is no timeline where, left battered but intact with a plausible win under their belt, Hamas evolves into a peaceful organization willing to coexist with Israel. I'd be surprised if they went even a week before launching more rockets.
Indeed, ten years of peace thanks to a thorough beatdown of Hamas would be greatly promising for Israeli-Arab normalization in general, if not resolving Palestine in particular. The Sunni states are clearly not interested in fighting and they're willing to make peace in a context where the Palestinian issue isn't inflaming the world situation, as we saw with the Abraham Accords.
Gaza is a counter-insurgency, you just have a flawed model of "Controlling Territory" where it's always like that in the West Bank.
What you're seeing in Gaza is what "Controlling Territory" has looked like in most counter-insurgencies, Israel **does** control the territory, it doesn't have X soldiers per every Y square kilometers of Gaza but that's completely irrelevant, it has F15s and F16s and Merkavas that can cross all of Gaza in time ranges from 5 minutes to 2 hours.
The problem is, who laid the rule of "Territory is Life, seize my Territory and I will roll up and die on the floor"? States. The obsession with territory is entirely a self-inflicted fetish owing to the origins of States as evolutions of feudal social contracts.
When Israel was fighting states, seizing territories in a Blitz Krieg fashion was devastatingly successful, it acted as a force multiplier for what is - realistically - a nation that would be crushed by any prolonged pre-WW2 conflict of attrition. But armor and modern airpower act as the core primitives from which Israel constructs its military superiority.
But conflicts of attrition are literally what Guerrillas are all about. Israel wants a single grand showdown, a single Battle of Endor, just like the Empire wanted in Star Wars. In contrast, Hamas is the Rebel Alliance, they **would** be crushed in any remotely direct confrontation, but: Catch Them If You Can. Their mere presence challenges Israeli image, their mere existence is a continues win for them and a continues loss for Israel. It's a "Capture The Flag" and the side that has the flag is Hamas, they seek to prolong this state of affairs for as long as possible, possibly forever.
> Does Israel know where Hamas is, or not?
Which Hamas? It's extremely easy to know where a random Hamas militant is: They shoot at Israeli soldiers with AK-47s, Yassin 105s (RPGs) and snipers, and film themselves doing so.
But Yahya Al Sinwar, roughly the equivalent of Yoav Gallant for Hamas? Mohammed Al Daif, also a Yoav Gallant figure? No. Hostages and their entourage of guards? Still no.
What about the political leadership of Hamas, like Ismail Haniyah? My **Impression** is that Israel does know where they are, but the only problem is that where they are is in Qatar, Egypt or Turkey, an assassination in any single one of them would have the effect of pouring all the Middle East's gasoline on an Amazon rain forest fire.
> What does Israel hope to accomplish by bombing all those buildings?
Making Gazans' lives so hell that they join the war on Hamas, here's an investigation by +972 (the telephone prefix for phones in Israel and Palestine) magazine, A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/. The tldr; is that Israel has 4 classification for targets in Gaza, and only 1 or at most 2 of them are actually credibly "This will immediately and physically hurt Hamas if we hit it". The other 2 are so called "Power Targets", that is, a euphuism for bombing civilians in the hope that they will revolt on Hamas.
> What is the strategy of both sides?
The strategy of Hamas is that common meme among online gamers: Objective -> Survive. There is no strategy beyond that, just survive and keep driving Israel crazy, every moment Israel is at war is one more moment it's killing civilians, losing allies, masturbating away its economic might, and drawing Iranian and Proxy-Iranian fire. In addition to deepening social unrest and political polarization. Not to mention the 80K-100K citizens displaced from the North under gunpoint from Hezbollah, and the much smaller number from Gaza's envelope (the area around Gaza which the victims of October 7th were primarily from).
The strategy of Israel is incoherent. The declared aim is "Bring back hostages" AND "militarily dismantle Hamas", both at the same time. That's - in any realistic book - impossible. You will understand Israel's war conduct better if you decompose its state vector as the sum of multiple competing forces:
(1) Netanyahu and his crowd: Those don't want anything except the political survival of Netanyahu and his camp, as well as massive, 100x-if-possible casualties on the Palestinian side. The hostages are a nice-to-have but not a priority.
(2) So called Neo-Zionists and/or Religious Zionists: Those believe in a "Greater Israel", West Bank, Gaza, some of them even Southern Lebanon. To them, the Gaza war is a fundamental vindication for their view: Settlers bring security. The West Bank is settled and didn't have October 7th, Gaza was de-settled and launched October 7th, therefore, the reasoning goes, Settlement Is All You Need. They want to settle Gaza and expel severely reduce the Palestinians from Gaza, they also want to hasten and accelerate the ethnic violence against Arabs in the West Bank, both as payback for October 7th and as insurance policy and a practical demo for what Settlement can do to Israeli security. They tend to actively despise the hostages and their families, inciting police against them behind closed doors, but they don't dare yet to engage with them in the open.
(3) The Pro-War-After-Hostages side: This is not a single political party or side, it's a loose informal coalition of all those who do support the war and do want it to continue but only after whatever it takes for Hamas to return the hostages, including a temporary ceasefire that might last months and releasing Palestinian prisoners. This camp tends to **strongly** call for early elections and to dispose of Netanyahu before continuing the war under a more competent leadership.
(4) The Anti-War side: Those tend to be reviled and surrounded on all sides, but they are rapidly growing. They include orgs like Standing Together and Bereaved Families Forum, their take on October 7th is that it's the natural consequence of occupation and other Israeli policies, and that continuing the war in Gaza is just digging the hole further.
Those 4 camps and potentially more are all riding in a single trench coat which is post-2023-October Israel. More aid into Gaza? That's camp 3 or 4 taking the wheel. Gaza Settlement Conference right after the first ICJ trial of genocide? That's camp 2. "Total Victory" even though the war has dragged on for 8 months? That's camp 1.
Here's a couple of sources on the military side of the war which I'm not very familiar with, I haven't watched most of those things because I'm more focused and interested in the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, but I can vouch for their neutrality from other topics I watched them on, they **might** have been radicalized by this particular war - any one of them at any rate - but that would be surprising news:
(1) Caspian Report, sample video: How Israel became a high-tech military power (and why it failed) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnMKj_VsrAc
(2) Kings and Generals, sample video: Israel invades South Gaza - War Continues - Kings and Generals DOCUMENTARY : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ePNi1_52w
(3) The Armchair Historian, sample video: Israel-Hamas War 2023 Summarized | Animated History : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp-QHzpsjWo
Trust in those sources doesn't mean they won't be biased or misleading, just that they won't be intentionally so. Everything is colored by what sources used to make it, and you may find bias here and there.
At the risk of "digressing into which side is right", I would argue something similar to what Sam Kriss has in his pieces on Gaza: the IDF doesn't really have a clear strategy for victory (Hamas is a little more goal oriented, I think, but their strategy is political rather than military). There's no way of saying that which isn't a condemnation, but it also can't be ignored because tactics are derived from strategy; rational tactics assumes a rational strategy.
Israel's stated goal is to destroy Hamas, which is credible, but their strategy is not really geared to achieve this. The Gaza war is a guerilla war where the occupier is avoiding occupation; hence your confusion, it's a hybrid of the two forms. Normally you need to occupy territory in order to destroy the political infrastructure of an insurgency. Israel is casualty averse and can't afford long wars at a high degree of mobilization, and occupation is manpower intensive and tedious, so they want to avoid this.
Instead, Israel's strategy revolves around raids, temporary occupations and bombing. Charitably, they're targeting the weapons caches that Hamas needs to fight. This is futile given the dense urban environment and Hamas' vast network of tunnels that negates many of Israel's advantages in technology and firepower. Israel has withdrawn from large areas of Gaza that it previously occupied, presumably leaving them for Hamas to re-occupy them.
Historically successful counterinsurgency strategies have revolved around separating the insurgency from the population it draws from. Israel has done this to the extent that it can, but there's really nowhere for the population to go within the small territory of the strip.
Returning to the original point, occupiers in guerilla wars often lose track of what they're doing (cf. The USA in Vietnam). Without clear objectives, their alternative is to wear the insurgency down through attrition. After a certain point, that's just fighting for the sake of fighting, redoubling ones efforts after having forgotten ones aim.
(For the sake of completeness, some will argue that the strategy is to be "bring pressure" on Hamas to release the hostages. If Hamas isn't existentially threatened by Israel's war, then it isn't bringing pressure on them, so the same applies.)
Re Hamas, they have no hope of defeating Israel through force alone, but neither can they be rooted out. Effectively they're waiting the Israelis out, inflicting casualties where they can. Their strategy to the extent they have one is long-term and political: for as long as Israel inflicts disproportionate casualties (whether there is a way to fight that avoids this or not) the international situation will shift against them. Remember, that's not only in true for the West, but even more so in the Middle East. The more violence occurs in Palestine, the more the Middle Eastern governments Israel has been hoping for rapprochement with have to stand against Israel for domestic reasons. Egypt's recent turn to support South Africa's ICJ case could be big on that front, they are by far the most important country for Israel to keep on side. But again, lacking a clear military objective (other than survival) in its own way this too is violence for the sake of violence.
This all makes sense.
So perhaps the optimal thing for Israel to do is to carry on for a few more weeks or months, give the whole strip a quick once-over, degrade Hamas's capabilities as much as possible in that time, and then fuck off back home?
Getting rid of Hamas entirely isn't possible, nor is ensuring the election of a new peace-loving pro-Israeli government in Gaza. But what they can reasonably hope for is to massively degrade Hamas's capabilities while teaching a lesson that any future attacks on Israel will be met with a massively punitive response.
Getting rid of Hamas entirely isn't possible, but a long-term occupation of the Gaza Strip (à la West Bank) should be, if costly.
What they have to do is destroy the tunnels and take control of the border to prevent future imports of weapons and equipment. No new weapons, no new tunnels = Hamas loses.
"degrade Hamas's capabilities as much as possible in that time, and then fuck off back home"
Sure it makes sense. So why is Israel still in Gaza?
Because it doesn't make sense. "Degrade Hamas's capabilities, and then fuck off back home", was Israel's policy from 2006 to 10/6/2023. They called it "mowing the grass". That's how they got 10/7/2023.
They're not mowing the grass any more. They're rooting out the weeds.
The policy of the Israeli government prior to 10/7/2023 was to assume that Hamas didn’t want to attack Israel. Hamas has not been coy about expressing their views--their 2017 charter said “armed resistance” was the “strategic choice”--but apparently the Israeli government preferred to believe otherwise.
Negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians, if even possible (Hamas hinted at a willingness to accept a two state solution in its 2017 charter, but I don’t know whether it actually would), would mean Israel giving up territory that it now controls. On the other hand, <em>not</em> having a peace agreement means that Israel is at war, and needs to remain on a war footing even if no fighting is happening at the moment. But if you are an authoritarian, you don’t have to choose between those two options. Instead, you can live in a fantasy world where no choice is necessary. If something dramatic happens that makes the fantasy unsustainable (like the Oct. 7 attack), you then pivot to arguing that you must remain in power to protect the country from the mess you created.
Hamas and/or PIJ has attacked Israel on multiple occasions in every calendar year since Hamas took power in Gaza. It is not plausible that Israeli government policy assumed that "Hamas didn't want to attack Israel".
Israeli government policy assumed that, so long as they maintained strict control of the border and periodically "mowed the lawn", Hamas's attacks would remain tolerably ineffective. That's what lead to 10/7.
I've used the term "ethnic cleansing" a lot regarding this war, and I'm not convinced anything else is going on. I apologize if, accordingly, you need to delete said comment, but I believe the military goals of ethnic cleansing differ from those of both conventional and counter-insurgent warfare, so this distinction is relevant.
Israel's government wants to depopulate Gaza, reasoning that Palestinians living there are all Hamas supporters who can't fight back if they're dead, and desires the land for resettlement of Israelis. It's not governing anything, just killing and killing.
With regard to Rafah, international and domestic pressure seems to have forced it earlier in the conflict to allow people in the rest of Gaza somewhere to flee, which was the city in the southernmost portion of the strip, furthest from Israeli population centers. But it's been going on for months, the IDF isn't mutinying, Israel's neighbors aren't invading, and the US is giving Israel a blank check, so Netanyahu and his government are trying to finish it.
At the risk of posting in troll thread, what exactly is making you believe that destroying Hamas is not the main objective? By the same reasoning, you could call the British bombing campaign on WW2 Germany "genocide" (unlike Israel, they were not even dropping leaflets).
Resettlement suggestions appear from time to time on the margins of Israeli society, but I have yet to hear one from any IDF top brass. Not to mention that 30K of 1+ million in half a year does not make a very successful genocide campaign.
Just as a nitpick, a lot of ethnic Germans were resettled forcibly after the war.
I believe that 30k in one year is by this point a significant undercount, as the statistic originates with reports from Gaza's (now largely destroyed) hospital network, which is no longer able to provide updates.
Britain did bomb German cities during World War II, but did nothing remotely like the deliberate targeting of hospitals seen in this conflict. Britain did not evacuate cities at gunpoint, either. And when Britain (or even America, in the Pacific War, which imo had a way more brutal bombing campaign) did take territory, it set up its own occupying administration, instead of expelling the population.
They are already not listing names. Nothing would keep them from counting the dead in the rubble they've cleared and extrapolating accordingly. The idea that the Gaza health ministry is undercounting dead is one of the most inane theories I've heard over the last couple years, on par with Krokus City Hall being a Ukrainian op.
Maybe the Nazis didn't use hospitals as barracks? It's not often that I end up handing it to the Nazis, but sometimes you get to appreciate things in comparison. (Well, not counting the fact that they did some forcible euthanasia in asylums.)
Because even if "Hamas" was destroyed, another equivalent group would just replace them unless the conditions changed. And Israel is completely uninterested in improving the situation down there. So that only leaves them with one method of solving this problem.
What is your theory for why Israel is not currently at war with the PA in the West Bank?
The Marshall Plan was proposed in 1947. Before that, the most widely discussed (I think?) proposal was the Morgenthau Plan, which ended up ditched as Hoover realized that it would cause half Germany to starve (and Europe to be overrun by the Soviets). Give the Israelis some time.
I have to agree. What is to prevent a new "Samah" party from arising with the same goals as before, but without Israeli hostages and without having attacked Israel?
Except you can't just _assert_ they have only one method, you have to show that they're doing it, which you have not.
>So Gaza must be something in between, but I don't have a good sense of what. Does Israel know where Hamas is, or not? What prevents them from eliminating them? What is the day of the average IDF soldier in Gaza like? What about the average Hamas soldier? Are they generally shooting at each other, or not? What does Israel hope to accomplish by bombing all those buildings? What is the strategy of both sides?
I will delete any comment that digresses into which side is in the right, find some other comment subthread for that.
I think the big think to understand is there is no clear boundary between "Hamas fighter" and "civilian". I tis a continuum, where people can be on a wide array of involvement, and so you really need to go building to building and root out all the infrastructure/weapons/traps/etc, and then shoot people who try and stop you. There isn't special "Hamas goggles" you can wear.
Maybe tangential to your question, but this article describes how the lack of a post-war plan means that the Israeli army is fighting to retake the same areas over and over.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-chief-said-to-tell-pm-that-army-fighting-again-in-parts-of-gaza-due-to-lack-of-strategy/
That is, the IDF is letting Hamas back into areas as they move on, which will surely drag things out a bit.
My understanding is that Hamas is following the 9/11 playbook here. After the 2001 attacks, Al-Qaeda saw significant recruitment to their cause. This was in part because they were able to demonstrate a 'successful' attack, but also because it provoked an American response localized to the ME that affected previously unaligned parties. But they didn't just attack once and then disappear. They continued fighting using standard asymmetric warfare tactics, like hiding among the civilian population, not using official uniforms, etc. This ensured that the US backlash produced civilian casualties, angered unaligned parties, and produced continuous recruitment opportunities. By the time the US pulled out of Afghanistan, soldiers were fighting people who weren't even born when 9/11 happened.
In the Arab communities, there have always been disparate views on the Palestinian conflict. Provoking Israel to invade and bomb Gaza neatly consolidated many of those factions/viewpoints toward Hamas' way of thinking. The argument Hamas is making isn't to the US or Israel, really, but to other Arabs. The point Hamas are trying to make is to say, "Look at what's happening in Gaza. You can't negotiate with Israel, they just want to take the land. The only way to win this is through armed resistance in asymmetric warfare."
To make that argument, they only have to be seen still fighting in Gaza. They don't have to be winning, just still fighting. They're counting on Israel to kill non-combatants, which will further promote recruitment to Hamas. If someone's grandma dies, Hamas is there saying, "Do you want revenge? We're the only ones fighting against the people who killed grandma." When Israel 'finishes up' in the north and moves south, Hamas has an incentive to pop back up in the north to demonstrate that they haven't been beaten.
This also means that the Israeli strategy is as doomed to failure as the American strategy in Afghanistan early in that war. A direct military invasion is a necessary component of Hamas' strategy. The whole point of 10/7 was a recruitment drive, and that's what they're getting right now - not just in Gaza but throughout the Arab world. There are almost certainly more Hamas and Hamas-aligned groups today than at this time last year, or even last month. The current war will have long-term effects on people throughout the region as a down payment on recruitment for the next 20 years. In short, Hamas is capitalizing on cycles of violence to achieve their political objective - not of peace and security in Gaza - but of growing their movement.
More concerning is how well the pyrrhic backlash strategy of major terrorist attacks seems to work. If a malicious actor can manage to provoke a stronger power with a sufficiently powerful single event, they can use the reaction as a powerful recruitment tool for years to come. This is because the single event is only unforgettable in the minds of sympathizers, while the ongoing reaction is played continuously for neutral and hostile actors.
A better response to both 9/11 and 10/7 might have been an extended policing action. Both CIA and Mossad have reputations. If they were able to infiltrate and destroy individual terrorists cells in highly targeted ways, they could reduce the incentive to join terrorist orgs, eliminate the perception that terrorists are 'fighting battles' (since there wouldn't be pitched battles to fight), and demonstrate to the victims of the attack that they're responding appropriately. Indeed, in making it a police action, they would reduce the clout given to the terrorist organization for conducting the attack and thereby reduce the incentive for conducting future attacks to drive recruitment.
> Both CIA and Mossad have reputations. If they were able to infiltrate and destroy individual terrorists cells in highly targeted ways, they could reduce the incentive to join terrorist orgs
That might work in areas that are part of Israel proper or at least actively occupied by Israel. It doesn't work in pre-war Gaza because in pre-war Gaza, Hamas was the police and they weren't particularly keen to help Israel arrest their terror cells.
IDK what's feasible or not. I do know both organizations have conducted high-profile killings of major figures in hostile territory on numerous occasions. Maybe that's not reliable enough to, say, put out a hit on the organizers of 9/11 and 10/7 to get the kind of results that would dissuade people from conducting that kind of attack. It's an empirical question, and one that's not possible for someone like me who is outside the intelligence community to assess.
It can't be worse than the military responses that enhance recruitment for these terrorist organizations. It's an ingroup/outgroup problem, where people will rally against the outgroup if they perceive themselves as part of the ingroup that's under attack. And the violent reaction of major powers to this kind of attack absolutely reinforces that strategy. It's ironically inviting this kind of attack, but only after we get back to peacetime and the terrorist recruitment drive is over. That makes peace impossible. So if it's a question of an imperfect solution versus a counterproductive one, I say why not try the experiment? Or maybe anything other than what we know doesn't work.
Israel originally invaded Northern Gaza and then Khan Yunis. During this period, they briefly occupied some of the territory while trying to destroy infrastructure and clear things out but mostly set up on the ground to the extent necessary to search through specific sites. Otherwise, they stationed themselves and resources outside of harm's way (at first, within protected areas of Gaza, and now, inside Israel).
In February, Israel left all of Gaza except for a small road they constructed which bisects Gaza between the North and the South. Prior to this, Israel had searched through/destroyed infrastructure in all of Gaza except for Rafah (where nearly all Palestinians are seeking refuge) and two former refugee camp villages in central Gaza. Since then, Israel has conducted a small number of raids/missions in areas they previously left but mostly are not in Gaza anymore.
To enter an area of Gaza, a huge amount of work needs to be done.
First, it's targeted from the air to destroy existing infrastructure, followed by being swept by vehicles for IEDs, then plowed through with infantry, etc., all of which requires significant protective and logistical support.
Hamas mostly isn't fighting the IDF head-on.
There are two specific strategies at play.
A large chunk of Hamas fighters flee and migrate to areas where they are out of harm's way. Another group will hide, often in tunnel shafts, until they can fire at IDF soldiers.
Sometimes Israel specifically launches a raid into an areas where Hamas fighters are actively gathering, in which case they engage in a firefight (mostly, they are destroyed with things other than guns though)
Israel has essentially no tolerance for dead soldiers. It's not impossible for the IDF to control territory, but it's more dangerous than what they want to sacrifice, so they essentially try to minimize territorial control and actually being visible in Gaza, to the extent possible. If they need to control territory or be visible, they use a huge amount of support to protect themselves, which is very costly.
Because Israel finds it too dangerous to hold territory, once they sweep through an area, they give it back, which is then taken over again by a degraded Hamas (there is nobody else vying for control and Hamas still has weapons/support, so they de-facto control any territory Israel leaves).
The other aspect of this is that Israel isn't trying to remove Hamas from power. It would be possible for Israel to sweep through an area and then hand it off to a new power. But Israel doesn't want to provide any alternative form of government to Hamas, because they are worried that any alternative to Hamas will make a Palestinian state more likely to materialize, which they view as a much worse alternative to Hamas.
This war is going catastrophically bad for Israel based on what I think they should be trying to achieve (removing Hamas from power), solely due to Netanyahu's objectives being very different than mine. FWIW, Netanyahu's objectives are not aligned with the IDF or the majority of Israelis, but unfortunately, what he says, goes.
>"Israel has essentially no tolerance for dead soldiers."
Do you have a good explanation for this? Obviously any army wants to protect its own soldiers, but typically that desire will be balanced against the military objectives that justify the soldiers being there in the first place. Is it because the various factions of Israeli leadership can't agree on what the military objectives are, so avoiding dead soldiers ends up being the only objective by default?
Maybe because of the mandatory service. The soldiers are not citizens from different class and different parts of the country that we care about in the abstract . Those are our literal friends and family members.
Is "we" here elites or rich people or what?
Sorry. I meant Israelis, and thought it would be understood from the context that I am one
I suspected this is what would happen, but do you have any sources for this? The US media doesn't really have any good sources inside Gaza, and non-paywalled Israeli media (i.e. Jerusalem Post) seem mostly focused on the Israeli reaction and world reaction to the Gaza operation. What sources am I missing?
I suspect the "day in the life" situations will be hard to come by and/or anti-inductive on the open internet, for reasons between "this would give information to the other side and make it easier for them to counter our tactics" and "the people actually doing this day-to-day are not looking at this particular part of the internet, because they have more urgent things to do with each hand".
Just an observation, but I think people are wayyyy overindexed on 'AI taking all teh jobs' and way underindexed on 'middle class jobs in rich countries are gradually offshored in the coming decades'. Take a look at the careers page of any mid-sized to large company, and you'll see that a lot of software development, back office, and other traditionally middle class jobs are now located in India, Eastern Europe, or to a lesser extent Latin America. I almost don't know of any company of a decent size that doesn't have some of their programming functions done in India now.
I'm aware that this was attempted in the early 2000s and didn't work out, but I'm seeing the shift happening now. Remote work has undoubtedly accelerated the change- if you can program remotely from within the US, why can't the company just hire remote developers in Poland who are willing to work US hours, and save themselves a bunch of money? But it's not just software, it's really any office job, including lower-wage stuff like middle and back office functions. Anyways, this is what I'm seeing in corporate America and I feel like this is very underdiscussed, especially compared to AI hype. Of course some jobs cannot be done remotely- for those of us with a couple few decades of working life left, might be worth considering what those are
I am unable to find any good data on rates of white collar jobs that are offshored. Do you have any?
Right now, unemployment in the US is at historical lows and has been for a long time. If offshoring of jobs is picking up, it's likely because there are more jobs in total and not Americans losing jobs. This seems like a good indication for the economy to me.
Also remember that offshoring is done to reduce costs, which will, in the long run, produce surplus for US consumers (through cheaper goods and services). While its easy to see an office worker who lost their job to someone overseas, it's much harder to see the benefits of reduced costs which are spread across many people.
My observation was meant to be descriptive and not normative. With that being said, your last paragraph is so ridiculous it's hard for me to grock that people actually believe this kind of thing. Can you think through what might be some of the consequences to the US economy of not having high-end employment? Advanced industries?
What have the consequences been of US farming employment dropping by 90% from its peak? "This time it's different" Why? What about white collar jobs makes them different when they are eliminated (either through outsources or technological progress)?
Outsourcing is downstream of other political, economic, and technological dynamics. Labor for some function can be performed more cheaply elsewhere, so the labor is outsourced. But the effect that has can only be determined by know *why* the labor is more expensive in the US.
There may be negative consequences of complete industries being outsourced out of the US. You only asked about specific jobs. But again, to understand the consequences we have to know why the industry was outsourced (though i can't think of a single *industry* that has been outsourced or eliminated from the US, mostly specific parts of an industry or a job function within an industry).
Low value manufacturing was outsourced because the products are low value and don't support the necessary wages in the US. Bring back those jobs would lead to low wages for those workers or those goods becoming more expensive - neither of which is a good outcome.
Cutting edge microchip processing was "outsourced" because firms outside of the US developed new technologies that were better. US firms and US consumers have greatly benefited from those developments. Bringing that manufacturing to the US is hard, as we are seeing, and may be a net positive for the US (we'll see).
It's also hard to define outsourcing. Many people used to use iTunes to listen to music, but now they use Spotify. So they went from a product made by a US firm by (primarily) US developers to a product made by a Swedish firm made by non-US developers. Is this outsourcing? Should the US have put tariffs on Spotify? Should we have subsidized development of iTunes?
I doubt any of this is persuasive to you. And it probably doesn't even address your comment, I am mostly just adding more of my thoughts. Overall, I think it's impossible to say what the impact of your hypothetical is, the economy is too dynamic and has proved very resilient to this type of change in the past.
We still have the same amount of agricultural output as when the sector employed vastly more workers (well, actually probably a lot more output). That's not at all the same thing as not having food grown in the US at all! Also, agriculture was obviously never a highly skilled technical field- I would like to preserve that knowledge & human capital here in the US.
I'm not into preserving low-value manufacturing, but I am into retaining high-value manufacturing. To your point, cutting edge microchip processing was outsourced because other governments sank investment into attracting the sector via a very deliberate state intervention strategy- not some kind of Adam Smith vision where different countries are good at different things.
Is there any industry or technical knowledge that we shouldn't outsource in exchange for lower prices for consumers? How about if all of our tech giants, Meta, Google et al were Chinese and the US had as any many smart software engineers as say Peru or Morocco has today- do you think that would be a good trade for the US? How about fighter jet technology- currently the US is still the global leader, you'd be OK if another country took all of our technical knowhow here and we lost the ability to build the F-35, you think that'd be OK? If Wall Street closed up shop and all of the world's major banks were Chinese- totally cool with you? US consumers could have lower credit card & ATM fees, in exchange the yuan is the world's reserve currency and Wall Street is now located in Beijing- sound like a good deal? C'mon man.
Countries become rich & powerful by leading the technological frontier of key industries. Giving that away for lower prices is insanely destructive.
(Spotify is a US-listed company with the large majority of its employees here. The World Wide Web was invented by a Brit working on a European scientific project but who commercialized it and made themselves the world technology leader, and became insanely wealthy in the process? Obviously not Europe. That's all I care about)
>i can't think of a single *industry* that has been outsourced or eliminated from the US
Machine tools https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-happened-to-the-us-machine-tool
> why can't the company just hire remote developers in Poland who are willing to work US hours, and save themselves a bunch of money?
on one hand: same reason it failed in the early 2000s: different cultures. (managers and engineer already don't understand each other. If all your managers are american, and all your engineers are polish, the friction increases significantly).
on the other hand: there are many people who work remotely, then move to a cheaper place, and continue to work remotely for the same brutto income. This really does happen (at least in my circles, which is corporate europe, not america). But in these cases, there is no cultural barrier to begin with.
As my original comment notes, hiring white collar workers offshore cannot 'fail' because that's the reality of what's happening now. This is not a projection about the future, it's a statement about the present day. So clearly the cultural issues are not enough of a barrier
I've worked for multiple big tech companies, and they have had offices in many other countries including India and Eastern Europe for a long time now. But these offices have grown in the context of the US, Canada, and Western Europe offices also growing, not really in terms of laying off people in high wage countries and replacing them with people in cheap countries.
I think what's actually going on, at least in the software industry, is that investment and hiring are intensely cyclical. This is probably the third big wave in my career of all the big tech companies having at least partial hiring freezes and a lot of startups shutting down and not being
replaced, leading to a bleak job-hunting situation for unemployed programmers.
I found an interesting video that shows the ten largest companies in the world from 1980 to 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0
It is striking how recent the rise of the tech giants is. As recently as 2009, there was only one tech company in the group: Microsoft. By 2021, there were eight, assuming we count Tesla and TSMC as tech companies.
IBM and Cisco etc. were there too.
It was interesting watching Japan briefly dominate the top ten, and later on China made some incursions into the top ten. But US companies kept coming back. At least when it comes to acquiring market capital the US companies seem to dominate. What are the factors that allow this? Our currency stability? Large pools of investment capital? I wonder what it would have looked like if we had run that from 1900 onward?
My guess is that at least part of the answer is a large, wealthy home market without much in the way of internal trade barriers, whether formal or informal. You can set up in the US and serve a population of more than 300 million consumers using a consistent set of laws (mostly) and a single language (mostly) before thinking about doing anything internationally. That means that by the time a US company has to deal with international issues at all, it is already large.
>You can set up in the US and serve a population of more than 300 million consumers using _a consistent set of laws (mostly)_ and a single language (mostly) before thinking about doing anything internationally.
[emphasis added]
This is a large chunk of why I am unenthusiastic about "states' rights". ( I tend to phrase it as the parts of the US being too tightly coupled for large interstate differences to be reasonable or realistic, red/blue differences notwithstanding. )
What's really remarkable about their growth is that the underlying technology that pushed them to the top has a very small footprint in many cases. Facebook, if we're looking at the minimum size needed to run it, could have been an extremely small company making ludicrous profits. It, and many of the other tech giants, grew *after* their huge success and then spent the money doing other things. Google's moonshot research group, or Facebook's Metaverse, and many of them have added thousands of employees with questionable worth to the core organization.
A Google with just the original search engine is a viable company that's a small fraction of the size of the current Google but makes similar amounts of money (maybe much more without the added costs).
It makes sense that companies try to grow by spreading into areas adjacent to their original core expertise. And Google, to take one example, has certainly tried to do that many times. But they have never found anything even remotely as lucrative as search. I suppose it is to their credit that they are willing to shut down these failed expansions eventually, rather than continuing to pour money into them indefinitely.
Perhaps the recently announced layoffs and stock buybacks are signs that they are shifting course, delivering profits to shareholders, and refocusing on their profitable segments.
Re last paragraph: I your view, what incentivised Google to keep adding stuff without additional value (insofar as it was without additional value back then, too)? What keeps Google from pruning some of its useless branches? Especially considering that Google is not exactly known for keeping all products alive indefinitely: https://killedbygoogle.com/
For a while, there was a sense that Google was willing to hire any sufficiently good software engineer. Not so much because they could use the engineers most efficiently, but mostly because it would keep the engineers from working for a competitor.
Google seems unwilling to accept that it's time to grow up and be a blue-chip company with a steady search business that can produce hefty dividends to its stockholders. And, yes, maintain a large and vibrant R&D department, probably more so than most blue-chip companies, but consider e.g. General Electric in its heyday, or Xerox's PARC.
If they're not willing to do that, if they're going to continue to think of themselves as the scrappy startup that is going to Change The World, then they've got to keep adding stuff - preferably innovative stuff that they can imagine will change the world, but enough of it to soak up literally all of that search money, because what else are they going to do with it? Pay it out in *dividends*, like grandpa's stodgy blue-chip?
OK, it turns out that Google/Alphabet announced its very first ever dividend a couple weeks ago. I suspect that was a big psychological step for them, and it will be interesting to see how it happens next.
Google with large profits has a few options: 1) profits for shareholders/owners, 2) investments in the market (or buying other companies), or 3) creating its own internal investments in potential but untested ideas (like the original search).
It turns out that Google had such incredibly high profits that it could essentially do all three at the same time. In fact, the profits were so high that it could do all three with basically no pressure not to, or to limit the extremes.
All companies have pressure to expand with more employees - limiting current employee stress, fixing problems, hiring your brother's son, whatever. Most companies have natural limits that push the other direction, such as reduced profits or even bankruptcy. When a company has such huge profits as Google and those limits are nearly impossible to reach, it leads to filling many more of those positions no matter how careful the company tries to be. An intelligent Google, which seems to be the case, aims for things that may pay off in the future at higher rates than if the money was just invested in the stock market. That's a decent long term business strategy, though it's not possible to accurately gauge the real benefits since every attempt may fail. Comparing the potential for gain compared to search is difficult, because search was so unusually profitable. There are very few businesses in the history of the world that reached even close to how profitable search has been, so my paragraph holds even if Google's research divisions or whatever had been very successful.
Google has been pruning things, just slower and later than most companies would. Google's leadership is very intelligent, and they can see some areas are never going to pan out, so they can be removed. The incentives are just lined up such that doing so is harder and therefore happens less and later, when it's more obviously wasteful or harmful.
> An intelligent Google, which seems to be the case, aims for things that may pay off in the future at higher rates than if the money was just invested in the stock market.
Exactly. Effectively they are angel investors in their own internal startups. Most of these startups will fail, as they would externally.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts
I watched all the youtube finalists for the first time. I was surprised at so many of them being pretty mediocre.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eurovision+2024
An overview of the Eurovision songs-- official video versions. I missed the show broadcast. Are the official videos much different?
Here we have the tradition of rock songs having evocative lyrics rather than exact meanings.
Some were excellent, but I think the majority were no more than fair to middling. It might be mostly that it's really hard to write and produce an excellent song, and for all I know, a lot of countries aren't knocking themselves out to win.
Are there themes that show up in specific years? Are there trends with some types of songs becoming more or less common?
There were a remarkable number of "I've gotta be me" songs.
Albania--Titan in Disguise-- not bad but there's a lot like that
Armenia-- Folk themed, Get Up and Dance, cheerful and fun
Austria-- Rum de dum dum, We Will Rave-- another anthem about not being broken by the end of a relationship. It looks like the video might have a story line, but I can't figure out what it is. Why is the body-building there?
Australia-- It's Raining Love, we may be dreaming but the atoms are awake-- vague New Age stuff, unambitious musically, but it's restful
Azerbaijan-- The sound was a little muddy and I didn't catch all the lyrics. I liked the blue fire in the rocks effect.
Belgium-- Are You Still Playing the Game?-- apparently something is wrong, but I can't figure out what. There's a pretty young man
Croatia-- Rim Tim Tagi Dim-- fun and energetic. Has a coherent story line
Cyprus-- Liar-- a woman is angry at a man who chose someone else-- best dancing so far, music better than the previous but not all that great
Czechia-- Pedestal-- woman ends a bad relationship, is planning to value herself more. It's not a bad message, but I'm feeling like I'm being lectured.
Denmark-- Shouldn't be so hard, like breathing under water-- woman looking a t a bad relationship-- emotionally complex, good singing, good lyrics
Estonia-- Needed subtitles, but cheerful and energetic
Finland-- No Rules-- I'm torn because total freedom from rules isn't a good idea, but the song is a decent (indecent?) representation of a mood
France-- Mon Amour-- a man wants to revive a relationship that's probably over-- operatic and well-done
Germany-- Who am I fighting for?-- a man sings about desperation-- this song hits emotionally
Georgia-- Rising from the ashes-- Did we build empires just to watch them burn?-- the best "I will prevail" anthem so far
Italy-- I Roll Like Dice-- I think it's a woman trying to restart a relationship, but it's hard to tell what's going on-- striking voice and good use of variety
Iceland-- I Feel It Coming-- a woman who's scared but excited about what might be a good relationship-- the fear is in the lyrics, the excitement is in the music-- good tune, I hear echoes of Motown
Ireland-- Doomsday Blue-- I have no idea what this is about, but I appreciate that little echo of "They're Coming to Take Me Away"-- I'm not the audience for this one
Israel-- I'm still broken from this hurricane-- emotionally effective lyrics and singing
Italy-- La Nola-- needed subtitles, but enthusiastic and varied. Cross between near-rap and opera
Latvia-- Hollow-- The singer is real, and the world seems so fake. Good presentation. This is probably worth discussion-- I'm used to seeing this theme handled through science fiction, but it's literal in the song.
Lithuania-- Luktelk-- needed subtitles, but enjoyable-- seems to be about being on your own side "I'll never let you down, I know you're a fighter"-- better music than most
Malta-- Got Me On, But the Blame's on You-- scary, sexy woman-- consent is dubious, but the song is well presented
Moldova-- I Want You to Be Happy-- choral singing, and I couldn't make out most of it-- not bad, not wonderful
Netherlands-- Europa-pa-- cheerful silly song about liking Europe, ends with a sad tribute to his parents-- the singer was disqualified, and the punishment may be excessive, but I don't think the song is a great loss
Poland-- I'm the One Who Built the Tower-- another song about having capability to run one's own life-- chipper tune, pleasant enough
Portugal-- Grito-- needs subtitles, but the best singing I've heard so far. It's gorgeous.
San Marino-- Give Me a Reason to Want to Change-- scaring the straights, defeating the straights-- It isn't spectacular, but it made me realize that this is the first song with actual rock music
Serbia-- Ramonda-- Something is missing from the world, it can barely be found-- this is the loveliest so far
Slovenia-- Veronika-- Scary mermaid, genuinely eerie
Spain-- Picture-Perfect Vixen-- empowered woman who's a performer with an enthusiastic audience of mostly older people
Sweden-- Unforgettable-- from the point of view of a man who's hooked on a vampire or somesuch and he loves it-- this song isn't a good influence, but you could dance to it
Switzerland-- I Broke the Code-- operatic song about becoming oneself. Impressive production, but I don't think the music is very interesting.
Ukraine-- I'm Not Holy, I'm Alive-- needed subtitles, but some of the best singing and music. Classical with some rap. They actually look strong instead of just singing about being strong.
United Kingdom-- Would You Make Me Dizzy From Your Kisses?-- A man looking forward to delirious times with someone-- not magnificent music, but pleasant
Norway-- Ulveham-- needed subtitles-- I'd seen a subtitled version previously, and I wonder whether it was based on an existing fairy tale or ballad. I don't know whether I'd lost focus, or whether the music just isn't interesting.
My off-the-cuff low-effort takes, of the finalist performances, in order:
1 - Sweden - OK song, but rubbed me the wrong way.
2 - Ukraine - Nice song, didn't like the rap much but it was OK, cool armor, girl on hill in robes and metal thing in hand gave me a vibe of "The Motherland Calls". Probably intentional.
3 - Germany - Soulful but boring. The lyrics are ostensibly about the rat-race, but also work as an indictment of totalizing ideologies, which is probably unintentional but still cool.
4 - Luxembourg - OK, poppy, but doesn't stand out.
5 - Netherlands - It's interesting how the talk before the show assumed that he'd been removed for being anti-Israel, and I suppose technically we still don't know if that's the case.
6 - Israel - Good song, nice voice, they look like they came out of a Stargate. It's a shame about the censorship, but I agree that I'd rather keep politics out of my song contests, because it's a distorting force, just as elsewhere in this open thread we discuss the effect on literature. The audience reaction sounded odd, and I wonder if they were editing out the booing.
7 - Lithuania - Eh song, inoffensive but soothing. I like hearing other languages.
8 - Spain - OK song, older singer, simple message, nothing wrong with it. I saw a description that described it as "camp", and I don't know what they meant.
9 - Estonia - Cool folk-rap fusion, but not quite to my taste. I love the non-Indo-European language exposure.
10 - Ireland - Evil witch breakup song. Good music, great presentation, but while I see people talking about positive messages in the lyrics, to me it reads very very differently. I was amused that the clip they kept showing could easily have had Force Lightning edited into it. Also I would appreciate a signed statement (in blood, if necessary) that there were no attempts to influence the audience through magic.
11 - Latvia - Decent ballad, goofy presentation, but I liked how the lyrics can be read as being against ideological recruitment.
12 - Greece - Silly pop-rap, but at least in was in the native language.
13 - United Kingdom - Meh boy band. Gayness of the choreography was off the charts (not a complaint, just an appreciation of Olympic-level performance).
14 - Norway - Metallic, fairy-tale lyrics in the native language, great presentation. Pretty good, but I feel like I should like this more than I do. It seemed more like an actual concert than most, with the musicians seemingly very into their performance.
15 - Italy - Meh, musical native language rap. Body-positive backup dancers were an interesting tactic.
16 - Serbia - OK, melancholy goth ballad.
17 - Finland - OK, silly pop song, good theatricality. Giant egg and pyrotechnics! It looked like the T-shirt was "pre-blurred", instead of what they did for the video.
18 - Portugal - Meh. I respect the effort, at least, but they seemed way too serious somehow.
19 - Armenia - Good, extremely enthusiastic folk, but self-conscious, self-referential, and almost solipsistic?
20 - Cyprus - Eh, very American production, maybe looked like a slightly sexed-up Taylor Swift?
21 - Switzerland - Good, theatrical, draggy, polymorphic, at one point it almost seemed like it turned into a James Bond song.
22 - Slovenia - Meh song, great singer. Literally operatic vocals, but they weren't incorporated into the song itself. Skinsuit and mostly naked backup dancers writhing in skinsuits, is not what I consider adequate presentation. (All hail Lordi.)
23 - Croatia - YES, closest thing to good I've heard so far, kinda folk fusion, with audience participation. Folk visuals and enthusiasm and fire.
24 - Georgia - OK pop song, good voice. Decently cool visuals and costuming, and fire. I liked some of the lyrics: "Put out the fire, put out the fire, did we build empires, just to watch them burn?"
25 - France - OK standard love song, great vocals and great range. Impressed that he backed off of the microphone briefly. But looks like he was wearing super-loose-weave muslin or something.
26 - Austria - OK technopop. Bad lyrics: "Rum-de-dum-dum-da" is what Winnie the Pooh sings because he has too little brain to think of anything better. The video made me think of a ST:TNG episode where Dr. Crusher goes on a first contact mission to the Planet of the Space Sluts, and gets knocked on the head and goes native. The performance made me think of Barbarella.
Switzerland won. And as you said, not bad but not impressive. And yet it got maximum votes from most juries, although it wasn’t that popular with the televoters.
There’s two competitions here really. It’s a song contest in theory - the singer and production is not that important to the juries. It’s a singing competition to the television voters.
I believe you're getting this precisely backwards. It's the juries, composed of industry professionals, who reward vocal and production virtuosity - which is precisely how Switzerland won. In contrast, public voting tends to reward songwriting even in absence of artistry, and usually boosts catchy tunes like this year's Croatia's and Netherlands' entries.
(There are two counterexamples this year, France with a difficult vocal line that got a better audience than jury score, and UK with a catchy tune that did better with juries, but both can be explained by the fact that the public and the juries score different performances. The French singer's voice reportedly broke down during the jury-scored final rehearsal, while the UK's singer really bungled his performance in the public concert.)
since it’s a live competition the song can’t fully be separated from the performance, of course. However it is a song, not a singing, contest and the song writer is awarded a prize as well.
Jury votes tend to be for the better, rather than the catchier song - which isn’t the same thing. Tattoo was clearly a better song than the cha cha cha song. I’m not so sure about the Swiss song this year though, but I’m not a music expert but the public were in favour again, of a fairly quirky entry. France might have won if performed better at the jury selection.
Glad to see my taste is not as isolated as I feared. Have watched about half the songs to about half-time -- yes, most of them were too boring for me to finish. Gåte (Norway) is nice but that song is completely unremarkable (this here is a lot better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkHFJN7qBfU ). Serbia had wonderful fantasy RPG visuals but the song hardly fits them. San Marino and Italy were at least fun and somewhat headbangable. Croatia is offensively minimalist (2 tones in the entire song); I'd have appreciated it for the idea alone but not like that. Ukraine is the only one that is catchy enough that I would want to hear it again.
"Are there themes that show up in specific years? Are there trends with some types of songs becoming more or less common?"
There definitely are; there's the trope of the "Eurovision ballad" and with the two semi-finals, the organisers try to spread these out so the final won't be one ballad after another. Some thing is very spectacular one year and then the next year it gets copied (generally lots of things on fire). France pretty much always sends a chanson, because that's what they do best and even if they don't win, a winsome waif warbling in The Language of Love will place at the end in a position that doesn't disgrace them.
There's even parody video about it, coming from when Sweden last hosted it in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv6tgnx6jTQ
The final was on Saturday, they reduced it down to 25 countries (it says 26 but the Dutch entry was disqualified under controversial and nebulous circumstances involving, allegedly, "a complaint of inappropriate behaviour made by a female member of the production crew" - he didn't want to be photographed and pushed the camera away, or made a ' threatening gesture' towards the camera; it's murky which is why a lot of rumours were going around).
The official performances were indeed different to the videos in most cases. The UK was terrible, which is why it did alright in the voting but didn't win. I've been saying all along the Irish entry was terrible, but it got sixth place.
The end winner was Switzerland, beating out Croatia (seems to have been a favourite). As ever, there was a lot of divergence between the jury vote and the popular vote, which is how Switzerland won. Mostly everyone is glad Israel didn't win, for various reasons (it would be one hell of a headache organising it next year in Tel Aviv if the Gaza situation has not been resolved, as far as the EBU is concerned, and there were the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests going on so they're glad it didn't win).
The full four hours of the final is on Youtube, though I don't know if you can get it from a US address (may need a VPN):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckGRHJ-J9G4&t=1s
I liked the Estonian performance, and yes Croatia was lots of energy. Finland? Well I liked the jorts with showers of sparks 😀 Spain was very.... eh, let's just say this wouldn't be out of place in a Drag Queen Story Hour for your local kids' library or primary school.
Final performances:
Estonia
Traditional instruments and dad rap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSMMU2wX0Bk
Croatia
You never thought lace doilies could be this hardcore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSMMU2wX0Bk
Finland
It is my understanding that denim outfit is known as a "Canadian tuxedo" but I'm not sure what you'd call this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nidDtyS0Wo
Spain
Appearing in a primary school for Pride Month near you (but to be fair, good camp fun)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOMoQoHG5aU
Switzerland
The winner, and one of the two non-binary entrants (ours was the other)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO_qJf-nW0k
Ukraine
A song about the Blessed Virgin and Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Well after the demon-summoning (the Irish entry wasn't the only one calling the spirits) and degenerate goings-on with the other acts, we needed some decency 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4N82wPpdg8
Georgia
I've interacted with our local authority retained firefighters, and I can tell you it's *nothing* like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrWufVsIeM
How familiar are you with Eurovision? You say you were surprised that most were mediocre, but you seem to have thought quite a few were at least ok, which seems pretty good to me. It's such a festival of the outré and often ridiculous, that it really varies how much is invested in it, musically.
Besides, there are all kinds of tricky factors involved in the scoring. For example, the public often votes for their neighbors. The juries aren't free of bias either: this year the official juries apparently systematically ignored Israel (which gives some credence to the idea that last year they were biased in favor of Sweden.). Meanwhile, the Israeli jury gave the top number of points to Luxembourg's entry, who was born in Israel.
Singers from the big countries are at a disadvantage in the scoring, and also anyone already successful in a bigger country also has the least to gain from winning.
>this year the official juries apparently systematically ignored Israel
It just isn't true. Israel got about as many jury points as pre-competition expert/enthusiast opinions and bookmaker odds would predict. I realize it's impossible to prove it wasn't being (unfairly) disregarded from the get-go, but it was simply never considered a contender on music terms.
I realize there is an epistemic bubble that believed it could win, and it made a big push to brute-force the audience vote (a failed one, because it went against a voting system that is explicitly designed, and then honed for decades, to prevent this kind of intrusions and make sure the winner has a truly universal appeal). But the bubble was wrong. If I were to guess, it misunderstood Israel's position and expected an [Ukraine, 2022] treatment (which, a legit example of systematic bias - borne out of genuine populaton-wide pro- sentiment that just isn't there for Israel). What it was actually getting was a [Russia, 2014-15] treatment of (almost) everyone keeping up appearances and pretending nothing out of the ordinary ever happened outside so that everyone can have a song contest in peace. (And it has now undermined this arrangement to such extent that it's hard to imagine it being allowed in again any soon. Especially with organisers under immense fire after the event turned out to be a disaster in general.)
>Singers from the big countries are at a disadvantage in the scoring
This hasn't really been true for a while, performances during semi-finals in particular seem to be doing their job.
How does Eurovision prevent voting campaigns that aren't genuinely popular?
Not very familiar. Note that I wrote my opinions of the songs, not of the judging or vote.
The voting is generally the best bit. They curtailed it a lot this year (due to potential for protests or the jury foreman saying something Unfortunate re: Gaza) but you can pretty much bet on neighbour votes for neighbour, neighbour DOESN'T vote for neighbour (particularly scandalous when X has voted for Y but Y fails to reciprocate), one country very pointedly does NOT vote for another (a lot of score-settling) - Greece and Cyprus used to do a lot of mutual "we give you maximum points", particularly when Turkey was competing, because of the whole 1964-1974 hostilities.
Juries vote 1-12 points to songs and it's always exciting to see "who will get 12 points here?" and of course, "what entry will end the night with no points?"
Yes, I understand. I was mentioning it as something that might affect the quality of the songs.
I would recommend watching the whole show instead – it's a whole different experience than watching music videos. If you're in the wrong country, you might need a VPN to access it on YouTube.
Is the music any better? Or is it that the show is better at generating excitement? Or what?
I found one difference. I've seen a clip from "Dizzy". The song is about looking forward to extremely enjoyable sex. The official video is of a man in various locations by himself. I admit that when I set out to write about it, I assumed a girlfriend, but then I realized there was no partner in sight, so the gender wasn't specified.
The show video makes it clear that this is from a homosexual viewpoint, which I don't mind.
Even if I had an issue about that, I would still defend the song because it has a catchy tune. Almost none of the other entries do.
Well, the UK vacillates between the glory days when they used to win it, so they take it seriously enough to send an established act, and offence from their entry not doing well in the previous contest so they pretend they don't care and it's all nonsense. As one of the Big Five countries which funds the show, they automatically qualify for the final so don't have to go through the semis to be voted in (UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy are the Big Five).
They seem to have taken it seriously this year, by sending Olly Alexander who is an established act, and of course this was another year they hoped to/expected to win (so I'm anticipating complaining for next year's show):
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/may/10/you-have-to-have-a-skirt-rip-moment-how-to-win-eurovision
"The staging is also distinctive, described by Olly Alexander’s own team as “a post-apocalyptic dystopian boxing gym locker room, aboard a spaceship hurtling towards Earth through a black hole in 1985”. It features a shower, and homoerotic dance moves that will make the Daily Mail flush with anger. Oh, and camera tricks will make Olly look as if he’s flying from the ceiling. “I think it’s a home run,” says Gustaph. “I’m telling you.”
Yeah, no. The staging was *too* clever and didn't come across well for the final. The backing dancers just looked to be sliding into one another and the performer didn't get much of a chance to belt it out, given that he was "on the ceiling" in a pile of limbs.
The music is the same, unless the artist is a bad singer or messes up somehow, in which case it is worse. But watching a music competition is a different experience from watching a set of music videos, I suppose, as you say, because of the excitement. And many of the individual live performances as such are also interesting – I don't often see anything like them outside Eurovision, whereas the music videos are just regular music videos.
Thank you for the comprehensive summary.
Trolley-experiment in real life: How many pulled the lever? - Taking 110 bucks or saving a life: what feels better 4 weeks later? - Leading German behavioral economist did the studies. Yours truly scorches his book - graphs included: https://doppelkorn.substack.com/p/would-you-save-a-life-for-100-should disclosure: my first review ever, too late and too inferior for the contest.
I'm probably too stupid, but I found it unclear what was going on - how many Indians were being treated for what?
"The participants were informed, that a) the institute had earmarked a donation of 350€ (nearly 400 $) to save the life of an Indian in Uttar Pradesh (paying for the treatment of 5 Indians suffering from tuberculosis, which should save all of them - else 1 in 5 would die). But the institute would cancel that donation and instead donate 1050€ to treat 3*5 people in Bihar. Thereby preventing ca. 3 tuberculosis deaths."
Is that €350 for 5 in Uttar Pradesh versus €1,050 for 15 in Bihar?
As for the rest of it, I'm probably brain-dead after work because I tried reading through and Mr. Brain just went "That is indeed a lot of words, plus graphs. Always with the graphs". So, it may be a great post, but I'm sorry, I have no idea what your conclusion is.
Thanks for the feedback! You got it right, perfectly. Maybe I should add another graph from the book? (There is one about the issue, you had. A. Falk is reader-friendly.)
Tuberculose mortality is around 20% without the proper treatment, it seems. So only after having given 5 sick-ones the proper treatment can you take pride in "saving one life". So either 5 in U.P. get treated - as was planned without an intervention by the participant - or 3*5=15 in Bihar. Saving one life or 3 lifes. (Curing the other 4 resp. 12 comes extra, tuberculosis really hurts. Kafka knew.) -
It is not a great post, obviously - and deteriorates in the 2nd half. I do not recommend to go further after the "evil lottery". The graphs are from the book, thus in German.
Okay, that clears it up. But it doesn't seem to be the classic trolley problem; it's 5 people for 1 life or 15 people for 3 lives, which comes out the same (1 in 5).
If you don't choose UP then that one guy dies, but he's going to die anyway. In the trolley problem, the guy on the track will live if you let the other five die. In this case, both 'tracks' involve death, so it's "3 versus 1" and the rest die, so of course the best choice is to pick the 3 who will live.
In the trolley problem, I have to actively kill the one guy. If I pick Bihar instead of UP, I'm not killing someone who would live otherwise. That makes the difference, and I think it's a real difference: one death versus five, where I intervene to kill the one, for the trolley problem. Four lives and one death versus twelve lives and three deaths, where the deaths will happen regardless of what I choose to do about the TB patients.
My brain is aching now. If the 5 in UP do not get their treatment, there will be 4 still sick and soon one corpse. (And in Bihar 12 will remain sick and 3 will die.). If the participants decides: "Leave those 5 in UP untreated, treat instead 15 in Bihar" - then the 5 in UP remain untreated and one of them will most likely die. - I am too much of an utilitarian to understand why 25% of people would NOT switch from treating 5 to treating 15 - but I am too dumb for most of Kant.
In this real-life version of the trolley - if you do NOT 'pull the lever' 15 sick people in Bihar will remain untreated (3 of them will even die). If you 'pull the lever', only then the 15 will get treatment, but the 5 guys in UP (earmarked for treatment) will NOT get the treatment, they would have got, if no one had intervened.
Okay, it sounds like the set-up is unnecessarily complicated, those researchers need a good boot up the backside.
So they committed to treating 5 people in UP - without treatment, the fatality rate for TB is 1 in 5, yes? So if they treat the UP people, all 5 will live. If they don't, 1 person will die.
But then they made the proposal: "If you agree, we won't give the money to UP, we'll give it to 15 people in Bihar instead".
So now the set-up is: treat 5, save 1 versus treat 15, save 3. And this is a real switch, not the thought-experiment one.
In that case, I still think people would take "treat the 15" because you're saving more lives, but it's a bit shitty of the researchers to play games with real lives like this - now the 5 people won't be treated and 1 will probably die.
The fact remains, though, that this is not like the trolley problem where one person dies versus five people die and if you don't intervene, the one person lives. This is real disease, real people, and out of 20 all told, there is the chance of 4 dying for real. You're just reducing deaths by saving 3 rather than saving 1.
If I do nothing in the trolley problem, yes, those 5 people die (not flipping the switch). But I did not deliberately kill 1 person (flipping the switch) who would have lived otherwise had I not flipped the switch. But if I do nothing for the TB patients, 4 people die anyway. Whichever I pick, someone will die for real, it's not like the guy in UP would have lived if I didn't choose to give the money to Bihar (not flipping the switch).
Let me clarify:
Trolley problem - flip the switch, 1 person dies. Don't flip the switch - 5 people die. If I don't flip the switch, the 1 person lives because now they're not in danger of being killed by a runaway trolley.
TB real world problem - flip the switch, 1 person dies. Don't flip the switch - 3 people die. But those people would have died anyway, regardless of me flipping the switch or not. There is no way that person in UP lives or the 3 persons in Bihar live because they have a deadly disease which, if untreated, will kill them.
Trolley problem requires me to actively kill someone. The TB problem requires me to pick who, out of the guaranteed fatalities, dies. That's not a great choice, but it's not "this person would live if you didn't kill them". That's why I don't think it's the same as the classic trolley problem.
Trolley problem - 1 person lives OR 5 people live
TB problem - 1 person dies OR 3 people die
As I wrote, I believe budget constraints allowed the study to only offer 15 treatments for each turn - not 25; indeed, it was 3 vs 1 instead of 5 vs 1. But there are many variations of the classic idea. The worst ones are on smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/trolley-7
Still. the study paid to treat 5 real humans, actually sick with tuberculosis, facing real death. Or treat instead 15 other humans in another region. For each turn. If a participant decided "switch to cure 15 instead of 5" real people got treated who would not have been treated otherwise. (Sure, having a real trolley run over real people would have been more straightforward! Shame on them to over-complicate.)
That specific study turned out actually BORING - besides curing some hundred poor folks from tuberculosis. In pretty much all trolley-scenarios, some people prefer not to touch the lever. In all cases that number is lower if the kill-ratio is 10+ instead of one (compared to 2 instead of 1). Around a quarter in the control group who were offered the TB-case as a thought-experiment said: "I would not touch the lever". And in real life, it was about the same. Meh.
The FUN part comes when people can choose: take €100 or have us donate €350 to cure 5 Indians, preventing ca. one death by TB.
The hilarious part comes, when - after a lottery - people tell how they feel about the outcomes: "The money would have been better".
Since we are all headed to the gulag in the near future, Canadians volunteered to go first - thank you - I thought it would be fun to write a review of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-one-day-in-the-life-of. Ivan remembers his life before the Soviet when there were pans full of fried potatoes. Life in the gulag featured no such luxuries, so I wrote a post about how to fry potatoes properly: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/mondays-food-tip-best-fried-potatoes. Enjoy before the inevitable midnight knock on the door.
That version of fried potatoes reminds me of boxty, which is a more Ulster/Midlands thing; it uses cooked and raw potatoes mixed with flour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxty
When I'm frying spuds, I tend to use leftover boiled potatoes, chop them into chunks, and fry them with chopped onion. No grating here!
I guess my version 'grated' you the wrong way; no worries, as long as you fry them in butter, they're delicious! Happy eating!
I was surprised by the grating, but that's because generally I'm in too much of a hurry and too lazy to go to the extent of grating the spuds when I can just chop them up, throw them in the pan with some onion, maybe fry them in the fat from frying rashers beforehand, and then have delicious (and carb-laden, alas!) meal ready fast 😁
What are the best ways to figure out if a piece of text an image or someone who contacted you is AI generated?
If you're in communication with the suspected AI (e.g. messages on social media), you could try to "hack" them by sending out-of-context prompts that an AI will respond to very differently than a human. Of course, if they ARE human they'll probably be confused or offended. And there's no guarantee an AI might not have patched those loopholes.
If it's a text, I don't think there's a surefire way to tell. Yes, AI has certain stylistic quirks, but some humans do write like that sometimes, and the "AI tone" can be avoided by specifying a tone in the prompt. I guess if it's a long text that makes a coherent argument, it's most likely by a human. And if it starts with "as a large language model, I..." It's probably by an AI.
For images, check how many fingers the figures have, how the hair looks, whether patterns like lace, text or textures make any sense, and just generally whether the picture has an AI vibe. There will be some false positives and false negatives, but generally speaking it's still possible to tell.
But ultimately you just have to trust your judgement about whether the place where you found the material is likely to serve you AI generated content.
Yeah, almost everything will be outdated in a while and I guess the best tell will be context but right now there could still be pretty reliable signs, I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where testing someone for "AIness" in an online chat will be the norm.
This article does a good job of explaining some of the more subtle things to look for, beyond fingers or text. It also points out the importance of looking at context and provenance - how did the sender claim to *get* this image?
https://coagulopath.com/how-to-identify-ai-images-in-2024/
thanks
This seems to work:
https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection
...for now, that is. I bet it won't work for long. The near future is a dystopia in which we will have to assume that every piece of media of any kind is AI generated.
Thanks, now it's way easier to fake something but we already had photoshop so I assume it's not really a change that drastic, you can use context and trust when there's nothing else left. Like for people lying in text, you don't assume a random headline you read online is real but it still isn't a dystopian world.
Provenance is still unfakeable, not matter how good your AI is. You can fake up a photo and claim it was taken by a New York Times journalist, but you can't cause your photo to appear on the actual New York Times website.
Being AI generated doesn't make it a dystopia. Motives are crucial. (Currently, of course, the motives are generally malicious to one degree or another, but the same it true of human generated media. I get around 50 spam phone calls a day, and they're not AI generated.)
It's not just motives, it's also competence. People are quite capable of lying, but AI can get things wrong faster.
In the future, when demonstrating your humanity is a daily requirement, it will be commonplace to introduce yourself in an email by calling the other party a n****r.
My God, I have an excuse to link Visioneers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3xhMOXT1Z8
Nice!
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 4 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 47/45/49/46 (43/46/50/49)
Biden: 40/45/50/52 (42/45/50/49)
RFK: 3/3/1/1 (4/4/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 2/5/1/0 (3/2/1/0)
Newsom: 1/0/1/0 (2/0/1/0)
Harris: 1/1/1/0 (1/1/1/0)
Betfair is anomalous here in seeing Biden as unfavoured and I have switched my Trump bet back to Biden.
Polymarket is anomalous in putting Obama as high as 5%. This seems wrong to me, and I'm not sure (a) why Polymarket participants rate her chances this highly or (b) what has changed in the last month.
Seems like an arbitrage opportunity exists if Betfair has Trump favoured 47 to 40 and Manifold has Biden favoured 52 to 46
Manifold hasn't completed its pivot to real money yet, so it's not much of an arbitrage.
Good point. My knee-jerk reaction, on seeing the near-agreement between the 4 markets 4 weeks ago, and the 7 point disagreement now was "Wake up, arbitrageurs! Wake up!". But, as you pointed out, there isn't a real arbitrage opportunity here. ( And, as Scott pointed out in the latest Mantic Monday, the CFTC isn't helping... )
Would anyone of you be interested in watching a documentary hosted by a closeted rationalist who visits NGOs across Greenland, collaborates with them to try our hands at tactical urbanism, and provides commentary relating to the car infrastructure of the US, the biking infrastructure of Oulu in Finland, and figures such as Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl and James C. Scott?
Yes, certainly. Folks who I know who are from Oulu often have offered the biking infrastructure as a particular high point.
Especially when they pedal.
yes!
There is quite a selection pressure for published books to meet a reasonable standard, and it is rare to see a less than glowing review, with maybe a few caveats such as it being a shame the book under review has no index.
But on rare occasions, a book generally agreed to be bad slips through the net and reviewers are much more critical. Although I respect the effort and commitment an author must make to write a book and get it published, a really bad review can be quite funny, and of course is useful for indicating books it may be best to avoid. I'll give a couple of examples I've come across over the years.
First, "Gwynne's Grammar" (2014) received mixed reviews, according to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevile_Gwynne
* Linguist Geoffrey Pullum called Gwynne a "preposterous old fraud" with a "lack of any grasp of the subject" and was quoted in the New Zealand Herald saying, "I've never seen a book so bad on my subject".
* Oliver Kamm, a leader writer for The Times newspaper, in Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage, described Gwynne’s Grammar as "a work of titanic silliness" and in The Times in January 2017 as "the worst book I have read on language and perhaps on anything".
I found a bootleg ebook copy, and on a brief skim it seems far more wordy than I would expect a simple grammar book to be. But not having studied it in detail, it would be unfair of me to comment on its qualities good or bad.
My next example is "The Garden of Ediacara". I bought a copy of this many years ago in a thrift shop, thinking it would be an interesting account of the weird and wonderful life forms around in the early Cambrian period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran
But its diagrams were very poor, as I recall, and the prose had a strange dream-like quality. So much so that I couldn't really get into it and realised I was gaining nothing by persevering with it. Only years later did I find out that it was generally regarded as a badly written book:
https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2-1-review-garden-of-ediacara
Can anyone come up with other recent(ish) and probably well-founded examples of a real rotten tomato book review?
Probably does not count - but I just posted a rant-review of a book by the leading German behavioral economist, Prof. Armin Falk. Published 2022, aimed at the broader public "Why it is so hard to be good". It presents the first real-life version of the trolley-experiment - shows that taking the bucks make one happier than healing the sick - and other worthy stuff. Still, one wishes to send him back to ECON 101 + to an introduction how (not) to interpret dictator games. https://doppelkorn.substack.com/p/would-you-save-a-life-for-100-should
Me just not a pro-reviewer. In fact, that is my first. ;) Fun-fact: The most popular reviews are scorchers. In German literature, the bestseller is Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Lauter Verrisse ("nothing but scorchers") - while his collection: "Nothing but praise" is mostly ignored. ;)
I cohost a podcast about inner mental experiences - how things like using imagination, experiencing emotion, proprioception and so on vary between individuals and societies.
It's called "Imagine an apple" - find it in any podcast app.
Would love feedback on the episodes there are so far and suggestions of good people to interview!
https://zencastr.com/Imagine-an-apple
Sounds fascinating to me too. I recommend you interview philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel. If you want to get an idea of how he thinks about inner experience, I review his book Perplexities of Consciousness here: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
Anyone who's fascinated by Sartre's Psychology of Imagination would be good too.
Or anyone who's doing thought sampling research. There's someone who's been doing it for years, so many that I'm not even sure they're alive -- last name is Hurlburt.
Lucid dreamers.
Some Buddhist meditators. Interesting factoid: As mind training for kids some Buddhists sound a gong and ask them to listen to the sound getting fainter and fainter and listen for the very last super-subtle sound.
Gaming addicts. IMO even the best game is a very impoverished, simple environment compared to real life, and I think a lot about the impact on the mind and brain of spending most waking time gaming.
There's a researcher at one of the big California universities studying child consciousness, and wondering if there are ways to enable adults to again access "lantern consciousness."
People who feel profoundly changed by a psychedelic drug experience. Read a study about a smoking cessation program where subjects took 2 psilocybin trips as part of a brief -- something like 8 weeks -- smoking cessation program. Program had a much higher success rate than most. Article includes what subjects' said about the impact of the drug experience. Can locate link for you later today if you're interested.
> IMO even the best game is a very impoverished, simple environment compared to real life, and I think a lot about the impact on the mind and brain of spending most waking time gaming.
Have you heard of the term "legibility" from the book "Seeing Like a State"? I think games tend to have environments that are very legible.
Lots of interesting ideas, thank you!
I've read "Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic" by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel, and found I liked Hurlburt's take more. Really good that Schwitzgebel did that test case with him, I'm impressed!
Russell Hurlburt is not only alive, but still doing Descriptive Experience Sampling - and publishing videos of it, including a recent series with Michael Pollan! https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/lena/do_I_have_internal_monologue_sampling.html
This sounds super interesting but my particular variety of inner mental experience means that I cannot listen to podcasts. Do you also have a way of providing a transcript?
Unfortunately not, sorry! I'll keep in mind that it would be useful.
Are there any apps that do it for any podcast? Where do you normally go to get the transcripts - the show notes, or the podcast's site?
Youtube does it automatically but it's the same quality as the automated subtitles, meaning it's not very good, especially if you use a lot of jargon. I usually go to wherever the podcast is hosted and see if I can find the transcript in the description, sometimes there's a dedicated 'show transcript' button but I don't keep up with any podcasts so I couldn't tell you which service has it.
This is such a wonderfully niche idea for an entire podcast (not just a series or an episode, but a dedicated podcast!) that I will definitely be listening. Any Merleau-Ponty content would be very much appreciated.
Thanks!
Amazingly there's more than one such podcast - Experience.Computer covers similar terrain but from very different angles https://experience.computer/
I haven't dug into all the phenomenology philosophers - do you know if any of them got into *inner* experience, rather than just sensory experience? And actually formed language for describing it - imagination, inner speech, unsymbolized conceptual thinking, emotion etc?
It would be good to do an episode with a philosopher going through that - covering Mearleau-Ponty and also Husserl. But generally giving the history. Good idea!
As Eremolalos mentioned, Sartre did a lot of emotional descriptiveness stuff, as well as a lot of theorising about the meta cognition aspects (all consciousness is self-consciousness and so forth). The centring of 'otherness' and theory of mind and so forth in the vignettes and how that plays a role is also important. Sartre on dreaming is also interesting. The three post-Husserlians all use a baseline from Hegel/Husserl and then invent their own jargon which then gets translate from German/French back into English, which can cause confusion. Merleau-Ponty is probably the most straightforward and engages with brain damage victims, proprioception, etc etc.
Tim Crane is someone currently flying the flag for the intentionalist viewpoint (rather than the qualia view, although I think he has a hybrid stance).
I think that the 'footlights of your consciousness' thing that DES talks about is just the same thing as intentionality as discussed by those 4. The what it is like is less important than the literal content- but that is only from a couple of hours flicking through Hurlburt's videos yesterdays, which I found fascinating.
Stupid medical question: Why are DEA drug classifications called "Schedules"?
I assume because this is how legislation often works - there will be the main body of the text of the law, divided into numbered clauses or paragraphs, and then there will be Schedules at the end which contain relevant information that can be referred to in the main body of the text simply by referencing the relevant Schedule. In this case, that is what has happened - the main body of the text sets out what the law is in respect of the various categories of drug, but it references the Schedules for a list of which drugs are in which category.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title21/chapter13&edition=prelim
I think it's a lesser-used meaning of the word, which sounds odd because we mostly only see it in very specific places. Like how some income tax forms are "schedules", and India has "scheduled tribes".
Possibly our modern sense is a derivation. If it originally meant something like "a list", then if it started to be mostly used for "lists that include times", we'd end up in the current situation?
Announcing the release of my book "Taming the Apocalypse" which explores the potential for low tech biotechnology (hybridisation and facilitated random horizontal gene transfer) to produce a vastly larger array of domesticated plants, animals and microbes than the small handful accidentally stumbled upon at the dawn of agriculture and civilisation. Available in ebook and audiobook on kobo.
https://www.amazon.com/Taming-Apocalypse-Shane-Simonsen-ebook/dp/B0D2XCLJ85
https://www.kobo.com/au/en/audiobook/taming-the-apocalypse-2
If anyone is interested, I did a deeper dive in the gender salary gap of Berlin's startup & tech scene and the results are pretty bad (12-15% almost across the board).
https://handpickedberlin.com/berlin-salary-trends-2024-deep-dives-salary-gap/
This is a weird conversation, because everyone on all sides of the topic agree that women are expected (by general societal expectations) to take care of children and the elderly far more than men. Feminists complain about it, others laud it, but everyone agrees it's true. With it being true, we should definitely expect more women (not all, maybe not a majority, but some and more than men) to take part time work with lesser requirements. For instance working less overtime, or shorter commutes, or more predictable hours, or less responsibility. Something that gives them freedom and flexibility to care for children and the elderly, as we all agree they are expected to do more often than men. This has the obvious effect of lowering the wages of women who take lesser responsibility/hours/whatever.
If we looked at how many hours men work verses women, we come up with some pretty obvious stats. Men work (in the 2014 data that came up first on Google), on average 8.1 hours per day, while women work 7.3. That's about a 10% difference in hours worked. (https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/time-spent-working-by-full-and-part-time-status-gender-and-location-in-2014.htm).
If those numbers hold true across different areas, then we should *expect* a 10% difference in pay, even if zero other factors were included whatsoever. That doesn't even factor into questions about leaving the workforce and stalling a career or whatever completely obvious results would come from decisions made to prioritize careers less.
We could certainly talk about whether that's good that women prioritize family over work, or if there's ways to make that better without harming other areas.
If I were a man working 8.1 hours a day and a female coworker was working 7.3 for the same pay, I would be upset by that. I would be even more upset if I decided to work 7.3 and my pay got reduced. And I think everyone in this conversation would agree that would be bad. So why are we upset when women work less hours and get less pay? Even people who hate that outcome should not focus on individual jobs (which are legally required to pay the same for the same work), but instead whatever societal factors cause women to choose to work less hours. And if it turns out that women prefer working less hours and they are happier when working less, then I'm thinking there isn't a problem at all.
Thanks for writing this so I didn't have to. OP's article finds the results "sad" without considering even the most basic of obvious explanations? What's "sad" is leaving the reader of your article with a completely false interpretation that the tech industry pays women less because they are women.
I appreciate your points and will add them to the article!
But we also had majority of respondents working full-time.
Working full time is only part of the consideration. Overtime is much more common for men than women, for instance. Men also prioritize jobs that force them to be available and respond to situations at odd hours more than women, which can result in direct pay or possibly promotions to higher paying careers.
All of this stuff is pretty obvious if you think about the incentives that flow from early career choices.
Again, we can discuss whether it's good or bad that women prioritize family differently, but it seems really weird to me that we try to ignore it and wonder why women make less money (on average) than men.
Another piece of the situation is that, since women might be less available for work, they get paid less, so it can make financial sense for the husband to work the long hours even if it would work out better for both of them and their employers for the man to do the shorter hours and the woman to do the longer hours.
I did compensation management as a consultant for many years. In the US positions like nursing and teaching K - 12 have defined pay grades based on years of service etc.. Until you move into management, then it's up to individuals to negotiate their salary. Likewise, most tech positions, at least in the US, are based on individual negotiations between the employer and the candidate, who likely has a degree or certificate. It us unreasonable to suggest that these negotiated salaries be converted to a pay grade scale. There would be a revolution if you suggested this. Men and women with a degree or cert have the responsibility to negotiate their salary.
if anyone is interested i did a deeper dive in the gender gap of open source work, and the results are pretty bad. women are 20% of devs but <0.1% of contributors!!
Link?
There’s something odd about a society that’s ok with huge differences in individual compensation and, at the end of all that, certain subclasses within that society are expected to be compensated exactly the same.
A difference in individual salary can be explained away by a difference in individual ability, but between whole subclasses those random differences should disappear.
If there is a significant difference between the average salary of two different subclasses, then there must be a difference in their average ability or a difference in their average perceived ability (prejudice). If it's not the first, then it's the second, which is bad because it means that subclass is being discriminated against (e.g. racism or sexism).
That's the basic idea, anyway. I know this is oversimplified but I think it explains away the contradiction you're proposing.
>A difference in individual salary can be explained away by a difference in individual ability, but between whole subclasses those random differences should disappear.
Unless the subclasses are specifically chosen to be random samples (as in randomized controlled trials), it would be a strange coincidence for the means of the distributions of their abilities to exactly coincide. There are _many_ pathways that can introduce correlations (with causality going in several possible directions).
I know you said it's oversimplified, but I really think it needs to have a term for environmental factors, both good and bad.
Everyone is different, which means some are worth more than others. Rarely is the production of two people doing the same job worth the same. The subclasses thing is an example of double-think, from this standpoint. Always remember, you're unique, just like everybody else.
In what sense is such a small gap "pretty bad"?
IIRC Thomas Sowell's work back in the 1990s suggested that the real gap wasn't between men and women, it was between MARRIED women - especially those with kids - and everyone else. Women who never marry and stay in the work force continuously tend to make about as much or more than their male counterparts doing the same work for the same number of years.
Married women have an *extra opportunity* - a socially approved option that most men don't feel they have - the women can *choose* to work less, switch to an easier, more enjoyable job with shorter hours, or take a few years off entirely to have and raise kids while their husband pays most of the bills. Some married women *choose freely* to avail themselves of that option which obviously brings down the average salary of whatever group you're putting them in. And good for them! They are choosing happiness and family over money. That is a GOOD result, not a bad (or even "pretty bad") one! A society which allows/encourages some people to work less and others more depending on their interests and abilities and opportunity set is a *better society* than one that forces everyone to do work with the exact same level of difficulty and time investment and salary payback.
If any two groups had no "pay gap" at all, THAT would constitute a "pretty bad" result. :-)
They're only "choosing" to work less if by that you mean "paid employment". If they're having and raising children, running the household, and/or looking after elderly parents on top of that, that is not "no work". I think this is often a point of contention between men and women - "I'm out there all day working hard as the breadwinner while you do nothing" "Yes, but I'm looking after the kids and the house and your mother" "Well, you're my wife, that's your job".
If it's someone's "job" to do all that, then it is not "not working".
Ask Scott if he thinks taking care of his twins is not "work" or that he would be "working less" if he cut his work hours to spend more time at home?
Re your first sentence: I think if ANY two groups of people whom, for the sake of argument, we would expect to be earning the same (minus random differences), were earning up to 15% less (1/6! as upper bound in this specific case). That sounds like an incredibly unfair system (whatever that system is). Put another way: if you were switching jobs, and you had a choice between new job A paying 1*X$ and job B paying 1.001X$, both being otherwise pretty equal, you may well ignore the difference and decide based on vibes or whatever (let's not think about round numbers etc). Clearly there are salary differences that don't bother us. If however job B payed 15% less, I think it would need to provide you with some reaaally heavy alternative incentives (free fruit at the entrance!) for you to choose it. Numerical example: A pays 50k, B pays 43k. What additional compensation must B provide for you to choose it over A? Let's assume for the sake of argument that the "basics" are good in both - productive work environment, interesting day to day, friendly colleagues.
Should we include overtime (required, offered, whatever) in the calculation? 5 hours a week of overtime is equivalent to 7.5 hours of regular pay, or almost 19% higher wage for a pretty minimal investment of time - one extra hour per day for a five day workweek.
Even among two people working identical jobs for identical pay, someone willing to put more time in will make significantly more money. This is just one example where pay can vary based on individual choices, and not just varying by small amounts.
I hope you wouldn't suggest that all jobs equally require overtime of employees in order to keep pay rates similar.
> Numerical example: A pays 50k, B pays 43k.
For example, if A is full-time and B is part-time, I would consider myself extremely lucky to get the option B.
Of course, your hourly wage would be almost doubled. I should have clarified that the hourly wage is the focus, or that parttime vs full-time is not the focus here (other wise the jobs are very far from comparable). I'll update the comment, thanks.
(I would gladly take a part-time job with the same hourly wage I have now. But I don't have that option available.)
If A and B have the same work hours and weeks in the year and are the same in all other details, then of course I'll choose A. If A is a horrible stressful job, then I'll choose B.
Bad conditions in both jobs - need to be compensated more to work there, so more pay.
Less pay but better conditions - I'll choose that, I've worked in the shitty stressful jobs and unless you're paying me millions a year it's not damn well worth it.
Using hourly wage merely removes one difference where a lower salary is fully justified because women work fewer hours on average. But there are plenty of differences left that also are provably linked with salary differences, like choice of profession, commute duration/distance, willingness to work overtime, the structure of the compensation scheme (worker can be paid in more than salary), etc.
The more variables you look at, the more of the wage gap can be explained by factors that have a gender-independent effect on individual wages, but have a gendered effect on the average because men and women make different choices on the whole.
The remainder of the wage gap can potentially be explained by other behaviors that are very hard, impossible, or expensive to measure (accurately), or that no one has attempted to correlate. I can come up with measurements that I've not seen anyone attempt to correlate with salary differences, even though I would consider them viable candidates, like the effect of thing-oriented vs. people-oriented personalities.
The thing is, I don’t expect ANY two groups to be earning the same “minus random differences”. Different groups of people *are different*, and they’re different in every conceivable way. Different interests, different aptitudes, different backgrounds…and this SHOULD naturally translate into different salaries.
Look, forget about sex differences for a minute. Pick any OTHER structural difference between groups. Say, rival sports team fans. Or residents of different cities. Why would we NOT expect a difference of 15% between two groups of entirely different people?
If fans of the Knicks earn more than fans of the Celtics that doesn’t mean they’re earning more BECAUSE they’re fans of the Knicks and it doesn’t mean YOUR personal salary would change at all if tomorrow you switched to root for the other team. It just means you’re statistically being bundled in with a group that made certain choices that happened to impact the group average in one direction or the other. So long as those choices were freely made we should celebrate them and not worry too much about it - viva la difference!
UPDATE: as for your "numerical example", the difference in group average comes from some fraction of the group taking an even bigger cut than that; what job B (which pays, say, 40% less) offers is often *schedule flexibility*. Shorter hours and the ability to take time off as needed. Whereas job A is long hours, high stress and not much expected vacation time - if you want to budget time off to deal with a sick kid or parent (and can afford it via dual paychecks) it can be good for somebody in the family to take job B.
>The thing is, I don’t expect ANY two groups to be earning the same “minus random differences”. Different groups of people _are different_, and they’re different in every conceivable way.
Agreed! I hadn't read down to your comment when I wrote https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-329/comment/56362272 which (redundantly) makes the same point you had already made.
"It just means you’re statistically being bundled in with a group that made certain choices that happened to impact the group average in one direction or the other."
The only way I can make that make sense (fans of one sports team earning more than another) is the prawn sandwich brigade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawn_sandwich_brigade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vBai4W6TrI
Obviously, fans of a team in the 'posh' part of London are probably going to be wealthier on average than fans of a team in a former industrial Northern city, though this 2018 survey had some surprising results:
https://www.sportbible.com/football/news-football-highest-earning-premier-league-supporters-have-been-revealed-20180802
First addressing your update: Let me confirm - did you orginally mean that a gap of 15% (max in this case) is small and thus not "pretty bad", generally? Or did you mean it ONLY referring to groups and not including causality? Regarding the second question: If switching from group 1 to group 2 caused(!) me to earn 15% less at my next job than I otherwise would have, would you view this as problematic?
In that part, I mainly took issue with you ssemingly claiming that 15% is small and thus not really bad. And then also explaining why you thought the *Existence* of the gap is okay. Put another way: What if the gap was 40%? 80? 99.9? You argument regarding its origins would apply regardless, bur surely your first sentence would not make sense in such a world.
The disparity here is significantly smaller than class gaps.
When you consider that some individuals earn hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times more than the median, simply due to genetics, birthplace, or nationality, a 15% difference between groups doesn’t seem that much of a problem.
There is an underlying assumption here that gender prejudice is causing the 15% gap. What if, as Glen implied, it is correlated with something else? Perhaps Knicks fans earn more because the cities in which they live have a higher cost of living.
The question to be answered is WHY women make less, which is a hard question to answer without bias.
I think a gap of 15% between groups isn't enough to be notable - it's surprisingly small. Hence I don't understand the "pretty bad" comment. What would a "good" difference amount be, as far as this writer is concerned? Maybe my expectations are skewed by remembering the old feminist talking point of claiming men make "59 cents" to the man's dollar. 85-90 cents is a whole lot better than that, no?
Switching from one group to another makes NO difference in your salary, it just gives you a different comparison set. If some women are slowing down their career to have kids it doesn't change the fact that women who AREN'T doing that are earning as much as the men. Nobody earns the "average salary" of their group, we only earn our particular individual salaries. One guy winning the lottery doesn't raise all the other men's income, merely the male average; one woman taking time off for kids doesn't lower all the other women's income, merely the female average.
...um, why would switching groups *cause* you to earn less? I suppose if it happened because switching groups *changed your preferences* such that you made different choices, that'd be fine. So no, even that wouldn't be *inherently* problematic.
You are correct that a difference of 40% or 80% would also be fine so far as I'm concerned. Different groups are different!
The "Greater Male Variability" hypothesis also probably deserves mention in this context - if a few people are (or have been in the past) brilliant insane workaholics making vast amounts of money at the expense of everything else in their life and people like that drag up the average of their group, and men happen to be more likely than women to have that trait cluster, then "average male income" will be higher for it - and that's okay too.
[side note: I currently am working (by choice) at a job that pays on the order of *75%* less than my prior job. I made that choice *because I could afford to* so my having made it reflects well, not poorly, on my overall life circumstance. Feel free to extrapolate that to the circumstance of women who choose to "slow down" to have kids.]
15% would be kind of subtle for individuals to notice, but it would have a big lifetime effect.
Do underground black market surgeons who would perform a procedure on you despite having no valid medical prescription for it exist?
I don't know about "no valid medical prescription", but there is a Canadian case of someone seeking - well, look, read the article, I don't think I can properly describe what they want without inadvertently being offensive, because I have no idea what terminology to use, never mind what is the approved phrasing:
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontarian-wins-legal-battle-for-public-funding-of-gender-affirming-surgery-argued-as-experimental-1.6843504
There is a clinic in Austin, Texas, where they are hoping to get the procedure(s) done and this clinic offers a wide range of services:
https://cranects.com/non-binary-surgery/
I wonder how the plumbing will work! But it isn't public money entirely wasted, because expertise in arcane procedures like that might benefit people who need surgery for genital injuries, for example caused by anti-personnel mines.
But some of these surgeries are getting weird. It can only be a matter of time before some "furry" wants surgery to acquire a fully functioning waggable tail! :-)
Yes, they're called "organ harvesters".
Someone has to be installing all those illegally harvested kidneys, not to mention harvesting them.
If it is a procedure such as an amputation, which reduces bodily functionality, then a surgeon performing that solely to cater for a bizarre urge (not unheard of) but no physical benefit would be breaking their Hippocratic oath. So they would risk being struck off the medical register, and lose their livelihood, if their operation became public knowledge.
I was going to object to the description of "bizarre fetishistic urge" since that's not in line with what I know of body integrity dysphoria, but looking into it, I see it's now considered an acquired rather than an innate disorder. So I still object to the wording but I'm aware that some cases of BID can be fetishistic.
Yes, I removed that f-word because in view of your comment and on reflection it sounded a bit judgemental. But I still think it's reasonable to describe the urge to have elective amputations (if that is what the OP was referring to) as bizarre.
Apart from plastic surgeons?
Yeah. Things that can't just be elective and need a reason approved by the official medical system
I know someone who went to Thailand for sex changes, anecdotally I have heard of people going to Russia to to get their legs broken and then healed with small stents to lengthen them, but not sure if the latter is an urban myth.
You can get that done in the US now, & legally. I know someone who's looked into it extensively.
A while back, the Instagram algorithm recommended me the account of a man who was spending several months in Turkey healing from a procedure like this. (I think he was trying to go from 5'10" to 6'2"). There's a whole community of men documenting this process online. Weird rabbit hole.
If there's strong prejudice in play, at least some people will go to a good bit of trouble to escape it.
In the 1983 novel by Fay Weldon, "The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil", the character Ruth undergoes a series of surgeries - including operations to have her legs shortened - in order to physically resemble her ex-husband's mistress (all part of her plan to ruin them both, take over the mistress's life, and torment her ex-husband).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Loves_of_a_She-Devil
Jerry Seinfeld's commencement address to Duke's graduating class of '24...
> AI, on the other hand, is the most embarrassing we've ever invented in mankind's time on earth. Oh, so you can't do the work. Is that what you're telling me? You can't figure it out. This seems to be the justification of AI — I couldn't do it. This is something to be embarrassed about. The ad campaign for ChatGPT should be the opposite of Nike. "You just can't do it."
https://youtu.be/76QV2SrSqgo
Now I'm just wondering whether Seinfeld made or could make his own shoes, clothing, car and whatever else he owns or uses.
Somehow I doubt it and I also doubt that he's embarrassed about it.
What would be the point of creating a tool that only does things you can already do?
Saving time and drudgery. I certainly don't want to manually wash my clothes, but I certainly could.
Forgive me if your comment got past my sarcasm-detector.
No, I was sincere - I was trying to point out that almost every tool does something that you can't do unassisted. Even something as simple as a hammer or screwdriver is doing something you can't do. Most tools are not simply labor-saving devices but things that open up entirely new categories of task.
(Although the argument works just as well for tools that only save time and labor. I could use the OP's argument to say that you ought to be washing your clothes by hand, and using a washing machine is an admission that you aren't willing to put in the work to do it properly.)
I refuse to take seriously the AI position of a comedian.
Full disclosure: Since this group has many members who are interested in AI, I put that quote up there to see what the response would be.
But I don't think Seinfeld intended anyone to take him seriously. But what's weird *is* that people do. Seinfeld believes that PC sensibilities (whatever those are) are stifling the humor of the younger generation. From a historical perspective, there's always been out-of-bounds humor. The boundaries of what's acceptably funny have changed as culture has changed. Although the culture warriors on both sides are finding objectional things about AI, AI in general as a subject of humor seems pretty innocuous. Yet some people on this thread are not amused by his joke.
The line between mockery and humor is often pretty thin, and I have seen enough people online making this argument sincerely that I didn't really parse it as joking.
It's basically a version of the "you're not a *real* artist unless you do it the hard way" argument, an argument that hasn't made sense since the invention of the camera.
Ridiculous.
1. Say I really couldn't write a Shakespeare sonnet about the misery of being a washing mashine which I desperately want to put on my wall. Why must I feel embarrassed about this? Or maybe my reading comprehension is poor/slow - should I be ashamed for letting AI summarize a long essay in complex language? What if I'm a non-native speaker and struggle because of that, but would like to read a specific piece of text? Should I be ashamed that I ask an AI to translate Swahili to English rather than first learning the language well, or bothering my Swahili-speaking friends each time? And that's just for text. It definitely *is* the case that current AI can create vastly more beautiful pictures than most of us could, simply for lack of skills. It's a fair debate to ask if and when it would be good to let an AI do this versus a human artist etc. But it's clear that I shouldn't be embarrassed asking the AI merely because I lack the skills. Or perhaps it's just about coming up with creative inspiration.
2. Reducing AI to things you couldn't do is obviously restrictive. What about all the things I could, but don't want to? Boring formal letters (or maybe just many letters!), getting the gist of a long text I'm not deeply interested in, digitizing all of my 784 hand-written poems, ... (If you think OCR is "not reeeally AI", you should see my handwriting.)
I found this interesting op-ed from Mark Judge entitled "Make Happiness Cool Again" https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/2999440/make-happiness-cool
It seems vaguely directionally right-ish to me, but I'd be interested in hearing objections.
I kind of disagree with the idea that we should just be happy and stop worrying about problems, but I do agree that the left has a despair problem.
And honestly, I am furious with them. There's no reason why the climate change topic has to be filled with so much despair, and it's actively counterproductive. Greenpeace and the like need to stop the dumb stunts like climbing oil rigs and throw their support behind getting money to build the future - the renewable energy half of the equation.
We should be living in the most exciting time in human history. We've learned to harness the raw elemental power of the universe, basically for free, and we can use this energy to flourish. But no, these idiots want the government to shut down the existing energy industry without having already built the new one.
Drives me up the wall.
I think Mark Judge is basically correct, though the causality (along with the origins of woke itself) is complicated and arguable. As a term, I think "punitive liberalism" should really be "punitive leftism".
There really are surviving people who uphold liberal Enlightenment values such as freedom of speech, and are not part of the punitive left, with the left's language policing and censorious speech codes.
I agree with Nancy Lebovitz's characterization of a large chunk of it as:
>If you're white, and especially if you're male and white, everything good in your life was taken from someone more worthy.
It drives me up the wall too.
Personally I do _*NOT*_ apologize for my race, my sex, or my savings. I _celebrate_ my luck.
One contributor to this crap was Peter Singer. His "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" in 1972 was an attempt to ram unbounded obligations down the throats of everyone in the industrialized world. My view on him is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-272/comment/14859849
The woke oppressor/oppressed dynamic seems similar. I don't know which is more responsible for our current state. In fairness, Singer had many similarly poisonous predecessors, making similarly risible demands.
Kudos to beowulf888 for the analysis of the factions on the left. Yeah, most of the poison seems to be centered in the woke/CRT guiltmongers.
Again, the causality is complex! I would like to hear more details about
>In a 2022 article about the death of social life at Stanford University, Ginevra Davis described the purge of happiness: “Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting. Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.”
Was this woke/CRT, or title XI, or something else?
I would indeed like to see happiness made cool again. We have a working industrial society. Let us celebrate it!
I think he's largely correct about the problem on the left, but his image of the earlier right is inaccurate. He's taking the bits he likes most, from the selection of bits that he saw, and drawing conclusions from there.
One specific place I think he goes wrong is that I think the "happiness" extended from Reagan through the neoliberal Clinton, and might have survived Bush v Gore, but took a fatal hit in 9/11. The unhappy-left was marginalized, and stayed marginalized through that entire time. It might even go back to Carter and Ford, I'm not sure. I wasn't around for all of this, but my sense was that the unhappiness started picking up in the 60s, hit a peak in the early 70s, and then faded into the background. I think the fading was due to the silent majority and the media oligarchy realizing that things had gotten bad, and that a course change was needed. And Reagan was the first politician who really tapped into that sentiment, and it took until Bill Clinton for a left-wing politician to figure out how to do the same thing.
I remember hearing after JFK's assassination that we were all responsible. Admittedly, it was only one source, but it was awful enough that I still remember it. I don't know why anyone would say that, but it did seem like a way of making people feel bad for no good reason.
Since then, I've seen a progressive left with anti-happiness habits. In particular, everything is an emergency. No one is allowed to specialize, so they're worried about everything all the time. This one may have gotten better, but for quite a while, any victory for your political goals was met with "don't feel good, there's still work to be done". If you're white, and especially if you're male and white, everything good in your life was taken from someone more worthy.
I'm not sure how much of this is me having a rather autistic reaction of taking what people say literally, while actual progressives aren't that rough on themselves and each other, but it's driven me up the wall.
There's a weird line in Sympathy For the Devil that I'd never really understood: "I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys', when after all it was you and me". I've never thought of the Stones as being the voice of the American Left, but I guess they existed in a cultural stew that was downstream of it.
What's really odd, now I come to look it up, is that the song was first recorded the same week that RFK was assassinated; the lyric was originally just about John F but got changed at the last minute.
Either way, I can't comprehend the mindset of someone who looks at a couple of assassinations committed by (a) a Communist and (b) a Palestinian, and thinks "Whoa, you know who's really guilty here? All Americans!"
Film maker Antonioni filmed the Stones in their studio working on Sympathy For the Devil, and included the footage in his movie Zabriskie Point. The rest of the movie is pretentious arty crap, but the Stones footage is a fascinating look at the band creating one of their better songs. Their first version is a ballad, with the singular "Kennedy" line. On the 2nd take the next day they added the conga drum jungle rhythm, and since Bill was a no-show, Keith did a better more energetic bass line, this changed the whole feel. Also some nice guitar licks from Mick Taylor. And the line was updated to plural. The 2nd take (the released version) is much improved compared to the 1st.
And yes, Nancy, you were misled by the devil to feel bad. Maybe a dubious case could be made that "you and me" means American gun culture, since they were both shot. But the Stones and the devil aren't American.
I mean, the narrator in that song is literally the devil, so probably you'd want to take his moral claims with a few grains of salt!
Hah! Great point. :-)
I think what would-be 'progressives' promote is a sort of mindless conformity to Neomarxist norms via pop ideologies like genderism and wokery.
Lyndon Johnson's civil rights reforms helped culture immensely, but they were so successful they carried racialist mistakes like 'affirmative action' with them. We're still living with the excesses.
The protest against Israel's response to Hamas's assault is a prime example. Hamas must be rejoicing with every news report of student protests. Conventional 'progressive' dogma disassociates the Palestinian Hamas assault of October 7 from Israel's attempt to neutralize Hamas where it lives. Yet, when protesters call for the murder of Jews, they're not arrested and prosecuted for a hate crime.
For killing Jews to be a hate crime, they'd apparently have to chuck them off the roofs of the tallest buildings on campus -- as Hamas does to protesters in Gaza.
It seems to be a delusion of the Right that the Left is a unified entity with unified goals and agendas. Off the top of the brain are seven distinct ideological attractors within the Left — which sometimes form alliances with others, but most of the time they're feuding with each other.
1. Old Guard Marxists: reached maximum influence in 70s & 80s—lost it with collapse of Sov Union—now fighting a bitter rearguard battle against the CRT (whom they regard as heretics because they use Marxist dialectics but substitute race for class).
2. Old Style Socialists: went into eclipse during the Red Scares of the 50s and early 60s (mostly because their livelihoods in academia were canceled by successful campaign blacklisting by the right). Marxist never trusted them, because they were too wishywashy—but with the success of social democratic parties in Europe the Socialists had a revival that peaked with the Bernie candidacy. But with the failure of Bernie and the success of Biden, they've been eclipsed by the CRT (aka the "woke" folks). Socialists (aka social democrats, democratic socialists) are the group that called themselves "Progressives" during the Bernie vs Hillary civil war. Nowadays the Woke have appropriated the Progressive moniker.
3. Old style civil rights groups: They're still active, doing community organizing and voter turnout. They may pay lip-service to the CRT woken, but they're less about ideology and more about practical results. Obama tapped into this group very successfully during his campaigns. A lot of the BLM activists came from that camp. But they are only partially contiguous with the CRT woken.
4. The CRT Woken: Critical Race theorists used Marxist dialectics to argue that that race (instead of class) was the driving force of inequality in the world. The gender warriors latched on to this system of thinking. Initially, old-guard feminists appropriated this system of thought. Then the LGBTQ+ hijacked the conversation (called the old-style feminists TERFs because the old-style feminists didn't tolerate women with penises). Now Woke is combination of PoC and LGBTQ+, anyone not down with their agenda(s) are reactionaries. As an interesting side-note, while the right thinks Woke has been driven by university professors and the administrators in academia, the source of its power originates in education departments who train teachers. While the general liberal arts professoriate are not particularly woke, they've been confronted by a younger generation students and now grad students inculcated the CRT and CGT elements in the educational praxis.
5. Old style trade unionists: although there are Marxist and socialist elements within trade unionism, there's always been tension between the boots on the ground, organizers, and the ideologues. Unions have been declining for the last 50 years (and thus their power has been declining) mostly because Union management has become fat and lazy. However, unions are making a resurgence under younger generation of organizers. I suspect their power base is going to grow within the Left in the next decade.
Some smaller attractors on the Left:
6. Old-style feminists: largely eclipsed by LGBTQ+ Woke activists.
7. Old-style gay activists: largely eclipsed by LGBTQ+ Woke activists.
To win elections, Democrats have to turn out the vote. So Dems try to be inclusive of these groups. Marxists have always considered mainstream Dems to be the identical to Rightwing candidates, so they don't count when it comes to turning out the vote. And the Progressives usually defect because usually more moderate Democratic candidates get chosen for the presidential campaigns (because radical Dem candidates can't win elections at the national level—but they can win at the district level). But to win a national election the Dems have to turn out the black vote and women (who predominately registered Democrats). Latinos are important in some states.
Hope this helps you understand the dynamics of the Left. ;-)
The only politically sound solution is for Jews to declare themselves 'Transsexuals', then October 7 can be declared a Hate Crime and Jews will have the same protections we give toilet trolls.
Perhaps circumcision could be argued to count, at least for the males?
8. Environmentalists, not that they necessarily agree with each other.
Oh, my. Thanks! I totally forgot about the environmentalists. This is another group that the Right sees as some sort of a monolithic entity but in reality, is a fractured movement of which there are at least half a dozen feuding factions. Animal rights activists and food activists are also some peripheral groups to environmentalists.
> They may pay lip-service to the CRT woken, but they're less about ideology and more about practical results
To me, it looks like these have mostly been taken over by woke, not just in the Sense where I know it when I see it, but in the sense that effectiveness takes a back seat to having the correct rhetoric and ideology. Would you mind going into more detail about why you think differently?
> the source of its power originates in education departments who train teachers.
I'd also like to hear more about this.
The last experience I with with community organizers was with people I knew in the Portland BLM protests. These were all peeps who were veteran activists. In the past, they trained protestors in non-violent resistance (but a lot of the protestors who showed up at the Portland protests were not trained). Though there was a lot of "defund the police" talk, the organizers I knew just wanted to get rid of the Neanderthals who were ensconced in the Portland PD. I admit I can't speak for other community organizers.
As for Education departments, OMG! Phillip Lemoine (who is a Leftie BTW) wrote an essay (now I can't find the link to it) where his experience has been that it's his students who are leading the woke charge, rather than the liberal arts professoriate. But he points his finger at the Education Departments of Universities who have been pushing this ideology down to the current crop of teachers and school administrators. And I believe it!
Did you hear about the California Math Framework craziness? It applies "social justice principles" to math lessons. As a Leftie I'm all for social justice. But math is not a subject where social justice or any other ideology should distort its teaching.
https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/11/california-math/
Then there was the Oakland Unified School District that sponsored a playdate meetup for PoC kids. This was in clear violation of Title IX laws yet they did it anyway. And then they were shocked that they received death threats and bomb threats from the Rightwing extremists.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/justinphillips/article/oakland-chabot-racism-bomb-threat-18340221.php
I admit I'm out of step with the younger generation of Lefties. OTOH, I am totally out of step with any of the Rightwing crazies who seem to calling the shots in Congress and the GOP. I'll tolerate my crazies if it wins us control of Congress and the Presidency. Unfortunately, I think it turns off moderate Dems and Independents — which we need to win elections.
Thanks! I bumped into a few of those during my own city's BLM experience, but my impression was that they were most effective in the early days, in keeping the focus on BLM and policing, and that as the number of people involved grew, the situation got completely out of their control. Which I suppose is exactly what your theory would predict. :-)
"In particular, everything is an emergency. No one is allowed to specialize, so they're worried about everything all the time." That's a really great string of sentences. I think of that a lot in the context of choosing a career (which I'm still in the process of to some degree). There are so many effective choices that choosing seems to be turning your back on too much, even though to get good at anything requires that sort of choice. On top of that, the modern world runs on small jobs -- there's no shame in being a cog in a good machine. Maybe it's projection, but that seems to be a specific problem this community propagates with its focus on maximization.
Which community are you thinking of? I was talking about progressives, but you might be talking about rationalists or effective altruists.
Yeah, I meant “this” community, loosely people who read this blog but more specifically people influenced by EA ideology.
Absurd. Vaguely right-ish? Really?
The article sure seems that way. At least, it's anti "modern identitarian left", and pro "the self-selected good bits of older versions of the right". (The author was apparently born in 1964.)
Oh, was this whole thread due to someone misinterpeting my use of the word "right" to mean "right-wing" instead of "correct"?
Oops, well, **I** certainly made that mistake. :-/
What made me laugh is his rose-colored glasses about the "wholesome fun" people were having during the Reagan economic "boom". I remember a disco culture fueled by cocaine and a punk culture with lots of heroin.
Hey, it was a time of no fentanyl or zenes, which has basically dectupled overdose deaths in both cocaine and heroin users today. Coke was coke and dope was dope back then, neither of which is true any more.
That pretty much counts as a halcyon and wholesome time in MY book!
Ahhh, yes. Halcyon days of safer dope, and when Herpes was the only incurable STD out there.
Must you nit pick? The shoulder pads were important too and they weren't unwholesome.
My impression is that "morning in America" is a bit like "America is the most racist country in the world", in that if you repeat it often enough and loudly enough, a bunch of people will uncritically accept it, including a lot of kids who don't have the perspective to know better.
If you're up for even more writing, I'd be up for something on the Ford-Carter-Reagan dynamic. :-)
There's good research that conservatives are, on average, happier. This makes perfect sense when you consider that they are more religious and less likely to endorse victimhood.
Links please.
Are these studies normalized for age distribution? Older people generally track happier than younger people (probably due to older people having better incomes than younger people), and there happens to be a higher proportion of oldsters among conservatives.
There is also research that shows that median Conservative IQs are approximately ten points lower than median Liberal IQs. I suspect that difference would go away if one normalized for age.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2022/08/27/why_are_conservatives_happier_than_liberals_849615.html
This came up when I googled it. Yes normalised for age. As far as I’m aware it’s a relatively uncontroversial, well replicated finding - the only controversy is in the interpretation (liberals may argue that this finding is because conservatives turn a blind eye to social injustice)
Unfortunately, that article references a FiveThirtyEight story which references a link to a Pew Research Study that leads me to a 404 dead end.
As a conservative (though not religious), I'm happy to hear that.
What's happening with the book review contest? As several people have said in the announcement post comments, it's not clear how to confirm if our submissions have been received. What's the timeline for when to expect the next stage in the contest? I'm also not clear if I can edit my submission for typos or if that's against the rules. I'm *also* not clear if I should even be publically acknowledging that I've submitted something or if that partially breaks the rule of anonymity (I'm guessing it doesn't since I'm just a random commenter, but I'm unclear), but there's no other way to ask these questions.
And sorry if I sound impatient, but I'm very surprised there hasn't been a single word from either Scott or a single commenter about the contest in the last two open threads.
It's always been like this, complete public silence until the next stage of the contest. I did some math to cope with the lack of information.
2023:
announcement: feb 2nd
deadline: april 5th
start reviewing: may 1st
book review 1: may 20th
book review 16: september 1st
2024:
announcement: mar 2nd
deadline: may 5th
start reviewing: june 1st??
book review 1: june 20th????
book review 16: october 1st???????
All times subject to further delays or new discoveries in "putting a bunch of links in a google docs" efficiency.
PS: Also, I did see Scott saying editing for typos after the deadline is fine, but I think you have a practical time limit (maybe he duplicates the document at some point?).
Following up on my post from last week, I have an adventure in dodgy climate science to share. I was browsing through some info on solar cycle fluctuations when I came across a comment from a V. Zharkova. I searched the name, and apparently she published a very controversial paper, Zharkova et al 2019. Intrigued, I set off.
The main focus of the paper was on fluctuations in the Sun's magnetic field. That was completely overshadowed by a comparatively very minor point, however. As aficionados of orbital mechanics probably know and the rest of us don't, nothing in the solar system actually orbits around a fixed central point. Every solar body, including the Sun, orbits around the solar system barycenter. This is basically the center of gravity of all the solar bodies at that given point in time. Mostly this means just the Sun and Jupiter for practical purposes.
Anyway, Zharkova's paper made the extraordinary claim that the Sun orbited the barycenter, but the Earth did not. This implied that the distance between the Earth and Sun would vary by up to 0.02 AU (on top of the variation due to Earth's elliptical orbit). If true, it would mean the distance between the Earth and Sun varied by ~50% more than previous orbital mechanics would dictate. For those not familiar with the subject, this difference would be astronomical (sorry).
Naturally the paper caused a stir after this came to light. The publisher has all of the comments on the paper archived and available to the public. Initially, another PhD chimed in wondering how the orbital distances could possibly be so far off. Zharkova responded, and PhD 2 was astounded that she didn't think the Earth also followed the barycenter along with the Sun. They argue past each other for a while. Then PhD 3 intervenes and claims that the barycenter is actually fake, and just a mathematical artefact or something. This went on for a while and I admit I don't fully understand everything. Apparently it was a serious enough error that the paper was retracted by the publisher, even though the majority of Zharkova's work had nothing to do with it.
Wondering about the rest of the paper, I watched Zharkova give a youtube lecture about it. A little background for the audience - there are long term fluctuations in solar activity, and periods of historically high/low solar activity generally correlate with temperature proxies for anomalous temperature. One of these periods is the Medieval Warm Period. After going through her model of electromagnetic solar activity, Zharkova hit a bit of a snag: her model had this period about 300 years too late.
Carbon dating works by measuring the decay of radioactive carbon-14. Carbon-14 is typically created by cosmic rays lopping a proton off of nitrogen atoms. Cosmic ray activity is not constant, so there is a calibration curve to compensate for this. A disruption in the model of cosmic rays would mean the calibration curve gave wrong dating results. So Vela Junior comes to the rescue! Vela Jr. is a remnant of a nearby supernova that was recently detected. A supernova creates a massive flux of cosmic rays, easily explaining how the model was off by 300+ years. But wait - alas, the dating of Vela Jr. to 600 years ago was based on a contested spectroscopic analysis that couldn't be replicated. The dating is now thought to put the supernova over 1500 years ago.
This whole debacle is a classic case of trying to find post-hoc rationalizations about data to fit the model. Lots of good lessons here. As an amusing aside, Zharkova has a thick Russian accent and I turned on the youtube auto subtitles to help understand her. On "eigenvalues", it just kind of gave up and transcribed "aan". The best one by far was transcribing "antiphase" to "antifa".
I think it would be pretty inaccurate to describe the inner planets, including Earth, as orbiting around the solar system's barycentre. A single Earth orbit takes 1/12 of a Jupiter orbit, so for the purpose of the basic shape of Earth's orbit, the sun is pretty much fixed, and the attraction to Jupiter takes a very different form (and is much weaker) than that of a mass inside Earth's orbit. You could describe the Earth-Sun system and Jupiter as orbiting around each other, but that leads to a very different overall shape for the Earth's orbit than it simply orbiting the barycentre.
I don't really know anything about orbital mechanics. My impression is the Earth-Sun system orbits its own barycenter, which for all practical purposes is just the Sun due to the enormous mass difference. The Earth-Sun system also orbits the Earth-Sun-Jupiter barycenter. The other planets also impact this, but their masses are very tiny in comparison and the time horizon for these effects are 100K+ years.
Ticket prices go up at the end of Monday, not in 2 hours! Just clarifying (I'm running LessOnline).
Edit: Ah, Scott's update the OP (thanks Scott!). That was primarily a miscommunication on my part, oops.
Is there a difference between Lighthaven and Lightcone in the last sentence? Is Lightcone distinct from the Lighthaven event venue? Does one own the other? I haven't heard of Lightcone
Lighthaven is our lovely multiple-person venue: https://www.lighthaven.space/
The Lightcone Infrastructure team is a team of us that runs the venue but also does lots of other projects (for instance we run LessWrong.com).
Gotcha, I had heard only of Lighthaven before. It does look spectacular
WTF is up with the Dems on the commission trying to outlaw real money based election prediction markets in the name of preventing election "interference"?!?
Seems like large companies already effectively have huge bets on who wins the election as a result of policy exposure. Hell, a truly large and liquid betting market would actually do a fair bit to reduce the incentive of large corporations to net donate to one side of an election because that action itself is a PR/regulation risk (u piss ppl off and may lose) and the market lets them hedge w/o that.
And the few individuals who can really move those markets are the canidates and their close advisors. But surely it's a huge win for the country if we can bribe the people who are willing to take money to cause a certain political outcome to throw their own elections!!
Are we really at the point where even the people on the expert committees are seeing this fully through a signalling lens? Or is there some less negative psychological explanation of the partisan breakdown of this vote?
There are lots of betting markets that are banned. I can't buy fire insurance on my neighbor's house. I can't take out life insurance for a stranger's life. Doctors can't place bets on which patients will live and which patients will die. Heck - it's (probably) still illegal to pay someone to maintain a lawsuit in exchange for a cut of the proceeds (unless you're the lawyer doing it on contingency). That one's even got its own term - champerty.
All of that is to say nothing of actual gambling. That's banned almost everywhere in the United States, even though most people don't think that the outcome of a roulette wheel is nearly as important as the odds of the Presidential election.
You really underestimate how much people really, really, really hate the idea of someone making a profit from matters of chance.
> I can't buy fire insurance on my neighbor's house. I can't take out life insurance for a stranger's life. Doctors can't place bets on which patients will live and which patients will die.
> You really underestimate how much people really, really, really hate the idea of someone making a profit from matters of chance.
Those three examples don't support the following conclusion; they are banned not because fires and deaths happen by chance but because it's so easy to get them to happen on purpose.
That's fair, although I think there's an element of that fear in this election market thing. Look at George Santos and how easy it was for him to lie his way into the House of Representatives. If he could have cashed in on his lies, or allowed his donors to cash in on his lies, that would probably make the story worse, not better. Likewise for the New York Times and the Hunter Biden story - if they had been able to bet on Joe Biden and then bury stories unfavorable to him, that doesn't seem like a good thing.
So yeah, I can totally see people worried that major players will start betting on elections and then using their power to influence the elections. They already do it now and they don't make nearly as much money as they could.
Ok, that's the first explanation that makes psychological sense to me. They aren't just banning this relatively obscure thing out of vague moral concern but really think there might be big bad effects,
But then it raises the question of how they believe this despite the absence of such shenanigans in the UK.
I want to make the case to you that law is the product of experience, not reason. (That's Oliver Wendell Holmes' quote).
The U.S., for example, bans futures trading on onions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act Why? Because once upon a time, two bad people tried to corner the market on onions futures. So the U.S. banned it. No other country, to my knowledge, bans the trading of onions futures.
But the U.S. had a bad experience, and then enacted a law to prevent that experience from repeating. That's not a matter of logic, but, rather, experience.
Truthfully, there probably aren't going to be big bad effects in the U.S. from election market betting. The same way no one would corner the market in onion futures today. But the law doesn't work that way. It's not at all based on reason and purely based on experience. The U.S. has had a rough go of elections (and onion contracts) and thus the law reflects our shared experience.
Seems like your quote doesn't support your conclusion...we don't have experience suggesting it creates an issue.
However, this whole discussion has been rendered moot because Scott explained that adding a general ban actually reduces their work so we no longer need an explanation of why they would waste limited time on this and it's enough for them to just think it's better to not allow than allow.
> You really underestimate how much people really, really, really hate the idea of someone making a profit from matters of chance.
I think the opposition to gambling in general is mostly motivated by the opposite case, where some stupid people lose all their money, and then their families starve, or they then go steal something -- in case of offline gambling, if you live near the gambling house, expect people trying to break in your house at least once a month, that creates a lot of anger.
That's the problem that "stupid people lose their money" sounds nice in theory, but less nice in practice, when you see their children begging on the street, and everything you don't carefully lock gets immediately stolen.
In the US, I believe champerty is called maintenance, and no-win-no-fee lawyers have to tread carefully to avoid falling into that trap. The problem with bank-rolling someone's case is that if they lose then anyone who had made those champertous contributions will be called upon to fork out a commensurate proportion of the costs!
Right, look if this was the issue coming up asking for a change to positively approve them this is a more than sufficient explanation. However, it's not really an explanation for why to bother fussing with it at all -- and as a member of the commodity futures trading commission it's not at all clear how this is more like gambling than any other market I oversee.
I still think you need something more to explain why they aren't just doing the easy thing and making no changes.
They probably wanted to change it from the moment they heard about it, but it takes forever to do notice-and-comment rulemaking?
It took 12 years and 100,000+ pages for the FDA to decide what percentage of peanuts it takes to make peanut butter. PredictIt got started 10 years ago, so we're moving pretty fast for government.
My confusion isn't why they didn't do it earlier but why it seemed important enough for them to invest limited time and influence into. The fact that it's so hard to change rules just sharpens the question.
I mean, it's like finding out that Biden has spent 100 days as president trying to ban federal police from swearing or require warning labels on products with xantham gum . Ok, maybe he doesn't like those things but he has 4 years and can only do so much and unless he has a personal motive (dog died bc of xantham gum) or a political one (wants to seen pro trad morals) that would be an odd use of limited resources.
I don't think the guys at the CFTC board are just twiddling their thumbs wondering what they can ban. I'm sure they have many pressing issues so what elevated this to one?
"I'm sure they have many pressing issues so what elevated this to one?"
Call me crazy, call me paranoid, tell me to wrap myself in tin-foil but I have to wonder: is this more fall-out from the Sam Bankman-Fried affair? Regulatory bodies being more hyper than usual around things these (looks at notes) "Rationalists" are involved with? Hmmm - sums of money being solicited from the public for things to do with maths and statistics and those guys involved again, let's nip this in the bud before we get another FTX on our hands?
I actually think Scott answered this in his mantic Monday post...it turns out this change actually decreases their workload.
I don't understand the anti-gambling position, but trying hard to steelman it:
Aside from the consequentialist worries (encouraging corruption and cheating, causing addiction, etc), it seems to be something like: your money isn't *doing* anything useful. Unlike an investment, it's not actually growing the economy or contributing to production of goods or services in some way. It's not incentivising productive action by others. It's just sitting there, being traded on the rules of artificial games (whether that be cards, dice, horses or predictions).
And therefore...it should be banned? No, I don't understand the last part, or really the first part either. But there's got to be *some* apparently good reason for the opposition, right? Can anyone help?
Your money in a prediction market IS doing something useful - it's generating information! It is helping produce a current best estimate of the odds of something happening. And the more people are putting their bets into that market the faster the estimate converges and responds to new information over time. The market is doing much the same thing the New York Times does - giving us time-sensitive info that's useful today but will be near-worthless tomorrow. Is that not a form of "contributing to production"?
I think, if I were them, I'd see it this way:
1. There's an air of riskiness about allowing gambling on elections. Even if I can't think of exactly what could go wrong, it just seems like inviting trouble. Look at all the sports gambling scandals. You say that it's too our benefit if we can bribe out people who are bribeable- but what if they get in the primaries and win them purely to setup this scheme, then they're taking a spot away from a better candidate. (I think this is plausibly true and a legitimate consideration- it does have an air of "risk from something I haven't thought of yet")
2. Gambling is bad for people anyway. There's too much gambling. We should turn down the dial on the gambling knob (very plausibly true especially in a broad sense)
3. There's no clear benefit to this (you and I know this is false, but to someone uninitiated, even someone bright, it could seem true)
4. Given I'm going to oppose it, might as well throw a bit of meat to the base about rUsSiA etc.
That's a compelling case if I was forced to vote up or down or had nothing else important to do but it doesn't explain why I wouldn't just decide to not bother fucking with it at all and go deal with one of the many other important issues in my remit.
What's odd here is they are taking positive action to shut it down not merely failing to remove a barrier.
Also possibly interesting in ‘events for young people in Europe this summer’: I recently heard about Works In Progress’s Invisible College, and afaik it promises to be pretty cool. https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/apply-to-come-to-invisible-college
What's happening at the frontier of your field / a field you're excited about?
Could be highly niche which means people outside the field may not understand the rate of progress happening right now. Add links to blogs / sites that may help us find out more.
I'm interested in fashion counterfeiting because it's kind of a crime that feels more victimless than usual (IP crime but with physical products) and also because there's now some incredibly good fakes. The supply chain part is also interesting. There's an interesting article in The Cut about this topic.
Also, the more similar to the genuine article they look, the more they kind of throw into question of what product, exactly, is the genuine retailer selling. If you can get a practically identical luxury handbag at 10% the cost of a real one, and yet the real store still exists, it's not actually in the business of selling handbags. On the other hand, the brands do spend a hell of a lot of money trying to fight counterfeiting.
The part I'm kind of at a loss for is why governments even bother defending the IP of say, Chanel. Is there a bounty? It can't be cheap to go through so much mail, so why exactly is this getting funded?
I don't know it you're going to get good answers. For example, I can't talk about what's happening at the frontier of my field: this stuff is all trade secret, vendor-customer relationship secret, or in the process of being patented. The last one at least will give you a chance to read it 18 months after the application.
If I post any of this publicly I risk losing my job at a minimum.
What *is* your field? Are a lot of fields like this?
Finance, data science, AI, and a bunch of other fields are like this (at least in my direct knowledge).
I think in general if you work for a Fortune 100 or any sort of finance company, you sign nondisclosure papers as part of your contract.
Electronics and semiconductors.
I am starting to think that “time” doesn’t actually exist, only “motion”. It seems to me impossible to make reference to the passage of time without reference to motion, whether that be motion of the sun, a clock hand or the radioactive decay of an atom. And conversely, if all motion were to stop, how would that be distinguishable from time stopping?
If what we generally think of as “time stamps” are just ways to keep denote different configurations of matter and energy in the universe, then, for example, it solves all time travel paradoxes — the reason we haven’t seen any time travelers is because there is no such thing as “time” to travel in. If some Cartesian demon were to reset the universe to some configuration of matter and energy that had occurred previously, it would look the same as traveling back in time but no paradoxes involved. And although I am not a physicist, based on my layperson’s understanding of relativity, the reason for time dilation would be that motion gets slower as your mass increases as you approach the speed of light, etc.
Of course, these are all just shower thoughts, hopefully someone smarter than me can weigh in.
Seems related to Immanuel Kant's belief that time is our 'inner sense' (in contrast to space, the 'outer sense'), which seems based on the idea that the only way we have a sense of time is through our memory and inner ability to stitch the various positions of space together
I completely agree, and tried to write down some related, but different, shower thoughts here:
https://medium.com/@nordtomme/time-is-nothing-like-a-subway-map-4a69f7b85459?sk=6edbe5584f1b899dfa839a47c82bc388
>seems to me impossible to make reference to the passage of time without reference to motion
And vice versa!
> it solves all time travel paradoxes
You can also.solve them by disallowing time travel.
You might want to check this out:
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/
While I do not know enough to endorse it or not, it's very cool.
I suggest you check out Lee Smolin's discussions of time. I've bookmarked this video. Unfortunately, Lee's speech and motion is starting to be affected by his Parkinsons and it can be distracting. The serious discussion starts about 4 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3og9i5YfWU
Julian Barbour already wrote this in "The End of Time".
Describing the decay of a radioactive atom or the transition between two energy states as "motion" seems like a nonstandard definition of the term.
Just an undergrad in physics here but it's very common to supress dimensions in which there is no variation, since they most often make no difference to the results--which is exactly what you're doing. Motion is just variation in the time dimension, so without it it does make sense to have "no time"--ie everything would behave the same whether or not you had a time dimension.
It works with spatial dimensions, too--solving the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom involves separating out all the angular dependencies (which you can do because the problem is invariant under rotations ;ie, there is no variation along angular directions, only radial) and solving for the radial part of the solution. Them you can go back and tack on the angular solutions. But careful! The angular solutions can break angular symmetry, which seems odd/unphysical until you notice that the ground state is perfectly symmetric, and getting an electron out of the ground state would require breaking the symmetry of the situation with some input of energy.
Another example comes from an interesting problem in my general relativity class last semester--we were to calculate the TOV equation in two (spatial) dimensions (ie, for a flat circle star) which the textbook mentioned was equivalent to calculating it for an infinite cylindrical star. This is the same suprwssion of a dimension with no variation--if you right down the cylindrical star in cylindrical coordinates, nothing varies along the z direction, and you can supress it and get back the 2-d circular star.
Anyways, bottom line is that I think you're catching onto a well known thing in physics, which is that dimensions with no variation can be surpressed--usually. I think there are cases where the results are non-trivially different with added constant dimensions, like the higher energy levels of the hydrogen atom. Additional righting something down in full with multiple dimensions and then surpressing can sometimes yield different results due to the topology/geometry of the higher dimensional space you introduced--again looking at the problem of the hydrogen atom, the radial equation looks like the Schrodinger equation, but the potential includes an extra term that behaves like a "centrifugal" force due to the way polar coordinates work.
I think about this by imagining a 2d system with time, represented in 3 dimensions (and then trying to imagine a 3d system with time, represented in 4 dimensions). For the 2d system, it'd be like a series of chessboards, stacked on one another. The pieces would move continuously, and so would trace out a path in 3d, moving ever upward until they were removed from play or the game ended. You can imagine the "current time" being a horizontal slice moving continuously upward, or you could just imagine the entire thing as a solid whole, that all exists at once. It might look like a lot of strings arranged in a vertical bundle, all tangled together, but loosely oriented in the same direction.
If all motion were to stop somehow, all of it, everywhere, I don't think there'd be an observer left in the system. But an entity standing outside could observe and see, and possibly restart the system by reaching in somehow.
This doesn't really address your point, but if the chess game is between two outside players, and one has to take a bathroom break, and the time scale of the 3d representation is in real time rather than in moves, then yes, it could stop and then restart, and the time might not matter in the representation in terms of moves, but it would matter to the outside players. But that's not quite what you're asking about, I don't think.
I like this idea of a perspective outside the stopped System. From this perspective, the question is sensible: "For how long has all motion in the System been on pause?" Even when there's no actual observer outside the System, since there's always a conceivable observer, time does continue even when the pieces are all paused.
And the concept of outside time might be unrelated to the concept of time within the System. It might be like playing a video. The video exists, and can be played straight through in real-time. But it can be paused, and jumped around in, and sped up or slowed down, and none of that actually changes the video itself.
In City of God St Augustine argued the same thing, God exists out of time which only starts with the creation of the heavens on earth and the subsequent movement. Augustine argues that if nothing were moving, then time would effectively cease to exist because there would be no change to measure.
This was in order to argue that God wasn’t a procrastinator who waited around for an eternity to create the cosmos. God exists outside of time which didn’t exist until he created it, along with the universe.
(Augustine believed in the 6000 year old earth if I recall correctly. he was trying to explain why a God that was always there waited until recently - by the standards of infinity - to do anything useful).
That's true, but I think that space also falls prey to the same reasoning. Motion is distance over time. So just like you can't make reference to the passage of time without distance, you really can't make reference to distance without time. (E.g., when I look out my window and see into the distance, it's fixed at a particular place in time. I can't look out my window and see the Triassic Era).
You can abstract distance and time (e.g., a mile in the abstract, a minute in the abstract) but you can only ever observe them together. They're intrinsically linked.
But even for motion, time does appear to be weird. We can return to the same spaces at different times, but (it seems) we can never go back to a previous time no matter what space we occupy. That's pretty weird!
I don’t think motion is distance over time, it’s just distance. You can say “This thing moved from Point A to Point B” with no reference to time required. The reason you can’t look out your window and see the Triassic Era is because the current configuration of matter and energy is not the same as it was in the Triassic Era. If it were identical to the Triassic Era there would be no way to distinguish that from time traveling back to the Triassic Era, kind of the same way that acceleration is indistinguishable from gravitation. I don’t think the concept of time is necessary to describe motion, but the concept of motion is necessary to describe time.
>You can say “This thing moved from Point A to Point B” with no reference to time requir we
With no reference to the amount of time required, but if it is it is it different places at different tim es, it is in two.places at the same.time.
> the current configuration of matter and energy is not the same as it was
The words "current" and "was" already imply some kind of... time.
We can say that there is no time only motion, but then the question is how is that motion synchronized? If time is merely the movement of the particles, what mechanism allows us to predict which particle will hit the target first, or whether the particles will hit each other?
I’m only using those terms for convenience because much of our language presumes that time exists. You could posit a reference system that numbered every possible state of matter and energy in the universe and instead refer to those numbers rather than “time stamps” and it would work just as well to identify any particular “time period”. Again, an organization of matter and energy identical to that of what we commonly call the Triassic Era would be indistinguishable from the Triassic Era, so you could just as easily call something “Configuration 8736191022” or whatever rather than “8:59PM on June 11, 100 Million BCE”. No reference to time required.
I suspect you may be simply *renaming* time.
Now you have organizations of matter and energy, and the mystery of "what is time" was replaced by the mystery of "why are these organizations such that e.g. the law of inertia works".
Isn't time just motion in a direction our brains don't process?
Also yes the block universe is the only universe that makes sense to me.
Which? Those are incompatible claims.
If space-time can be quantized, they could be entangled. In your opinion, would that be a good alternative to a timeless block universe?
Odd. I was also pondering this week about whether it's possible to define time without reference to motion.
That sure would be a much more intuitive explanation for time dilation if it were true. Even my 4 year old could get the idea that they will move slower if I make them hold a backpack filled with rocks.
> I was also pondering this week about whether it's possible to define time without reference to motion.
This question seems to suffer from some unjustified assumptions. Stipulate that you can't define time without reference to motion.
It's even more true that you can't define motion without reference to time.
Very much hoping someone smarter than both of us will weigh in especially if they bring in Zeno's paradoxes! (About which I would love to do a podcast if I could find the right person!)
Zeno's Paradox is very easy to explain. It arises simply because the clearly false conclusion is stated without a necessary qualifying condition, but inclusion of that condition makes the statement true.
The way it is stated is that the runner Achilles gives the tortoise a head start, and then they both run and crawl respectively ever shorter successive distances so the tortoise always seems to stay ahead. But the conclusion doesn't consider that the sum of those distances run by Achilles converges to a particular value, say 140 yards (depending on the distances). So the conclusion should be not simply that Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise, as traditionally stated which gives rise to the paradox, but that "Achilles won't catch up with the tortoise _before_he_has_run_140_yards_" (or one could express the conclusion equivalently in terms of time, based on Achilles's running speed)
TBH, I've never understood the tremendous fuss people have always made about this so-called paradox, when it can be so trivially explained!
In my view, there really IS something unintuitive about Zeno's paradox, and it's the idea of convergence of infinite series.
I see. Did you read the article I linked? The author thought it was a bit more tricky than that.
I’ve heard people say that calculus explains Zeno’s paradox but based on my (dim) recollection of college calculus it mainly deals with into how things approach the limit via infinitesimals, not how things actually exceed the limit. I always figured that moving objects must eventually reach their destination because space is quantized and it is impossible for an object to go half a Planck’s length, so eventually you can’t keep further subdividing the interval. But I am also not a mathematician :-).
It does explain it. The whole point of calculus and other mathematics on sequences and series is to work out if a sequence converges to a value or not. So the sum of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 can be shown to converge to 1, while just adding it up on an infinite calculator will never get there.
Did you read the article though. It has some interesting points to make that suggest calculus isn’t the answer (or at least not the whole answer). And remember there are a series of paradoxes and they feed off each other.
It’s interesting. So far as I understand it the art seems to be saying that the paradoxes are only paradoxes if our understanding of reality is correct. Therefore our understanding of reality needs to change!
I guess it’s like AC Doyle (through Holmes) said, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth”.
I particularly love this article about the paradoxes as it much less dismissive than most stuff I read on them. I feel there is still stuff to be wrestled with here though as a non mathemetician I really wouldn't know. Anyway I gather the author of the paper is hard to find so if anyone knows about them I'd love to know.
https://mathpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm
The example with the mirrors merely shows that discontinuous motion is not well-behaved, and that the behaviour of light that the example implicitly assumes (in which the motion is discontinuous) cannot be physically realistic. Drawing the conclusion that space and/or time must be discrete from this is an incorrect inference.
In Zeno's paradox, as it is usually stated, the conclusion that motion is impossible is simply a non-sequitur, but if we take it to be making a slightly different point, that the future cannot be deduced from the past and does not follow from it because in between any two moments there was always time for something else to happen (there is no previous moment), then here calculus offers a solution: the laws of physics are differential equations, which include an assumption of continuity (in the technical mathematical sense).
Has reading any of Robin Hansons material changed the way you interact with the world? I’m not sure it has made my life any better, just occasionally I notice that a status game is happening or maybe I should be more critical of some medicine
That most political discussions are just signalling tribal membership, and that the 1/300,000,000 chance that one of us peons actually gets to decide something is not worth the energy that goes into the discussion.
Yes, it confirmed that I should not waste time reading his stuff.
It reminds me that sometimes things do not make sense because they were actually never supposed to make sense, only to send a signal.
For example, if someone says "I want X", and you say "okay, here is X", and they say "no thanks", this can be quite confusing... until you consider the hypothesis that perhaps they do not really want X, they just want to be perceived as "the *kind of person* who wants X", because there are some advantages of that which are unrelated to whether they actually get X or don't.
If anything, reading Robin Hanson's archives has made me much more skeptical that because someone is internet famous with smart people that they are themselves worth reading. Hanson rarely cites his sources, makes very firm claims about uncertain things (e.g. claims that dropping fertility *caused* the decline of the Greeks and Romans, which, to put it mildly, is contested), casually extends trend lines to infinity (which gets both interesting ideas like grabby aliens but also statements like the Amish will take over the USA in three hundred years because they currently have higher birth rates so we better mollify them and their values). Hanson also practices the kind of armchair evolutionary psychology that always seems to end with the conclusion that the social structure which prevailed in the time of his childhood just so happens to be optimally aligned.
> the Amish will take over the USA in three hundred years because they currently have higher birth rates
This may be true if current trends continue, but they can't. Eventually the Amish will occupy all the available* farmland and will not be able to expand further. Since the rural population is dwarfed by the urban population, they will still be a minority. It's interesting to speculate what they will do when this happens, all their options (not living on farms, too high population density on their farms, reducing breeding) are in conflict with their values.
*available means for sale. Corporate owned farms will go cheaper than family owned, so at some point I expect there will be mostly Amish owned, a few family owned, and no corporate owned. This may be an improvement compared to now.
They've already been getting into businesses other than farming because farmland is so expensive.
Interesting, I'm curious to learn more about this.
https://amishamerica.com/amish-business-directory/
Wow. I was wondering about the "using electricity" thing, but that says there are actually Amish "electricians (yes, electricians)".
> but also statements like the Amish will take over the USA in three hundred years because they currently have higher birth rates so we better mollify them and their values
The premise is reasonable; the conclusion would normally be something more like "we should *adopt* their values".
If they're going to take over in the future, they can impose their values then; if we don't want them, why would we do the same thing in advance?
@Michael
It can be wise to mollify people who may not forever be powerless and in fact may become more powerful than you or at least strong enough to hurt you, to prevent them from taking revenge.
For example, the 'extract reparations' strategy imposed on Germany after WW I seemed a lot less wise than the 'Marshall plan' strategy after WW II.
Revenge for what? We already give the Amish everything they want.
The plan for them to take power is that we voluntarily kill ourselves.
I was thinking more broadly than the Amish, more 'current events.'
It may be even wiser to adopt the Cato's strategy towards Carthage.
Gaining an ally seems smarter than destroying an enemy.
That kind of greed is what gets one stabbed in the back.
The argument assumes nothing meaningful changes for a period of time equivalent to the start of the industrial revolution; it's a big jump from "this is the direction of travel, what lessons can we learn" to "this will happen, we should prepare for it".
I don't think anyone predicted the birthrate collapsing. All the worry was about the population bomb, and that did it's bit to cause the collapse, though I don't think it was the primary factor.
Agree on both counts; actions which require assumptions about steady human culture and behaviour over hundreds of years are intrinsically suspect in my view.
I haven't plugged my podcast here for a bit so I thought I'd mention my latest episode. Recently I have been getting interested in the Byzantine Empire and its extraordinary longevity - seeing off any number of enemies in a history of over a thousand years until finally going down to the Ottomans in 1453. Anthony Kaldellis is a great speaker and I enjoyed this one as much as any I have done. He is considered by some to have controversial ideas on the subject but probably only in a way that specialists in the field would notice. Anyway - please give it a go!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/14985673
Like many amateur history enthusiasts, when I first started studying Roman history, and later (Byzantine) Roman history, I was curious how the empire collapsed; what caused Rome to “fall”. As I learned more the question eventually shifted to “how did they manage to make it this long?!”
ticket prices won’t go up until EOD tuesday!
Your site says "Ticket prices increase $100 on May 13", is this wrong?
giving people *slightly* more time :)