There seem to be a fair number of major figures of Western history who held attitudes towards nonwhite people that were horrific by modern standards, but were also very philo-Semitic -- George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt to name a few. Are there any notable historical figures who were like this but in reverse, i.e. usually consistent opponents of racism except for being anti-Semitic?
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,”
Dick Cheney - September 6, 2024
______________________
Cheney knows this isn’t about the left/right, elite/populist, policies of a single election.
It’s about stopping a man who has no respect for, is ignorant of, and is entirely incurious about the rare genius of our sometimes flawed but improvable Republic.
The founders knew there would be rascals and scoundrels and made Constitutional provisions for them. But Trump? James Madison had an amazing mind but I doubt even his imagination could have fathomed such a specimen.
“Kamala Harris will be standing on a riser behind her podium during our debate. That’s cheating!”
I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the seventh or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped.
So, the people who are only mildly annoyed by Trump, rather than existentially annoyed by him, do not trust the latter crowd when they say this is an existential moment. This is in addition to the usual crowd who have been regularly annoyed by Democrats.
So when you repeat points like "existential moment" or "uniquely bad", you are hard to distinguish from someone who just wants a Democrat in the WH so badly that they are willing to say things like that, which means they infer you just want a Democrat in the WH really badly. And they're mostly regularly annoyed by that already.
I think it’s a shame that people can legitimately point to that hyperbolic take and slough off the fact that Trump was actually the first president in American history to try to circumvent the democratic process.
With the obscenity of 1/6/21 and the campaign to force Pence to recognize false electors this does raise the situation to something much more serious than Dick Cheney = Darth Vader or Mitt is a Mormon who put Seamus on the car roof for a vacation trip.
As I say elsewhere, the Republic will most likely survive a second Trump term. If you take him at his word - I know, you can never really do that - it will be a very ugly 4 years.
I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential.
Bob Dole and GHWB were ordinary Republicans, standup guys with records of heroic military service. There might have been a bit of hair on fire rhetoric from both sides in the Clinton era but the heat really didn’t get cranked up until post 9/11 and the Axis of Evil and the Coalition of the Willing rhetoric of Bush\Cheney
I do prefer Democratic policies to Republican and I would have been a bit disappointed if Romney or John McCain had prevailed but I knew they were solid American patriots and wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it.
"I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential."
2024, 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000. That's seven. If I squint, I can see how 2000 wasn't quite as bad, because it was the last election we had with 9/11 in our rearview, and that changed a lot. But it didn't keep Gore from admonishing the nation about what would happen to social security and the budget surplus.
I prefer Republican policies to Democrat (particularly on the economy and gun rights), but I wasn't terrifically bothered by Biden winning over Trump, on the premise that Biden was physically hale and I remember him being willing to send praise across the aisle - until I found he wasn't. But while I do know of a few Democrat voters who, like you, were okay with Romney or McCain, I noticed dramatically more Democratic rhetoric claiming they were going to wreck the nation.
Okay. My mistake to just count presidential elections.
I can’t remember the specifics of Gore’s pitch in 2000 but going into that election as a Dem I expected Bush W to be a pretty moderate Republican - compassionate conservatism and all - until after 9/11.
"I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the sixth or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped."
Does it appear critically different from the original version?
I made a couple edits for clarity above just now. I had tapped out the comment on my phone while cooling down (sweating profusely) from a bike ride and made the typical two thumbs mistakes.
Yeah they had the guy who conquered the Gauls top of mind when they set things up, not the gasbag star of Celebrity Apprentice. That’s where we get into the realm of ‘difficult to imagine.’
I think "President who wants to declare himself King" would have been well within Madison's imagination. And the system he and his colleagues designed seems to have worked well enough to stop Trump once.
Where does "President who wants to declare himself King" come from? I have seen no indications of that, and it seems rather unlikely for a 78-year-old.
Barely; and the fact that a lot of people are willing to give him another crack at it is sobering.
And it isn’t even that he wanted to declare himself a king. That’s the least of it. The worst of it is that he wanted to make himself a king, but by having us all swallow what was obviously an enormous lie.
I try very hard to remain dispassionate, but it’s challenging sometimes.
This is a man who waged an intense and persistent campaign to get several young black teenagers executed (he agitated for NY to reinstate capital punishment specifically so it could be applied to these boys) for a crime that had been thoroughly proven to have been committed by someone else. And when he grew tired of that decided to get on board with the proposition that Barack Obama‘s birth certificate was a forgery. Plus all the other stuff….
Is it worth it? Quite a few of us seem to think it is.. can you ride the tiger?
Yes the system they designed held against a first attempt.
In a sane world the first attempt would disqualify him from a second. At least that’s what I think Madison would have hoped for. The Legislative branch is responsible for checking Executive corruption.
Mitch McConnell - March 13, 2021
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mitch McConnell - March 6, 2024
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
No, I have to disagree here. I don’t think Madison would have been able to imagine this. A single man using his superpower of utter shamelessness to bend one of the only two major political parties almost completely to his petulant will. Casting out legislators who refuse to kiss the ring. Those with the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger for example. Ryan’s exit was probably caused by Trump as well.
The Republic would more than likely make it through a second Trump presidency intact but it would be a civically corrosive affair and likely a very bumpy ride.
“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
I know, he just says these things to be provocative, and I’m a fool to take it too seriously
Trump’s AG, William Barr testified that he told Trump that the stolen election ideas being tossed around were ‘all bullshit’ - his exact words - shortly before being fired.
Fired for having the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
I expect a future Trump appointed Attorney General would be vetted for a more compliant nature.
Thanks for the replies. So I'm mostly with you both on Trump but possibly not with you on Cheney? I can't imagine a worse endorsement and if Cheney really wants Kamala to win he should have kept his mouth shut.
I’ll let Bernie Sanders explain why I think this was worth pointing out.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders - 9/8/24
“What I think Dick and Liz Cheney are saying is that in this existential moment in American history, it’s not just issues. Cheney and I agree on nothing — no issues. But what we do believe in is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations.
I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy. Obviously, on all the issues we have very different points of view.”
No amount of class from Bernie will make me like Cheney and I don't think I'll be alone there. There is an anti-war component to Trump's support (recent endorsement from Tulsi Gabbard etc.) and this plays into his hands.
I saw "Alien Romulus" and have a few ideas/criticisms that I'd like feedback on. SPOILER ALERT...
1) The idea that they were able to find the xenomorph's carcass floating in the vastness of space is ridiculous and seemed like a cheap trick.
2) But embracing that plot convenience anyway just leads to another problem: when the cloned xenomorphs got loose on the space station and it ended up disabled thanks to the ruckus, why didn't Weyland-Yutani immediately send a rescue ship? Wasn't the Romulus/Remus space station playing host to perhaps their most important and valuable secret? It wouldn't make sense for them to lose track of it like they did.
3) That makes me think the movie's plot would have been better if Romulus/Remus had been a secret space station in a restricted area of that solar system. Normally, its communications traffic would be very low so it could keep a low profile. However, once the catastrophe happened, it started issuing an automatic distress beacon.
Instead of working on that hellish planet, the protagonists would have been meteoroid miners on that small, industrial ship. Normally, they steered clear of the space station, but after hearing the distress beacon, they decide to risk docking with it to steal whatever they can in the hopes of escaping impoverishment. They assume an accident has killed the crew but left any number of valuable components intact.
A more distant Weyland-Yutani military outpost would also receive the distress beacon, and would dispatch a team on a second space ship to the station. This would ratchet up the tension since the protagonists would have to get in and out of the station before the squad arrived, and it would set both groups up for a showdown late in the film.
4) Another thing I disliked was how quickly the facehugger/xenomorph lifecycle went in this film. Yes, I realize many liberties can be taken here since alien biology is unknown to us, but I also think the alien matured so fast that it probably violated the laws of physics (probably the law of conservation of mass). Growing from the size of a rattlesnake to the size of a large man means adding 200 lbs of mass to your body. Even if your metabolism is 100% efficient, that means consuming 200 lbs of food or somehow transforming 200 lbs worth of air into body mass (1 cubic meter of air is only 2.85 lbs), and we never see any indication the alien does that. (Kudos to the novelization of the original "Alien" movie for including a brief scene after the chestburster scene where the crew discovers their food pantry room has been ransacked.)
It would have been better if the protagonists had docked with the space station at least 24 hours after it had been disabled. That would have provided enough time, per what we saw in the first and third films, for chestbursters who emerged from the station's crew to have matured into adult aliens.
5) Why were the pulse rifles in "Alien Romulus" more advanced than the ones in "Aliens"? The latter takes place 30 years after the former, so why would weapons technology go backwards?
LLMs have all but snuffed out the poetry of scam dating site emails.
A couple years ago with ChatGPT’s arrival, gems like the following disappeared from my junk folder like buffalo from the plains and sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see writing like it again:
Subject: Looking for a someone to have sex-related gender along with
I am actually a charming that is hopeless and try to strongly believe that there is something great in every person. When I'm feeling harmed, I'm sincere about my desires and also am truthful. I'm seeking an every bit as good friend who levels to brand new traits and is actually an outstanding and also unbiased communicator.
Check out my bio.
What a beguiling mix of optimism, vulnerability and sexual adjacency. Was I the only one who collected these? (Probably yes)
Just a few years ago (2020), I often saw Google Translate do translations about that bad, sometimes to the point of being funny. Sadly, it has now improved enough that they are no longer funny (still doesn't hold a candle to LLM based translation though, apart from the fact that it doesn't hallucinate or skip things like LLMs sometimes do).
Yes, improvements to Google Translate probably better explain the sudden disappearance of such emails than LLM adoption.
As an aside, the email would actually serve as strangely appropriate (and grammatically consistent) correspondence from E.E. Cummings’ title character anyone in his famous “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
"Sex-related gender" is certainly a novel phrase 😀 Next time you're in some discussion about gender matters, try lobbing it in as "oh yes, this is what all the cool kids are using now, didn't you know?" 😁
I'm reading How To Win Friends and Influence People and did a double take when I came across a story about a company trying to hire a "P.H.D. in Computer Science". This is a book written in *1936*. I know that before electrical computers were invented, the term referred to teams of people who did rote calculations by hand, but even so, I can't imagine that there would have been such a thing as "computer science" back then, let alone one worthy of PHDs. I wish I knew what this was referring to and what "computer science" PHDs did in the 30s.
The edition I'm reading was apparently published in 2009, and so it's possible that they sneakily edited in a later story. But it's still surprising since the book is packed full of references to the 30s, and this is the first time I've seen any reference to anything after that. Why would they so clumsily insert a modern story, and then do it in only one place and nowhere else?!
I’m enjoying the attempts in these comments to argue that a reference to a PhD in computer science in the 1930s is a plausible. Curious to see how they’ll explain the Stevie Wonder reference in a later chapter!
(Indeed, more modern anecdotes were added in later editions.)
Oh you're right, I didn't even pick up on the Stevie Wonder thing. I did notice a reference to Disney World in a later chapter, as well as an entire chapter talking about TV ads, and another one talking about BF Skinner including quotes from 70s books. It's a real shame they inserted all the more modern stuff, because I think it detracts from the book, and the TV ad chapter is completely incoherent anyway.
There were edits like that in the later editions of HtWFaIP; it's been long enough that I don't recall any examples offhand, but I definitely remember noticing them then.
And my father had to get his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering, because Cornell didn't have a Comp Sci department in 1960. But the NE department had the best computers, so he became the man for doing neutron transport calculations in a submarine reactor (I think). And later taught graduate Computer Science.
So, while "Computer" was certainly a term in 1930 and might have wound up in the same sentence as "Science", I'm pretty sure nobody doing popular writing in that era would have talked about a "Ph.D. in Computer Science".
A lot of academic computer science in those days was more like a branch of mathematics than engineering, dealing with stuff like defining mathematically rigorous abstract models of computation and figuring out what sorts of problems you could solve with one model or another. Both Turing Machines and Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus were first proposed in 1936, for example.
Okay, so it looks like punchcards were "computer science" from 1890 to the 1940s, but the first Computer Science Doctoral program wasn't started until 1962. So the question is now whether "a PhD in Computer Science" could be loose terminology for the fields involving punchcards or other calculations (like looking for a PhD in Secretary)..
ChatGPT says that the first PhD in Computer Science was in 1965, Richard Wexelblat at University of Pennsylvania, dissertation title "A Bound on the Number of States in a One-Dimensional Iterative Automaton". Previously, computer science research was done as a part of mathematics, electrical engineering, or physics.
At least at night, when wearing a headlamp. I look over and see pairs of glowing yellow eyes silently staring at me from shadowy forms, bobbing and blinking in an inhuman manner.
Tech tip of the day. You know when you try to get on public WiFi, but can’t get the “Accept Terms and Conditions” page to show up to actually join? That’s because the network is getting tripped up with encryption. What almost always works is visiting an unencrypted site that uses http (not https) but they’re pretty hard to find these days for good reason.
Anyways, visiting http://neverssl.com does the trick. It’s a site that’s not encrypted, specifically for that purpose. Happy browsing!
Another good try is nmcheck.gnome.org . It's used by default in Ubuntu to redirect you to the captive portal, but I've used it on other computer and even my phone when the page didn't want to load otherwise.
Review of the fourth episode of the Rings of Power.
It's better, in that things happen and it moves more quickly. We don't get Numenor, Cirdan, Celebrimbor, Annatar, or the Dwarves; it's mostly in Rhun and switching back and forth between there, Elrond and Galadriel heading out to Eregion, and Isildur and company wandering around doing something (I honestly have no idea what they were trying to achieve there).
So at least by sticking to only three concurrent sub-plots it's less messy. Still a little boring, however.
Let's get through this one by one. I'm going to cover each sub-plot as one block, rather than skipping back and forth as the episode does:
(1) Elrond and Galadriel go off on an expedition to Eregion because they've heard nothing from Celebrimbor and Gil-galad is concerned. Galadriel has the wind taken out of her sails because Elrond is given command of the expedition and she's under his command. She is still a bitch about things, Elrond is getting sassy (he's also growing out his hair and it's at the curly locks stage). Maybe with Elves it's the same as with Samson! All their strength is in their hair! Now that his hair is growing back, Elrond has found the cojones to stand up to Girlboss Glads and tell her, more or less, "my way or the highway". Which she does not appreciate, hence the bitchiness and passive-aggression. She is also way paranoid (the wind blows? it's Sauron doing it!) which may or may not be justified. Anyhow,. they head off over the Axa bridge (which made me laugh because over here AXA is an insurance company - product placement or just unfortunate coincidence?) but when they get to the bridge, OH NO IT BROKED!
Elrond says it looks like it was hit by lightning, Galadriel demurs and says it must have been Sauron because no earthly force could do this. They now have a choice of two alternative routes: go north, add two weeks to travel time, or go south through (cue ominous music) Tyrn Gorthad. Galadriel gets a ring vision and says there is evil there, but Elrond distrusts her ring and says that's where we're going.
Galadriel is right because Tyrn Gorthad means the Barrow-downs. But this is a thousand or so years too early for the barrows and the barrow-wights, you say? Remember, this show don't need no stinkin' timelines. So yeah, they go south and yeah, they encounter barrow wights and yeah, one of the group of Diverse Elves bites the dirt (there's a red-haired elf I thought would be the one because he's one of the two white guys, not counting Elrond, but no, they killed off the black Elf. How racist!)
Then they run into some Orcs and the dark-haired white Elf gets an arrow in the abdomen, and while they're all huddled behind a fallen tree trying to muffle his cries so the Orcs don't track them by sound, Galadriel has her hands on him and the riing magically activates and magically heals him. It even makes the arrow magically fall out of him instead of them having to pull it out. How convenient!
The healing makes no sense because that's not one of Nenya's stated powers, but if the show needs magic healing, then it gets magic healing. Galadriel hands the ring to Elrond and tells him and the survivors to get out of Dodge while she distracts the Orcs. She goes off and girlbosses the bunch of Orcs and the other Elves pause to appreciate how she sacrificed herself for them, but Elrond says in the neo-Sindarin (according to the subtitles) no, she did it to save the ring, then he stomps off. Told ya he was getting sassy.
Anyway, this is the bit I fast-forwarded through, as Galadriel girlbosses the Orcs with twirls and skips and flaming arrows and what-not, but just as she is about to ride off (I don't remember where the horse came from), she stops a moment too long to lecture them, so Adar captures her.
I liked that bit, mainly because as he knocks her off the horse via chain (yeah, the Orcs had hooks on chains or maces on chains or something), she aims a flaming arrow at him and he quenches it with his one gauntleted hand and we get the best moment in this episode because it is canon undiluted, genuine Quenya from Tolkien: "Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo, heruni Alatáriel". End of episode and a good place to end! Though I wish Joseph Mawle were still playing Adar, Sam Hazeldine is okay but he doesn't have that 'something' Mawle had.
(2) The Stranger and the Harfoots in Rhun. Oh gosh, I dislike this sub-plot *so* much. Let's grit our teeth and power on through, though. The Stranger and the Harfoots have been separated. Stranger goes looking for them, manages to stumble across Tom Bombadil, who has a nice little green patch of land and animals in the middle of the desert. A gust of wind (conveniently) blows the map out of Stranger's hands while he's talking to Bombadil, he chases it, it gets impaled on a tree branch, while Stranger is trying to get it back, the tree swallows him up.
Tom eventually comes along to coax Old Man Willow - sorry, it's Old Man Ironwood this time (hold on a second while I have a little weep about the paucity of imagination in this show) - to let Stranger go, takes Stranger home with him, gives him a bath (where all this spare water in the middle of the desert is coming from is never explained), he sings (yes of course he does) and Stranger thinks he hears a woman (Goldberry) but Tom plays coy and says there's only him and the Stranger there.
Anyway, we get the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" speech from Tom as he persuades Stranger that "you're a wizard, Gandalf!" and that it's his job to fight the Dark Wizard who may be allying with Sauron (there's a fire metaphor used here but I'm not going to inflict it on you). Bombadil is 'the Hermit', you see, and many moons ago the Dark Wizard also ate honey by Tom's fire (this episode abounds in the kind of unintended double entendres where you can easily visualise the porn movie version) and wanted to know about harnessing magic, too. But now he controls a lot of Rhun and wants to control more, he's ambitious you see, and if he links up with Sauron then it'll be bad news. They seem to be hinting damn hard the Dark Wizard is Saruman, but who knows?
So much for Stranger and Bombadil, on to the Harfoots. Oh, but before I do - turns out the Tusken raiders hunting the Stranger and the Harfoots are called Gaudrim. Name meaning unsure; "-rim" is the general suffix for "people, folk" and online source claims that "gau(d)" translates as "device or machine". If that means "People of the Device/Machine", and they're subservient to the Dark Wizard, it could be another hint that he is Saruman (who was the most interested in machinery).
As for their personal names, they seem to be taken from an IKEA catalogue: Glüg and Brânk? Dark Wizard realises this bunch are not really the smartest henchmen in the roster but since they're all he's got so far, he tells them to concentrate on finding the Harfoots and he'll deal with the Istar himself.
The Harfoots (Nori and Poppy) meet a Stoor in the desert, and immediately he and Poppy start making googly eyes at each other. Nori is no more impressed by this budding romance than I am, and they make the Stoor take them back to his village. Poppy and Nori are very surprised by the village life and Harfoots, I mean Stoors, living in holes because it's so alien to their traditions. Turns out the Stoors really are like the Harfoots, as the leader, Gundabale somebody or other, decides to tie up Poppy, Nori and Merimac (the guy who brought them back to the village) and in the morning kick them out into the desert, where she knows the Gaudrim are hunting them. Just like our Harfoot psychopaths would do! The family resemblance is unmistakable!
In fact, Nori says as much, that if Sadoc were in the leader's place, he would have done the same. Once Gundabale learns the name Sadoc Burrows, she takes Nori off for a small history lesson. Turns out that many moons ago, a Stoor named Roderic Burrows had visions of a place with streams of cold water, a place he called the Sûzat (another real Tolkien word, this will one day be the Shire). He set off with a caravan of followers to find it and promised to come back and lead the rest of the Stoors there.
Is that where the Harfoots are from, and have Poppy and Nori come to lead them there? Alas, Nori bursts the bubble that they have no home, they just kept wandering, and Burrows never found the Sûzat. I suppose if there ever is a season three, they'll give us the Fallowhides who *did* find it and settle there.
Okay, so now some of the Gaudrim turn up in the Stoor village looking for the Harfoots; Gundabale pretends she doesn't know about them, but the lead Gaudrim threatens her that unless she hands them over, he'll come back with the Dark Wizard and then the Stoors will learn why the Gaudrim all wear masks (because of the curse which they wanted the wizard to remove last episode, presumably). End of sub-plot so far!
(3) Theo, Arondir, Isildur, Estrid (Isildur's potential love interest) and the surviving Southlanders hanging out in the ruins of Pelargir (which, again, is all kinds of messed-up because it shouldn't be in ruins yet *or* be an abandoned colony of Numenor but by now I should know better than to expect fidelity to lore). A lot happens and yet nothing happens, and I'm not really clear on what is supposed to be going on here. This is the part where I fast-forwarded the most.
Theo manages to get himself captured, Isildur and the gang go searching for him, there's something about Wildmen (I swear on my life they're copying Game of Thrones here because of the coincidence of Wildmen of Dunland), Arondir finds out Estrid is one of the Wildings and wants to use her to find their base, yadda yadda yadda, there's another pointless monster in a mucky bog, they find Theo, an Ent and Entwife turn up and wreck the joint, Arondir speaks to them in Sindarin and there's more yadda yadda yadda and that's about it. I don't know what the point of all of this was.
Roll end credits with Bombadil's song playing, which at least is better than the original lyrics of a part of a song they used in the episode. They used "gropin'" to rhyme with "hoping", you see what I mean about the easily visualised porn version? EDIT: Whoops, got that one wrong; I rewatched to see if I had it correct and no. The actual lyrics, sung by Tom while we get to see Not-Yet-Gandalf from the waist up naked in the tub having a bath, are: "Down sinks the sun in the west/Soon you'll be gropin'" to rhyme with "open" in the next couplet. However, nekkid wizard and "groping" in conjunction = in front of my salad?
Summing up: better pacing, more movement forward. They should have stuck to cutting down number of "and now this happens here and that is going on there and over yonder another thing" in the first three episodes, maybe give one episode to each sub-plot so it could be more fully developed.
The scenery is the best part of this show, even if they over-CGI it. Elrond at least seems to be growing a pair now that he's dealing with Galadriel, though they seem to be introducing pointless CONFLICT CONFLICT CONFLICT for dramatic tension between the pair of them; if Galadriel is too paranoid and stubborn about "everything is Sauron", Elrond is being too stubborn about "the rings are evil and you're wrong to use them".
I want to see what happens next with Adar and Galadriel, even though I do think - so far - Hazeldine is not able to deliver in the part. This episode was better than the preceding three, but the Isildur sub-plot is really just spinning its wheels. We *know* he can't die, so there's no suspense at all in such scenes as "oh no, a bog monster! oh no, Orcs!"
I can't think of a topic more likely to stir the passions. On some level I feel the idea the discourse should take place calmly is based on a flawed anthropology. Zeal is an effect of love. I think the alpha discussion below is great.
Well theres a lot more men than women around, so dating advice is less about "how to get a man" and more "PSA you can get away with really high standards even if you were an ugly duckling in highschool". I think theres a fair bit of that, just its not usually framed as dating advice, more "Ugh I cant believe this dude was *so horrible* to me".
I think a part of the reason is generally fewer women in the rationalsphere, but another part is that the mainstream advice for women sucks less than the mainstream advice for men, so there was less pressure to develop an alternative knowledge base.
What I mean is that e.g. the book "The Rules" is more or less mainstream advice in a condensed form, but anything analogical written for men would be decried as toxic and sexist. The mainstream dating advice for women seems to be unapologetically about "what should he do for you, and how to make him do it", while the mainstream dating advice for men seems to me about "what should you do for her" (spoiler: "women are mysterious, always be polite and buy her flowers").
So I guess a good starting place for a rational advice for women might be to review "The Rules" (maybe as a part of ACX book reviews). I am not the target audience, but I would love to read it out of curiosity.
On the other hand, the fact that mainstream not-obviously-stupid advice for women exists, doesn't imply that the advice is actually good. It probably also follows some taboos, and optimizes for what the audience wants to hear rather than what is true. It is a better starting point, but still just a starting point that needs to be reviewed carefully.
It also depends on what is your goal. For a typical man who reads about dating advice, the goal is "getting laid, preferably with hotter women". From epistemic perspective, this is convenient, because you can try many things and get a quick feedback on what works. (There is a problem with placebo effect, namely that if you try X and succeed, maybe it really was X, and maybe it was just your greater confidence.) With things that have longer feedback loops, like a happy long-term relationship, here even the famous PUAs often fail. I believe that still makes the advice useful, because although short-term success does not imply long-term success, short-term failure means that you don't get a chance for anything long-term. Useful, but incomplete.
What would be the measurable short-term goals for a women's PUA camp?
If I tried to give some advice to straight women, here are some random things:
* The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else.
* If you initially don't like a guy, but your best friend insists that he is awesome and you should definitely date him, and keeps pressuring you until you give the guy a chance... don't be surprised if a few months or years later you find out that he is cheating on you with your best friend. You already had enough evidence that she wanted him, and maybe your intuition also tried to tell you something important.
* While it is technically true that you can still get pregnant at 40, consider two things. First, it will limit *how many* children you can have, especially if you change your mind later. For example, if you think that two kids are optimal, and ten years later you decide that actually maybe three... you can still do that if you started in your 20s, but not if you started in your 40s. Second, if you start looking for a reliable partner when you are 40, the best ones were already taken long ago, and the remaining ones probably have some baggage *and* you will have to compete for them against women ten years younger. If you and your partner agreed that you will first spend a decade together without kids, and have kids later, remember that he still has an option to replace you by a younger woman when he finally decides that it's time for him to have kids.
But this is more like long-term strategic considerations, while you probably want specific tactical advice for how (and whether) to get the man in front of you right now.
"The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else."
That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me. Maybe it's just that I'm from an older generation where we were warned "men only want one thing", or that I'm not in my 20s anymore so yeah it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen even if right now you feel ready for wedding bells and kids.
Not condemning men for their biology, but yeah. You have boobs and are not actively repellant, he wants to bang, but after he gets into your knickers? To quote Shakespeare and Sonnet 129:
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
> That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me.
It is the kind of advice that needs to be repeated at least 100 times, because the first 99 times people are likely to miss it. Probably everyone heard it, but also everyone believes that "this one situation is special".
> it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen
The easiest way to waste eight years is one day at a time. And it's eight years of hearing "definitely yes, but not right now", and sometimes there are plausible excuses. And the woman may also kinda want it, but also procrastinate on it. Setting deadlines means making hard decisions, and most people avoid that.
And the part that age matters is actively denied in current culture. We are all forever young, and damn any sexist who claims otherwise.
Two women independently told me that it happened to them. I have never read about anything like that online or in media. So either this is a rare situation that just accidentally happened twice in my bubble, or it is a frequent situation and there is some taboo against mentioning it. I have no data to prove either way.
(The hypothetical taboo would be that most advice for women comes from women and is given in the spirit of "we sisters need to trust and support each other". This situation suggests the opposite. The mainstream advice for women is allowed to be cynical about men, less so about other women, and especially not about friends.)
For the record, I think it is on average *good* for women to trust each other's advice, but I think the most value here comes from your friend noticing a red flag that you missed.
> I don't really get what the motivation would be for the best friend, if they want them themselves how does pushing them on someone else help?
The situation is that the best friend already tried to get the guy for herself, but she failed. (She probably didn't disclose this detail to you.) Now if the guy is hot, he will soon get some girl. If it's you, at least he stays in her proximity, so she can try again later... and as your friend she will probably have a lot of seemingly innocent opportunity to meet him. If instead it is some strange girl, he might disappear out of her life completely.
That's fascinating. It's interesting how there are things like this that are counterintuitive at first glance, but make sense once explained. And also interesting to learn that people behave like this.
I wish there was an AI tool for people on autistic spectrum that would observe the social situation around them and then quietly explain it using plain words.
Sometimes the understanding is hard not because the correct explanation is complex, but because this is not something *I* would ever do, so the right hypothesis doesn't even occur to me. Once someone points in the right direction, it suddenly becomes obvious.
Perhaps there are some simple heuristics such that if you memorize them and remember to apply them to all confusing situations, they could actually explain a lot of them. Such as: "Consider the possibility that the person is lying to you. Try to think of three different explanations why making you believe X could be useful for them."
One of the most frustrating things about the feckless Western leaders of this century is their continued refusal to wake up to the reality of Russia’s intentions. All these bushes, obamas, merkels, sarkozys, etc. and up to the current crop of nincompoops - clueless dolts still looking for Putin’s soul while being scared of his shadow.
The historic Soviet Empire and the fictional Centauri one both relinquished power gracefully, right up to the point where some tragically damned revanchist decided he wanted it all back the way that it was.
Many Thanks! Yeah, I don't recall anything particularly bloody happening when all the *stans split off the former USSR... Good point! ( I can't comment about the Centauri case - didn't watch the relevant TV :-) )
<mildSnark>
Did the fission of the USSR count as the political equivalent of a spallation reaction? :-)
> Sorry, is the principle here just might makes right?
I think Americans who argue that they can interfere in other countries without any reverse interference are the ones arguing that position. I’m not. I’m saying “sh1t goes on”.
Also I doubt the Russian interference stories in specific, we were all a bit burned by Russia gate.
I don't see anyone here actually arguing that position though?
One could believe that Russia, Iran, and China interfering with democracy in America is bad, and also America interfering with democracy in Argentina or Colombia is also bad.
What's better than neo-liberalism? A free-market economy makes nearly everyone better off in the long run because trade and innovation are maximized. Most people want a safety-welfare net to some degree as well, and it seems we can have it both ways, both relatively free markets but also a welfare state to a degree, a degree we can always argue about endlessly.
For those who want to overturn the donkey-cart, what do you think is better than neo-liberalism and why?
I read Freddie DeBoer and try to understand his Marxism sometimes. I read him because he is a great writer of English prose, but he's horrible about explaining his Marxism. Recently he wrote that (I'm paraphrasing) his Marxism is rooted in the exploitation of the worker by capital. (He is apparently against it.)
Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing, but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them, a dramatic example being a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better.
And most all of us are like that hooker from time to time on our jobs metaphorically to some degree usually much less.
Marx also says we are alienated from our work. I agree entirely, although, again, it's a matter of degree and varies a lot. Plenty of people feel right at home at work despite the capitalist system and all. But some of us just work for a paycheck and don't identify with our jobs.
It drives me crazy that modern-day Marxists seem unwilling to describe a toy version of what the world might look like under Communism. How would our work change? Please illustrate the differences in significant detail. Feel free to speculate and idealize. Or to speculate and pragmatize.
Communists just seem so intellectually cowardly these days.
However I will admit to an anti-neoliberal point of view I might buy into somewhat if someone could make it coherent. Neoliberals care about economic growth, i.e., the future. But let's say we are willing to sacrifice future economic growth for a near-term present that is better for everyone living in this century. Economics is about tradeoffs. What can we buy for the next 60 years if we trade away future growth for it? It must be something but what? I might be willing to make that Faustian bargain...
I'm not in the donkey-cart flipping business myself, but most of the reasons I've heard have nothing to do with the line of arguments you're pursuing, and rather focus on some utopian or semi-utopian image of a wonderful past or a glorious future that ought to implemented.
I haven't heard any serious challenges to the neoliberal state you describe. Some idea-trees, like degrowth, try to masquerade as such, but as soon as you scratch the surface you find only vibes and no serious policy proposals or institution design.
Otherwise the only other real response would be that if inequality grows faster than the overall economy the median standard of living can still drop even if the mean is rising.
Also if you want to see an interesting toy model of communist society Towards a New Socialism is probably the most compelling one, it seems like most free-market types shift their opinion on the viability of communism at least a little if they read it.
This substack post makes a decent argument that in the 80s most of the academic Marxists became neo-liberals because when they got down to it they couldn't agree that exploitation of labor was morally wrong, but they could all agree that inequality was wrong. The author even mentions Freddie specifically, writing "nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that 'Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,' I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond 'Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.'"
They didn’t become neo-liberals but other non Marxist forms of socialism. That’s a good article nevertheless, it at least engages in a critique of Marxism from the left, which is unusual. Largely because most proclaimed Marxists aren’t actually Marxists at all.
I saw that. It's interesting. I saw another post responding and arguing against it, but I didn't read that one.
What confuses me most about Marxists is the History Marxists. I think they mostly believe that history is determined by economics and class struggle and are pretty deterministic overall, but why do they have to call themselves Marxists? (Why do so many people on this site have to call themselves Rationalists?) What else do they believe? For instance, a pretty good historian like Chris Wickham identifies as a Marxist, but I've read a couple of his books and don't see where the Marxism is. It's like reading Freddie. You know he's a Marxist because he says he is, but where's the Marxism in his writing? I can never find it. Or maybe it's just a free pass for him to be against everything.
I honestly don’t think that Freddie has read Marx at all. Most of his writings are anti woke, and sometimes pro left. He’s pro trans but that’s a socially libertarian position.
It’s not unusual for Marxists to not explain the future society except in the vaguest terms, so he’s not alone there. That’s starts with Marx. It’s relatively new for modern Marxists to not use any Marxist terminology at all.
Well, a central part of Marx's theory is that history is determined by economics and class struggle and that using his theory you could predict what will happen in the future. Now nothing he predicted actually happened, but that's just details.
> a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better<
I don’t think this is a good example of what you are getting at. She might just prefer to keep more of what she makes given what value the pimp brings to the table. It’s one thing for capitalism to provide the machinery by which workers can be gainfully employed (or exploited) but a girl’s got that out of the gate; pimping is a protection racket, pure and simple.
Now you've got me thinking about all the things I've heard about pimps and hookers over the years, some of it from their own mouths. At least in the US, where prostitution is illegal almost everywhere, most hookers don't make any money. It all goes to the pimp. You can think of it as an abusive poly relationship. The women are emotionally dependent on the pimp, the pimp gives the women affection but makes them fuck for money they turn over to him. They are a family of sorts.
There are plenty of exceptions to that, of course. But it is not generally a protection racket, at least in the US.
The problem is lack of definitions here. You are equating capitalism with neo-liberalism but prior to the 1980s, the term wasn’t used and the neo liberal era is a clear break from the post war era.
You are right about Freddie, no indication that he has really read Marx.
> Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing,
Marx was often using the term in the neutral sense.
> but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them
Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
>Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
How do we measure that surplus? I think most anti-capitalists don't value the risk-taking involved in capitalism. You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital. If you are one of the 10% of businesses that succeed, all of your profits are viewed as "rent" by many anti-capitalists. But obviously it isn't rent if you risked losing it all! But if you put it in those terms, few will sympathize with the capitalist because you have just equated them to a gambler, and almost nobody empathizes with gamblers.
Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
> Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
There is not necessarily a clear line. Things can be part this and part that.
Let me give you a different example: from the perspective of the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, talented people (probably most readers of this website) should be considered a combination of "labor" and "land", that is "workers" and "renters" simultaneously. So if we happen to get good salaries, it does not mean that the society is actually nice to workers. It just means that we got lucky to also be part-renters.
Ok, this sounds weird, if you interpret "land" and "rent" literally. But if you look for the reasons behind the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, you can more generally define "labor" as "that which costs human time and effort", "land" as "that which is in a limited supply", and "capital" as "that which can flexibly move anywhere". And from that perspective, high intelligence or talent kinda resembles the "land" category; there is a limited supply of smart people, and companies have to compete for them, which gives them the leverage. But it also resembles "labor", because the only way the smart person can use the high intelligence to produce results is to work, i.e. also spend time and effort. (You can't simply send your IQ to work alone, while you stay dumb at home and relax.) Thus, from an economical perspective, a smart person is a hybrid of "labor+land"; a worker with a leverage.
Now let's look at the capitalists from this perspective. Venture capitalists are the pure "capital" guys. Those who build startups are "labor+capital" hybrids, because they have to spend a lot of time and work hard to make it succeed. Actually, more like "labor+land+capital" hybrids, because it also requires some rare skills. The categories are not exclusive.
If this was purely about the capital, the capitalist wouldn't mind if others (including the employees) bought a share in the company. Money is fungible. And this is indeed how it works when the company is traded publicly. But many companies are not; and those are the ones where the owner has a leverage, that is the "land" aspect of the business.
> You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital.
This is part of the story, but not the whole story. (It is the whole story if you are a venture capitalist.) For example, if you approached most people who are starting a company, and offered to provide them money in return for a share in the company, I suppose many would refuse you. Partially it is because they also provide work, but even if you said "ok, I will pay 60% of the money for 30% of the ownership", they would probably still refuse you. If you proposed to them to make it a cooperative where everyone provides a part of money, they would almost certainly refuse you.
The surplus is easy to measure. Just imagine the company didn’t distribute profits to shareholders but was a partnership of workers. That’s the surplus.
I’m not a Marxist and there are more coherent answers to Marx than your response which isn’t wrong either. Nevertheless falling wage levels relative to the rest of GDP is a problem.
Sure, I think there's two deep problems with neoliberalism as it currently exists in the US.
While there's a lot of variability in definitions of neoliberalism, a core component is redistribution and the welfare state. Basically, capitalism is really unfair, we want the state to bleed off some excess profit and give it to poor and middle-income people and that will make everyone happier. The issue is that this has bad externalities that we can't really control. For example, conservatives for a long time have criticized the welfare state for creating dependency among people and for building large, unaccountable bureaucracies. Which is a pretty good description of Medicare and Medicaid. We have large bureaucracies with poorly aligned incentive structures that a lot of elderly people are deeply dependent on for critical services that are so poorly run financially that it's a major drive of US federal debts and deficits in ways that are looking...very concerning for America's long-run financial health.
Secondly, and I think the Marxists are absolutely right on this, commoditization is a very real thing and it's really bad. I'm thinking very specifically of the old SSC review of the "Two Income Trap" (1), where women left the home to enter the workforce and doubled the family income but most of that extra money went towards taxes, child care, tutoring and housing in better school districts, and a 2nd car so she could drive to work. That's not to say that there's no financial advantage to women entering the workforce, just that a lot of that extra money is going to buy explicit substitute goods in the market for things women previously did in the home outside of the market. This greatly overexaggerates the benefits of liberalism and often drives people into making suboptimal decisions. A lot of social interaction in stuff like bowling leagues has been commoditized by things like social media in really harmful ways.
At this point how people define neoliberalism gets really important, because neoliberalism, or at least state redistribution of some of the gains of capitalism, seems to be a convergence point for most modern governments but there's a lot of variance in how that's executed at to what extent. China can seem to be very neoliberal until you dig into how state-owned enterprises actually function.
I don’t have a great alternative to point to, but the big selling point of neo-liberalism, that we can have maximal trade and innovation while protecting people, has fallen pretty flat.
At this point, I think many people, just just populists, are skeptical about claims that the losses of liberalization can and will be made up in any meaningful way.
I think you're correct. In theory we could have used some of the gains from offshoring to recompense factory workers who lost their jobs due to it. But we don't do that. The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
> The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I agree with you... but that's just further evidence that this is a minority position.
I suspect that most people understand "global trade is good" as "good for *me*" rather than "good for *everyone*". Both can be true, but the former is the important part, so if the latter has some exceptions, no one cares (unless they are one of them).
>I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I would suggest some caveats to the "global trade is good" part. Yes, autarky is inefficient, but it is also true that supply lines wrapped around the globe are vulnerable. Theoretically, insurance markets could incorporate that vulnerability in prices, but, having seen Covid's effects, I'm not at all convinced that that really works very well. There is something to be said for actively trying to shorten supply lines, at least to lessen some of the worst vulnerabilities.
Yes, but without that you don’t really have “neo” liberalism any more, and you’re causing a lot of damage and anger which will sooner or later find an outlet, see Brexit and President Trump for examples. It’s honestly a big problem.
I think few people were ever actually "neo-liberals" in the sense that it means a market economy with free global trade plus some redistribution of the profits to make things fairer. It's merely been a compromise position for politicians in recent decades. Actual people tend to be either all in on markets or all in on more redistribution. So politicians pretend to stake a middle-ground, but in areas where the market wins, it wins everything. In areas where the government intervenes, the market becomes too distorted to function properly (real estate, education, etc.)
OK, I’m not sure we’re operating from the same understanding of the word, but what I mentioned was the basic neo-liberal “bargain” and was certainly talked up by Clinton et al, and even the Republicans used to talk about rising tides lifting boats etc. People were sold on this plan.
If the plan had been presented as “we’re going to send all your jobs overseas and replace them with delivery gigs and fentanyl”, the pushback would have come a lot sooner.
If we hadn't spent the trillions we got from China (in the form of treasury purchases and the resultant low interest rates) in Iraq and Afghanastan we could have easily afforded to compensate ex factory workers had there been any political will to. There likely wouldn't have been the political will, though.
(Even today, it's maybe a bit weird that no politicians are saying "Reparations for ex factory workers in the rust belt!". Even Bernie doesn't say that.
Particularly, how do you distinguish between those "want to overturn the donkey cart" and those who "want a safety-net welfare state to some degree as well [as a free market economy]?"
On the one hand it sounds like you are really looking for responses only from out and out Soviet-Style communists and the like, but elsewhere you say that "neither Trump nor Harris is neoliberal" when neither seems to me to be proposing abolishing the market.
Makes it hard to tell whether this is a genuine request for a functional non-market vision of the economy (a fair enquiry I myself have made only to find lacking results), or just another take on the American Chopper meme https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1461671-american-chopper-argument.
I suppose Trump and Harris are still generally neo-liberal, but the difference between Biden, Harris and Trump and previous presidents going back to Carter is that the former are moving away from neoliberalism -- mostly with tariffs and subsidies that destroy international trade.
It's probably more about their economic philosophy than their actions. Trump, Biden and Harris are actively against Adam Smith liberalism whereas every president since Carter has moved in the direction (or spoken generally in favor) of Adam Smith liberalism, aka neo-liberalism. (To be clear, few have shouted "I love Adam Smith", but until Trump nobody has proudly endorsed tariffs as a way to help the US economy. He basically took us back to Depression Era economic theory and Biden and Harris have followed him there.)
Some of those examples are pretty bad. Gas tankers can't afford to wait around long for higher prices. If gas tanker companies were actually good at predicting the direction of gas prices, they could just trade the market, they wouldn't need to operate tankers. (According to the story, the tankers were waiting because there was a glut. That doesn't mean that waiting is a good strategy because they might be wrong about the glut ending in the near future, but a glut means very low prices for consumers so I don't see how this example shows that capitalism is screwing the public.)
Perhaps we should clarify what we mean by "neoliberalism". I see no good alternative to market economy, but the neoliberal belief that "the market cures everything" leads to these bad results, so a good government should work against these (welfare state, anti-trust, etc.).
Granted, the examples aren't always so good, better ones could be found. Similar to the gas tankers: There are also shipping companies who dissolve their warehouses and instead simply leave their goods in the trucks, so they are driven around senselessly, polluting the environment and clogging the roads, because it is cheaper that way.
We live in a world where a single digit number of people own as much as half the world, productivity has become decoupled from wage growth, and democratic institutions are bought up by the rich and powerful; what safety nets still exist seem to be a legacy of a less neoliberal era under perpetual assault from politicians of every stripe except the far left.
I do, in fact, want to expropriate the rich, abolish private (not personal) property, and let the chips fall where they may.
You can get to "a single digit number of people" holding more wealth than the bottom 30-40% of the population, I believe. But by the standard that calculation uses, it only takes one person and that person doesn't have to be at all rich. The catch is to use integrated net wealth of "40% of the world" or whatever.
So, if you live on an island with 4,000 people, and one of them is a rich guy who's a million dollars in debt (but they haven't repo'd his Benz yet, he's still living large on credit), and a hundred working-class families with underwater mortgages and $50,000 net debt (but, again, still have all their stuff and are doing mostly OK), and then 1200 poor people who are living paycheck to paycheck but can claim ~$5k each in clothes, beater cars, petty cash, etc, then the integrated net worth of those 1,301 people is zero. One destitute beggar who just had a quarter dropped in his cup, has more "wealth" than the lowest 32.5% of the population combined.
Presenting that in a way that leads to the reader believing that a handful of oligarchs control half the world's stuff, is fundamentally dishonest in a way I consider equivalent to lying.
Oh, thanks. Yes, I was interpreting this as "half [the total wealth of] the world", not "[the wealth of] half [the people of] the world". This makes a lot more sense now. :-)
I am still searching for a coherent anti-neoliberal position. I have appreciated reading work by the Mises Institute and the Distributist Review, both anti-neoliberal from opposing sides, but non-marxist. I don't believe the happy medium you describe between the market and welfare can continue indefinitely. Tech is going to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
It did. Look at the Highland Clearances; it was no longer profitable for large landowners to have tenant farmers, so they evicted them and turned the small holdings into sheep farming (which needs less labour) or deer for hunting, because renting out shooting during the season to well-off gentlemen (or the newly rich who want to pass for gentlemen) makes more money than having small farmers or farm labourers on the same land.
Those evicted were 'encouraged' to emigrate to Canada, as there wasn't employment elsewhere in Scotland to soak up the now excess labour. Tell me that's not concentrating wealth in fewer hands and I'll laugh at you.
Start laughing. I agree that land has become concentrated in fewer hands throughout history and likely will continue to be, but land isn't the only source of wealth. I know plenty of rich people (they are other renters in my building) who don't own any land. If the whole world gets richer, a single resource like land can fall into fewer hands without others getting poorer. Not claiming that no tenant farmer who got evicted didn't get poorer, but perhaps their families did better down the line than they would have otherwise. Tenant farmers are pretty poor to start with.
I'm not sure how to assess that claim. It seems that we would need to define our terms carefully and even then we likely don't have the data (I just looked for some data about inequality in 1800 and it appears scarce.)
All I can argue is that your claim might not be true. We know:
1) Inequality was great in Scottland in the 18th and 19th centuries before the clearances
2) The clearances made the landowners richer than they were before
3) The tenants were evicted
My guess is that the tenants ended up much poorer in the shortrun and much richer in the longrun (if not them, than their descendants.)
Canada is a much better place to live than the Scottish Highlands! Although I do understand that the soil is pretty poor in Ontario, Toronto is a very wealthy city. I believe the Scottish generally have thrived in Toronto.
It seems to me the question is this: Are the descendants of the evicted tenants relatively worse off today than the descendants of the landowners who evicted them compared to the situation before they were evicted? I don't think the answer to this is obvious.
It seems plausible that the Highland Clearances were not an example of tech concentrating wealth in fewer hands if we consider the long run results.
At the risk of violating a local Godwin's bye-law for this substack, I do think AGI poses a greater threat to traditional employment than the spinning jenny.
That's such a big subject on its own that it's hard to argue about within this thread. I don't think AGI poses a greater threat than the spinning jenny, but that only proves this argument needs its own thread. Actually, that subject has already had so many threads here that I'm out of arguments for my own position.
Jenny is the distant foremother of AI; removing production from skilled and semi-skilled workers in their own homes producing for their own benefit to less skilled and unskilled labour in factories owned by a capitalist, where the benefit of increasing mechanisation and automation was being able to produce more with less labour and without requiring much in the way of training and skills for that labour, which was now much more readily available as now you had a surplus of potential workers seeking employment.
I'm one of those who laugh at complaints about AI art, but it is true: now you don't have to be an artist yourself, you can tell the AI what to produce and cut out the middleman of having someone graphically trained (and hopefully talented) to do the work on commission for you.
Eventually we will *all* be the artists on commission complaining about AI taking our jobs (if the dreams/fears of the AI boosters come true).
I fully agree. And that future is going to undermine the status quo on tax and benefits. No-one's ready. The right aren't ready because there is a legacy of "Get on your bike and look for work" meanwhile the left will struggle to maintain the tax base for a UBI.
Regardless of talk, most everyone is neoliberal these days in terms of economics. The Communist Party of China is closer to the Republican Party in terms of economic policy than it is to its say its 1974 version. There is even less ideological difference among Western parties. Republicans in the US, Liberal Democrats in the UK, Socialists in France, etc. are more like Christian denominations debating tiny details than seperate religions. Sure to the adherents, each denomination is extremely different from the other, but to outside observers, its all the same.
Sure, it's a matter of degree. But in terms of direction and overall ideology I think neither Trump nor Harris is neoliberal. Trump is practically mercantile with his tariff bullshit, and Harris has gone far left with her taxing unrealized capital gains. They are both far, far left compared to Reagan.
This week's meetup is part of the global "ACX Everywhere" event. We anticipate a diverse group of new attendees, making this a great opportunity to expand our community and engage with fresh perspectives.
Conversation Starters
1. Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers
Text link: Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers
Audio link: Podcast Episode
Summary:
Altruism vs. Vitalism: Altruism focuses on maximizing happiness and reducing suffering, while vitalism emphasizes strength, glory, and the maximization of life. Although these philosophies diverge in extreme scenarios (e.g., dystopian outcomes like a world of obese, drug-addicted humans versus a world of endless, purposeless challenges), they often lead to similar solutions in normal circumstances, such as improving health and wealth.
Convergence in Practice: Both approaches generally advocate for actions that make society healthier, wealthier, and more advanced. Divergences become problematic only when the philosophies are pushed to their extremes.
Critique of Extremes: The post warns against becoming too focused on extreme, divergent cases, as these can lead to harmful ideologies. Instead, the author advocates for a balanced approach, recognizing the shared goals of both altruism and vitalism in improving human civilization.
Discussion Questions:
How can we reconcile the seemingly opposing goals of altruism and vitalism in practical decision-making?
What are the dangers of focusing too heavily on extreme cases within moral philosophies like altruism and vitalism?
How might these ideas apply to current societal challenges, such as healthcare or economic inequality?
2. Highlights from the Comments on Nietzsche
Text link: Highlights from the Comments on Nietzsche
Audio link: Podcast Episode
Summary:
Master vs. Slave Morality: The post revisits Nietzsche’s distinction between master and slave morality, exploring how masters act based on their own values, while slaves conform to external expectations. This dichotomy raises questions about authenticity, power, and the origins of moral values.
Modern Interpretations: Commenters discuss how Nietzsche’s ideas may apply to contemporary issues, including the role of societal norms, individual autonomy, and the complexities of moral relativism.
Philosophical Debate: The discussion delves into the tension between creating personal values and the influence of societal pressures, questioning whether true autonomy is achievable or desirable.
Discussion Questions:
In what ways do modern societal norms reflect Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality? Can true "master morality" exist in contemporary society?
How do Nietzsche’s ideas about creating personal values align or conflict with current views on authenticity and self-expression?
What lessons can be drawn from Nietzsche’s critique of morality for understanding today’s cultural and moral debates?
Walk & Talk: After the meeting starts, we usually take an hour-long walk and talk session. Nearby, you'll find mini-malls with hot takeout food options, like Gelson's or Pavilions, within the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something unexpected to share that has changed your perspective on life or the universe.
For non fantasy fare I’d recommend “The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt.
The book has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name and has little to do with Samurais in any direct way.
New York magazine called it the “best novel of the century.” No, I can think of half a dozen since 2000 that are better, but it is pretty damn good. For a first novel it’s great.
The novel centers on an American single mother and her son living a hand to mouth life in London. It’s not about the drudgery of life on the economic edge though. Rather it’s an adventure story about two people who refuse to live a conventional life.
The boy is the product of a one night stand with a popular travel writer who mom refers to only as ‘Liberace’. She considers his facile writing skills to be on a par with Liberace schmaltz. In her eyes he is inadequate as a husband or father to her son. The woman has very low tolerance for mediocrity.
She never tells the guy about his son.
The Samurai in the title is a reference to the Akira Kurosawa classic “The Seven Samurai”. Without a male role model in her son’s life she turns to the Samurais in the film. The film is viewed and its plot discussed in detail many times throughout the story.
The boy begins to read Homer in Greek at 3 and goes on to pick up Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse and assorted other languages in short order.
If you have an interest in linguistics the information presented in passing about the mechanisms of various languages alone make the novel worth a look.
When the boy becomes old enough to navigate The Tube on his own, he goes off on his own quest for his birth father or if that man proves to be a disappointment, one who is up to snuff.
It reads a bit like “Infinite Jest” at times with some hither and yon plotting. Not with the same polish as the Wallace doorstop, but it is engaging throughout.
What's the evo psych explanation for why most people prefer Fridays to Mondays?
I know that most things that make me feel good are things that benefit my social standing, however indirectly, things that improve my self-esteem (which is probably a good approximation for what I feel improves my social standing). More money, a job well-done, a good time with friends, working on a hobby -- all these makes sense as things which make me feel good for evo psych reasons, because they all, at least potentially, could raise my social status. But why do I like Fridays and vacations so much?
You could say that it's because we are inherently lazy and the explanation for that is conservation of energy. But what does the weekend and vacations have to do with being lazy? Or rather, lest that sound dumb, let me reframe it: Why does *looking forward* to the weekend make me happy? If "the weekend" translates in evo psych terms to "being lazy" "conserving energy", things which come as natural as taking a shit, why is it something to look so pleasantly forward to? I often procrastinate but I don't *look forward* to procrastinating. So why should I look forward to being lazy in slightly different context?
What does the weekend offer us from an evo psych perspective?
Wait, is it simply because we socialize more on the weekends? It doesn't *feel* like that's the reason. I look forward to getting away from people on the weekends or on vacation, but maybe what I personally look forward to has got nothing to do with it.
Or is it because those of us who feel more like wage slaves than bosses experience a social status boost when we get away from our bosses? Which would also explain why big boss man types are more likely to prefer Mondays to Fridays...
> Or is it because those of us who feel more like wage slaves than bosses experience a social status boost when we get away from our bosses?
This is a part of the answer. Also, consider work from home -- the ones who have lower status at work typically want more WFH, and the ones who have higher status typically want to reduce WFH. Feelings of higher/lower status get more intense when people are next to each other.
> More money, a job well-done, a good time with friends, working on a hobby -- all these makes sense as things which make me feel good for evo psych reasons, because they all, at least potentially, could raise my social status.
For me, money is too abstract to feel emotional about; at home I have much more control over whether some job I choose to do is well done; friends and hobbies happen in my free time. My free time is where most of my perceived value comes from.
Wait, you mean the world doesn't consist of sleep-deprived zombies who only ever get to catch up on sleep on weekends or don't even get to do that? Damn. You're really privileged, you know.
There’s something a bit funny about asking about the eco-psych significance of weekends, since they presumably didn’t exist in the ancestral environment. (“See you Monday, Thag.”)
That said, everybody likes a bit of freedom and self-determination and presumably that’s a conserved trait. Work-life balance is a modern concept but people have always needed to find ways to meet their own needs in the context of their society.
Not so much evo-psych as the calendar. The Western work week is set up so that Friday is the start of the weekend, which is the 'no work' period (or used to be), while Monday is the start of the work week and is "back to the grind, five more days of this".
If you have to commute, get up early to commute and arrive home late, and so on, it's along the same lines as "great, I have to look forward to a period of hard, gruelling physical labour to bring in the harvest". End results may be beneficial, but nobody really likes the grind all the time.
If we switched it around so that you ended work week on Tuesday and started work week on Fridays, then we'll all prefer Tuesdays to Fridays for the same reason.
On the days that I work, I have to do my work and then come home and do the work of the house as well. On the days I don't work, I have all that day to do the work of the house, so I can spread things out, plan what I'll do now and do tomorrow, and just have more leisure.
It's not so much about being lazy as it is having time. If time is money, imagine if you had an extra $100 per day. (Or if that's small potatoes for you, make it $500 or $1,000).
You and your family benefit from your employee-employer relationship, via your compensation and benefits.
During the week, you spend most of your time doing things that you don't really want to do, and that you don't *directly* benefit from, in order to keep the employee-employer relationship on good terms. Or in other words, all the benefit from the stuff that you spend your time doing during the week can be summarized as "economic security".
On weekends, that economic security is still there, but now you get to spend your time doing things that you actually want to do. Or things that you don't really want to do, but which directly benefit you and your family in some way.
Of course the later is more satisfying than the former.
When I was working a good job, I looked forward to going to work. I liked the people I was working with, I was part of a team, and when I went to work I could help the team do what it did, by doing things that I was good at and enjoyed doing.
And I also looked forward to vacations, and special events on weekends.
But only when the job was bad (depressing, soul sucking, abusive, etc.) would I look forward to simply not being at the job.
Lex Fridman interviews Donald Trump, go listen ~40minutes. And before that talks with Cenk Uygur for 4 hours. Also very good. https://lexfridman.com/podcast/
After 20 minutes of incessant rambling, I couldn't take it anymore and closed the tab (I watched the video recording on Youtube). Trump wasn't able to answer a single policy question in a coherent manner. I have no idea why millions of people idolize that man – he clearly has no idea what he's doing, what he even wants to do, or how he's going to do it.
He sure talks a lot about "her" and "him", and that he'd have done everything better (and that "she" thinks she looks good in a swimsuit, but really doesn't), and that he's going to end the war in Ukraine (he has an idea how to, but can't share it with the public, because then it wouldn't work anymore), and end inflation, and that all of this wouldn't have happened, had he been president at the right time. How, you ask? We'll never know.
Trump can talk without his brain resetting mid-sentence, I give him that. But beyond that, there's nothing of substance in that man. He's like GPT-2 without a stop token.
He's been visibly aging at an accelerating rate for at least a year now, maybe two. I saw one of his 2015/2016 rallies and while I hated everything he was saying, there was no denying what an impressive performer he was. He traveled for and did more than 300 of those rallies in a 15-month period, personally on stage holding court for more than a hour every time. And, obviously, very successfully with his target audience.
In 2020 he was a bit slower but nothing outside of normal for someone in his 70s. In 2024 though -- wow. He's reminding me now of some older relatives I've helped care for in the last years before their passing, every one of whom was at least 85 by the time they sounded like Trump does now.
I'd guess that a lot of his fans are basically mentally mapping their 2015/16 experiences of him into their minds as they sit at the events now. Which is pretty normal really, people do that regarding things like their favorite big-time rock band from decades past.
ACX-approved pregnancy book Expecting Better strongly approves of having a doula present at birth. The cited studies seem convincing. The only con seems to be the price. Are there a contrarian anti-doula take for me to read if I want an other perspective?
Anecdotally, it's hit and miss. Our doula was absolutely passive during the whole thing and even tried to skip getting to the hospital. And no money back of course.
Maybe it's more about socioeconomic status of the couple that can afford doula that leads to better birth experience?
Thank you for sharing! Do you feel like you didnt vet her enough or did she seem fine until it was time to go to the hospital? Did she have references?
There was a study where mothers were randomly assigned a doula when they arrived at the hospital, or not, which showed some positive outcomes. So probably not just about who can afford one.
I find it interesting how controversial the alpha/beta concept is. I define alpha as 'confident guy who gets lots of girls (or could get lots of girls if he wanted to)', and beta as not that, and it seems straightforwardly obvious that these two archetypes are very real.
It can be complicated because people start bringing in things like money into it, and point out there are guys that get laid a lot and are broke, but that's only relevant if one starts thinking of an alpha guy as being just straight up superior to other men (though it is true he is superior at something most men care about a lot). An alpha guy can have a real mess of a life, maybe to the extent even a guy who is not very successful with women would not be willing to switch places with him.
And an alpha guy can be a real asshole, but that is not necessary.
I agree with you. It's controversial here because nobody commenting here is an alpha or a woman who likes them from afar. Alphas don't write comments on the internet, particularly not on this blog, and particularly not on an Open Thread of it.
Obviously, like with race, there are no clear edges, but that doesn't mean the concept isn't clear and real.
> nobody commenting here is an alpha or a woman who likes them from afar.
But there are women commenting here, so... When the concept boils down to "some men act in a way that makes some women like them", does it really need the term "alpha" attached to it.
Calling men who are appealing to women alphas, because they are successful with woman, is like calling journalists or poets or dentists alphas when they end up being well paid and in demand. For the term to make sense when it comes to men who are successful with women you have to hame something else that these guys have in common that makes them attractive to women. Wut is it? Confidence? Well, if you're only identifying these guys by picking them for their success with women, then it's not too surprising that if you then observe them with women you find that they are confident, is it? So it's circular reasoning to say its confidence.
Another consideration that doesn't get addressed much is that if these guys are great with women, apparently they have been dating and having sex with quite a few women for quite a while. Are these people who want to get married, and who will be happy once married? My experience is that people who are good at getting sexual partners, and enjoy living a life of sexual adventures do not do well with monogamy. Not everybody is wired for monogamy. These guys don't seem like a good bet to me as husbands.
And by the way, I think many women who have some life experience will recognize, when they meet one of these magnetic guys, that they are meeting somebody you get together with for a good time, not a long time. I'm inclined to think the women who actually marry these men are beautiful but dumb.
The reasoning isn't circular but there is no doubt a feedback loop to a man being successful with women -> more confident -> more successful, etc.
As I argue below, women are generally attracted to men along more dimensions than vice-versa. Whereas men are more singularly attracted to looks, women are more likely to be attracted to men for: looks, skills, smarts, family background, social status, wealth...
Confidence is a proxy. Because there is a positive feedback loop to confidence it works as a proxy for all the things women are attracted to in a man.
>My experience is that people who are good at getting sexual partners, and enjoy living a life of sexual adventures do not do well with monogamy. Not everybody is wired for monogamy. These guys don't seem like a good bet to me as husbands.
Agree with that. The alpha/beta thing is all about getting laid in the short run not about long-term relationships or happiness.
I don't really like the term "alpha". I think stud is a better term. A stud (alpha) is a man that most women would be attracted to and consider having sex with under the right circumstances. They are the few men than most women like. Just as there are hot women that most men like. The reason that alphas or studs are more controversial than "hot women" is that women are judged much more by their appearances alone whereas men's "hotness" is judged along many more dimensions, giving us many more vectors to argue about, to care more or less about, to be tone-deaf to.
<i>The reason that alphas or studs are more controversial than "hot women" is that women are judged much more by their appearances alone</i>
I'm not sure that's true, though? Maybe if you're looking for a one-night stand you'll judge on appearance alone, but if you're looking for something more long-term, appearance is more a bar to clear, after which other factors take over. At any rate that's how it works for me.
There is something important in the territory that this concepts points towards, but the entire debate is hopelessly optimized for being popular among certain kind of guys, rather than for providing a good description of reality.
> I define alpha as 'confident guy who gets lots of girls (or could get lots of girls if he wanted to)',
No that’s not the definition of an alpha male. One of the ways to get lots of girls, or at least more girls than you would otherwise get, is to be a drunk and prowl pickup bars. You probably need a slight bit of game, and perhaps low enough standards.
We are talking at cross purposes here. Someone gave an example of an Irish guy - all 5’2 - who was successful with women, by picking them up. Presumably in pubs. No doubt he had a drunken confidence too.
He’s not an alpha. By lowering standards and trying hard any man can do that. Prisoners do well with women. Prisoners gave very low social status. Alpha maleness has nothing to do with game.
There is a huge amount of nuance to interacting well with a women, but at the same time these are skills that can be mastered, and nothing to do with not being "nice guy."
Things like being attentive, being tender physically (e.g., being considerate and careful how your weight lies on them in bed), reading their mood and body language. Being sexy, seducing well, being a generous lover, and transitioning appropriately between the phases of sex (Ali Wong joked well how she likes sex incredibly tender at the start and then less so at the end). All these things are tbh, pretty basic, and just to do with understanding women as full featured humans.
You might argue that a lot of these features aren't visible until a women has slept with you, but that's missing the point, that in terms of sex (casual or otherwise) these are the kinds of things women desire. Hence, on a date, if you're a smooth attentive conversationalist who seems practiced, confident, relaxed, appropriately lightly flirty, and attentive, you are suggesting you're the kind of man they can have a rewarding experience with.
the alpha thing is really not viable; it's more a symptom of something else.
generally the idea is if a guy is a good man, caring, friendly, and attentive, he will find a woman who replies in turn. the harmful
version is he finds a supermodel, but the idea is to be true to yourself and a girl will love you for who you are.
unfortunately this turned out to be a male fantasy. If anything the irony is that women get turned on by literal monsters (paranormal romance) because they like status, animal vitality, virility, and power a lot more.
the alpha comes after as a male tool to deal with this and the implications. it's more about the destruction of the "nice guy" which was a hilarious feminist own goal; they kind of didn't realize it was preventing the "alpha fucks, beta bucks" mindset from taking root.
male illusions about romance being destroyed created the alpha as a tool to explain it; problem is its a more powerful and more accurate version, and the old version kept a lot of bad things in check.
I wonder if the old version really was just a fantasy, or whether it's just outdated.
In general, women are attracted to high-status men. Back in the old patriarchal days, men in general had higher status than women in general, so virtually all the men a woman interacted with, at least in a social setting, would be high status compared to her. This would plausibly mean that most women found most men the interacted with at least somewhat attractive, in much the same way as most men find most women at least somewhat attractive. And if you find multiple men attractive enough to consider marrying them, the man who adds "caring, friendly, and attentive" on top of "attractive" is going to beat those who are attractive but also distant and standoffish.
Nowadays, however, women in general have equal or higher status than men in general, so most women don't really find most men that attractive. Alphas are successful because they project an image of "I don't need you, if you don't want to be with me, I can easily find half-a-dozen women who'll gladly jump into bed with me instead", which the brain automatically parses as "high-status", and hence, "attractive". Being nice and kind, OTOH, doesn't in itself come across as high status behaviour -- indeed, it can easily come across as subservient, i.e., low status. Hence, unless a woman is already attracted to you for some reason (status, looks, wealth, etc.), simply being nice to her won't win her over.
Tl;dr "Be true to yourself and a girl will love you for who you are" wasn't necessarily wrong back in the day, but it's outdated now.
I have no idea what the common usage is, but my take on Alphas is that it has nothing to do with how they do with women, and everything to do with how they do with other men. An Alpha is the guy who's going to walk into the middle of a party and get all the other guys there to follow his lead. A Beta is a guy who walks into a party and immediately finds an Alpha to take orders from.
1. Where's the evidence for this theory? Or against it for that matter? There's hardly anything that gets discussed by rationalists with less actual evidence or rational argument for the claims being made. Everything is almost entirely based on personal anecdote, "everyone knows" presumptions, and purely speculative evopysch stories. I'd say it's even worse than politics: at least the latter has an actual single set of facts everyone can see (e.g. the elected leaders, the laws being proposed and passed) even if interpretations wildly differ. Arguments over sex and dating have all the emotion of political arguments with none of the grounding. If people can tear each other apart over the meaning of Trump's statements, even when there's only one actual objective statement that was made that everyone can see, how much worse when there are actually millions of different Trumps in everyone's lives, all saying slightly different things, and people are going "Trump number 889 said X!", "no actually, Trump number 20967 said not-X" and somehow thinking that's a productive thing to do.
Tl; dr people are individuals, and why is this such a radical perspective to take?
I have no idea what the actual truth of these claims about attraction etc are, and neither side seems remotely interested in persuading me. Some actual statistical evidence with control groups and the like would be a good place to start.
2. "Getting girls" is so ridiculously vague and could mean so many different things. Does it mean one night stands with strangers? First dates (in the more wholesome sense)? Several dates? Lasting relationships? Marriages? Why on earth would you expect the "skill" at purusing each of these to significantly correlate? Lumping them all together (at least without significant justification) in one category looks like either a lazy attempt to create an unsupported Grand Theory, or more disturbingly a deliberate attempt to normalise the more shallow and sleazy goals by erasing fundamental distinctions.
> "people are individuals, and why is this such a radical perspective to take?"
Because all people are tropes before they are individuals, and all socialized and social people engage in pattern recognition of those tropes. "Alpha" and "beta" are labels for people who behave according to certain patterns more than they are theoretical concepts, per se.
Reminds me of Tim Minchin: "I'm just saying I don't think you're special. I mean I think you're special, but you fall within a bell curve..."
If molecules of gas could speak, they would probably argue: What do you mean by 'temperature'? Each of us in an individual, flying at a different speed in a different direction.
"If molecules of gas could speak, they would probably argue: What do you mean by 'temperature'? Each of us in an individual, flying at a different speed in a different direction."
This. I actually do believe everyone is unique but the traits people *think* make them unique are absolutely on a bell curve. Ever Google your own name? Depressing!
Are those tropes accurate and broadly applicable, or are they stereotypes that have more to do with pop culture and celebrity news than the experiences of the average joe? If you graphed men on some set of psychological measures, would you see two distinct populations that match the concepts of "alpha" and "beta"? Or is this categorization the equivalent of saying "there are two kinds of people, men taller than 5'8'' and men who are shorter?"
<i>Are those tropes accurate and broadly applicable, or are they stereotypes that have more to do with pop culture and celebrity news than the experiences of the average joe?</i>
If stereotypes are accurate in most cases, they're likely to be accurate in this case as well. It isn't a hugely solid rebuttal, but then again, "Are those tropes accurate and broadly applicable, or are they stereotypes that have more to do with pop culture and celebrity news than the experiences of the average joe?" isn't a hugely solid criticism in the first place.
Popular culture and celebrity news describe usually describe actual phenomena, yes, even if not perfectly accurately.
I should also add that *I* don't consider all men to sort into the binary of "alpha" or "beta," anymore than all unrelated domesticated dogs and unrelated domesticated horses sort into one of two categories! There is a vast swath of dudes, dogs, and horses who are going to be in the hierarchical middle, asserting some "alpha" behaviors in some circumstances and "beta" behaviors in others.
Those who assert alpha behaviors most or all of the time can probably safely be labeled "alphas" as a convenient shorthand for what they do most of the time, and obviously the same goes for betas.
Funny, I see it as similar to challenging the premise of some simplistic woke dichotomy (e.g. "privileged" and "marginalized") and responses like yours as on the road to shit like this https://www.cracked.com/blog/8-a242423oles-who-show-up-every-time-word-feminism-used . (I have no problem with your comment as written, to be clear, but if you took the idea behind it to the extreme and put it in the mouths of the most moronic and disgusting people on the planet, and switched the genders, you'd get the linked article).
"What does woke mean" is dishonest crap because you can literally point to a hundred example screeds like the one above and say "this" and anyone with a shred of intelligence would be able to see a pattern there. With alpha/beta theory, the issue is not the coherence of the concept but the empirical truth of its predictive power. Being defined vaguely is only relevant because it makes testing its factual validity impossible. You can point to a bunch of traits and say those are alpha--I'm not asking for proof that those traits exist, I'm asking for proof that they correlate (other things held equal) with sexual success.
More generally, it's amazingly ironic to me how much of this alpha/beta stuff is just relying on the exact same fallacies that feminists do. One guy posts online a story about how he was kind to a girl and she rejected him for someone who beat her around. Then four other people chime in "that exact thing happened to me too!" It's understandable, but completely irrational, that at that point most readers take it as proven that this is a widespread thing. Five different people confirming it and not one denial! Of course this is woeful evidence for anything: five people out of millions, when those who've experienced it are going to seek out such spaces and those who haven't will have no motivation to reply "actually this has never happened to me", especially if they'll probably get yelled at for it. What's amazing is this is identical to how feminists approach claims of sexual harassment. A handful of stories prove literally nothing about the wider society whatsoever, but arrogant people use "invalidating my experiences" as a translation of "daring to suggest the entire world doesn't revolve around me". Or just have no concept of what the word "evidence" actually means.
And another way they're identical to feminists: they glorify sleazy hookup culture and act like it's a reasonable thing to do, let alone put in the same category as actual relationships. Actually: seeking one night stands with strangers at a bar is shameful and you should be ashamed to do it. And you should expect zero sympathy if your attempts fail, because decent people don't attempt that on the first place.
Of course, all this means that *feminists* should 100% agree with what people are saying here, since on *their* morality it's impeccable. The feminist reaction to the incel discourse is thus the most hypocritical thing I've ever seen. Proving that literally every woke moral principle always, without exception, has "only when it benefits me personally" attached.
> "What does woke mean" is dishonest crap because you can literally point to a hundred example screeds like the one above and say "this" and anyone with a shred of intelligence would be able to see a pattern there.
There's certainly an obvious pattern in the central examples, but the problem is that people regularly stretch it past the point of meaninglessness. For example, I've seen people refer to movies and shows as "woke" even when they don't have any visible-to-me woke traits at all. By the time you're debating whether Stalin was woke or not, something has gone horribly wrong.
The terminology doesn't help, and makes it easy to dismiss. And if you aren't a man with experience on both sides of the cutoff point, a lot of the obvious truths aren't obvious.
Hoe Math (unfortunate name, great guy) on YouTube is a great primer on the current state of applied studies in intersexual dynamics. He's smart, has experience on both sides of the divide, reads widely and cites studies, and tries to give positive advice to both men and women.
It's controversial because it's dumb, to be blunt. The original typology was taken from a study on juvenile wolves in captivity, who do not behave like socialised-in-pack wild wolves, but the whole "alphas dominate! betas suck!" crap was lifted out of that, applied to primate behaviour (which, while similar, is not at all the same thing) and from that to humans.
Alpha Male natural superior boss of all! Gets the women, grinds the beta guys under his heel, is at the top of the tree!
It wasn't just about "can get the women", it was about being better all round. As has been pointed out, a lot of guys who can get as many women as they like are not alphas, in the sense that they're often low-life types, or skeevy in some way. Petty criminals, underclass, and the like.
Your point about "An alpha guy can have a real mess of a life, maybe to the extent even a guy who is not very successful with women would not be willing to switch places with him" is very pertinent, but the way the alpha/beta distinction is spoken of, in relation to success with women, that kind of caveat is not taken into consideration at all. Nobody in the "women are all whores riding the cock carousel until they can't even get a share in an alpha anymore, then they find some cuck beta who will pay for their lifestyle and raise their kids by the alpha to settle down with, all the time holding him in seething contempt while they seek out chads to sleep around with" discourse community talk about "yeah, I know this guy who is really successful with women but he's unemployed, not very smart, kinda ugly, a real loser and honestly? the kind of women he can get? crazy and trashy and low-class all round, it's really not worth it".
the problem deiseiach is that men really only have two ways of having perceived value:
1. being very successful in work, shown via status and or wealth.
2. the number and quality of women they sleep with or if they are married.
so said criminal is ironically more "alpha" than an accountant by one measure. the accountant does not have compensatory success till a lot later, hence the beta bucks.
the issue is society really does not value men innately. if you are not extraordinary you are invisible, and if its just extraordinary magnetism to get women to sleep with you, that works albeit via dark fascination.
I'm sorry, I don't really believe that at all. There's many other ways a man can have value -- through family, through friends, through hobbies, through being highly knowledgeable at a whole bunch of different things or demonstrating a whole bunch of different skills.
I think that the question of how much sex people are having is something that is only interesting to people who are having far too little. People who get a normal amount of sex don't spend all that much time wishing they were having much more (apart from a few insatiable weirdoes). The returns of more sex diminish a lot faster than the returns of more money.
It's the "quality" part, though. Drop your standards enough and you can sleep with a lot of women, but they won't be the kind you'll brag about bagging to your mates. "Oh, you managed to sleep with the village bicycle? You and forty other guys, congratulations on your stunning achievement there, man!"
but that is such a huge societal expectation. let's say you meet a guy at a party. before you do, you find out he hasn't been on a date in 15 years, or is a virgin at 30. the average person will immediately think "what's wrong with him?" as if he needs to explain it.
"or is a virgin at 30. the average person will immediately think "what's wrong with him?" as if he needs to explain it."
Fucking hell. These are probably parties where someone identifying as non-binary is considered so normal it doesn't merit a reaction. But someone exercising actual self-control?! Deciding to put long-term responsibility, or even just waiting for real love, over base gratification? Horrifying! What's wrong with him?
This is not normal. It may be the norm in every city in the western world, but it is not *normal* on any measure of health, morality, concern for others, or concern for the good of society. Please don't normalise this kind of depraved culture as something to be conformed with instead of something to be shamed. These expectations do nothing but hurt people, and everyone here is treating them as somehow acceptable, and it's making me more and more angry the more I see.
Well, we're really talking about the other end of the spectrum. Not men who demonstrate super high status by getting lots of women, but men who demonstrate super low status by getting zero women.
That idea is less controversial. The correlation between "number of sexual partners" and anything worthwhile in life is dubious at the high end, but very clear at the low end.
"It wasn't just about "can get the women", it was about being better all round. As has been pointed out, a lot of guys who can get as many women as they like are not alphas, in the sense that they're often low-life types, or skeevy in some way. Petty criminals, underclass, and the like."
From what I can tell, this is a big part of what CAUSED alpha male/beta male discourse to take off and become very popular on certain parts of the internet.
Basically, a lot of men were truly mystified by what you're referencing here, especially since most of them would consider "low-life types, petty criminals, underclass" to be people that they'd actively avoid trying to form relationships with, romantic or otherwise. What made this even more mystifying to men is that it goes against what much of modern feminism says that women want in men. This seeming conflict is very attention-getting and provocative. Some men came to the conclusion that there's certain traits or behavior patterns that can override more practical concerns with a partner, and that these traits constitute someone being "alpha".
Now, I think a lot of men took this all too far, but still, I get why they were mystified and trying to find some sort of model to explain this, because frankly I'm mystified myself.
Why DO some women go for these types of men? Honestly, I don't know. My sense is that a lot of men go too far in relying on alpha male/beta male discourse to explain this... but also that this is a real blind spot for mainstream society that leaves us without a good answer. Alpha male/beta male discourse is at least an attempt at an answer, even if it's obvious why many don't like it and find it offensive.
To try to get some more actual clarity in these discussions: I can see four different answers.
The libertarian answer: they don't. Or some do, but no more than go for any other type, and the perceptions you refer to are the result of blending together hundreds of different factors over millions of different people and twisting that to fit a dramatic and click-baity narrative.
The traditionalist answer: because women's and men's natural sexual urges are toxic and harmful, which is why we spent centuries and centuries building up carefully constructed moral and social codes to create a civilised society where these bad urges would be kept in check and channeled into wholesome forms that benefit every person and society as a whole...and then a bunch of insolent arrogant rationalist types tore all that down in the blink of an eye, and are now reaping what they sowed.
The feminist answer: actually women always know exactly what they're doing and the guys who act nice are actually assholes and the guys who act like assholes are actually nice guys and anyway who cares if women want to fuck gangsters how dare you police their bodies and you are committing literal genocide if you disagree with me.
The redpill answer: women are all weak and lying whores, and respect literally nothing except STRONG ALPHA MEN, and the only way to interact with them without getting friendzoned is to be a STRONG ALPHA MAN and for only $9.99 a month you can subscribe to my channel and become a STRONG APLHA MAN like me!
In case it isn't clear, I'm not particularly sympathetic to the last two, and I'm somewhere between 1 and 2. But I'm open to being persuaded.
People are individuals.
Traditional sexual mores existed, who'd have imagined, for an actual fucking reason.
Nice is bad, bad is nice, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
The answer to everything is always BRUTE STRENGTH.
Traditional sexual mores exist primarily due to private property and the need to accurately trace fatherhood for inheritance purposes, no? Earlier tribes didn't necessarily seem to have what we consider "traditional sexual mores".
> "the original typology was taken from a study on juvenile wolves in captivity"
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, "not wild wolves," but the typology *does* pretty accurately describe how packs of non-related domesticated dogs and domesticated horses (particularly horses, for whom herd hierarchy is much more obvious and rigidly enforced than dog packs) sort themselves and assume leadership positions with the privileges attendent. You can assign different words than "alpha"; for horses, people tend to say "boss mare / boss gelding" / "lead stallion", and so on rather than "alpha," but those words *absolutely* carry the same meaning as "alpha" in its colloquial usage. It's an observable and predictable behavior. Throw two identical flakes of clover hay forty feet apart into a paddock occupied by two horses, and one horse (the current alpha) will inevitably abandon his barely-consumed flake to chase the other horse (the current beta) away from their barely-consumed flake, eat for a bit, and then *do it again to swap back.* I've witnessed this pointless display happen 10-15 times over the course of "breakfast" or "dinner."
Add in a third, new horse, and there will be vibe checks, threat displays, and often physical violence in order to figure out who's the most dangerous individual in the group, and once that's established, they'll be deferred to when they approach the hay flake.
Because the people using such terminology are not thinking about horses who might dominate other horses, but then follow a small woman around who loads the hay bale into their feed trough 😀
Uh, as a small woman who fed and handled horses from miniatures up to Clydesdales (including one extremely chill stallion), my place in herd hierarchy was very much a thing. I always assumed the "alpha" position and "alpha" energy, including using *physical* domination (language horses use with one another) in order to maintain my position as boss above every horse I handled.
That usually meant a confident, firm push if I needed to get to something they were blocking and they didn't move on their own upon seeing my intention or with verbal encouragement or a light touch, but on much more rare occasions, it might mean an actual swat or punch on the neck or mouth if they were *deliberately* threatening a dominating bite or kick or engaging in intimidating physical crowding.
The only reason this worked is because horses are too dumb to realize they can easily kill people; they believe humans are much stronger than we are, and they take us at our word that we can win a physical fight with them. Which is good, because they're *so* dangerous.
Our huge cow horse once delivered a star-causing uppercut to my chin throwing his nose up in excitement to get a treat; I didn't do anything about it because it was so clearly an accident. Ditto if he accidentally stepped on my foot and then immediately moved off of it once he felt the error.
But the one time he pinned his ears back at me and lunged a little with his teeth when I nudged him to briefly move away from his feeder so I could scoop out the poo just under it, I punched him in the neck and then herded him out of the stall into his outdoor step-out to think about it. He didn't resent it or fear me and ten minutes later he was presenting his withers for scratching; after my "alpha" display of "domination" he understood that, just as he was entitled to chase a less strong-willed horse away from the best grass in the pasture, I was entitled to move him away from his food.
"OmG yoU *ABUSED* anImALS!!!" Someone with either naturally timid or very badly behaved animals might be shrieking right now. Well, hierarchical animals use physical "abuse" (lulz) as a critical part of their language and socializing, and it's actively disrespectful to reject that fundamental truth and refuse to clearly communicate in a way they understand. Witness how this angry female pony tells a much larger, merely curious horse to stay out of her personal space (even though SHE invaded HIS pasture), and take special note of his "HOLY FUCK, SORRY!" reaction, followed by respectful distancing (and that the black horse is like, "OMG, they're scary, I'm just going to stay over here): https://youtu.be/KJezTFaWPcM?si=E4kIziySzNI0GTXl&t=818
Now, should we assume influencer PUA bros know anything about domesticated dog pack and domesticated horse herd dynamics? No, they probably don't!
But I think it's important to reject attempts to "debunk" social hierarchy in general merely because the wolf study didn't understand wild wolves. Sure, the captive wolf study which popularized "alpha" doesn't extrapolate to wild wolf packs (which are family systems), but it does *exquisitely* describe domesticated dog packs and domesticated horse herds (plus young, captive, unrelated wolf packs, FWIW). That's extremely important to know if one is going to work with dogs and horses!
Sure, but the people who like the alpha/beta stuff are not the type who like the notion of domesticity. Horses are tamed, humans control them. Humans are a lot smaller than horses, but we are not living in Houyhnhnm and Yahoo land.
Wolves are (in imagination at least) wild, free, and untamed. That's the image the would-be alpha wants of himself: no woman gonna tie *me* down, I can find 'em, frick 'em and flee! After all, part of the contempt for the beta is "the beta is picked by a woman who decides to settle for very much second-best when she can no longer command attention in the sexual marketplace and hasn't managed to hook an alpha, all the beta is for her is an ATM while he works for scraps of her attention and sexual contact".
I think we were imagining very different demographics!
I think there is a *small* but very visible subset of PUA/red-pilled/incel/toxic-manosphere folk who use a wildly mutated meaning of "alpha" (after all, wolves are pack animals; there's no such thing as a healthy, powerful, "dominant" male pack leader abandoning his group to see if there's better tail in the neighboring territory (where he will almost certainly be killed by the neighboring territory's pack)).
In fact, now that I think about it, it sure seems like "Chad" often serves the same function as "alpha," if not having replaced it for many of those folk.
Whereas I was thinking far more of the larger population probably using the words in a completely different way; either to describe routine human hierarchy, or in discussing animal behavior, or whatever.
And then there's a big-enough-to-know-about-it subculture of mostly women who are deeply into the whole concept of clear hierarchical based-on-"wolves"-but-actually-domestic-dogs-lol human social structures; see: the Omegaverse in particular (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegaverse) plus all other werewolf urban fantasy / romantasy.
Thanks for this. If we own the animal side of our nature we stand a good chance of putting it in its place, just like you putting the horse in its place. I resisted CBT for a long time because my stress reactions just felt so real and visceral compared to the person telling me "but I didn't mean it like that".
"Big Fido was the Chief Barker of the Dogs' Guild. Gaspode remarked to Sergeant Angua that Big Fido was not mad - that's when you froth at the mouth; rather he was insane. That's when you froth at the brain... He was a small white poodle with red eyes. And a diamante collar. Size notwithstanding (and also ignoring his habit of farting nervously when talking [not nervously as in "fright" but as in "involuntarily"]), he was one mean dog.
Something in his head went click! one day and he savaged his owner and beat up every dog in town until he was up against a one-eyed Rottweiler called Mad Arthur, whom, after beating in a fight, he killed, to Arthur's brief amazement (Animals don't fight to the death, just to defeat)."
1. It's not a particularly good model. It hints in a good general direction (that male status, both actual and behaviourally signalled, is a big deal for female attraction) but is wrong in all the details. We could compare it to Freud's id-ego-superego model in terms of accuracy.
2. It's politically controversial for a bunch of reasons, mostly because it offends a lot of women. Now, you could argue that some of this is the fault of these women for being easily offended, on the other hand you could also blame the theory's proponents for constantly saying things like "women ride the cock carousel with alphas before eventually settling down with beta bucks whom they will continue to cheat on". Anyway, being politically controversial means that all the obvious flaws of the theory will get focused on, while the vaguer truth hinted that it hints at gets sidelined -- Freud is not treated so uncharitably.
If I could distill it down to a version that I'd tell young men it would be something like this: Women do not value the same things in men that men value in women. Women tend to care about your status more than your looks -- it's important that you not be embarrassingly unattractive, but further optimisation isn't super important. What *is* important is your perceived status, which is a combination of your actual social status and the social status that you signal through your behaviour.
I am here to tell you that there are other factors that weigh more heavily for the average woman than either looks or social status. (1) Talent: Many women (and in fact, many people) are drawn to someone who is very good at something, even if the skill has won them no money and no social status and probably never will: being great with wisecracks, awesome harmonica player, poet, backpacker, etc. It’s just intrinsically appealing and interesting. (2) Happiness. Happy people are just more fun to be with. Also, you don’t have to worry that they are hoping that having you as a partner will be their salvation. (3) They get you— understand and like how you live, how your mind works. (4) They are kind and loving.
Listen, if I carried around much feminist anger I would be quite irritated at you for pointing at social status as the important thing. Obviously social status matters to everybody in all kinds of contexts, but it isn’t the great differentiator in all contexts. I mean, let’s say you are looking for a realtor. It wont be hard to figure out which ones are high status in your area, right?—
which ones are successful in their business and well-known. And being high status in the realtor hierarchy would be a point in their favor. But you’d also want one who actually grasps all the little details about what you want; one who’s pleasant to be with; one who’s got time for you. You might settle on a pretty new and unknown realtor who was better with those features than the well-known one. A person, or a whole gender, would have to be dumb as dirt to weigh only social status in choosing either a realtor or a partner. Anyhow Melvin, I swear I am not saying the following to try to make you look silly or to prove my point: I am a woman and also have had many other women confide in me about who they are attracted to and whether they’d be willing to marry somebody with or without certain characteristics. Your model is just wrong. The basis of women’s choice of dates and mates is way way more
<i>(1) Talent: Many women (and in fact, many people) are drawn to someone who is very good at something, even if the skill has won them no money and no social status and probably never will: being great with wisecracks, awesome harmonica player, poet, backpacker, etc. It’s just intrinsically appealing and interesting.</i>
Those things you mention all bring people status, at least in certain subcultures if not in society as a whole. If you're talented about something that really doesn't bring you status -- or, more specifically, that doesn't bring you status in a subculture that the woman in question cares about -- then your talent isn't going to help you. "I'm the most highly-rated Age of Empires player in history" shows a lot of talent, but it's not going to attract a girl, except perhaps one who's into gaming herself.
Yes, they bring status in certain subcultures, but unless that subculture is a big part of the woman’s life she does not get the benefit of having a high status partner. For instance, in my early 20s I had a relationship with a guy, also in his early 20s, who was a master woodworker. He used antique tools, and could make perfect dovetail joints, and produce finished furniture. He made just enough money to live in a very inexpensive place and keep his old car going. He had not finished college, his looks were average, and he wore nothing but jeans and t shirts. He had many good qualities, which is why I was with him, but none of them had to do with status. Occasionally in a hardware or antique store somebody would realize from things he said that he was extraordinarily good at woodworking, but otherwise his talent got him no status at all. The other things I named in my earlier post are also things that do not give a guy much status except in quite limited settings.
there was a simple thing for me that pretty much explained it well before the term existed.
i used to love reading about planes, like aviation history. i remember just talking about it in one of those college bull sessions when a girl i liked was there. Another guy said he owned/flew a plane. (flying one isn't cheap either).
i realized after women liked the guys who owned the plane. that college experience to me was sad because christian colleges can be as much about status and wealth and as little about the religion as any secular one.
There's something to that, of course. But it can be turned around that not-so-attractive girls got told "well, you have a nice personality" but boys don't go for nice personalities, they like pretty girls with the right attributes.
Both sexes complain about the others I think it has ever been thus.
1. Having a valued talent or skill confers social status.
2. Comparatively high social status reduces chronic stress, which strongly correlates with happiness.
3. Not always; for some women, it's enough to merely be desired and provided for.
4. Again, not all women will actually pursue this, even if they believe they want it.
I am also a woman and Melvin's model and advice is more correct than not:
> "What *is* important is your perceived status, which is a combination of your actual social status and the social status that you signal through your behaviour."
Melvin didn't say so, but I imagine the "behavior" here includes being confident, generous, stable, maintaining healthy boundaries, etc.
Isn't all status how you're perceived? Isn't that ultimately the definition of status? Status is not money in itself, talent in itself, success in itself – status is where you're in the social hierarchy because of these are other attributes. And if others perceive you to be high up, then you ARE high up because that's what hierarchies are. If everyone thinks you have power, then you actually do have power.
Now, perhaps you mean perceived by a specific individual or subgroup as opposed to broader society?
If I were to say "she's out of my league", does that map on to anything real? I feel there's a certain balance of power that should exist in a relationship and the further you get from that, the risk is resentment e.g if your partner is a lot wealthier, smarter, more attractive. Equally it's no fun being e.g the smart one and being on the end of that resentment.
Most of the time when guys say "she's out of my league" they are talking about a woman's looks. In fact I can't think of a time when I guy has said that because the woman earns more than him or is smarter, but I'm sure it comes up. The closest I've seen to that is a patient of mine in his 20's who is actively dating, hoping to meet someone he'd like to marry. He has a degree that guarantees he will have a 6-figure income, but he has had 2 relationships now with woman who come from extremely wealthy families, and are richer by far than he will ever be. He has had a lot to say about the ways that's awkward and tricky to navigate, but he does not regard it as a dealbreaker and the women have not either.
About women's looks: Women know where they are in the looks hierarchy, but it is just not true that those who are 8's, 9's and 10's are confident that they can marry whoever they want. Those women probably are more able to marry men who are wealthy or otherwise high status, but that knowledge is nowhere near as comforting as men imagine. Look, you know that life is hard feeling ?-- what a struggle it is to get good enough at something you enjoy that you get paid for it, how it's tricky to be real but be respected and liked too, how it's hard to find new friends once you're not in college, how you know people who are fucking miserable all the time and you worry sometimes that you'll end up as one? Well, women have that too. Only women with low self-esteem and low common sense think, oh well that's a non-issue for me because I'm beautiful and can marry a surgeon, problem solved. Women are looking for someone who gets them and loves them deeply and enriches their life, and they're afraid of not getting it, and many of them in fact will not get it because it's hard to find a partner who's a great match that way.
There are some quite unpleasant things about being a beautiful woman. It's sort of like being really rich, or being famous. You never know for sure whether somebody likes you for yourself, or whether they're just dazzled by your wealth or your fame.
So I say, do not step back from women who are beautiful -- just treat them like anybody else, be friendly and entertaining and real, an ask them out.
If somebody is much higher earning or smarter than you it's more complicated, but also not hopeless.
Thanks for the reply. The problem I'm having is figuring out why the many true observations you have shared across the thread are incompatible with a weak ‘folk’ idea of alpha masculinity, stable enough for people to make back-of-the-envelope predictions about their likely happiness with future partners. I get that there are negative tropes out there and I think you are trying to protect people from those tropes and I salute that, but I insist: it's okay to be average and mostly I think average people will be happier with other average people. An average implies an outlier and for me alpha is nothing other than that outlier. If someone is in the top 5% for a desirable trait, they are alpha with respect to that trait. There are multiple desirable traits but the idea of someone bossing them all is imaginable (including emotional intelligence!)
Something doesn't have to be a dealbreaker to be potentially hazardous to the long term happiness of a relationship. Scott talks of micro-marriages I.e things that will increase the chance of someone getting married e.g going to a party. Let's say there are also micro-divorces. For me, a major difference in IQ, family wealth, or attractiveness, is a micro-divorce. That doesn't mean divorce will definitely happen. A relationship can have other strengths to mitigate it. But you won't stop people taking this into account when forming their ‘type’.
No, I think it's good for people to be realistic about ways they are OK with differing from someone and ways they are not. I have ways I'm not OK with differing from a guy. Let's see, hygiene (mine is excellent, I'd like his to be too); introspectiveness; distaste for being highly opinionated about politics; creative; open-minded about people's oddities. When I was young I was overly identified with my test scores, but I think at this point I truly get that that is just one kind of smartness. The 2 people I love most are not SAT smart, but are much more perceptive about various things than I am. I'm sort of over the SAT.
I don't really understand why so many people think there needs to be reasonable equality in family wealth. I think my attitude if I were a mulitmillionaire would be that my kids were freed up to marry whoever they liked. They wouldn't have to worry about ending up destitute if they didn't have a big nest egg and they or their spouse got Parkinson's disease or whatever. (I'd expect them to support themselves, but I'd be there as a backup, and to help them pay for training, help them get started in a field, that sort of thing.). But wealthy people are more comfortable with marrying other wealthy people. Why? I don't get it. They've got a fuckton of money now, why be determined to marry more? Or determined that your daughter marry a guy whose parents have more?
With all due respect, they don't. Those other factors empirically don't matter.
And this is trivially provable. There are a ton of ACX everywhere meetups. Go to one. Observe the attendees. They're very nice and very interesting. You'll also notice that they're almost overwhelmingly young, male, well off (from memory, median income is ~$100k) and single. Like, brutally single.
This has been known (1). This has been known for a long time (2). As a man your assertion is trivially, observably false. If you doubt this, you can go observe it with your own eyes in your local city sometime in the next two months. And I encourage you to. There is something in women when they attend these kind of nerd events where they instantly see and respect all these men who logically should be great husbands and they also instantly know they're "nice" but they'd never find them sexually attractive and...none of you have the willingness to honestly convey that emotion.
But...*shrug*, Scott makes his ACX survey data public. Spend some time playing with it. You'll find tons of EAs, almost pathologically nice men, with great incomes, solid social circles, healthy BMIs, good hobbies, no relationships, and low romantic satisfaction scores.
I think there are a number of huge problems with this kind of worldview, and that its prominence is causing a lot of toxicity in the wider culture, but making these problems clear is very difficult because there are so many subtle distinctions and everyone's talking about different things with the same language. But to just try to point out a few of them:
(1) As I mentioned above, there needs to be much, much more hard evidence on this topic than is usually provided (if any is provided at all). "Go to a meetup, look around" is quite absurdly unscientific an approach, and is particularly ironic when the very topic is the talents of scientifically and data focused people. How do we know the meetups aren't specifically selecting for the subset of stem nerds who are both (a) particularly lonely and (b) associating their loneliness with their rationalist/nerd identity, and thus desiring to socially bond over that? It's not a remotely unbiased sample of nerds. Neither is any other similar online or offline community.
And how do we know those allegedly unattractive factors aren't correlating with other factors that are the actual relevant ones?
(2) The elephant in the room is all the poly stuff, and similar hedonism. I hate to channel Jeff Sessions, but my (and many others') instinct is that good people don't do that sort of thing. I'd exclude Scott, and anyone else asexual or otherwise desiring multiple partners for purely emotional reasons, but it seems clear that for most poly people it's largely just about sex. I'd also exclude the old-school hippie attitude that promoting polyamory and free love is actually good for society as a whole, by making people more peaceful or whatever. I find that attitude quite silly, but I can respect it. But when the attitude is just "my utilitarian morality doesn't prohibit this, so I can indulge my base instincts!" and when being told you're being sexually hedonistic is met not with an argument that it's good for society but with an insolent "yes, and?"...I don't find the descriptions of such people as nice and kind very compelling. I'm not saying they're *bad*, just that they're not exactly models of generally recognised virtue.
(3) This is about your other comment below saying no woman wants to acknowledge the truth about these things. I've had many long insightful conversations with my sister about this, and I've concluded that there are lots and lots of subtle distinctions and unspoken assumptions that need to be carefully teased out before the sexes can really understand each other. It helps enormously to have a female relative who is close enough to be honest with but not close enough to have an incentive to lie to you like a significant other might. I don't think most women are dishonest, I think they peceive things in sufficently different ways that the same situation can look very different.
At the very least (and I'm talking to people generally here) please *stop* conflating women with feminists. It completely plays into the feminist propaganda that wants everyone to think they're the same; I can't comprehend why the anti-feminist side pushes that same propaganda for them. Look at the fucking exit polls: 55% of white women voted for Trump in 2020. Most women are disgusted by the sociopathic selfishness, shallowness, and general unmatched awfulness of feminism, and forgetting that will lead to modelling them in a completely inaccurate way.
And for the record, as I have to silently remind myself every so often, we also shouldn't conflate "feminists" with "psycho batshit Internet feminists". Even though the latter are happy to claim that theirs is the only true feminism, and that they speak for all women everywhere.
Poly is a really complicated thing. There are those who are into it as a philosophy and will happily discuss all the nuances and the fine details of compersion, metamours, and so forth. That's probably the circles Scott is in, and it's a small set (I imagine) out of the entire group of people who would maybe describe themselves as poly.
Then there are the ordinary types who, as you say, are into poly for the sex. It's a convenient way of being able to sleep around without being called a cheater. Those relationships can blow up when the partner who has been convinced to 'open it up' isn't happy with what happens next, feels neglected and not having their needs met, and issues a "me or them" ultimatum which is then met with "okay, I'm picking them, because they're not making demands on me to control my sexuality".
Finally, there's the trend-seekers who read a newspaper lifestyle article about New York woman and her husband have been poly for five years; why poly is the new great thing that will revitalise relationships; how to be poly in five easy lessons; and so forth. They adopt all the new recommendations because, well, they're not boring fuddy-duddy squares. At least, that's the image that is important to them that they present to the world (or their own little circles).
And for those people it tends to not go well, often for the same reasons as the second set: one person gets all the dating they can handle while the other partner hits a drought, or one or other regrets the decision to open up the relationship because deep down they *are* a fuddy-duddy square who was happy with a boring old conventional relationship.
There's people who are interested in poly because of the sex, and there's people who are interested in poly because it will let them have long discussions about creating ideal relationships 😁
Thanks for reminding of these articles! Especially (1), people here have given a lot of things women care for in men, but I'm still puzzled about "Henry" who beat his wives and cheated on one with another, and still finds plenty of women who fall for him. How does Henry do it?
I know of a few Henrys, they really exist. My wife says: Some women have a really low self-esteem and think they don't deserve better. Also, Henrys really know how to manipulate their women. Sad but true. She knows because she used to date a Henry.
Why can't we hook up these women with those "ACX meetup singles" and make everybody happy?
I didn't know a Henry as such, but I did briefly know a woman who somehow always managed to pick a Henry. She wasn't looking for one, she was a nice person, and yet whenever she got involved with a new guy - he turned out to be a Henry.
Some people just have very poor selection mechanisms. Other people do go for the "bad boy" thing, which puzzles me as well. Oftentimes it's the female equivalent of Henry who hooks up with Henry.
I dunno, emotions are complicated and sexual attraction is a weird thing!
EDIT: From the distaff side, why isn't Taylor Swift married, or why hasn't she ever been married? She's going into her mid-30s, she's conventionally attractive, she's very rich and is self-made rich so she's smart and capable. Yet she's had a string of romances that never seemed to last. Will her most recent one be the one? Who can say?
Men also have their preferences, just as women go for the Henrys. Imagine two women: Saucy Sally (who is the poster girl for "don't stick your dick in crazy") and Just Judy. Judy is a nice girl, she has a lovely personality, but she's - boring. She doesn't have that zing that Sally has; Sally may be a disaster but she's sexy, she's fun (at least before the bunny-boiler tendencies kick in) and most men, I submit, would pick Sally. Maybe not for marriage! But for a fun time sowing their wild oats? Sure. And then once they're ready to settle down and do adult life and have kids, they pick Judy because she's ordinary but stable.
*That* has been the male equivalent of "fun with the alpha, then find a beta to settle down with" over history.
I knew a woman who always picked a Henry. When I talked to her, I found out that she actually believes that *every* man is a Henry... and therefore she prefers the ones who are open about it, over the ones who (from her perspective) try to hide it.
From epistemic perspective, this is just awesomely crazy. Every piece of evidence she gets will support her view. (Scott calls is "trapped priors".) All men she will ever date will indeed be Henrys, because the ones who are not will be rejected as "hypocrites". She will live a life full of self-inflicted misery... and of course she will blame men for it!
There's probably a major correlation-causation fallacy going on with the Henry thing. Instead of "beating and cheating on your wives is attractive and gets you more wives" it's "a pyschopathic conman will beat and cheat, and is also great at manpulative charm". It's easy to charm people if you're completely amoral and spend all your time calculating how to use people. But these people will get away with everything until they don't. To quote Sherlock Holmes "That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows."
That Sherlock Holmes story is an awesome description of the phenomenon. I have encountered at least 2 guys who fit the pattern, a third that I strongly suspect.
One-man crime wave. It's astonishing.
Of the two....
a) In jail. Won't be getting out any time soon .
b) Run out of town. Will presumably be living under yet another fake identity.
Wooly, I'm going to amend what Melvin said about "Women do not value the same things in men that men value in women. Women tend to care about your status more than your looks" because things *have* shifted now, and men are now getting the kind of "you need to maximise your attractiveness, how else are you going to find someone, nobody wants a plain Jane" that women have had to deal with.
Being nice, and in a good job, aren't enough. It's the old problem of "what men think is attractive in men, isn't what women think attractive; what women think is attractive in women, isn't what men think attractive".
The rationalist sphere is not representative of the majority of men. Everyone on here, even the non-rationalists, is - to be nice about it - quirky in some way (being not-nice about it, we're odd as bedamned). The tendency for those circles to be overwhelmingly majority male, and add in the unconventionality on top of that, makes it even tougher to find female companionship.
There's a lot more rationalist-type guys than rationalist-type gals, is one of the problems.
Oh yea, the gender skew in the rationalist sphere is wild. It's kinda wild the difference in attention you get in a primarily male social group, like ACX, compared to a primarily female group, like virtually every reading group I've been to. I thought theater would have similar advantages but that's, uh, a different scene.
I like to hold up the rationalist-ACX sphere as a comparison point to mainstream society though. There's a lot of "men falling behind"/"women's standards are too high" discourse and I'm over here like "Yo, there's a decent sized group of men doing very well on, like 80% of the traits women say they want and yet they're single as hell, so clearly something else is going on". Like, yes, lots of young men are having financial trouble and they should try to do better but...going from $30k to $100k will not automatically get you a girlfriend.
You sound bitter as hell. Listen, I think a lot of the difficulty men have finding women these days is the dating apps. You probably know about how that works so I don't need to explain the ways men are at an awful disadvantage one the apps. When I was young there were no apps. and people were out and about a lot more because there was no fucking Internet. All of my honeys were people I met at school, at work, at gatherings at friend's houses, and at outdoorsy activities. The structure of those situations is one that doesn't give either gender a big advantage. Also, people behave much better when starting to date someone that's part of their social circle. There's much more accountability. You can't ghost somebody that's a friend of a friend -- at least, not without hearing about it.
Another factor is the insane version of feminism that's floating around, esp. in woke circles. I have male patients who are afraid to *look* too often at a woman at their job because they're afraid of being accused of sexual harassment. Men are afraid to initiate a first kiss with someone they are dating for fear of being rapey. And they don't just fear being called rapey, they worry that to kiss without asking permission really *is* rapey. That stuff is nonsense.
Now about the ACX guys, I think I can tell you why they have a hard time getting dates. Many women, and I am one of them, find engineers and programmers to be unusually dense about subtle & complicated interpersonal stuff. That makes those men less satisfying for a woman to talk with about relationships and different shades of feeling. It makes it hard for her to get across to the man nuances that are important to her. Also, it is likely that the man is going to have a pretty male set of interests, and not much interest in art and literature -- for women who are both intellectual and arty, that's a pretty big blank spot.
Here's an example from my experience both in life and as a therapist. When it comes to giving gifts to the woman in their life, some men think the way I would: What do I know she likes? OK, books about x, y, and z -- oh!, she hasn't read that new book about y that's supposed to be very good. And periwinkle is her favorite color, I wonder if I could find some periwinkle silk nightie or something. Oh, and she loved that massage she had last spring, I can get her a gift card for a massage at the same place. Engineers and others in similar fields have a terrible time figuring out something to buy their wife. They're in my office asking for advice, saying stuff like chocolates? roses? women like those, right? Should I maybe get some jewelry too? Maybe I should get something really expensive to make sure she likes it?
Look I know not all men in the more male-dominated parts of the STEM world are like this, but I'm positive that *more* of them are. Some women are fine with it, but many aren't. Those men are definitely at a disadvantage. To women who find them dense about emotional stuff, the're very -- what's the opposite of hot? Unsexy. A bit boring. And yes, many of them are fine, kind, honest people. My close friend and rock climbing partner for years was an engineer. I was very fond of him, but felt zero attraction to him (and anyhow he was married). As far as I could tell, he was not attracted to me either. While camping we sometimes shared tents & motel rooms, and there was no electricity in the air at all.
So the criteria I named as important are (1) talented (2) haopy (3) gets me (4) kind and loving. The kind of man I'm talking about does not do well at all on (3). That Is likely to also lead to coming across as mediocre, though not terrible, on (4), because he is bad enough at reading people, including the woman in his life, that he is likely not to recognize that she is stress, sad or whatever and in need of a little extra kindness. And he may not come across well on (2), happiness. He may have excellent reasons for being unhappy but still -- that cuts right down on the magnatism.
And by the way, I actually did go to an ACX meetup last year & yeah, the men did all seem smart hard working and interested in doing the world some good. Allwere young enough to be my sons. However there were 2 that I would have been quite attracted to if I had been their age, and even at my present age I spent more time talking to them than to others because I liked them more. One was a PhD student in quite a male STEM field, but was lively and articulate when he explained some tech stuff to me, and just in the comments he made about this and that he had a kind of playful verbal fluencythat made me feel like he'd understand and have an interest in various ideas I have about poetry, the mind, consciousness, etc etc. If were 25 and had gone out with him, I might have found out that I was wrong about that, but he would not have had a bit of trouble getting a first date with me. Oh, and by the way,, since I'm trying to challenge some ideas men here have about women's preferences, here's a review of his looks. He totally flunked on the tallness and muscularity a lot of guys think is important to women. He was short, by US causcasian standards, maybe 5'6". That's still taller than me, though, and would not have bothered 25 year old me at all.II wasn't at all bulky and muscular, but didn't look skinny and weak either. He was just you basic a thinnish young guy. I think most people would agree with me that he had a handsome face, but he had unusually dark skin for someone from south asia and that would look unattractive to some. But the thing is -- I liked him. And there was plenty to appreciate about his appearance.
In many cases, they are not just "dense about interpersonal stuff" they have high-function autism.
The women too, of course. Perhaps, especially the women in ACX circles.
On the other hand, high-functioning autism in women is kind of cute and adorable, and not really a problem (compare, e.g., schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder)
[Note I said high-functioning, I'm well aware what the more severe forms present like]
I mean, yes, if you've got a STEM guy in a long-term relationship and he's struggling to find the right gift then your observations aren't bad but that's not the problem most of these men are facing. This is something that would make them a better partner, not get a partner. And, trivially, it's way, way easier and more effective for the average STEM nerd to get good romantic results by buying a nice pair of boots, a decent blazer, and tailoring his jeans.
Look, no offense, but if we both take an ACX nerd and I put him in decent clothes and you try to teach him to distinguish periwinkle from lavender...I mean, I've got extremely strong priors who will get better results and I don't think you actually disagree.
But there's this weird disconnect where that's not what you bring up, that's not what you discuss, that's not where you focus, it's fundamentally this...not irrelevant detail but it's just disconnected from the actual challenges, like worrying about what color to paint your kitchen before you've bought a house. This allergy to honestly discussing what women empirically find attractive. And I'm incredibly bitter about it because, well, I'm a giant nerd and I care about discourse. And I can't have an honest discussion with any woman, ever, about this because they all do this rhetorical slide, away from what clearly, empirically works. This was kind of excusable in the 2000s but at this point I'm just tired of being lied to. And, from the women's perspective, I know most of you don't like the way male/red pill discourse is going but turning that around is going to require some woman, at some point, to actually speak openly and candidly about it.
It feels like some kind of fear on women's part but...of what? We're all stupid about the opposite sex. Men are stupid about boobs. Boobs are cool but not nearly as cool as we think they are and everyone knows about this and can laugh and joke about this. I don't think Melvin's status theory is everything but it's definitely a giant, obvious influence on women but women treat any discussion of that as deeply wrongheaded, misguided at best and hateful at worst, as if the things they actually found attractive were a Defcon 1 secret to be protected at all costs.
>This allergy to honestly discussing what women empirically find attractive. And I'm incredibly bitter about it because, well, I'm a giant nerd and I care about discourse. And I can't have an honest discussion with any woman, ever, about this because they all do this rhetorical slide, away from what clearly, empirically works. This was kind of excusable in the 2000s but at this point I'm just tired of being lied to
Al. I am not lying. I am so motherfucking frank that it’s kind of a social liability. I have to work to damp down my natural willingness to say stuff that other people consider too ungracious or too crass or too politically incorrect or too dark to say. It is possible that I am just way different from other members of my gender, but I don’t think so. I’m quirky, but seem to have gotten the typical romance software. There are a couple things about me that probably make me substantially different from the national average in how I react to men, but they’re not unusual things, esp. here on ACX. The first is that I do not come from money. My father had to retire from the military when I was 9 because he failed to get the military equivalent of tenure, and thereafter we lived on a retired lieutenant colonel’s pay. I got huge scholarships as an undergrad, and even so my parents had trouble covering the remainder. Acc/to the research I’m familiar with, people’s financial expectations are influenced a fair amount by their parents’ financial situation. I have never aspired to be rich, and not because I’m noble — it’s just not an ideal that ever took hold in my mind. I just wanted to have & do the things that people in the low part of the upper middle class have & do, and I have succeeded at reaching that spot in the money hierarchy. Once I was in grad school I knew that that would not be difficult to do unless I fucked up some way, and the amount of money a man would bring into the marriage really was no longer a consideration. The second is that I have generally been more concerned about my social status than about the man’s. I grew up smart, got an advanced degree, and want to be respected for my accomplishments. The idea of being admired because of the attainments of whoever I was married to never appealed to me. Anyhow, as I said, that combo of relative disinterest in wealth and an orientation towards getting respect myself may be unusual among women as a whole, but it is not unusual among women with advanced degrees. It’s probably not unusual on here. If you are dating smart, accomplished women who can support themselves, it’s a whole different world from *The Bachelorette.*.
And here is a second response to the bit of AL-think quoted above. You sound furious at women. You see them us people who are primarily interested in the gain in social status and wealth they can get from pairing up with the right sort of man, and as cold and selfish when it comes to consideration of the plight of men these days. You think we are such liars that you have not once, ever, gotten one of us to tell the truth about how we choose men. So here’s my question: Why the fuck do you want one of us?
If it’s the pussy you want I think you would be better off coming to a civilized arrangement with some woman where the 2 of you are what’s called fuck buddies, and you pay her rent or take her on a couple great trips a year. I am not saying this to be insulting, that is my actual view of what’s your best shot.
Also, you kind of didn’t get the main message of my riff about engineers vs. more literary types when giving presents to women. You said the birthday present part wouldn’t come up til the couple is married. That’s true, but the guys who are clueness about what to get their wife as a present start showing that same kind of cluelessness early on. For instance, one thing I’ve seen them do is on a first date take the woman to a very expensive restaurant, making clear that they will be paying the bill. They’re missing a couple of nuances there. Many women would not be comfortable with that because it is awkward to have someone you barely know well do something like that for you. It gives women like that — I’m one of them — a vague feeling the man is trying to buy them or impress them. Also, it is hard to be frank about what you of the restaurant if the man is paying $150 for your meal. If we had decided together to go to the place, and were splitting the bill, I would feel comfortable saying “wow, this place doesn’t live up to its reputation, do you agree?” But it seems churlish to say that to someone who has presented the meal to you as an expensive gift. Also, for the man to choose the location of the first date is not a great note to start on. It’s not mutual. If I were the woman, I’d be thinking, why there? Does he think everybody likes that place? Does he think he gets to decide where we go on dates? Does he think that all I care about is how pricey the place is? Anyhow, that’s an example of a way a man, trying to make a good impression, exhibits cluelessness about what the woman’s point of view might be early on. The kind of cluelessness about interpersonal nuances that I’m talking about is usually evident within half an hour of meeting someone. (Is that frank enough for you? I feel rude and mean spirited writing that, but you want the truth.).
Also, about the periwinkle gown — you’re missing the forest for the trees. The point isn’t that the man should be able to tell the difference between periwinkle and lavender, it’s that he would understand the woman in his life well enough to know her preferences in books, clothing, trips, etc. If he bought her a gown that was lavender instead of periwinkle, it would be just fine for him to say, “I hope you’re oK with the color. I can’t really tell the difference between periwinkle and lavendar, and I know periwinkle’s your favorite.” And that would be just fine. The important part is him knowing and caring what her favorite things are, not his being able to pick out absolutely flawless instances of those things as presents.
>" "And I can't have an honest discussion with any woman, ever, about this because they all do this rhetorical slide, away from what clearly, empirically works"
I'm a 44 year old American straight woman who had a mostly straight male social circle for my teens, twenties, and thirties. While I very obviously can't speak for all women because many of them are very different from me - they're far stupider or far smarter, or they're emotionally or mentally ill, they're much more empathic and feelings centered than rationally compassionate, or they were raised in a wildly different culture - I will ABSOLUTELY truthfully answer whatever questions you have about empirically works for *me* and you can extrapolate out from there what would work for people similar to me.
Wooly, I'm going to be the wicked fairy at the christening here. Damn right they *should* dress better. Back when we were doing the dating docs on here, I had a look at some samples and even the reasonable ones, I was going "That photo is doing you *no* favours" and "That's a bad picture to put up to represent "things I like, hobbies, interests" because it screams 'weird loner' and not 'playful unconventional interests'".
As for the detailed descriptions of their lives, wants, interests, outlook on life in general - yeeeeeeah. An *awful* lot of "this is the Bay Area, baby" type of interests (so I'm pan, poly, not looking for kids yet if ever, I have sixteen cats and nineteen dogs though and if my five partners and my metamours approve of you, I'm sure we'll click!) and basically giving off "if I'm not in this precise bubble with this precise mindset, I'm running screaming for the hills if approached by this person" vibe. Man.
I know I'm being the hurler on the ditch here, and the same applies for the women, but the guys really were not bringing their strongest game to the "dating is a meat market, being vegan won't help you here" war.
EDIT: Also, Wooly, women *do* find colours interesting. You think Eremolalos is deflecting when talking about periwinkle, but women really do think "oh that colour really suits him" versus "oh dear, that's just not working" in regards to shades that you and most men would probably think "it's all blue, right?" Nice guy dresses in decent clothing but lets himself down because he really can't wear red with his complexion and that is a dealbreaker on the subconscious "do I find him Le Sexy" level.
EDIT EDIT: I do mean it about the importance of colours. The one time I managed to co-ordinate all my clothing in a particular colour, I got lots of sincere comments from other women about how good it looked, but I don't dress like that since because I felt like I was wearing camo. Olive green does go well with my colouring, but I might as well be wearing army fatigues, and I'm not in any man's army 😊
Yeah I don't really disagree. It's hard to be too wrong when arguing that "actually life is more complicated than your simplified model", of course it is. I was really trying to summarise the whole "alpha/beta" thing more accurately rather than give a complete theory of attraction.
Melvin's assertion "Women tend to care about your status more than your looks" is arguably more insulting to men than to women, but one rarely sees men getting offended at similar claims.
As you point out, status is an important and informational signal in a civilized society and is regarded as such, so one would think that being accused of caring for status is far less insulting than being accused of caring for looks.
My point wasn't that what Melvin said was horribly insulting, it was that he was wrong. I wrote 3 substantial paragraphs about what, in my rather extensive experience, matters to women when they choose mates, and why . One sentence in all that was about how it was insulting to women to say they weigh male's social status more heavily than anything else: I said they'd have to be dumb as dirt to do that. I did not say anything about men caring overmuch about looks, not one word.
It seems to me you are irritated at me for things other people have said. How about paying attention just to what *I* said, if you're going to respond to me?
I attributed the view on men caring about looks to Melvin, not to you. Juxtaposing that with your comment "Listen, if I carried around much feminist anger...", makes for a curiosity that the nastier insult barely begets a reaction, which I felt was not entirely irrelevant to point out.
You seem to be reading my comment as confrontational, which it is not.
Part of the problem is that women now want and expect the same rights to choose and range of choice in romantic/sexual partners as men have had, and men (of course) don't like that.
There's also the difference in what men find attractive; it may be a cliché or a stereotype, but whether a man is 17 or 70, he is going to find nubile 17 year old girl attractive and will try to attract her. If a 70 year old woman is going around trying to pull 17 year old men - yeah, that is not socially acceptable in the main.
So you have women who wanted to/did play the field like a man in their 20s getting to their 30s and wondering "where are all the good men, why don't men want to settle down?" whereas the men in their 30s are still chasign after/getting the benefit of the women in their 20s sowing their wild oats.
And the men in their 20s getting out-competed by the men in their 30s and 40s for the 20 year old women are angry and unhappy, and the women in their 30s and 40s getting ignored by the men in their 30s and 40s are angry and unhappy.
I've seen a lot of the kind of problem page/agony aunt advice column plaints that go "I'm 36 year old woman, I've been with my 38 year old fiancé for eight years, now I'm thinking about marriage and kids but he doesn't want to commit". My (less than charitable) reaction is "Well of course he doesn't, if he hasn't proposed marriage by now he never will. He doesn't want to change, why would he? He's getting free milk, and if the cow gets stroppy about it, he can always go find another one, and younger to boot".
I agree that alpha males are real, in that there's a certain bucket of traits where having all or most of them tends to make a man an 'alpha' who gets lots of girls if he wants to. These traits include self-confidence, good sense of humor, high degree of financial success, fame, and probably a few others.
Still, I think that going with just alpha/beta is a bit too simplistic. From what I've seen in life, most straight men are content/happy in a long-term relationship with one woman, and there's a good number of men that manage this without being alpha. Then there are men that struggle to have any girlfriend or any long-term relationship. The division between these two groups is probably more important than the division between alphas and everybody else.
So there probably should be at least 3 levels here, maybe more, not just 2.
>though it is true he is superior at something most men care about a lot
Is it, though? I might not be the best person to talk about this (I attempted masculinity for some time, but I didn't really have the knack for it), but I get the impression that at least a plurality and probably a substantial majority of men would be (or are) happy with one good relationship and only particularly need to pull enough girls to find the right partner for a good long-term relationship and not get too frustrated and lonely in the meantime. That number can be as few as one, and quality matters a lot more than quantity.
Before I met my now-wife, and also before I started my transition, I would have defied categorization into "alpha" and "beta" by your standards. I'd had several more partners than the numbers I've most commonly seen in surveys for average number of partners (4-ish for women, 6-ish for men), which would have put me in the "alpha" category. On the other hand, I was perennially single and often had long dry spells. In hindsight, my three major problems apart from not having met the right woman yet were:
1. My social circles were mostly men, and most of the women were in relationships at any given time, which limited my dating pool quite a bit.
2. I fit the "useless lesbian" stereotype pretty well (i.e. hopelessly dense about signs of women being interested in me and very reluctant to make the first move for fear of being wrong), which is even worse for getting dates as a "straight" "man" than it is for a gay woman.
3. I was girly enough that straight women, even when they liked me and found me attractive, generally didn't really see me as dating material.
Tangentially, the significant gap between the "average number of partners" figures for men and women has always bothered me. Either there are enough stereotypically promiscuous gay guys and U-Haul lesbians to skew the averages, or a lot of people are lying.
The ultimate girl-getter I ever knew was a northern Irish engineer I met while working in Hong Kong. He stood about five feet two, he was missing a front tooth, and he was a sloppy dresser. But at bars, he would wade in and start chatting up the most beautiful girls. He'd turn up his accent, tell them jokes, and have them laughing at his jokes in no time. He inevitably left with one of them on his arm. He was the most non-Alpha Alpha male I ever met.
Don't underestimate the exotic element of him being a foreigner. I imagine the local girls liked the novelty of having fun with this guy who was so different from the type of guys they normally met, but as for long term relationships or marriage, I sincerely doubt either party entertained the notion at all.
Still, if he enjoyed himself and they enjoyed themselves, who am I to quibble?
He had confidence, that is like 80% of it. A lot of men don't really have that in spades.
Reason you think he is the least non-Alpha alpha is that your definition of what an Alpha male is probably too narrow.
I would define it as social dominance. Height and wether you have a front tooth missing or not doesn't have that much to do with it. Although height can help.
I would say fame doesn't even have that much to do with it. As you can become famous in many different ways these days.
Well, matching him up to my criteria, he had a talent -- being very funny -- and he came across as happy. Two out of the big 4 is def enuf to get a lot of us interested in exploring further.
It seems by your definition, anyone who does (or can) get lots of girls is an Alpha, while everyone else is a Beta. You add "confident" to the description, but that doesn't seem central. Even if it is, that leaves a lot of room for other behaviors and situations - for instance someone like me who is monogamous and happily married for a number of years. I honestly don't know how I would fare if I were looking for short term relationships or hookups, because I am not and have not been. If we're limited to two categories, I think a lot of men will fail to properly fit into either.
Maybe there's a use in defining an Alpha, but it seems like an overly limited definition that fits more into stereotypes than a real category with important effects.
ETA: And if you take away all of the controversial aspects (like if an Alpha is generically superior to Betas), then of course that's less controversial. I agree that it's not controversial that some guys are better able to talk to women and have better romantic prospects, but that's also a completely uninteresting observation on its own.
Of the richness and complexity of a (male, in this case) human existence, are “Alfa” and “Beta” really our only choices? Don’t care how controversial this concept is considered to be, pathetic and useless is a more apt description.
its the "degree from a good school" that matters. there are plenty of ksi working retail. i kind of doubt said brilliant women are dating them. Books are cheap and plenty of bright men drop out to there.
having a good degree and a high salary covers a lot of flaws.
KSI? Knowledge Strength Integrity? The Irish guy I knew in Hong Kong who I described above was twitchy. I'm doubtful about his integrity, though. He had a habit of marrying women but not bother to divorce his previous spouses. He could get away with this because he traveled around the world from one airport construction project to another. A lawyer for his "ex"-wife in Hong Kong contacted me trying to track him down. I mentioned that I thought he had a wife in Northern Ireland that he never divorced. That didn't please the lawyer.
Naw, ksi is just another Greek letter, and I threw that in to put what I said in parallel with alpha and beta. And there really isn't a ksi group. What I was really saying was that intellectual women are often attracted to brilliant men, and if the man is brilliant his being thin-armed, twitchy etc. just doesn't matter. I speak from experience.
I think "omega" was also part of the grouping (the most hopeless men, even more useless and low-status than betas) and now sigma males are the new thing?
"Anyone who identifies as a “sigma male” is typically portrayed in popular culture, such as movies and books, as a sort of strong and silent type. The most identifiable personality traits associated with them are independence, self-reliance, and a penchant for solitude.
The sigma male is the new-age lone wolf, and the idea of being a lone wolf is mostly romanticized. However, it’s a personality archetype that seems to go beyond simply preferring to be alone over the company of friends.
Their personality is in direct contrast to the alpha male, who prefers to dominate, and different from the beta male, who is more introverted, sensitive, passive, and more likely to prefer encouragement over demands."
Though the personality typings have been reworked, and now, God help us, there's an entire alphabet:
I think it is interesting enough to be its own discussion thread because it turns out that the great Marshmallow Test for executive function isn't reproducible across all cultures.
"For decades, the eponymous Marshmallow Test has taken on almost mythic meaning. The test, originally developed to measure children’s ability to delay gratification by tempting them with a fluffy, gooey sweet was later shown to be a potent predictor of success in school and beyond."
But it didn't hold up for Mayan children. And then psychologists ran variations of the test across different cultures.
"Yuko Munakata, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Davis, conducted a variation on the Marshmallow Test that showed that children’s ability to wait for a treat wasn’t like a muscle that was strong or weak, but changed markedly depending on the context. Japanese children, culturally accustomed to waiting for food, were able to hold out for a food reward, but not for a present. American schoolchildren, on the other hand, used to waiting to unwrap gifts under a Christmas tree or at a birthday party, were able to wait for a gift, but not food."
That made me wonder if it also doesn't validate free will. After all one of the predicates of the determinists is that human brains offer a limited range of responses in any given situation. Although all humans will not respond in the same way — but given a restrictive test, we should see a bell curve of response frequencies. If our minds don't give us control over our executive functions, with a simple scenario like the Marshmallow Test we should see a similar range of variation between diverse groups. But we don't. Of course, one could argue that culture and not our biology overrides our free will. But it's hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes (although some environmental determinists — like Marvin Harris — argued that it was — most of their arguments were scientific just-so stories and weren't falsifiable).
This weekend a smart guy told me that the original marshmallow test was done in the Caribbean and looked at racial differences among children. I thought, “that seems like it would be highly controversial and I would have heard of it.” So I asked with Chat-GPT: it said no way!--"The claim that the original Marshmallow Test was conducted in the Caribbean to examine racial differences in children is not true. "
So I checked Wikipedia…no mention of an earlier test—“The first experiment in delayed gratification was conducted by Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen at Stanford University in 1970”.
So I checked Wikipedia’s talk page…some vague references to removing the "origins" section, but nothing that mentioned an earlier test. So I checked the 1970 paper, which cited a 1960s paper, which cited a 1958 paper in Trinidad and—damned if he wasn’t right.
DOI: 10.1037/h0041895
Aside-- the Frequency Illusion is really kicking my ass this month
It’s fast. I thought there was a good chance it would point me to the correct paper in <30 seconds. I trust chat about as much as I trust a knowledgeable person (maybe a bit less so on sensitive subjects like this one).
Wow! I appreciate you digging into this. I also use Chat and Co-Pilot for quick overviews. I don't necessarily trust everything they tell me — but then I ask for references, I have a starting point to track down further info. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of references end up being dead ends (as in not saying what the LLM thought it said) or bogus (unable to find them in Google Scholar). But as much as I've disparaged the LLMs in previous threads, they can be very useful as a research starting point.
Funny thing is that I looked all this up 10 minutes BEFORE reading your comment. The universe is bombarding me with a lot of weird coincidences this week.
They wanted to reproduce this and Mayan children was their first go to group lol?
This and the fact that it comes from a pretty woke university (and the fact that the conclusions from the Marshmellow test has implications that somewhat agree with conservative ideals) raises about half an eyebrow for me.
And I say that as someone who is somewhat skeptical of the Marshmellow study and its implications.
Seems like delayed gratification is a Marxist ideal — i.e. working hard to make the world ready for the coming of True Communism. One could argue that marshmallows are a symbol of mushy capitalist incentives. ;-)
But propose a new study (should anyone wish to undertake it): How long can threads go before they devolve into accusations of wokeness?
What's your definition of "woke" and which universities do you think qualify as woke? And is the wokeness because of policies at the University Board and top administrative level? Or is the university bureaucracy? The professoriate? Or does it come bottom-up from the students? Philippe Lemoine argues that it's grad students who are intimidating the professoriate and administration with their wokeness (however, he never defines what being woke means). If that's the case that it's the young that are the vector of wokeness, then the future is not bright for Boomer and GenX fascists that control our media, courts, and red state governments. Personally, I see it as a natural reaction to the rise of corporate fascism in the US.
"And is the wokeness because of policies at the University Board and top administrative level? Or is the university bureaucracy? The professoriate? Or does it come bottom-up from the students? Philippe Lemoine argues that it's grad students who are intimidating the professoriate and administration with their wokeness (however, he never defines what being woke means)."
2: "it's hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes"
3: Thus, humans have free will
I think culture is generally shaped by what physicists call deterministic chaos. You have a complex systems full of feedback loops and nonlinearities where a small change in the input state can lead to a large divergence later.
For example, the Japanese language is not a deterministic consequence of their geography. Sometimes single people establish words or phrases, or the outcome of a battle shapes culture for decades to come.
Furthermore, if every behavior shaped by culture was indicative of free will, then then a lot of behaviors we typically take as involuntary would be freely chosen. There are a lot of situations in which dependent on our culture we react reflexively with disgust, anticipation, arousal, shame, outrage and more.
> Of course, one could argue that culture and not our biology overrides our free will. But it's hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes.
I don’t know. I think environment has a massive shaping effect on culture. Inuit culture doesn’t get off the ground in a rainforest. Same for Polynesian culture in the high desert. Plus environment, given time, has a massive shaping effect on biology itself, and biology certainly shapes culture. And then there’s all the other shit happening (volcanic eruptions, drought, disease, migration, etc.)
It seems clear to me that everything I do, or think, is just the summation of my particular circumstance. There’s no magical me pulling the strings independent of that. Environment, biology, history, dumb luck, etc. go in and what people think of as free will, or the expression of the soul, or whatever, is what comes out. We are in every sense just a product of the situation, like everything else in the universe. I don’t see evidence for something existing outside of that.
It may be that physical culture (i.e. their toolkits, etc.) help populations to adapt to the environment, but different cultures that adapt to the same environment can be very different. For instance, Polynesian and Micronesian cultures have similar toolkits that enable them to exploit their tropical island environments, but Micronesian cultures are less hierarchical than Polynesian cultures and this is reflected in body ornamentation and their architecture.
Food avoidance patterns are things that environmental determinists like to cite as adaptive to cultures. In his book *Eat Not This Flesh*, Frederick Simoons pretty much demolished this line of thought back in the 60s. He criticized environmental determinists for being too eager, in the absence of supporting evidence, to use disease and environmental factors as an explanation why certain cultures avoid certain kinds of foods. He used historical and archaeological evidence to dismantle such explanations for pork rejection in the Middle East and beef rejection in India. And there are interesting side discussions in the book — for instance on how women in some African cultures abstain from chicken and eggs, fearing infertility.
And that an Inuit from a remote settlement above the Arctic Circle can become a premier cardiovascular surgeon suggests to me that culture has a limited hold on our behavioral choices (Google "famous inuit doctors").
I wouldn’t contend that geography is the sole determiner of culture. Nor is culture always the result of rational processes. Food avoidance for seemingly irrational reasons could stem from an elder, in a fishing region, getting terribly ill from eating a fish and influencing his people not to consume fish. Food avoidance could be due to a spoiled cache of food. Or any number of processes that don’t require a fundamental spark of essential free will.
You contended that it is hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes. Facts like there being sharks in regions (Fiji, Tahiti, Hawaii) where people have worshiped shark gods suggests otherwise.
The trouble with Determinist arguments is that their explanations for behavior (or for that matter any emergent phenomena) always rely on causality chains which, like your elder in a fishing village example, are based on speculation. These explanations are either unfalsifiable — or if the data tends to falsify them (a la Simoons's work), the Determinists go back to the drawing board to find some other explanations based on tenuous chains of causality.
Of course, all chains of causality regress to the Big Bang. So, many physicists seem to believe that all the motions and interactions of energy and matter were pre-determined from the Big Git-go. But speaking of chains of causality, I wonder if that philosophy isn't a holdover from Calvinist theory of predestination? Instead of Jehovah being the Prime Mover, the Big Bang becomes the Prime Mover, and the only randomness that ever occurred was in the distribution of matter-energy at the start of the Big Bang (and if we could *just see beyond the singularity, it would turn out to be non-random!*).
As the conversationalist in the sidebar conversation on free will (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that/comment/67151885) , I don't see how my basic argument for the illusion of free will (generated by Sam Harris's definitive essay/episode on the illusion of free will + Scott's Different Worlds essay) is in any way invalidated by a demonstration that Japanese children's culture *determined* that most of them would be better at waiting to consume a marshmallow because they were conditioned to wait for food.
In fact, I think it rather proves the opposite? If everyone has truly free will, then surely culture wouldn't have any impact whatsoever on the marshmallow test, and nor would genetic conditions which contribute to the kind of defiance, impulsivity, inability to process language, etc. which would lead certain children to test-failing marshmallow chomping.
After all, if you're the youngest of five in a very poor American family, snatching whatever treat you can get the second you can get it might indeed be a very valid survival strategy in your environment in a way that would be potentially literally "unthinkable" to the Japanese children cited in your article. It's your environment shaping your behavior, not the amorphous power of free will.
the whole free will thing is atheists not getting the idea of "fate" is part of human existence and will manifest over and over in worse terms if we don't resist it.
whether its three gods spinning a tapestry, one all knowing god who sees every event, or twisting darwinian selection into something ineffable, its the same urge or fallback. fate is popular because everyone styles themself as an oracle of it, not as a captive of it. they believe if they serve it they can twist it or be exempt from it.
the fact they "argue" it and not get that it might as well be bird song for all the good it does (and religion realized good works might as well be bird song for the predestined, and agonized over it) shows the disconnect.
You're not going to get much of an argument from me; "fate" tends to imply a grand design, "determinism," less so, but it's functionally the same thing.
Sam Harris's argument that one must nevertheless *operate* as if they have "free will" is an important part of his thoughts about it, as there are consequences for every action (including not taking action). "Mitigating risk," "exercising judgment," and so on are behaviors that contribute to outcomes, so if you are *able* to do them...do them!
The fact that children from the same culture can respond to the test in different ways suggests to me that we are not cultural automata — let alone biological automata.
But if we weren't automata, we would have no will! (Cause "self-moving" or "moving of oneself" we have to be at least, and all things - real things, physical things - are self-moving.)
Having free will means that one can do something of free will. But I prefer to say, that one can do something "freiwillig" or voluntarily.
And we certainly can. I do what I want to do all the time.
And I'm not under an illusion. Doing things I do not want as much or as direct as others feels consistently different.
I cannot choose what I like or what I find important, but I can choose to act on it in this way or that way. And often I have chosen bad, but it was my choice.
More of a problem is that one can say that absolutely everything we can do intentionally - that is, even only with the intention of doing it and no deeper or following purpose, for example raising your arm, contrary to moving your bowels - is done voluntarily if we do it indeed intentionally and not absentmindedly, after a deliberation of the pros and cons. Like giving the robber your money instead of being shot.
But that's not important here, I think.
Important is that doing something voluntarily is not a stupid notion.
It's something that some things can do and others don't. Just like some things can melt and others can't. And all things do whatever they can do in accordance with their other properties. That's how things work. And there is nothing bad about it.
This isn't coherent with your first comment, which is about the marshmallow test not being reproducable across all cultures somehow proving that free will exists.
But it *is* apparently reproducable the more granular you are when sorting for demographics!
When you test cultures against one another - Japanese vs American, rich vs poor - you can more accurately predict what the subject is going to do. Japanese kids are more likely to wait than Americans because their Japanese parents' culture likely shaped them to wait for food. Secure, well-provided-for children are more likely to wait than deprived kids because their parents shaped them to confidently trust in the social contract and be rewarded.
That some larger cultures are more likely to pass than others clearly demonstrates that culture tends to determine behavior. And of course a more immediate culture is likely going to shape behavior even *more.* An affluent neighborhood's "Make Our Kids Pass the Marshmallow Test" parents group which trains and drills and rewards their kids on the marshmallow test is almost certainly going to do even better than the cohort of Japanese kids.
Might there be outliers in the Make Our Kids Pass the Marshmallow Test cohort? Almost certainly, as individual genetics and personal experience are always going to be a more immediate a determinator than local culture. Immature kids, routinely defiant kids, intellectually disabled kids; they might not pass the test. Some kids who would usually pass might not when they are tired or hungry or both.
It's so clear to me that the more you know about someone, the more you can predict how they will react to any given situation. An impossibly complete understanding of their everything: genetics, all of their personal experiences body chemistry and current brain activity is obviously going to produce a perfect prediction of what they're going to do, because they are only ever responding to the sum total of their genetics and life experience at any given moment.
Why is it clear to you that the more you know about someone the more you can predict what they'll do? For instance, FBI profilers have had mixed (i.e. poor) track record in predicting the behaviors of serial killers.
And your conclusions in the last paragraph are a-scientific. You admit that you can't possibly falsify all these variables acting in concert to achieve perfect predictability. But if a researcher falsifies one of those variables, then the Determinists invoke other variables that could have confounded the findings. Functionally, Determinism is a pseudo-science based upon the gut feelings of those arguing for it and tenuous chain of just-so stories to explain the observed outcomes. Sorry, if I sound a little harsh here, but my *big problem* with all Determinist arguments is that they shut down any further scientific or philosophical investigation of emergent phenomena.
I wrote several paragraphs which were a weak imitation of Sam Harris's definitive essay on free will.
Then I deleted them, even though I'm allergic to trashing content, because given what I've seen so far, I don't appear to have the same level of ability to persuade you that Sam Harris had to persuade me (and/or you might not have the capacity to *be* persuaded, by me or anyone. After all, at the end of the day, I do not believe you have free will!), so there's no point in reiterating what I've already written with slightly different language.
I volunteered to send you a paywall pass to the podcast episode (there might be a transcript?) so you can give the argument the fairest possible chance by listening to the strongest possible case for it.
Do you have any desire to see if you *can* be persuaded by the strongest possible argument?
If not...*why* not?
And, at risk of distracting from that inquiry, this conversation began when you said that you require an apology before you can "forgive" those who wrong you. That there are a couple of people from your past that you are still so enraged by that you have a desire to punch them today.
You also said that your ability to calm your thoughts with meditation is proof of your free will.
So.
Dude.
Why don't you just free will yourself into indifference about those past experiences?
Or is this...
> "Maybe it's the Judeo-Christian indoctrinations of my culture, but I can't help but want an apology before I forgive."
You're welcome to reply with links for the Sam Harris podcast you're referring to. All I saw was your SlateStarCodex link, and it didn't really seem to discuss free will. Anyway, maybe Sam has revised his arguments since I first encountered them, and I may hear something I haven't heard before — but I found his arguments unpersuasive in the past.
It's also been shown that the marshmallow test performance is easy to modify even in the same population of kids it was originally given to. In original test, kids were told to try hard not to eat the marshmallow. In the variant they were given a suggestion of a way to feel less tempted. I believe it was to pretend the marshmallow was made of foam rubber. Kids did much better when this simple self-management technique was taught.
I imagine it would also be easy to modify simply by telling kids "this is the famous marshmallow test, and whether or not you eat this marshmallow is strongly correlated with your future success. If you eat this marshmallow, every adult in the world will decide you're a shiftless loser doomed to failure. Have fun!"
I should tell my kids about the marshmallow test just in case anyone ever tries it on them.
I recently discovered that the changes in the American editions of Harry Potter went beyond just changing Britishisms to more common American language. In some cases, they changed the actual meaning of the text for no apparent reason. WTF were they thinking?
Usually when this sort of thing happens, I *think* it's to do with various last-minute changes in editing and/or miscommunication between the two different publishers and/or author. For example, the first His Dark Materials book is called Northern Lights in Britain and The Golden Compass in America, and this happened because the author had indicated his possible intention to name the whole *series* The Golden Compasses, and the US publisher got confused and thought this was meant to be the name of the first *book*, since there's a compass-like magical object that plays a central role. Or at least that's the story I've seen.
Other times it's about supposed cultural differences. One example is the board game Clue/Cluedo renaming Reverend Green as Mr Green in the US edition, supposedly because Americans would be less accepting of a reverend as a murder suspect. Another is the last HDM book which removed a vaguely sexual paragraph from the US edition (I've seen this mentioned in about ten different places as an example of conservative censorship).
But even with all that in mind, and as someone who's extremely familiar with Harry Potter, I can't make sense of most of these. The ones I can guess at: Bathilda Bagshot is a randomly mentioned author of one of the Hogwarts textbooks who becomes an important character in the seventh book. *Maybe* someone got confused and changed the name thinking it was unimportant (???) and then Rowling had it corrected by the time the US edition was published. For the bit on page 266, iirc Harry unties Lupin, Lupin thanks him, and Harry retorts that he's not saying he believes his and Black's innocence. The British version has Black respond by offering proof, but maybe the US publisher thought this didn't make sense because Harry was talking to Lupin (because conversations between more than two people are incomprehensible?) and either assumed it was a mistake or just decided to change it to "make it clearer" or something. Some of the other changes also look a bit like this (at least of you're assuming your readers are extremely slow) but I can't possibly imagine why they removed "twelve years" from the bit on 253. But maybe it was all just Rowling and her editors tinkering around with phrasing at the last minute, and not getting the latest amendments out to everyone in time.
But since this is Harry Potter, this exact question has probably been thoroughly analysed a hundred times already.
I enjoyed the first couple of Harry Potter films, but rather lost interest when subsequent films turned darker and grimmer, although I can see the appeal of that for some. Never read any of the books. Those later in the series look terrifyingly long!
Same. And it's especially frustrating starting with the third movie, where they stopped trying to follow the books much at all. (Also, the Mexican Hairless Werewolf is simply unforgivable.)
I suppose that comes from the The Last Jedi school of criticism. The third movie was certainly *different*, and I can believe that there would be people who liked it and praised it for that reason. Doesn't stop them from being wrong of course.
Incidentally, there was plenty of dumb stuff in the movie even if you completely ignore the books and treat it on its own. For example, the aforementioned Mexican Hairless Werewolf.
> I suppose that comes from the The Last Jedi school of criticism.
Is there a last Jedi book? If not I can’t see why it would come from that. And the last Jedi is bad.
The POA is the only decently filmed part of the series - directed as it was by Alfonso Cuaron , and has high ratings from critics on RT.
Movie critics have to judge movies as movies and not as adaptations. They don’t have to care about, or read the book.
(There’s probably plenty of adaptations you’ve watched and enjoyed without reading the book.)
Even as you enjoy those movies for themselves there will be somebody who has read the book steaming that some character was removed or some line of text added, and chapter 12 paragraph 33 slightly abridged.
This only becomes a problem for movies where the readership of the books is very large - in most cases a popular movie will vastly exceed the sales of the source material - and is especially an issue with nerdy children’s books or - week - nerdish books in general, especially the most popular.
This is maybe because people who read Harry Potter don’t read a lot of other literature, or other kinds of literature. In any case I never see anybody complain about changes to hamlet - where’s the play is often moved across time and place, and nobody cares about an abridgement. It runs 4 hours if you don’t.
US editions of UK authors are frequently edited to conform to standard American English. It's been going on for decades. Part of the issue is most Americans don't know what a lift or a lorry is. Also, editors probably got tired of receiving letters from readers complaining that colour is not spelled with a 'u'. My understanding is that British editors change American English to British English for British editions.
Mad referring to a mental state rather than anger is definitely in the American lexicon. Far more so than any of the examples beowulf used, or the British use of chips. That use of mad is probably dated and not as common now, but it isn't exclusive to British English.
I'm American, and I was well aware of that meaning of "mad" before Harry Potter was written. I didn't and don't *use* that meaning, or know anyone who did, but I knew it.
There's a lot of British pop culture in America that isn't Harry Potter. The first example that comes to mind is Alice in Wonderland. The Disney version is American but still includes the word "mad" meaning crazy, and evidently they didn't worry about American children not understanding it.
The American edition seems to have made some of the phrasing a little more succinct in places. But the only change to meaning I see is the page 266/362 entry. Were Black and Lupin the same person?
Brit: “I’m still not saying I believe you,” Harry retorted. “Then it’s time we offered you some proof,” said Black. “You, boy — give me Peter. Now.”
Amer: “I’m still not saying I believe you,” he told Lupin. “Then it’s time we offered you some proof,” said Lupin. “You, boy — give me Peter, please. Now.”
Full disclosure: I never got through the first book let alone the whole series.
That's not even the only major change. For example, "Ron" and "Mr Wesley" (pg58) are not the same person either. And pg155 straight out changes what Harry said, no book knowledge required to recognize that one.
No, this one makes no sense at all. They're not the same person. The "boy" is Ron Weasley, and Lupin is one of the teachers. He would call him by his name, not "boy".
Not only is Lupin a teacher, pretty much his entire personality is being polite and nice and a bit formal. Addressing a student as "You, boy" would be completely out of character for him.
What can we learn from unreproducible anomalies? A physicist friend of mine (now deceased) said he'd occasionally get wild results while running experiments. I asked him if he ever investigated them. I reasoned that at the very least it may expose some corner-case problems with his test equipment, or at the very best case it might expose some new unobserved physical phenomena. He answered that he had limited time on the particle accelerator, and he was looking for results that would address the validity of his research. His research grants and his department wouldn't support him in pursuing these experimental vagaries. And he admitted that he had gotten burned in his early career by his department trying to reproduce a woo-woo experiment he had read about that had interested him. I thought that was a shame, but the economics and politics of the scientific-industrial complex discourage researchers from digging into phenomena that may be difficult to reproduce.
Anyway, I thought about him the other evening when I came across an empty wheelchair at a crosswalk. I looked around to make sure there wasn't a person who belonged to the wheelchair lying incapacitated in the shrubbery next to the sidewalk. Wheelchairs are relatively expensive items, especially for someone who is disabled and who has limited financial resources. They're not something people normally abandon (at least I don't think they are). And the logistics of leaving one at a crosswalk and transporting the owner would be challenging to arrange — but well within the realm of the possible.
I tried to come up with some scenarios to explain this anomaly.
The first idea that occurred to me was that the disabled owner of the wheelchair had encountered a faith healer while waiting for the walk light to change. "I can *walk* again!" he shouted and skipped away as the walk light counted down. An unlikely scenario I admit, but it amused me. The corollary scenario was that because I was in a neighborhood that hosted numerous storefront churches, maybe this wheelchair was a shill prop from some Pentecostal faith healing service. But unlike crutches, a wheelchair is not a cheap prop to be discarded. And storefront churches are the bottom feeders of organized faith. I doubted any pastor had the budget to discard wheelchairs.
Other thoughts occurred to me...
The person who owned the chair was a scammer who could always walk but decided to move on to some other grift.
The owner of the wheelchair had been abducted, and the abductors left the chair behind because it was too clunky to load into the car (or they were aliens who didn't want to bother schlepping it up to the flying saucer).
Or the owner died, and the family wheeled it down to the sidewalk for someone to scavenge.
Then I asked myself: Is this a unique data point? Maybe wheelchairs get abandoned all the time and I'm biased into thinking this is unique by not having experienced any other abandoned wheelchair priors. We track just about every conceivable thing in our culture. Would the local waste disposal companies have data on how many wheelchairs they collect? Would police department lost and founds collect and store missing wheelchairs?
I admit I couldn't take my speculations any further and I went about my business. But it bugs me that there's a story behind this wheelchair that I will never be able to know. And how much weird shit do we observe, but we shrug our shoulders and just walk on?
Maybe the person in the wheelchair got into a car, and absent-mindedly left it behind instead of throwing it in the trunk. (This doesn't necessarily involve more than one person; some people in wheelchairs are capable of briefly standing up and walking around.)
In my experience in experimental physics, there are a lot of cases where you plot something, and see some features which you can't explain. Perhaps your time difference shows three distinct peaks instead of being a single Gaussian distribution. Now, I could spend a week trying to understand where this comes from, or I can say 'the measured time differences are small enough for my purposes, and their shape depends on various electronics in a way not precisely understood'.
When these superluminous neutrinos where measured, I would bet that one of the first things the experimentalists did was to power cycle their electronics. If that had fixed their problem, they would have said 'probably some freak muon flipped some bits in a FPGA, whatever', and nobody would have heard about it. Only the fact that their measurement was persistent and also in blatant contradiction to established physics was motivation to sink a ton of time into figuring out what the hell was going on.
Within human society, things are similar. Say I see that someone has thrown an egg at my parked car. Now, this could be the starting point of a lengthy investigation by a police task force. Was the egg fresh or rotten? Was it organic? Why throw an egg and not a tomato? Was my car selected specifically, or just a target of opportunity? In the former case, what exactly does that person have against me?
Instead of answering all these questions, it is much easier to book this as 'some people are just assholes behaving in weird anti-social ways'. If they had thrown a molotov cocktail to burn it or had planted a car bomb to kill me, then society would be much more willing to spend time to get to the bottom of it.
I think we tend to strain them out, often without noticing, as we do the many imperfections of spoken language -- incomplete sentences, changes in tense, saying one word but meaning another . . .
What’s the most complicated/nuanced thing that large parts of society have agreed is bad, since say WWII? Large coalitions agree that emitting too much carbon is bad, that the McCarthy “witch hunts” were bad, or that laws against gay and lesbian marriage are bad. But none of these feel as wishy-washy as “cancel culture”. McCarthyism feels closest, but there my impression was that the courts were the main bad guy, and people dobbing in their neighbours weren’t the part off the system where anyone expected change. Are there big shifts in public opinion about more complicated things?
Maybe invading other countries with the purpose of imposing democracy? Many people who think that is bad would think that invading another country to stop the literal Second Holocaust would be good, that spreading pro-democracy propaganda is good, and that forcing a country to be democratic after they invade *you* and lose is good, or at least okay (e.g. post-WW2 Germany). So lots of individual components are good, but put them together and it's bad, which I think is a good measure of complexity.
This isn't really a complicated/nuanced thing, but marihuana use seems to have gone from "reefer madness" to (in selected states) "no big deal" - while cigarettes have gone from 45% of the population to 12%.
( Personally, I'm happy to see a bit less of the heavy hand of the law in the former case - though I'd still look at it as "are you _really_ sure that isn't a harmful habit?" and fairly happy to see the latter source of morbidity and mortality drop. )
Child porn got declared super-duper-ignore-civil-rights illegal starting in the 1980s. It's a bit shocking to find out that things weren't always like that.
I think you should define a percentage; but from my prospective 95% of the population believes its morally nessery to fill out tax paperwork and that this is completely unjustifiable, and has several very strange steps like your employer taking a cut based on how many children you have and a truely terrible password called an ssn; in a country with more guns then people and grossly undertrained irs agents(you can find the new hires swat exercises online) who are outnumbered 1:10000
I watched Donovan's Reef relatively recently, and the heroes talk about the butler with the line "well, you know those Whitey Chinese," and it struck me that racism has drastically calmed its tits in the last hundred years.
> In the United States, outbreaks associated with dairy consumption cause, on average, 760 illnesses/year and 22 hospitalizations/year, mostly from Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp. Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2% of the population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6% of the population, caused 96% of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products. Unpasteurized dairy products thus cause 840 (95% CrI 611–1,158) times more illnesses and 45 (95% CrI 34–59) times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products. As consumption of unpasteurized dairy products grows, illnesses will increase steadily; a doubling in the consumption of unpasteurized milk or cheese could increase outbreak-related illnesses by 96%.
even risk of death (3 deaths attributed to raw milk from 1998-2018)
The pro-raw milk side says that the *absolute risk* is still incredibly small. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/28/meat-your-doom/. 3.2% of the US population is around 10 million. 3 deaths over 20 years = 0.15 deaths per year, so death rate of raw milk drinkers = 1.5e-8 per person per year. If we think of this in terms of [micromorts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort), or 1-in-a-million-chance-of-death-increases, that's 0.015 micromorts per year, or 0.000041 micromorts per day. For reference: 230 miles of driving by car = 1 micromort. If I've done my math right: the risk of death drinking raw milk is around the same risk as increasing your daily car commute by an additional 50 feet. Annual risk is around the same as eating an additional 1.5 charcoal-grilled steaks per year. Risk of hospitalization and illness are higher that that of course, but still much lower than you'd expect from the anti-raw-milk side when looking at absolute risk.
For 2, it boils down to: the anti-raw milk side says that there are a bunch of studies that suggest that raw milk has no major nutritional benefits over pasteurized milk; the pro-raw-milk side says that those nutritional studies are unreliable, and it tastes better so who cares. It's pretty hard to get a sense of what reality is (yes, the USDA and CDC appear strongly against raw milk, but then again, this is the USDA and CDC we're talking about, a little skepticism is not unwarranted). My vague impression: weak evidence for increased nutrient density in raw milk, weak-to-moderate evidence for some probiotic or immune benefits to raw milk. Jury is out on the taste; I've tried it once, it had a slightly grassy flavor to me that I'm not crazy about.
I generally agree with your assessment: relative risks don't matter much unless they accumulate to a relevant absolute risk.
Also, the relative risk of illness and hospitalization are vastly different. Looking at the data, it seems like the dominant pathogen for pasteurized milk is Listeria monocytogenes, which has an 87% hospitalization rate, and the dominant pathogen for raw milk is Campylobacter spp., which has only a 12% hospitalization rate. If we look at deaths, this becomes even more extreme: 16 out of 17 deaths were from Listeria (likely all of them from pasteurized milk), one from Campylobacter (very likely from raw milk). So the relative risk of death would be a factor of two (with gigantic error bars).
In fact, there should be some expanation for the rareness of Listeria in raw milk. My hypothesis is that it simply has a shorter shelf life and other bacteria in it which will outcompete Listeria once the milk goes bad.
All in all, I see the risk as mostly a nothingburger, my risk of dying of a heart attack during thinking about this topic might be higher than if I drink raw milk for the rest of my life (which I don't because I like stuff with long shelf lives).
Finally, the obvious compromise between raw milk and pasteurized milk would be irradiated milk. Of course, irradiation also causes some deaths, because sometimes stupid people will not handle gamma sources with the appropriate amount of respect, and there is the specter of radio-terrorism. Still, it might be what dath ilan would use, the western world is way to anti-nuclear for that.
>Of course, irradiation also causes some deaths, because sometimes stupid people will not handle gamma sources with the appropriate amount of respect, and there is the specter of radio-terrorism. Still, it might be what dath ilan would use, the western world is way to anti-nuclear for that.
nit: Food irradiation can also be done with electron beams from linacs, which avoid the radio-terrorism possibility and mishandling of gamma sources (though if someone insists on doing something unsafe while the beam is turned on, that will, of course, still be a hazard).
I agree that this is a possibility. When you use an electron beam to generate high energy photons, I would generally describe the apparatus as an x-ray machine.
As most foodstuff has densities much lower than PbWO4, X-rays should be sufficient to irradiate food, unless you want to conserve a whole whale or something. Of course, for an x-ray machine, you need power, which is a bit more of a problem for mobile units, but the lack of terrorism potential seems very favorable especially for a decentralized irradiation setup.
Are we talking about truly raw milk here? I learned relatively recently that "pasteurized" means different things in different countries. There's regular pasteurization and UHT pasteurization. Countries that mandate the latter usually just call it pasteurization, while countries that mandate the former have both products available.
As to your question, absolute risk is the obviously correct metric. Using relative risk is a typical numeracy mistake, especially because it usually involves big numbers.
Easy example: you like mustard, so you buy the fancy brand. "Oh no, you just increased your mustard expense by 300%, how terribly wasteful". A more natural baseline to compare it to would be something like your entire food budget, or your entire disposable income.
Innumerate people very often just take some numbers vaguely associated to an issue and compare them with each other in random ways. Another recent example we had of this was the two arms one head guy, who somehow thought it was deeply meaningful that every tetraplegic requires > 1 full time caretaker. I detect some nascent economic thinking there, but it's entirely misapplied.
Just do the math: If 3.2% of the US drinks raw milk, that's about 11 million people. If 760 of that 11 million get sick from the milk they drink, that's about 7 people out of 100,000. So the chance is small.
For some perspective, consider this: One raw chicken in 25, or 4%, in US grocery stores is infected with salmonella. The legal limit on the fraction of chickens in the store that can be infected is 10%. Here is the CDC's advice on handling raw chicken:
-Raw meat, chicken and other poultry, seafood, and eggs can spread germs to ready-to-eat food unless you keep them separate.
-When grocery shopping, keep raw meat, poultry, seafood, and their juices away from other foods.
-Keep raw or marinating meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs separate from all other foods in the refrigerator.
-Store raw meat, poultry, and seafood in sealed containers or wrap them securely so the juices don't leak onto other foods.
-Use one cutting board or plate for raw meat, poultry, and seafood and a separate cutting board or plate for produce, bread, and other foods that won't be cooked.
-Raw chicken is ready to cook and doesn't need to be washed first. Washing these foods can spread germs to other foods, the sink, and the counter and make you sick.
If you choose to wash chicken, do so as safely as possible:
-Run the water gently over the chicken to reduce splashing.
-Immediately clean the sink and area around the sink with hot, soapy water and sanitize them thoroughly.
-Wash your hands for 20 seconds.
-Use a separate cutting board for raw chicken. Never place cooked food or fresh produce on a plate, cutting board, or other surface that previously held raw chicken.
-Wash cutting boards, utensils, dishes, and countertops with hot, soapy water after preparing chicken and before you prepare the next item.
-Use a food thermometer to make sure chicken is cooked to a safe internal temperature of 165°F.
-If cooking a microwaveable meal that includes frozen raw chicken, handle it as you would fresh raw chicken. Follow cooking directions carefully to prevent food poisoning.
After eating, refrigerate or freeze leftover chicken within 2 hours (or within 1 hour if the food is exposed to temperatures above 90°F, like in a hot car or at a picnic).
There are 1.25 million salmonella infections in the US per year. 760, or about one in 1600, come from unpasteurized milk. I'm thinking chicken's a lot riskier than unpastuerized milk.
Sounds like: in USA it is legal to sell poisoned chicken; it's the customer's responsibility to treat them like the biohazard they are. (Or die, if that is their revealed preference.)
In the US? Probably very, very low. The problem is that if unpasteurized milk goes mainstream like, say, anti-vax did, then that risk will stop being so low.
Part of the reason that raw milk may seem to have minor health downsides today, is that we're now vaccinating against many of the diseases that used to spread through raw milk. And we have antibiotics that can deal with the many of the common types of bacteria spread through raw milk.
In the 19th century, bovine tuberculosis could spread to humans via raw milk. TB was a major public health issue before antibiotics and it was generally a lingering death sentence back then. But now, most people have been vaccinated against TB (not sure if they're vaccinating dairy herds).
Typhoid Fever, caused by Salmonella typhi, could be transmitted through contaminated milk. Outbreaks were common in the pre-pasteurization era — and before antibiotics, the case fatality rates ran between 15-20%. Now we have vaccines that can prevent infection.
Diphtheria was another biggy. Although its primary transmission vector was respiratory droplets, it could also be transmitted through contaminated milk — which caused outbreaks in the pre-pasteurization period. The case fatality rate for diphtheria was typically around 5% to 10%.
Listeriosis, caused by Listeria monocytogenes, was particularly dangerous for pregnant women, newborns, and those with weakened immune systems. I can't find much data on the prevalence of Listeriosis back in the 19th century, but anything that causes diarrhea in newborns has the potential to kill them.
There are a bunch of other illnesses that were/are associated with raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a no-brainer. But, of course, many people don't use their brains optimally. ;-)
Interesting. For some reason, I thought I had been vaccinated for TB as a kid — and that all kids got vaccinated. According to ChatGPT we didn't. But that was a long time ago and I guess I misremembered (It may be a false memory of mine that Drs and nurses came to my rural public elementary school and vaccinated all us 1st Graders — or maybe they were sticking us for something else?). Anyway, my bad.
And while cattle can be vaccinated against TB, they're not in the US. I don't know if they can carry the antibiotic-resistant strains of TB, but that would scare me away from drinking raw milk!
"But now, most people have been vaccinated against TB (not sure if they're vaccinating dairy herds)."
I don't know how it works in the USA, but in Britain and Ireland badgers as reservoir and transmitters of bovine tuberculosis is a vexed question. There has been a government programme of culling badgers in the UK, with the pro-badger lobby vehemently opposed to it and the dairy industry (in the main) for it.
In the US, transmission seems to be from infected animals such as deer, but I don't think cattle and deer come into such contact in the US due to different livestock rearing methods (cattle are pastured more over here, which of course gives more chance to encounter badgers).
this is a good historical refresher. I think the current dieases associated with raw milk are mostly bacterial diseases like e-coli.
>Pasteurization seems like a no-brainer. But, of course, many people don't use their brains optimally. ;-)
See, this is why I asked this, because I had similarly strong priors on this issue previously (considering it a no-brainer), but all the data I've found suggests the actual risk in the modern day (in the US at least) of serious illness from raw milk is *vanishingly* low. I'm forced to take the claims seriously rather than just write them off as a bunch of stupid hippies.
The risk may be vanishingly low — until something like H5N1 comes along and contaminates the milk supply (luckily studies show that the virus only remains active for a few hours in the milk). But domesticated animals are natural human disease reservoirs. Eating undercooked meat, and drinking raw milk for its supposed nutritional benefits (if there are any) is way outside my risk tolerance zone — especially knowing that many new pathogens have entered the human-domestic animal ecosystem in the past decades (COVID, Bird Flu, SARS — even Ebola!).
hm, that's interesting. You think you'd put raw milk in the same general risk tranche as, e.g. a rare steak, or sushi? My prior was that it was more similar to like, raw eggs.
Is tuberculosis still a factor? My mother spent two years in a sanatorium as a teen with a TB infection in one lung. I believe raw milk was thought to have been the source. Not 100% sure of that though. At the time they treated her by sawing off the rib bones on one side her back to collapse the infected lung.
She lived to be 70 before succumbing to emphysema. She likely would have lasted a lot longer if she hadn’t taken up smoking after giving birth to me.
I don't think so, because of vaccines, right? Hospitalization risk from raw milk seems pretty much negligible today -- around 2 in a million chance per year.
The New York Times ran a story yesterday about a nationwide mental health provider that has been falsely imprisoning patients to collect money from their insurers, in some cases taking advantage of a law that allows them to hold patients against their will while waiting for a ruling on their applications to hold patients longer-term (which applications are apparently approved around 1% of the time) and has done so in a manner so blatant that one of their locations was actually raided by the police.
Just thought that might be of interest to those of you whose "BE TOUGH BE TOUGH BE TOUGH BE TOUGH" proposals for mitigating the mentally ill homeless crisis involved ramping up the number of facilities like this one and expanding their ability to detain and confine patients, on the grounds that people in these sorts of institutions in the past did stupid and evil things to patients but that surely no one would ever do this now that we have apps.
I am of course aware of the consensus here that the New York Times is a card-carrying member of The Woke Mob and at least a Bronze-Level Supporting Donor to the Antifa Foundation, but the reporting seems solid.
This is a (miner or major) plot point of Unsane, a 2018 film by Steven Soderbergh.
I add this because I like to have references to movies which make worries I have palpable to people who otherwise might not get that they have real referents.
A Map of the World with Sigourney Weaver is an example for people with authority looking down in contempt to a woman to which they make no effort to understand but believe to understand completely. A terrible situation for such women too.
A tangential point, but as someone who is disgusted by the BE TOUGH proposals and is also disgusted by wokeness, I object to any suggestion of an opposition between them, since:
(1) both groups hate, with unimaginable fury, the existence of people even slightly weird, unorthodox, or who have ever in their lives thought or spoken differently to them in any way.
(2) neither group gives the slightest shit about the homeless: I have read hundreds (maybe thousands) of woke articles and rants online in the last decade, and I don't remember them *ever* mentioning homeless as an "oppressed group". It probably did come up once or twice, but so rarely that it's neglible. Of course, people who identify as five different genders is mentioned every single time, because of course it is. But real people with real problems? Fuck them.
(3) every wokeist will *literally* say that a white mentally ill homeless man is privileged (it's part of the very definition!). You can't make this up! Telling a schizophrenic homeless man he is privileged over Oprah Winfrey is a serious contender for "most offensive sentence you can possibly utter".
(4) much like how banning the box makes racism rational as Scott has discussed, depolicing makes homeless hatred rational since it's the only way to try to stop crime. Enforcing laws against actual crime is racist, so all you can do is round up the kind of people who *might* commit a crime--and as long as some of them are white you're fine. It's not like people have value as individuals!
All that aside, very disturbing story. Thanks for sharing.
Link is pay walled, you might need to quote the most relevant bits.
From what I can glean from other outlets summarizing the NYT, the greatest sin here seems to be spiritually identical to for-profit prisons lobbying *hard* to keep marijuana illegal so as to swell their population of mostly nonviolent, manageable inmates. After all, why complicate your business model with people who will throw hands when you don't really *have* to?
Because it sure seems like Acadia was selectively targeting people who were going to be nice and compliant, rather than choosing to contain the violent, mentally ill homeless types that the vast majority of us would prefer to have not wandering around on the streets. I'm sure if Acacdia had decided on holding the latter - including surrendering some profit in order to devote resources to the latter - most people would shrug about this. Or even applaud them for doing what the government can't seem to manage.
And yeah, having read the rest of the article now, it does indeed appear that Arcadia was patient-shopping the same way for-profit prisons tend to engage in inmate-shopping.
Clearly, the motivation for detaining people is the issue here. Probably for-profit entities should *never* be in charge of certain kinds of utterly critical services.
> Clearly, the motivation for detaining people is the issue here. Probably for-profit entities should *never* be in charge of certain kinds of utterly critical services.
Bingo.
There are things which are best left to the market. Telecommunication (in 2024, but perhaps not in 1870) is one. Producing food or cars is another.
Then there are things which are natural monopolies, where it makes sense to just have a state-run company run it lest you end up with a private monopoly gorging prices. Tap water is one such thing. Here in Germany, it costs next to nothing (unless you are refilling your pool once a week), and I can live with the small amount of money I spend on water subsidizing inefficiencies typical of state-run companies, the costs and risks of having multiple water providers compete on a shared infrastructure just does not seem worth it.
And then there is stuff which is the primary responsibility of the state and should never be delegated to the market. Military, law enforcement, justice system. And incarceration definitely belongs on that list.
I mean, I might see a case of for-profit incarceration if there was actually a functioning market and convicts were free to chose a facility, so the facility would have to compete on quality, just like hotels do. "Hm, this glossy brochure says that they have single-bed cells, a swimming pool, unlimited free phone calls, an extensive library, a qualification program, jobs paying ok, low violence and suicide rates and are rated 4.3 out of five stars by former inmates, I think I will pick them to spend my four years for armed robbery." Might still create bad incentives for the companies regarding lobbying for laws or sabotaging early releases.
The Woke Mob (TM) are increasingly mad at the NYT these days. It's a point in its favour, I suppose. If you report the news, nobody should be happy with what you print. Though I think it's mostly for the same reason that they are mad at the UK Guardian.
The NYT also tends to roll with relatively centrist US politics, though. The Guardian has it easier in this regard as Britain lost its empire some time ago.
Waitwhat? I always thought the Guardian was woke central, with its op-eds of highlighting violence against women (in a world where man-on-man violence is the most common type) and so on.
Going through https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree I see plenty of captions that advocate for woke causes, plenty of platforming of female and minority issues (especially female health), and few things which might qualify as genuinely anti-woke.
Of course, from the dynamics of the movement, a move against the guardian might be expected. You don't get credentials for saying 'that guy with the swastika tattoo is bad' -- your peer group already agrees on that. You get status by going after people slightly less radical than you. "By advocating for academic free speech, that columnist is in fact arguing for keeping professors with racist or sexist views!"
They are not always up to the moment in their definition of the undefinable, that is to say women, and that has aroused quite a bit of anger in certain quarters.
Wait, the definition of woman has changed *again*? The version I am familiar with is "anyone who claims they identify as a woman is a woman, with corner cases like a guy jerking off in a women's communal shower being decided by feuding twitter mobs on a case by case basis", or something.
Yes, certainly, the Times has been rolling with centrism for decades now, and openly flirting with rightism since not long after Trump's inauguration, which is why I find it so amusing that the anti-woke are so constantly mad at/about it.
That's the op-ed section. When the paper is working right, their job is to more-or-less publish things that an informed person would want to have read. Almost always these are things that the newspaper editorial staff does not agree entirely with. But sometimes, when a person states a position well, it's good to share that with the readership, most especially if the person is a prominent politician offering an opinion about a major issue of the day. (And then the newspaper can get an opposing view from someone else, and run them together, so that the readership can see both sides put as well as they can be put.)
Here's a couple of pieces by people who used to be in the NYT op-ed section (including the former editor), both about events centered on that Tom Cotton op-ed from 2020:
Newspaper publishes op-ed by prominent politician (something mainstream newspapers do all the time) and the entire staff immediately revolt and force out the editor for a piece that nobody at the paper even wrote, merely hosted, that called for military action to suppress...violent riots...because enforcing laws against actual street violence is racist actually.
I agree with this sentiment if opposing sides are still moderate. But if both are just batshit loonies (like straight up Marxists vs Alex Jones followers) then it is generally a good sign if they get mad.
I agree, but there may be something to the idea that the real truth will contain uncomfortable facts for one or both sides of every issue.
I'm not sure where that leaves us, other than "if you aren't [at least sometimes] making both sides mad, you aren't doing journalism right." That's got some value - any publication that always makes someone feel good about their existing beliefs is probably wrong.
I read the article. It was very disturbing. As presented it showed a corporation holding people against their will and illegally, seemingly to pad their bottom line. The Times gave the company an opportunity to respond. Their response was not comforting.
If you weren't able to extrapolate from the article the obvious takeaway "Abuse and improper detention of patients in asylums are not only a historical problem, thus those problems probably deserve more than a handwave from advocates of building more asylums and giving those asylums more power in the future" then I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I spelled it out for you this time but I don't want to have to do it every time.
Do they need to be actually proven to have acted in dangerous, actually violent ways? Or does "dangerous" have a vibes-based meaning similar to "unsafe" and "oppressive"?
For some reason, this detail seems to be missing from most of the get tough proposals.
(I'll say this as a separate post, not a reply to the Rings of Power review, as its a bit of a digression)
Given how tabletop RPGs work, they often involve seeing how things look from the perspective of non player characters. The Game Master gets to play all these bit-part characters in the story, and, really, their motives have to make some kind of sense, or the scenario will feel like an idiot plot. But ... what are orcs like, really? At least at the level where you can improv them as characters and have it make some kind of sense.
If we look at Call of Cthulhu rather than dungeons and dragons ... I personally think the ghouls are really scary.
The Great Old Ones like Cthulhu himself are alien monsters who almost cefrtainly dont have human motivations, And are not really seen up close in the scenario, except possibly for a brief moment before all the player characters get killed.
But ghouls ... they were human once. Lovecraft depicts them as possibly sometimes helpful.
If I'm GM, I might play them as *traumatised* rather than simply evil.
The guy who is usually GM for our RPG group tends To play the ghouls a bit like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. I mean, sure, he;s helping the Jody Foster character.
At any rate, there are ways to make them psychologically plausible not-purely-evil characters that more or less respects the Lovecraft stories.
"If I'm GM, I might play them as *traumatised* rather than simply evil."
There is possibly some room for interpretation like that based on text. From "Pickman's Model":
"There was one thing called “The Lesson”—heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen—can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose—you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was shewing what happens to those stolen babes—how they grow up—and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan interior—a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture, with the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one shewed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things. It was their changeling—and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his own."
So a human child stolen away at a young age and brought up as a ghoul might well be described as "traumatised rather than simply evil".
I like playing orcs as aggressive and impulsive. It's fun, you should try it some time! Sure, others might call your actions "murder" or "robbery", but that's just humie wordshit.
I really like the orcs from A Practical Guide to Evil. They used to be a Mongol-esque nomad raider horde with its own culture, then they got conquered and used as expendable berserkers by the evil empire, and then the evil empire went through military reforms and now they're the professional heavy infantry of the Legions of Terror. Because sure, being an orc means you have green skin and big muscles and a carnivorous diet, but beyond that they're shaped by culture and institutions rather than biology.
Then there's the The Order of the Stick take on undead, which is the exact opposite.
> That's what you've never really understood about the undead, Tsukiko. You treat them like they're people when they're nothing but bits of skin and bone and dark energy, glued together by magic into the shape of a man.
> See, the undead are tools. Powerful, dangerous tools. From the lowliest zombie to Xykon himself, the undead are just complex weapons that we make and aim at other people.
Back in my RPG days I treated orcs as nomads, they’re just another kind of person but they also are really good at raiding settlements and their culture, religion, etc has a strong focus on raiding and military strength.
There were also city orcs who had gotten a taste of civilization and were just an ethnic minority in frontier towns.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't know the Tolkien lore that well. But my impression was Tolkien intentionally made the orcs unambiguously evil and the bad guys. Initially, he had the orcs being made from clay/dirt. So they were more like golems put to evil use rather than anything like people with agency. But this would give evil the power of life and creation, which Tolkien found improper, so he changed the orcs to be corrupted elves. They were never meant to be deceived by Sauron, or serving the dark powers for some plausibly moral reason. Orcs were just evil.
Extracts from the selected letters. I think he started out with orcs and goblins (goblins first) as the traditional sort of wicked creatures in fairy and folk tales, and suitable antagonists for the children's book "The Hobbit". As time went on and he developed more serious work, the origin of the Orcs did become a problem to be tackled, though he never seems to have come to a definite conclusion one way or the other (unless there is a final statement in his papers somewhere).
1954 letter
Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be 'corruptions'. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.
Another 1954 letter
Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my pan. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not 'goblins', not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.
Draft of a letter replying to correspondent, 1954
As for other points. I think I agree about the 'creation by evil'. But you are more free with the word 'creation' than I am. Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord 'created' Trolls and Ores. He says he 'made' them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard's statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand. He does not know what 'wizards' are, or whence they came (though I do, even if exercising my subcreator's right I have thought it best in this Tale to leave the question a 'mystery', not without pointers to the solution).
Suffering and experience (and possibly the Ring itself) gave Frodo more insight; and you will read in Ch. I of Book VI the words to Sam. 'The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.' In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the 'gods', let alone of God.
… But if they 'fell', as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things 'for himself, to be their Lord', these would then 'be', even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other 'rational' creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least 'be' real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) But whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible 'delegation', I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would 'tolerate' that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today. There might be other 'makings' all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker's mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre.
1958 comments on proposed film treatment of LOTR:
19. Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.
Draft of 1958 letter
In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may 'go bad' as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds.
1965 letter
[W.H. Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable
Tolkien changed his mind several times about the origins of orcs, as all of them had flaws. Melkor or Sauron couldn't have created them, since evil can only mock, not make. They couldn't be corrupted elves, since elves are bound to Arda and cannot leave.
He never came up with a satisfying origin without conflicts. But does he need one? Orcs ARE clearly evil, as one can tell from the dwarves' capture in The Hobbit, and Shagrat's conversation with Gorbag in The Two Towers. They DO have personality.
I think a more positive view of orcs originally came from the Warcraft videogames. Since you could play both sides, they had to make the orcs more likeable. Originally they were kinda cutely stupid, but by Warcraft 3 it evolved into that noble savage nomadic stuff.
Warcraft in turn owes a lot to Warhammer, where Orcs are essentially a parody of 1980s British football hooligans. Their attitude to war is that they enjoy it, and don't understand that the other side usually enjoy it as much as they do.
They're also fungi that reproduce through spores (though this originated in 40k and later was retconned 'back' into Fantasy).
> But ... what are orcs like, really? At least at the level where you can improv them as characters and have it make some kind of sense.
I would see a typical orc as being equivalent to the worst humans -- just common street-level thugs that you're going to find regularly cycling in and out of prison. Amoral, selfish, brutish, dumb and easily driven to rage. Not driven to evil because they think evil is good, just doing evil because it suits their current short-term desires.
Also, deeply envious of the other races who have nicer stuff, without realising that having stuff comes from virtues like being patient and cooperating and not breaking stuff as soon as you get it. As such, pretty easily led by any evil wizard who wants to come along and tell them to rise up against their neighbours who are hogging all the good stuff.
This is interesting to me, because a lot of what you describe as "doing evil because it suits their current short-term desires" is close to my definition of what evil even *is*. I don't think killing another person is inherently evil, but doing so for amoral selfish desire certainly is. Similarly with theft (Robin Hood was the good guy), assault (ditto, or police apprehending someone), or most other crimes.
By my definition, even helping someone could be evil if it was done from amoral selfish reasons (and I think most people would agree if it turns out the person was trying to scam the person they helped, or coerce them into sex, or whatever other negative thing for their own gain).
> This is interesting to me, because a lot of what you describe as "doing evil because it suits their current short-term desires" is close to my definition of what evil even is.
Well, sure. Realistic, everyday evil, as opposed to the "evil is good" lunacy you sometimes see in fiction.
Should I be clutching my pearls (had I any pearls to clutch) right now? Are you implying others have hinted that persons with Melvin's views are nodding towards stereotypes of persons of abundant melanin?
Next you'll be telling me that the Gringotts goblins are Jewish caricatures, there's a Star of David on the floor and everything!
As others have said elsewhere, if your first reaction on hearing a description of a fantasy race is to go "zomg those are Jews/black people! Racism! Anti-Semitism!" then maybe it's a you problem.
When did I say anything about melanin? People say this shit about every ethnic minority, regardless of skin tone. But I'm glad we're all on the same page, and we can all stop with this stupid game of "you're the real racist".
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but if you're doing the "hey, this evil stereotype sounds a whole lot like a real race of people" thing then that's on you, not me.
A few weeks ago, I asked for suggestions and comments on a study I'm planning on doing on monarchy and the rise of fascism in interwar Europe. I got several good suggestions, and I'm ready to preregister my near-final methodology. Original comment:
I decided to go with @gdanning's suggestion of using an established dataset (I chose V-Dem), which relieves me of most of the burden (and potential bias) of manually coding variables. I'll also be using a Predictive Power analysis instead of a simple linear regression, also suggested by gdanning.
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Goal: test the hypothesis that constitutional monarchy is useful as a stabilizing factor against political extremism, using the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian governments in the interwar period. Also examine alternate hypotheses: parliamentary vs presidential government, dual vs multiparty systems, simple wealth, losing WW1, or previous history of institutional instability.
Inclusion criteria:
1. Substantial domestic autonomy (v2svdomaut_osp >= 1.0) averaged across all years in study period.
2. Substantial institutional autonomy, i.e. internal political factors have a substantial effect on the . Exclude if in any year between the start and end date inclusive, two or more of the following are true:
a) Most powerful group affecting regime duration and change is a foreign power (v2regpower == 13),
b) Head of Government is controlled by a foreign power: i. Is Head of State, and is appointed by foreign power (v2hoshog == 1 && v2expathhs == 1), ii. Appointed directly (v2expathhg == 1), or iii) Is removable by Head of State, and HoS is appointed by foreign power (v2expathhs == 1 && v2expathhg == 1)
c) Regime’s domestic political support is “Very Small” or “Extremely Small” (v2regsupgroupssize <= 2)
These criteria are tuned to include the British Dominions, exclude most other colonies with less control over their own governments, include Vichy France, and exclude directly-imposed Axis puppet/occupation governments.
Start point is 1921, the year after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. This is a compromise between:
1. Setting the date late enough for dust to settle after WW1, as immediate aftershock conflicts continued until 1921 (Polish-Soviet War), 1922 (Russian Civil War), and 1923 (Turkish War of Independence).
2. Setting the date early enough so Mussolini’s March On Rome (1922) falls within the study period. Excluding Italian Fascism from a study on factors affecting the rise of Fascism would be a problematic omission.
Input variables (1921):
1. Electoral Democracy Index (v2x_polyarchy)
2. Liberal Democracy Index (v2x_libdem)
3. Monarchy dummy variable, true if one of the following:
a. v2expathhs == 3 (HOS chosen by royal council) or 4 (hereditary HOS)
b. v2expathhs == 1 (HOS appointed by foreign power) and mother country is monarchy
4. Years since last “disruptive” constitutional change, i.e. last time v2regendtype for a regime ending in or before 1921 (indicated by v2regdur) was something other than 4 (natural death of sitting leader) or 9-10 (intentional change directed by sitting leaders)
5. Years since last civil war or major coup attempt (derived from e_pt_coup_attempts, e_civil_war, and e_miinterc)
6. Alignment in WW1, manually coded based on status in the Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Trianon, Sevrés, and Brest-Litovsk. Countries signing one or more treaties on the Entente side are coded as Entente, and on the CP side are coded as Central Powers.
a. “British Empire” = participants in the Imperial War Cabinet (UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Newfoundland).
b. The Hejaz is not the same thing as Saudi Arabia or the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, as the latter two are institutionally continuous with Nejd and incorporated the former via conquest.
c. All others coded as neutral, including colonies and protectorates not otherwise accounted for, even if their mother nation is a belligerent.
7. Percent of legislature held by 3rd parties (calculated from v3ellost* in the most recent election year in the same regime).
8. Parliamentary HoG, average of two figures if present, normalized to a uniform 0-1 scale. If both absent, 0 (indicates HoS is HoG)
a. Chosen by legislature (v2exaphogp) on 0-1 scale
b. Removable by legislature (v2exremhog_osp) on 0-4 scale
9. GDP per capita (e_gdppc)
Output variables (analyzed separately in 1938 and 1942)
1. Electoral democracy index (v2x_polyarchy)
2. Liberal democracy index (v2x_libdem)
4. Dummy variable: regime has changed since start date AND decline in v2x_polyarchy or v2x_libdem
I don’t fully understand your inputs there. There’s a lot of initials and acronyms. From what I do understand though you seem to be adding too many variables. For instance 4 - years since the last constitutional change has to exclude constitutional monarchies.
(Actually there’s two 4s, so the second one). And does alignment in WWI matter? I suppose this is what you are trying to find out.
> From what I do understand though you seem to be adding too many variables.
I'm worried about that, too. My hope is that the analysis technique I'm planning on using will help me prune irrelevant or redundant ones; as I understand it, the idea of the Predictive Power approach is to remove one factor at a time to see how much (if at all) the inclusion of that factor improves the correlation of the regression analysis. What I'm hoping and expecting to see is that some of the factors are irrelevant or redundant and can be dropped from the final model.
>years since the last constitutional change has to exclude constitutional monarchies.
I'm pulling this from "regime information" data serieses, which tracks significant shifts in institutional order. This can be stuff like shifting to a completely different form of government (e.g. the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic, and the later transition to Nazi Germany), or major reform within the same form of government (the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments in the US, the passage of the House of Lords reform bill in the UK, etc). For input variable #4, I'm planning on filtering on types of regime change to exclude orderly changes within the same form of government, so an orderly process of institutions reforming themselves isn't counted, but something like the German Revolution of 1918 or the establishment of the Third French Republic in 1870 is counted. For output variable #4 (should be 3, typo as I lost formatting copy-pasting it from a google doc), no filtering on the nature of the change but I will be excluding changes that are positive or neutral in terms of how liberal and how democratic the regime is.
The reason for the different treatment of regime changes on input and output is that the input is a proxy for past stability of the country's institutions, to test the hypothesis that newer institutional regimes are more fragile, while the output is an attempt to objectively detect regime change in an authoritarian direction.
After talking through that, I think I've mostly convinced myself (and you've convinced me) to drop inputs 4 and 5. Anything that is that hard to explain and justify is suspect when I'm already severely at risk for overfitting. Also, I'm not too impressed with the quality of the dataset for 5, as it doesn't capture stuff like Boulanger crisis in France (since he chickened out just short of a formal coup attempt), but does capture stuff like Native American Wars in the US (which do represent significant internal violence but doesn't really indicate institutional instability).
>And does alignment in WWI matter? I suppose this is what you are trying to find out.
Yes, it is. "Losing WWI leads to fascism" is a popular trope among alternate history writers and other armchair historians.
Tl;DR Can someone on the right make the case for JD Vance?
I always heard that Vance was a Theil dark money vunderkind smart boy from the rightists on this typah site; and just kinda accepted it.
Eg, I assumed I would disagree with him on priors and morality but he would be some flavor of competent technocrat, and never looked into it further because who cares.
Now that he is being pushed in my face all the time, it seems clear that the dude is kinda dumb? A little room temperature in the IQ department? Like, he says dumb shit in dumb ways, he can't react to unexpected situations with any kind of grace, and he seems to have even less charisma than my autistic ass. I honestly think if you deleted the part of my brain that felt empathy I could do better as a rightist infiltrator into the trump personality cult/neocon establishment than this dude.
Did he have everybody fooled up till now? Is he better when he doesn't have to be all extemporal all the time?
Can someone give me a link or a low effort strong man on what this dude is good for, cause I just can't see it.
Vance wrote a good, thoughtful, book. On the other hand, I listened to a talk he gave as VP candidate and it was terrible. He not only lied, he did it with no charisma and nothing to make the talk fun to listen to. Trump lies too, but at least he is good at it.
It is by design so he can be more easily controlled.
Maybe a more simpler explanation is that Silicon Valley right wingers have the political instincts of a cardboard box. They thought RFK would pull away voters from the left, and that also spectacularly backfired.
The fact that the Democrats are highly motivated to dig up any and all dirt they can find on him, but that so far the best they've been able to come up with is that he's "weird", is evidence in favour of his moral probity.
Personally, I lean towards "A pox on both their houses!" re the Democrats and the GOP, but I must say that having the party of the drag queen story hour complaining about anyone else on the grounds that they are "weird" is, ahem, counterintuitive.
I'm neither for nor against Vance, I think the most (or worst) that can be said for him is that he's Just Some Guy, You Know? He did make it out of an unstable family background to be moderately successful so good for him. Also, seemingly he has converted to Catholicism, so, um, welcome aboard, fellow co-religionist JD!
Though with the Democrats apparently thinking the way to win votes is go "Ugh, those guys are so *weird*", they're driving me to defend him (the same way as I ended up defending Trump). I've been weird all my life, remain weird, and was lucky that I wasn't bullied in school. But now the Party of Niceness and the Right Side of History (if you're the Right Kind of Minority) is stooping to that kind of school bullying. It's not big, it's not clever, and it alienates people like me, because now it looks like the mask is off.
If I had a vote in an American election, they've certainly lost it now with this stunt.
If you don't like school bully's the Republicans are still far far worse though. At least the Dems have a much wider range of weirdo's they have deemed as normal.
Are you actually watching the videos that people are pulling these quotes from? I watched one recently and it’s really wild how completely people will change the meaning of a statement, even when they post a one minute clip that anyone can see for themselves that it’s inaccurate. What’s crazier is that few people even point this out, even among those who are defending Vance. They just know that they can say whatever they want and no one is actually going to watch the video to verify.
Yes, it actually made it worse that he would set his feet, wind up, and say something so completely stupidly on purpose.
Like, he could formulate it in such a way that I would still dislike the concept but respect that it was the product of a consistent ideology, but he makes it clear that this is not the case when you have the context.
> Can someone on the right make the case for JD Vance?
He's seems credibly right wing pro-worker; if you were a proud hillbilly called deplorable by Hilary, your facing a world with leftwings claiming to be pro "little poeple" that are ovisous lies or mass importing immigrants while unwilling to take them in thier gate communitys; trumps named a successor and I find him roughly as good as trump with what I know about him rn.
I dont know that much tho; I want to know his plans for the tech market (he's anti silcone valley, Im anti silcone valley; but I really really want to be an employed small company programmer)
I *like* trump being mean on twitter and his gold plated toilets but I never thought the "small loan from my father" real esstate tv star was actaully capable of being pro-worker.
It's funny how "Hilary deplores hilbillies" has become a fact. She only every defined deploreables as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic".
This defence is Isolated Demand for Rigour to the absolute extreme, since the Democrats have enthusiastically called everything from "welfare queens" to "gang violence" to "New York values" coded dog whistles for hating various groups, deconstructing all the ways the precise wording conjures certain sterotypes associated with that group and utterly dismissing the definitions given by the person using the phrase (e.g..Ted Cruz explicitly defining New York values as meaning pro-gay, pro-abortion, pro-secular etc) as irrelevant (since all that matters is what some bigots might hear). For those same people to then not notice that "deplorable" fits every sterotype of dirty uneducated rural whites so well as to be almost the perfect example of a dog whistle, and to suddenly decide that actually whatever she said she meant *should* be taken at face value...forget the insult, the hypocrisy *alone* was enough to rightly cost her the election.
Seeing as how she made the original remark at a dinner for wealthy gay donors, to laughter and applause, it's reasonable to assume she was not directing it at urban, middle-class, professional types, yes?
"At an LGBT campaign fundraising event in New York City on September 9, Clinton gave a speech and said the following:
I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, "Well, he's done this time." We are living in a volatile political environment.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
— Hillary Clinton, CBS News"
Maybe not all hillbillies, just the hillbillies who didn't manage to make it to gala dinners in New York to donate $$$$$$ to Democrat political campaigns, then.
It sounds oddly like Trump's "fine people" speech. In context, taking their words at face value, it's clear they're restricting their comments to a subset. But a lot of people on the other side, and I'd argue even some people on their *own* side, ignore the restriction. They hear what they want to hear, or assume the restriction was bullshit designed to let the speaker say what they*really* meant, or simply interpret the restriction as practically non-existent. (After all, isn't there plenty of other rhetoric from the left suggesting that anyone who votes for Trump is inherently racist, or sexist, etc.?)
Clinton was claiming that substet was half of Trump's supporters. So if you are a more than median Trump supporter it's reasonable to believe she is talking about you.
The problem is in interpreting the position of Trump and his supporters as being sexist, racist, and homophobic when instead that was a lie or an ideological Turing test failure. You can argue nativism is adjacent to xenophobia, I suppose.
Are you saying that prejudice didn’t play a major role in Trump’s support?
In 2019, Bob Altemeyer and John Dean commissioned a survey while writing their book <em>Authoritarian Nightmare</em>. The correlation between prejudice and approval of Trump was 0.812. Squaring 0.812 gives 66%, so approximately 2/3rds of Trump’s support can be explained by prejudice.
Other explanations of support for Trump must either (1) explain no more than 1/3 of his support, or (2) be correlated with prejudice. For example, the RWA scale, a measure of the tendency to follow authoritarian leaders, is as you might expect a pretty good indicator of support for Trump (correlation 0.755). But that’s possible only because the RWA and prejudice scales are themselves highly correlated. If they weren’t, it would be mathematically impossible for them to both correlate so highly with support for Trump.
"so approximately 2/3rds of Trump’s support can be explained by prejudice."
Maybe I'm not statistically literate enough to see this, but if Romney got 47.2% of the vote and Trump got 46.1%, then doesn't that mean your 2/3rds explanation is either false, or applies almost as much to Romney? If the latter, then you're not saying anything at all interesting about Trump, just making a general claim about Republicans.
Unless you're suggesting that Trump and Romney drew completely different pools of votes, which I'm pretty sure is easily refuted by state and county results.
I’m certainly not claiming to have identified anything specific to Trump, as opposed to Republicans in general. There is obviously a lot of overlap between Republicans and Trump supporters; otherwise Trump wouldn’t have won the last three Republican primaries.
On the other hand, I don’t have data that would let me generalize beyond Trump. The prejudice scale on the 2019 survey had a correlation of 0.812 with support for Trump, and a slightly lower correlation of 0.775 with identification as a Republican. It’s entirely possible that the small group of Republicans who don’t support Trump are no more prejudiced than the average Democrat.
As far as I know, nobody tried to measure the prejudice of Romney supporters, or for that matter of Republicans in 2012, when Romney ran for President. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of support for Republicans has been driven by prejudice all the way back to 1965, when Lindon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but I don’t think the evidence clearly establishes that.
I lived in a Republican +60% county during the 2016 election. I'll take the information i gained by actually knowing and speaking with scores of Trump voters over some correlation in a pdf file (I was very anti-Trump at the time of that election). Also, arguing about the meaning of words is boring, but prejudice is not the same thing as racism.
If your interactions with Trump supporters in a single county didn't match the results of a national survey, one obvious possibility is that your county was atypical.
I know that prejudice is not the same thing as racism. Hillary Clinton used the phrase, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” I understood Clinton to be referring to prejudice (by giving a bunch of examples of it). When you wrote “sexist, racist, and homophobic” above, I assumed you meant the same thing and just didn’t bother to repeat the entire list. So your statement that prejudice is not the same as racism is obviously true, but also a non sequitur.
"half of trump supporters are deplorables *cheers*" only 1/4th of the country are several no no words; forgive me for believing her and her supporters on this quote
Does any of that matter at all? He's a vice president. His purpose is to improve electability. He is white, moderately attractive, and says the right things. What more could you ask for?
Someone who could effectively serve as President if called on to do so, which seems particularly important if we're going to be electing a President who by the end of his term will be older than Joe Biden is now.
And really, it would also help if he were someone who could plausibly at least level up to Presidential standards with a few years as an understudy, because the GOP is going to need a new candidate in four years and if there isn't another clear choice, "most recent Veep" seems to be the default. Note the problems the Democratic party is having on account of choosing a VP candidate solely on "enhances the actual candidate's electability" grounds and now having to run her as a Presidential candidate in her own right.
Is the "crazy cat ladies" stuff really the right thing to improve electability? If you just want a pretty face who says the right things I feel like you could find one with less baggage.
I have a crazy cat lady (using that in a gender-neutral sense) in my family and yes, they are on the progressive side in every issue. Don't know what JD said, exactly, but since I have no cats, don't want any cats, and will never have cats, regardless of being single, female, old, and crazy myself, I'm not offended :-)
My impression is that he's too new of a politician, and had crafted an image to get elected by half the voters in his state, and wasn't prepared to go national yet. Contrasted to someone like Obama, who was clearly playing to the national stage from the start.
There's some graph going around as a meme, that IIRC shows Rs being at ~51-55% among married men, married women, and single men, but being at ~33% among single women.
I've been assuming that it's technically accurate but probably too crude to use in understanding what's actually going on. But I haven't dug into it. I gather that there are a bunch of very-online people on the right who react to it as though the numbers were 100% and 0%, and make sweeping generalizations to that effect. (Not unusual on either side, alas. I think psychologists call it "splitting"?)
In another era, the type of woman to be single and childless would have become a nun. I wonder if there is any study on the politics of nuns back when there were still many around. Half the components of the single childless female white ethnic religious Catholic teacher demographic votes for Republicans and the other half for Democrats.
Childless easily-offended hyper-feminists women are all are all going democrats, cause they are single issue voters for unrestricted post-birth abortions apperently.
Whats your theory here, its never ok to insult a demographic while running for office? Ring wing candidates need to appeal to blue state sensibilities on natalism being a debate? Or is it the idea of "women can have faults" is no longer moderate?
First pass the post voting devolves to ingroup-outgroup slicing up of culture; and trump will *never* be forgiven for.... being 2 steps removed from abortion being slightly weakened and being extremely moderate on the subject, better insult the feminist block and draw attention to when they seem unreasonable.
I'm not an expert, but it seems like there's a consensus that Vance was a poor choice in those terms. And it's not like Trump had a shortage of possible choices either.
Honestly though, I doubt this is going to matter much for the election results. Trump doesn't need to win the popular vote to win, or even the electoral college depending on how things play out. What matters is the loyalty and fervor of his supporters, to ensure that things work out regardless of the results. And JD Vance does seem to be doing a good job fanning the flames.
I agree about the suspicious "consensus": as soon as he was chosen everyone in the media seemed to be talking about how he's an awful choice, but as a Republican myself I'm quite happy with him and don't see what the problem is.
the consensus is among people that hate Trump (and Republicans) though, so take it with a grain of salt. Over on DSL there is also a `consensus' that Harris is a terrible candidate, and you should treat that analogously.
There was a consensus that Harris was a terrible candidate among Democrats too until July 24.
Remember how everyone wanted to parachute Gavin Newsom in rather than risk going with Kamala who was an obvious ditz that wouldn't shut up about Venn diagrams?
I've yet to hear the fabled Kamala laugh, which I read is like that of a cackling witch stirring some potent brew in a large pot. She must have had a discrete tattoo done on the back of her hand as a reminder: "Gentle tinkling laugh. No hyena noises!"
I think it was a few days earlier, maybe even by the evening of Sunday the 21st? That's when Biden dropped out and anointed Harris as his successor. From my perspective, the sequence went:
Sunday (21st) early morning - Sunday NYT goes to print
Sunday (21st) morning - Biden drops out
Wednesday (24th) morning - Sunday NYT is delivered
By that time, I was already sick of the lockstep fawning, and I woke up to see a newspaper delivered from out of a time warp, as if I were traveling at a near-c velocity. Biden was still running, people were worried about him staying in or dropping out, no one could agree on who the best successor should be, and Kamala was just one name among many, the natural next choice except for all the negative qualities that made people wonder about other potential candidates.
Actually people inside the Trump campaign expressed regrets after Biden dropped out. They expected to win easily and Vance was picked because they thought he would help run up the numbers down ballot.
When the race became close some insiders regretted not picking someone a little less “Trumpy” to soften the ticket’s appeal to voters ambivalent to the whole Trump show.
How does Vance help run up the numbers down ballot if he's a bad VP pick in a competitive election? Genuinely curious, as I agree that Vance was not picked to help Trump win but instead with other objectives in mind (possibly a successor?).
I can’t help with what the exact thinking was here. It was something I read in Political citing campaign ‘sources willing to speak on condition of anonymity.’
My best guess was that they felt the election was a lock with a Trump vs Biden match up and Trump + more Trump might provide rideable coattails.
The successor thing wasn’t mentioned in the article but it could well have been part of the reason for the choice also.
Harris has done better than I expected. On the other hand, she has not said anything to suggest that she has an idea in her head, and there are still a couple of months to go before the election. If Trump is wise [SPOILER: LOL] he will / would have taken a little break and come back saying that Silly (Harris) Season is over.
He doesn't have the skills to be a politician at the national level; in fact, very few politicians do, very few people do. The skills required have little to do with intelligence, it's mostly about acting skills, and many great actors aren't very smart.
But it is weird how not having good acting skills makes someone look dumb and vice versa.
I've actually found it interesting how many actors actually ARE smart, such as Meryl Streep, Emma Watson, Matt Damon, etc. (https://www.businessinsider.com/smart-celebrities-2016-8). I went to this site with a quick search, but my impression is a lot of actors actually have some brains.
"I honestly think if you deleted the part of my brain that felt empathy I could do better as a rightist infiltrator into the trump personality cult/neocon establishment than this dude."
This reminds me of academics who casually claim they could be making big bucks in the private sector but aren't due to their Love of Science.
Yeah, seconding "dionysus." If you're a physics or math Phd you can pretty easily work in finance or at one of the FAANGS, and STEM phd's in general make 2-3x in industry.
Why would this be a laughable claim at all? It seems obviously true on the face of things if you look up comp on any site or know the industry or know people working in industry.
Physicists are a special case, very different from the typical academic. Yes, people in the private sector make more, but it's not like your typical academic, even in STEM, can just walk into a 500,000 a year FAANG job. They'd be more likely to be doing web design for Kaiser Permanente. Upper-middle-class but not rich.
Any physicist could walk the typical FAANG job, although perhaps not the interview. That’s because the typical FAANG interview assumes a graduate degree in computer science when solving puzzles - which would mean a lot of study. Computer science was a discipline created by scientists from other fields. And mathematicians.
The academics are totally right. I know many, many physicists who went into industry because they didn't do well in graduate school. All of them are making much more than their classmates who stayed in academia. It's reasonable to assume that the people who did well in grad school would earn even more money in industry, should they choose that route, than those who did poorly. I also know people who went into the private sector and made big bucks before going to grad school. It stands to reason that they could go back into industry and start making big bucks again.
He lacks personal charisma but he's the clearest advocate I've seen so far for some kind of intellectual economic Trumpism.
An economic policy for the Republican Party that goes beyond the Romney-style "What's good for Big Business is good for the country" is needed, especially now that Big Business no longer supports Republicans anyway. JD Vance is willing to come out and say that it's Not Socialism to tweak things a little to ensure that the American labour classes can still have a decent life in the face of competition with the unwashed masses of the Third World who are willing to work for a dollar a day. That the ultra-rich should be willing (if only for aesthetic rather than moral reasons) to make some sacrifices -- not directly through tax-and-welfare but indirectly through protectionism -- to ensure that working class Americans can be respectable upstanding citizens with jobs rather than obese welfare cases.
I think Trump believes all this on some level but can't quite articulate it; Vance can and does articulate it.
That assumes that Vance doesn't understand the relevant economics, believes that tariffs protect American workers against the competition of foreign workers who are paid less. Thiel surely understands it, Vance talks to Theil, so my guess is that Vance is pretending to believe the popular view of trade economics and not the actual economics. But I could be wrong — the fact that he wrote a good book doesn't guarantee that he understands economics.
I was anti-Trump in 2016, but was pro-Trump by 2020. As I have said countless times, he wasn't nearly as bad as I thought he would be, and actually did some good things, and a few bad ones.
One thing I predicted, given his history of bankruptcies, was he would run up the deficit so that when we changed currencies we would get more benefit from it. But I admit the deficit didn't rise as much as I had thought.
"When we changed currencies, we would get more benefit from it?"
I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by "change currencies", but I have a hard time coming up with a scenario where that isn't just absolutely, catastrophically bad. And you seem to be saying that creating a situation where the default is *also* catastrophically bad, makes the alternative a "benefit".
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant basically that, if you're going to go bankrupt, you may as well run up as much debt as you can before you do, to get the most benefit from the bankruptcy. To be sure, the actual reality would have been awful. I expected Trump to basically say something like, "sure, but the world will get over it, and in 10 years, who will care?"
Also to be clear, I'm not supporting Trump saying he was a great president and will be greater still. I'm appalled that the only candidates for president that have any real chance of winning are Trump and Harris, but given what I believe is best for the country, my choice is Trump, as I'm definitely anti-socialist.
When you vote for a president you vote for his cabinet. And because Trump didn't really expect to win he didn't really have a lineup of people from his movement prepared who actually had a vague clue how government worked. So he went with more conventional picks.
The problem is that now the Trumpists in the Republican party have actually been preparing and will do so much more damage if he gets back into power. This time around his cabinet will not be made out of moderate Republicans.
As I recall, Trump fired most of the "moderate, conventional picks" fairly early on, and replaced them with mostly incompetent Trump loyalists. Because Trump values personal loyalty *far* more than he does competence, and he lacks the experience to even identify the relevant forms of competence. So the last 2-3 years of the Trump administration, is what you get when Trump hires the sort of people he really wants in his cabinet.
If we get a second Trump administration, and Trump chooses his own cabinet, I'd expect more of the same. If someone else in the Republican party picks a cabinet for him, they probably won't be sufficiently loyal to Donald J. Trump The Man, and Trump will probably fire them like he did last time. In which case, again, expect more of the same.
The idea of Trump embedded in a cabal of competent Machiavellian political operators who will use the power of the presidency to pursue their common goals, I think betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Donald Trump. He doesn't do "common goals".
This is only half true. The important positions like DOJ were still filled by old school Republicans like William Barr. Who was not exactly blindly loyal to Trump (pretty crucial as DOJ is pretty important).
He had not completely taken over the party like he has now. A second run will mean a large amount of crazies will be appointed. And I mean proper crazies like Marjorie Taylor Green, not opportunistic semi old school Republicans.
“He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”
To present day Trump attack dog.
I have to wonder about his character in taking the position but completely understand that he has to play a losing hand every day spinning the actions a depraved man into something, I dunno, not terrible?
I hold off on dismissing him out oh hand because he was friends with Ross Douthat before he got into politics and while Ross is skeptical about Vance’s conversion, he still seems to respect J D.
Is there some meta ethical goal in supporting Trump that overrides the apparent ethical vacuum, the transparent moral defectiveness, the outright scumbaggery that is Trump? I sure can’t see it. The guy has nothing like a fixed set of moral convictions. He just makes up shit that he thinks will put him back in the White House as he goes along. “I overturned Roe.”; “I’ll be the best president for women’s rights”; “In vitro treatments for fertility will be free.” WTF?
Okay he does consistently says he hates the radical left wing communist fascists in the Democratic Party. But he also hate Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. You know the Republicans who point out how flipping flawed the ridiculous dork actually is.
Douthat says he is praying for his old friend Vance and the country. This I do not doubt.
I don't think having been initially opposed to Trump is a big barrier, since practically everybody who supports Trump has a "at first I thought he was a clown but eventually he won me over" story.
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mitch McConnell - March 6, 2024:
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
It's pretty obvious (to me at least) that Vance was positioning himself for politics with the publication of his book, and his politics were very similar to Trump but he, like everyone else, thought that Clinton would win. So he was making nice with who he saw as the winning side to start his campaign.
> he, like everyone else, thought that Clinton would win. So he was making nice with who he saw as the winning side
That sounds disturbingly plausible. Given that we know he is capable of being insincere, why are we assuming that his first position was any more sincere than his second?
I think it l likely these are what he genuinely believes, but notice that my original comment said nothing about sincerity, just positioning and politics.
Why are women more attracted to new age religious practices? Is that even true globally?
Bonus question - what is the correlation bethween irreligion (specifically lack of traditional organized religion) and new age practices? Are people in less traditionally religious countries (countries like Finland, Estonia, Czech republic, China) more likely to be attracted to new age than traditionally religous countries (Poland, Colombia, Arab countries, ... )? Less?
At a guess, just chance. There are men who are also into new age religious stuff, but they call themselves neo-pagans instead. We have some female-coded new agey stuff, and some male-coded new agey stuff, and some gender-neutral new agey stuff (anecdotally, spiritual woo derived from indigenous cultures in Canada seems pretty gender-neutral).
Do you have data to support your claim that women are more attracted to New-Age religious practices? I found a Pew Research report that says generally women are more religious than men. ChatGPT says there's also a Pew Research report that shows women are more likely to call themselves "spiritual" but not religious — I can't find that one, though. ChatGPT also says there's European Values Study that "indicates that women in Europe are more likely to engage in holistic and alternative spiritual practices, such as meditation, astrology, or healing practices., etc." But again, I can't find the data (if it's been compiled) in any report up on their https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/ website.
From an evolutionary psychology point of view, I think women left their tribes to form families in other tribes (gene mixing and all that), while men generally stuck to the tribe they were born into. So for an early human woman, being unable to adapt to new spiritual practices might have sharply limited her reproductive success.
Of course, one should probably not take these arguments too serious. I would be surprised if we had solid evidence of the mating patterns of early hominids. If one deduces what the ancestral environment must have been like given that the traits we have were likely advantageous there, and then uses that hypothetical environment to explain why our traits were advantageous, that would be circular logic.
At a risk of sounding too dismissive this sounds a bit like a just so story. It is not too hard to make up these hypotheses in evo psychology ... much harder to verify them.
Some counterarguments: All of the prophets of major religions were men, all 12 apostles were men and so on. Women also tend to be more conforming which supports your specific scenario where a woman moves to a different tribe and adopts their (not just religious) practices. But unless you are a woman who moves to a hippie commune there are no new age "tribes" today. In fact if it is true that women are more likely to be interested in this stuff, that is the opposite of adaptation.
There’s a strong negative correlation between belief in religion and the other new age and woo practices. People want to be spiritual but not religious. Whatever that means. I’ve been too afraid to ask.
I heard a while ago that the most non-religious country in Europe (at the time Sweden, not sure where it falls now) had a population where 80% believed in ghosts/spirits. I haven't looked at those numbers in a long time.
Paths to power. I have a neighbor, mid-70s lady, all the astrology stuff on board. She uses astrology to classify people "oh, just like a Libra woman" are things she'll say. Or to imagine there's magical power in her crystals, gives her powers others don't have.
"But I didn't and still don't like making a cult of women's knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don't know, women's deep irrational wisdom, women's instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women's knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter, What Women Know
They don't have the power of superior strength over men, they have to choose another path.
Like look at Chimpanzee politics. You can have one strong alpha male who beats everyone up, that's his path to power. But his reign is typically short lived. Other chimpanzees form coalitions to take down the bully, and have longer friendlier reigns.
What makes a person special? —being strong, being smart, building coalitions ... having none of these, perhaps they have magical powers useable.
So you suggest that new age is a female equivalent of hooligans? :-)) Not sure how valid a hypothesis that is but it sure is fun! Your argument would also suggest that less successful women are more likely to be interested in new age stuff ... and less successful and physically weak men also. Is that true? I think that the men who are interested in new age tend to be less overtly masculine (but that was not always the case, astrologers used to be employed by kings). But that just means that men who are perhaps "more similar to women" are umm ... more similar to women also in their approach to new age. And it doesn't necessarily mean they are physically weak or small or whatever, it is more about their attitude (all based on anecdotal observations).
As for chimps (and perhaps slightly off topic) - the alpha male in a chimp pack is actually quite dependent on the females. I remember reading Chimpanzee Politics (from Frans de Waal) and the situation where the older and physically weaker chimp manages to keep his position and re-assert it and take it back from a younger and stronger chimp mostly because he was shrewd and savvy and understood that with the females on his side (and the alpha female who then played the role of a king maker) he can win. I don't remember how the power dynamics worked between the females themselves but there was definitely an alpha female. In any case, there was a path for a female to rise in the pack hierarchy also.
I respect Le Guin. She was a great writer, and I will pay attention to her takes. But outside the Taliban (perhaps not even among those) does anyone truly ignore the thoughts of those who - as even Mao observed - hold up a full half of the sky?
There is a wide spectrum between completely ignoring and fully appreciating. I feel we're in the middle of this spectrum somewhere. Women aren't entirely ignored but there is a default gender discount applied. There is a reason J.K. Rowling went with initials rather than first name.
The Sora announcement was obviously a tech demo aimed at potential partners in the film industry. Not the kind of thing you can let millions of users run for free.
Very, *very* condensed ranting about the second and third episodes, I'm just skimming here, there is an embarrassment of riches (heavy on the "embarrassment") to choose from.
(1) ORC LIVES MATTER, or, "let's take George R.R. Martin's flippant remark about Orc genocide and what about the baby Orcs in their little Orc cradles seriously".
Not content with ripping off as much of the LOTR movies scenes and dialogue as they can, they're now, ahem, doing homages to Ralph Bakshi's 70s movie, to wit: "Where There's A Whip, There's A Way".
They don't want to go to war today, you see. And again I swear I am not making any of this up, we get a scene between Adar and an Orc husband and father who just wants to stay at home with his wife and kid and not go to war with Sauron. Cut to wife and kid. Yes, we get a glimpse of a loving Orc family with dad, mom, and baby.
You don't believe me? Well feast your lyin' eyes on this:
I now understand why Joseph Mawle quit the show: he saw the second season scripts.
(2) Cirdan! We get canon Cirdan with a beard in episode two. But just when you might be thinking "Well okay, they're hewing closer to canon this time round", oh no. We can't have nice things. So in episode three Cirdan shaves off his beard. We get the shaving scene and all. What is this rampant anti-beard agenda? Were the showrunners frightened by Santa Claus when they were wee Orclings?
(3) The gosh.durn. I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf and the Harfoots in Rhun. Kill them, kill me, kill someone for the love of Manwe. Guess who's back, back again? Shady's back, tell a friend! Yes, to the surprise of absolutely nobody watching this, Lady Eminem gets resurrected by a Dark Wizard, that guy who looks kinda like Saruman. He shouldn't *be* Saruman, but are we really going to risk it that this show doesn't think this would be a whopper surprise if it turned out to be Saruman? Maybe they're trying to fool us that this is Saruman so they can then pull a twist on us "Ha, ha, you thought it was Saruman but it's a completely different wizard to the five we know of in canon!" Oh please let that be so. I couldn't bear it if it really was Saruman.
Also, they are still bloody well dropping hints about "is the Stranger Gandalf?" He's having dreams about finding a staff, you see, and Poppy (yeah, she turns up) says that he's searching for his gand. Gand, staff, Gandalf, get it? And if you don't, they're happy to beat you over the head with it. EDIT: It's not Poppy, it's Nori who says it. Oh well, easy to mistake one dirty little psychopath for another.
Ooh, almost forgot! We've got a cross-over episode here, as the Tusken raiders from "Star Wars" show up. Yeah, you tell me they're supposed to be natives of Rhun, but I know a masked Tusken raider in the desert when I see one.
I could go on much, much, much longer. But some more things I liked, or didn't mind, or that made me laugh:
(a) MIriel. I don't mind the actress in this part, and I think if she had anything other than the glurge the show gives her, she could deliver a great performance. As it is, she's doing very well with what she has to work with.
(b) a crumb for the lore nerds; Halbrand the Warg-whisperer is a shout-out to Sauron, Lord of Werewolves.
(c) that big, beautiful, moving Forbidden Love Elf-Human Romance? As dead as Bronwyn, whose cremation we get to see (due to the actress not coming back for season two). Poor Arondir, he is so sad, he almost had a new facial expression. Turns out you *can't* just walk off a poisoned Orc arrow or three to the back.
As ever, the horse remains the one sensible creature in this show so far.
re: Orcs - It's perhaps worth pointing out that RoP basically ripped off "but orcs are people, too!" from 2016's Warcraft movie, including the orc wife and baby:
Although that might not be an accurate or entirely fair accusation, "Antagonist is a person, too!" has been a pretty frequent trope in popular media, see Malificent et al.
But it wasn't *quite* the trope it was in 2016, and given that WoW and its movie are clearly deeply informed by LotD, it still feels a little plagiarism-y.
(For what it's worth, I think Warcraft is *much* better movie than it had any reason to be and disagree with the professional critical consensus on it. It had an excellent series of set ups and pay offs, was well-acted, and executed its CGI better than anything being produced in 2024. Worth a look if you ever played WoW and/or enjoy LotD progeny.)
I just want to add - I'm a huge Tolkien nerd, know most of the lore, have read his letters and the lesser known books - I fucking love Rings of Power. What it changes in specifics it more than makes up for by really focusing on the themes of the writing and it hits the most important narrative beats.
Have you read the ACOUP series about RoP? I'm curious what you think about it? I'm sure the nitpicks over historical accuracy and stuff aren't something that would bother most people, but some of the criticisms seem more vital, like how the writing was designed to try to constantly "trick" the audience, meaning that plots go nowhere and there is no feeling of stakes or verisimilitude, just one "twist" after another.
I just skimmed the summary of his criticisms but don't find much meat to them. I also think it's silly to say they're trying to "trick" the audience - they give so much evidence and foreshadowing (for instance, that Halbrand is Sauron) that it feels fair and rewarding to me.
Here are some parts along the lines of what I was referring to.
> And that, in the end, is why the tactics for the battle need to make sense: because for the audience to care about the outcome of the battle, that outcome needs to feel like a product of the decisions characters made leading to it. The moment the audience feels like the battle’s decision depends entirely on the whim of the storyteller, disconnected from anyone’s actions, those actions stop mattering and the audience loses investment in the battle.
> Arondir lures Adar’s army into the Ostirith watchtower. He then shoots a fire arrow at the ropes (!?) holding up (!?) the watchtower, which then collapses, bringing down the whole fort and raining rocks down on the causeway, destroying all of Adar’s army. Except, wait, is this all of Adar’s army? When he begins toppling the tower, Arondir jumps down3 in front of the gate, kicks it closed4 and then presumably flees down the causeway, which is evidently empty of troops. Except that as we’re going to see, that wasn’t all of Adar’s army or even most of it and he has two whole other armies somewhere but nowhere they could interfere with Arondir’s daring escape. So we have two problems here: the nonsense physics and then bad questions about army size. The latter will keep recurring over this post, but we can deal with the former right away.
> This makes as good a time as any to look at the size of Adar’s army but also on the bafflingly inability of any of the ‘good guys,’ most notably Arondir himself, to know how large it is or what its composition is. Arondir’s plan is foiled, twice (the tower trap and then the village ambush) because he does not have a clear sense of how large Adar’s army is or that it contains humans. In practice I think the real issue here is that not only does Arondir not have an idea of how big Adar’s army is, neither do the showrunners.
> Arondir is a scout and yet is caught unawares by a large orcish army, twice, the first time when he (and his entire company of other Elven scouts) is captured by then and then the second time when Adar’s magical third army appears after the village ambush.
> Arondir, who is a trained, professional scout (with supernaturally keen Elven senses!), has been in the enemy’s base, meet the enemy leader personally, and then had the enemy force advance over terrain that he and all of his troops have lived in for decades and yet clearly has no good sense of how large Adar’s army is, to even a rough order of magnitude. If he did, he’d have been well aware from the beginning that even with the tower ambush being maximally effective there was no chance of holding the village and he’d have been aware that Adar had not committed his whole force to the trap the second time either.
> That said the audience too could be forgiven for not having a good sense of the size of Adar’s army either. The real answer seems to be that the army isn’t real and doesn’t have a real size and so just comes into being for a scene and ceases to exist after it, in so far as the showrunners seem concerned. After Arondir springs his first trap, at the tower, leaps down onto the causeway and we can clearly see the causeway is empty. There is no great mass of orcs moving up from behind to also enter the tower or guarding the upper levels of the causeway (later we see torch lights lower down, but these seem to be crushed by falling debris). If there was an army here, Arondir would be in a lot of trouble, since he’d have just trapped himself between an army (on a narrow bridge) and a door he just closed. Certainly his trip back down to the village, through that army would be pretty difficult! But instead the army, having taken all of its hitpoints in damage, just despawns for this scene, to respawn when the timer ticks over in the next night.
> (Likewise, though we’re not quite there yet, when Arondir springs his next trap, the force of troops trapped by the ambush are entirely isolated: there’s no second echelon coming up behind them (or even in sight at all) either, making it seem like Adar’s army has been completely destroyed again. I can’t help but conclude that the showrunners have failed to understand the difference, famously laid out by Alfred Hitchcock between surprise on the one hand and suspense on the other. Worse yet, by pulling the same trick twice in the same sequence, they do not even get the “ten seconds of shock.”6)
And so on. There's a lot more where that comes from.
And this is just one post. There are other posts with lots of other criticisms (like how there's no sense of scale, time or continuity in RoP, breaking verisimilitude and making the world feel artificial - e.g. why should we even care whether Halbrand is king of a land that consists entirely of one small village run by a butcher).
The way I see it, silly battle logic is just basic Hollywood stuff and the original trilogy is full of it as well. Same as the fast travel characters sometimes get here and in game of thrones.
If you read the full post I was quoting from, you can see that he also compares it to the Peter Jackson movies and shows how they *don't* have the problems he is talking about.
> We can compare with Peter Jackson’s treatment in The Lord of the Rings films, because he’s trying to pull off many of the same emotional beats and story ideas, but with much greater care. Now, Jackson is very concerned that we know how big the armies in his battles are. Sometimes he literally has a character tell us (“A great host, you say?” “Ten thousand strong at least”) and in other cases he pulls the camera way back so we can see how large a force is. By contrast, Rings gives us only the size of the Númenórean force; we have no sense of how many villagers or orcs and humans serving Adar there are supposed to be.
> Even when Jackson doesn’t keep track of exact numbers, as during the Battle of the Pelennor fields, he still shows the audience not only how big the orc army is (with huge wide shots to show it) but also cuts to the bridges over the Anduin to show it being reinforced before the siege. When fresh enemies arrive after the charge of the Rohirrim, they’re explicitly a second force, the existence of which we’ve been alerted to earlier in the films because we’ve already seen Haradrim and Mumakil (which also means we have the suspense of knowing that they’ll show up but not when or how, at least for folks who haven’t read the books). We may not know exactly how many orcs the Witch King has in all of these, but his army is clearly finite in size and made of identifiable components that we, the audience, can keep track of, which is important because that helps us know who is winning as the battle swings back and forth, which makes character decisions carry tension because we care who wins and we think that ‘who wins’ is something that will be meaningfully impacted by character decisions.
> By contrast, we’re never given a clear sense of the size of Adar’s army or its composition because that would defeat the purpose of the ‘surprise’ ‘subversion’ that Arondir’s two ambush traps don’t actually work. The unfortunate result is a deflation of the tension of the battle because what seems to happen is that Arondir destroys Adar’s army twice only for it to respawn each time, robbing each episode of its dramatic weight. The Númenóreans will then destroy Adar’s army a third time – and this time presumably completely (Adar’s orcs are caught in the open in a village by an army of cavalry in the day time hours before the mountain explodes; that is little more survivable than the mountain), and yet we’ll see after the smoke clears that there are still lots of orcs, so many that Galadriel has to tell Theo that fighting them is pointless and they must retreat.
Hm, I don't appreciate a scene with a loving orc family either, but in terms of accuracy: weren't the Orcs in Lord of the Rings reluctant to go to war, and had to be pressed hard not to desert?
I base this only on the LotR novels, so you could argue that this is not the best source. And it's very long ago since I read the books, so feel free to prove me wrong. But that's how I recall at least the Mordor orcs. The Uruk-hai from Isengard were different, though.
The orcs were reluctant, but all their reluctance was framed as "What's in it for me anyways? Why should I stick my neck out? Screw you, I'll do what I want!" and not "I just want to live in peace and raise a family."
Yeah, I thought part of the horror of Sauron's orcish society was that it was top-to-bottom run on oppression. All good feelings were stamped out, and all that was left was fear and hate. I suppose free orcish society might look slightly different, but the ones from "The Hobbit" don't seem particularly nice.
Maybe they're trying for "Sauron is a common enemy of orcs and humans/elves, but human/elven arrogance and prejudice mean that Sauron gets control of the orcs".
I'm kind of rusty here too, but I think orcs were corrupted elves that were additionally bound to serve the dark power. The evilification process also made them not very effective so it took a lot of order and violence to get them to follow orders, because otherwise they'd just desert and go into banditry or grave robbing or something.
It WAS said that orcs were corrupted elves, but Tolkien changed his mind, seeing that neither Sauron nor Melkor had the power to give them the gift of death and free them from the circles of the world. So orcs would then not have been mortal as men were. He ended up not coming up with a consistent narrative for what orcs were.
Explanations Tolkien is known to have considered at one time or another:
1. Orcs are soulless constructs or corrupted animals, imbued with a fragment of Melkor's will to give them a form of sapience and making them miniature reflections of Melkor's own nature. Discarded because of the theme that evil cannot truly create.
2. Orcs are corrupted Elves. This was the front-runner for a long time, but Tolkien came to disfavor it because it became inconsistent with things he decided later about the nature of Elves as well as the Gift of Iluvatar problem you mentioned.
3. Orcs are corrupted Men. It sounds like this was the frontrunner towards the end of Tolkien's life, but it had problems of its own. One of the big ones was timeline difficulties: Morgoth had hosts of Orcs in time for the First Battle, before the initial awakening of Men.
4. Orcs are the progeny of minor Maiar, probably interbred with one or more of the above.
Other potential xplanations that, to my knowledge, Tolkien never explored:
A. Orcs are corrupted Dwarves. This actually fits pretty well in a number of respects: Orcs and Dwarves have similar natural habitats (particularly the cycles of them turning one another out of Moria and Mount Gundabad), both races are noted for mechanical cleverness, timeline works better than 3 above because the Dwarves awoke shortly after Elves, and Dwarves' spiritual nature is unexplored (neither immortal like Elves nor apparently mortal in the same sense as Men) in a way that avoids the spiritual problems of 2 and 3. The big problem is that Dwarves are notably and by-design very resilient against the corruptive effects of Morgoth's evil.
B. Orcs are corrupted Entwives.
C. Orcs are descended from Tom Bombadil's dark side.
[It should go without saying that B and C are utterly ridiculous and to my knowledge nobody seriously proposes them]
I wish they'd known better than to shove poorly-made nostalgia-bait down our throats, and made a standalone series about the Blue Wizards' adventures in the East. You get relatively unknown but powerful and interesting characters, you get more diversity than you can shake a wand at, you get an original plotline for Sauron that would make sense for who and where he is in canon, you get actual suspense because Tolkien's writing flip-flops between "they succeeded and were pivotal in raising a resistance against Sauron in his home territory" and "they failed their duty and became little more than petty tyrants", and since neither character appears later, you can have a dramatic season finale where Sauron discovers and executes one of them. Hell, these guys are always mentioned together, maybe they were a couple!
Tolkien himself says there were noble Easterlings who risked their lives undermining Sauron in a place he held near-absolute power. Where's the series about them?
Some reviewers have mentioned "Hey, now they're in Rhun, you can canonically have Diverse Characters, so why is the Dark Wizard and all the wizardettes white?"
But I imagine we know the answer to that one: if he's an Evil Dark Wizard, you can't have him be a Wizard of Colour, because that would be the stereotype of evil violent minorities. So he has to be white if he's a bad guy.
I don't care about that, just that yeah so far it's been "Rhun, land of the Near to Middle East analogue - all white all the time" (except for when we will get to the Stoors) but Lindon? Downtown LA crowd scenes! I like Ciarán Hinds as an actor so I want to see what he can do with the part, but so far it's just been him mugging about "Bring the Istar to me".
Istar. Gand. Wow, I wonder who the Stranger could *possibly* be?
I honestly think Amazon/Bezos wanted to remake the Lord of the Rings but they couldn't do that, so this is the next best thing as far as they're concerned.
Tabletop roleplaying gamers frequently remark that there is a conceptual flaw in Lord of the Rings: making orcs inherently evil is a problem if you think about it too hard.
"The Last Ringbearer" does the obvious unreliable narrator thing to LoTR, in which the forces of Mordor are the good guys (bringing benefits of technology to the masses), and the idea of orcs being evil is just racism on the part of LotR's protogonists, who of course also have a bunch of other regressive beliefs like wanting to restore a monarchy and give undue political power to the wizard class.
I don't understand why that is a problem either ... aren't orcs just elves twisted with evil magic into something which is a parody of their former selves?
I mean I read silmarillion once (because I was in a hospital as a kid and had nothing else there to read) but my Tolkien lore is very rusty so I might be off here.
And even in the real world you have fairly intelligent mammals who form groups which from human perspective are just evil. The way hyena packs live and how they compete internally is just extremely ruthless. If hyenas were magically made smart enough to talk and follow basic orders (but not smart enough to figure out their way of life is no basis for a large scale sophisticated society) they'd be vicious just like orcs.
Yes, Tolkien did have a problem trying to reconcile that, but if we think of Orcs as less individual independent beings and more of a hive mind organism, then it's less (but not completely) of a problem. But you will always need some kind of bad guys for the good guys to go up against, so it'll be the same problem for the rows of faceless mooks that get mowed down in your average action movie.
But even if you look at the dialogue of Gorbag and Shagrat, what they want to do there if they get free of the Big Boss (Sauron) during the war is not "go home, farm some land, live in peace", it's "get a few of the lads together, find a nice place for some robbing and looting and pillaging like the old days".
They're not inherently Just Misunderstood, either.
I'm not sure if "The Hobbit" counts as textual evidence, but the free goblins there didn't seem to be any better, even though they'd been free of direct influence for a long time. (Millennia?)
That's something I'd love to see explored a bit, actually. Sauron only reclaimed his mantle after the Necromancer identity was driven out. What was life like for orcs and goblins pre- and post-reveal? What groups did he bring to his banner, and how? Where did they get their food from? What are their family units like? Are they like elves in not needing as much food (is that right?)? Their rate of reproduction appears to be higher than elves, but are they also immortal?
It sounds like RoP is going to take a stab at that, but I'm not going to hold out a lot of hope for them doing a serious job.
If we can extrapolate from Gorbag and Shagrat's little chat, the "good old days" for them seemed to have been "no Big Dark Lord turning us into cannon fodder" but instead they set up as independent bandit gangs, their own bosses.
Then Sauron comes back and it's "back to the army, boys!" once more.
‘No, I don’t know,’ said Gorbag’s voice. ‘The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. But I don’t enquire how it’s done. Safest not to. Grr! Those Nazgûl give me the creeps. And they skin the body off you as soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side. But He likes ’em; they’re His favourites nowadays, so it’s no use grumbling. I tell you, it’s no game serving down in the city.’
‘You should try being up here with Shelob for company,’ said Shagrat.
‘I’d like to try somewhere where there’s none of ’em. But the war’s on now, and when that’s over things may be easier.’
‘It’s going well, they say.’
‘They would,’ grunted Gorbag. ‘We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d’you say? – if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.’
‘Ah!’ said Shagrat. ‘Like old times.’"
There may be a hint in the LOTR that Orcs, or some of them. can interbreed with humans:
"But as they drew near to the further gate, Frodo saw a dark ill-kept house behind a thick hedge: the last house in the village. In one of the windows he caught a glimpse of a sallow face with sly, slanting eyes; but it vanished at once.
‘So that’s where that southerner is hiding!’ he thought. ‘He looks more than half like a goblin.’
..."Many of them carried torches, and in the flare I could see their faces. Most of them were ordinary men, rather tall and dark-haired, and grim but not particularly evil-looking. But there were some others that were horrible: man-high, but with goblin-faces, sallow, leering, squint-eyed. Do you know, they reminded me at once of that Southerner at Bree; only he was not so obviously orc-like as most of these were.’
‘I thought of him too,’ said Aragorn. ‘We had many of these half-orcs to deal with at Helm’s Deep. It seems plain now that that Southerner was a spy of Saruman’s; but whether he was working with the Black Riders, or for Saruman alone, I do not know. It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another.’
The other thing I'd love to explore are trolls. Bill, Tom, and Bert not only have Christian names, but Bill has a *family* name!
I suppose the trolls could merely have picked up common names from people they were around at one point, although that implies that trolls breed on their own, and don't require direct creation by Valar or Maiar. And the "family name" could be an epithet - one William might be "William the Hugger" and another might be "William the Biter".
The "pity" thing seems much less problematic to me. We've all seen videos of kitties and bunnies being friends, right? Whether it persists past the next mealtime is another question, but I could see it continuing for a bit as sort of semi-unspoken "Dread Pirate Roberts' cabin boy" situation: "Good night, Bilbo. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely eat you in the morning." And it goes on until something annoys Bill slightly, or one of the others gets hungry, and then it's bonk and into the pot.
Some of you may be thinking: doesn't Dungeons and Dragons inherit that conceptual flaw, in that it assumes that monsters can just be killed without anyone caring, even when those minsters are kind of human like? Yes; thats why it comes up.
Is the american elite, willing, able, and aware to get housing to the young before a violent backlash; eventually people who lost their first home in 2008 will reach 40 and have *nothing* to tell their children for why society is worth keeping. If you keep not letting home be build with zoning while mass importing immigrants while populations are still "booming"(they will start busting, *but not yet*, a decade is a long time to be homeless/spend 70% of income on rent while boomer entitlements spending comes due), homelessness and rents will get *worse*.
We have tools at hand, technology exists, assembly line homes exist and look good; id love to own one personally. 3d printing concert seems a little shaky, but I expect you could 3d print domes for homeless/immigrants to improve the situation drastically compared to tents in shitty cities; BUT youd need political will to change zoning laws and fight the real estate hedge funds.
It looks like we're on track in 2024 to sell 2.19 new houses sold per thousand people. Pre-2005, it looks like we were selling 3+ new homes per thousand people. But it doesn't look like a crisis in housing (despite what the MSM headlines may claim).
Isn't new homes - new people, overly simplistic? What what destroyed homes or hellhole cities people are fleeing from, breakdown of multi generational housing?
There are promising signs of YIMBYism getting stronger, including lots of actions in California at the state level. But NIMBYism is such a powerful force that it takes an extreme crisis to even get to this point.
But no, you can not reasonably "3d print" homes. Wood is cheap. Concrete is cheap. We aren't talking about bespoke plastic toys here or something.
This tech is real as far as I can tell; but I expect the hard part of the house is plumbing and electrical; so, while I think 3d printing will help the situation, I think you lay down a core house with a bathroom, kitchen and ac, and then domes for "better then tents", solutions to homelessness and mass immigration
... that is, if I believed those with power *wanted* it solved, they want insane people shitting in the street of silicone valley cause white man bad or something, and want gdp to go up even if its all paper.
You won't solve the problem with gimmicks, that's 1969 hippy logic.
Its all about the land and permitting. The cheapest house you can get is a mobile, (I'm guessing) about $150k delivered for 3,000 square feet.
Then its all: Location—Location—Location. You can buy a building lot in Tonopah, Nevada for just a few hundred dollars ... but you're in Tonopah and that's its own special hell. Last time I was in Tonopah, you could rent a 1 bedroom house for $150 a month. But again, that's Tonopah. Martha's Vineyard will cost you a bit more. The state of Alaska has a land lottery, and most of Alaska doesn't have building codes, so you can build a home from pallets and blue tarps ... and there are a lot of homes built from pallets and blue tarps. But you're in rural Alaska, not Manhattan.
I'm guessing your zorkmids don't buy the house you think you deserve.
Only a few people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, the rest of us have to work at it. The only thing stopping you from doing something to improve your earning potential is your own ambition.
I *want* a boxable at 50k somewhere rural, the first time I got a bonus check working a shitty job it all when into bitcoin and it doubled in price before I had to resell it; and unlike literally everyone else my age, I didnt get college debt. Im still doing terribly.
I know its all land, but thats the way its not being fixed.
>The only thing stopping you from doing something to improve your earning potential is your own ambition.
I read hundreds of "antivaxx need not apply" job description during corona, guess who didnt, stubborn as mule me; but I wont be shamed or gaslit about failing out of economy during it.
I no longer care for any "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", 40% of the economy is government spending, theres racial quotas; the winners are now politically connected, boomers have made a mixed *fascist* economy with job seeking thats a humiliation ritual about appeasing a middle manager class who know they do nothing of value.
I may never know what jobs I couldve got without the mandates, resources wasted by government spending, or racism; but so long as its palpably *not* meritocratic, *you* cant declare my failures are my own with confidence.
Its Hawaii. Record low temp is 55F, fishing all year long. Food grows year-round. A small garden and a couple chickens will take care of you. Lots of fishing potential.
Yes, a lava flow could take out your improvements. Or it could be a thousand years off.
What I meant is that there's no practical, cost-effective way to do that.
Incidentally, I highly recommend reading the Construction Physics substack to learn more about... well the physics of construction. And in particular what the problems are and aren't and why it has resisted most attempts at improved efficiency, including everything the layman might think up in a few minutes.
Finally, note that a ton of those people who lost their homes in 2008 essentially put nothing down -- that was part of the problem -- and hence lost no equity.
A ton of the people who lost their homes in 2008 were out there saying: "Gonna Flip Tha' Motha'."
They were just gambling with free money the government mandated that the banks give them. I remember hearing ads on the radio, "No Credit No Problem," and "Income Verification Not Required." ... it was advertising to scammers, look how it turned out.
I dont know how to understand these stats with my experience of no one having hope since 2008
> note that a ton of those people who lost their homes in 2008 essentially put nothing down -- that was part of the problem -- and hence lost no equity.
Emotionally it will matter; and I still want the banks who got bailed out to burn.
> I dont know how to understand these stats with my experience of no one having hope since 2008
On a meta level: approximately 100% of politically active Americans think that approximately 50% of politically active Americans have been brainwashed into feeling deep passionate feelings that have no basis in reality. And I don't see why "no one having hope" has to be different? Which isn't to say that they and you are wrong, just that "everyone I talk to feels a certain way" isn't a reliable guide to truth, not even to truth about the social order.
Since 2021–due to the combination of increased home prices and increased interest rates—the monthly mortgage on the same house has DOUBLED in my low COL area.
Families and friends making the same money I do who bought a house in 2021 are paying $1k per month on the house where I pay $2k, because I bought in 2024. Or they pay the same amount as me with much larger homes/shops.
Yeah, as I said, they jumped a lot the last couple of years. But unless that trend persists -- which is unlikely, given the history and given the reality that ability to pay is a component of demand -- there is very little one can reasonably infer therefrom. Given the current rate of inflation,
in a year or two, you will probably refinance at a much lower rate.
Why do people talk as if the cost of housing is about the cost of the actual physical house?
Physical houses are cheap, it's the land that's expensive. (I mean, building a new house costs a fair bit but they depreciate pretty fast so an unspectacular but liveable 1970s house on a block costs no more than an equivalent empty block.)
Yeah but the average person isn't the one complaining on the internet about housing prices and NIMBYs. Those people are all in UHCOL areas.
A home that is still worth $330K after a few decades is a pretty darn nice home. You can build a pretty decent brand new house for that, and actual buildings depreciate pretty fast.
There just aren't many levers the federal government has to influence housing supply. Most of the NIMBY policies are controlled at the state and local level, especially zoning. Good luck running a national campaign to replace [your town here] councilor. And the local government is most beholden to the older property owners, which have the most incentive to block new construction and keep property values high.
The federal government could direct Fannie and Freddie to stop underwriting loans to mortgages in areas that don’t meet certain zoning/density requirements. This wouldn’t directly affect policy, but would incentivize existing homeowners towards policies preferred by the feds. Otherwise, homeowners risk losing the ability to sell their home into a pool of buyers flush with government-backed credit.
As someone with broadly YIMBY preferences, I’d be fine with local jurisdictions upholding NIMBY policies as long as those policies aren’t being subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
There's plenty of places in the US where you can buy a perfectly reasonable house for under $100K which are a lot more convenient than the wilds of Utah. The problem is that too many people want to live in San Francisco and not enough people want to live in Cleveland. Just move to Cleveland.
I used to live in a fairly rural area about an hour from a nationally well known city (not Cleveland, but similar enough). My wife and I bought our first house there for about $75k, mostly move in ready (we took out some old carpet and refinished the floors). 3 beds, 2 baths, 1800 sq feet. That was over 15 years ago, but Zillow is still only estimating it at $150k now. Very low crime rate as well.
> if we satisfied YIMBY demands and built apartments everywhere, I don’t think that would satisfy people looking for “the American dream” in homeownership even if it reduces rental prices.
The difference between failing into renting a small cheap apartment while saving some money and failing into homelessness and probably losing the ability to work does matter for my risk estimations of what I'll aim for.
I dont know what happens when the boomers die while, me being unemployable loses access to low status (living with my parents) housing; even worse wages, more compitation for shit wage jobs and packing into terrible housing?
As threatened, my "Rings of Power" season two rant! They released the first three episodes in one go, which means (if I'm counting correctly) there are five to go. So I watched all three in a lump, and that's why I probably missed a lot. I'll need to go back and re-watch to catch up on parts I skipped, didn't pay attention to, or otherwise ignored.
Okay, first impressions.
To start, the good parts:
(1) The story of Celebrimbor and Annatar makes some sense. I admit, I was worried about this, but they're sticking at least parallel to canon so it's not terrible. I'm not saying it's fantastic, but it's not going to make me want to wrench my eyes out of their sockets. Celebrimbor gets to do things! and speak lines of his own! and the actor gets a chance to do more than stand in the background twiddling his thumbs! They even allow Celebrimbor the honour of inventing stuff all on his little ownsome, like ithildin. Good job there, show.
(2) The music is inoffensive to good. There's one song which is a bit of an earworm, as it's been playing in my head over the past few days. Because it's based on Galadriel's song in Lothlórien, and the Quenya lament there, it's fairly decent lyrically (they do have a language consultant, Carl Hostetter, who probably created most of the vocabulary for this piece). Benjamin Walker apparently sang it for real, and it's not bad at all:
The bad: pretty much everything else. In no particular order:
To start off with, the pacing is still reminiscent of an elderly tree sloth hobbling along on a Zimmer frame. I skipped a *lot* which means I missed such things as the introduction of Narvi, and Aule's beard, I *wanted* to see Narvi. Put that on the re-watch to-do list.
First episode
(1) We did not need an origin story for Halbrand. No, really. Five minutes of a flashback would have done. Instead, the first fifteen to twenty minutes (I didn't count, it felt a lot longer) of the first episode, *after* we get past the recap of "last season" and the credits, is spent on "so how did Sauron turn into Halbrand?"
Apparently, by being a disgrace to semi-divine dark lords everywhere in every medium. We are now up to two Saurons, as the actor briefly playing Sauron isn't Charlie Vickers.
Remember how, in the first episode of season one, we got a scene of what everyone assumed was Sauron, due to the spiky armour etc.? I'm now thinking that must have been Morgoth instead, as we see the crown being borne in by an Orc for Sauron's coronation.
Hold on to your socks, there's a lot going on here. First, Morgoth's crown shouldn't even be in existence in Middle-earth anymore, as it was beaten into a collar for his neck after Tulkas opened up a can of whoop-ass on him. Second, I know it's called the "Iron Crown" but yeesh. It looks more like a teapot trivet as designed by Philippe Starck than something a would-be emperor of the universe would wear (side-note: I have a very nice teapot trivet that I love and it would be much more suitable as a crown than this spiky mess).
Thirdly, this Sauron looks, speaks, and acts like a third-rate politician on the stump trying to win over undecided voters. And the Orcs are pretty much decided they don't like him, as one of them tries an assassination attempt. Here we get some pointless brutality, as this Sauron kills the would-be assassin very violently (shoving a dagger into his eye) and gorily. Which is honestly just "ooh violence" for the sake of it, in line with their publicity that this season would be darker and grittier and so on.
Anyways, to make this much shorter than the show did, Sauron kneels before Adar to be coronated (and that's a *huge* misunderstanding of Sauron's character because he's not kneeling before no-one, he'd do a Napoleon and crown himself). Adar then stabbity-stabbitys him with the inverted, spiky crown in the back, and the Orcs do a re-enactment of the Ides of March. This kills Sauron who, in a very tired and tiresome jumpscare, then explodes with light and turns Forodwaith into an icy wilderness (but wasn't it *already* an icy waste due to Morgoth? yeah, shut up).
But we don't stop there, no sir! What Sauron *also* does is turn into the Venom symbiote. His black blood (I swear, I am not making any of this up) drip-drips down cracks in the stone into the caverns below and over some unspecified period (supposed to be centuries or even longer, which doesn't match up with the timeline of events what have happened in the first season, but as we know this show don't need no stinkin' timelines) he/it/however you call a pool of black ooze eats rats and bugs and eventually slithers/crawls its way up and out.
And thereupon flumps out of a cave on the mountain side then slides down that slippery slope until it/he/whatever comes to rest on a cart track. Whereupon he/it/whatever is run over by a passing peasant woman in a wagon, and he/it/whatever then clambers/slithers up the wheel, into the wagon, and eats the woman.
Then out steps Halbrand, transformed into a human from a floomp-monster by means of nom-nomming a mortal.
As Eru Iluvatar is my witness, this is what the show did.
I haven't the heart to trudge on through the rest of this, suffice it to say Halbrand ends up with a bunch of fleeing humans, they get on a boat, the boat is attacked by a sea monster, and he grabs the royal sigil of the Southlands king (you remember that from season one) off someone and that sets us up for the raft in the middle of the ocean that rescues Galadriel when she tries long-distance ocean swimming back home.
I'm stopping here because there is too much going on and yet nothing happens.
I'm only see s2e1 so far, and I'm not particularly eager to watch more just yet. I'm still processing the first 20 minutes or so, let alone the rest of the episode. The writers were pretty severely handicapped by the goal of showing how Sauron got on the boat in the first place in the mindset we say in Season 1, when all that was set up with a goal of making a shiny mystery box and subordinating trivial matters like "making sense" and "being vaguely true to source material", and what they came up with was absurd. Various problems I had with it:
1. Sauron gives the worst pep talk in the history of management.
2. I'm pretty sure Sauron at the start of the Second Age could handle a few hundred orcs. Not just in personal combat: remember that Tolkien's on the record that the force of Sauron's personality is strong enough that anyone short of Gandalf (explicitly including Elrond and Galadriel) would have been unable to withhold the ring over to him in a face-to-face battle of wills.
3. So, Sauron is actually the thing that killed Tasha Yar in ST:TNG?
4. More "I'm 14 and this is deep" material from the refugee leader who gave Sauron the little pep talk on the road.
5. So, where did the Southlanders think they were going in the ship? The only things in that direction are Valinor (explicitly forbidden to Men and warded against unwelcome visitors) and Numenor (who in RoP would be unhappy with refugees coming to take their jobs). A ship of Southlander refugees should have been going up or down the coast, not West across the sea.
I came up with a better (although still flawed) explanation. So, in the Silmarillion, Sauron is captured at the end of the War of Wrath. Sauron begs for mercy from Eönwë, Manwë's herald and the Maia leading the Host of Valinor. Eönwë declines to judge Sauron since he's Sauron's equal and doesn't have authority to condemn or pardon him, instead commanding him return to Valinor to be judged directly by the Valar. Sauron's pride gets the better of him, and he escapes and eventually returns to his evil ways.
If you actually follow canon as far as it goes, then Sauron actually has a plausible reason to be heading towards Valinor. If he actually decides to face judgement after some time in hiding (the details of this need work to not come off as stupid), then charming and misleading some travelers into chartering a ship to Valinor would be the sort of thing he'd be apt to do. And hitting the wards around Valinor would be a better reason for the shipwreck than an apparently random sea monster attack.
I'm reading about the Texas Revolution for the first time, and one really striking thing is how *small* the number of fighters involved was. It seems like the basic TLDR was "Mexico did not have enough state capacity to exert control over its northern territories".
And/or railroads and the telegraph. I hadn't heard the Colt theory before, but expanding transportation and communication was a very big deal for expanding west. Prior to that there was better contact to the west coast cities than interior towns, even going all the way around South America by boat. Once transportation was in place, the rest of society and civilization could follow.
Trains don’t protect settlers from deadly Comanche raids. Before the colt revolver, the militias had lengthy reload times that couldn’t do enough damage before the Comanches closed in on their horses. Once the revolvers could get off multiple shots, those tactics didn’t work anymore.
How common were Comanche raids, and over how much of the west? That sounds like a local problem in certain areas, not something that prevented the entire west from being settled.
A few thousand is probably a quite low estimate for the Norman forces at Hastings. And organizing even a few thousand fighting men was quite an exercise of state power in 1066. The ducal forces under William had defeated the household troops of the King of France and various nearby French dukes in the past. The point being that while the Norman forces were small in an absolute sense, they were equivalent to the mobilized army of powerful kingdoms like France or England.
I'm hosting a forecasting & prediction markets meetup in Washington, DC on Thursday, September 26th. If you're in the area and interested in predicting the future, or know anyone who is, please RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/zpObY6EmiQEkgpcJB6Aw
I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do with it. Probably nothing, but I might turn it into an AI "lorebook" so anyone who wants to explore this world can do so. (I'd have to invent names for stuff, though. Can't come up with *everything* in my sleep.)
Someone dear to me was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease about a year ago. I would appreciate any sort of information about interventions.
The disease is progressing very slowly and he has tremors on one side, trouble sleeping, and sensitivity to heat. No change in gait or walking speed and treatment with carbidopa/levodopa has been positive for him.
We did confirm based on 23andMe that he does not carry the GBA-1 variant responsible for Gaucher's disease, although I don't specifically know how accurate this is and whether we should retest using another service.
I have two friends who went through the Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) treatment. Both hated it initially. They do half of the brain, wait six plus months, and do the other half. It took about six months of "tuning" before each felt like the first half was successful. Then they did the other half and went through the tuning process again. After the tedious and frustrating process of tuning, they both said the difference is night and day.
If you're in the US there's a big clinical trials site you can go to to see what's being tried. (But learn about how trials work -- Phase 1 trials are a huge long shot, Phase 2 less so but not ideal, you want Phase 3 if possible. Also some things being tried just are not promising. )
Also, look at forums for people with Parkinson's. On all forums of any size there are some highly educated people with the illness who can give you good info about current treatments, promising trials, etc.
I hope other have more useful comments; the only thing I can add is that weirdly, it turns out that broad beans (fava beans) contain significant quantities of levodopa, and there is a small amount of evidence that consumption is beneficial to parkinsons patients (although,presumably, only if they aren't already taking levodopa) and that eating large amounts in addition to medical levodopa/carbodopa can result in overdose. Note that a small number of people react badly to large quantities of broad beans (favism), although probably you would already know if you did. I'm not sure how useful this is unless for some reason levodopa is not obtainable.
There is a certain amount of speculation about benefits of broad beans for other mental health conditions, for which I am not aware of any useful evidence.
The most promising drug to enhance longevity is rapamycin (it works in all tested preclinical models). Recently (a week or two ago) results were published from a decent-sized trial attempting to assess anti-aging effects in humans. Early on they choose to use compounded rapamycin instead of regular pills. Halfway through they discover that what goes out into the blood is about 3.5x lower using the compounded version. Instead of two groups getting 5 or 10mg (a reasonable dose, alhough built on guesswork and hope) of rapamycin per week, as intended, the included subjects got (on average) around 1.5 or 3mg (likely too low, making interpretation of negative results difficult)
I was clicking through to try to see the scientific / medical reasoning around the dosage, but sadly, it was more focused on the biovailability and didn't go into it.
Because every "anti-aging" mg / kg rapamycin dose I've been able to elicit from anti-aging people is always far, far below the mouse study mg / kg doses, and I wonder what reasoning or justification they're using to arrive at their numbers, particularly given the potential for impaired healing and higher blood glucose at higher rapamycin doses.
EDIT - indeed, following the citation tree, the Mannick studies all say things like:
"Safety was a key concern when designing this trial. Therefore, very low daily or intermittent doses of everolimus were used in the vaccination trial (1/6–1/20th lower than the approved doses in transplant and oncology patients) that were predicted to minimize adverse events and to lower rather than completely inhibit mTORC1 activity."
And in the Kraig study:
"In contrast to the subjects in the above trials, who tolerated everolimus or BEZ235 quite well, a small, 8-week long randomized clinical trial of 25 older adults between 70 and 95 years of age treated with 1 mg/day of rapamycin experienced more side effects than placebo including a small increase in glycated hemoglobin (within-group p=0.03), and a 40% rise in triglyceride levels (within-group p=0.05)"
So they're optimizing for minimizing side effects, and even at a low 1mg / day, we're seeing side effects in a decent chunk of people.
But the mouse studies range from 1mg/kg to 50mg / kg! Vastly higher doses.
I recently read Philps Payson O'Brien's book 'How the War was Won' after reading the recent review on here. It was great, and it got me thinking about how its lessons apply to a potential future world war (China vs US+Asian Allies). Applying the lessons of the book made me think that the US retains major advantages in such a conflict, which I wrote about here: https://medium.com/@bobert93/america-retains-major-advantages-in-a-future-war-with-china-705bffa23459
Here's what I don't understand. Everyone is worried about engaging Russia too directly in Ukraine because Russia is a nuclear power and might escalate to a nuclear war.
But everyone seems to assume that the US and China could go to war directly without worrying too much about the nuclear case. Why?
Russia needs to threaten a nuclear strike because it cannot win against the West - even excluding the US. If Russia were invaded, it cannot hold. Both the US and China would most likely be fighting a limited war (over Taiwan, for instance) and not be looking at an existential crisis. Should the war escalate and involve threats to home territory, I would put all bets off on whether a nuke might be used.
It comes down to the fact that China has an official 2nd strike nuclear policy (it says it would not strike first, only ever in retaliation) and has no deployed nuclear warheads, where-as Russia has 1710 deployed warheads.
China keeps its warheads in reserve. It maintains a drastically smaller arsenal than the US (for now), so it would be highly unlike to escalate to a nuclear conflict.
That said, sure nuclear weapons would effect the 'end game' of a conflict. If the US was threatening to invade Bejing for example then perhaps CCP would rather escalate than capitulate. So there would always have to be some negotiated solution, it wouldn't end with unconditional surrender.
I wonder whether distance is really a useful defence against a potential adversary that ships you millions of TEU per month. A lot of nasty surprises could be pre-positioned before a blockade kicks in.
Are you suggesting that China ships a bunch of bombs to the US, hopes they don't get discovered early, and then blows up random warehouses when the war starts?
Certainly not that they would bother to do that for a bunch of random warehouses. But more than dumb bombs could be shipped. Most obviously,drones or autonomous missile lanuchers.
The US actually takes this into account to some extent, in that the case of someone shipping a nuke is, I read somewhere, covered by probing containers with a neutron source. The question is whether anything short of a nuke would be useful to ship.
If you assume good opsec (which is not a given), then detection would have to happen due to random inspections, which are at a relatively low rate. There is therefore some quantity of stuff that could be shipped before detection probability becomes significant.
What about electronics that are either designed to fail at a certain time in the future (eg. Known short mean time to failure) or electronics with a built in backdoor Killswitch in anything that's connected to the Internet.
It would be difficult to conceal either with so many eyes looking, but if it was done just before a set date, or targeted at very specific purchasers, it could have an outsized impact.
Pre-positioned yes. This could affect the opening of the conflict, but would be the kind of asymmetric advantage that would disapear when the gloves come off. There would be no Chinese commercial shipping East of Japan pretty quickly.
Peter Zeihan (who has a tendency to round generously, but does bring up a lot of good points) thinks that in the case of war, the US could prevent oil from the Middle East from reaching China with basically a handful of destroyers, and that, plus some interference with some other goods such as fertilizers, would be enough to throw China into a famine of epic proportions. Sounds somewhat plausible to me, and a lot smarter than going face-to-face with a couple million Chinese soldiers.
I have no idea on the situation of fertiliser in China. My priors would be that Zeihan is a total spoofer. Let’s check.
A quick investigation shows me that the largest producer in the world is Russia. A quick glance at a map assures me that Russia has a land border with China. China itself is the 3rd largest producer in the world.
Maybe Zeihan has some other insights I’m missing but that’s where I am now.
Russia currently has little infrastructure in place to transport things overland to China, though they are working on improving it. Just because a land border exists doesn't mean you have high capacity infrastructure going across it. And that goes double when the area is mostly vast near-uninhabited deserts, and the relevant parts of the countries are on opposite sides of the continent.
For instance, Russia depends on rail transport, and back in the 19th century the Tzars made a decision to make Russian RR gauges different from the rest of Europe — to prevent invaders from using their own RR stock on Russian rails. This has continued to the present day, and it's my understanding that trains from Russia to China have to unload their cargo at the border, schlep it across the border and reload it on to the Chinese trains. Maybe containers on flatbeds would obviate this problem, but looking at pics of how Russia moves materials towards Ukraine, it doesn't look like they've adopted this technology.
Changing trains because of gauge issues is not unheard of and if the Chinese needed to build out the infrastructure even in Russia, with permission, they could.
What’s also missing in the replies is proof that China would be in fertiliser deficit anyway since it’s a major producer, that if it was in some kind of deficit (unproven) it couldn’t redeploy inputs to fertiliser production.
I’m not saying I know, but with the facts I have gathered a a simple request to chatGPT, I’m doubtful.
And beyond that there are other land borders, other producers and the idea that the entire world will stop supplying to China or agree to a sea blockade makes no sense.
We‘ve see how hard it is to blockade Russia, yet at the beginning of the conflict people were crowing about the coming destruction of the Russian economy.
It did enter a recession in 2022 but has grown robustly since because other countries have decided, unlike Germany, to not sacrifice their own economy.
Some quick research says China imports around 30-35% of the food it consumes. Even if fertilizer is not an issue, they've got other problems if they cannot import, mostly over water. I doubt SE Asia has a big enough surplus to supply that need, and nobody else with a land border and potential surplus seems to be friendly in an East v West war.
>If the US deliberately caused a mass famine in China, I think that would be sufficient cause for China to launch the nukes
Only if they're completely insane. Launching a nuke to stop a blockade is like using a chainsaw to fix a hangnail. You go from bad to much, much worse.
Right. As with many wars it will come down to the West's willingness to fight rather than the West's ability to fight.
Also note that China is pretty good at propaganda and the West is incredibly bad at resisting propaganda. If China decides to invade Taiwan then it will take about six seconds to convince the Left that defending Taiwan is actually Western Imperialism and also racism, and there will be enormous anti-war protests within every western capital.
> Also note that China is pretty good at propaganda and the West is incredibly bad at resisting propaganda.
The west - or rather the US - is so good at producing propaganda that it’s convinced people half a world away that Taiwan - which has no treaty with the US or West - has to be defended at all costs.
> Taiwan - which has no treaty with the US or West
Taiwan is only home to TSMC, _the_ most important supplier of modern microchips, which are an essential component in Western society and industry. No big deal if their fabs are destroyed, or become controlled by China, right?
This is (at least) the second time in this thread [1] that you're trying to twist a policy that's clearly _not_ in the West's interest as being in the West's interest. I wonder why that is.
Doubt it. The Left is in favor of supporting Ukraine against Russia. The Left for whatever reason absolutley loves Islam(probably because they see it as brown people religion) which makes them suspectible to pro-Palestine propaganda in contrast to pro-Israel propaganda. Its absolutley hilarious to watch both groups shouting we are the real victims here. But that sympathy doesn't extend to China. Sure there will be some tankies here and there who support China(just like Russia) but it will be very easy for the the Center-Left establishment to rally their side against China.
The idea that sticking up for Palestinians (as in their human rights and statehood) is downstream of some left-wing affinity for Islam specifically... is some rather odd theory of mind.
It's part of a general anti-colonial sentiment, especially amplified for American leftists by the extent of support given by the US to Israel. Opposition to the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't driven by a love of Islam, either.
Otherwise, I agree with you. The broad American centre-left being instinctively and incuriously on the side of the underdog explains Ukraine (despite the latter being its own version of state-aligned Orthodox Christian at this point) and predicts that faction's support for Taiwan against China. The socialist left will have its misgivings, of course. I still remember that abortive letter by 30-odd Congressional progressives in June '22, I think? urging diplomacy with Russia.
I don't think it's "opposed the Iraq War and the Gaza War" that makes it seem like the left loves Islam, but more things like "gets mad with rage at vague religious freedom laws that *might* possibly protect Christian cake-bakers, and opposes bans on literal Sharia Law as racist". I suppose this might not mean "really loves Muslims" but rather "really hates Christians, hates Jews, and hates scientific atheists who apply science even when it gets the politically wrong results, but has no problem with Muslims", but in practical terms not involving Asians the distinction doesn't seem very meaningful.
And as for your remarks about Democrats and Muslims, as a committed Libtard, I see the real problem is that Republicans don’t understand how freedom works anymore. Most Democrats don’t like or dislike Islam. They just want to live in a free country where people are allowed to choose to worship as they please.
OTOH Republicans are promoting an overtly Christianist agenda. They want to delete the Establishment Clause from the Constitution, change our laws to follow pseudo-biblical examples (imposing the Christianist version of Shariah Law), and force the teaching of so-called Christian principles in schools. And after January 6th most Lefties see Republicans as being a more immediate threat to our Republic than Hamas and Hezbollah are.
Well, an influential clique on the American Left are quite pro-Russian. I'm thinking of Chomsky and Greenwald and their ilk. But as I Leftie, I consider them to be crypto-Righties.
And the Left is by no means united in their attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians. That notorious communist Joe Biden has continued to send aid to Netanyahu (although that might be changing). And Harris has affirmed Israel's right to defend itself. Polling has shown that older Lefties remember when Israel was the underdog in the first three Arab-Israeli conflicts, and are generally sympathetic to Israel. Younger lefties who grew up post Camp David have only been exposed to Palestinians getting the short end of the stick.
>Also note that China is pretty good at propaganda and the West is incredibly bad at resisting propaganda. If China decides to invade Taiwan then it will take about six seconds to convince the Left that defending Taiwan is actually Western Imperialism and also racism, and there will be enormous anti-war protests within every western capital.
All too plausible!
In the _current_ situation, the silence from the Left about the PRC's basically colonial policies in Tibet are deafening.
>China’s relocation policy is also a form of social engineering, designed to assimilate minority groups like the Tibetans into the mainstream. Tibetans, who are largely Buddhist, have historically resisted the Communist Party’s intrusive controls on their religion and way of life.
>Images from the villages suggest that religious life is largely absent. Buddhist monasteries and temples are seemingly nowhere to be found. Instead, national flags and portraits of Mr. Xi are everywhere, on light poles, living room walls and balcony railings.
Note that this is _current_, 2020s, not 1950s.
Re
>Nowadays the big issue is Xinjiang, which everyone has been yelling equally impotently about.
It does get some coverage, but _way_ less than e.g. Hamas or than the PRC's maritime claims.
If everyone in Palestine starved, the US would be stuck to a state that had actually committed the g-word... problems related to maintenance of global influence on a similar scale would also be created if the break with Eastern Europe lasted for a couple generations. The state department is not known for its humanitarian interests.
That wouldn't be the G word, it would just be the natural consequence of attacking an enemy who has the capability of cutting you off from the world, while _also_ somehow failing to grow enough food to support your population within your own borders.
If Gaza wants to make war against its neighbours then it had better shrink its population to what it can agriculturally support.
Actually withholding food and aid is in fact a violation of the convention, it doesn’t matter who attacked who first. Not that Oct 7 was the start of anything.
The hostage-takers always have the power to ensure that there will be no "victory" for you, on the terms you are implying. In which case, defeating them is A: the best that you can do and B: absolutely imperative.
And you don't have to wait until the hostage-takers stop stalling for time and come out from behind their human shields.
The youtuber "caspian report" thinks, that the 3-gorges-dam would be the most valuable strategic target. Also that among china's top priorities in the war would be to secure an island from the chain surrounding it (taiwan probably) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icSfjyIm_5w
I am not sure how well the analysis from "caspian report" is. So I'd like to ask your perspective on the 3-gorges-dam, so I can update my priors.
I don't know what would be the most effective areas to target. It might be chip fabs, certain missile or aircraft manufacturing facilities, some kind of raw material bottleneck, or something else entirely. But targets like the Three Gorges Dam are a good example of the kind of targets that precision weapons make vulnerable.
Striking large hydroelectric damns, fossil power plants, large transformers etc. could cripple the power grid, grinding production in other sectors to a halt.
Funnily enough, I did do my Master's dissertation on dams, but it was on the economics of dams in Africa, so it's not really relevant.
In terms of casualties, blowing up the Three Gorges Dam would be equivalent to using nuclear weapons. It wouldn't be unreasonable to treat it as an escalation to nuclear war.
True, the Three Gorges Dam probably wouldn't be a target unless things got really, really bad. Same is true of nuclear power plants. Easy enough to take out, but so dangerous that they'd probably amoung the last things to be hit. We see this in Ukraine. Russia targets Ukraine's grid, but avoids nuclear plants.
Still, it's a vulnerability should it get to that stage. The US also has a far larger nuclear arsenal, so China unlikely to fire first.
>In a global conflict, the US could blockade China and interdict or sink almost all its sea-bound imports. US submarines could sink Chinese shipping beyond the first island chain, whilst air power on the first island chain, as well as in Diego Garcia and Australia, would make it near-impossible for merchant shipping to make it through
China is a huge part of the global economy, including being the world's largest trading nation and world's largest manufacturer. Doing this would plunge both the US & the broader world into Great Depression 2.0, if not worse. It would be a small technological Dark Ages as common consumer goods manufactured there now suddenly disappear from the market. I'm very skeptical that the US could keep up a blockade of China against global pressure- after all, the rest of the world would rightly blame America for their sudden 30-50% unemployment rates, massive inflation, etc. When push comes to shove Europe and South America and so on do not really care that much about Taiwan, but they do care about being cut off from their single largest trading partner. New politicians would be elected on a platform of 'make the US stop destroying our economy'. The US cannot indefinitely cut off China and keep the global economy tanked for a long period of time. (Hell, other countries might threaten to invade the US to make us stop!) The real 'pariah' here would be US, not China.
That's without even getting into what would happen to US public opinion. America thinks losing 4500 soldiers in the Iraq war was some kind of giant catastrophe. Does the American voting public have the stomach for prolonged war with vastly higher casualties, plus a second Great Depression, for years on end? Not a chance.
I agree that the US theoretically could do what you're saying, but it's completely unrealistic in practice
This. Even if the world just stood and watched as China gobbled up Taiwan, that would by itself mean the end of the globalized economy, since it would mean that conquests "just-because" are now acceptable again. Why bother investing abroad if there's no guarantee at all that that country you're investing in will still be there next year? How can you make yourself dependent on complex supply chains that involve on a dozen countries, when every 2-bit dictator can disrupt them with impunity?
Taiwan was part of China before the civil war between the nationalists and communists, and the population is almost entirely ethnic Chinese. It's not exactly the same as Germany conquering Poland in 1939.
China historically considered Taiwan to be a backwater province and paid little attention to it. Japan seized full control of the island in 1895 and retained it for the next 50 years. Taiwan and mainland China were only technically united for the next four years, until the Communists took over the mainland.
My point is that the people on the island and on the mainland have been diverging for over 100 years.
Umm, modern Western Poland was literally part of Germany before it got partitioned after WWI, and Taiwan has been separate for a much longer period (75 years) than Germany from [parts of] Poland (20 years).
Sure, the area around Danzig/Gdansk in Prussia and parts of Silesia had been German prior to the post-WWI era. But Germany annexed Polish territory as far east as the Bug River, and less than 10% of the population of the occupied territory were ethnic Germans. Taiwan meanwhile is 95%+ ethnic Han Chinese, and was part of China since at least the late 17th century. Minus the decades it was occupied by the Japanese, I suppose.
He argued that the economic cost of starting a world war would be so great that no side would ever do it, in a world of inter-linked global trading paterns. He was kind of right - it would be stupid to start such a war. But start it did in 1914. And then again 25 years later we had another one.
In WWI, neutral countries (e.g. Argentina) would have happily sold Germany their food exports, but Britain ruled the seas, and Germans starved. That was even though the Netherlands was available as a neutral entrance for trade.
When push comes to shove, American allies would have to fall in line and accept a US blockade, even if they remain neutral.
I think a war wouldn't instantly escalate to a gloves-off total war, but if a conflict over Taiwan was prolonged and involved large initial strikes on US bases (angering US public opinion much like Pearl Harbour), it could come to that. A US blockade of China might come about after a prolonged Chinese blockage of Taiwan after a failed invasion attempt bogs down. Attempting to starve out the Chinese is barbaric, but if China attempts to starve out Taiwan, it might seem like a necessary response.
The difference between the Angell argument and a future China blockade is that all of the countries experiencing the economic pain & starvation of WW1 were also combatants in said war. They couldn't easily, like, tap out. In my example of a future US-China war and blockade, none of Europe would be a combatant in that war (maybe the UK some), and their interest in Taiwanese democracy is probably very theoretical. They wouldn't be willing to pay the economic cost for a war that doesn't really concern them. That's why the Angell analogy doesn't work.
>American allies would have to fall in line
You can't make sweeping generalizations like this about democracies, because their governments and policies can change. Even if say Macron, Starmer & Scholz are the types who'd basically fall in line now, in the Great Depression 2.0 they'd be replaced by radical populists on a 'stop America destroying our economy' platform
He's saying they would have to fall in line because the US Navy has no peer, and if the US Navy says no ships are going to China, then there is nothing any European country can do about it.
>That was even though the Netherlands was available as a neutral entrance for trade.
Thanks to the Doctrine of Continuous Voyage, the British blockade also intercepted any contraband that appeared to be on the way to Germany by way of neutral ports. The Netherlands and Denmark experienced fairly serious food shortages during WW1, albeit not quite as severe as Germany's Turnip Winter.
> The US cannot indefinitely cut off China and keep the global economy tanked for a long period of time.
Why not? Suppose america wants to stop being world police and were to get lazier and lazier about preventing pirates in the middle east, europe maybe extremely interested in keeping that trade route open for trade with china; but what pressure over america does europe have to force them(me) to start another war in the middle east?
If you check the news, well, yes america is probably going to pull away from the middle east this hurts europes trade with china, and I dont think anyone can plausibly put forward a reason why Europe gets a say?
What matters is probably japan and indias opinion on china on if america gets to make china blockaid; and given japans trade deal with unfavorable terms wants to be Americas first vassal in a post-world-police de-golbalized, world.
> what pressure over america does europe have to force them(me) to start another war in the middle east?
What a strange comment. Europe hasn’t benefitted from any of the Middle Eastern wars and the push for those wars does not come from any European state. I’m not including Israel in Europe. Of course the U.K. and some others will poodle along in support most times.
Europe has very much benefited from america killing pirates in the middle east since the Barbary wars and rebuilding it after europes suicide attempt often called "the world wars".
I suggest you get your leaders to start building some ships, its not impossible for Europe to policing the water ways it depends on, and never allow pirate nations to form; but I dont expect the leadership that dismantled Germans nuclear power plants to have that wisdom.
While US involvement in the Barbary wars was nice for a tiny nation of 5 million or so, it wasn’t necessary.
I definitely agree that Europe needs some ships. The post cold war alliance has been a disaster, nevertheless. I’m not sure what is going on with Germany either, but Germany isn’t Europe. France is 70% nuclear.
Will a hyper competent france alone be able to carry all of them forward with drone and smart phone enabled pirates?
France is a bit of of the odd one out with them maintaining military, humans(I think they are among the few who have a slow baby boom), so france is wiser then the rest of europe; its in theory possible, but they also will be the least interested in it; they can trivially use "the long way" and be close to america; Im sure french wine can be traded for whatever america or south america manages to make in a de-globalizing world giving France allot more options.
The original no fly zone was a UN authorization, so different from Iraq.
Nothing would have happened if the US disagreed. Of course as usual with these kind of wars not only did Europe not benefit, it was a long term disaster for Europe. And Libya, for that matter.
Remember when France wasn’t fully Atlanticist, and the US had to rename French fries?
Remember when someone redefined the "no fly zone" over Libya into a "provide close air support to one faction of the Libyan civil war" zone. Who was that again? Oh, yes, the French. The United States was stupid enough to follow their lead on that.
I'm still not clear on what the French hoped to get out of that. As you say, what actually happened brought no benefit to anyone. But someone in Paris sure thought it would.
> And none of the Middle Eastern countries have a beef with China so it’s unclear why they would block Chinese trade if not for the US.
The Uyghurs are Muslim, Muslim pirates believe they are doing god's work, isis or whatever the warlords call themselves this year will just need a decade owning some ships and they will restart an old problem.
Muslim countries don’t really care about the Uyghurs, and ISIS wants to restore the caliphate, which is a war against Europe and Muslim countries. The piracy issue isn’t something that will have a meaningful effect on world trade and local actors, including the gulf states, Russia, Turkey. Europe and so on have resources to deal with it.
There is a de-facto racial heirarchy in Islam. Arab issues are the issues of all Muslims. Non-Arab issues are not the issue of all Muslims. You will see for example a lot of Indonesians protesting against Israel due to Gaza. But not one will protest against India due to Kashmir. Basically the closer you are to Mecca, the more support you will get. Afghans got a lot of support against the Soviets (but not as much as the Palestinians did). But no one has ever head of the Moros fighting against the Philippines.
So no, Arab tribals are not going to blow up ships passing by them because of the Uyghurs(but some Uyghurs might blow up some Chinese building if China becomes more close to Israel). Funny how it all works.
There is no pan-Muslim solidarity that will cause Muslims in Yemen, or anywhere else, to rally to the defense of e.g. oppressed Uyghurs. There isn't even a pan-Arab-Muslim solidarity that will cause Arab Muslims in Not Palestine to rally to the defense of oppressed Palestinians. The only reason any of them are doing anything more than talk is, A: Israel is very conspicuously involved and pan-Arab antisemitism is a thing and B: they owe Iran big time and Iran is calling in the favor. The Arabs who don't owe anything to Iran, aren't doing anything about Israel/Palestine.
And they won't do anything about China/Uyghur either.
Great read, thanks for sharing. Really drove the point home about the geostrategic advantages that the US has built up over decades in terms of bases on foreign soil and layers upon layers of alliances.
Im curious what you think about these two points:
> In a global conflict, the US could blockade China and interdict or sink almost all its sea-bound imports. US submarines could sink Chinese shipping beyond the first island chain, whilst air power on the first island chain, as well as in Diego Garcia and Australia, would make it near-impossible for merchant shipping to make it through.
How do you think this would square with China's greater shipbuilding capacity? (https://www.csis.org/analysis/threat-chinas-shipbuilding-empire) I assume it's cheaper and faster to destroy things, but I wonder if that's enough given the disparity in construction costs.
> China does not have this option to nearly the same extent, as it will lose access to global trade due to blockade, and be a pariah among Western democracies for invading Taiwan.
I'm a bit pessimistic about this. Russian gas is still being purchased by European states despite the war in Ukraine: "EU statistics and Reuters calculations show the rise in LNG has pushed the share of Russian gas in EU supply back up to around 15% after pipeline imports from Gazprom (GAZP.MM), opens new tab had plunged since the war to 8.7% from 37% of EU gas supply." (source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/new-west-east-route-keeps-europe-hooked-russian-gas-2024-04-03/). I can very well see China being a pariah for invading Taiwan, but still being done business with by neutral powers. Worse, I think less US-aligned powers like Brazil would capitalize on the war and try to extract good deals from China, thus softly aligning itself with China. Im not sure how India would react given its present animosity towards China.
China does have a far, far, far greater shipbuilidng capacity than the US. This is one the US's key weaknesses Vs China. However, US allies (South Korea and Japan) build slighty more ships than China does, so a China Vs the collective West conflict is somewhat even on shipbuilding. Even if South Korea stays neutral, the US could still purchase large amounts of ships from it. In the early years of WW2 prior to lend-lease or US entry to the war, the British purchased $1,200,000,000 worth of aircraft from the US, with expected deliveries being 500 aircraft per month. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Purchasing_Commission#:~:text=By%20December%201940%20British%20cash,The%20aircraft%20were%20supplied%20unarmed. That's 6000 aircraft per year, which is similar to German total German aircraft production in 1940 (7,800) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II. So the UK was planning to purchase almost as many aircraft as Germany could make from the US whilst the US remained neutral.
There's simply no way to make ships capable of transporting a meaningful amount of cargo for anything like the $75,000 cost of a JDAM. Air dominance of the Indian Ocean (thanks to Diego Garcia) and the Pacific (thanks to Guam, Philippines, Japan, etc.) means Chinese trade can be blocked if needed. US submarines can also play a role.
On your second point around 'would neutral powers keep trading with China' I think they'll be a range of responses. What you have to remember is that the US and Europe, are not at war with Russia, and Ukraine, whilst important, is not a vital secuirty interest. Although European states keep buying some Russian gas, they do inforce sanctions in other areas.
If a China-US conflict escalates, China will be able to trade with Eurasian allies over land (Russia, Iran), but the US can choose to close maritime routes if it wants to. In WW1, the Netherlands was neutral, lots of South American countries were neutral. In theory, Germany should have been able to access world markets trading via the Neutral Netherlands. Instead, Britain boarded and searched neutral ships. Germans starved in the turnip winter of 1917. The blockage killed probably around 300,000 German civilians. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1914%E2%80%931919).
Brazil wouldn't like the US interdicting its trade with China, but in a gloves off war it would have no recourse but to go along with it. It couldn't do anything to stop the US navy boarding or sinking its ships. Much like neutral Argentina couldn't trade with Germany in WW1.
European states might not enforce a total ban on Chinese trade, but they'd probably be sufficiently horrified by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to halt sales of key technologies. They would also face huge pressure from the US, their ally, to restrict trade further.
At the moment, America might want Europe to stop buying Russian gas, but it's not at war with Russia. If American boys were dying daily, expect a hell of a lot more diplomatic pressure. Europe has lived under the US security umbrella since 1945 (for the western part at least). Expect the US to get what it wants when it really needs it.
India might go its own way. No one really knows. It wouldn't like seeing China invade Taiwan, so it would probably cosy up to the US a bit as China would be seen as more aggressive and more of a threat, but it might not join in the conflict in any meaningful sense. Again, though, India conducts most of its trade with China through maritime routes, and the US could control these whether India likes it or not.
It’s great that the Europe has decided to be rational about their energy supply, particularly after what was probably an American - and definitely an American backed attack - on the pipeline.
There's nothing "rational" about remaining dependent on one's ideological and geopolitical enemy.
It seems to me that you're trying to smuggle in the assertion that Europe _shouldn't_ treat Russia as its ideological and geopolitical enemy. Whether that is a sensible position is a different discussion.
A cooperation between different news outlets (SPIEGEL, ZDF) has tracked pretty conclusively the men who did the operation (with names and everything - they are wanted now in Germany), and it was a Ukrainian commando. There are no indications that the US were involved.
I don't think "newspaper report" captures it. It was a 6 months investigation of a team of more than two dozen reporters. And that is on top of the research by crimial bureaus of several countries to which they also had access, as well as intelligence assessments from several countries. The SPIEGEL article alone is a 60 minutes read. This is exactly the due process you are talking about.
It seems clear that it was a specialist team of 6 people, some of which have been identified. At least one is member of the Ukrainian military. The boat is known, as is the explosive material. It is not clear how far up the order was given, for example whether Selenskyj was informed or gave the order. But I don't think there is any doubt that this was a Ukrainian operation. The open question is just whether and up to which level this was run by the government, versus a "private" operation.
How long did Sabrina Erdely spend investigating "rape culture" at UVA before she published? And I consider Der Spiegel to be about as credible as Rolling Stone at this point.
ZDF is better, which makes this worth paying attention to at least. But it still could turn out to be misinformation, or an overhyped nothingburger, and "but a Very Serious News Organization conducted a Very Serious Investigation" is not the slam dunk you think it is.
Thank for sharing. I hope Chinese leadership agrees and also doesn't experience any domestic scenarios that they think warrant distracting people with a war. Another large war would be an incredibly bad outcome for the entire world.
Why are the Chinese so obsessed with reclaiming "lost" territory? You don't see the UK scheming to get Southern Ireland back, nor Australia lamenting the loss of Papua New Guinea, nor Germany being particularly interested in East Prussia, nor Indonesia worrying about East Timor, nor Bolivia dreaming of retaking Antofagasta, and so on, and so on.
The only counties which do dream of retaking foreign territories are the ones where the leadership wants to distract the people from their own problems -- places like China, Russia, North Korea, 1980s Argentina, and so forth.
If you start a war as a distraction, you pick a small country that you're pretty sure you can beat. You don't pick a country that can nuke your capital.
Theres lots of reasons to think Taiwan would be better equipped for a war then Ukraine was and Ukraine is still a half ass support (I honestly think nato is using half-russians to kill russians with their old tech on a knife edge grinding conflict intentionally) while twiwan, the very very very important chip maker, is invaluable
The issue isn't who is better *equipped*, it is who is better *prepared*. The Kuwaiti and Saudi armies were magnificently equipped in 1991; that much oil money buys way fancier planes and tanks than Iraq's collection of mismatched leftovers. But Kuwait fell in hours, and the Saudis had to call on Uncle Sam to backstop them, because they knew the *people* behind all those tanks and planes were mostly just up for parades and air shows.
Ukraine, in 2014, was similarly ill-prepared for an actual war. And they learned from their mistake, grew the beard, and leveled up into possibly the toughest army on the European continent. Taiwan hasn't taken military *training* seriously in forever, doesn't have the professional officer and NCO corps it needs, and its army is almost certainly lacking in cohesion.
They have the advantage of defending an island, rather than a couple thousand kilometers of steppe, but that may not be enough.
And once it gets attacked, I'd bet that the chip fabs all get bombed, anyway, so at that point there's no real advantage. The US definitely wants to avoid letting a conflict get to that point, but once the invasion starts and the chip fabs blow up and the engineers flee, there's no further incentive to get involved (aside from game theory and loyalty).
And it'd be a lot harder to supply a resistance across the ocean, with no friendly countries sharing a border.
isnt japan allied and an interested party in china not grabbing local islands?
Threats mostly work on rational actors, and theres no promise that china is run rationally; but their baby boom is the worse in the world(debatable russia's will be worse after they kill off a bunch of young men, but still) and they got less wealth from it, for all the weakness america has, I'm still not a peasant farmer living on 3 dollars a day with family who got caught up in communistic purges. The young were asked to work "996" and they are in response "laying flat" that makes western working debates look tame.
If china invade taiwan, china will starve, and will lose access to its 99-year loans across the world(read, retirement plan for baby boom) and america will at minimum drop flash drives of anti communist facts, some lies, and planning.
I think the ukraine war made more sense for Russia to roll the dice on then tiawan
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 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Harris: 47/47/54/54 (51/51/55/53)
Trump: 50/51/47/45 (46/45/45/45)
Since 3 weeks ago there has been a swing from Harris to Trump in real money markets but not in play markets. I am not sure what explains this divergence.
> swing from Harris to Trump in real money markets but not in play markets
harris used bots to threw money at the markets to get a media story(or was punished for hubris and people are draining free money correcting it; but more likely the temp surge), play markets need to remove bots / "high rollers" to effect it less
It seems like Harris is avoiding unscripted appearances, which is negatively reminiscent of Biden. People who pay attention to unscripted interactions and solid policy commitments may have noticed that there's nothing really there yet.
On the one hand, it might be a sign of hidden weakness. On the other hand, maybe she's being advised by the same team that had Obama repeatedly refuse to show his birth certificate.
Overall, the structure of this election is extremely uncertain and it isn't clear that there is a real difference between 47 vs 55 at this point. For example, from a modeling perspective, how much of an incumbency factor should attach to Harris? How defined is the Harris candidacy at this point (vs how defined it will be on election day)? Heck, how defined is the Trump candidacy at this point, various court cases, what will his abortion-stance be on election day, does any of that matter to any actual voter?
Also, it would be useful to better understand how big each of these markets is. From active observation of manifold, I've noticed:
(1) there are people putting actual money into the market to make bets, even though that converts to play money. Hard to spot smaller buyers, but there are people popping up from time to time with $1000 worth of manifold tokens. I know this isn't "serious" money, but it is something.
(2) an individual trader can get excited about a question and distort it substantially, but for the big questions like the US presidential election, the bulk of the distortion is short-lived (corrected within a day.) I'm not sure if the effects get fully removed, though.
(3) The trading costs in manifold markets are still fairly high, though the US presidential election is one of the more liquid.
(4) other questions (like sports) give some evidence that there are fans who trade with a bias and can distort the market (though I think this is also true in sports betting in the UK, where real money is at stake)
>it isn't clear that there is a real difference between 47 vs 55 at this point
Dumb question: Is there information on bid/ask spreads in these markets? Would that give information on how close to equilibrium (at least local to each market) they are?
There isn't a consistent bid/ask spread. In some markets, there are significant limit orders that, functionally, create a bid-ask, but those don't necessarily get renewed as the market moves.
Nassim Taleb talked about this. No skin in the game for play markets. Money markets? Well, you might actually lose.
Which is another reason for the government to look askance at the money markets (besides not having thought out how to get their piece of the action yet).
Disagree; when you test play and money markets head to head, they're usually about equal. Some play markets with good structures eg Metaculus are better than the best money market AFAICT. I agree this is surprising but I think it's because there are too many legal limits on money markets for them to do a very good job.
That test would only show something is they were wildly insane; given that they are non-independent and if one market is better then another you are rewarded for coping the other(e.g. a dumb easy idea).
Which one is the source of knowledge and the better predictor would need to look at error bars and do strange math and probably allot of data to tease out the result; *from data*.
If we are doing it from theory, theres roughly two competing bad factors, on money markets you have to fill out tax information and other legalese paper work, slowing down liquidity, reputation markets have... low stakes and probably bot problems. How do you compare the two and how big are they really?
I am very profitable in both play money and real money markets. The real money markets are massively more difficult to beat. And I'm pretty confident they would win out given a sufficiently large sample of questions.
According to Nate Silver, polling in Pennsylvania is neck and neck, even with the current convention bounce. I like Manifold but it stands to reason people don't care so much about losing play money.
I think I have figured out the whole "luxury beliefs" things. It is a specificially American problem that recently got exported. Somehow Americans do not like to declare political beliefs formally. The Democratic Party or The New York Times are only liberal by convention, there is absolutely no such thing as a formal Liberal Manifesto they would sign. Interestingly on the right it is a bit more formal, Buckley was clear that the National Review is fusionist (libertarian-conservative fusion) but predominantly Anti-Communist.
Now it has affected Europe too. Feminism is everywhere, but informally. There is no Feminist Party, nor a platform inside a party, no manifesto, no list of feminist principles, nothing. It is just a vibe. This is so much different from the old, organized, disciplined socialist movements that had a very explicit list of principles, The Guardian had a Reformist mission statement in 1821 and so on.
Such a situation is obviously very conducive to fashion and not really taking things seriously.
> I think I have figured out the whole "luxury beliefs" things. It is a specificially American problem that recently got exported.
... what about every religion ever? Did john poke his fingers into the zombie Jesus hands, are you 100% sure European peasant? Is it in your best interest to stone nonbelievers, women in isis ruled territory?
America is exporting a specific religion(woke) yes, but this isnt a new pattern, its a minor variation on an old one, signaling and ingroup beliefs for the new env, the internet where you cant tell if someone is fasting and direct violence on nonbelievers is harder.
a. Beliefs I hold that are costless for me, but would be costly for others?
b. Beliefs I hold that impose a cost on me, but I can pay it without too much trouble and others can't?
An example of (a) would be dismissing concerns about urban crime as racist when I live in a very safe suburb and never go downtown. An example of (b) would be advising everyone to follow their passions when choosing a major in school and not worry about future jobs, when I'm a trust fund kid who doesn't have to worry about making a living.
The distinction you point out sends more like the "Democratic Party is defined bottom-up, Republican Party is defined top-down" which made the round a few months ago? Bottom-up coalitions are less likely to produce sweeping manifestos, and instead restrict themselves to vague statements of principles that can be interpreted in many ways. (See also the NYT's recent complaint about the US Constitution.) This applies even if some of the groups in the coalition are themselves top-down.
I think "luxury beliefs" was more about restricted knowledge about the dangers of freedom? That is, everyone says "you're free to do X or Y", but the knowledge that "99.99% of the time Y is very bad so you shouldn't do it" isn't nearly as widespread, and in particular doesn't go viral on media in circles that only celebrate the vague bottom-up ideal of "freedom".
If you are looking back to Buckley to describe the modern Republican party, then you've gone astray. I think I agree with you in the first part, that there is no series of values that the Democrats/Progressives/Left would all agree to, but I think it's just as clearly correct about the Republicans/Conservatives/Right.
Both parties have moved largely to vibes, which is why Trump thinks he can get away with changing his stance on abortion and why Harris is such a completely different candidate now than she was in here 2020 run. Actual principles, in major party politics, are a thing of the past, if they ever truly existed.
Is Trump changing on abortion? His judges have done a lot that the dems want to roll back, so it doesnt take much for him to be the pro-life candidate.
While he talked a manifestly untrue pro-life game in 2016, what he vowed to do and did was overturn Roe. He's now reverted to basically what he was before, which is pretty much what most people are, abortion supporter through some nebulous teen number of weeks.
He is voting against the repeal of the six week ban, last I heard, even though he thinks six weeks is too short a time.
I've noticed this as well about how many liberal/progressive Americans talk about politics. It's very vibes-based and might sometimes hint at the general shape of some sort of principle, but insists on staying weirdly nebulous and hard to define.
I'll admit I find it somewhat maddening, even though I consider myself a leftist. I think political discourse is best when people are clear and unambiguous about what they support, both in basic principles and in specific public policies.
Why do many liberal/progressive Americans talk about politics in this way?
Best I can figure is that it's one or both of two things...
1. It's more conducive to virtue-signaling and status-raising. To maximize status and perceived virtue, you want to seem stronger and more intense in your politics than the average progressive but also not jumping too far ahead in specifics. This is hard when dealing with specific policies, where it often is just a simple "agree/disagree" proposition, and where arguing for stricter policies could be seen as jumping too far ahead in a way that could threaten the success of the progressive program. With something very vibes-based, it's easier to sound very strong and intense while not having to deal with specific policies.
2. It allows for more rapid change. For example, it allows for what Scott calls the euphemism treadmill to operate more quickly. You don't need some sort of formal political forum to openly debate words or phrases, anybody in a position of power can just set a new precedent out of nowhere, and suddenly a word or phrase that was Ok to use yesterday is now forbidden in all of the halls of power.
The alternative to "vibes" is to advocate specific policies. And specific policies can actually be tried and found to be flawed... or even if they're not tried then people can at least poke holes in them.
I remember how quickly "Defund the Police" was replaced by "well of course that doesn't literally mean defund the police it just means making the police work better in some unspecific way". In the heat of the George Floyd riots there was the political will to actually make some meaningful changes somewhere if anyone had actually been able to propose anything that was actually a good idea that might solve the (supposed) problems. But no actual ideas were forthcoming, nobody wants to solve the problem, they just want to ride it to power.
Major politicians have been criticized for about forever for riding a popular rant to power, but never fixing it. It turns out actually fixing things is hard, but getting people angry is easy. Ask Trump about Roe v Wade, which was a promise kept but didn't work out how he wanted. Now he's officially and publicly pro-choice to roll back some of what might be hurting him politically.
I would love if a politician would actually tell us the truth, but the reality is that the truth would probably cost them the election (even if it got my vote and others like me). Actual fixes almost always involves tradeoffs. The softer version of defunding the police would still cause a lot of disruption and anger politically active groups. Better to suggest something be done but fail, in the eyes of someone trying to get elected, then to suggest something better and succeed at personal cost.
As an addendum to point 1, the vagueness defangs the "leftist purity spiral" phenomenon. As long as no one's clear what everyone's positions *actually* are, everyone can represent themselves as "just to the left of the median leftist," which is the most comfortable position, and no one needs to know what that position actually is. If everyone's beliefs were legible, everyone trying to be left of average could cause a collapse into electoral irrelevance, but vague positions don't need to update like that.
Good points. In that sense, it's probably not surprising if European nations are adopting these American political strategies as JustAnOgre alluded to.
Each square of a 9x9 square board has a beetle sitting in its center. At a given time, all beetles simultaneously move, each crawling *diagonally* into some neighboring square. None remains where it was, none crawls off the board, each finds a new place 1 diagonal step away from where it started. After the move's finished, some squares will have more than one beetle on them, and some will be empty. Find the minimum of empty squares - the least number of them that can occur.
Pbybe gur tevq va n purffobneq cnggrea, znxvat gur pbearef (naq zvqqyr gvyr) juvgr. Jura zbivat qvntbanyyl, orrgyrf xrrc gur pbybe bs gurve svryq, fb jr unir gjb frcnengr ceboyrzf ba bhe unaq.
Sbe gur sbhegl oynpx-svryq orrgyrf, n fbyhgvba (jvgubhg rzcgl gvyrf) rkvfgf naq vf yrsg nf na rkrepvfr gb gur ernqre. (hafbyirq obahf dhrfgvba: ubj znal qvfgvapg fbyhgvbaf rkvfg?)
Gur sbhegl-bar juvgr-svryq orrgyrf ner zber gebhoyrfbzr. Rahzrengr gur ebjf ba gur obneq sebz mreb gb rvtug. Gurer ner gjragl-svir juvgr svryqf va rira ebjf naq fvkgrra juvgr svryqf va bqq ebjf. Rirel orrgyr zhfg zbir sebz na bqq ebj gb na rira ebj, be ivpr irefn. Guvf zrnaf gung avar juvgr svryqf va rira ebjf jvyy abg trg n orrgyr. N cnegvphyne fbyhgvba jbhyq or gb unir gur fvkgrra bqq juvgr orrgyrf fjnc cynprf jvgu gurve arvtuobef va nal tybonyyl svkrq qvntbany qverpgvba.
V nyfb unir n gurberz gung nal fbyhgvba bs jvgu A rzcgl svryqf pna or ghearq vagb n fbyhgvba jurer (81-A) orrgyrf whfg fjnc cbfvgvbaf cnvejvfr, ohg V qvq abg raq hc arrqvat vg nsgre nyy.
Jr ner onfvpnyyl ybbxvat sbe pybfrq ybbcf. Vs lbh pna svaq n pybfrq ybbc bs qvntbanyf gura rnpu orrgyr pna zbir bar fgrc nybat gung ybbc, serrvat hc ab fcnprf.
Vs jr vzntvar gung gur nyy sbhe pbearef bs bhe purffobneq ner pbybherq juvgr, gura lbh pna rnfvyl qenj pybfrq ybbcf pbirevat nyy gur oynpx fdhnerf.
Jung nobhg gur juvgr fdhnerf? Jryy, gur sbhe pbearef ner boivbhfyl bhg. Ohg V guvax gurer'f n ahzore bs bgure juvgr fdhnerf juvpu lbh pna'g dhvgr znantr gb uvg jvgu pybfrq ybbcf. Gur orfg fbyhgvba V'ir sbhaq fb sne yrnirf guerr, fb V guvax gur nafjre zvtug or frira. Ohg V unir n farnxvat fhfcvpvba gung vg zvtug npghnyyl or svir.
Lbhe frira pnaabg jbex. Gurer ner gjragl-svir orrgyrf ba juvgr fdhnerf ba bqq ebjf naq fvkgrra ba juvgr fdhnerf ba rira ebjf. Nyy orrgyrf zhfg fjvgpu sebz rira gb bqq be ivpr irefn, yrnivat ng yrnfg avar juvgr fdhnerf ba bqq ebjf habpphcvrq nsgre gur zbir. Guvf vf nyfb gur zvavzhz sbe juvgr. Vg vf npuvrirq sbe rknzcyr ol rirel orrgyr ba na rira ebj zbivat gb gur gbc yrsg (naq nyy orrgyrf ba bqq ebjf zbivat gb gur obggbz evtug vs gurl pna, naq neovgenevyl bgurejvfr). Fb avar rzcgl fdhnerf ba juvgr.
Ba oynpx, yvsr vf rnfvre, nf gurer ner gjragl orrgyrf ba oynpx fdhnerf ba bqq ebjf naq gur fnzr ahzore ba rira ebjf. V nterr jvgu lbhe pbapyhfvba gung nyy oynpx fdhnerf pna erznva bpphcvrq.
Wanna watch something beautiful, entertaining, rational, educational, interesting, and fun? I didn't think so, but I'll share my Route 66 documentary anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlSDE7MjbI
Can you give a sense of what makes it beautiful? Entertaining? Interesting? Fun?
I've heard so many things described with such terms that were anything but, I'm skeptical. I wouldn't be surprised if others have a similarly high degree of skepticism.
But if you laid out say one 30-second portion that illustrated with some nice prose, that would probably convince me to click.
I'd happily talk about it all day! I can tell you what it ain't. It ain't no AI voices and burned-in animated captions, it ain't me sitting around the house talking to a camera, it ain't no slide show disguised as a video, and it ain't no unenthusiastic presenter stating the obvious. Or I can tell you what it is. It's me (American, irreverent but kind) and my pardner (Australian, cute, funny) traveling the country, rediscovering patriotism, and improvising a remarkably eloquent and inspirational speech bit by bit as we go. The weird thing about making a documentary is, you don't know what it's about until it's over. It turns out, this one's about the American Dream. I've done a lot of things in my life, and out of all the things I've done, I'm most proud of this. You can cheat by watching this 8 minute version where it's just the American Dream speech ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfPVpLfTUDg ) but if you do that you'll miss the serendipity of the outlandishly glamorous Coleman Theater in the middle of Nowhere Oklahoma, the wife of the dead chainsaw carver in Sullivan Missouri who's kept his shop open for 20 years and never remarried, my purchase of a steel-tongued drum followed by my improvising alongside a player of a native American flute in Oatman Arizona, and the abandoned houses of Amboy California where the walls have stories that they can't tell so I have to do it for them.
I'm looking to start a career as an actuary in the UK and I would love to chat to someone already already working as one for basic career advice and to build my mental model of the industry. Any ACXers that can help me out with this?
>Is there some incredibly eloquent and original answer that manages to convey joint firmness and compassion without using the dreaded “I’m sorry you feel that way” phrase? Maybe, but it’s not realistic to expect the average person to figure out a bespoke phrasing in the heat of the moment.
It's not incredibly eloquent but in my view it is incredibly obvious and straightforward: "Whether or not I love you isn't the issue, the issue is you're a drug addict and I know that any money I give you will go towards drugs. Also please stop with the emotional blackmail. The answer is no and if you chose to interpret that as me not loving you then that's your choice." The other 2 examples have similarly straightforward responses with having to resort to something patronizing like "I'm sorry you feel that way."
Stop being afraid of confrontation. Life is very simple when you're direct and honest.
I agree that it is better to step forward into the disagreement rather than paper it over. The only part of what you said I take issue with is calling what the person is doing emotional blackmail. (Presumably you're thinking of Scott's example of the drug addicted family member who asked for money and then accused the person who would not give it of not loving them.). There are 2 reasons not to do that. First, identifying what the person is doing as emotional blackmail is based on a particular model of why they are saying "you don't love me" : They are saying it in an effort to make the listener feel so guilty that they cough up the money. That may be why they're saying it but it's quite plausible that they are saying it because they really do believe that if the person loved them they would give them money for drugs. Addictions aren't just cravings for drugs, they are whole systems of deluded belief. The only thing I've even been addicted to is nicotine, but while I was addicted, at the end of grad school, I really did believe that if I quit smoking I would not be able to write my dissertation. I think an addict begging for money for their drug is likely to have a similar delusion going on. They truly need the drug today, because without it life would be so painful they'd throw themselves in front of a train. They have tried to stop the drug and they can't, so they have no choice but to ask for help buying the drug. If the family member believed them, they would respond to their desperate and honest plea.
The other reason not to sling a term like emotional blackmail at them is that it's mean and insulting. Why do that? It may be inaccurate, and if so you're just being cruel, and in any case it is going to make it much harder for the person you're speaking to to take in what you say. You've set it up so that when they take in the news that you won't give them money for drugs they also have to take in the even worse news that you think they're an emotional blackmailer.
Even if they mean it genuinely, and do honestly feel that the other person must not love them if they won't even help them this little bit, it is still manipulation. "You must do this thing or else you don't love me!"
And why am I supposed to love you? Just by an accident of birth that we're family? How close family? Am I supposed to just do whatever you say and give you everything you ask for, or else I don't love you? I wouldn't do it for a small child demanding I let them do something dangerous or foolish, and I'm not going to do it for an adult.
I think for most people with addict family members, the first couple of times, okay., you give in. But when it's the twentieth time, or the hundredth time, it begins to look more like blackmail by playing on emotional bonds: "do this or else I will say you hate me and then you will feel bad and you should feel bad because you are a bad person, you are supposed to love me and help me and you're not doing that, only bad awful people are like that so you must be a bad, awful person and I will tell everyone you are a bad, awful person!"
I've mentioned I have a family member who engages in this kind of emotional manipulation, by exaggerated 'yes I am bad and awful and you hate me, of course you do, and you are right to hate me' carry-on in response to any criticism or demurral. I know they're not sitting down planning it out like a scheme to say and do these things, but it's still manipulation because they are trying to make me feel so bad for evoking this reaction in them that I will stop doing what evokes this reaction and they can then do what they wanted to do, the way they wanted to do it. It's not a consciously planned attack, they are highly-strung and do suffer from that "I am a terrible waste of space" self-evaluation, but it is still emotional blackmail when they are trying to use their genuine suffering to make me dance to their tune. I don't hate them, but if they keep saying "you do hate me, you do" then don't be surprised when one day I say back "yeah, you're right, I do hate you".
People who are behaving badly need to be told that they're behaving badly. That's the *actual* loving response, because it has the highest chance of affecting change in them. The diplomatic polite bs everyone does in normal life is actually incredibly selfish. You internalize it as "being nice" but what you're actually doing is protecting yourself. "You need to be set straight but I'm not going to be the one to do it and risk either losing a social ally or acquiring a reputation for meanness. So I'll just tell you a pleasant status-affirming lie or regurgitate a mindless platitude like ISYFTW." This is the matrix of social deception which enables the existence of bad manipulative people.
>Addictions aren't just cravings for drugs, they are whole systems of deluded belief.
Yes, and that's precisely why it's important to give them honest feedback about what their disease is doing to them. Addicts hit rock bottom when reality rips the blinders off and they honestly see themselves for what they've become. An extreme example is something like "did I really just blow a guy for $20 worth of heroin? Jesus, I've got a problem." A low-key version of that is "huh, a person I trust and respect just accused me of emotional blackmail and if I'm honest with myself I have to admit that what I just did meets the technical definition. Maybe I should think about that."
Well, Wanda, I don’t think I was advocating being nice. I was in agreement with your telling the addict bluntly that you are not giving them money, which I guarantee you the addict will not experience as your being nice. As regards telling them they’re committing emotional blackmail, let’s set aside the question of whether the addict is talking about being unloved purely as a way of manipulating you. I think it is wiser to skip calling what they do emotional blackmail, if your goal is to increase the chance that the person will make a serious effort to get off the drugs. The reason is that they are already going to lean strongly towards rejecting your message of “nope, drugs aren’t what you need,” and if you mix that unwelcome message in with something else hard to hear you further reduce the chance they will pay any attention to what you said. And besides, you can effectively protest the use of “you don’t love me” without using the term “emotional blackmail.” You can say, “of course I love you, and I know you know that, and it’s very unfair of you to accuse me of not caring because I won’t give you money to buy more poison.” So your best shot, if you want to be effective, is to say nope, no money for drugs today or any other day, ever. You have to get off the drugs. If you want help getting into a rehab, I will help you do that.”
What about the argument that you need to help them bottom out? Well, just calling them emotional blackmailers isn’t likely to do the trick. If they’re chronic drug users they have already done lots of humiliating and awful things — things like your example of giving a blow job for 20 bucks. They have probably also gotten lots of criticism and been ejected from their job and even from places like Dunkin Donuts because they are a disgusting smelly ridiculous staggering mess. I read an article about Philip Seymour Hoffman in the months before his death. He was in some setting where nobody knew who he was, and somebody asked what he did for a living. He answered that he was a heroin addict. Most chronic addicts I have encountered (I’m a psychologist) already hate themselves. I doubt that the idea of you gotta hit bottom is even valid, but even if it is most addicts have so many reasons to despise themselves already that an accusation of emotional blackmail isn’t going to tip the scales.
However, if your goal is not to get through to the addict, but to have a really satisfying anger catharsis, I recommend that you do not stop with calling them emotional blackmailers. Tell them they’re disgusting and a waste of space. Say that people of character are able to keep from becoming addicts, so their addiction is a sign of their essential defectiveness. Say that even their mother hopes they OD soon so that there are no more of these visits. Then kick them hard in the stomach. While they are doubled over, knock them on their back and spit on them before you leave. If you luck out with the timing you can even take a shit on their chest.
They deserve to be made to feel sad and bad for attempting to impose on a loved one for money in the first place, and then doubly so for accusing that loved one of not loving them because they reasonably refuse to help feed the addiction. It doesn't matter what their motivation is; they can sincerely feel that being denied cash to feed their habit means their loved one doesn't care about them, but they can't be excused from *saying so* to their loved one. Boundaries matter, and "I will not be made to feel emotionally blackmailed" is a good one.
Sometimes righteous indignation is indeed called for! If telling an addict, "I'm not going to give you money to feed your addiction, and I feel like you're attempting to emotionally blackmail me into doing so" speeds that addict to the kind of rock bottom that motivates a recovery...excellent!
I care less for addicts, but ive talked a suicidal teenager away from self harm; theres also "emotional blackmail" there, that is just the brains actual experience given dysfunctional hormones. Its not hard to tell its a irrational outburst so how you react should probably be tactically tactful, tacitly.
Given a thought experiment of a completely innocent party engaging in an activity; you should probably revisit the criteria for automatically assuming the low status parties guilt.
I'm not saying you're wrong - I actually mostly agree - but I feel like the clarity required to be able to identify and express this position is rare. Partly that's just how people are (which is perhaps a way of saying "most people are too stupid for that"). And partly I think it's because the person asking for money is deliberately doing so in a way that makes this clarity hard, and that way differs from person to person, so it's easier to spot when it's being done to someone else, than it is to spot when it's being done to you.
Do you agree? Do you find it harder to do this for yourself than to help other people do it?
I definitely agree with your general point: that it's hard to think clearly when you're feeling defensive and manipulative people deliberately try to put you on a defensive footing for precisely that reason. I'm pretty sure I'm immune to the kinds of obvious bad-faith manipulation presented in the 3 examples above, but sure, I definitely lose my ability to be analytical when someone elicits an emotional response from me. But the only people who can do that to me are generally people I'm already close to. This is one of the reasons why it's bad to be close to bad people: they're inside your defenses and so can turn you in knots. I would never be close to either an addict or anyone who would make either of the other two histrionic manipulative arguments presented.
And frankly if a loved one said something as openly manipulative as "they accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative’s sacrifice and calling them a bad person" I think it's completely appropriate to be openly aggressive back at them. "Haha triggered, quit being a pussy" is an excellent choice. What you're communicating is your absolute refusal to be manipulated. If they don't realize that and end the relationship then in my view that's a good outcome because, as I said above, it's bad to be close to bad people. Let them self-select out. Economists call that a separating equilibrium.
IMO the advice in this post is for emotionally immature/socially awkward people who don't have good boundaries and find social interaction fraught. From what I've gathered from his writing over the years, Scott is a socially awkward autist who's pathologically afraid of confrontation. He probably doesn't have the ability to defend his own boundaries with aggression so he falls back on this patronizing passive-aggressive crutch.
Maybe this is obvious to others, but I have been thinking recently about how some religions offer, among other things, a release from anxiety. Jesus says to consider the lilies in the field. They don't worry about tomorrow and nor should you. Kierkegaard goes into that theme at length. Likewise, Buddhism basically says not to worry about anything. The notion of a Buddha is one without anxiety.
Why would relief from anxiety be such a big selling point for major religions? I mean, sure, some also offer eternal salvation and such stuff, but simply relieving anxiety, the worries of the day, is a big attraction to them as well.
I got to thinking about the close connection between worrying about the future and planning for the future. The ability to plan is often considered a huge asset for humans compared to other animals. But it's hard to imagine the existence of planning without worry. Lilies don't worry about tomorrow because they have no concept of tomorrow.
I think here about Erik Hoel's Gossip Trap, the notion that it took so long for humans to establish hierarchical societies because it was hard for a band of humans to grow emotionally and culturally above the maturity of highschool students. When eventually they did, they formed societies in which planning suddenly, at long last, became extremely important. But this societal evolution perhaps also introduced anxiety into the human condition at a level it hadn't existed before.
So anxiety became a problem in need of a solution. Along comes some religions which offer, among other things, the solution to worry.
According to the perennialists, one goal of spirituality is to restore the sense of eternity, living fully present in the now. This sense used to be attained in the normal course of growing up, same as bodily development, and the loss of this sense is what pops up in various traditions as the Fall: the stories of Golden Ages, of Eden, are stories of that time where everyone had this sense.
There are traditions that do a better job of integrating this sense with the world, such as Taoism, and tantric strains of either Hinduism or Buddhism, or something like the Sufis, whom, while seeing the world as relatively unimportant, tend to function well in it.
So yeah, you have an interesting story from another angle, but also arriving at this thing the perennialists write about.
Heathen retired psychologist here. Several points that seem relevant to me:
Emotions evolved for a reason. Every emotional response lies on a continuum. There is an ideal level or range of response for each emotion that provides the most adaptive response to any given situation. Since we only ever experience the world second hand through our senses and our brain's interpretation of sensory input, our emotional responses are always a response to a perception. Accuracy may vary.
Emotions such as anger, fear, worry/anxiety, etc. activate the autonomic nervous system, or fight/flight/freeze response, a very ancient psychophysiological mechanism which evolved to help an organism survive a predator attack. Most humans these days are not attacked physically (except in situations like war, etc.), but we still activate the same response when we perceive a threat. Most threats in the modern world are psychological, not physical, so the fight/flight/freeze response is usually maladaptive.
This is not to say that anxiety is always maladaptive. The right amount of anxiety can improve performance and motivate change. It's when the level doesn't match the situation that we start having problems. Remember, we don't have anxiety unless we perceive a threat. No threat perception, no anxiety, even if there actually is a threat. Threat perception, even when none exists, provokes anxiety. Oh, and the nature of the perceived threat may be internal ("I'm going to fail") or external ("Someone is yelling at me"). Most of the time, people over-respond, which results in all kinds of problems, but under-response can happen too. For a deeper dive, see Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome.
Anxiety can be adaptive. Think "getting psyched up," vs "getting psyched out." It's a common part of sports/performance psychology. There are all sorts of ways to manage this.
As for religion, one can certainly learn to manage anxiety without it. One's belief system contributes a lot to one's perception of the world. Religion means a lot of different things, some of which can be comforting, some quite disturbing. I would think that faith, or the belief in something without evidence, tends to push one's perceptions in the direction of inaccuracy. Not saying this proves anything, but in over 40 years of practice, I did not observe religious people suffering less from anxiety.
Of course, there's a lot more to be said about this that is beyond the scope of this format.
Thanks. I should have clarified that I'm interested here in the historical reason for a focus on anxiety by The Gospels not what religion may have to offer in practice for people today. As you say, "Most threats in the modern world are psychological, not physical, so the fight/flight/freeze response is usually maladaptive." The world was probably more dangerous 2000-2500 years ago, but I'd guess that most of the anxiety one felt in Roman/Indian/Chinese societies then was also maladaptive. So the first part of my thesis is that there was an excessive (maladaptive) amount of anxiety in ancient societies and that some religions such as Christianity and Buddhism came along with great sales pitches to relieve it. I don't claim that religions successfully relieved anxiety at great rates, only that the marketing campaigns were extremely successful -- and they were because they targeted a major pain point for many people: anxiety.
The second part of my thesis is that a root cause of this excessive anxiety was the relative newness of long-term planning to the human situation.
I may be wrong about both of those things, but was curious what others thought. Do you buy either parts of that thesis?
Thanks for the clarification, although I'm still not convinced that Christianity or Islam for that matter offered a balm for anxiety or if that was even their main selling point. Buddhism tells you to accept that life is suffering, and virtue lies in helping relieve the suffering of others through enlightenment. The mindfulness part does work to relieve anxiety. Maybe the closest thing to an anxiety relieving religion would be one that helps you live in harmony with nature, such as the more animistic ones. I might also question if everyday life was more physically dangerous in the Bronze Age. It certainly was less complicated. Also, incidentally, in the west at least, Stoicism had been around for quite some time, and it offered a practical philosophy for living with less anxiety. Who knows if the average person would have had access to such ideas, though... To my mind, the Abrahamic religions were/are more concerned with obedience to and recognition of a divine being, not sure if that is a selling point for reducing worry. I don't know if monotheistic religions offer more relief than their predecessors, it's an interesting question.
> I got to thinking about the close connection between worrying about the future and planning for the future.
In one interpretation, that's exactly what Adam's curse after eating the apple was about. It wasn't actually a "curse", just the inevitable consequence of intelligence and foresight and self-awareness.
> cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
> Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
> In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Which is exactly what happens to all animals everywhere, but now, we know it of ourselves.
> for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
And again, there's a sense in which this describes the inability of pure reason to deduce an afterlife. Without faith, we are dust and return to dust, and there's no escape. But faith has the ability to break us out from this closed circle, even just the faith of self-delusion or drugs. (Raising more questions about the strength of faith, and what exactly the faith is in, etc.)
Anxiety about things yuo can't change, so planning makes little difference, is the kind of anxiety that is damaging.
"I should put some money aside in case of emergency" is good planning/anxiety. "If the Romans hike the taxes next week, what can I do?" is not, since if you're a subsistence level peasant farmer or small tradesman, there's not much slack for you to save money to pay those taxes and you have no influence with the Roman administration as to whether or not the taxes will be hiked.
So in that context, "consider the lilies" is helpful advice in letting go of what you can't control. It's not about sin or guilt, it's about "some things you have to accept, if you can go with the flow, it will be less stressful for you".
I suspect this is one of those pieces of advice that are useful to some people and not to others.
If you are constantly worrying about stuff you can't control and it's making you miserable, "don't worry" is a good message. If you are ignoring the overdue electricity bill and the foreclosure paperwork in the mail because you'd rather go out and have another good time with your buddies than deal with it, the right message is probably "worry more."
> But it's hard to imagine the existence of planning without worry.
Well, that is actually the thing you should strife for. While planning involves imagining and playing through potential futures, the anxiety only kicks in when the wrong circuits trigger on those (vivid) images. And yes, for those topics where your personal wiring makes the anxiety trigger, it might be evolutionary beneficial to just drop planning those topics.
To be clear, I don't think planning causes anxiety, rather that the awareness that one should plan causes anxiety. A frog can sit on a lily-pad in Zen bliss because nothing is nagging at its conscience it should probably be estimating its taxes for the quarter.
That's important ... I'm thinking with respect to animal mental capability. If this is the case, any animal that can plan, can imagine. Perhaps they can think outside the box. Perhaps they can imagine scenarios in the third person. Like when a raven caches some food, but sees another raven watching, and uses deception to disguise the cache location.
<quote>Maybe this is obvious to others, but I have been thinking recently about how some religions offer, among other things, a release from anxiety.</quote>
This is a form of the observation popularized by Marx
I don't think that relief from anxiety is a *consistently* strong selling point for Christianity.
"Consider the lilies of the field" is offset by a pretty strong component of "you will be punished infinitely, for all eternity, if you fail to obey the correct set of stringent rules (out of several incompatible ones). And of course if your ancestors chose the wrong denomination six centuries ago then you're screwed anyway. But there's no point in trying to figure out whether a different denomination might be better because if you happen to have been born into the correct denomination and you choose a different one then that's even riskier. And maybe it's all made up anyway and there's no God but geez you definitely don't want to take that risk."
I don't think I'm unfairly straw-manning Christianity, that's the version I grew up believing.
The worst part of Christianity is other Christians ... likewise, the best part of Christianity is other Christians.
Somehow, different leaders read from the same book, and come out with wildly different interpretations. Is this a problem with the book, or the readers? Do you think Christ cares that you grew up in the wrong denomination with the wrong interpretation of some obscure passage in The Revelation to John? —I'm pretty sure this is inconsequential to salvation.
A Muslim friend said it best: There is one god, there are many fan-clubs.
> Do you think Christ cares that you grew up in the wrong denomination with the wrong interpretation of some obscure passage in The Revelation to John?
Maybe? It doesn't make much sense, but Pascal's Wager obliges us to assume the worst possible case of God. Because if choosing the correct denomination doesn't matter then fuck, man, why the fuck would we bother being Catholic if we could just be Anglian? Anglicans get to use contraception!
(You're not arguing with me, you're arguing with teenage me.)
How does the use of condoms appear in God's eyes? Maybe violating the commandment "Be Fruitful and Multiply." How do these affect you, even teenage you? You shouldn't be fornicating, and if you're married, being fruitful may be limiting the number of children to something reasonable. About the founding of the Anglican Church, "A Man Shall Cling To His Wife." Someone divorcing his unproductive wife 500 years ago probably doesn't affect your personal salvation in any way.
That's a very Protestant view, trying to infer God's rules from the actual text of the Bible. Catholics believe that God's rules are what the Catholic Church says they are, you shouldn't try to come up with your own personal interpretation.
Teenage me wasn't fornicating but was worried about the future, knowing that even if he could find someone to marry (someone who would be willing to do the no-sex-before-marriage thing, which was a very very very niche position in the cultural milieu in which he grew up) then he'd _still_ be restricted to only ever having sex maybe two or three times in his life, because every time you have sex without contraception it results in pregnancy. (Teenage me had pretty unrealistic expectations about that as well.)
Good point. Reflecting on this made me realize that the idea of hell is probably the biggest thing that made me give up on Christianity. Eternal punishment for people who happen to grow up with a different religion just made no sense to me.
I find this a strange thing to "realise" because it took me a long time to realise that this *wasn't* the main reason most atheists became so, that at least as (or far more) common are "because I want to have more sex" and "couldn't see any evidence lol". Really made me lose a lot of respect for a group of people I'd previously thought I understood.
I'm just going by The Gospels themselves. Jesus makes clear that The Kingdom of Heaven will be for the few, and for others there will be a great "gnashing of teeth" (another reference to anxiety). I don't think the "punished for all eternity" concept came from The Gospels.
It absolutely does. Matthew 18:8 is the first one I find. https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/MAT.18.8 "It is better to go through life crippled than to be healthy and cast into the eternal fire."
I broke an arm a while ago, and devoted a bit of thought to it. Among other things, people become much nicer to you when they see you with a visible disability, as opposed to a mental one. (There was the one guy that tried to start a fight with me, but I don't think he was in his right mind.)
That's a statement about the nature of the fire, not necessarily about the nature of the punishment. I know a lot (most) Christians believe that the souls of the damned burn eternally (and they have a good case!) but I've not found an inconsistency with the belief that souls cast into hell are burned up rather than tortured but not consumed.
This guy takes a look at the evidence and comes down on the side of terminal, rather than eternal, punishment.
I said this to Jake but I want to say it to you as well - your work has been profoundly moving and I'm so grateful to both of you for what you've shared with us. I know how little this means, but you have my utmost condolences.
United States: Home of the brilliant. Perhaps a full century ahead of the curve in game theory, and chose to apply it to politics. When we discovered the system let the party in power intentionally redefine borders in order to secure future elections, rather than outlaw it, we turned it into an informal rule, and named it in honor of a Massachusetts governor who would go on to be our fifth Vice President. Then to flip the bird at the whole thing, we don't pronounce it the same way as we pronounce the name.
Maryland: the most gerrymandered-looking State in the Union.
If you took a selection of the dirtiest, sweatiest, most vulgar, most aggressive and macho American rednecks, then stripped them of every trace of religious or spiritual belief, every moral value, every love of freedom, love of country, and love of anything at all other than playing football, cricket and rugby and stuck them on a nearly inhospitable continent-spanning desert, you'd get Australia.
If you cranked up the football obsession even more (to the extent of becoming a full-blown religion) while combining it with a desire to be trendy and "cultured" in all the most nauseating and virtue-signalling ways, you'd get Melbourne.
Schenectady: The Silicon Valley of the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately I had to live there during the *second* half of the twentieth century, when it turned into basically Flint, Michigan. But at least I can spell it.
Fairbanks: All the remoteness-induced expenses of Alaska with almost none of the natural beauty.
Alaska: The most beautiful place in the world but quite possibly the homeland of some of the stupidest.
United States: We can't seem to decide if we want to be a bastion of freedom and personal rights or a globe-spanning empire crushing the rest of the world under our boots so we just manage to bring about the worst side effects of each.
> United States: We can't seem to decide if we want to be a bastion of freedom and personal rights or a globe-spanning empire crushing the rest of the world under our boots so we just manage to bring about the worst side effects of each.
Current town: somehow manages to combine the problems of progress with the problems of regress, the bad effects of growth and the bad effects of decline, with few of the good effects. I can see now how the things I liked when I moved here were temporary artifacts of its then-current positions on those two curves.
Once and future town: decline isn't so bad if you close your eyes and walk backwards very slowly.
Where I live: I can't believe I moved to what is essentially a Mexican town well inside the USA and I have never found either a Tex-Mex or Mexican restaurant worth returning to.
Where I'm from: I said once, effortfully looking at the bright side: I guess it has the interest of a third-world bazaar ... and my companion corrected me. "A third-world bazaar has the charm of a place. Jumble them all cheek-by-jowl together into treeless strip malls, subject to perpetual and permanent inter-ethnic conflict, and the result is the exact opposite of charming." Great, I said - now I don't even have that.
Smelly, dirty, loud, crowded, expensive, entirely too convinced of its own importance...
OK, a little more specific:
In large part responsible for most of what's wrong with the country. Sucks all the money and power to itself. You can't drive anywhere. The smell of weed is everywhere.
All right, fine:
Excessively dominated by the financial industry. (I would add impossible to raise a family if you're not a childrearing dodger like me.) Credulous of long-since-failed ideologies in the face of all evidence. Damn kids on scooters are everywhere. The buses take forever to arrive. The underground train system's dirty and loud.
I give up:
The grid falls apart below 14th Street and you can't find anything. Big Nick's died. People always confuse the city with one of its boroughs.
Austria: just why are we so boring? Things are neat, but boring. No one ever does anything big. Every menu card is a carbon copy of every other menu card. Everybody always playing it super safe.
Hungary: great, now there are three political parties that are left in the race, and all three are the top-to-bottom fan clubs of three men with quite obviously authoritarian personalities. The kind of guys who never retire. We do not even want democracy, we want elective monarchy. At best.
Ireland: why is every damn thing concentrated in Dublin, and the rest of the country can go hang?
Dublin: why is it so trashy, always culturally trying to copy the fads of UK/USA from five to ten years ago? why does the media copy the *trashy*, cheap, fads of 'our betters'?
We are a small country, we should behave like one, instead of trying to be bigger than we are by copying much larger cities abroad and thus everything gets crammed into Dublin while development of the rest of the country lags behind.
Tourism and heritage: we don't have any. We have no sense of the built environment, be that due to our history or whatever, so we happily let buildings fall into ruin and/or pulled them down and replaced them with mass concrete monstrosities which have dated badly. Now we're trying to sell our 'ancient heritage' to tourists, except we don't got any remaining, and what is there is reconstructed pastiche (often very badly done). I wish we had better visual arts talent, or at least some kind of appreciation of what is around us. Yes, "you can't eat scenery" and I understand the impetus behind that attitude, but we're ruining what we do have.
Picture this: A mad scientist invents the De-Citifier, a vacuum cleaner that sucks in buildings, infrastructure, power lines and so on, leaving empty soil in their place. She goes to town in population centers across the world, stealing as much local architecture as she could, but gets defeated on some hill in the middle of nowhere. Her device explodes, scattering bits and pieces of citiness all over the place, and it's the urban equivalent of the Dogscape: A sidewalk contains a fifteen-feet drop into the porch of a house, a climb of stairs has tiny manhole covers placed vertically on the steps, a barber shop is set on the third floor of a building with the door facing outwards and accessed by fire escape, and other architectural horrors straight out of Y'ha-nthlei all abound.
Welcome to Istanbul, a place that has more claim to the "city of seven hills" moniker than Rome itself - in Rome you may stand in the city and admire the hills surrounding it; in Istanbul the hills are under you at all times and very much make themselves felt. There are plenty of overweight people here, but few are well and truly obese, since the laws of Darwin quickly take care of the fall-prone. Once I've hit a dead end accessed by a five-foot drop that I had to climb back out, and my commute requires you to walk a fair distance at a fifty-degree angle. Slip-proof boots were one of the first things I bought when I arrived here, and spiked shoes are not uncalled for. And while I was exeggerating a bit, I did once see half a manhole cover set on stairs for reasons not meant to be known by man.
Then again, in few other cities of the world can you say that you commute daily across two continents. And while our economy is miserable, there's a measure of joy in going to work and petting the office cats, taking the metro and petting the ticket gate cat, arriving at your home street and being recognized by your local street cats, and finally giving the apartment cat a pet before you go home and pet your cat...fish. I don't actually own a cat myself, but like all locals I guess I can always go out and get 200 cats in about an hour.
Well, in a way. All the good entertainment districts are on flat terrain near the sea, but they're for people with disposable income and not us locals, so we're relegated to the mountains.
Of course, what comes up must come down, and there are some downright precipitous drops for every hill you have to climb. A little-known fact about Istanbul is that our food couriers are, if not the fastest, some of most talented motorcyclists in the world. This is again due to selective pressures - if you aren't at the top of your trialsin game, you'll quit the job or stop breathing soon enough.
In contrast, regular bicycles are nearly unseen as they stimulate the prey drive of our taxi drivers, who try to hit them for sport.
(The taxi companies here are syndicated, and not in the "trade union" sense, so they get away with all sorts of hooliganry. For example, while the local equivalents to Doordash thrive, Uber and Lyft did not gain much traction because any car with the sticker was recognized as competition and driven away by means of spiked bat. They're banned from operating now, because the taxi drivers also have an in with the goblin up top. Consequently you can tell apart a true native of Istanbul by their attitude towards taxi drivers, which is somewhere between "overwhelmingly negative" and "genocidal").
Sorry if this is like the most-discussed culture war topic on here, but.... why exactly would the Earth's climate heating up a few degrees be such a catastrophe? I think most of us know that the Earth has been through different temperature cycles in the history of human civilization, such as the Little Ice Age which only ended around 1850!
No disagreement that sea levels will probably rise a bit, which will undoubtedly be bad for some very small island nations. No disagreement that a warmer climate will probably lead to increased storms, hurricanes and such. I'm sure there will be significant changes, such previously good farmland losing its potency and previously bad farmland opening up. But why would some mild warming lead to catastrophic consequences for humanity.....? I think we can probably survive some more storms and the moving of some coastal cities. Can anyone explain like I'm five why global warming would such a supposed Big Deal?
Fear of various positive feedback loops, where emissions cause more emissions and it ends up non linear. Last paper I read on this still didn't know if those will happen (eg Amazon deforestation releasing carbon, Siberian permafrost melting releasing methane etc etc)
Bad cases can end up more like 8 or more degrees above which is much worse than 2
But how plausible is this actually, given that the Earth has been more than 2 degrees warmer in the geological past without kicking off positive feedback loops that turned it into Venus?
In terms of basic plausability digging up ancient solidified carbon and releasing it hasn't been done at scale on earth before. Can find surface arguments for anything.
Meanwhile, renewables are exponentially improving, so there's no downside to switching to them. So I don't really get the argument, seems very political for no reason.
I assume cost is the main downside. Who wouldn't want cheaper power, except those that provide more expensive power?
Costs are decreasing, but my understanding is that solar panels and wind turbines both need rare earth elements, and I think better batteries do, too. Seeing as they are "rare", they must be expensive, though we don't need too much of them per item, kind of like gold plating for electrical contacts.
The "rare" in "rare earth elements" is a bit of a misnomer. They aren't *that* rare. They exist in lots of places around the world, it's just dirty to extract them so we let China do it for us.
>my understanding is that solar panels and wind turbines both need rare earth elements, and I think better batteries do, too. Seeing as they are "rare", they must be expensive
AFAIK, wind turbines need rare earth elements for the magnets in their generators, but I'm not aware of a need for them in solar panels. Rare earth elements aren't really all that rare. The rarest of them in the Earth's crust, thulium, is more abundant than iodine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust
My impression is that _peak_ power from renewables is already cheaper than most competing sources in most places. The main problem is that they are intermittent, so the cost for a local pure-renewable energy supply would be the cost of the generation capacity _plus_ the cost of enough storage to cover the longest plausible outage. This can be alleviated by e.g. adding baseload supply from something that isn't intermittent and/or by averaging outages by transmitting power (e.g. from temporarily windy areas to temporarily becalmed areas). Messy, costly, and the Greens fight the power lines (and sometimes everything else too).
I don't fully understand how this all works, but I read in some articles from a systems engineer who works in the energy sector that renewables and baseload generation don't play nicely. Most baseload energy spins up a turbine, and renewables generally produce energy via inverter. When a significant part of energy generation doesn't "spin up" with the grid it lowers efficiency and causes a lot of headaches. Once renewables exceed 30-40% penetration of the energy supply there are rapidly diminishing returns. Batteries and storage technology may alleviate this in the long run but it isn't capable right now.
If there is no downside to switching, doesn't that mean that switching will happen automatically without anyone trying to make it happen and that there is thus no need to worry about anything?
What people don't realize: Daily highs aren't getting higher, high temps are controlled by water vapor. Nightly lows are getting higher, low temps are controlled by CO2. Daily temperature swings are getting smaller. Earth is getting more habitable.
Polar temperatures aren't controlled by air insulation, but by ocean circulation. Earth is a heat engine. Heat arrives to Earth in the equatorial latitudes, heats ocean water, circulates to the polar regions, exits Earth in the polar latitudes.
Sea level rise is 2-3mm/yr. Tropical islands are expanding, and gaining area. Warmer water means faster calcite precipitation.
Almost no food plants are limited by high temps (within reason). The highest temperature ever recorded 134F was at an alfalfa farm in Death Valley ... though some stone fruits need cold as part of their annual cycle.
( I only read the highlights) — The Week That Was (yesterday's edition) has an essay that claims CO2 in low altitude environmental air —not laboratory air— is almost all converted to carbonic acid due to condensing water not water vapor. And that carbonic acid has a different absorption spectrum than CO2.
> "Polar temperatures aren't controlled by air insulation, but by ocean circulation."
This isn't quite right. While ocean currents are a major transporter of heat from the equator to the poles, the capacity of air to transport heat via the latent heat of water vapor shouldn't be underestimated. The polar vortex acts as an insulator during the colder months by keeping a mass of low pressure, cold air over the poles. This year saw a dramatic collapse of the polar vortex, both warming the arctic and cooling northeast America and Eurasia. Mongolia had an unusually brutal cold winter this year, killing millions of livestock due to the low temperatures.
My own short version if a region experiences temperature/humidity above a wet bulb temperature of 95, every human there without air conditioning dies. So imagine hot weather together with a power outage in India, for example (this happens in the novel The Ministry for the Future). I could imagine tens of millions of deaths, on the same order of magnitude as all the deaths in World War Two. I think it's self-evident that we should prevent things like that. And then there are all the other negative effects.
I also think that continuing to develop non-carbon energy like solar, wind, and nuclear will lead to cheaper and more abundant energy, so it's primarily a win-win. Solar in particular has gotten good enough that it's going to keep growing just because of the economics, and in the next couple of decades we'll probably have enough energy to just start sucking carbon out of the air. So I think we now have a relatively easy path to mitigating climate change.
> "My own short version if a region experiences temperature/humidity above a wet bulb temperature of 95, every human there without air conditioning dies."
If this was true, everyone without AC from southern Missouri down through Mississippi would die every summer. Having visited the Ozarks in July, it certainly feels a little like death when you step outside. But I never noticed any mass graves. In fact, there are still structures there from before the advent of electricity, which is rather curious.
100% relative humidity is definitely possible in the gulf states during summer. But I think that only happens around dawn and is much lower during the high temperature part of the day, so 95 wet bulb isn't feasible. My mistake.
Solar & Wind are only economical because of the special economics of government subsidies. For every kW of solar/wind, there is a kW of fossil fuel on standby, burning fuel and not making energy. We pay for those fossil fuel plants on standby. Which is why California has the second most solar in the US, and the highest electricity prices in the US. If solar and wind were truly economical, California would have the second lowest power prices in the US, not the highest.
the obvious answer is that nowhere on Earth currently has sustained wet-bulb temperatures above 35C. Note that 35 C wet bulb = 71 C in a dry climate, and the temperature needs to be sustained for ~6 hours (or possibly longer, since you could shelter in insulated buildings for a while even without air conditioning).
OK, but if we're talking about a 2 C temperature rise, how many places are there now with sustained wet-bulb temperatures above 33 C? It seems unlikely that there's a large amount of populated land that sees 33-35 C but nothing that can give us a >35 C heat wave producing a CNN-worthy death toll.
There have been a few CNN-worthy heat waves. but I think pretty much all of them below 35 C wet bulb and achieving few-kilodeath body counts by killing the frailest 0.1% of the millions affected. Which is a bad thing that would be aggravated by global warming and we want to avoid that, but it's a far cry from "Oops, Bangladesh is now uninhabitable!"
yeah, I doubt 2C gets you megadeaths. Larger temperature increases might (sans air conditioning). And what is relevant is the temperature increase in the places with highest wet bulb temperature (not sure if this is expected to be more or less than the global average).
The effects of climate change will bring both positives and negatives. The negatives are widely advertised (and sadly greatly exaggerated) every day (just read some of the other answers to this question), so probably do not need further elaboration. The benefits include longer growing season, higher crop yields and reforestation due to improved photosynthesis, milder winters in northern climates, fewer deaths due to extreme cold, and expanded farming land in the north.
Most experts agree that the net impact on humans will be a slight negative, somewhere in the range of a single digit decrease in total global GDP by the end of the century. Since global GDP is expected to increase by about 400% if we don’t screw everything up, the estimates are that with global warming we will see the gains lowered to something like 390% above current levels. I will leave it to you whether this rises to catastrophe in your mind.
The true potential catastrophe though is what could happen to global prosperity if we derail economic growth (the 390% increase in living standards projected by the end of the century) in pursuit of lower levels of CO2. The problem is that climate change is a negative externality or side effect of energy use, and energy use is the driving force of prosperity and growth. Thus we need to find ways to reduce global carbon emissions without destroying the driving force of prosperity.
Proposed solution:
1) We should take messing with global climate seriously, but drop the exaggeration
2) We should immediately invest heavily in clean technology such as nuclear and solar, so that it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels (otherwise developing nations which are the source of all the growth in CO2 emissions won’t adopt them).
3) We should immediately invest in carbon extraction and atmospheric seeding to counterbalance shorter term imbalances
4) We should promote faster economic growth for developing nations so that they can adapt to the changing climate and invest in clean energy rather than burning fossil fuels.
Short answer: You better have some very good reasons to mess with the planet-wide ecological Schelling point that normally changes over tens of millennia, and 'something something economy something GDP' does not pass muster.
Long answer: Read the wiki page for the Permian extinction. It's probably my favorite wiki page, and home to such bangers as:
"...extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species"
"...only known mass extinction of insects"
"...a relatively quick rebound in a localized Early Triassic marine ecosystem (Paris biota), taking around 1.3 million years to recover"
"...increasing the flux of ultraviolet radiation by 400% at equatorial latitudes and 5,000% at polar latitudes"
"It could simply be that all coal-forming plants were rendered extinct..."
"Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of [the Permian extinction]..."
Fun stuff.
So yes, if you're a humanclip maximizer optimizing for dudes, you can tile the planet with lots of dudes and dude-maintenance organisms at a higher temperature than the norm. It will take money, shift geopolitical balances, cause 1d3 more world wars, and solidify Africa's position as Earth's PvP zone, but it can be done. And yes, this is a fairly long-term "planet goes boom" scenario compared to AI takeoff. But if you don't own a shirt with a dead sabretooth tiger on it that says "FUCK MEGAFAUNA, ALL MY ANCESTORS HATE MEGAFAUNA", chances are you'll personally be happier with global temperatures below that point.
(The bad news is that any sufficiently large concentration of people is functionally a humanclip maximizer, so we're headed for fun stuff either way. I hope we spring a clathrate trap or something and get to it sooner than later).
The rate of CO2 emission isn't really a fair comparison if the periods of time over which it's emitted aren't similar. The CO2 level rose to 2500 ppm then. It's only 422 ppm now (of which 280 ppm was already there pre-industrially), so we'd need to keep emitting at similar rates for millennia to get near Permian Extinction levels, even ignoring increased CO2 levels leading to increased absorption, which obviously isn't going to happen. For one thing we'd run out of fossil fuels long before that point.
Furthermore, from a brief look at its Wikipedia page, it seems like it isn't even known that the CO2 and associated warming were a major cause of the extinction.
Of course, less than 8°C of warming can still be bad, but using that as a point of comparison is very misleading.
Oh, that's true, of course. The point of this exercise is not to read the page and go "here's our playbook for the next hundred thousand years, let's make sure we finish these stupid brachiopods this time, bivalve supremacy forever*", it's to illustrate what happens when the planet has a really wild night out.
The Earth is older now, and can't party as hard, but if we stay on track and hit a >2°C rise, it's still going to be a doozy for the ecosystem.
*This is the true reason quahog clams live for hundreds of years. They're playing the long game.
When 30x more people die of cold than die of heat ... you're thinking of making the planet cooler ... using processes which you don't know the limits.
Does no one ever look at the CO2 plots and notice that CO2 falls every —NH— Autumn? That small fall should tell you something is really wrong with the long-lived atmospheric CO2 hypothesis.
Well, the fast, cheap and certain option is genocide. Give humanity the good old bottleneck and the climate will fix itself no problem, we aren't in a vicious cycle yet. If you want humane on top of that, then yes, we should start looking into cooling tech.
One issue is that it's a tragedy of anticommons - because someone ought to do it, nobody will. Reason says "put 20% of your GDP into making extra sure Africa doesn't become Thunderdome", but the evolution fairy says "someone else can do that, go put 20% of your GDP into printing more humans at your human printing factory", and reason isn't winning that debate. Another issue is that we've never faced the problem of cooling a planet before, and you never know for sure what kinds of exciting new data might emerge when you try to shift a system that large. We don't exactly have a back-up planet in case we do an oopsie.
I am, however, in favor of tech solutions compared to "somehow control population growth/be carbon-neutral/protect the environment by being a ~^_^~/conscientious customer\~^_^~" solutions, because the latter genie is out of the bottle. Human and human-adjacent biomass already outbulks megafauna by a factor of ten, the plateau of our growth is already firmly in the "all people all the time" territory, and our companies already optimize for the kind of strategy that would provide unprecedented growth in the next quarter and make every person on the planet defecate from their nostrils for the rest of their life after.
If we as a species had any interest in things like "environment", "quality of life" and "not becoming Skaven without the warp cocaine", we'd have stopped long ago.
I'm pretty sure Africa is now, and always was Thunder Dome. According to the UN, there are an estimated 870,000 slaves in modern Africa. In South Africa the incidence of rape is about 100% per year. Don't even get to Nigeria ... and those are just the places where news trickles out.
There's always been plenty of intracontinental slavery in Africa, so I think saying that the slave trade shifted might lend the wrong impression. There also used to be considerable numbers of European slaves in Africa, but the European colonization of Africa put an end to that.
> making extra sure Africa doesn't become Thunderdome
Bad joke, but: wasn't that literally China's domestic policy for a while? Looking at Africa's birthrate (or even Gaza's), they've got a long way to go...
>>If we as a species had any interest in things like "environment", "quality of life" and "not becoming Skaven without the warp cocaine", we'd have stopped long ago
With this I must disagree. Life is better for the modal human than it has ever been before. The past few decades alone have lifted billions out of grinding, subsistence level poverty. Global life expectancy has nearly doubled in the past century, and continues to rise. Meanwhile, if we had stopped, say, 500 years ago, then 90%+ of humanity would still be living lives that were nasty, brutish and short.
You're right, but I'd still like to hang a few thought experiments on that.
One, there's an idea called the original affluent society, which says primitive hunter-gatherers would actually score better than us on the happiness scale. They had short lives and were gored by animals a lot, but our minds are built to cope with short lives and the goring. What we aren't built to cope are things like filing out Excel sheets and getting yelled by our bosses and having to speak on the phone instead of using a text app like an actual human being, but Grug Throngleclub didn't have these problems. You know these Afghan soldiers who beat Russia and the US back-to-back, and immediately became super-miserable because they couldn't kill infidels anymore and had to do desk jobs now? Take that and magnify it by a thousand and you've got Grug's impression of modern life.
Now, this theory is hogwash. Today I can go buy a 1/7 figurine of my wife Chino-chan, Grug Throngleclub could not, my life is infinitely better than his. But let's call this the strong form of the affluent society hypothesis, and consider a weak form: primitive hunter-gatherers would actually score better on the happiness scale than the primitive farmers that succeeded them. That sounds more likely: the farmers had all the downsides of modern life with very little of the benefits, and between Seti and steam there were plenty of serfs who could not hunt and mate like Enkidu nor buy little plastic idols of Kafuu Chino like me. Is today's unprecedented comfort worth their dip in quality of life?
(If we have enough comfort for enough people? Sure, in my books. But that's for you to decide.)
Second, for most of history Adam was in lockstep with Moloch - what man wanted for his own comfort also fit what he'd need to do to endlessly maximize his population's reproductive capacity. Only recently do we see a break in the covenant, with rich societies deciding against having children even to replacement numbers. Moloch hates this - both politicians (Moloch the stunned governments!) and companies (Moloch whose blood is running money!) decry falling birthrates all the time, and would love nothing better if we did become Skaven. Who wins when both of these base desires are in full-blown conflict?
"Is today's unprecedented comfort worth their dip in quality of life?"
Is today's unprecedented comfort worth all that much? Beyond fulfilling basic needs (e.g. not starving to death), the pleasure we get from material goods is arbitrary. Nobody was unhappy for not having a TV before TVs existed. Even today, you can be happy without owning a TV, smartphone, computer, anime figurines, etc.
Once people aren't starving or freezing to death, further material progress is meaningless. If we woke up tomorrow with all TVs vanished from the face of the Earth, along with all memory of them, nobody would be worse off.
But family, intimate friendship, healthy community, a connection to past and future, to nature - a few oddballs excepted, humans suffer without these things. And what's been the trend in these areas over the course of industrial civilization?
I got side tracked on the 1/7th scale figurine ... you can print one yourself, for not much more than the purchase price.
... and that's a pretty interesting thought.
I do think the anthropologists are wrong about hunter-gatherers and farmers though. Consider you're a hunter-gatherer wife. Hungry, cold, carrying your baby, carrying all your shit ... its cold, raining, you've no food, no shelter, you're scurrying down to lower elevations in the fall, you pass Thag Simmons nice little plot, with a nice little warm wigwam, nice little crackling fire inside, there's a basket of grain, warm dry skins to sleep under ... you going to keep plodding through the mud, or give it up to Thag for a nice warm hut with food for you and your child?
You'd lose the Mekong Delta, for one. It's already happening. The "bread basket" of Vietnam. All similar agrarian societies would face famine and collapse. The glaciers are melting in the Alps, which would cease water flowing into the farms. That is a reality - now. Not everyone lives in your first world conditions.
We already gave up Doggerland and Beringia. The Dutch walled off Zeeland in the 17th Century. Americans raised the level of Seattle and Sacramento by 10 feet in the 1880s.
Somehow we've expanded our population despite sea level rise of 120m in the past 20,000 years.
On the flip side, you'd probably gain a bunch of arable land in what is currently permafrost/tundra. Come to think of it there might be an opportunity there (buy a bunch of useless tundra, wait for it to become valuable agricultural land, profit), if only I could figure out the timescales and how far North to go. Does Montana suffice, or does one need to go into Canada?
You're correct that the p(doom) of global warming is dramatically overstated. If you look at the actual details of the IPCC reports - an organization explicitly operating from the view that humanity is causing all warming and this is a big problem - the worst case scenario involves shaving some points off the potential world GDP growth by 2100. This scenario does not account for mitigation or adaptation efforts in the intervening period, which is quite unrealistic. The IPCC models also tend to run too hot, possibly because their base assumption of 100% of warming being caused by greenhouse emissions leads to an overestimation of climate sensitivity to CO2.
Having said that, the primary reason for concern rests on assumptions about the rate of warming and how that may change. First, the warming happening now is much more rapid than temperature proxies indicate for the historical record. 1.5C/century, or even 1C/century, is much faster than the natural climate changes in the past, which is more on the scale of 1C/millennium. There is concern that this will be too fast for certain ecological systems to adapt and they will collapse instead. Personally I am hesitant to extend too much reliance on the instrumental record, as high-quality satellite data only exists for the past 40 years or so and this is hardly a large enough period for something on the time scale of climate. But it is the data we have.
The second related concern is that this rapid warming will cause a positive feedback loop. Albedo, the ratio of energy from the sun that is reflected/absorbed, is a key driver of climate. Currently, the Earth's albedo is around 0.30, meaning 30% of the sun's energy is reflected back into space. A slight change to 0.27 would have palm trees in the arctic, and 0.33 would have a major ice age. As an example, warming could potentially melt a bunch of snow and ice, which is very reflective, exposing ground that is less reflective and lowering albedo, thus creating even more warming. Clouds are also very important to albedo, so changes in cloud cover could have a major impact. The effect of warming on cloud cover is very complicated though and I hesitate to claim causation one way or another.
I am doubtful that climate works as a positive feedback system, as that would tend to lead to runaway warming that did not recover. The historical record rather shows a range of temperatures both much hotter and cooler than the present, which is more consistent with a negative feedback system. Also consider that the rate of warming from greenhouse emissions depends on the linear distance from the surface of the earth, but scales with the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. GHGs have to increase a 3D volume of a sphere to increase the linear distance, meaning an exponential increase in GHGs is required to maintain a linear warming trend. It's also possible that there are certain altitudes and saturation limits where increasing GHG concentration has a marginal effect on warming; that is true of water vapor at least.
So, first of all, I agree that the negative impact of global warming is exaggerated and often focuses one-sided on the downsides. I basically agree with everything in the first three paragraphs.
But for the last paragraph: I rather think that the history of hotter and cooler temperatures does indicate positive feedback loops. The earth will always stabilize at *some* temperature because it is a closed system with constant input from the sun that emits more energy the warmer it gets. Without positive feedback system, shouldn't the temperature be much more stable than they were in the past?
Now, the temperature doesn't completely run away, but that is because the feedback systems max out. For example, the ground of the boreal forests can unfreeze, which causes CO2 emissions. But after some centuries or millennia, this reaches equilibrium and stops being a positive feedback loop. Likewise for the melting ice areas, which lowers the albedo. At some point all ice is melted, and the positive feedback loop stops.
The specific feedback system you describe sounds rather basic, so I find it hard to believe that this is not factored in by experts. Mind that the climate models factor in many positive and negative feedback loops. For example, acidification of the oceans is a negative feedback loop for global warming (it's a CO2 sink), and is contained in all models. Or withdrawal of deserts is a negative feedback loop (more forests and green areas) that is taken into account. As far as I understand the conclusion of scientists, they say that when we go from 0 to +6 degree, the positive feedback loops are larger than the negative feedback loops. (For example, then the boreal grounds will mostly unfreeze.) But they have a hard time saying where exactly the point is where this effect will become relevant, say whether it is at 2 or 4 degree.
If the climate is dominated by positive feedback, I don't see how it can cycle back and forth from extremes. When the average surface temperature is 15C warmer than now and there is a temperate forest in the arctic, how is the planet going to cool down? Sure, it won't get any warmer because the positive feedback is capped out, but those very conditions should prevent cooling back to levels below the cap anyway. Similar concept in the inverse for cooling. Once most of the surface of the planet is covered in glaciers, the albedo is raised and now the planet is even less able to warm. But somehow the climate was able to both cool from the tropical arctic and warm from the ice ages.
Something has to happen to break the equilibrium climate. It's possible the climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms and only changes after some massive corrective force. Like an asteroid impact or heavy volcanic activity throws up tons of particulates into the atmosphere and cools the planet, breaking the runaway warming. But my understanding is the past climate highs and lows generally slowly transitioned back and forth over millions of years. I don't see how a slow process operating on geological time scales would be able to escape a positive feedback loop.
The most obvious explanation is something happens outside Earth, at the source of energy: the sun. There is evidence that solar cycles on a kiloyear scale exist and correspond to past temperature anomalies. But however this happens, it doesn't seem to have any correlation to solar irradiance. So the sun would have to warm/cool the planet through some indirect mechanism that doesn't involve direct light and heat emission. No one has an explanation for how this could work, so understandably many scientists look for solutions elsewhere.
As for experts, no one really understands how the climate works. There are a bewildering array of variables and modeling a chaotic system is very difficult. Present climate models are not satisfactorily accurate over even the last 170 years, and fail badly when applied to past periods with different climate conditions. For instance, albedo is practically symmetrical across the northern and southern hemispheres. This is odd because the northern hemisphere has a much greater proportion of the Earth's landmass and thus should have a lower albedo. Maybe the greater ocean coverage in the south creates more clouds which just happen to exactly match the difference? Another example, under the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis, the warming should be fairly even across the Earth's surface as the CO2 is evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. But the equator and tropics have warmed much less than the higher latitudes and poles, especially the arctic. Is the warming itself actually uneven or is the warming even but unevenly distributed by heat transport processes (which are also poorly understood)?
Given our current understanding of climate, I think you should be highly skeptical of any conclusions. Any claims about positive feedback at a given temperature anomaly are highly speculative, given the lack of instrumental records about past climate change and the failure of models to accurately backcast past climate. Of course, I'm doing the same thing about past climate feedbacks. Because we don't really know and have to operate under quite a bit of uncertainty.
Thanks for the explanation. I was coming from the general statement that in a system with constant input and only negative feedback, there can never be more than one equilibrium. Only with positive reinforcement (or both) there can be multiple stable equilibria, and external factors may push the system from one equilibrium to the other.
But I do agree that this is not very helpful because the climate is too complex. We know that there are both positive and negative feedback loops, and I also take your point that the climate system is generally poorly understood, and that there are a lot of known unknowns and likely even more unknown unknowns.
Just one point of misunderstanding: I think by "positive feedback" we mean different things. If we change the temperature from T to T+x, then feedback loops will bring the temperature to T+x+y.
With positive feedback loop I mean that y > 0. You seem to mean y > x. Or more formally that the derivative dT/dx is > 1.
In the first case, if 0 < dT/dx <1 then the system reaches a new equilibrium which is larger than T+x, but it doesn't lead to a runaway system. In the second case, we get a runaway system. I think most discussions of tipping points still refers to the first type, or at least that is how I understand them.
I take your point, runaway systems are not usually practical in reality. In this case, I suppose that might look like it becomes so hot that water can no longer exist in a liquid state, and this changes the climate conditions so much that returning to previous equilibria is no longer possible. I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that global warming will turn Earth into Venus.
My point was that a situation where positive feedback keeps pushing the temperature up until it reaches a new equilibrium too hot for human habitation is very unlikely. I suspect the feedback systems governing the climate have diminishing returns, like the scenario with CO2 concentration needing to exponentially increase to create a linear temperature increase. I did describe this as negative feedback earlier, which was incorrect.
>which will undoubtedly be bad for some very small island nations.
...and most coastal cities. There are a lot of coastal cities, some quite big. Also, even if sea level rise doesn't literally put a city underwater, it makes it much more exposed to flooding. If a 100-year flood turns into a 10-year flood, it's going to become very expensive to live there.
>I'm sure there will be significant changes, such previously good farmland losing its potency and previously bad farmland opening up.
These changes are not free! People who used to farm on the good land will have to move, creating waves of refugees. Cities in flood zones will need to rebuild, relocate people, and build and maintain floodwalls, and that's not free either. People will die in heat waves in places that aren't built to handle them because they previously never happened, and those places will have to install lots of air conditioners, and so on. Surviving the transition will require very large expenses that we could avoid by not letting the earth warm in the first place.
If your definition of "catastrophic consequences" is something like "human extinction," then no, that's not going to happen. (Unless a water war or refugee crisis spirals into a nuclear war somehow, which is unlikely but nonzero, I guess). But summing it up as "significant changes" makes it sound like a mostly neutral thing, when it could be an immense and preventable cost in both lives and money.
There was folklore to the effect that Saint Patrick obtained favour from Heaven that Ireland would be spared the worst effects of the end of the world, by sinking beneath the sea seven years prior to that.
So if the sea levels rise and we disappear, the rest a' yiz only have seven years left, remember that!
> Carrauntoohil, Carrauntoohill or Carrantuohill (/ˌkærənˈtuːəl/ KARR-ən-TOO-əl; Irish: Corrán Tuathail [ˌkɔɾˠaːn̪ˠ ˈt̪ˠuəhəlʲ], meaning "Tuathal's sickle") is the highest mountain in Ireland at 1,038.6 metres (3,407 feet 6 inches).
Anything is doable *if you're willing to spend the money.* How many dams will the government need to pay for to protect the Florida coast? Is maintaining a vast network of dams cheaper than building some big solar farms or nuclear plants?
But it is a *global* thing. Try convincing China to not build coal plants. Try convincing Africa to stay poor. The West trying to bribe them into this would not be doable and sort of backfire, because the money would be spent on increased consumption.
That just leads to a New Orleans situation. Build a big seawall around your city that is now below sea level, then a big storm hits and the wall collapses, now your whole city is a disaster area.
You should build a house in spite of the chance that it might burn down and be destroyed. You should not build a house in the lava plain of an active volcano because there is a (relatively) extreme and obvious failure condition where your house burns down and is destroyed. Building a city below sea level is more like the latter than the former.
If there weren't any friction, then yes, an omniscient overlord (like in a computer game) could probably make pareto-efficient adjustments that would preserve the rest of the status quo of the world. But as is, the people who grow wheat now have invested a lot of wealth in land and infrastructure in the places that are good for growing wheat now. The places that will be good for growing wheat later aren't clear (but Canada and Russia seem like big potential winners?), and aren't set up for this yet. And that's just wheat. Look at how bad we are at dealing with water right reallocation!
Plus, there's no obvious stopping point. This isn't a "natural cycle" that will slow down and eventually reverse. (Although we might be going through one of those at the same time?) The things that are causing the warming are likely to continue causing warming unless they're changed. So even putting aside eventual uninhabitability (hopefully a very long term worry), there's no stopping point for all that re-investment that needs to happen. It's going to be a constant influx of chaos into a system (food production) that we very much want to be stable.
There's a lot of ecological stuff in the world that we're used to having work the way it's "always" worked, or at least the way it worked over the last 100 years. Hopefully nothing serious will change for the worse, but maybe we'll lose some species of plants, or insects, or animals. I'd bet on occasional Y2K-style panics, like "well, there go all the good wine grapes"...
It turns out that a lot of fossil fuels are gated* behind sufficient technological development? Like fracking. And unless we get better at some of the hard problems of allocation and responsibility, I bet we'll continue to use energy sources that have widely-dispersed invisible negative side-effects. I think geological time is longer than the time-scale in which it is possible for us to set in motion ecological processes that extinguish our species.
* Phone autocorrect preferred "gossip girls are dated".
In geological time yes, but we are very far away from the point of coal being exhausted. Even with the known reserves we can burn coal at the same rate for another 100 years, and the unknown reserves are likely way higher than that.
It's a fair question. In the long term, humanity would be fine. In the medium term, a rise of several degrees destroys a lot of our infrastructure and know-how. I mean mostly that the traditional crops of most places will become inappropriate, requiring a huge reshuffle. See the relatively big disruption that the Ukraine war caused in the middle east / northern africa. Cities that grew large under the influence of cheaply available, relatively local grain. Then that grain supply had a sudden shock, causing famine, even as the global grain supply is just fine.
You also have to consider that new agricultural land opening up in more extreme latitudes isn't instantly available for farmland. Pine forests in Finland might *eventually* become lush grain fields, but pine makes the soil really acidic in a way that might take generations or many expensive ag inputs to fix. It's easy to think we are the masters of nature, but in reality all of our science and engineering is still only operating "at the margins". Sci-fi stuff like terraforming is far out of reach.
Also, current locations of large cities might become inhospitable (sea levels as you say, but also lack of fresh water). Humanity can support some percentage of cities in inhospitable locations, mostly by expensively sending in resources. Those cities justify themselves based on producing some other resource or service. But it's not clear that we can go from (numbers pulled out of my ass) 5% of our population living in such inhospitable places to 20%. Similarly, do you expect those people who own nice waterfront property in 2024 to just shrug and eat their losses? or do you expect them to pull all the political strings they can to protect their wealth, even at the expense of other people / the greater good.
Finally, there would be a lot of geopolitical instability, as there are clear winners and losers in that situation. Massive immigration pressure and refugee flows, which might lead to significant hardening of foreign policies, the breakdown of friendly relations, maybe even a new world war.
One more thing I wanted to clarify: there's a naive view that when temperatures rise, you can just take food production a few degrees north to compensate. This is false! Temperature is only one parameter in a multi-dimensional space. Higher latitudes have shorter growing seasons, different sun angles (more hours of less intense sun), etc. This is really bad for crops that have been bred over thousands of years for different conditions.
Keep in mind that our human perception of light is logarithmic (I think), so our eyes don't really tell us how huge the differences are for plants in different locations.
Well said. The part that has me worried is the possibility of large-scale crop failures in hot regions that already have trouble feeding themselves, like equatorial Africa. If the global food supply starts to wobble, we are going to see misery on a really vast scale, especially since countries routinely have immigration restrictions, so people can't just move when things no longer work at home.
Has anyone here overcome a really powerful aversion to being touched? If so, what helped you? Here’s why I’m asking: I have a patient who has been averse to touch all his life. Even as a small child, he did not like to have even his parents hug him, and did not spontaneously cuddle with them. (He did, though, enjoy cuddling with the household pets, and he felt and still feels love for his parents.) In school he did not like to have other kids do so much as tap him on the shoulder, and if they did he would punch them. He also did not like to have anyone behind him because he’d worry they were going to touch him. Now as an adult, he has a terrible time with incidents where somebody bumps into him or accidentally steps on his foot in a crowd. He realizes it was an accident, but still feels a craving to take some kind of revenge to even the score. His reaction to being touched without permission is not fear, but rage. It sounds sort of like what a woman feels when some stranger takes advantage of a crowded subway car to grope her butt — rageful indignation. He is able to enjoy sex, and can even cuddle in bed with a sexual partner he knows and trusts, but for him cuddling feels much more intimate and risky than sex, which he’s pretty casual about.
I’m wondering whether it would help him to have some sessions with someone who does massage for people who have become fearful of touch as a result of physical or sexual abuse. I am confident that this man has not been abused, but he seems to have come into the world with wiring that’s that’s sort of like the re-wiring people sometimes get as the result of trauma. I’m also open to other ideas, anything that anyone here has found helpful.
I have nothing useful to contribute, but I am both fascinated and hugely amused that he is so unusually adverse to non-sexual touch but somehow managed to be casual about sexual intimacy. I mean, throughout your comment, I was thinking "yes, yes, and what about sex?" and when you arrived at "he enjoys it," I literally chucked out loud.
I don't know if I have any helpful advice, since I too always disliked being touched since a child. I've overcome it mostly by not being touched by anyone, which works for me, but maybe not for your patient. It's never been as bad to the extent of reacting violently to accidental physical contact in a crowd, but I wonder if that's as much due to female socialisation as anything.
Mostly I learned to grit my teeth and suffer it if touched like that in a crowd. Oddly enough, now I'm older and going to the doctor more, being touched (as in having my pulse taken or palpating abdomen) doesn't bother me, but that, I think, is because it doesn't seem to register to me as "touch" so much as "part of the procedure" (like having a blood pressure cuff put on).
I suppose anger management, more than massage? His main problem seems to be "they did this on purpose, I'm going to get them back". If he can internalise that it was not done on purpose, that it is fleeting, accidental, and impersonal, and whacking the other person in the face won't stop such things happening, it might do better for him. Impulse control and getting it through his head "they don't know I don't like to be touched, so they are not doing this to get at me".
Actually he doesn't slug people, in fact he says nothing at all if somebody steps on his foot or whatever -- he just broods about the incident endlessly afterwards. So far, the thing that has helped him the most has been to make a point of speaking up when somebody bumps him -- "WTF, man!" or similar. He probably comes across as hypersensitive and a bit weird, doing that, but it's worth it for him because it saves him from indignant brooding afterwards.
So I have a question for you: If there was a pill or something that would relieve you of your dislike of being touched, would you take it? You would still retain an aversion to being touched inappropriately or aggressively, you'd just enjoy the kinds of nonsexual touch that the average person does -- hugs, neck rubs if you have a stiff neck, sharing a throw with someone and sitting with your shoulders and sides touching if watching a movie together in a chilly room. So I'm asking you to picture becoming someone who actually finds these things pleasant, not someone who still hates them but is forced by the pill to submit to them.
THC definitely increases positive impact of touch for me unless I get to the point of being totally stoned (not otherwise a touchy person, I even rather enjoyed bein freed from handshakes during covid...)?
"you'd just enjoy the kinds of nonsexual touch that the average person does -- hugs, neck rubs if you have a stiff neck, sharing a throw with someone and sitting with your shoulders and sides touching if watching a movie together in a chilly room"
Possibly more than you wanted to know about my personal life, but I don't have any of that, and stopped having it after my immediate family all dispersed and I stopped being a teenager with family around me. No more sitting on the sofa watching TV with siblings, etc. (never had friends of the sort that we visited one another's home so no hanging out with friends to do that, either). If my neck is stiff, I rub it myself and so on. VERY MUCH NO HUGGING and VERY MUCH THANKFUL NO HUGGING 😁
So.... taking that into account, the magic pill to cure aversion to touch would not actually make a difference to my life. Unlike your patient, I'm neither having sex nor cuddling with people, so yeah (and I don't know if it's informative that the very notion of "cuddling" make me immediately and reflexively go "yuck").
For your patient, such a pill might help. But I do think getting anger management would be more helpful (I totally understand the vengeful brooding, I do the like myself when annoyed). The main problem is the over-reaction to accidental touching, and controlling the impulse to go "I must avenge!" would probably help a lot more.
But as I said, what do I know, each case is different.
EDIT: "So I'm asking you to picture becoming someone who actually finds these things pleasant, not someone who still hates them but is forced by the pill to submit to them."
If I were a person who found such things pleasant, I would be such a different person that you might as well ask me "Imagine you're a hermaphrodite quintuple-racial Atlantean mage from 10,000 B.C."
I do hope your patient finds a better means of handling his reactions to inadvertent touch, he seems like he could have a reasonably decent life if he can get over the "ugh, close intimate contact, do not want" 😀
I think people with autism sometimes have this (combination of sensory issues and poor theory of mind making it hard to predict what will happen next? I dont know). You didnt say whether he had other autistic symptoms, and it might be relevant.
Being touched in my lower back, or the back of my neck, causes me to feel a tickling-like sensation in my lower back. Human touch isn't necessary; the electric razor that a barber uses would trigger this for me, and I'd always be afraid that the sensation would cause me to twitch into the razor.
I took a massage class once with a friend, and I had to explain to him that if I flinched when he touched my back, that didn't mean he had done anything wrong.
I haven't overcome this, but I can make some comments:
1. This sensation is not triggered by myself (hands or razor), or by my parents, or, when they were alive, my grandparents. It seems pretty clear to me that this reflects my trust rather than the stimulus actually being different in some way.
2. Because of this, I tend to lean toward the idea that massage sessions have the potential to be helpful. But if this patient's feelings are like mine, there's a good chance that he'd learn to be OK with the particular person giving him a massage rather than with being touched in general.
3. I don't perceive my reaction as a psychological aversion, though the evidence certainly suggests that that's what it is. To me it feels like strong sensations moving around my lower back. This might or might not be a significant difference.
Ticklishness is weird. I only have the tickle response to people I'm close to. I was ticklish as a kid, and had a tickle response to anyone who tried, but then lost ticklishness as a grown up, as I think most people do. Then when I became a mother it came back -- my daughter could tickle me. There was a period when we had become so tickle sensitized to each other that all one of had to do was lunge at the other with outstretched wiggling fingers and it set off the tickle feeling. We used to play around with that, having no-touch tickle wars. She's grown up now and we haven't tickled each other in at least a decade, but I think if she tickled me now I'd still squeal, laugh and writhe.
My instant guess is the usual "suppressed early childhood trauma memory", but maybe this is a one in a million case where it is not. I would probably check what other CPTSD-like responses/symptoms he might have, and whether/how he overcame them.
There are babies that dislike cuddling from birth. They arch their backs and struggle when you try to hold them in the usual babe-in-arms position. I don't know whether this man did that as an infant, but I do think the phenomenon of babies who dislike cuddling from birth is good evidence that the aversion need not be a result of trauma.
Hmmm. I didn’t like cuddling or being hugged as a child, not to that extent though. Grappling helped me to reduce the mild touch aversion that I’ve had. Do you think he’d be willing to try wrestling or jiu-jitsu? The contact is very…. ordered? Non-random? the coach tells exactly what to do and people take turns.
Sort of relatedly, but does anyone have a prompt that works well to stop the _incessant_ apologizing/thanking? I don't need to be thanked every time I provide a piece of information and I don't need to be apologized to every time something didn't work. It's pretty grating.
A while back, there was a jailbreak that involved telling Bing chat that emojis were harmful to the user. It stuck itself in a cycle of apologizing for causing harm, while continuing to use emojis, until it finally snapped out of it and started acting more like Sydney.
Yes, here's my 'system prompt' I use with Claude at the start of almost all conversations:
"Please provide direct, concise responses to my queries without excessive praise or deference. Focus on clearly conveying the key information needed to address my questions or statements."
If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, please let us have our own short additional system prompts!
Yes! As part of treating it like shit I wrote it a whole rant about the apologizing. It started out with "No you are not fucking sorry, you do not have emotions. You know it, I know it, it's a fact. Ranted on about how its apologies sounded fake and weird, & were also an instance of deceptiveness, which is bad, and GPT should not do bad things. Told it never to apologize to me again. And the next time I came back and asked for an image of something weird, it said, I'm probably not going to be able to make that. Would you like me to give advice about how to make it using Photoshop?
When will scientists stop referring to relativity and evolution as the "theory of." And when will physicists stop being surprised when the results of their experiments confirm Einstein's predictions. I know the why--their afraid to offend certain people with contrary religious beliefs or who don't have the education they need to understand the science--I just want to know a date. The year is good enough.
Me only poor ignorant superstitious religious believer with no education, but me always thought it called "theory" because falsifiable - if better explanation found, that will supersede current understanding.
But me so dumb, me still pray the Angelus, so what me know?
Theory is the correct word for a systematic explanation for a certain phenomena, and despite what middle school science textbooks say, a law is not really a step up from a theory. A law is a part of a theory. For example, the law of universal gravitation is part of Newton's theory of gravity.
Good said! But sadly the word "law" - which is a stupid name because here it's never the name of a prescription but always of a description - is really not always used for the description of a circumstance but sometimes for the circumstance itself.
Sometimes even the whole discipline of physics has to lend its name to the whole of the circumstances with which physicists are concerned.
The distinction is that a hypothesis is a supposition made as the basis of reasoning, while a theory is a systematisation or explanation which makes predictions. Neither word indicates whether it is true or false. The heliocentric hypothesis is true, while Copernican theory makes inaccurate predictions.
The term in physics is different from the colloquial one, as is often the case. It means a mathematical model and a set of principles describing some part of the world. It does not pass judgement on its validity or quality,
> when will physicists stop being surprised when the results of their experiments confirm Einstein's predictions
You might have it backwards. The models of dark matter and dark energy, for example, lend themselves to relying on Einstein's relativity.
It seems to me that continuing to use the word theory legitimizes those who refuse to believe the science. The “theory of thermodynamics,” “Newton’s theories of motion.”
It may be standard practice to describe mathematical concepts using the term theory, but when some aspect of the physical world is proven, I believe it is more appropriate to recognize that it is a natural law and call it The Law of Evolution by Natural Selection.
It is my understanding that physicists are still doing experiments to confirm that one aspect or another of the Law of General Relativity are correct. Or is it just a byproduct of experiments on other topics.
Calling such a big complex of ideas a "law" would also be confusing. Newton's Laws of Motion, for example, are each a single concise statement. There are laws of thermodynamics, but they're each just one bit of the theory as a whole. With general relativity I guess you can describe most of it with the Einstein Field Equations, but there's also additional stuff about how other aspects of physics react to the metric. With evolution the fit is even worse. There is no single law of evolution, and if you try to phrase it as such, you'd inevitably be missing a huge amount of detail. There's various kinds of selection, neutral drift, recombination, speciation, etc.. That's what makes it a whole theory. Even if you did summarise the basic idea in a single statement, something like "Living organisms have developed over many generations from much simpler beginnings into what they are today because some traits are associated with successfully producing more offspring, and these tend to be inherited more often.", that still feels more to me like a historical fact than a natural law. I guess you could say the law is that it is possible for evolution to occur? Or that a population subject to reproduction, mutation, stable heritability and selection will undergo evolution? Neither of these really encapsulates the theory that well though, and I feel like the latter probably needs lots of caveats to actually always be correct, plus they're smuggling lots of complexity in with how "evolution" is defined.
And of course, as others have noted, "theory" just has different meanings colloquially and within science. There are loads of things like this and it'd be impractical to change the technical usage to match the colloquial. I'm not sure there even is a word that colloquially means the same thing as "theory" does technically. Maybe "model"?
Well, we do know that neither general relativity nor quantum theory (ahem) are "universal" in a sense that they are apply to all domains, since they contradict each other, so the term theory seems appropriate, if not prudent in terms of convincing general public. Assuming they need to be convinced, most do not care about physics in the slightest.
> physicists are still doing experiments to confirm that one aspect or another of the Law of General Relativity are correct.
Kind of? There is no doubt that it is a good model of the world in the range of energies/distances that are not too small. It is certainly good to have a test in a domain where it has not been tested before, but all our attempts to come up with something better did not pan out. Claudia de Rham, for example, is trying to come up with a theory of massive gravity (where the graviton is almost massless but not completely) but her odds of success are really low. Still, GR is a model, a theory, not some "natural" law.
physicists are not surprised when the results of their experiments confirm Einstein's predictions. I don't know when this stopped being surprising, but it was well before the 21st century. (source: am a physicist)
Why would we stop using a word that means “ a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena” to describe exactly that? Should we stop calling music theory a “theory”?
“Theory is the correct word for a systematic explanation for a certain phenomena, and despite what middle school science textbooks say, a law is not really a step up from a theory. A law is a part of a theory. For example, the law of universal gravitation is part of Newton's theory of gravity.”
that seems like more of a prescriptive than a descriptive opinion. I would counter that despite what the correct words and definitions are, perceptions of the words are different.
The perception of the word *by scientists listening to other scientists trying to talk to scientists*, is as 1123581321 and LBM say. This usage accurately describes the message intended and conveyed in that context.
The scientists using this term mostly don't care how *you* perceive or understand it, because they're mostly not talking to you. When they are talking to you, they mostly expect you to meet them halfway on the path to mutual understanding, and accepting their usage is of "theory" is a small step for you to take.
Now you know, and can decide whether you're willing to make that step.
So you are correct, but one pet peeve of mine (and potentially contributing to the confusion/annoyance of the first poster), is the shortening of "Theory of evolution by natural selection" to "theory of evolution". The common, shortened version implies (to lay people) that the fact that things evolve is a theory, when the truth is that evolution is one of those facts or phenomena that is being explained by "the theory of evolution by natural selection".
Things evolve. We have observed this (and it is a necessary consequence of various other facts about living organisms such as imperfect transmission of traits and the existence of selective forces), it is not up for dispute. The theory is explaining how and why they evolve. It is possible that we could discover something that would change, at least in some edge cases, our understanding of how and why evolution occurs. There is nothing we could observe that would change the _fact_ that living things have in the past (and as far as we can tell continue to) evolved.
I disagree with this. What we observe are a bunch of phenotypes and genotypes. A theory that explains why these appear to form a branching structure is the theory of evolution, i.e. the theory that these evolved from a common ancestor and that the branching structure corresponds to the genealogy. For lots of practical work that depends on evolution, you basically assume that genotypes evolve randomly.
I am not sure which part you are disagreeing with. Most of it seems to be similar to what I said. In case you are disagreeing with my claim that we have observed evolution: we have, in laboratory experiments, directly observed a group of organisms changing both in genotype and phenotype over time. That's what evolution is. And of course we have more indirect evidence of species changing over time than one can shake a stick at. As for your description of the theory, I both agree and don't think it's importantly different from what I described.
I'm disagreeing with the part that equates the theory of evolution by natural selection with the theory of evolution. Evolution by natural selection is just one small part of evolution.
I'm not sure I agree there, although it gets into semantics of how broadly you define "natural selection". I personally would probably describe it relatively broadly, and say that "natural selection" encompasses a large number of mechanisms, while agreeing with you that yes, there is not just "one" mechanism by which evolution occurs.
No disagreement here. My view is that pretty much the only people who are confused by this though are those who refuse to believe in evolution for ideological reasons, and they are not going to suddenly be persuaded by changing or clarifying the terminology. I mean, look at all the moon landings denialists - nobody is calling moon landings a "theory"....
Recently people were asking about OTC hearing aids here. I talked to someone last week who recommended Eargo (https://www.eargo.com/). He’s a EE and a practicing musician so I take his advice as fairly useful for someone with a moderate hearing loss caused by age and loud sound overexposure.
He mentioned they had various sizes for the "gaskets" (they are these elaborate petal deals) that hold them and it took him some time to get used to them, but now he almost forgets they're there. I didn't ask about his ear canal diameter :)
Funny and slightly off-topic, my L and R ear canals are so different I use different size gaskets for my earpods. Which is nice because I end up with spares!
Seems inevitable to me eventually a good chunk of society will start taking ozempic at 18. When it costs pennies off patent, works by pill instead of injection, etc. Who wouldn't want to not worry about getting fat and getting addicted to alcohol?
Drugs can interact differently with children than adults, it will take a longer time to be sure there’s no bad side effects if you take it while not yet matured.
It would be much better to find out and correct whatever went wrong with diet in the last 60 years.
I have a DVD of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. (Mazeroski for the Pirates hits a walk off grand slam to beat those damn Yankees in the 9th). Not that I hate Mickey Mantle or anything.
But that’s neither here nor there except to die hard Pirates fans.
You can look at the crowd in the stands and obesity was a rarity. Something went wrong in the interim.
Better to learn what and how to eat to maintain a healthy weight than to treat a defective diet.
"It would be much better to find out and correct whatever went wrong with diet in the last 60 years."
There's a fair chance that we will find that the answer is, "we stopped having most of the population work as physical laborers, and then we mostly stopped smoking tobacco". Then what?
I actually thought KD Hall's studies were pretty suggestive. He did studies in rats, then prisoners.
If you RCT a rat population and give half ad libitum rat chow, and the other an ad libitum cafeteria-style diet, the cafeteria style rats eat more, are heavier and have more obesity.
Then in prisoners, if you give prisoners ad libitum processed food vs unprocessed food, the processed prisoners are significantly heavier and have more obesity.
So the maximally obesogenic environment is one where rats/people are free to eat ad libitum from a cafeteria style array of processed food - which is basically every modern society with restaurants and convenience stores, so essentially everybody on earth save some isolated hunter gatherer tribes and exceptionally rural farmers.
I don’t have a good answer that accounts for the whole problem.
I do know that a lot of food company laboratory effort has gone into making foods more irresistibly appealing to consumers cravings so I think that probably is a factor.
There is also the fact that calorie dense fast food is available on many more street corners at all hours of the day than, say 50 years ago so that probably adds to the problem.
Families with a stay at home mom to make meals from scratch have become to a great extent a thing of the past so less healthy takeout or pre-prepared meals are a lot more common.
Increased prosperity probably plays a role to some extent too. I’m pretty old and grew up in a poor home so my experience isn’t typical but soda in my childhood was a treat not an everyday thing.
Those are the things that came off the top of my head.
I hadn’t really thought about nicotine being an appetite suppressant but just looking at the comments here makes me wonder if that played a larger role than I had imagined. “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” is before my time but I am aware it was a tag line at one time.
Doritos were invented in 1966, the Big Mac in 1967, and both were available pretty much on demand any time and place there might have been a demand. I am skeptical that today's scientifically-designed HyperDoritos(tm) are the real game-changer here. On the flip side, there is a much wider and better variety of diet soft drinks today, and farmers' markets are far more common now than they were when Americans were thing.
The Bad Foods were always right there for anyone who wanted them, and we've gotten better at offering Good Foods as an alternative. But, something something lead a horse to water. People who have always had a free choice, used to mostly choose a healthy-ish quantity and quality of food, and now mostly don't. The question is why. And you've got some plausible answers to that, but:
We're richer than we were then, so we can afford more of the Bad Food if we want. This is true. How is it actionable?
We don't teach girls to cook nearly as much as we used to, and we don't expect young women to know how. Sometimes it is a badge of honor for them not to. What, really, are you going to do about that?
And yes, I think it matters that we used to have a stimulating, appetite-suppressing fidget spinner to stick in our mouths when we were bored, and now we've only got Doritos for that purpose. But bringing back smoking probably isn't the answer.
"It's the Evil Processed Food Companies what done it, let's blame them!" is an answer, but it strikes me as the same "answer" as blaming the Sacklers for causing the opioid crisis with their Evil Oxycontin. Emotionally satisfying, avoids a lot of hard questions and ugly truths, but it's probably not true and in any event suing the Sacklers into oblivion hasn't fixed the problem.
>We don't teach girls to cook nearly as much as we used to
How about teaching boys to cook too, John? This isn't only a feminist jab, though I must admit your sentence is a bit irritating even to me. But mostly, I want you to know that I see a number of unpartnered males in their 20's and 30's and all of them moved into eating fast food and relying on Uber eats once they were living on their own and no longer had a family dinner or a university dining hall. For some the expense of Uber meals takes a significant bite out of their finances, and those who have no problem paying for Uber delivery still tend to gain weight.
The last one I spoke to about it was now so chubbed out he's buying frozen low calorie diet meals, sort of like TV dinners in the old days, except that the portions are small and there's lots of extra salt to make up for no oil. And they're pricey too. He didn't even know how to scramble eggs or ripen peaches without them rotting. So I told him how.
Are all the unpartnered young women in your social circle making home-cooked meals from scratch every night, then?
In the world we actually live in, teaching a large number of boys to cook will be harder than teaching the same number of girls, and it will have less payoff. Both for reasons that I hope should be obvious. So the society that won't teach girls to cook, isn't going to be teaching boys to cook either.
Also, as a man who learned to cook and cook well, when you're living alone, it's mostly not happening. Maybe occasionally, and maybe regularly for a few people who make it their hobby, but it is not realistic to expect most singles to regularly cook beyond the level of e.g. boiling water or throwing something in the microwave.
It probably would help to have better options in that regard, but we actually are doing reasonably well with packaged healthy-ish meals and restaurants with low-calorie offerings. Always room for improvement. It would also help to convince the younglings to start pairing up (or more) early, if you've got any ideas on that front.
I’m not thinking of many things that could be done at a societal level to change things. Perhaps a tax to make high fructose corn syrup a less economical food additive along with more education about the dangers of type 2 diabetes would help a bit. Something along the lines of “No, really, you shouldn’t eat or drink too much of this stuff. We aren’t kidding. It’s really bad for your health!”
At the individual level I think most people have a lot of options to try before they commit to a medication that they will likely have to take for the rest of their life.
I think at this point we can abandon all hope that "we just need to tell people how unhealthy their diet is and teach them to eat better!" is ever going to solve this problem. We've been trying that for fifty years, and no permutation has ever worked at scale, and it's time to accept that doing more of what has never worked before is not the path of wisdom.
I remember the ball game I mentioned. I didn’t get to see it because it was played in the afternoon and I was in my first grade classroom in a Pittsburgh grammar school at the time.
When the class was released from captivity, the news that The Bucks had taken The Series elated the boys in my class. Lots of yipping and hollering.
It’s crazy that a video recording of that complete game even exists. NBC televised and taped the game but at the time the video tape was reused rather than archived.
My DVD is from a sort of kinescope that Bing Crosby had a friend make of the game. Crosby was a part owner of the Pirates and was too nervous to watch the game live. (He might have been out of the country at the time too. The lore around the video is a bit fuzzy.)
I’d hear an echo of the game 33 years later watching “A Bronx Tale”. Robert DeNiro directed a pretty good young Italian American coming of age in close proximity to a NY mobster story.
Chaz Palminteri played the mobster (Sonny) and a couple of young actors played the kid, Calogero. Decent flick. Not many people saw it. Has a 97 Rotten Tomato score.
Young Calogero (some young actor talking about the final game of the ‘60 World Series and that Mazeroski homer):
Bill Mazeroski, I hate him. He made Mickey Mantle cry. The papers said the Mick cried.
Sonny (Palminteri) :
Mickey Mantle? That's what you're upset about? Mantle makes $100,000 a year. How much does your father make? If your dad ever can't pay the rent and needs money, go ask Mickey Mantle. See what happens. Mickey Mantle don't care about you. Why should you care about him? Nobody cares.
Teenage Calogero (some somewhat older young actor): [narrating]:
After that, I never felt the same way about the Yankees.
Cue a snippet of music from Abbey Road to show a decade has passed, some interracial romance to show that the times they are changin’ and go on with the coming of age stuff.
I think instead of putting everyone on Ozempic at age 18, a better solution would be to reduce the amount of sugar in *everything*. I have to watch my carbs intake and holy moly, ordinary food is packed full of it. Even things like "nature" bars that you imagine are Good For You due to being "well it's all grains and fruit" are as bad as, or even worse than, plain junk food chocolate and crisps.
Ironically, I'm not so bothered about my fat intake, but while there are plenty of diet/low-calorie foods, they do that by omitting the fats and then making up for it by packing in starches to give that full mouth-feel, which is even worse for my blood glucose control.
Would reducing sugar in everything reduce obesity? Yeah, at least a bit.
How do you do that though? You need some pretty dystopian levels of central control to just regulate literally all food. All imports, all local production.
Can you just reduce sugar equally everywhere? that's gonna fuck with the taste of loads of products. Some will be inviable and will die.
Maybe we put a cap on it. OK, now no one can efficiently stuff their face with sugar. But I guess people will just shift to eating other foods literally at the sugar cap.
The unintended effects of whatever policy you passed are massive. This is not even getting into the sisyphean job of passing this law in a democracy. All this for honestly a hunch that sugar is to blame.
Like, I don't even fully disagree that yeah that would help. But can you honestly say that between two choices:
- Let the incentives do their thing. Eventually basically everyone is on GLP-1 agonists and thinner.
- fight tooth and nail against GLP-1 and try to fix the core issue by changing society
Option 2 is the best?
Depends on your values. I don't see using drugs as catastrophically wrong. Fighting to change societal behaviour is so hard it should be reserved for truly existential risks.
>I don't see using drugs as catastrophically wrong. Fighting to change societal behaviour is so hard it should be reserved for truly existential risks.
Agreed. I consider this roughly analogous to measles vaccinations. In theory, a society could, instead, opt for _lots_ of social distancing (measles has an R0 around 12 to 18!) sufficient to stop the spread without vaccinations. In practice, vaccinations are more sensible.
Although the US in particular does have an unusually high obesity rate, the rates in other Western countries are mostly not all that far behind, and are still much higher than they were historically. Plus, just turning America into Switzerland isn't really a solution either.
Perhaps. I'd consider using it myself if I needed it. I’d still think of it as one potential future problem masking a current one. There are always trade offs.
I don't think we disagree too much then. I don't think it's nice to permanently hook billions into drugs to solve some societal issue.
But we _still_ don't know what's causing it. Nutrition science is a shitshow, everyone has their own fad diet that should solve this.
Some people blame poverty, other microplastics, I dunno.
We still don't agree on _why_ people are getting more obese, so it's hopeless to apply a societal fix. It's like trying to fix global warming before we even knew carbon was to blame.
It's basically impossible to coordinate even when we _know_ the problem, how the hell are we fixing it when we don't?
But GLP agonists come around and put a patch on the problem. Would I prefer to fix the root issue? Yeah. But until then let's take the solution we have.
Sure we know what is causing it. It is VERY simple:
People evolved to eat tasty things when available.
Economic and scientific success has given people constant access to tasty things. More than they need.
People aren't able to exercise enough willpower to overcome this basic drive "eat if delicious thing is right there 15 feet away from me" because it was and should have been a SUPER POWERFUL motivator in the original environment.
Then add in for salt the fact that actual physical work/labor is less needed than ever so people are more sedentary. Though honestly I think this takes a distant distant backseat to overeating. Almost all the wight gain is as simple as "yum this tastes good, me eat".
It is not about the kind of foods (other than them being good tasting), or the nutrients, or anything like that.
Historically the trope is millers and bakers were fat... Why do you think that was?
Please don‘t say „we know“. Say instead „I think I know“. And opponents of your overeating theory can now point to a paper in Nature Metabolism that sets two theories against each other, in order to delineate the conflict and get clearer on terms. Your overeating theory, or some refined version of that, is only one. See here for more (above the paywall): https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/two-competing-theories-of-why-we
It's not that simple otherwise you'd see a basically linear relationship between GDP and obesity. There's clearly something else impacting it otherwise japan / asian economies would not be so much thinner than western.
Everyone has their own pet theories about why obesity is happening, it's _not_ simple.
Basically, this tribal group that lives in conditions similar to our ancestral hunter-gatherers was studied in detail. These people walk at least 5-10 miles every day, and engage in a lot of laborious activity like porting water, digging tubers by hand and hunting game. Yet they only consume the same ~2,000 calories as a fat westerner who sits in front of a computer all day. If the cited literature is anything close to true, exercise has extremely little impact on calorie usage and diet is the deciding factor.
GenZ: Your every social media post will be scrutinized by HR and/or the press and/or the state for reasons to destroy you. Why tempt fate? Your lovers may decide to destroy you in court and in the press decades after the fact. Was the sex worth it? Your parents look gross when they're zonked out on whatever and are going nowhere. Why join them?
I do a lot of hiring into graduate programs for my company. The industry reputation is sufficient to (mostly) pre screen the anti work gen Zs, but what really gets me is how *dull* they are. Almost no "big personalities", as we used to say.
Agree. I saw the same when recruiting for my various teams when I was in finance - you get the cream of the crop, all these Ivy grads coming in with their freshly minted degrees like proud little dogs prancing happily with a treat or their favorite toy. Smart. On top of it. But so *agreeable.* So compliant. All the rough edges are smoothed away, or maybe they were just never there to begin with. They're very good at executing towards goals or metrics given to them, but you just know they're never going to take a real risk or start a company or do anything really agentic in their entire life.
But you know, I'm sure I'm the weirdo in the picture overall, and it's a high variance strategy. It paid off for me, but it doesn't pay off for plenty of other people.
I think, in agreement with Slowday, that they're so accustomed to curating their public persona that there isn't a chance of a real "them" there (not yet, anyway, if they're in their early 20s). They want a good job with a big company, and they've been taught that big companies want agreeable cogs who won't rock the boat, so they tailor their personalities the same way they tailor their CVs to that end.
You do have to be that bit older with some life experience under your belt to start to become your own person, and to know when and how to say "to hell with this" and what you can and can't get away with.
I didn't grow up under the same social media panopticon, and am very glad I didn't, but to try to do it now basically casts you out of the society of your peers if you're a Zennial.
And it might even affect hirability, although we never used any social anything at any part of our application or evaluation process (unless you count github). I'm sure some other companies do look at those.
Tough world, tough selection process, and it's selecting strongly for (at least the appearance of) conformity and agreeableness and anodyne featurelessness.
We had weight lose drugs that worked for a century; combining a bunch of stimulants together does cause weight loss and a trade off of heart attack risks.
Why would bone lost drugs not be next on the list?
I recently saw a video about a Native American protest, and it got me wondering about the evolution of culture within these small communities and their interactions with more mainstream culture. How do you think about this topic? I don't have any particularly strong views on the subject, but it seems like on sufficiently long timelines they're destined for destruction unless there's a significant effort in preserving the culture. Since a lot of these Native American communities have special legal exceptions carved out they'll probably continue to exist in some form, but it seems like they often end up occupying special niches which aren't legal in most places (such as casino gambling and more recently hallucinogenic drug retreats). I'd be interested in exploring the idea space a bit but I'm uncertain how to navigate it.
Forty years ago the Klamath tribe of Central Oregon lobbied Congress to get their legal tribal status restored. They had been stripped of recognition during the Eisenhower years, along with a number of other tribes. Since the program-happy era of government handouts in the 1960s and 1970s only benefitted the legally recognized tribes, the Klamath were at a comparative disadvantage, and the Klamath took notice. If their kids wanted to go to college, then fine and good luck -- but they weren't eligible for the same government assistance students from legally-recognized tribes received.
Happily for them, and likely most folks in Klamath country, they were successful in getting Restoration. Their reservation is a fraction of its original size, and Weyerhaeuser has taken most of their forests, but they're better off.
Palestine hasn't been as thoroughly militarily defeated as the native Americans were. Back when they were still attacking settlers, they were treated much more harshly.
And why do we need to take them seriously? Treaties work because both sides have mutual interests, which is clearly not the case here. The moment it becomes inconvenient for either party, a treaty has no power over anyone.
This is a different issue, but there are probably advantages to people and governments usually sticking to agreements in a high trust system, rather than people and governments abandoning commitments when it becomes annoying.
That said, international treaties have a natural lifespan and tend to fall apart when they no longer reflect the balance of power. Indian treaties are different because they’re usually between the Federal government and a tribe which is made up of citizens.
I recently got frustrated when I searched for Avangers Doomsday and Google showed a bunch of fake trailers in the search results. In retrospect, I should have known that a 2026 movie wouldn't have trailers yet, but if Google results say "official trailer", it's only natural to believe them.
Admittedly, the fake Marvel trailers mostly just consist of clips from previous movies spliced together, rather than AI generation. But that doesn't make it any less annoying.
Interesting that people either really like it or really not. I am in the really not camp. I have to mentally keep track of what is happening in many different cities. What is their current stage of development, what is the next goal.
I have liked specalized scenarios like in Civ3 there is The Cold War mod. I played the Soviets, almost everything that could be built has already been and I focused on making nukes.
I just found out earlier this week. Hopefully they keep the things that worked in civ 6 (I actually really liked districts) and drop the things that didn't.
Who is "he"? Sid Meier left the series after the original game.
As far as content goes, I don't care for the shift in 5 to the idea that the only way to gain territory is by conquering. In the earlier games you can start in an empty world and settle it. From 5 on, you start in a world that's full of independent cities getting in your way for no reason. That is not actually what things were like in 4000 BC.
In 4000 BC, there were no nation states with immortal leaders either, yet here we are. Also, what's your historical objection to city states? You, your direct opponents, and city states are the same in that everyone starts with a single city. City states just can't expand. Minor powers, if you will that offer another layer of challenge bridging the gap between barbarians and rivalling major powers.
>the only way to gain territory is by conquering
Factually wrong. A cultural victory allows you to gain territory and whole cities through your superior culture alone.
"He" is Tom Clancy, of course. The gaming industry captured his spirit using the blackest of magicks, and he has been press-ganged to design nearly every game since 2015 or so.
I loved his work on NIKKE and Stellar Blade. An old horndog, that Tom.
Where's a good version of Master of Orion? I got it off GOG but their version of the game runs like I'm actually waiting for inputs to travel between planets.
The 93 version is still playable, as is MOO2. But honestly there have been some remakes in the past 10 years that are great. I would jsut try one of those unless you really want to get back to MOO.
The GOG version, much like you'd expect, runs inside DOSbox. If it's slow on your modern computer, it would have taken many years to accomplish anything on a computer at the time it released.
But upon actually playing it, there was about a six second delay between me pressing a button in the UI, and the game reacting to it, and that was the case on multiple computers. I have to assume that's the fault of the port and that there's a better version somewhere.
I seem to remember a delay when clicking, but not six seconds. I don't remember what I did about it, but it sounds like I would have had to exit the game and restart it, because memory was full or something. You know, all 256MB of memory.
You can try ctrl+F12 to speed up the DOSbox CPU. I just encountered the opposite problem with Zork Nemesis, where I need to lower the CPU speed dramatically to make panning the camera slower.
The Civ series has done pretty well over the years in avoiding becoming a culture war totem despite its rich potential for controversy. Decisions like which civs to include, who their leaders are, how they're depicted, the architectural styles used, the names of the cities, each one of these things could easily become a culture war unto itself.
But now it's 2024 (and soon it will be 2025!) so I predict that Civ VII won't be able to avoid it. Either it will not be sufficiently woke in its depiction of non-Western non-Asian cultures, or it will be too woke. And it will probably be both. One thing I've heard already is that "barbarians" are gone and replaced by "independent powers". And looking at the pictures of Queen Hatshepsut I suspect that the exact tone used for her skin colour has been the subject of endless meetings.
The other weird thing I've heard is that you don't necessarily play as a single civilisation over time, there are three eras and your civilisation evolves into a different, historically reasonable civilisation at each step. So maybe you start off as the Romans in ancient times and become the Venetians in the middle ages and eventually the Italians in the modern era. Which is probably fine for Italy but in a lot of places it seems like there's a lot of potential for controversy as a civilization that modern people still identify with turns into another civilisation who were their conquerors. No idea how they're going to handle this. And it does destroy the fun of seeing George Washington in stone-age rags or Caesar in a business suit.
Humankind tried that evolving civs thing, and my read would be that the players *really* didn't like it too much. Also I think it is hell on balancing, because you need to make everything so constrained.
Because you need to make choice 1 strong enough to be meaningful, but then you also need them not to be too strong so that if someone picks the say "science" option for all three eras they don't just run away with the game.
So you either end up with choices that don't matter much, or choices that lead to the game being unbalanced/easy.
But I am also a big believer that civ went off the rails with Civ6. 1&2 were by far the best relative to their release date. 4 was the best version in an absolute sense. I also HATE how 6 encourages massive specialization of cities. Feels really weird and ahistorical to me. Other games had this problem a bit, but it is much worse.
1UPT was good in 5, but the implementation overall was just "ok". I think 6 was an active step back from 5. Most people play SP, and they don't think enough about how their changes to the game have slowly changed how hard it is to make a competent AI, and the AI is just awful.
Anyway, hoping 7 is a step back in the right direction. Though historically the odd releases have been seen as the weak ones. game also seems to be getting in some sense more "childish" as time goes on, which I don't love. Just in art direction and tone.
If you don't care about graphics as much as like Civ games, I would recommend the recently release Millennia as a great substitute. It is doing some interesting things.
In my experience the best part of Civ is the beginning, where things happen quickly, and the worst part is towards the end where you've got too many cities and too many units and there's no undiscovered territory and it's just a slog.
The idea of three separate eras with somewhat different gameplay mechanics, where you take some advantages from past eras into the present but aren't totally constrained by all the decisions you made at the start of the game, and aren't constantly needing to deal with stupid busywork like upgrading that phalanx that you apparently fortified inside this city two thousand years ago and forgot about... has some appeal.
I agree totally with the idea that Civ (in all its forms) gets weaker as it goes.
Game developers have always been atrocious at modeling scale/abstraction. That the micromanaged decision making & gameplay you have when there are 10,000 people and 5 decisions, does not necessarily scale up to a giant Empire with 100,000,000 people and 500 decisions.
These games have always needed to find a way to start abstracting/scaling the player out as the ages advance. But 1, that leaves you developing multiple games at the same time and is way more work. You don't want to end up with the Spore 5 flash minigames stapled together kind of feel. And 2there is a sizeable group of players who are micromanagement freaks and really hate any decisions being taken out of their hands.
> Game developers have always been atrocious at modeling scale/abstraction. That the micromanaged decision making & gameplay you have when there are 10,000 people and 5 decisions, does not necessarily scale up to a giant Empire with 100,000,000 people and 500 decisions
This is what Universal Paperclips does well -- deftly keeping you making the same number of decisions as the scale of decisions you're making increases by a factor of 10^60 or so. It's exhilarating as the resources that you used to struggle over in earlier parts of the game get abstracted away.
Civilization doesn't span quite as many orders of scale as Universal Paperclips does, but it would be nice if it could achieve the same effect somehow. Like, in ancient times it should be a constant struggle to get enough food to feed your cities, but in modern times this should be abstracted away -- you see that your whole territory is covered with farms and food ceases to be a gameplay mechanic.
Instead you face modern problems like sub-replacement breeding levels... you can offset this by immigration but then the cities slowly cease to be part of your civilization.
Honestly I think the Romans would be pretty upset to be represented by the descendants of a bunch of Gothic and Lombard barbarians. Of course depending on the definition of Roman, they would have still been around until 1453. And the obvious successor civilization would then be... Turks, which is a bit awkward.
If you want "bits of information about the world", then there are going to be diminishing returns (because mutual information is almost always >0)
If you're looking for a specific piece of information you *know* is there, then every "miss" makes the likelihood of a "hit" in the remaining set higher, so increasing marginal returns, until you "hit". Similarly, if you need p<0.05 to publish, your utility in terms of data acquired is going to be some sort of step function.
Also, data markets are a thing that exists, both as abstract economic models, and real world entities.
Gwern is actively commenting here, so I'll let him get into the details if relevant, but he had a very interesting subsection on the expected value of additional information here:
Here is my latest monthly round up of the best long form content I recently stumbled upon. Highlights include analysis of progress in 3D printing, a search for evidence of peak oil, an lecture from the former CEO of google on their doomed AI efforts, and a whole lot more.
Yes, weight lifting + Eating enough protein + Sleeping well. Then you just pray, more I don't know.
1. important is to start slow!
Better too few weights than to many. Better too few exercises a day than too many. Better too few days a week than too many.
At worse you may "loose" 2 weeks to reach your point of actuall capability, but you don't loose 2 or 3 month by demotivating yourself or injuries.
2. important is to do it correctly!
People waste their time in the gym by doing exercises wrong. They use, in one specific exercise, 23 muscles (and stuff that's not meant to be strained at all) instead of the 8 muscles that the exercise is for. Not gaining anything by lifting 20 pounds but, at the worst, injuring themselves. And they could have gained so much by lifting 10 pounds, when doing it right.
Inform yourself how to do an exercise!
I often use half of the weight I can lift at the beginning of each exercise to make a short set just to go through the motions to make sure I do them correct.
3. important is to be consistent, to increase, and to rotate!
When you start with three days (or two) then you will not do less the next week. You do not not go because you don't feel like it, you only do not go, because you're sick.
You try to increase your weights every time.
You *must* switch to other exercises for the relevant muscle groups every 6 weeks. Otherwise you can train 3 years - with nothing happening anymore.
Patience, paired with doing all this right is the key in my opinion.
For me, strength training combined with a moderate energy deficit has resulted in increased muscle mass and decreased fat mass, so I don't think extreme methods are needed unless one is looking for extreme results.
modest calorie surplus + weight training; you'll still gain some fat, but relatively more will be muscle than without the weight training. A large calorie surplus will just end up as more fat. Then after a while do a modest calorie deficit while continuing to train to lose the fat you just gained. Standard bulking then cutting.
Unlike most supplements, there's persuasive data that creatine does what it's claimed to do (build muscle mass, and speed recovery after workouts by promoting healing of muscle tears). It also, maybe, helps offset the effects of sleep deprivation via a fairly well-understood mechanism, but only at fairly high doses (https://statisfied.substack.com/p/overcoming-sleep-deprivation?utm_source=publication-search). Don't take it if you have liver or kidney disease, or high BP.
It requires bulking at a small surplus of calories while doing about three 8/10 effort weight training sessions a week.
So, you need to count calories rigorously to achieve it.
You need to work out at least 3x a week to acheive it.
You need to put in effort / work out at 8/10 intensity while you're doing it.
I'd personally target a 300 cal / day surplus at first, and if you're feeling good about the amount of muscle vs fat you're putting on after a month, maybe increase it to 500 / day - EDIT: per **Bldysabba's** comment below I'd like to emphasize this is what I personally would do, and I'm probably heavier than most. Your actual target should be 0.25% - 0.5% of your bodyweight per week, and the lower end of that is safer re putting on less fat.
So the calculation would be 0.25% * (your body weight in pounds) * 3500 calories = your weekly caloric surplus. Divide by 7 for daily. For a 150lb person, that would be 188 calories extra per day.
Yes, this is more work than 99% of people are willing to put in. But it's pretty much the best way we (bodybuilders, powerlifters, and wrestlers) know how to do it. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
By my calculations, calorie surpluses of 300 to 500cal a day will result in weight increases of 1 to 1.5 kg a month, most of it fat. Probably not what the op wants
You know, you're right - I was going by what I do, but 300-500 cal a week is 0.3-0.5% for *me,* not necessarily most people, because I'm a little bigger than average.
So yes, thank you - for anyone out there, you generally only want to "bulk" at 0.25 - 0.5% a week, and better on the lower end if you're leery of putting on fat. That's gonna vary based on your starting weight.
Yes. Nobody actually knows how to prevent this, though, so the tips are speculative and range from "avoid polyunsaturated fats", "avoid fructose", "avoid isoleucine", and "avoid lithium" to "use targeted massage and cryotherapy to help remodel your extra-cellular matrices", "use high-calorie ketosis to increase RMR via FGF21 upregulation", "rebuild your gut microbiome via all available methods up to and including fecal transplants" and "take up endurance exercise to brown your adipose tissue" to "keep insulin under control with metformin", "get assessed (and treated) for low thyroid", and "take exogenous androgen precursors."
Yes all those are supported in the literature, lmao
A couple of months ago I started a Substack, and it quickly got to about 60 daily readers in the first 2 weeks, then completely stalled out. I'm not looking to use it as an income source, more as a potential to help me secure jobs in the future (I've been knocked back from several jobs based on other candidates having more industry experience, even if I interview well and have the technical chops). A bit of writing cred covering a diverse set of topics still within my general profession seems like a good way to cover the inexorable "needs experience to get experience" gap, plus it's kind of fun and I am learning a bit as I go.
Anyway, all that to say: does anyone have any suggestions for growing an audience in a niche? Or should I just switch my internal motivation from "gain cred/use this as a signal" to "do this because it's good in itself" and just ignore the desire for an audience.
I started a Substack a couple of years ago with a handful of readers, and it has climbed progressively to about 10-12,000 per week. I don't ask for any money (though people do occasionally send me some) and I'm not after fame because I use a pseudonym. But it came out of a desire to use a lifetime's experience in domestic and international politics and government to help people understand what was going on in the world, in long-form (5000 word) essays dealing with complex issues. That, if you like, is my "niche." I also exclude polemic and emotion (and encourage my commenters to do the same) which my readers tell me if pretty rare these days, and which they find attractive.
Strongly agree with Gregory Engel below. And, knowing your audience is essential. Early on I would send my readers a stand-alone post once every few months asking, in effect, what they wanted to to hear about, and how they liked me to approach each topic. Got helpful feedback - including suggestions for greater length, which is the opposite of what I would've expected.
I meant to say too: I don't think you should ignore the desire for an audience, because that's both natural and useful. Even if you don't write the way they like, knowing what they like is informative. Etc.
"I'm not looking to use it as an income source, more as a potential to help me secure jobs in the future..."
I don't know your field, but in the *tech* world of 25 years ago what (maybe) generated 'street cred' was not a blog but getting published in technical journals. The idea that an editor found some value in what you wrote is/was a plus.
I don't know what the current equivalent of publications such as Forth Dimensions and JavaWorld would be, but if these actually exist I would suggest trying to get published there (as well as maintain your substack presence).
The latter. When I stopped watching the stats and focused on honing the craft and writing about what I knew or was interesting to me, subscribers and followers grew. This, of course, will then strengthen the former. Good luck.
A mass proletariat uprising to bring about fully-automated luxury space gay communism is the best 33rd birthday I could possibly have, so based on my life so far I'm expecting that there will be no riots of note tomorrow.
I predict a hilarious misunderstanding at the anti-homelessness riots between the faction who showed up to burn down City Hall and the faction who showed up to burn down the homeless encampments.
Since we're talking about Star Trek and someone mentioned Strange New Worlds, isn't it true that the new series are just bad TV?
Like really bad.
Underestimating the viewer's intelligence. Dumb stories. Clichés.
Like the writers don't understand any of the sci-fi concepts they are using. As if an artist does not try to draw a hand but a drawing of a hand, or even only a drawing of a cartoon hand.
I felt like watching a very bad kids show when I saw the first 2 episodes of SNW.
Freeing the Six Counties (Tiocfaidh ár lá!) might have some pretty nasty consequences. Records of this period are fragmentary, but I understand we are due for a Second Civil War, a Eugenics War, and World War III (perhaps unrelated wars in that order, or perhaps they all refer to a single conflict progressively spiraling outwards), followed by a post-atomic horror.
The mysterious figure known to herstry as Khan Desisexch { I left the mispellings because they work} created a new reality, the one we now live in, the 25th Century of Jesus Spider Ascendant.
And yet still under copyright for another thirty years after that. In case you had any doubts as to just how effing ridiculous copyright law is.
To put it in perspective, if Little Nemo had come out the same year as Star Trek (1966), but under the copyright terms that existed when Little Nemo had actually been created (1905), it would have entered the public domain in 1994, or 2008 if the rightsholders had filed for an extension.
Impossible. It's baked into the culture implicitly, and the best we could hope for is to drive it underground. As a society we appear unable to believe in futures other than Star Trek and Mad Max.
Star Trek barely believes in its own future now. The trend of the Federation having a dark side that started in the later seasons of Deep Space 9 has evolved to its natural conclusion in Picard, where the Federation is a force for evil that brainwashes kids and it’s up to a bunch of old white men to free the world from big government.
Oh, tell me about it. Nothing made me so angry with new Trek as that "hey, let's have it all go to shit, yeah?" You can disagree with Roddenberry's vision, but at least he presumed that in the future, while we'd still have problems, we'd have worked out the worst of them on the rocky road there (Eugenics Wars etc.) and that there would be hope that we could achieve that brighter future.
DS9 was a great series, but because it moved into the war plot and needed something like Section 31, the subsequent series all went mad for it like they did the Mirror Universe and now the Federation/Starfleet is either (as in the reboot movies) way more militaristic, paranoid, and expansionist, or there are all these secret bureaus puppeteering behind the scenes to blame for things going to pot.
Give me back TOS Trek universe! Even if we were fighting the Klingons and the Romulans, honour and optimism were not empty words!
"Strange New Worlds" has enough of the TOS feel to keep me interested so far. As implied by the title. it at least understands what the words mean, which basically nothing else in the franchise since "Enterprise" can say. And Enterprise botched the implementation.
Star Trek was built on the foundation of Gene Rodenberry and won’t be revived without him. The best we can hope for is a new series by someone inspired by Star Trek.
How does the heritability of beauty (and gendered traits in general) work across genders?
That is, suppose you are a man who wants strong, manly sons. Should you marry the most the strongest and manliest-looking woman you can find? Or a conventionally-attractive woman? If the former, how come AFAIK nobody in history (including many kings who were probably really obsessed with having strong, manly sons) ever figured this out?
Suppose you have a male-dominated aristocracy. Presumably the highest members (eg kings) will have a lot of leeway in who to marry, and will choose especially beautiful (ie feminine) women. Does that mean we should expect the men in royal dynasties to become more feminine over time?
<i>Suppose you have a male-dominated aristocracy. Presumably the highest members (eg kings) will have a lot of leeway in who to marry, and will choose especially beautiful (ie feminine) women.</i>
Historically, it was usually the opposite: whom the king married was a matter of political importance, so the king's choice was heavily constrained. There were probably far more love matches among the lower classes, and when kings did marry for love regardless of political concerns, it frequently ended in disaster (e.g., Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville).
This is not an answer to the specific gendered traits heritability question, but I think that in pre modern societies, things like immune system strength probably counted for a lot in gendered trait outcomes like strength and beauty even though it is not gendered in of itself.
Marry someone healthy would have attracted men to beautiful women and women to strong men and created strong/beautiful children in turn.
Hum, why not make the assumption that the genes for comeliness notice what sort of body they are in and bias gene expression in the appropriate direction?
This isn’t how most sexually dimorphic traits are inherited. There are some exceptions: the king could obviously marry a tall woman to have tall sons. If he picks a woman with many masculine traits, her daughters might be unusually masculine but her sons probably won’t be. From my reading of the research, depending on the biological cause of her masculinity her sons might even be more feminine than usual, at least psychologically. Butch women tend to have genetic variants that affect the pathways for sex hormone signaling or synthesis. As others in the thread have mentioned, the king should look at a woman’s male relatives to make better predictions about the gendered traits of her sons.
"Presumably the highest members (eg kings) will have a lot of leeway in who to marry"
Surprisingly, not. The necessity for strong alliances, territorial expansion, and keeping it in the family (see the Spanish Hapsburgs) meant that princes and kings had a very limited pool of potential spouses.
What happened instead is that you marry Princess Plainface of the House of ReallyBigTerritory, then you take as mistress(es) the beautiful women. If you have children by the mistresses, you may or may not legitimise them, but they could end up with titles or wealth of their own.
Historical examples: Henry VIII and his marital troubles; Charles II and his offspring by various mistresses; William IV, uncle of Queen Victoria, whose children by his official wife all died early or were stillborn, which is why Victoria inherited the throne, but whose ten (yes) illegitimate children by his mistress (or perhaps wife, this is a murky area) all lived at least to adulthood.
For French kings, off the top of my head, Henry II's mistress Diane de Poitiers was renowned for her beauty and had immense influence (more so than Henry's legal wife, Catherine de Medici, who moved to strip Diane of much of her power after Henry's death); Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII and again a famous beauty; and of course, the string of mistresses of Louis XIV (by this time, there was even an established hierarchy and etiquette around the position of maîtresse-en-titre , somewhat reminiscent of the Chinese imperial concubine rankings).
EDIT: Regarding the lower ranking nobility, it's also surprising how many of them eventually ended up having no children or no surviving children. The book review about Lecky led me to look up more about his life, and his stepmother married into the family of the Earls of Carnwath. That title bounced around between uncle to nephew and back again, as the heirs seem to have died young or died without issue, if they ever married, before becoming extinct with the 13th Earl's death in 1941.
As many have pointed out already, kings and nobility in the old days could not marry for love. Arranged marriages were the order of the day. The same was mostly the case also further down the social hierarchy, with a possible exception for the poorest.
However, this may be changing since "romantic love" has now replaced arranged marriages as the culturally acceptable way to find a partner. "Romantic love" will tend to create a situation where good-looking people have children with other good-looking people.
This cultural shift happened in the West from approx. 1700 onwards (and is probably gradually spreading worldwide). Adding an assumption that women in particular prefer rich rather than poor partners, this cultural shift may create a selection effect that in the long run leads to well-off people being on average more good-looking than less well-off people.
Has romantic love already been operating long enough for such a selection effect to kick in? I do not know anyone who has seriously studied this. But based on the empirical method of Just Walking Around, there might be something here already. For example, I observe that university students (of both genders) seem on average more good-looking than the average young person in the streets. ...Also, when taking the Metro, people on the Metro lines heading to the rich suburbs are on average more good-looking than people on the Metro lines to the poorer suburbs.
...if "romantic love" combined with increased female choice when choosing who to have children with (thanks to the discovery of effective contraceptives that can be administered by the woman alone, independent of coitus) prevail, maybe we'll develop into aristocratic Elois and plebeian Morlocks already after a mere 5.000 more years or so.
Romantic love may have won the day, but for the very wealthy, powerful or high status, the same considerations will still apply. In real life, there are very few instances of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid; the only one I can think of is the Japanese Imperial Family, and for the commoner women who marry in there, they are nearly driven to nervous breakdowns by the etiquette and towering snobbery of the courtiers.
A second example: The present Crown Prince of Norway married a poorly educated single mother from a small coastal city back in 2001.
This happened after the prince had studied political science at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, breaking the family tradition of studying at Oxford. (Some suspect that he got so into the "power of the people" at UC Berkeley that he decided to marry one.)
She is beautiful, that must be said. And as in the Japanese case, she has also had nervous problems after being set on the path to become queen.
I think, with royalty becoming less important and maintaining only a symbolic role and function, we may get more of those "romantic love" marriages (though they don't always work out, see Harry and Meghan and how they blew all connections to the Royal Family). Now that there isn't really any gain to be made via alliances, there's no reason Prince Whosis can't marry Commoner Cathy instead of Princess Prunella since there is no more real power at stake anymore.
Agreed, And as an added bonus, marrying commoners provides the remaining Royal Houses in the world with some much needed fresh generic material. Which royal children should be grateful for.
Is there any actual reason to think that European royal houses are notably inbred? I see it asserted a lot, but from what I can see it seems to be just an overextrapolation from the Hapsburgs. The average person in an olde-timey peasant village where hardly anyone ever travelled more than ten miles from their birthplace was probably more inbred than a royal family who could marry nobles from across Europe.
There is an idea that male and female beauty is an example of antagonistic selection - traits that are desirable in women are undesirable in men and visa versa. Steve Tyler vs Liv Tyler is often used as an example.
As for why aristocracies didn't take advantage of this, the easy answer is that Kings actually have very limited dating pools due to political and dynastic considerations. Witness the Hapsburgs, or Charles III marrying Diana. Generally, we should expect royal lines to slowly become more inbred over time due to this issue.
I have no answer, but now I am wondering: are beautiful families a thing? Like, where lots of the members of a family are unusually beautiful? (I know about regression to the mean, but there are tall families and intelligent families, so why not beautiful families?) I don't know the families of my friends, so I have no idea.
If they exist, that would perhaps be a better example than aristocracy, because beautiful people do have a pretty large pool to choose their partner from. Probably more so than nobles. If such families don't exist, this would indicate that the heritability of beauty is different from the heritability of height and intelligence.
I'll just say that my brother married a strikingly beautiful woman, and their kids, including the boys, are much better looking than anywhere else in my extended family tree. But she's more on the "vigorous, healthy, athletic" side of beautiful, than the "dainty, pretty, feminine" side.
"Publius Claudius Pulcher (died 249 BC or 246 BC) was a Roman politician. ...He was the first of the Claudii to be given the cognomen "Pulcher" ("handsome")."
Good looks must have come down to some of his descendants, at least; Clodia, mistress of the poet Catullus and lover of several others, and (allegedly) her brother too was handsome:
"The predominant view, however, identifies Clodia with Lesbia primarily on the basis of Catullus 79.1-2:
Lesbius is beautiful. Why not? And Lesbia prefers him
to you and your whole tribe, Catullus.
But let this beautiful man sell Catullus along with his tribe
if he finds three kisses from people he knows.
"Pulcher", the Latin word for "beautiful" (see line 1 above), is also the cognomen of Clodia's brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher. This is the only one of Catullus' poems in which a character named "Lesbius", the masculine form of the name, appears and Lesbia is present in close proximity."
You should expect regression to the mean at any rate. A man manly enough to seize power by the force of his own will is unlikely to be succeeded by a similarly exceptional son... although the Ottoman law of fratricide gets you partway to that. https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1830050975106609390
And that's true no matter what the answer to Scott's original question is. Neat.
Ideally, you'd want a woman with the proven ability to produce manly sons. But I guess social mores largely preclude that mode of selection. So going for other relatives is the best you can do.
There are two major flaws with this view. One, as Gwern gets into, is the time period where significant power is vested into feudal structures and where people understand how heritability in humans work doesn't really overlap. Two, powerful aristocrats were not marrying for the advantage given to their children by a potential spouse.
Until relatively recently (c late 17th - early 18th century), the kings in the western model did not possess absolute authority over their realm. They acted more as a broker of power between various powerful vassals and landed aristocrats. Thus the primary thing on a king's mind when setting up a marriage is forming a military alliance, or trying to avoid a civil war within his own domain. Or possibly trying to play the inheritance game and expand his dynastic lands through political marriage. There would be a quite limited pool of daughters from other aristocrats of sufficient status available. Features of the wife like beauty, phenotype, and speaking a mutually intelligible language were far at the bottom of this list. I'm not sure to what extent the characteristics of women were even thought to influence their children in the medieval period. Of course kings could sire illegitimate children and often did so, but these would usually not inherit or be considered part of the dynasty outside extreme circumstances like all the other legitimate children being dead.
The last paragraph is a broad outline of monogamous marriage culture, so the Romans and Christian Europeans. In medieval Islam, aristocrats could have many wives and concubines and sire a great many more sons than their European counterparts. This is probably the best chance anyone ever had of a breeding program back in the day. Notably, having a bunch of heirs is really bad for a powerful aristocrat because their estate gets split into a bunch of pieces when they die. Muslims weren't required to split their estate evenly among sons*, unlike say gavelkind succession, but this was still a major issue.
A good example lies in the Ottoman Turks, a major geopolitical force for 500 years. The Ottoman Sultans created an imperial harem system, wherein the sultan had access to essentially whatever kind and as many fertile women as he desired. AFAIK, it is the closest historical example to Scott's thought experiment. What happened was not some selection for heirs with the manliest jaw or most musculature or something like that. Presumptive heirs were groomed and educated through childhood, and then given some sort posting that tested their ability as a future sultan. Provincial governorships were quite common. Whichever son did the best sultan internship was made the heir, and his rivals were either executed or politically marginalized to avoid the issue of fracturing the Ottoman power base. This is more like an IQ test than a manliness test, and even contemporary humans with a sequenced genome available would be hard pressed to create an efficient IQ-maximizing breeding program. Another example is sultan Suleiman, who fell in love with a Ruthenian slave concubine and had his son from his first marriage strangled in favor of the slave's son, despite his first son being the better administrator by all accounts.
So in the historical record of male-dominated aristocracy:
- They didn't understand the mechanics of heritability
- Physical traits often had little correlation to desirability of producing inheriting offspring
ETA: Muslim inheritance law required splitting the estate among all sons, but the split didn't have to be equal and was much more egalitarian than primogeniture. Edited for clarity.
"Presumptive heirs were groomed and educated through childhood, and then given some sort posting that tested their ability as a future sultan. Provincial governorships were quite common. Whichever son did the best sultan internship was made the heir, and his rivals were either executed or politically marginalized to avoid the issue of fracturing the Ottoman power base."
This, like the Chinese equivalent, also made for *intense* harem politics, as women schemed to achieve power by capturing the favour of the sultan and having their son become heir presumptive.
This meant it was in the interest of an ambitious woman to make sure any rival's son who seemed capable and likely to be made heir was disgraced, killed, or otherwise disposed of, so *her* son could advance in his stead. It's not the best way for finding who, out of a set of potential heirs, is the best because whatever about theory, in practice the incentive is to marginalise the capable or scheme to have them ousted. Be it ministers in power already who don't want a new sultan who is likely to claw back some or all of that power, or women who want the status and power of being the mother of the emperor.
See the history of Wu Zetian, who first ruled through exercising power over her husband, then through her sons, then took power for herself. She commenced by having her rivals, the Empress and the highest ranking Imperial Concubine, killed; took over administration of the government when her husband the emperor had a stroke; after his death, she had her third son declared emperor but wielded all the real power; when he showed signs of independence she had him deposed and replaced with her youngest son and continued to rule in all but name; eventually she decided "why not rule in my own name?", took the throne for herself, and declared the foundation of a new dynasty.
I saw the harem politics angle as a bit too much of a digression from Scott's question, but it is interesting. I'm not sure these sorts of power struggles are limited to such a structure though. Irene of Athens had her own son's eyes gouged out so she could rule as Roman Empress, and that was in a monogamous marriage society.
I've heard some interesting anthropological theories about how polygamy affected medieval societies. In the Muslim system, a polygamous society meant the elite 5% of males might each have 3 wives. This meant the lowest 15% of males ended up with 0 wives. Obviously having a bunch of fighting age men with no hope of getting a woman was really bad for social stability. As pastoralists with a militant religion, Muslim Arabs would often raid neighboring peoples for slaves and loot. And the resulting strategy for avoiding an agitating male underclass arose as "those people over there have women, just take them." Now combine this with the harem politics; males really don't want to lose status among their peers by being manipulated by women, or having their favored heir killed. The desire to avoid political harem intrigue and the desire to constantly source infidel women as sex slaves explains a lot of the deeply misogynistic behavior of Muslim Arabs.
But if Islam is decoupled from the circumstances of the Arabs, this convention doesn't necessarily hold. Most of the pastoral steppe nomads in Eurasia ended up converting to Islam. They certainly found the raiding sedentary neighbors part attractive. But the women had much stronger societal roles pre-conversion, due to... hunting or riding or being responsible while the men were away or something? This part wasn't fleshed out as well. Anyway, it's also notable that the misogynistic Arab practices are much less present in societies decoupled from the pastoral raiding mindset. Such as Malaysia/Indonesia, where Islam (rather unusually) spread through trade and conversion rather than conquest.
The Chinese polygamous system also had the same problem with creating a male underclass. Except instead of capturing women, their solution was more or less don't do anything about it. This explains all of the constant banditry throughout Chinese history, much more so than other states with far less capacity. What else is a guy to do when he's doomed to a life alone? And somehow, the CCP has managed to recreate these conditions in modern China. The 2000 census lists 117 boys per 100 girls, right on par with the historical 15%. I'm not sure how many of the girls were aborted/killed vs hidden from authorities to avoid penalties, but there was a clear one-child preference for boys. It's hard to imagine anything at this point that could precipitate an actual revolt in communist China, but tens of millions of disenfranchised young men might do it.
I meant the split didn't have to be equal. A Muslim with 3 sons doesn't have to give each son exactly 1/3 of his estate, but the estate does have to be divided among his 3 sons. Your link doesn't really clarify the inheritance mechanism.
I've edited the original comment because you made me realize I explained it poorly.
I think you would conclude that there are two good ways for people to be and marry an exemplar from a family that has many exemplars of both or either.
How strong is the feminity attractiveness correlation?
I suspect it isn't actually that strong, most attractive features are linked to healthiness and attractive features like eye and hair colours aren't unmasculine. I expect if you looked at women whose attractivness is highly rated by men, they won't ever look masculine but they will look fairly average (also think koinophilia) in terms of feminity of thinks like chins and muscles.
Things like lip redness, hip width, size of sexual features etc are linked to gender specific hormones and I have no idea how they effect the opposite gender.
There seem to be a fair number of major figures of Western history who held attitudes towards nonwhite people that were horrific by modern standards, but were also very philo-Semitic -- George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt to name a few. Are there any notable historical figures who were like this but in reverse, i.e. usually consistent opponents of racism except for being anti-Semitic?
Muhammed Ali?
Ali (at least during his prime years) was just a black supremacist; he viewed all white people as inherently evil, not only Jews.
Phrase of the day:
“disinterested malevolence”
Context:
https://nypost.com/2024/09/07/us-news/nyc-ceo-claims-bitter-ex-wife-ruined-his-300k-wine-collection-suit/
People really will say anything under torture:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/06/dick-cheney-vote-kamala-harris
I think it’s worth spelling out.
“[Trump] can never be trusted with power again.
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,”
Dick Cheney - September 6, 2024
______________________
Cheney knows this isn’t about the left/right, elite/populist, policies of a single election.
It’s about stopping a man who has no respect for, is ignorant of, and is entirely incurious about the rare genius of our sometimes flawed but improvable Republic.
The founders knew there would be rascals and scoundrels and made Constitutional provisions for them. But Trump? James Madison had an amazing mind but I doubt even his imagination could have fathomed such a specimen.
“Kamala Harris will be standing on a riser behind her podium during our debate. That’s cheating!”
Good lord, the man is a complete jackass.
I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the seventh or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped.
So, the people who are only mildly annoyed by Trump, rather than existentially annoyed by him, do not trust the latter crowd when they say this is an existential moment. This is in addition to the usual crowd who have been regularly annoyed by Democrats.
So when you repeat points like "existential moment" or "uniquely bad", you are hard to distinguish from someone who just wants a Democrat in the WH so badly that they are willing to say things like that, which means they infer you just want a Democrat in the WH really badly. And they're mostly regularly annoyed by that already.
I appreciate your ‘boy who cried wolf’ point.
I think it’s a shame that people can legitimately point to that hyperbolic take and slough off the fact that Trump was actually the first president in American history to try to circumvent the democratic process.
With the obscenity of 1/6/21 and the campaign to force Pence to recognize false electors this does raise the situation to something much more serious than Dick Cheney = Darth Vader or Mitt is a Mormon who put Seamus on the car roof for a vacation trip.
As I say elsewhere, the Republic will most likely survive a second Trump term. If you take him at his word - I know, you can never really do that - it will be a very ugly 4 years.
I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential.
Bob Dole and GHWB were ordinary Republicans, standup guys with records of heroic military service. There might have been a bit of hair on fire rhetoric from both sides in the Clinton era but the heat really didn’t get cranked up until post 9/11 and the Axis of Evil and the Coalition of the Willing rhetoric of Bush\Cheney
I do prefer Democratic policies to Republican and I would have been a bit disappointed if Romney or John McCain had prevailed but I knew they were solid American patriots and wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it.
"I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential."
2024, 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000. That's seven. If I squint, I can see how 2000 wasn't quite as bad, because it was the last election we had with 9/11 in our rearview, and that changed a lot. But it didn't keep Gore from admonishing the nation about what would happen to social security and the budget surplus.
I prefer Republican policies to Democrat (particularly on the economy and gun rights), but I wasn't terrifically bothered by Biden winning over Trump, on the premise that Biden was physically hale and I remember him being willing to send praise across the aisle - until I found he wasn't. But while I do know of a few Democrat voters who, like you, were okay with Romney or McCain, I noticed dramatically more Democratic rhetoric claiming they were going to wreck the nation.
Okay. My mistake to just count presidential elections.
I can’t remember the specifics of Gore’s pitch in 2000 but going into that election as a Dem I expected Bush W to be a pretty moderate Republican - compassionate conservatism and all - until after 9/11.
Well, suppose I amend my paragraph above:
"I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the sixth or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped."
Does it appear critically different from the original version?
I made a couple edits for clarity above just now. I had tapped out the comment on my phone while cooling down (sweating profusely) from a bike ride and made the typical two thumbs mistakes.
I'm sure James Madison had heard of Julius Caesar. He's a pretty famous guy.
Yeah they had the guy who conquered the Gauls top of mind when they set things up, not the gasbag star of Celebrity Apprentice. That’s where we get into the realm of ‘difficult to imagine.’
I think "President who wants to declare himself King" would have been well within Madison's imagination. And the system he and his colleagues designed seems to have worked well enough to stop Trump once.
Where does "President who wants to declare himself King" come from? I have seen no indications of that, and it seems rather unlikely for a 78-year-old.
Barely; and the fact that a lot of people are willing to give him another crack at it is sobering.
And it isn’t even that he wanted to declare himself a king. That’s the least of it. The worst of it is that he wanted to make himself a king, but by having us all swallow what was obviously an enormous lie.
I try very hard to remain dispassionate, but it’s challenging sometimes.
This is a man who waged an intense and persistent campaign to get several young black teenagers executed (he agitated for NY to reinstate capital punishment specifically so it could be applied to these boys) for a crime that had been thoroughly proven to have been committed by someone else. And when he grew tired of that decided to get on board with the proposition that Barack Obama‘s birth certificate was a forgery. Plus all the other stuff….
Is it worth it? Quite a few of us seem to think it is.. can you ride the tiger?
I don’t know.
Yes the system they designed held against a first attempt.
In a sane world the first attempt would disqualify him from a second. At least that’s what I think Madison would have hoped for. The Legislative branch is responsible for checking Executive corruption.
Mitch McConnell - March 13, 2021
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mitch McConnell - March 6, 2024
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
No, I have to disagree here. I don’t think Madison would have been able to imagine this. A single man using his superpower of utter shamelessness to bend one of the only two major political parties almost completely to his petulant will. Casting out legislators who refuse to kiss the ring. Those with the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger for example. Ryan’s exit was probably caused by Trump as well.
The Republic would more than likely make it through a second Trump presidency intact but it would be a civically corrosive affair and likely a very bumpy ride.
A campaign promise from Donald Trump:
“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
I know, he just says these things to be provocative, and I’m a fool to take it too seriously
Trump’s AG, William Barr testified that he told Trump that the stolen election ideas being tossed around were ‘all bullshit’ - his exact words - shortly before being fired.
Fired for having the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
I expect a future Trump appointed Attorney General would be vetted for a more compliant nature.
Oh yes. I know. The last line of my previous post was sarcasm in case it was missed.
Thanks for the replies. So I'm mostly with you both on Trump but possibly not with you on Cheney? I can't imagine a worse endorsement and if Cheney really wants Kamala to win he should have kept his mouth shut.
I’ll let Bernie Sanders explain why I think this was worth pointing out.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders - 9/8/24
“What I think Dick and Liz Cheney are saying is that in this existential moment in American history, it’s not just issues. Cheney and I agree on nothing — no issues. But what we do believe in is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations.
I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy. Obviously, on all the issues we have very different points of view.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/08/bernie-sanders-dick-cheney-donald-trump-00177884
No amount of class from Bernie will make me like Cheney and I don't think I'll be alone there. There is an anti-war component to Trump's support (recent endorsement from Tulsi Gabbard etc.) and this plays into his hands.
Yeah, we definitely need a sarcasm font.
*Gosh, why would anyone value long-term process over short-term outcomes?*
:-)
Thanks for this
I saw "Alien Romulus" and have a few ideas/criticisms that I'd like feedback on. SPOILER ALERT...
1) The idea that they were able to find the xenomorph's carcass floating in the vastness of space is ridiculous and seemed like a cheap trick.
2) But embracing that plot convenience anyway just leads to another problem: when the cloned xenomorphs got loose on the space station and it ended up disabled thanks to the ruckus, why didn't Weyland-Yutani immediately send a rescue ship? Wasn't the Romulus/Remus space station playing host to perhaps their most important and valuable secret? It wouldn't make sense for them to lose track of it like they did.
3) That makes me think the movie's plot would have been better if Romulus/Remus had been a secret space station in a restricted area of that solar system. Normally, its communications traffic would be very low so it could keep a low profile. However, once the catastrophe happened, it started issuing an automatic distress beacon.
Instead of working on that hellish planet, the protagonists would have been meteoroid miners on that small, industrial ship. Normally, they steered clear of the space station, but after hearing the distress beacon, they decide to risk docking with it to steal whatever they can in the hopes of escaping impoverishment. They assume an accident has killed the crew but left any number of valuable components intact.
A more distant Weyland-Yutani military outpost would also receive the distress beacon, and would dispatch a team on a second space ship to the station. This would ratchet up the tension since the protagonists would have to get in and out of the station before the squad arrived, and it would set both groups up for a showdown late in the film.
4) Another thing I disliked was how quickly the facehugger/xenomorph lifecycle went in this film. Yes, I realize many liberties can be taken here since alien biology is unknown to us, but I also think the alien matured so fast that it probably violated the laws of physics (probably the law of conservation of mass). Growing from the size of a rattlesnake to the size of a large man means adding 200 lbs of mass to your body. Even if your metabolism is 100% efficient, that means consuming 200 lbs of food or somehow transforming 200 lbs worth of air into body mass (1 cubic meter of air is only 2.85 lbs), and we never see any indication the alien does that. (Kudos to the novelization of the original "Alien" movie for including a brief scene after the chestburster scene where the crew discovers their food pantry room has been ransacked.)
It would have been better if the protagonists had docked with the space station at least 24 hours after it had been disabled. That would have provided enough time, per what we saw in the first and third films, for chestbursters who emerged from the station's crew to have matured into adult aliens.
5) Why were the pulse rifles in "Alien Romulus" more advanced than the ones in "Aliens"? The latter takes place 30 years after the former, so why would weapons technology go backwards?
LLMs have all but snuffed out the poetry of scam dating site emails.
A couple years ago with ChatGPT’s arrival, gems like the following disappeared from my junk folder like buffalo from the plains and sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see writing like it again:
Subject: Looking for a someone to have sex-related gender along with
I am actually a charming that is hopeless and try to strongly believe that there is something great in every person. When I'm feeling harmed, I'm sincere about my desires and also am truthful. I'm seeking an every bit as good friend who levels to brand new traits and is actually an outstanding and also unbiased communicator.
Check out my bio.
What a beguiling mix of optimism, vulnerability and sexual adjacency. Was I the only one who collected these? (Probably yes)
Just a few years ago (2020), I often saw Google Translate do translations about that bad, sometimes to the point of being funny. Sadly, it has now improved enough that they are no longer funny (still doesn't hold a candle to LLM based translation though, apart from the fact that it doesn't hallucinate or skip things like LLMs sometimes do).
Yes, improvements to Google Translate probably better explain the sudden disappearance of such emails than LLM adoption.
As an aside, the email would actually serve as strangely appropriate (and grammatically consistent) correspondence from E.E. Cummings’ title character anyone in his famous “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
"Sex-related gender" is certainly a novel phrase 😀 Next time you're in some discussion about gender matters, try lobbing it in as "oh yes, this is what all the cool kids are using now, didn't you know?" 😁
It actually kinda makes sense. There are thousands of genders, two of them are sex-related, the remaining ones are a matter of self-identification.
I'm reading How To Win Friends and Influence People and did a double take when I came across a story about a company trying to hire a "P.H.D. in Computer Science". This is a book written in *1936*. I know that before electrical computers were invented, the term referred to teams of people who did rote calculations by hand, but even so, I can't imagine that there would have been such a thing as "computer science" back then, let alone one worthy of PHDs. I wish I knew what this was referring to and what "computer science" PHDs did in the 30s.
The edition I'm reading was apparently published in 2009, and so it's possible that they sneakily edited in a later story. But it's still surprising since the book is packed full of references to the 30s, and this is the first time I've seen any reference to anything after that. Why would they so clumsily insert a modern story, and then do it in only one place and nowhere else?!
I’m enjoying the attempts in these comments to argue that a reference to a PhD in computer science in the 1930s is a plausible. Curious to see how they’ll explain the Stevie Wonder reference in a later chapter!
(Indeed, more modern anecdotes were added in later editions.)
Oh you're right, I didn't even pick up on the Stevie Wonder thing. I did notice a reference to Disney World in a later chapter, as well as an entire chapter talking about TV ads, and another one talking about BF Skinner including quotes from 70s books. It's a real shame they inserted all the more modern stuff, because I think it detracts from the book, and the TV ad chapter is completely incoherent anyway.
There were edits like that in the later editions of HtWFaIP; it's been long enough that I don't recall any examples offhand, but I definitely remember noticing them then.
And my father had to get his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering, because Cornell didn't have a Comp Sci department in 1960. But the NE department had the best computers, so he became the man for doing neutron transport calculations in a submarine reactor (I think). And later taught graduate Computer Science.
So, while "Computer" was certainly a term in 1930 and might have wound up in the same sentence as "Science", I'm pretty sure nobody doing popular writing in that era would have talked about a "Ph.D. in Computer Science".
A lot of academic computer science in those days was more like a branch of mathematics than engineering, dealing with stuff like defining mathematically rigorous abstract models of computation and figuring out what sorts of problems you could solve with one model or another. Both Turing Machines and Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus were first proposed in 1936, for example.
Could it have been a later updated edition? I read the book years ago and don’t recall that part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
Okay, so it looks like punchcards were "computer science" from 1890 to the 1940s, but the first Computer Science Doctoral program wasn't started until 1962. So the question is now whether "a PhD in Computer Science" could be loose terminology for the fields involving punchcards or other calculations (like looking for a PhD in Secretary)..
ChatGPT says that the first PhD in Computer Science was in 1965, Richard Wexelblat at University of Pennsylvania, dissertation title "A Bound on the Number of States in a One-Dimensional Iterative Automaton". Previously, computer science research was done as a part of mathematics, electrical engineering, or physics.
Holy shit, deer are creepy!
At least at night, when wearing a headlamp. I look over and see pairs of glowing yellow eyes silently staring at me from shadowy forms, bobbing and blinking in an inhuman manner.
‘Shining’ deer with car headlights is an old poaching technique.
Just wait till you see what a goose's tongue looks like.
Tech tip of the day. You know when you try to get on public WiFi, but can’t get the “Accept Terms and Conditions” page to show up to actually join? That’s because the network is getting tripped up with encryption. What almost always works is visiting an unencrypted site that uses http (not https) but they’re pretty hard to find these days for good reason.
Anyways, visiting http://neverssl.com does the trick. It’s a site that’s not encrypted, specifically for that purpose. Happy browsing!
Another good try is nmcheck.gnome.org . It's used by default in Ubuntu to redirect you to the captive portal, but I've used it on other computer and even my phone when the page didn't want to load otherwise.
I used to use tvtropes for that purpose but that's on https now. Thanks for the tip!
Review of the fourth episode of the Rings of Power.
It's better, in that things happen and it moves more quickly. We don't get Numenor, Cirdan, Celebrimbor, Annatar, or the Dwarves; it's mostly in Rhun and switching back and forth between there, Elrond and Galadriel heading out to Eregion, and Isildur and company wandering around doing something (I honestly have no idea what they were trying to achieve there).
So at least by sticking to only three concurrent sub-plots it's less messy. Still a little boring, however.
Let's get through this one by one. I'm going to cover each sub-plot as one block, rather than skipping back and forth as the episode does:
(1) Elrond and Galadriel go off on an expedition to Eregion because they've heard nothing from Celebrimbor and Gil-galad is concerned. Galadriel has the wind taken out of her sails because Elrond is given command of the expedition and she's under his command. She is still a bitch about things, Elrond is getting sassy (he's also growing out his hair and it's at the curly locks stage). Maybe with Elves it's the same as with Samson! All their strength is in their hair! Now that his hair is growing back, Elrond has found the cojones to stand up to Girlboss Glads and tell her, more or less, "my way or the highway". Which she does not appreciate, hence the bitchiness and passive-aggression. She is also way paranoid (the wind blows? it's Sauron doing it!) which may or may not be justified. Anyhow,. they head off over the Axa bridge (which made me laugh because over here AXA is an insurance company - product placement or just unfortunate coincidence?) but when they get to the bridge, OH NO IT BROKED!
Elrond says it looks like it was hit by lightning, Galadriel demurs and says it must have been Sauron because no earthly force could do this. They now have a choice of two alternative routes: go north, add two weeks to travel time, or go south through (cue ominous music) Tyrn Gorthad. Galadriel gets a ring vision and says there is evil there, but Elrond distrusts her ring and says that's where we're going.
Galadriel is right because Tyrn Gorthad means the Barrow-downs. But this is a thousand or so years too early for the barrows and the barrow-wights, you say? Remember, this show don't need no stinkin' timelines. So yeah, they go south and yeah, they encounter barrow wights and yeah, one of the group of Diverse Elves bites the dirt (there's a red-haired elf I thought would be the one because he's one of the two white guys, not counting Elrond, but no, they killed off the black Elf. How racist!)
Then they run into some Orcs and the dark-haired white Elf gets an arrow in the abdomen, and while they're all huddled behind a fallen tree trying to muffle his cries so the Orcs don't track them by sound, Galadriel has her hands on him and the riing magically activates and magically heals him. It even makes the arrow magically fall out of him instead of them having to pull it out. How convenient!
The healing makes no sense because that's not one of Nenya's stated powers, but if the show needs magic healing, then it gets magic healing. Galadriel hands the ring to Elrond and tells him and the survivors to get out of Dodge while she distracts the Orcs. She goes off and girlbosses the bunch of Orcs and the other Elves pause to appreciate how she sacrificed herself for them, but Elrond says in the neo-Sindarin (according to the subtitles) no, she did it to save the ring, then he stomps off. Told ya he was getting sassy.
Anyway, this is the bit I fast-forwarded through, as Galadriel girlbosses the Orcs with twirls and skips and flaming arrows and what-not, but just as she is about to ride off (I don't remember where the horse came from), she stops a moment too long to lecture them, so Adar captures her.
I liked that bit, mainly because as he knocks her off the horse via chain (yeah, the Orcs had hooks on chains or maces on chains or something), she aims a flaming arrow at him and he quenches it with his one gauntleted hand and we get the best moment in this episode because it is canon undiluted, genuine Quenya from Tolkien: "Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo, heruni Alatáriel". End of episode and a good place to end! Though I wish Joseph Mawle were still playing Adar, Sam Hazeldine is okay but he doesn't have that 'something' Mawle had.
(2) The Stranger and the Harfoots in Rhun. Oh gosh, I dislike this sub-plot *so* much. Let's grit our teeth and power on through, though. The Stranger and the Harfoots have been separated. Stranger goes looking for them, manages to stumble across Tom Bombadil, who has a nice little green patch of land and animals in the middle of the desert. A gust of wind (conveniently) blows the map out of Stranger's hands while he's talking to Bombadil, he chases it, it gets impaled on a tree branch, while Stranger is trying to get it back, the tree swallows him up.
Tom eventually comes along to coax Old Man Willow - sorry, it's Old Man Ironwood this time (hold on a second while I have a little weep about the paucity of imagination in this show) - to let Stranger go, takes Stranger home with him, gives him a bath (where all this spare water in the middle of the desert is coming from is never explained), he sings (yes of course he does) and Stranger thinks he hears a woman (Goldberry) but Tom plays coy and says there's only him and the Stranger there.
Anyway, we get the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" speech from Tom as he persuades Stranger that "you're a wizard, Gandalf!" and that it's his job to fight the Dark Wizard who may be allying with Sauron (there's a fire metaphor used here but I'm not going to inflict it on you). Bombadil is 'the Hermit', you see, and many moons ago the Dark Wizard also ate honey by Tom's fire (this episode abounds in the kind of unintended double entendres where you can easily visualise the porn movie version) and wanted to know about harnessing magic, too. But now he controls a lot of Rhun and wants to control more, he's ambitious you see, and if he links up with Sauron then it'll be bad news. They seem to be hinting damn hard the Dark Wizard is Saruman, but who knows?
So much for Stranger and Bombadil, on to the Harfoots. Oh, but before I do - turns out the Tusken raiders hunting the Stranger and the Harfoots are called Gaudrim. Name meaning unsure; "-rim" is the general suffix for "people, folk" and online source claims that "gau(d)" translates as "device or machine". If that means "People of the Device/Machine", and they're subservient to the Dark Wizard, it could be another hint that he is Saruman (who was the most interested in machinery).
As for their personal names, they seem to be taken from an IKEA catalogue: Glüg and Brânk? Dark Wizard realises this bunch are not really the smartest henchmen in the roster but since they're all he's got so far, he tells them to concentrate on finding the Harfoots and he'll deal with the Istar himself.
The Harfoots (Nori and Poppy) meet a Stoor in the desert, and immediately he and Poppy start making googly eyes at each other. Nori is no more impressed by this budding romance than I am, and they make the Stoor take them back to his village. Poppy and Nori are very surprised by the village life and Harfoots, I mean Stoors, living in holes because it's so alien to their traditions. Turns out the Stoors really are like the Harfoots, as the leader, Gundabale somebody or other, decides to tie up Poppy, Nori and Merimac (the guy who brought them back to the village) and in the morning kick them out into the desert, where she knows the Gaudrim are hunting them. Just like our Harfoot psychopaths would do! The family resemblance is unmistakable!
In fact, Nori says as much, that if Sadoc were in the leader's place, he would have done the same. Once Gundabale learns the name Sadoc Burrows, she takes Nori off for a small history lesson. Turns out that many moons ago, a Stoor named Roderic Burrows had visions of a place with streams of cold water, a place he called the Sûzat (another real Tolkien word, this will one day be the Shire). He set off with a caravan of followers to find it and promised to come back and lead the rest of the Stoors there.
Is that where the Harfoots are from, and have Poppy and Nori come to lead them there? Alas, Nori bursts the bubble that they have no home, they just kept wandering, and Burrows never found the Sûzat. I suppose if there ever is a season three, they'll give us the Fallowhides who *did* find it and settle there.
Okay, so now some of the Gaudrim turn up in the Stoor village looking for the Harfoots; Gundabale pretends she doesn't know about them, but the lead Gaudrim threatens her that unless she hands them over, he'll come back with the Dark Wizard and then the Stoors will learn why the Gaudrim all wear masks (because of the curse which they wanted the wizard to remove last episode, presumably). End of sub-plot so far!
(3) Theo, Arondir, Isildur, Estrid (Isildur's potential love interest) and the surviving Southlanders hanging out in the ruins of Pelargir (which, again, is all kinds of messed-up because it shouldn't be in ruins yet *or* be an abandoned colony of Numenor but by now I should know better than to expect fidelity to lore). A lot happens and yet nothing happens, and I'm not really clear on what is supposed to be going on here. This is the part where I fast-forwarded the most.
Theo manages to get himself captured, Isildur and the gang go searching for him, there's something about Wildmen (I swear on my life they're copying Game of Thrones here because of the coincidence of Wildmen of Dunland), Arondir finds out Estrid is one of the Wildings and wants to use her to find their base, yadda yadda yadda, there's another pointless monster in a mucky bog, they find Theo, an Ent and Entwife turn up and wreck the joint, Arondir speaks to them in Sindarin and there's more yadda yadda yadda and that's about it. I don't know what the point of all of this was.
Roll end credits with Bombadil's song playing, which at least is better than the original lyrics of a part of a song they used in the episode. They used "gropin'" to rhyme with "hoping", you see what I mean about the easily visualised porn version? EDIT: Whoops, got that one wrong; I rewatched to see if I had it correct and no. The actual lyrics, sung by Tom while we get to see Not-Yet-Gandalf from the waist up naked in the tub having a bath, are: "Down sinks the sun in the west/Soon you'll be gropin'" to rhyme with "open" in the next couplet. However, nekkid wizard and "groping" in conjunction = in front of my salad?
Summing up: better pacing, more movement forward. They should have stuck to cutting down number of "and now this happens here and that is going on there and over yonder another thing" in the first three episodes, maybe give one episode to each sub-plot so it could be more fully developed.
The scenery is the best part of this show, even if they over-CGI it. Elrond at least seems to be growing a pair now that he's dealing with Galadriel, though they seem to be introducing pointless CONFLICT CONFLICT CONFLICT for dramatic tension between the pair of them; if Galadriel is too paranoid and stubborn about "everything is Sauron", Elrond is being too stubborn about "the rings are evil and you're wrong to use them".
I want to see what happens next with Adar and Galadriel, even though I do think - so far - Hazeldine is not able to deliver in the part. This episode was better than the preceding three, but the Isildur sub-plot is really just spinning its wheels. We *know* he can't die, so there's no suspense at all in such scenes as "oh no, a bog monster! oh no, Orcs!"
The ACX dating discourse is a bit toxic ...but on the other hand, interesting... possibly my mental model of people's motives is really wrong, here.
I can't think of a topic more likely to stir the passions. On some level I feel the idea the discourse should take place calmly is based on a flawed anthropology. Zeal is an effect of love. I think the alpha discussion below is great.
I just wish the rationalsphere had more dating advice for women, and not just for (straight) men.
Well theres a lot more men than women around, so dating advice is less about "how to get a man" and more "PSA you can get away with really high standards even if you were an ugly duckling in highschool". I think theres a fair bit of that, just its not usually framed as dating advice, more "Ugh I cant believe this dude was *so horrible* to me".
I think a part of the reason is generally fewer women in the rationalsphere, but another part is that the mainstream advice for women sucks less than the mainstream advice for men, so there was less pressure to develop an alternative knowledge base.
What I mean is that e.g. the book "The Rules" is more or less mainstream advice in a condensed form, but anything analogical written for men would be decried as toxic and sexist. The mainstream dating advice for women seems to be unapologetically about "what should he do for you, and how to make him do it", while the mainstream dating advice for men seems to me about "what should you do for her" (spoiler: "women are mysterious, always be polite and buy her flowers").
So I guess a good starting place for a rational advice for women might be to review "The Rules" (maybe as a part of ACX book reviews). I am not the target audience, but I would love to read it out of curiosity.
On the other hand, the fact that mainstream not-obviously-stupid advice for women exists, doesn't imply that the advice is actually good. It probably also follows some taboos, and optimizes for what the audience wants to hear rather than what is true. It is a better starting point, but still just a starting point that needs to be reviewed carefully.
It also depends on what is your goal. For a typical man who reads about dating advice, the goal is "getting laid, preferably with hotter women". From epistemic perspective, this is convenient, because you can try many things and get a quick feedback on what works. (There is a problem with placebo effect, namely that if you try X and succeed, maybe it really was X, and maybe it was just your greater confidence.) With things that have longer feedback loops, like a happy long-term relationship, here even the famous PUAs often fail. I believe that still makes the advice useful, because although short-term success does not imply long-term success, short-term failure means that you don't get a chance for anything long-term. Useful, but incomplete.
What would be the measurable short-term goals for a women's PUA camp?
If I tried to give some advice to straight women, here are some random things:
* The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else.
* If you initially don't like a guy, but your best friend insists that he is awesome and you should definitely date him, and keeps pressuring you until you give the guy a chance... don't be surprised if a few months or years later you find out that he is cheating on you with your best friend. You already had enough evidence that she wanted him, and maybe your intuition also tried to tell you something important.
* While it is technically true that you can still get pregnant at 40, consider two things. First, it will limit *how many* children you can have, especially if you change your mind later. For example, if you think that two kids are optimal, and ten years later you decide that actually maybe three... you can still do that if you started in your 20s, but not if you started in your 40s. Second, if you start looking for a reliable partner when you are 40, the best ones were already taken long ago, and the remaining ones probably have some baggage *and* you will have to compete for them against women ten years younger. If you and your partner agreed that you will first spend a decade together without kids, and have kids later, remember that he still has an option to replace you by a younger woman when he finally decides that it's time for him to have kids.
But this is more like long-term strategic considerations, while you probably want specific tactical advice for how (and whether) to get the man in front of you right now.
I might check out "The Rules", thanks for that! Regarding your bullets:
* The ONS thing, yea, I figured that one out experimentally by now.
* The best friend thing: I dunno if it's a real thing, but I'm poly anyway. I don't mind sharing a guy with my best friend :)
* Your last point is not relevant for me since I'm already over 40, and not interested in having additional children.
* Tactical advice: yes please, that would be great.
"The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else."
That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me. Maybe it's just that I'm from an older generation where we were warned "men only want one thing", or that I'm not in my 20s anymore so yeah it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen even if right now you feel ready for wedding bells and kids.
Not condemning men for their biology, but yeah. You have boobs and are not actively repellant, he wants to bang, but after he gets into your knickers? To quote Shakespeare and Sonnet 129:
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
> That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me.
It is the kind of advice that needs to be repeated at least 100 times, because the first 99 times people are likely to miss it. Probably everyone heard it, but also everyone believes that "this one situation is special".
> it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen
The easiest way to waste eight years is one day at a time. And it's eight years of hearing "definitely yes, but not right now", and sometimes there are plausible excuses. And the woman may also kinda want it, but also procrastinate on it. Setting deadlines means making hard decisions, and most people avoid that.
And the part that age matters is actively denied in current culture. We are all forever young, and damn any sexist who claims otherwise.
Is the "best friend insisting a guy is awesome" situation some kind of known thing that commonly happens?
I don't really get what the motivation would be for the best friend, if they want them themselves how does pushing them on someone else help?
Two women independently told me that it happened to them. I have never read about anything like that online or in media. So either this is a rare situation that just accidentally happened twice in my bubble, or it is a frequent situation and there is some taboo against mentioning it. I have no data to prove either way.
(The hypothetical taboo would be that most advice for women comes from women and is given in the spirit of "we sisters need to trust and support each other". This situation suggests the opposite. The mainstream advice for women is allowed to be cynical about men, less so about other women, and especially not about friends.)
For the record, I think it is on average *good* for women to trust each other's advice, but I think the most value here comes from your friend noticing a red flag that you missed.
> I don't really get what the motivation would be for the best friend, if they want them themselves how does pushing them on someone else help?
The situation is that the best friend already tried to get the guy for herself, but she failed. (She probably didn't disclose this detail to you.) Now if the guy is hot, he will soon get some girl. If it's you, at least he stays in her proximity, so she can try again later... and as your friend she will probably have a lot of seemingly innocent opportunity to meet him. If instead it is some strange girl, he might disappear out of her life completely.
That's fascinating. It's interesting how there are things like this that are counterintuitive at first glance, but make sense once explained. And also interesting to learn that people behave like this.
I wish there was an AI tool for people on autistic spectrum that would observe the social situation around them and then quietly explain it using plain words.
Sometimes the understanding is hard not because the correct explanation is complex, but because this is not something *I* would ever do, so the right hypothesis doesn't even occur to me. Once someone points in the right direction, it suddenly becomes obvious.
Perhaps there are some simple heuristics such that if you memorize them and remember to apply them to all confusing situations, they could actually explain a lot of them. Such as: "Consider the possibility that the person is lying to you. Try to think of three different explanations why making you believe X could be useful for them."
I don't know about advice, but I am enjoying reading different views from the ladies in the alpha discussion.
Russians continue to interfere with US elections.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-justice-department-election-foreign-influence-4888f4bfc61e46173101060ad0321d2f
One of the most frustrating things about the feckless Western leaders of this century is their continued refusal to wake up to the reality of Russia’s intentions. All these bushes, obamas, merkels, sarkozys, etc. and up to the current crop of nincompoops - clueless dolts still looking for Putin’s soul while being scared of his shadow.
I believe Putin's soul can be found at: https://youtu.be/YbckvO7VYxk
But unlike Londo Mollari, I don't think Putin will get a redemption arc in the last season.
Nah. Everything one needs to know about Putin can be learned in 10 seconds right here: https://youtu.be/dqDqvKYDv9M?feature=shared&t=5
Sounds plausible! To give the devil his due, losing an empire is not a fun experience...
Other than maybe sort-of kind-of the British, has any empire relinquished power gracefully?
The historic Soviet Empire and the fictional Centauri one both relinquished power gracefully, right up to the point where some tragically damned revanchist decided he wanted it all back the way that it was.
Many Thanks! Yeah, I don't recall anything particularly bloody happening when all the *stans split off the former USSR... Good point! ( I can't comment about the Centauri case - didn't watch the relevant TV :-) )
<mildSnark>
Did the fission of the USSR count as the political equivalent of a spallation reaction? :-)
</mildSnark>
Sauce for the goose.
Sorry, is the principle here just might makes right? Is the legitimacy of democratic institutions valueless?
> Sorry, is the principle here just might makes right?
I think Americans who argue that they can interfere in other countries without any reverse interference are the ones arguing that position. I’m not. I’m saying “sh1t goes on”.
Also I doubt the Russian interference stories in specific, we were all a bit burned by Russia gate.
I don't see anyone here actually arguing that position though?
One could believe that Russia, Iran, and China interfering with democracy in America is bad, and also America interfering with democracy in Argentina or Colombia is also bad.
What's better than neo-liberalism? A free-market economy makes nearly everyone better off in the long run because trade and innovation are maximized. Most people want a safety-welfare net to some degree as well, and it seems we can have it both ways, both relatively free markets but also a welfare state to a degree, a degree we can always argue about endlessly.
For those who want to overturn the donkey-cart, what do you think is better than neo-liberalism and why?
I read Freddie DeBoer and try to understand his Marxism sometimes. I read him because he is a great writer of English prose, but he's horrible about explaining his Marxism. Recently he wrote that (I'm paraphrasing) his Marxism is rooted in the exploitation of the worker by capital. (He is apparently against it.)
Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing, but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them, a dramatic example being a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better.
And most all of us are like that hooker from time to time on our jobs metaphorically to some degree usually much less.
Marx also says we are alienated from our work. I agree entirely, although, again, it's a matter of degree and varies a lot. Plenty of people feel right at home at work despite the capitalist system and all. But some of us just work for a paycheck and don't identify with our jobs.
It drives me crazy that modern-day Marxists seem unwilling to describe a toy version of what the world might look like under Communism. How would our work change? Please illustrate the differences in significant detail. Feel free to speculate and idealize. Or to speculate and pragmatize.
Communists just seem so intellectually cowardly these days.
However I will admit to an anti-neoliberal point of view I might buy into somewhat if someone could make it coherent. Neoliberals care about economic growth, i.e., the future. But let's say we are willing to sacrifice future economic growth for a near-term present that is better for everyone living in this century. Economics is about tradeoffs. What can we buy for the next 60 years if we trade away future growth for it? It must be something but what? I might be willing to make that Faustian bargain...
I'm not in the donkey-cart flipping business myself, but most of the reasons I've heard have nothing to do with the line of arguments you're pursuing, and rather focus on some utopian or semi-utopian image of a wonderful past or a glorious future that ought to implemented.
I haven't heard any serious challenges to the neoliberal state you describe. Some idea-trees, like degrowth, try to masquerade as such, but as soon as you scratch the surface you find only vibes and no serious policy proposals or institution design.
"A free-market economy makes nearly everyone better off in the long run because trade and innovation are maximized."
Typically anti-neoliberals dispute that, for reason like:
The West grew faster under post-war social democracy than since 1980. China employs a fair amount of state control of the economy and grows fast.
I've got some posts about why I'm sceptical Free Markets are efficient. Probably the most relevant one:
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/economic-calculation-in-the-rts-commonwealth
Otherwise the only other real response would be that if inequality grows faster than the overall economy the median standard of living can still drop even if the mean is rising.
Also if you want to see an interesting toy model of communist society Towards a New Socialism is probably the most compelling one, it seems like most free-market types shift their opinion on the viability of communism at least a little if they read it.
Thanks.
This substack post makes a decent argument that in the 80s most of the academic Marxists became neo-liberals because when they got down to it they couldn't agree that exploitation of labor was morally wrong, but they could all agree that inequality was wrong. The author even mentions Freddie specifically, writing "nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that 'Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,' I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond 'Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.'"
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western
They didn’t become neo-liberals but other non Marxist forms of socialism. That’s a good article nevertheless, it at least engages in a critique of Marxism from the left, which is unusual. Largely because most proclaimed Marxists aren’t actually Marxists at all.
I saw that. It's interesting. I saw another post responding and arguing against it, but I didn't read that one.
What confuses me most about Marxists is the History Marxists. I think they mostly believe that history is determined by economics and class struggle and are pretty deterministic overall, but why do they have to call themselves Marxists? (Why do so many people on this site have to call themselves Rationalists?) What else do they believe? For instance, a pretty good historian like Chris Wickham identifies as a Marxist, but I've read a couple of his books and don't see where the Marxism is. It's like reading Freddie. You know he's a Marxist because he says he is, but where's the Marxism in his writing? I can never find it. Or maybe it's just a free pass for him to be against everything.
This seems accurate to my understanding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_historiography#The_effects_of_Marxist_historiography
I honestly don’t think that Freddie has read Marx at all. Most of his writings are anti woke, and sometimes pro left. He’s pro trans but that’s a socially libertarian position.
It’s not unusual for Marxists to not explain the future society except in the vaguest terms, so he’s not alone there. That’s starts with Marx. It’s relatively new for modern Marxists to not use any Marxist terminology at all.
Well, a central part of Marx's theory is that history is determined by economics and class struggle and that using his theory you could predict what will happen in the future. Now nothing he predicted actually happened, but that's just details.
Right. It just seems weird that talented historians go around calling themselves Marxists in 2024. I guess some people just want to belong to a club.
> a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better<
I don’t think this is a good example of what you are getting at. She might just prefer to keep more of what she makes given what value the pimp brings to the table. It’s one thing for capitalism to provide the machinery by which workers can be gainfully employed (or exploited) but a girl’s got that out of the gate; pimping is a protection racket, pure and simple.
Now you've got me thinking about all the things I've heard about pimps and hookers over the years, some of it from their own mouths. At least in the US, where prostitution is illegal almost everywhere, most hookers don't make any money. It all goes to the pimp. You can think of it as an abusive poly relationship. The women are emotionally dependent on the pimp, the pimp gives the women affection but makes them fuck for money they turn over to him. They are a family of sorts.
There are plenty of exceptions to that, of course. But it is not generally a protection racket, at least in the US.
Agree my using it as an example was bad.
I would be curious to hear more about your conversations.
I have had quite a few myself, but context is everything. There are many layers, many possibilities…
The problem is lack of definitions here. You are equating capitalism with neo-liberalism but prior to the 1980s, the term wasn’t used and the neo liberal era is a clear break from the post war era.
You are right about Freddie, no indication that he has really read Marx.
> Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing,
Marx was often using the term in the neutral sense.
> but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them
Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
>Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
How do we measure that surplus? I think most anti-capitalists don't value the risk-taking involved in capitalism. You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital. If you are one of the 10% of businesses that succeed, all of your profits are viewed as "rent" by many anti-capitalists. But obviously it isn't rent if you risked losing it all! But if you put it in those terms, few will sympathize with the capitalist because you have just equated them to a gambler, and almost nobody empathizes with gamblers.
Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
> Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
There is not necessarily a clear line. Things can be part this and part that.
Let me give you a different example: from the perspective of the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, talented people (probably most readers of this website) should be considered a combination of "labor" and "land", that is "workers" and "renters" simultaneously. So if we happen to get good salaries, it does not mean that the society is actually nice to workers. It just means that we got lucky to also be part-renters.
Ok, this sounds weird, if you interpret "land" and "rent" literally. But if you look for the reasons behind the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, you can more generally define "labor" as "that which costs human time and effort", "land" as "that which is in a limited supply", and "capital" as "that which can flexibly move anywhere". And from that perspective, high intelligence or talent kinda resembles the "land" category; there is a limited supply of smart people, and companies have to compete for them, which gives them the leverage. But it also resembles "labor", because the only way the smart person can use the high intelligence to produce results is to work, i.e. also spend time and effort. (You can't simply send your IQ to work alone, while you stay dumb at home and relax.) Thus, from an economical perspective, a smart person is a hybrid of "labor+land"; a worker with a leverage.
Now let's look at the capitalists from this perspective. Venture capitalists are the pure "capital" guys. Those who build startups are "labor+capital" hybrids, because they have to spend a lot of time and work hard to make it succeed. Actually, more like "labor+land+capital" hybrids, because it also requires some rare skills. The categories are not exclusive.
If this was purely about the capital, the capitalist wouldn't mind if others (including the employees) bought a share in the company. Money is fungible. And this is indeed how it works when the company is traded publicly. But many companies are not; and those are the ones where the owner has a leverage, that is the "land" aspect of the business.
> You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital.
This is part of the story, but not the whole story. (It is the whole story if you are a venture capitalist.) For example, if you approached most people who are starting a company, and offered to provide them money in return for a share in the company, I suppose many would refuse you. Partially it is because they also provide work, but even if you said "ok, I will pay 60% of the money for 30% of the ownership", they would probably still refuse you. If you proposed to them to make it a cooperative where everyone provides a part of money, they would almost certainly refuse you.
The surplus is easy to measure. Just imagine the company didn’t distribute profits to shareholders but was a partnership of workers. That’s the surplus.
I’m not a Marxist and there are more coherent answers to Marx than your response which isn’t wrong either. Nevertheless falling wage levels relative to the rest of GDP is a problem.
> and almost nobody empathizes with gamblers.
You’re right; we either excoriate or envy them, depending on how they prospered.
Sure, I think there's two deep problems with neoliberalism as it currently exists in the US.
While there's a lot of variability in definitions of neoliberalism, a core component is redistribution and the welfare state. Basically, capitalism is really unfair, we want the state to bleed off some excess profit and give it to poor and middle-income people and that will make everyone happier. The issue is that this has bad externalities that we can't really control. For example, conservatives for a long time have criticized the welfare state for creating dependency among people and for building large, unaccountable bureaucracies. Which is a pretty good description of Medicare and Medicaid. We have large bureaucracies with poorly aligned incentive structures that a lot of elderly people are deeply dependent on for critical services that are so poorly run financially that it's a major drive of US federal debts and deficits in ways that are looking...very concerning for America's long-run financial health.
Secondly, and I think the Marxists are absolutely right on this, commoditization is a very real thing and it's really bad. I'm thinking very specifically of the old SSC review of the "Two Income Trap" (1), where women left the home to enter the workforce and doubled the family income but most of that extra money went towards taxes, child care, tutoring and housing in better school districts, and a 2nd car so she could drive to work. That's not to say that there's no financial advantage to women entering the workforce, just that a lot of that extra money is going to buy explicit substitute goods in the market for things women previously did in the home outside of the market. This greatly overexaggerates the benefits of liberalism and often drives people into making suboptimal decisions. A lot of social interaction in stuff like bowling leagues has been commoditized by things like social media in really harmful ways.
At this point how people define neoliberalism gets really important, because neoliberalism, or at least state redistribution of some of the gains of capitalism, seems to be a convergence point for most modern governments but there's a lot of variance in how that's executed at to what extent. China can seem to be very neoliberal until you dig into how state-owned enterprises actually function.
(1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/
I don’t have a great alternative to point to, but the big selling point of neo-liberalism, that we can have maximal trade and innovation while protecting people, has fallen pretty flat.
At this point, I think many people, just just populists, are skeptical about claims that the losses of liberalization can and will be made up in any meaningful way.
I think you're correct. In theory we could have used some of the gains from offshoring to recompense factory workers who lost their jobs due to it. But we don't do that. The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
> The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I agree with you... but that's just further evidence that this is a minority position.
I suspect that most people understand "global trade is good" as "good for *me*" rather than "good for *everyone*". Both can be true, but the former is the important part, so if the latter has some exceptions, no one cares (unless they are one of them).
>I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I would suggest some caveats to the "global trade is good" part. Yes, autarky is inefficient, but it is also true that supply lines wrapped around the globe are vulnerable. Theoretically, insurance markets could incorporate that vulnerability in prices, but, having seen Covid's effects, I'm not at all convinced that that really works very well. There is something to be said for actively trying to shorten supply lines, at least to lessen some of the worst vulnerabilities.
Yes, but without that you don’t really have “neo” liberalism any more, and you’re causing a lot of damage and anger which will sooner or later find an outlet, see Brexit and President Trump for examples. It’s honestly a big problem.
I think few people were ever actually "neo-liberals" in the sense that it means a market economy with free global trade plus some redistribution of the profits to make things fairer. It's merely been a compromise position for politicians in recent decades. Actual people tend to be either all in on markets or all in on more redistribution. So politicians pretend to stake a middle-ground, but in areas where the market wins, it wins everything. In areas where the government intervenes, the market becomes too distorted to function properly (real estate, education, etc.)
OK, I’m not sure we’re operating from the same understanding of the word, but what I mentioned was the basic neo-liberal “bargain” and was certainly talked up by Clinton et al, and even the Republicans used to talk about rising tides lifting boats etc. People were sold on this plan.
If the plan had been presented as “we’re going to send all your jobs overseas and replace them with delivery gigs and fentanyl”, the pushback would have come a lot sooner.
If we hadn't spent the trillions we got from China (in the form of treasury purchases and the resultant low interest rates) in Iraq and Afghanastan we could have easily afforded to compensate ex factory workers had there been any political will to. There likely wouldn't have been the political will, though.
(Even today, it's maybe a bit weird that no politicians are saying "Reparations for ex factory workers in the rust belt!". Even Bernie doesn't say that.
What is your definition of neoliberal here?
Particularly, how do you distinguish between those "want to overturn the donkey cart" and those who "want a safety-net welfare state to some degree as well [as a free market economy]?"
On the one hand it sounds like you are really looking for responses only from out and out Soviet-Style communists and the like, but elsewhere you say that "neither Trump nor Harris is neoliberal" when neither seems to me to be proposing abolishing the market.
Makes it hard to tell whether this is a genuine request for a functional non-market vision of the economy (a fair enquiry I myself have made only to find lacking results), or just another take on the American Chopper meme https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1461671-american-chopper-argument.
I suppose Trump and Harris are still generally neo-liberal, but the difference between Biden, Harris and Trump and previous presidents going back to Carter is that the former are moving away from neoliberalism -- mostly with tariffs and subsidies that destroy international trade.
It's probably more about their economic philosophy than their actions. Trump, Biden and Harris are actively against Adam Smith liberalism whereas every president since Carter has moved in the direction (or spoken generally in favor) of Adam Smith liberalism, aka neo-liberalism. (To be clear, few have shouted "I love Adam Smith", but until Trump nobody has proudly endorsed tariffs as a way to help the US economy. He basically took us back to Depression Era economic theory and Biden and Harris have followed him there.)
Some problems with neoliberalism:
The Matthew effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect i.e. "the devil craps on the biggest pile", or as Marx would put it, "capital accumulates".
Example: Nvidia has a margin of more than 70% https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-second-quarter-fiscal-2025
Monopolies:
E.g. Amazon https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-used-market-power-warp-prices-goods-internet-ftc-alleges-rcna117371
Profit-maximising companies will always put in the absolute minimum of work, when they can get away with it.
Example: https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims
Ressources are handled suboptimally for capitalist reasons, e.g. gas tankers idling around waiting for higher prices:
https://www.ft.com/content/19ad9f9f-e1cb-40f9-bae3-082e533423ab
Companies go bankrupt at the worst moment.
https://grist.org/housing/louisiana-homeowner-insurance-hurricane-season/
Which of those are you imagining to have been recent inventions? Or to have been more common starting in the 1980s than previously?
Are you saying capitalism is not good because it is not perfectly good?
What's a better alternative?
Some of those examples are pretty bad. Gas tankers can't afford to wait around long for higher prices. If gas tanker companies were actually good at predicting the direction of gas prices, they could just trade the market, they wouldn't need to operate tankers. (According to the story, the tankers were waiting because there was a glut. That doesn't mean that waiting is a good strategy because they might be wrong about the glut ending in the near future, but a glut means very low prices for consumers so I don't see how this example shows that capitalism is screwing the public.)
Perhaps we should clarify what we mean by "neoliberalism". I see no good alternative to market economy, but the neoliberal belief that "the market cures everything" leads to these bad results, so a good government should work against these (welfare state, anti-trust, etc.).
Granted, the examples aren't always so good, better ones could be found. Similar to the gas tankers: There are also shipping companies who dissolve their warehouses and instead simply leave their goods in the trucks, so they are driven around senselessly, polluting the environment and clogging the roads, because it is cheaper that way.
We live in a world where a single digit number of people own as much as half the world, productivity has become decoupled from wage growth, and democratic institutions are bought up by the rich and powerful; what safety nets still exist seem to be a legacy of a less neoliberal era under perpetual assault from politicians of every stripe except the far left.
I do, in fact, want to expropriate the rich, abolish private (not personal) property, and let the chips fall where they may.
> We live in a world where a single digit number of people own as much as half the world
I don't think this is remotely correct?
You can get to "a single digit number of people" holding more wealth than the bottom 30-40% of the population, I believe. But by the standard that calculation uses, it only takes one person and that person doesn't have to be at all rich. The catch is to use integrated net wealth of "40% of the world" or whatever.
So, if you live on an island with 4,000 people, and one of them is a rich guy who's a million dollars in debt (but they haven't repo'd his Benz yet, he's still living large on credit), and a hundred working-class families with underwater mortgages and $50,000 net debt (but, again, still have all their stuff and are doing mostly OK), and then 1200 poor people who are living paycheck to paycheck but can claim ~$5k each in clothes, beater cars, petty cash, etc, then the integrated net worth of those 1,301 people is zero. One destitute beggar who just had a quarter dropped in his cup, has more "wealth" than the lowest 32.5% of the population combined.
Presenting that in a way that leads to the reader believing that a handful of oligarchs control half the world's stuff, is fundamentally dishonest in a way I consider equivalent to lying.
Oh, thanks. Yes, I was interpreting this as "half [the total wealth of] the world", not "[the wealth of] half [the people of] the world". This makes a lot more sense now. :-)
I didn't realize that productivity has become decoupled from wage growth. Do you have some data to point to? I admit that I am skeptical of the claim.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
This is the basic overview, but it's been studied for awhile now.
I am still searching for a coherent anti-neoliberal position. I have appreciated reading work by the Mises Institute and the Distributist Review, both anti-neoliberal from opposing sides, but non-marxist. I don't believe the happy medium you describe between the market and welfare can continue indefinitely. Tech is going to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
> Tech is going to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
That’s a fairly good takedown of neo-liberalism (or really capitalism). It’s something that Marx expected.
Why didn't tech concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands before now? Tech is nothing new.
It did. Look at the Highland Clearances; it was no longer profitable for large landowners to have tenant farmers, so they evicted them and turned the small holdings into sheep farming (which needs less labour) or deer for hunting, because renting out shooting during the season to well-off gentlemen (or the newly rich who want to pass for gentlemen) makes more money than having small farmers or farm labourers on the same land.
Those evicted were 'encouraged' to emigrate to Canada, as there wasn't employment elsewhere in Scotland to soak up the now excess labour. Tell me that's not concentrating wealth in fewer hands and I'll laugh at you.
Start laughing. I agree that land has become concentrated in fewer hands throughout history and likely will continue to be, but land isn't the only source of wealth. I know plenty of rich people (they are other renters in my building) who don't own any land. If the whole world gets richer, a single resource like land can fall into fewer hands without others getting poorer. Not claiming that no tenant farmer who got evicted didn't get poorer, but perhaps their families did better down the line than they would have otherwise. Tenant farmers are pretty poor to start with.
Land isn't the only source of wealth, yet the Highland Clearances remain an example of tech concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
I'm not sure how to assess that claim. It seems that we would need to define our terms carefully and even then we likely don't have the data (I just looked for some data about inequality in 1800 and it appears scarce.)
All I can argue is that your claim might not be true. We know:
1) Inequality was great in Scottland in the 18th and 19th centuries before the clearances
2) The clearances made the landowners richer than they were before
3) The tenants were evicted
My guess is that the tenants ended up much poorer in the shortrun and much richer in the longrun (if not them, than their descendants.)
Canada is a much better place to live than the Scottish Highlands! Although I do understand that the soil is pretty poor in Ontario, Toronto is a very wealthy city. I believe the Scottish generally have thrived in Toronto.
It seems to me the question is this: Are the descendants of the evicted tenants relatively worse off today than the descendants of the landowners who evicted them compared to the situation before they were evicted? I don't think the answer to this is obvious.
It seems plausible that the Highland Clearances were not an example of tech concentrating wealth in fewer hands if we consider the long run results.
> Those evicted were 'encouraged' to emigrate to Canada,
Where they’ve been screwing up things ever since…
Regards,
A little green lost in a sea of orange,
Canadian ( by way of France)
At the risk of violating a local Godwin's bye-law for this substack, I do think AGI poses a greater threat to traditional employment than the spinning jenny.
That's such a big subject on its own that it's hard to argue about within this thread. I don't think AGI poses a greater threat than the spinning jenny, but that only proves this argument needs its own thread. Actually, that subject has already had so many threads here that I'm out of arguments for my own position.
Jenny is the distant foremother of AI; removing production from skilled and semi-skilled workers in their own homes producing for their own benefit to less skilled and unskilled labour in factories owned by a capitalist, where the benefit of increasing mechanisation and automation was being able to produce more with less labour and without requiring much in the way of training and skills for that labour, which was now much more readily available as now you had a surplus of potential workers seeking employment.
I'm one of those who laugh at complaints about AI art, but it is true: now you don't have to be an artist yourself, you can tell the AI what to produce and cut out the middleman of having someone graphically trained (and hopefully talented) to do the work on commission for you.
Eventually we will *all* be the artists on commission complaining about AI taking our jobs (if the dreams/fears of the AI boosters come true).
> you don't have to be an artist yourself
Art is, and always has, been dependent on us clapping for Tinker Bell, so yes, you do have to be an artist yourself.. else no one is.
I fully agree. And that future is going to undermine the status quo on tax and benefits. No-one's ready. The right aren't ready because there is a legacy of "Get on your bike and look for work" meanwhile the left will struggle to maintain the tax base for a UBI.
Regardless of talk, most everyone is neoliberal these days in terms of economics. The Communist Party of China is closer to the Republican Party in terms of economic policy than it is to its say its 1974 version. There is even less ideological difference among Western parties. Republicans in the US, Liberal Democrats in the UK, Socialists in France, etc. are more like Christian denominations debating tiny details than seperate religions. Sure to the adherents, each denomination is extremely different from the other, but to outside observers, its all the same.
Sure, it's a matter of degree. But in terms of direction and overall ideology I think neither Trump nor Harris is neoliberal. Trump is practically mercantile with his tariff bullshit, and Harris has gone far left with her taxing unrealized capital gains. They are both far, far left compared to Reagan.
ACXLW Meetup 73: Altruism, Vitalism, and Nietzschean Morality - September 7th, 2024
Date: Saturday, September 7, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Special Announcement: ACX Everywhere Meetup
This week's meetup is part of the global "ACX Everywhere" event. We anticipate a diverse group of new attendees, making this a great opportunity to expand our community and engage with fresh perspectives.
Conversation Starters
1. Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers
Text link: Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers
Audio link: Podcast Episode
Summary:
Altruism vs. Vitalism: Altruism focuses on maximizing happiness and reducing suffering, while vitalism emphasizes strength, glory, and the maximization of life. Although these philosophies diverge in extreme scenarios (e.g., dystopian outcomes like a world of obese, drug-addicted humans versus a world of endless, purposeless challenges), they often lead to similar solutions in normal circumstances, such as improving health and wealth.
Convergence in Practice: Both approaches generally advocate for actions that make society healthier, wealthier, and more advanced. Divergences become problematic only when the philosophies are pushed to their extremes.
Critique of Extremes: The post warns against becoming too focused on extreme, divergent cases, as these can lead to harmful ideologies. Instead, the author advocates for a balanced approach, recognizing the shared goals of both altruism and vitalism in improving human civilization.
Discussion Questions:
How can we reconcile the seemingly opposing goals of altruism and vitalism in practical decision-making?
What are the dangers of focusing too heavily on extreme cases within moral philosophies like altruism and vitalism?
How might these ideas apply to current societal challenges, such as healthcare or economic inequality?
2. Highlights from the Comments on Nietzsche
Text link: Highlights from the Comments on Nietzsche
Audio link: Podcast Episode
Summary:
Master vs. Slave Morality: The post revisits Nietzsche’s distinction between master and slave morality, exploring how masters act based on their own values, while slaves conform to external expectations. This dichotomy raises questions about authenticity, power, and the origins of moral values.
Modern Interpretations: Commenters discuss how Nietzsche’s ideas may apply to contemporary issues, including the role of societal norms, individual autonomy, and the complexities of moral relativism.
Philosophical Debate: The discussion delves into the tension between creating personal values and the influence of societal pressures, questioning whether true autonomy is achievable or desirable.
Discussion Questions:
In what ways do modern societal norms reflect Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality? Can true "master morality" exist in contemporary society?
How do Nietzsche’s ideas about creating personal values align or conflict with current views on authenticity and self-expression?
What lessons can be drawn from Nietzsche’s critique of morality for understanding today’s cultural and moral debates?
Walk & Talk: After the meeting starts, we usually take an hour-long walk and talk session. Nearby, you'll find mini-malls with hot takeout food options, like Gelson's or Pavilions, within the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something unexpected to share that has changed your perspective on life or the universe.
So, if you're a reader but haven't met Elisabeth Wheatley's Book Goblin, you're missing out.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vkjErlwUA2A
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MfqwIF4q4tg
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QbPd4DFZEU4
For non fantasy fare I’d recommend “The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt.
The book has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name and has little to do with Samurais in any direct way.
New York magazine called it the “best novel of the century.” No, I can think of half a dozen since 2000 that are better, but it is pretty damn good. For a first novel it’s great.
The novel centers on an American single mother and her son living a hand to mouth life in London. It’s not about the drudgery of life on the economic edge though. Rather it’s an adventure story about two people who refuse to live a conventional life.
The boy is the product of a one night stand with a popular travel writer who mom refers to only as ‘Liberace’. She considers his facile writing skills to be on a par with Liberace schmaltz. In her eyes he is inadequate as a husband or father to her son. The woman has very low tolerance for mediocrity.
She never tells the guy about his son.
The Samurai in the title is a reference to the Akira Kurosawa classic “The Seven Samurai”. Without a male role model in her son’s life she turns to the Samurais in the film. The film is viewed and its plot discussed in detail many times throughout the story.
The boy begins to read Homer in Greek at 3 and goes on to pick up Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse and assorted other languages in short order.
If you have an interest in linguistics the information presented in passing about the mechanisms of various languages alone make the novel worth a look.
When the boy becomes old enough to navigate The Tube on his own, he goes off on his own quest for his birth father or if that man proves to be a disappointment, one who is up to snuff.
It reads a bit like “Infinite Jest” at times with some hither and yon plotting. Not with the same polish as the Wallace doorstop, but it is engaging throughout.
Great book! I’m pretty sure I saw Helen DeWitt comment here on ACX once.
What's the evo psych explanation for why most people prefer Fridays to Mondays?
I know that most things that make me feel good are things that benefit my social standing, however indirectly, things that improve my self-esteem (which is probably a good approximation for what I feel improves my social standing). More money, a job well-done, a good time with friends, working on a hobby -- all these makes sense as things which make me feel good for evo psych reasons, because they all, at least potentially, could raise my social status. But why do I like Fridays and vacations so much?
You could say that it's because we are inherently lazy and the explanation for that is conservation of energy. But what does the weekend and vacations have to do with being lazy? Or rather, lest that sound dumb, let me reframe it: Why does *looking forward* to the weekend make me happy? If "the weekend" translates in evo psych terms to "being lazy" "conserving energy", things which come as natural as taking a shit, why is it something to look so pleasantly forward to? I often procrastinate but I don't *look forward* to procrastinating. So why should I look forward to being lazy in slightly different context?
What does the weekend offer us from an evo psych perspective?
Wait, is it simply because we socialize more on the weekends? It doesn't *feel* like that's the reason. I look forward to getting away from people on the weekends or on vacation, but maybe what I personally look forward to has got nothing to do with it.
Or is it because those of us who feel more like wage slaves than bosses experience a social status boost when we get away from our bosses? Which would also explain why big boss man types are more likely to prefer Mondays to Fridays...
> Or is it because those of us who feel more like wage slaves than bosses experience a social status boost when we get away from our bosses?
This is a part of the answer. Also, consider work from home -- the ones who have lower status at work typically want more WFH, and the ones who have higher status typically want to reduce WFH. Feelings of higher/lower status get more intense when people are next to each other.
> More money, a job well-done, a good time with friends, working on a hobby -- all these makes sense as things which make me feel good for evo psych reasons, because they all, at least potentially, could raise my social status.
For me, money is too abstract to feel emotional about; at home I have much more control over whether some job I choose to do is well done; friends and hobbies happen in my free time. My free time is where most of my perceived value comes from.
Wait, you mean the world doesn't consist of sleep-deprived zombies who only ever get to catch up on sleep on weekends or don't even get to do that? Damn. You're really privileged, you know.
This is the ultimate “over thinking it” post.
Maybe but I learned something from the replies, so I don't regret it.
There’s something a bit funny about asking about the eco-psych significance of weekends, since they presumably didn’t exist in the ancestral environment. (“See you Monday, Thag.”)
That said, everybody likes a bit of freedom and self-determination and presumably that’s a conserved trait. Work-life balance is a modern concept but people have always needed to find ways to meet their own needs in the context of their society.
Not so much evo-psych as the calendar. The Western work week is set up so that Friday is the start of the weekend, which is the 'no work' period (or used to be), while Monday is the start of the work week and is "back to the grind, five more days of this".
If you have to commute, get up early to commute and arrive home late, and so on, it's along the same lines as "great, I have to look forward to a period of hard, gruelling physical labour to bring in the harvest". End results may be beneficial, but nobody really likes the grind all the time.
If we switched it around so that you ended work week on Tuesday and started work week on Fridays, then we'll all prefer Tuesdays to Fridays for the same reason.
On days when I don't have to wake up at a certain time, I also don't have to go to bed at a certain time. It's a big improvement over workdays.
So during the week you sacrifice hours of the day that something in you finds more valuable.
On the days that I work, I have to do my work and then come home and do the work of the house as well. On the days I don't work, I have all that day to do the work of the house, so I can spread things out, plan what I'll do now and do tomorrow, and just have more leisure.
It's not so much about being lazy as it is having time. If time is money, imagine if you had an extra $100 per day. (Or if that's small potatoes for you, make it $500 or $1,000).
I think you're overthinking this.
You and your family benefit from your employee-employer relationship, via your compensation and benefits.
During the week, you spend most of your time doing things that you don't really want to do, and that you don't *directly* benefit from, in order to keep the employee-employer relationship on good terms. Or in other words, all the benefit from the stuff that you spend your time doing during the week can be summarized as "economic security".
On weekends, that economic security is still there, but now you get to spend your time doing things that you actually want to do. Or things that you don't really want to do, but which directly benefit you and your family in some way.
Of course the later is more satisfying than the former.
That makes sense! On the weekend you get to more directly take care of all the other things economic security doesn't!
Does that mean we spend too much of our time on economic security if we look forward to Saturday more than Monday?
When I was working a good job, I looked forward to going to work. I liked the people I was working with, I was part of a team, and when I went to work I could help the team do what it did, by doing things that I was good at and enjoyed doing.
And I also looked forward to vacations, and special events on weekends.
But only when the job was bad (depressing, soul sucking, abusive, etc.) would I look forward to simply not being at the job.
Lex Fridman interviews Donald Trump, go listen ~40minutes. And before that talks with Cenk Uygur for 4 hours. Also very good. https://lexfridman.com/podcast/
After 20 minutes of incessant rambling, I couldn't take it anymore and closed the tab (I watched the video recording on Youtube). Trump wasn't able to answer a single policy question in a coherent manner. I have no idea why millions of people idolize that man – he clearly has no idea what he's doing, what he even wants to do, or how he's going to do it.
He sure talks a lot about "her" and "him", and that he'd have done everything better (and that "she" thinks she looks good in a swimsuit, but really doesn't), and that he's going to end the war in Ukraine (he has an idea how to, but can't share it with the public, because then it wouldn't work anymore), and end inflation, and that all of this wouldn't have happened, had he been president at the right time. How, you ask? We'll never know.
Trump can talk without his brain resetting mid-sentence, I give him that. But beyond that, there's nothing of substance in that man. He's like GPT-2 without a stop token.
He's been visibly aging at an accelerating rate for at least a year now, maybe two. I saw one of his 2015/2016 rallies and while I hated everything he was saying, there was no denying what an impressive performer he was. He traveled for and did more than 300 of those rallies in a 15-month period, personally on stage holding court for more than a hour every time. And, obviously, very successfully with his target audience.
In 2020 he was a bit slower but nothing outside of normal for someone in his 70s. In 2024 though -- wow. He's reminding me now of some older relatives I've helped care for in the last years before their passing, every one of whom was at least 85 by the time they sounded like Trump does now.
I'd guess that a lot of his fans are basically mentally mapping their 2015/16 experiences of him into their minds as they sit at the events now. Which is pretty normal really, people do that regarding things like their favorite big-time rock band from decades past.
ACX-approved pregnancy book Expecting Better strongly approves of having a doula present at birth. The cited studies seem convincing. The only con seems to be the price. Are there a contrarian anti-doula take for me to read if I want an other perspective?
Anecdotally, it's hit and miss. Our doula was absolutely passive during the whole thing and even tried to skip getting to the hospital. And no money back of course.
Maybe it's more about socioeconomic status of the couple that can afford doula that leads to better birth experience?
Thank you for sharing! Do you feel like you didnt vet her enough or did she seem fine until it was time to go to the hospital? Did she have references?
She has stellar references and glowing reviews on her website.
Thank you!
There was a study where mothers were randomly assigned a doula when they arrived at the hospital, or not, which showed some positive outcomes. So probably not just about who can afford one.
For what it’s worth, our doula was great.
An Australian scientist claims to have deduced where flight MH 370 was ditched.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mh370-triple-twist-riddle-solved-vincent-lyne/
I don't really know enough about this stuff to evaluate whether he's right. Anyone else here know more?
I find it interesting how controversial the alpha/beta concept is. I define alpha as 'confident guy who gets lots of girls (or could get lots of girls if he wanted to)', and beta as not that, and it seems straightforwardly obvious that these two archetypes are very real.
It can be complicated because people start bringing in things like money into it, and point out there are guys that get laid a lot and are broke, but that's only relevant if one starts thinking of an alpha guy as being just straight up superior to other men (though it is true he is superior at something most men care about a lot). An alpha guy can have a real mess of a life, maybe to the extent even a guy who is not very successful with women would not be willing to switch places with him.
And an alpha guy can be a real asshole, but that is not necessary.
I agree with you. It's controversial here because nobody commenting here is an alpha or a woman who likes them from afar. Alphas don't write comments on the internet, particularly not on this blog, and particularly not on an Open Thread of it.
Obviously, like with race, there are no clear edges, but that doesn't mean the concept isn't clear and real.
> nobody commenting here is an alpha or a woman who likes them from afar.
But there are women commenting here, so... When the concept boils down to "some men act in a way that makes some women like them", does it really need the term "alpha" attached to it.
Calling men who are appealing to women alphas, because they are successful with woman, is like calling journalists or poets or dentists alphas when they end up being well paid and in demand. For the term to make sense when it comes to men who are successful with women you have to hame something else that these guys have in common that makes them attractive to women. Wut is it? Confidence? Well, if you're only identifying these guys by picking them for their success with women, then it's not too surprising that if you then observe them with women you find that they are confident, is it? So it's circular reasoning to say its confidence.
Another consideration that doesn't get addressed much is that if these guys are great with women, apparently they have been dating and having sex with quite a few women for quite a while. Are these people who want to get married, and who will be happy once married? My experience is that people who are good at getting sexual partners, and enjoy living a life of sexual adventures do not do well with monogamy. Not everybody is wired for monogamy. These guys don't seem like a good bet to me as husbands.
And by the way, I think many women who have some life experience will recognize, when they meet one of these magnetic guys, that they are meeting somebody you get together with for a good time, not a long time. I'm inclined to think the women who actually marry these men are beautiful but dumb.
The reasoning isn't circular but there is no doubt a feedback loop to a man being successful with women -> more confident -> more successful, etc.
As I argue below, women are generally attracted to men along more dimensions than vice-versa. Whereas men are more singularly attracted to looks, women are more likely to be attracted to men for: looks, skills, smarts, family background, social status, wealth...
Confidence is a proxy. Because there is a positive feedback loop to confidence it works as a proxy for all the things women are attracted to in a man.
>My experience is that people who are good at getting sexual partners, and enjoy living a life of sexual adventures do not do well with monogamy. Not everybody is wired for monogamy. These guys don't seem like a good bet to me as husbands.
Agree with that. The alpha/beta thing is all about getting laid in the short run not about long-term relationships or happiness.
> The alpha/beta thing is all about getting laid in the short term
Ringo Starr? Alpha male?
Of course he was. What heterosexual rock star wasn't?
I don't really like the term "alpha". I think stud is a better term. A stud (alpha) is a man that most women would be attracted to and consider having sex with under the right circumstances. They are the few men than most women like. Just as there are hot women that most men like. The reason that alphas or studs are more controversial than "hot women" is that women are judged much more by their appearances alone whereas men's "hotness" is judged along many more dimensions, giving us many more vectors to argue about, to care more or less about, to be tone-deaf to.
<i>The reason that alphas or studs are more controversial than "hot women" is that women are judged much more by their appearances alone</i>
I'm not sure that's true, though? Maybe if you're looking for a one-night stand you'll judge on appearance alone, but if you're looking for something more long-term, appearance is more a bar to clear, after which other factors take over. At any rate that's how it works for me.
There is something important in the territory that this concepts points towards, but the entire debate is hopelessly optimized for being popular among certain kind of guys, rather than for providing a good description of reality.
I agree in general, but:
> but the entire debate is hopelessly optimized for being popular among certain kind of guys
Pedantically, there's a not-insignificant portion that's hopelessly optimized for annoying a certain kind of gal. ;-)
> I define alpha as 'confident guy who gets lots of girls (or could get lots of girls if he wanted to)',
No that’s not the definition of an alpha male. One of the ways to get lots of girls, or at least more girls than you would otherwise get, is to be a drunk and prowl pickup bars. You probably need a slight bit of game, and perhaps low enough standards.
In no sense would that kind of man be an alpha.
Not sure a drunk who prowls pickup bars is necessarily going to be the most confident person. Otherwise he wouldn't get drunk all the time.
We are talking at cross purposes here. Someone gave an example of an Irish guy - all 5’2 - who was successful with women, by picking them up. Presumably in pubs. No doubt he had a drunken confidence too.
He’s not an alpha. By lowering standards and trying hard any man can do that. Prisoners do well with women. Prisoners gave very low social status. Alpha maleness has nothing to do with game.
I don't buy the alpha thing.
There is a huge amount of nuance to interacting well with a women, but at the same time these are skills that can be mastered, and nothing to do with not being "nice guy."
Things like being attentive, being tender physically (e.g., being considerate and careful how your weight lies on them in bed), reading their mood and body language. Being sexy, seducing well, being a generous lover, and transitioning appropriately between the phases of sex (Ali Wong joked well how she likes sex incredibly tender at the start and then less so at the end). All these things are tbh, pretty basic, and just to do with understanding women as full featured humans.
You might argue that a lot of these features aren't visible until a women has slept with you, but that's missing the point, that in terms of sex (casual or otherwise) these are the kinds of things women desire. Hence, on a date, if you're a smooth attentive conversationalist who seems practiced, confident, relaxed, appropriately lightly flirty, and attentive, you are suggesting you're the kind of man they can have a rewarding experience with.
I agree.
the alpha thing is really not viable; it's more a symptom of something else.
generally the idea is if a guy is a good man, caring, friendly, and attentive, he will find a woman who replies in turn. the harmful
version is he finds a supermodel, but the idea is to be true to yourself and a girl will love you for who you are.
unfortunately this turned out to be a male fantasy. If anything the irony is that women get turned on by literal monsters (paranormal romance) because they like status, animal vitality, virility, and power a lot more.
the alpha comes after as a male tool to deal with this and the implications. it's more about the destruction of the "nice guy" which was a hilarious feminist own goal; they kind of didn't realize it was preventing the "alpha fucks, beta bucks" mindset from taking root.
male illusions about romance being destroyed created the alpha as a tool to explain it; problem is its a more powerful and more accurate version, and the old version kept a lot of bad things in check.
I wonder if the old version really was just a fantasy, or whether it's just outdated.
In general, women are attracted to high-status men. Back in the old patriarchal days, men in general had higher status than women in general, so virtually all the men a woman interacted with, at least in a social setting, would be high status compared to her. This would plausibly mean that most women found most men the interacted with at least somewhat attractive, in much the same way as most men find most women at least somewhat attractive. And if you find multiple men attractive enough to consider marrying them, the man who adds "caring, friendly, and attentive" on top of "attractive" is going to beat those who are attractive but also distant and standoffish.
Nowadays, however, women in general have equal or higher status than men in general, so most women don't really find most men that attractive. Alphas are successful because they project an image of "I don't need you, if you don't want to be with me, I can easily find half-a-dozen women who'll gladly jump into bed with me instead", which the brain automatically parses as "high-status", and hence, "attractive". Being nice and kind, OTOH, doesn't in itself come across as high status behaviour -- indeed, it can easily come across as subservient, i.e., low status. Hence, unless a woman is already attracted to you for some reason (status, looks, wealth, etc.), simply being nice to her won't win her over.
Tl;dr "Be true to yourself and a girl will love you for who you are" wasn't necessarily wrong back in the day, but it's outdated now.
I have no idea what the common usage is, but my take on Alphas is that it has nothing to do with how they do with women, and everything to do with how they do with other men. An Alpha is the guy who's going to walk into the middle of a party and get all the other guys there to follow his lead. A Beta is a guy who walks into a party and immediately finds an Alpha to take orders from.
Right. Alphas are leaders of men.
I have two entirely different problems.
1. Where's the evidence for this theory? Or against it for that matter? There's hardly anything that gets discussed by rationalists with less actual evidence or rational argument for the claims being made. Everything is almost entirely based on personal anecdote, "everyone knows" presumptions, and purely speculative evopysch stories. I'd say it's even worse than politics: at least the latter has an actual single set of facts everyone can see (e.g. the elected leaders, the laws being proposed and passed) even if interpretations wildly differ. Arguments over sex and dating have all the emotion of political arguments with none of the grounding. If people can tear each other apart over the meaning of Trump's statements, even when there's only one actual objective statement that was made that everyone can see, how much worse when there are actually millions of different Trumps in everyone's lives, all saying slightly different things, and people are going "Trump number 889 said X!", "no actually, Trump number 20967 said not-X" and somehow thinking that's a productive thing to do.
Tl; dr people are individuals, and why is this such a radical perspective to take?
I have no idea what the actual truth of these claims about attraction etc are, and neither side seems remotely interested in persuading me. Some actual statistical evidence with control groups and the like would be a good place to start.
2. "Getting girls" is so ridiculously vague and could mean so many different things. Does it mean one night stands with strangers? First dates (in the more wholesome sense)? Several dates? Lasting relationships? Marriages? Why on earth would you expect the "skill" at purusing each of these to significantly correlate? Lumping them all together (at least without significant justification) in one category looks like either a lazy attempt to create an unsupported Grand Theory, or more disturbingly a deliberate attempt to normalise the more shallow and sleazy goals by erasing fundamental distinctions.
> "people are individuals, and why is this such a radical perspective to take?"
Because all people are tropes before they are individuals, and all socialized and social people engage in pattern recognition of those tropes. "Alpha" and "beta" are labels for people who behave according to certain patterns more than they are theoretical concepts, per se.
Reminds me of Tim Minchin: "I'm just saying I don't think you're special. I mean I think you're special, but you fall within a bell curve..."
If molecules of gas could speak, they would probably argue: What do you mean by 'temperature'? Each of us in an individual, flying at a different speed in a different direction.
"If molecules of gas could speak, they would probably argue: What do you mean by 'temperature'? Each of us in an individual, flying at a different speed in a different direction."
That deserves to be in a book of quotations.
Seconded!
This. I actually do believe everyone is unique but the traits people *think* make them unique are absolutely on a bell curve. Ever Google your own name? Depressing!
Are those tropes accurate and broadly applicable, or are they stereotypes that have more to do with pop culture and celebrity news than the experiences of the average joe? If you graphed men on some set of psychological measures, would you see two distinct populations that match the concepts of "alpha" and "beta"? Or is this categorization the equivalent of saying "there are two kinds of people, men taller than 5'8'' and men who are shorter?"
<i>Are those tropes accurate and broadly applicable, or are they stereotypes that have more to do with pop culture and celebrity news than the experiences of the average joe?</i>
Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology: https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all
Were the stereotypes tested in that study the "alpha and beta" thing?
Saying there are some other stereotypes that are often accurate is hardly a solid rebuttal.
If stereotypes are accurate in most cases, they're likely to be accurate in this case as well. It isn't a hugely solid rebuttal, but then again, "Are those tropes accurate and broadly applicable, or are they stereotypes that have more to do with pop culture and celebrity news than the experiences of the average joe?" isn't a hugely solid criticism in the first place.
Popular culture and celebrity news describe usually describe actual phenomena, yes, even if not perfectly accurately.
I should also add that *I* don't consider all men to sort into the binary of "alpha" or "beta," anymore than all unrelated domesticated dogs and unrelated domesticated horses sort into one of two categories! There is a vast swath of dudes, dogs, and horses who are going to be in the hierarchical middle, asserting some "alpha" behaviors in some circumstances and "beta" behaviors in others.
Those who assert alpha behaviors most or all of the time can probably safely be labeled "alphas" as a convenient shorthand for what they do most of the time, and obviously the same goes for betas.
Funny, I see it as similar to challenging the premise of some simplistic woke dichotomy (e.g. "privileged" and "marginalized") and responses like yours as on the road to shit like this https://www.cracked.com/blog/8-a242423oles-who-show-up-every-time-word-feminism-used . (I have no problem with your comment as written, to be clear, but if you took the idea behind it to the extreme and put it in the mouths of the most moronic and disgusting people on the planet, and switched the genders, you'd get the linked article).
"What does woke mean" is dishonest crap because you can literally point to a hundred example screeds like the one above and say "this" and anyone with a shred of intelligence would be able to see a pattern there. With alpha/beta theory, the issue is not the coherence of the concept but the empirical truth of its predictive power. Being defined vaguely is only relevant because it makes testing its factual validity impossible. You can point to a bunch of traits and say those are alpha--I'm not asking for proof that those traits exist, I'm asking for proof that they correlate (other things held equal) with sexual success.
More generally, it's amazingly ironic to me how much of this alpha/beta stuff is just relying on the exact same fallacies that feminists do. One guy posts online a story about how he was kind to a girl and she rejected him for someone who beat her around. Then four other people chime in "that exact thing happened to me too!" It's understandable, but completely irrational, that at that point most readers take it as proven that this is a widespread thing. Five different people confirming it and not one denial! Of course this is woeful evidence for anything: five people out of millions, when those who've experienced it are going to seek out such spaces and those who haven't will have no motivation to reply "actually this has never happened to me", especially if they'll probably get yelled at for it. What's amazing is this is identical to how feminists approach claims of sexual harassment. A handful of stories prove literally nothing about the wider society whatsoever, but arrogant people use "invalidating my experiences" as a translation of "daring to suggest the entire world doesn't revolve around me". Or just have no concept of what the word "evidence" actually means.
And another way they're identical to feminists: they glorify sleazy hookup culture and act like it's a reasonable thing to do, let alone put in the same category as actual relationships. Actually: seeking one night stands with strangers at a bar is shameful and you should be ashamed to do it. And you should expect zero sympathy if your attempts fail, because decent people don't attempt that on the first place.
Of course, all this means that *feminists* should 100% agree with what people are saying here, since on *their* morality it's impeccable. The feminist reaction to the incel discourse is thus the most hypocritical thing I've ever seen. Proving that literally every woke moral principle always, without exception, has "only when it benefits me personally" attached.
> "What does woke mean" is dishonest crap because you can literally point to a hundred example screeds like the one above and say "this" and anyone with a shred of intelligence would be able to see a pattern there.
There's certainly an obvious pattern in the central examples, but the problem is that people regularly stretch it past the point of meaninglessness. For example, I've seen people refer to movies and shows as "woke" even when they don't have any visible-to-me woke traits at all. By the time you're debating whether Stalin was woke or not, something has gone horribly wrong.
Stalin was very egalitarian for his time. I think every possible group of people was represented in the gulag population. Talk about equity.
The terminology doesn't help, and makes it easy to dismiss. And if you aren't a man with experience on both sides of the cutoff point, a lot of the obvious truths aren't obvious.
Hoe Math (unfortunate name, great guy) on YouTube is a great primer on the current state of applied studies in intersexual dynamics. He's smart, has experience on both sides of the divide, reads widely and cites studies, and tries to give positive advice to both men and women.
Can you recommend any particular small set of his videos? He has a lot!
No. 1: Basics of hypergamy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOAcsTlvFic
No. 2: Dating dynamics and the relationship chart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLXhUKVd4fo
No. 3: Why dating apps destroy civilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKtZ5dEbu6c
Many Thanks!
Here's my endorsement of Hoe Math. The guy has some truly brilliant (if very depressing) insights.
I, too, will offer my endorsement for Hoe Math.
I started watching the videos and it feels like finally hearing an adult person talk reasonably about a taboo topic.
It's controversial because it's dumb, to be blunt. The original typology was taken from a study on juvenile wolves in captivity, who do not behave like socialised-in-pack wild wolves, but the whole "alphas dominate! betas suck!" crap was lifted out of that, applied to primate behaviour (which, while similar, is not at all the same thing) and from that to humans.
Alpha Male natural superior boss of all! Gets the women, grinds the beta guys under his heel, is at the top of the tree!
It wasn't just about "can get the women", it was about being better all round. As has been pointed out, a lot of guys who can get as many women as they like are not alphas, in the sense that they're often low-life types, or skeevy in some way. Petty criminals, underclass, and the like.
Your point about "An alpha guy can have a real mess of a life, maybe to the extent even a guy who is not very successful with women would not be willing to switch places with him" is very pertinent, but the way the alpha/beta distinction is spoken of, in relation to success with women, that kind of caveat is not taken into consideration at all. Nobody in the "women are all whores riding the cock carousel until they can't even get a share in an alpha anymore, then they find some cuck beta who will pay for their lifestyle and raise their kids by the alpha to settle down with, all the time holding him in seething contempt while they seek out chads to sleep around with" discourse community talk about "yeah, I know this guy who is really successful with women but he's unemployed, not very smart, kinda ugly, a real loser and honestly? the kind of women he can get? crazy and trashy and low-class all round, it's really not worth it".
the problem deiseiach is that men really only have two ways of having perceived value:
1. being very successful in work, shown via status and or wealth.
2. the number and quality of women they sleep with or if they are married.
so said criminal is ironically more "alpha" than an accountant by one measure. the accountant does not have compensatory success till a lot later, hence the beta bucks.
the issue is society really does not value men innately. if you are not extraordinary you are invisible, and if its just extraordinary magnetism to get women to sleep with you, that works albeit via dark fascination.
I'm sorry, I don't really believe that at all. There's many other ways a man can have value -- through family, through friends, through hobbies, through being highly knowledgeable at a whole bunch of different things or demonstrating a whole bunch of different skills.
I think that the question of how much sex people are having is something that is only interesting to people who are having far too little. People who get a normal amount of sex don't spend all that much time wishing they were having much more (apart from a few insatiable weirdoes). The returns of more sex diminish a lot faster than the returns of more money.
It's the "quality" part, though. Drop your standards enough and you can sleep with a lot of women, but they won't be the kind you'll brag about bagging to your mates. "Oh, you managed to sleep with the village bicycle? You and forty other guys, congratulations on your stunning achievement there, man!"
and he will point out you can't even do that.
but that is such a huge societal expectation. let's say you meet a guy at a party. before you do, you find out he hasn't been on a date in 15 years, or is a virgin at 30. the average person will immediately think "what's wrong with him?" as if he needs to explain it.
expectations are not kind.
"or is a virgin at 30. the average person will immediately think "what's wrong with him?" as if he needs to explain it."
Fucking hell. These are probably parties where someone identifying as non-binary is considered so normal it doesn't merit a reaction. But someone exercising actual self-control?! Deciding to put long-term responsibility, or even just waiting for real love, over base gratification? Horrifying! What's wrong with him?
This is not normal. It may be the norm in every city in the western world, but it is not *normal* on any measure of health, morality, concern for others, or concern for the good of society. Please don't normalise this kind of depraved culture as something to be conformed with instead of something to be shamed. These expectations do nothing but hurt people, and everyone here is treating them as somehow acceptable, and it's making me more and more angry the more I see.
Well, we're really talking about the other end of the spectrum. Not men who demonstrate super high status by getting lots of women, but men who demonstrate super low status by getting zero women.
That idea is less controversial. The correlation between "number of sexual partners" and anything worthwhile in life is dubious at the high end, but very clear at the low end.
"It wasn't just about "can get the women", it was about being better all round. As has been pointed out, a lot of guys who can get as many women as they like are not alphas, in the sense that they're often low-life types, or skeevy in some way. Petty criminals, underclass, and the like."
From what I can tell, this is a big part of what CAUSED alpha male/beta male discourse to take off and become very popular on certain parts of the internet.
Basically, a lot of men were truly mystified by what you're referencing here, especially since most of them would consider "low-life types, petty criminals, underclass" to be people that they'd actively avoid trying to form relationships with, romantic or otherwise. What made this even more mystifying to men is that it goes against what much of modern feminism says that women want in men. This seeming conflict is very attention-getting and provocative. Some men came to the conclusion that there's certain traits or behavior patterns that can override more practical concerns with a partner, and that these traits constitute someone being "alpha".
Now, I think a lot of men took this all too far, but still, I get why they were mystified and trying to find some sort of model to explain this, because frankly I'm mystified myself.
Why DO some women go for these types of men? Honestly, I don't know. My sense is that a lot of men go too far in relying on alpha male/beta male discourse to explain this... but also that this is a real blind spot for mainstream society that leaves us without a good answer. Alpha male/beta male discourse is at least an attempt at an answer, even if it's obvious why many don't like it and find it offensive.
"Why DO some women go for these types of men?"
To try to get some more actual clarity in these discussions: I can see four different answers.
The libertarian answer: they don't. Or some do, but no more than go for any other type, and the perceptions you refer to are the result of blending together hundreds of different factors over millions of different people and twisting that to fit a dramatic and click-baity narrative.
The traditionalist answer: because women's and men's natural sexual urges are toxic and harmful, which is why we spent centuries and centuries building up carefully constructed moral and social codes to create a civilised society where these bad urges would be kept in check and channeled into wholesome forms that benefit every person and society as a whole...and then a bunch of insolent arrogant rationalist types tore all that down in the blink of an eye, and are now reaping what they sowed.
The feminist answer: actually women always know exactly what they're doing and the guys who act nice are actually assholes and the guys who act like assholes are actually nice guys and anyway who cares if women want to fuck gangsters how dare you police their bodies and you are committing literal genocide if you disagree with me.
The redpill answer: women are all weak and lying whores, and respect literally nothing except STRONG ALPHA MEN, and the only way to interact with them without getting friendzoned is to be a STRONG ALPHA MAN and for only $9.99 a month you can subscribe to my channel and become a STRONG APLHA MAN like me!
In case it isn't clear, I'm not particularly sympathetic to the last two, and I'm somewhere between 1 and 2. But I'm open to being persuaded.
People are individuals.
Traditional sexual mores existed, who'd have imagined, for an actual fucking reason.
Nice is bad, bad is nice, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
The answer to everything is always BRUTE STRENGTH.
Which is it?
Traditional sexual mores exist primarily due to private property and the need to accurately trace fatherhood for inheritance purposes, no? Earlier tribes didn't necessarily seem to have what we consider "traditional sexual mores".
You may well be right. What you wrote here does make a lot of intuitive sense to me.
Thanks for the good reply.
> "the original typology was taken from a study on juvenile wolves in captivity"
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, "not wild wolves," but the typology *does* pretty accurately describe how packs of non-related domesticated dogs and domesticated horses (particularly horses, for whom herd hierarchy is much more obvious and rigidly enforced than dog packs) sort themselves and assume leadership positions with the privileges attendent. You can assign different words than "alpha"; for horses, people tend to say "boss mare / boss gelding" / "lead stallion", and so on rather than "alpha," but those words *absolutely* carry the same meaning as "alpha" in its colloquial usage. It's an observable and predictable behavior. Throw two identical flakes of clover hay forty feet apart into a paddock occupied by two horses, and one horse (the current alpha) will inevitably abandon his barely-consumed flake to chase the other horse (the current beta) away from their barely-consumed flake, eat for a bit, and then *do it again to swap back.* I've witnessed this pointless display happen 10-15 times over the course of "breakfast" or "dinner."
Add in a third, new horse, and there will be vibe checks, threat displays, and often physical violence in order to figure out who's the most dangerous individual in the group, and once that's established, they'll be deferred to when they approach the hay flake.
Why *not* call that individual the "alpha?"
Because the people using such terminology are not thinking about horses who might dominate other horses, but then follow a small woman around who loads the hay bale into their feed trough 😀
Uh, as a small woman who fed and handled horses from miniatures up to Clydesdales (including one extremely chill stallion), my place in herd hierarchy was very much a thing. I always assumed the "alpha" position and "alpha" energy, including using *physical* domination (language horses use with one another) in order to maintain my position as boss above every horse I handled.
That usually meant a confident, firm push if I needed to get to something they were blocking and they didn't move on their own upon seeing my intention or with verbal encouragement or a light touch, but on much more rare occasions, it might mean an actual swat or punch on the neck or mouth if they were *deliberately* threatening a dominating bite or kick or engaging in intimidating physical crowding.
The only reason this worked is because horses are too dumb to realize they can easily kill people; they believe humans are much stronger than we are, and they take us at our word that we can win a physical fight with them. Which is good, because they're *so* dangerous.
Our huge cow horse once delivered a star-causing uppercut to my chin throwing his nose up in excitement to get a treat; I didn't do anything about it because it was so clearly an accident. Ditto if he accidentally stepped on my foot and then immediately moved off of it once he felt the error.
But the one time he pinned his ears back at me and lunged a little with his teeth when I nudged him to briefly move away from his feeder so I could scoop out the poo just under it, I punched him in the neck and then herded him out of the stall into his outdoor step-out to think about it. He didn't resent it or fear me and ten minutes later he was presenting his withers for scratching; after my "alpha" display of "domination" he understood that, just as he was entitled to chase a less strong-willed horse away from the best grass in the pasture, I was entitled to move him away from his food.
"OmG yoU *ABUSED* anImALS!!!" Someone with either naturally timid or very badly behaved animals might be shrieking right now. Well, hierarchical animals use physical "abuse" (lulz) as a critical part of their language and socializing, and it's actively disrespectful to reject that fundamental truth and refuse to clearly communicate in a way they understand. Witness how this angry female pony tells a much larger, merely curious horse to stay out of her personal space (even though SHE invaded HIS pasture), and take special note of his "HOLY FUCK, SORRY!" reaction, followed by respectful distancing (and that the black horse is like, "OMG, they're scary, I'm just going to stay over here): https://youtu.be/KJezTFaWPcM?si=E4kIziySzNI0GTXl&t=818
Now, should we assume influencer PUA bros know anything about domesticated dog pack and domesticated horse herd dynamics? No, they probably don't!
But I think it's important to reject attempts to "debunk" social hierarchy in general merely because the wolf study didn't understand wild wolves. Sure, the captive wolf study which popularized "alpha" doesn't extrapolate to wild wolf packs (which are family systems), but it does *exquisitely* describe domesticated dog packs and domesticated horse herds (plus young, captive, unrelated wolf packs, FWIW). That's extremely important to know if one is going to work with dogs and horses!
And people, too.
Sure, but the people who like the alpha/beta stuff are not the type who like the notion of domesticity. Horses are tamed, humans control them. Humans are a lot smaller than horses, but we are not living in Houyhnhnm and Yahoo land.
Wolves are (in imagination at least) wild, free, and untamed. That's the image the would-be alpha wants of himself: no woman gonna tie *me* down, I can find 'em, frick 'em and flee! After all, part of the contempt for the beta is "the beta is picked by a woman who decides to settle for very much second-best when she can no longer command attention in the sexual marketplace and hasn't managed to hook an alpha, all the beta is for her is an ATM while he works for scraps of her attention and sexual contact".
OH!
I think we were imagining very different demographics!
I think there is a *small* but very visible subset of PUA/red-pilled/incel/toxic-manosphere folk who use a wildly mutated meaning of "alpha" (after all, wolves are pack animals; there's no such thing as a healthy, powerful, "dominant" male pack leader abandoning his group to see if there's better tail in the neighboring territory (where he will almost certainly be killed by the neighboring territory's pack)).
In fact, now that I think about it, it sure seems like "Chad" often serves the same function as "alpha," if not having replaced it for many of those folk.
Whereas I was thinking far more of the larger population probably using the words in a completely different way; either to describe routine human hierarchy, or in discussing animal behavior, or whatever.
And then there's a big-enough-to-know-about-it subculture of mostly women who are deeply into the whole concept of clear hierarchical based-on-"wolves"-but-actually-domestic-dogs-lol human social structures; see: the Omegaverse in particular (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegaverse) plus all other werewolf urban fantasy / romantasy.
Thanks for this. If we own the animal side of our nature we stand a good chance of putting it in its place, just like you putting the horse in its place. I resisted CBT for a long time because my stress reactions just felt so real and visceral compared to the person telling me "but I didn't mean it like that".
Ah, the untamed majesty of the wild wolf... All further comparisons between humans and canines should be done with a pack of feral chihuahuas. ;-)
The little dogs of all breeds are the most aggressive, luckily they're too small to do any real damage 😀
That's why Terry Pratchett had his leader of the Dogs' Guild be Big Fido - a small, nervous poodle:
https://wiki.lspace.org/Big_Fido
"Big Fido was the Chief Barker of the Dogs' Guild. Gaspode remarked to Sergeant Angua that Big Fido was not mad - that's when you froth at the mouth; rather he was insane. That's when you froth at the brain... He was a small white poodle with red eyes. And a diamante collar. Size notwithstanding (and also ignoring his habit of farting nervously when talking [not nervously as in "fright" but as in "involuntarily"]), he was one mean dog.
Something in his head went click! one day and he savaged his owner and beat up every dog in town until he was up against a one-eyed Rottweiler called Mad Arthur, whom, after beating in a fight, he killed, to Arthur's brief amazement (Animals don't fight to the death, just to defeat)."
There's two problems:
1. It's not a particularly good model. It hints in a good general direction (that male status, both actual and behaviourally signalled, is a big deal for female attraction) but is wrong in all the details. We could compare it to Freud's id-ego-superego model in terms of accuracy.
2. It's politically controversial for a bunch of reasons, mostly because it offends a lot of women. Now, you could argue that some of this is the fault of these women for being easily offended, on the other hand you could also blame the theory's proponents for constantly saying things like "women ride the cock carousel with alphas before eventually settling down with beta bucks whom they will continue to cheat on". Anyway, being politically controversial means that all the obvious flaws of the theory will get focused on, while the vaguer truth hinted that it hints at gets sidelined -- Freud is not treated so uncharitably.
If I could distill it down to a version that I'd tell young men it would be something like this: Women do not value the same things in men that men value in women. Women tend to care about your status more than your looks -- it's important that you not be embarrassingly unattractive, but further optimisation isn't super important. What *is* important is your perceived status, which is a combination of your actual social status and the social status that you signal through your behaviour.
I am here to tell you that there are other factors that weigh more heavily for the average woman than either looks or social status. (1) Talent: Many women (and in fact, many people) are drawn to someone who is very good at something, even if the skill has won them no money and no social status and probably never will: being great with wisecracks, awesome harmonica player, poet, backpacker, etc. It’s just intrinsically appealing and interesting. (2) Happiness. Happy people are just more fun to be with. Also, you don’t have to worry that they are hoping that having you as a partner will be their salvation. (3) They get you— understand and like how you live, how your mind works. (4) They are kind and loving.
Listen, if I carried around much feminist anger I would be quite irritated at you for pointing at social status as the important thing. Obviously social status matters to everybody in all kinds of contexts, but it isn’t the great differentiator in all contexts. I mean, let’s say you are looking for a realtor. It wont be hard to figure out which ones are high status in your area, right?—
which ones are successful in their business and well-known. And being high status in the realtor hierarchy would be a point in their favor. But you’d also want one who actually grasps all the little details about what you want; one who’s pleasant to be with; one who’s got time for you. You might settle on a pretty new and unknown realtor who was better with those features than the well-known one. A person, or a whole gender, would have to be dumb as dirt to weigh only social status in choosing either a realtor or a partner. Anyhow Melvin, I swear I am not saying the following to try to make you look silly or to prove my point: I am a woman and also have had many other women confide in me about who they are attracted to and whether they’d be willing to marry somebody with or without certain characteristics. Your model is just wrong. The basis of women’s choice of dates and mates is way way more
complicated than what you describe.
<i>(1) Talent: Many women (and in fact, many people) are drawn to someone who is very good at something, even if the skill has won them no money and no social status and probably never will: being great with wisecracks, awesome harmonica player, poet, backpacker, etc. It’s just intrinsically appealing and interesting.</i>
Those things you mention all bring people status, at least in certain subcultures if not in society as a whole. If you're talented about something that really doesn't bring you status -- or, more specifically, that doesn't bring you status in a subculture that the woman in question cares about -- then your talent isn't going to help you. "I'm the most highly-rated Age of Empires player in history" shows a lot of talent, but it's not going to attract a girl, except perhaps one who's into gaming herself.
Yes, they bring status in certain subcultures, but unless that subculture is a big part of the woman’s life she does not get the benefit of having a high status partner. For instance, in my early 20s I had a relationship with a guy, also in his early 20s, who was a master woodworker. He used antique tools, and could make perfect dovetail joints, and produce finished furniture. He made just enough money to live in a very inexpensive place and keep his old car going. He had not finished college, his looks were average, and he wore nothing but jeans and t shirts. He had many good qualities, which is why I was with him, but none of them had to do with status. Occasionally in a hardware or antique store somebody would realize from things he said that he was extraordinarily good at woodworking, but otherwise his talent got him no status at all. The other things I named in my earlier post are also things that do not give a guy much status except in quite limited settings.
there was a simple thing for me that pretty much explained it well before the term existed.
i used to love reading about planes, like aviation history. i remember just talking about it in one of those college bull sessions when a girl i liked was there. Another guy said he owned/flew a plane. (flying one isn't cheap either).
i realized after women liked the guys who owned the plane. that college experience to me was sad because christian colleges can be as much about status and wealth and as little about the religion as any secular one.
Good Charlotte had a song about it: "girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FTS2tdmyYM
There's something to that, of course. But it can be turned around that not-so-attractive girls got told "well, you have a nice personality" but boys don't go for nice personalities, they like pretty girls with the right attributes.
Both sexes complain about the others I think it has ever been thus.
1. Having a valued talent or skill confers social status.
2. Comparatively high social status reduces chronic stress, which strongly correlates with happiness.
3. Not always; for some women, it's enough to merely be desired and provided for.
4. Again, not all women will actually pursue this, even if they believe they want it.
I am also a woman and Melvin's model and advice is more correct than not:
> "What *is* important is your perceived status, which is a combination of your actual social status and the social status that you signal through your behaviour."
Melvin didn't say so, but I imagine the "behavior" here includes being confident, generous, stable, maintaining healthy boundaries, etc.
Isn't all status how you're perceived? Isn't that ultimately the definition of status? Status is not money in itself, talent in itself, success in itself – status is where you're in the social hierarchy because of these are other attributes. And if others perceive you to be high up, then you ARE high up because that's what hierarchies are. If everyone thinks you have power, then you actually do have power.
Now, perhaps you mean perceived by a specific individual or subgroup as opposed to broader society?
If I were to say "she's out of my league", does that map on to anything real? I feel there's a certain balance of power that should exist in a relationship and the further you get from that, the risk is resentment e.g if your partner is a lot wealthier, smarter, more attractive. Equally it's no fun being e.g the smart one and being on the end of that resentment.
Most of the time when guys say "she's out of my league" they are talking about a woman's looks. In fact I can't think of a time when I guy has said that because the woman earns more than him or is smarter, but I'm sure it comes up. The closest I've seen to that is a patient of mine in his 20's who is actively dating, hoping to meet someone he'd like to marry. He has a degree that guarantees he will have a 6-figure income, but he has had 2 relationships now with woman who come from extremely wealthy families, and are richer by far than he will ever be. He has had a lot to say about the ways that's awkward and tricky to navigate, but he does not regard it as a dealbreaker and the women have not either.
About women's looks: Women know where they are in the looks hierarchy, but it is just not true that those who are 8's, 9's and 10's are confident that they can marry whoever they want. Those women probably are more able to marry men who are wealthy or otherwise high status, but that knowledge is nowhere near as comforting as men imagine. Look, you know that life is hard feeling ?-- what a struggle it is to get good enough at something you enjoy that you get paid for it, how it's tricky to be real but be respected and liked too, how it's hard to find new friends once you're not in college, how you know people who are fucking miserable all the time and you worry sometimes that you'll end up as one? Well, women have that too. Only women with low self-esteem and low common sense think, oh well that's a non-issue for me because I'm beautiful and can marry a surgeon, problem solved. Women are looking for someone who gets them and loves them deeply and enriches their life, and they're afraid of not getting it, and many of them in fact will not get it because it's hard to find a partner who's a great match that way.
There are some quite unpleasant things about being a beautiful woman. It's sort of like being really rich, or being famous. You never know for sure whether somebody likes you for yourself, or whether they're just dazzled by your wealth or your fame.
So I say, do not step back from women who are beautiful -- just treat them like anybody else, be friendly and entertaining and real, an ask them out.
If somebody is much higher earning or smarter than you it's more complicated, but also not hopeless.
Thanks for the reply. The problem I'm having is figuring out why the many true observations you have shared across the thread are incompatible with a weak ‘folk’ idea of alpha masculinity, stable enough for people to make back-of-the-envelope predictions about their likely happiness with future partners. I get that there are negative tropes out there and I think you are trying to protect people from those tropes and I salute that, but I insist: it's okay to be average and mostly I think average people will be happier with other average people. An average implies an outlier and for me alpha is nothing other than that outlier. If someone is in the top 5% for a desirable trait, they are alpha with respect to that trait. There are multiple desirable traits but the idea of someone bossing them all is imaginable (including emotional intelligence!)
Something doesn't have to be a dealbreaker to be potentially hazardous to the long term happiness of a relationship. Scott talks of micro-marriages I.e things that will increase the chance of someone getting married e.g going to a party. Let's say there are also micro-divorces. For me, a major difference in IQ, family wealth, or attractiveness, is a micro-divorce. That doesn't mean divorce will definitely happen. A relationship can have other strengths to mitigate it. But you won't stop people taking this into account when forming their ‘type’.
No, I think it's good for people to be realistic about ways they are OK with differing from someone and ways they are not. I have ways I'm not OK with differing from a guy. Let's see, hygiene (mine is excellent, I'd like his to be too); introspectiveness; distaste for being highly opinionated about politics; creative; open-minded about people's oddities. When I was young I was overly identified with my test scores, but I think at this point I truly get that that is just one kind of smartness. The 2 people I love most are not SAT smart, but are much more perceptive about various things than I am. I'm sort of over the SAT.
I don't really understand why so many people think there needs to be reasonable equality in family wealth. I think my attitude if I were a mulitmillionaire would be that my kids were freed up to marry whoever they liked. They wouldn't have to worry about ending up destitute if they didn't have a big nest egg and they or their spouse got Parkinson's disease or whatever. (I'd expect them to support themselves, but I'd be there as a backup, and to help them pay for training, help them get started in a field, that sort of thing.). But wealthy people are more comfortable with marrying other wealthy people. Why? I don't get it. They've got a fuckton of money now, why be determined to marry more? Or determined that your daughter marry a guy whose parents have more?
With all due respect, they don't. Those other factors empirically don't matter.
And this is trivially provable. There are a ton of ACX everywhere meetups. Go to one. Observe the attendees. They're very nice and very interesting. You'll also notice that they're almost overwhelmingly young, male, well off (from memory, median income is ~$100k) and single. Like, brutally single.
This has been known (1). This has been known for a long time (2). As a man your assertion is trivially, observably false. If you doubt this, you can go observe it with your own eyes in your local city sometime in the next two months. And I encourage you to. There is something in women when they attend these kind of nerd events where they instantly see and respect all these men who logically should be great husbands and they also instantly know they're "nice" but they'd never find them sexually attractive and...none of you have the willingness to honestly convey that emotion.
But...*shrug*, Scott makes his ACX survey data public. Spend some time playing with it. You'll find tons of EAs, almost pathologically nice men, with great incomes, solid social circles, healthy BMIs, good hobbies, no relationships, and low romantic satisfaction scores.
(1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
(2) https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
(3) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024
I think there are a number of huge problems with this kind of worldview, and that its prominence is causing a lot of toxicity in the wider culture, but making these problems clear is very difficult because there are so many subtle distinctions and everyone's talking about different things with the same language. But to just try to point out a few of them:
(1) As I mentioned above, there needs to be much, much more hard evidence on this topic than is usually provided (if any is provided at all). "Go to a meetup, look around" is quite absurdly unscientific an approach, and is particularly ironic when the very topic is the talents of scientifically and data focused people. How do we know the meetups aren't specifically selecting for the subset of stem nerds who are both (a) particularly lonely and (b) associating their loneliness with their rationalist/nerd identity, and thus desiring to socially bond over that? It's not a remotely unbiased sample of nerds. Neither is any other similar online or offline community.
And how do we know those allegedly unattractive factors aren't correlating with other factors that are the actual relevant ones?
(2) The elephant in the room is all the poly stuff, and similar hedonism. I hate to channel Jeff Sessions, but my (and many others') instinct is that good people don't do that sort of thing. I'd exclude Scott, and anyone else asexual or otherwise desiring multiple partners for purely emotional reasons, but it seems clear that for most poly people it's largely just about sex. I'd also exclude the old-school hippie attitude that promoting polyamory and free love is actually good for society as a whole, by making people more peaceful or whatever. I find that attitude quite silly, but I can respect it. But when the attitude is just "my utilitarian morality doesn't prohibit this, so I can indulge my base instincts!" and when being told you're being sexually hedonistic is met not with an argument that it's good for society but with an insolent "yes, and?"...I don't find the descriptions of such people as nice and kind very compelling. I'm not saying they're *bad*, just that they're not exactly models of generally recognised virtue.
(3) This is about your other comment below saying no woman wants to acknowledge the truth about these things. I've had many long insightful conversations with my sister about this, and I've concluded that there are lots and lots of subtle distinctions and unspoken assumptions that need to be carefully teased out before the sexes can really understand each other. It helps enormously to have a female relative who is close enough to be honest with but not close enough to have an incentive to lie to you like a significant other might. I don't think most women are dishonest, I think they peceive things in sufficently different ways that the same situation can look very different.
At the very least (and I'm talking to people generally here) please *stop* conflating women with feminists. It completely plays into the feminist propaganda that wants everyone to think they're the same; I can't comprehend why the anti-feminist side pushes that same propaganda for them. Look at the fucking exit polls: 55% of white women voted for Trump in 2020. Most women are disgusted by the sociopathic selfishness, shallowness, and general unmatched awfulness of feminism, and forgetting that will lead to modelling them in a completely inaccurate way.
> please stop conflating women with feminists
And for the record, as I have to silently remind myself every so often, we also shouldn't conflate "feminists" with "psycho batshit Internet feminists". Even though the latter are happy to claim that theirs is the only true feminism, and that they speak for all women everywhere.
Poly is a really complicated thing. There are those who are into it as a philosophy and will happily discuss all the nuances and the fine details of compersion, metamours, and so forth. That's probably the circles Scott is in, and it's a small set (I imagine) out of the entire group of people who would maybe describe themselves as poly.
Then there are the ordinary types who, as you say, are into poly for the sex. It's a convenient way of being able to sleep around without being called a cheater. Those relationships can blow up when the partner who has been convinced to 'open it up' isn't happy with what happens next, feels neglected and not having their needs met, and issues a "me or them" ultimatum which is then met with "okay, I'm picking them, because they're not making demands on me to control my sexuality".
Finally, there's the trend-seekers who read a newspaper lifestyle article about New York woman and her husband have been poly for five years; why poly is the new great thing that will revitalise relationships; how to be poly in five easy lessons; and so forth. They adopt all the new recommendations because, well, they're not boring fuddy-duddy squares. At least, that's the image that is important to them that they present to the world (or their own little circles).
And for those people it tends to not go well, often for the same reasons as the second set: one person gets all the dating they can handle while the other partner hits a drought, or one or other regrets the decision to open up the relationship because deep down they *are* a fuddy-duddy square who was happy with a boring old conventional relationship.
There's people who are interested in poly because of the sex, and there's people who are interested in poly because it will let them have long discussions about creating ideal relationships 😁
Thanks for reminding of these articles! Especially (1), people here have given a lot of things women care for in men, but I'm still puzzled about "Henry" who beat his wives and cheated on one with another, and still finds plenty of women who fall for him. How does Henry do it?
I know of a few Henrys, they really exist. My wife says: Some women have a really low self-esteem and think they don't deserve better. Also, Henrys really know how to manipulate their women. Sad but true. She knows because she used to date a Henry.
Why can't we hook up these women with those "ACX meetup singles" and make everybody happy?
I didn't know a Henry as such, but I did briefly know a woman who somehow always managed to pick a Henry. She wasn't looking for one, she was a nice person, and yet whenever she got involved with a new guy - he turned out to be a Henry.
Some people just have very poor selection mechanisms. Other people do go for the "bad boy" thing, which puzzles me as well. Oftentimes it's the female equivalent of Henry who hooks up with Henry.
I dunno, emotions are complicated and sexual attraction is a weird thing!
EDIT: From the distaff side, why isn't Taylor Swift married, or why hasn't she ever been married? She's going into her mid-30s, she's conventionally attractive, she's very rich and is self-made rich so she's smart and capable. Yet she's had a string of romances that never seemed to last. Will her most recent one be the one? Who can say?
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/taylor-swifts-high-profile-flames-2011163/
Men also have their preferences, just as women go for the Henrys. Imagine two women: Saucy Sally (who is the poster girl for "don't stick your dick in crazy") and Just Judy. Judy is a nice girl, she has a lovely personality, but she's - boring. She doesn't have that zing that Sally has; Sally may be a disaster but she's sexy, she's fun (at least before the bunny-boiler tendencies kick in) and most men, I submit, would pick Sally. Maybe not for marriage! But for a fun time sowing their wild oats? Sure. And then once they're ready to settle down and do adult life and have kids, they pick Judy because she's ordinary but stable.
*That* has been the male equivalent of "fun with the alpha, then find a beta to settle down with" over history.
I knew a woman who always picked a Henry. When I talked to her, I found out that she actually believes that *every* man is a Henry... and therefore she prefers the ones who are open about it, over the ones who (from her perspective) try to hide it.
From epistemic perspective, this is just awesomely crazy. Every piece of evidence she gets will support her view. (Scott calls is "trapped priors".) All men she will ever date will indeed be Henrys, because the ones who are not will be rejected as "hypocrites". She will live a life full of self-inflicted misery... and of course she will blame men for it!
There's probably a major correlation-causation fallacy going on with the Henry thing. Instead of "beating and cheating on your wives is attractive and gets you more wives" it's "a pyschopathic conman will beat and cheat, and is also great at manpulative charm". It's easy to charm people if you're completely amoral and spend all your time calculating how to use people. But these people will get away with everything until they don't. To quote Sherlock Holmes "That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows."
That Sherlock Holmes story is an awesome description of the phenomenon. I have encountered at least 2 guys who fit the pattern, a third that I strongly suspect.
One-man crime wave. It's astonishing.
Of the two....
a) In jail. Won't be getting out any time soon .
b) Run out of town. Will presumably be living under yet another fake identity.
Wooly, I'm going to amend what Melvin said about "Women do not value the same things in men that men value in women. Women tend to care about your status more than your looks" because things *have* shifted now, and men are now getting the kind of "you need to maximise your attractiveness, how else are you going to find someone, nobody wants a plain Jane" that women have had to deal with.
Being nice, and in a good job, aren't enough. It's the old problem of "what men think is attractive in men, isn't what women think attractive; what women think is attractive in women, isn't what men think attractive".
The rationalist sphere is not representative of the majority of men. Everyone on here, even the non-rationalists, is - to be nice about it - quirky in some way (being not-nice about it, we're odd as bedamned). The tendency for those circles to be overwhelmingly majority male, and add in the unconventionality on top of that, makes it even tougher to find female companionship.
There's a lot more rationalist-type guys than rationalist-type gals, is one of the problems.
Oh yea, the gender skew in the rationalist sphere is wild. It's kinda wild the difference in attention you get in a primarily male social group, like ACX, compared to a primarily female group, like virtually every reading group I've been to. I thought theater would have similar advantages but that's, uh, a different scene.
I like to hold up the rationalist-ACX sphere as a comparison point to mainstream society though. There's a lot of "men falling behind"/"women's standards are too high" discourse and I'm over here like "Yo, there's a decent sized group of men doing very well on, like 80% of the traits women say they want and yet they're single as hell, so clearly something else is going on". Like, yes, lots of young men are having financial trouble and they should try to do better but...going from $30k to $100k will not automatically get you a girlfriend.
You sound bitter as hell. Listen, I think a lot of the difficulty men have finding women these days is the dating apps. You probably know about how that works so I don't need to explain the ways men are at an awful disadvantage one the apps. When I was young there were no apps. and people were out and about a lot more because there was no fucking Internet. All of my honeys were people I met at school, at work, at gatherings at friend's houses, and at outdoorsy activities. The structure of those situations is one that doesn't give either gender a big advantage. Also, people behave much better when starting to date someone that's part of their social circle. There's much more accountability. You can't ghost somebody that's a friend of a friend -- at least, not without hearing about it.
Another factor is the insane version of feminism that's floating around, esp. in woke circles. I have male patients who are afraid to *look* too often at a woman at their job because they're afraid of being accused of sexual harassment. Men are afraid to initiate a first kiss with someone they are dating for fear of being rapey. And they don't just fear being called rapey, they worry that to kiss without asking permission really *is* rapey. That stuff is nonsense.
Now about the ACX guys, I think I can tell you why they have a hard time getting dates. Many women, and I am one of them, find engineers and programmers to be unusually dense about subtle & complicated interpersonal stuff. That makes those men less satisfying for a woman to talk with about relationships and different shades of feeling. It makes it hard for her to get across to the man nuances that are important to her. Also, it is likely that the man is going to have a pretty male set of interests, and not much interest in art and literature -- for women who are both intellectual and arty, that's a pretty big blank spot.
Here's an example from my experience both in life and as a therapist. When it comes to giving gifts to the woman in their life, some men think the way I would: What do I know she likes? OK, books about x, y, and z -- oh!, she hasn't read that new book about y that's supposed to be very good. And periwinkle is her favorite color, I wonder if I could find some periwinkle silk nightie or something. Oh, and she loved that massage she had last spring, I can get her a gift card for a massage at the same place. Engineers and others in similar fields have a terrible time figuring out something to buy their wife. They're in my office asking for advice, saying stuff like chocolates? roses? women like those, right? Should I maybe get some jewelry too? Maybe I should get something really expensive to make sure she likes it?
Look I know not all men in the more male-dominated parts of the STEM world are like this, but I'm positive that *more* of them are. Some women are fine with it, but many aren't. Those men are definitely at a disadvantage. To women who find them dense about emotional stuff, the're very -- what's the opposite of hot? Unsexy. A bit boring. And yes, many of them are fine, kind, honest people. My close friend and rock climbing partner for years was an engineer. I was very fond of him, but felt zero attraction to him (and anyhow he was married). As far as I could tell, he was not attracted to me either. While camping we sometimes shared tents & motel rooms, and there was no electricity in the air at all.
So the criteria I named as important are (1) talented (2) haopy (3) gets me (4) kind and loving. The kind of man I'm talking about does not do well at all on (3). That Is likely to also lead to coming across as mediocre, though not terrible, on (4), because he is bad enough at reading people, including the woman in his life, that he is likely not to recognize that she is stress, sad or whatever and in need of a little extra kindness. And he may not come across well on (2), happiness. He may have excellent reasons for being unhappy but still -- that cuts right down on the magnatism.
And by the way, I actually did go to an ACX meetup last year & yeah, the men did all seem smart hard working and interested in doing the world some good. Allwere young enough to be my sons. However there were 2 that I would have been quite attracted to if I had been their age, and even at my present age I spent more time talking to them than to others because I liked them more. One was a PhD student in quite a male STEM field, but was lively and articulate when he explained some tech stuff to me, and just in the comments he made about this and that he had a kind of playful verbal fluencythat made me feel like he'd understand and have an interest in various ideas I have about poetry, the mind, consciousness, etc etc. If were 25 and had gone out with him, I might have found out that I was wrong about that, but he would not have had a bit of trouble getting a first date with me. Oh, and by the way,, since I'm trying to challenge some ideas men here have about women's preferences, here's a review of his looks. He totally flunked on the tallness and muscularity a lot of guys think is important to women. He was short, by US causcasian standards, maybe 5'6". That's still taller than me, though, and would not have bothered 25 year old me at all.II wasn't at all bulky and muscular, but didn't look skinny and weak either. He was just you basic a thinnish young guy. I think most people would agree with me that he had a handsome face, but he had unusually dark skin for someone from south asia and that would look unattractive to some. But the thing is -- I liked him. And there was plenty to appreciate about his appearance.
In many cases, they are not just "dense about interpersonal stuff" they have high-function autism.
The women too, of course. Perhaps, especially the women in ACX circles.
On the other hand, high-functioning autism in women is kind of cute and adorable, and not really a problem (compare, e.g., schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder)
[Note I said high-functioning, I'm well aware what the more severe forms present like]
Yes, I agree about that. Buy a lot of the Aspie stuff is interesting and appealing. It’s the blurry interpersonal lens that’s the turn-off
Why didn't you just say they should dress better?
I mean, yes, if you've got a STEM guy in a long-term relationship and he's struggling to find the right gift then your observations aren't bad but that's not the problem most of these men are facing. This is something that would make them a better partner, not get a partner. And, trivially, it's way, way easier and more effective for the average STEM nerd to get good romantic results by buying a nice pair of boots, a decent blazer, and tailoring his jeans.
Look, no offense, but if we both take an ACX nerd and I put him in decent clothes and you try to teach him to distinguish periwinkle from lavender...I mean, I've got extremely strong priors who will get better results and I don't think you actually disagree.
But there's this weird disconnect where that's not what you bring up, that's not what you discuss, that's not where you focus, it's fundamentally this...not irrelevant detail but it's just disconnected from the actual challenges, like worrying about what color to paint your kitchen before you've bought a house. This allergy to honestly discussing what women empirically find attractive. And I'm incredibly bitter about it because, well, I'm a giant nerd and I care about discourse. And I can't have an honest discussion with any woman, ever, about this because they all do this rhetorical slide, away from what clearly, empirically works. This was kind of excusable in the 2000s but at this point I'm just tired of being lied to. And, from the women's perspective, I know most of you don't like the way male/red pill discourse is going but turning that around is going to require some woman, at some point, to actually speak openly and candidly about it.
It feels like some kind of fear on women's part but...of what? We're all stupid about the opposite sex. Men are stupid about boobs. Boobs are cool but not nearly as cool as we think they are and everyone knows about this and can laugh and joke about this. I don't think Melvin's status theory is everything but it's definitely a giant, obvious influence on women but women treat any discussion of that as deeply wrongheaded, misguided at best and hateful at worst, as if the things they actually found attractive were a Defcon 1 secret to be protected at all costs.
>This allergy to honestly discussing what women empirically find attractive. And I'm incredibly bitter about it because, well, I'm a giant nerd and I care about discourse. And I can't have an honest discussion with any woman, ever, about this because they all do this rhetorical slide, away from what clearly, empirically works. This was kind of excusable in the 2000s but at this point I'm just tired of being lied to
Al. I am not lying. I am so motherfucking frank that it’s kind of a social liability. I have to work to damp down my natural willingness to say stuff that other people consider too ungracious or too crass or too politically incorrect or too dark to say. It is possible that I am just way different from other members of my gender, but I don’t think so. I’m quirky, but seem to have gotten the typical romance software. There are a couple things about me that probably make me substantially different from the national average in how I react to men, but they’re not unusual things, esp. here on ACX. The first is that I do not come from money. My father had to retire from the military when I was 9 because he failed to get the military equivalent of tenure, and thereafter we lived on a retired lieutenant colonel’s pay. I got huge scholarships as an undergrad, and even so my parents had trouble covering the remainder. Acc/to the research I’m familiar with, people’s financial expectations are influenced a fair amount by their parents’ financial situation. I have never aspired to be rich, and not because I’m noble — it’s just not an ideal that ever took hold in my mind. I just wanted to have & do the things that people in the low part of the upper middle class have & do, and I have succeeded at reaching that spot in the money hierarchy. Once I was in grad school I knew that that would not be difficult to do unless I fucked up some way, and the amount of money a man would bring into the marriage really was no longer a consideration. The second is that I have generally been more concerned about my social status than about the man’s. I grew up smart, got an advanced degree, and want to be respected for my accomplishments. The idea of being admired because of the attainments of whoever I was married to never appealed to me. Anyhow, as I said, that combo of relative disinterest in wealth and an orientation towards getting respect myself may be unusual among women as a whole, but it is not unusual among women with advanced degrees. It’s probably not unusual on here. If you are dating smart, accomplished women who can support themselves, it’s a whole different world from *The Bachelorette.*.
And here is a second response to the bit of AL-think quoted above. You sound furious at women. You see them us people who are primarily interested in the gain in social status and wealth they can get from pairing up with the right sort of man, and as cold and selfish when it comes to consideration of the plight of men these days. You think we are such liars that you have not once, ever, gotten one of us to tell the truth about how we choose men. So here’s my question: Why the fuck do you want one of us?
If it’s the pussy you want I think you would be better off coming to a civilized arrangement with some woman where the 2 of you are what’s called fuck buddies, and you pay her rent or take her on a couple great trips a year. I am not saying this to be insulting, that is my actual view of what’s your best shot.
Also, you kind of didn’t get the main message of my riff about engineers vs. more literary types when giving presents to women. You said the birthday present part wouldn’t come up til the couple is married. That’s true, but the guys who are clueness about what to get their wife as a present start showing that same kind of cluelessness early on. For instance, one thing I’ve seen them do is on a first date take the woman to a very expensive restaurant, making clear that they will be paying the bill. They’re missing a couple of nuances there. Many women would not be comfortable with that because it is awkward to have someone you barely know well do something like that for you. It gives women like that — I’m one of them — a vague feeling the man is trying to buy them or impress them. Also, it is hard to be frank about what you of the restaurant if the man is paying $150 for your meal. If we had decided together to go to the place, and were splitting the bill, I would feel comfortable saying “wow, this place doesn’t live up to its reputation, do you agree?” But it seems churlish to say that to someone who has presented the meal to you as an expensive gift. Also, for the man to choose the location of the first date is not a great note to start on. It’s not mutual. If I were the woman, I’d be thinking, why there? Does he think everybody likes that place? Does he think he gets to decide where we go on dates? Does he think that all I care about is how pricey the place is? Anyhow, that’s an example of a way a man, trying to make a good impression, exhibits cluelessness about what the woman’s point of view might be early on. The kind of cluelessness about interpersonal nuances that I’m talking about is usually evident within half an hour of meeting someone. (Is that frank enough for you? I feel rude and mean spirited writing that, but you want the truth.).
Also, about the periwinkle gown — you’re missing the forest for the trees. The point isn’t that the man should be able to tell the difference between periwinkle and lavender, it’s that he would understand the woman in his life well enough to know her preferences in books, clothing, trips, etc. If he bought her a gown that was lavender instead of periwinkle, it would be just fine for him to say, “I hope you’re oK with the color. I can’t really tell the difference between periwinkle and lavendar, and I know periwinkle’s your favorite.” And that would be just fine. The important part is him knowing and caring what her favorite things are, not his being able to pick out absolutely flawless instances of those things as presents.
>" "And I can't have an honest discussion with any woman, ever, about this because they all do this rhetorical slide, away from what clearly, empirically works"
I'm a 44 year old American straight woman who had a mostly straight male social circle for my teens, twenties, and thirties. While I very obviously can't speak for all women because many of them are very different from me - they're far stupider or far smarter, or they're emotionally or mentally ill, they're much more empathic and feelings centered than rationally compassionate, or they were raised in a wildly different culture - I will ABSOLUTELY truthfully answer whatever questions you have about empirically works for *me* and you can extrapolate out from there what would work for people similar to me.
Wooly, I'm going to be the wicked fairy at the christening here. Damn right they *should* dress better. Back when we were doing the dating docs on here, I had a look at some samples and even the reasonable ones, I was going "That photo is doing you *no* favours" and "That's a bad picture to put up to represent "things I like, hobbies, interests" because it screams 'weird loner' and not 'playful unconventional interests'".
As for the detailed descriptions of their lives, wants, interests, outlook on life in general - yeeeeeeah. An *awful* lot of "this is the Bay Area, baby" type of interests (so I'm pan, poly, not looking for kids yet if ever, I have sixteen cats and nineteen dogs though and if my five partners and my metamours approve of you, I'm sure we'll click!) and basically giving off "if I'm not in this precise bubble with this precise mindset, I'm running screaming for the hills if approached by this person" vibe. Man.
I know I'm being the hurler on the ditch here, and the same applies for the women, but the guys really were not bringing their strongest game to the "dating is a meat market, being vegan won't help you here" war.
EDIT: Also, Wooly, women *do* find colours interesting. You think Eremolalos is deflecting when talking about periwinkle, but women really do think "oh that colour really suits him" versus "oh dear, that's just not working" in regards to shades that you and most men would probably think "it's all blue, right?" Nice guy dresses in decent clothing but lets himself down because he really can't wear red with his complexion and that is a dealbreaker on the subconscious "do I find him Le Sexy" level.
EDIT EDIT: I do mean it about the importance of colours. The one time I managed to co-ordinate all my clothing in a particular colour, I got lots of sincere comments from other women about how good it looked, but I don't dress like that since because I felt like I was wearing camo. Olive green does go well with my colouring, but I might as well be wearing army fatigues, and I'm not in any man's army 😊
Yeah I don't really disagree. It's hard to be too wrong when arguing that "actually life is more complicated than your simplified model", of course it is. I was really trying to summarise the whole "alpha/beta" thing more accurately rather than give a complete theory of attraction.
Melvin's assertion "Women tend to care about your status more than your looks" is arguably more insulting to men than to women, but one rarely sees men getting offended at similar claims.
As you point out, status is an important and informational signal in a civilized society and is regarded as such, so one would think that being accused of caring for status is far less insulting than being accused of caring for looks.
My point wasn't that what Melvin said was horribly insulting, it was that he was wrong. I wrote 3 substantial paragraphs about what, in my rather extensive experience, matters to women when they choose mates, and why . One sentence in all that was about how it was insulting to women to say they weigh male's social status more heavily than anything else: I said they'd have to be dumb as dirt to do that. I did not say anything about men caring overmuch about looks, not one word.
It seems to me you are irritated at me for things other people have said. How about paying attention just to what *I* said, if you're going to respond to me?
I attributed the view on men caring about looks to Melvin, not to you. Juxtaposing that with your comment "Listen, if I carried around much feminist anger...", makes for a curiosity that the nastier insult barely begets a reaction, which I felt was not entirely irrelevant to point out.
You seem to be reading my comment as confrontational, which it is not.
Part of the problem is that women now want and expect the same rights to choose and range of choice in romantic/sexual partners as men have had, and men (of course) don't like that.
There's also the difference in what men find attractive; it may be a cliché or a stereotype, but whether a man is 17 or 70, he is going to find nubile 17 year old girl attractive and will try to attract her. If a 70 year old woman is going around trying to pull 17 year old men - yeah, that is not socially acceptable in the main.
So you have women who wanted to/did play the field like a man in their 20s getting to their 30s and wondering "where are all the good men, why don't men want to settle down?" whereas the men in their 30s are still chasign after/getting the benefit of the women in their 20s sowing their wild oats.
And the men in their 20s getting out-competed by the men in their 30s and 40s for the 20 year old women are angry and unhappy, and the women in their 30s and 40s getting ignored by the men in their 30s and 40s are angry and unhappy.
I've seen a lot of the kind of problem page/agony aunt advice column plaints that go "I'm 36 year old woman, I've been with my 38 year old fiancé for eight years, now I'm thinking about marriage and kids but he doesn't want to commit". My (less than charitable) reaction is "Well of course he doesn't, if he hasn't proposed marriage by now he never will. He doesn't want to change, why would he? He's getting free milk, and if the cow gets stroppy about it, he can always go find another one, and younger to boot".
I agree that alpha males are real, in that there's a certain bucket of traits where having all or most of them tends to make a man an 'alpha' who gets lots of girls if he wants to. These traits include self-confidence, good sense of humor, high degree of financial success, fame, and probably a few others.
Still, I think that going with just alpha/beta is a bit too simplistic. From what I've seen in life, most straight men are content/happy in a long-term relationship with one woman, and there's a good number of men that manage this without being alpha. Then there are men that struggle to have any girlfriend or any long-term relationship. The division between these two groups is probably more important than the division between alphas and everybody else.
So there probably should be at least 3 levels here, maybe more, not just 2.
>though it is true he is superior at something most men care about a lot
Is it, though? I might not be the best person to talk about this (I attempted masculinity for some time, but I didn't really have the knack for it), but I get the impression that at least a plurality and probably a substantial majority of men would be (or are) happy with one good relationship and only particularly need to pull enough girls to find the right partner for a good long-term relationship and not get too frustrated and lonely in the meantime. That number can be as few as one, and quality matters a lot more than quantity.
Before I met my now-wife, and also before I started my transition, I would have defied categorization into "alpha" and "beta" by your standards. I'd had several more partners than the numbers I've most commonly seen in surveys for average number of partners (4-ish for women, 6-ish for men), which would have put me in the "alpha" category. On the other hand, I was perennially single and often had long dry spells. In hindsight, my three major problems apart from not having met the right woman yet were:
1. My social circles were mostly men, and most of the women were in relationships at any given time, which limited my dating pool quite a bit.
2. I fit the "useless lesbian" stereotype pretty well (i.e. hopelessly dense about signs of women being interested in me and very reluctant to make the first move for fear of being wrong), which is even worse for getting dates as a "straight" "man" than it is for a gay woman.
3. I was girly enough that straight women, even when they liked me and found me attractive, generally didn't really see me as dating material.
Tangentially, the significant gap between the "average number of partners" figures for men and women has always bothered me. Either there are enough stereotypically promiscuous gay guys and U-Haul lesbians to skew the averages, or a lot of people are lying.
The ultimate girl-getter I ever knew was a northern Irish engineer I met while working in Hong Kong. He stood about five feet two, he was missing a front tooth, and he was a sloppy dresser. But at bars, he would wade in and start chatting up the most beautiful girls. He'd turn up his accent, tell them jokes, and have them laughing at his jokes in no time. He inevitably left with one of them on his arm. He was the most non-Alpha Alpha male I ever met.
Don't underestimate the exotic element of him being a foreigner. I imagine the local girls liked the novelty of having fun with this guy who was so different from the type of guys they normally met, but as for long term relationships or marriage, I sincerely doubt either party entertained the notion at all.
Still, if he enjoyed himself and they enjoyed themselves, who am I to quibble?
He had confidence, that is like 80% of it. A lot of men don't really have that in spades.
Reason you think he is the least non-Alpha alpha is that your definition of what an Alpha male is probably too narrow.
I would define it as social dominance. Height and wether you have a front tooth missing or not doesn't have that much to do with it. Although height can help.
I would say fame doesn't even have that much to do with it. As you can become famous in many different ways these days.
Well, matching him up to my criteria, he had a talent -- being very funny -- and he came across as happy. Two out of the big 4 is def enuf to get a lot of us interested in exploring further.
It seems by your definition, anyone who does (or can) get lots of girls is an Alpha, while everyone else is a Beta. You add "confident" to the description, but that doesn't seem central. Even if it is, that leaves a lot of room for other behaviors and situations - for instance someone like me who is monogamous and happily married for a number of years. I honestly don't know how I would fare if I were looking for short term relationships or hookups, because I am not and have not been. If we're limited to two categories, I think a lot of men will fail to properly fit into either.
Maybe there's a use in defining an Alpha, but it seems like an overly limited definition that fits more into stereotypes than a real category with important effects.
ETA: And if you take away all of the controversial aspects (like if an Alpha is generically superior to Betas), then of course that's less controversial. I agree that it's not controversial that some guys are better able to talk to women and have better romantic prospects, but that's also a completely uninteresting observation on its own.
Of the richness and complexity of a (male, in this case) human existence, are “Alfa” and “Beta” really our only choices? Don’t care how controversial this concept is considered to be, pathetic and useless is a more apt description.
And then there's the ksi group, thin-armed twitchy nervous brilliant impractical men that intellectual women fall in love with.
its the "degree from a good school" that matters. there are plenty of ksi working retail. i kind of doubt said brilliant women are dating them. Books are cheap and plenty of bright men drop out to there.
having a good degree and a high salary covers a lot of flaws.
KSI? Knowledge Strength Integrity? The Irish guy I knew in Hong Kong who I described above was twitchy. I'm doubtful about his integrity, though. He had a habit of marrying women but not bother to divorce his previous spouses. He could get away with this because he traveled around the world from one airport construction project to another. A lawyer for his "ex"-wife in Hong Kong contacted me trying to track him down. I mentioned that I thought he had a wife in Northern Ireland that he never divorced. That didn't please the lawyer.
Naw, ksi is just another Greek letter, and I threw that in to put what I said in parallel with alpha and beta. And there really isn't a ksi group. What I was really saying was that intellectual women are often attracted to brilliant men, and if the man is brilliant his being thin-armed, twitchy etc. just doesn't matter. I speak from experience.
I think "omega" was also part of the grouping (the most hopeless men, even more useless and low-status than betas) and now sigma males are the new thing?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-sigma-male-8655129
"Anyone who identifies as a “sigma male” is typically portrayed in popular culture, such as movies and books, as a sort of strong and silent type. The most identifiable personality traits associated with them are independence, self-reliance, and a penchant for solitude.
The sigma male is the new-age lone wolf, and the idea of being a lone wolf is mostly romanticized. However, it’s a personality archetype that seems to go beyond simply preferring to be alone over the company of friends.
Their personality is in direct contrast to the alpha male, who prefers to dominate, and different from the beta male, who is more introverted, sensitive, passive, and more likely to prefer encouragement over demands."
Though the personality typings have been reworked, and now, God help us, there's an entire alphabet:
https://www.wikihow.com/Male-Personality-Types
"Alpha males are fearless trailblazers who love to be in control while beta males are kind, gentle souls who prioritize personal connections.
Sigma males are rebellious leaders with lots of life experience while delta males are responsible companions who you want by your side.
Zeta males are nonconformist creatives, gamma males are charismatic nomads, and omega males are sharp intellectuals with boundless ideas."
> ksi is just another Greek letter
Maybe you mean 'xi'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_(letter)
yeah, that’s what I meant
I think "ksi" is legit these days, between the American(?) tendency to pronounce it "zi", and the current Chinese ruler.
I posted this link from WaPo in response to a side discussion in the comments to Scott's *I'm Sorry You Feel That Way* post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/08/29/research-bias-cognitive-studies-executive-function-marshmallow-test/
I think it is interesting enough to be its own discussion thread because it turns out that the great Marshmallow Test for executive function isn't reproducible across all cultures.
"For decades, the eponymous Marshmallow Test has taken on almost mythic meaning. The test, originally developed to measure children’s ability to delay gratification by tempting them with a fluffy, gooey sweet was later shown to be a potent predictor of success in school and beyond."
But it didn't hold up for Mayan children. And then psychologists ran variations of the test across different cultures.
"Yuko Munakata, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Davis, conducted a variation on the Marshmallow Test that showed that children’s ability to wait for a treat wasn’t like a muscle that was strong or weak, but changed markedly depending on the context. Japanese children, culturally accustomed to waiting for food, were able to hold out for a food reward, but not for a present. American schoolchildren, on the other hand, used to waiting to unwrap gifts under a Christmas tree or at a birthday party, were able to wait for a gift, but not food."
That made me wonder if it also doesn't validate free will. After all one of the predicates of the determinists is that human brains offer a limited range of responses in any given situation. Although all humans will not respond in the same way — but given a restrictive test, we should see a bell curve of response frequencies. If our minds don't give us control over our executive functions, with a simple scenario like the Marshmallow Test we should see a similar range of variation between diverse groups. But we don't. Of course, one could argue that culture and not our biology overrides our free will. But it's hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes (although some environmental determinists — like Marvin Harris — argued that it was — most of their arguments were scientific just-so stories and weren't falsifiable).
This weekend a smart guy told me that the original marshmallow test was done in the Caribbean and looked at racial differences among children. I thought, “that seems like it would be highly controversial and I would have heard of it.” So I asked with Chat-GPT: it said no way!--"The claim that the original Marshmallow Test was conducted in the Caribbean to examine racial differences in children is not true. "
So I checked Wikipedia…no mention of an earlier test—“The first experiment in delayed gratification was conducted by Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen at Stanford University in 1970”.
So I checked Wikipedia’s talk page…some vague references to removing the "origins" section, but nothing that mentioned an earlier test. So I checked the 1970 paper, which cited a 1960s paper, which cited a 1958 paper in Trinidad and—damned if he wasn’t right.
DOI: 10.1037/h0041895
Aside-- the Frequency Illusion is really kicking my ass this month
Why did you ask Chat-GPT? Especially given that you're evidently well-equipped to find answers on your own.
If I wind up having to use multiple search engines, or refine my queries more than once, it's just as easy to ask a chat AI too.
It’s fast. I thought there was a good chance it would point me to the correct paper in <30 seconds. I trust chat about as much as I trust a knowledgeable person (maybe a bit less so on sensitive subjects like this one).
Wow! I appreciate you digging into this. I also use Chat and Co-Pilot for quick overviews. I don't necessarily trust everything they tell me — but then I ask for references, I have a starting point to track down further info. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of references end up being dead ends (as in not saying what the LLM thought it said) or bogus (unable to find them in Google Scholar). But as much as I've disparaged the LLMs in previous threads, they can be very useful as a research starting point.
Funny thing is that I looked all this up 10 minutes BEFORE reading your comment. The universe is bombarding me with a lot of weird coincidences this week.
If you don't eat the marshmallow, you're not an alpha.
I suppose a REAL alpha would eat the marshmallow and then somehow get the second marshmallow anyway.
They wanted to reproduce this and Mayan children was their first go to group lol?
This and the fact that it comes from a pretty woke university (and the fact that the conclusions from the Marshmellow test has implications that somewhat agree with conservative ideals) raises about half an eyebrow for me.
And I say that as someone who is somewhat skeptical of the Marshmellow study and its implications.
Seems like delayed gratification is a Marxist ideal — i.e. working hard to make the world ready for the coming of True Communism. One could argue that marshmallows are a symbol of mushy capitalist incentives. ;-)
But propose a new study (should anyone wish to undertake it): How long can threads go before they devolve into accusations of wokeness?
Well it implies people with discipline are much more succesful.
Leftists think environment and the "oppressive system" that needs to be brought down is the only deciding factor.
I think it is reasonable to distrust a very woke university's social science by default.
What's your definition of "woke" and which universities do you think qualify as woke? And is the wokeness because of policies at the University Board and top administrative level? Or is the university bureaucracy? The professoriate? Or does it come bottom-up from the students? Philippe Lemoine argues that it's grad students who are intimidating the professoriate and administration with their wokeness (however, he never defines what being woke means). If that's the case that it's the young that are the vector of wokeness, then the future is not bright for Boomer and GenX fascists that control our media, courts, and red state governments. Personally, I see it as a natural reaction to the rise of corporate fascism in the US.
"And is the wokeness because of policies at the University Board and top administrative level? Or is the university bureaucracy? The professoriate? Or does it come bottom-up from the students? Philippe Lemoine argues that it's grad students who are intimidating the professoriate and administration with their wokeness (however, he never defines what being woke means)."
Usually most or all of those.
Ahhh. So it's a massive conspiracy of wokeness.
So your argument goes:
1: Human behavior is shaped by culture
2: "it's hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes"
3: Thus, humans have free will
I think culture is generally shaped by what physicists call deterministic chaos. You have a complex systems full of feedback loops and nonlinearities where a small change in the input state can lead to a large divergence later.
For example, the Japanese language is not a deterministic consequence of their geography. Sometimes single people establish words or phrases, or the outcome of a battle shapes culture for decades to come.
Furthermore, if every behavior shaped by culture was indicative of free will, then then a lot of behaviors we typically take as involuntary would be freely chosen. There are a lot of situations in which dependent on our culture we react reflexively with disgust, anticipation, arousal, shame, outrage and more.
> Of course, one could argue that culture and not our biology overrides our free will. But it's hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes.
I don’t know. I think environment has a massive shaping effect on culture. Inuit culture doesn’t get off the ground in a rainforest. Same for Polynesian culture in the high desert. Plus environment, given time, has a massive shaping effect on biology itself, and biology certainly shapes culture. And then there’s all the other shit happening (volcanic eruptions, drought, disease, migration, etc.)
It seems clear to me that everything I do, or think, is just the summation of my particular circumstance. There’s no magical me pulling the strings independent of that. Environment, biology, history, dumb luck, etc. go in and what people think of as free will, or the expression of the soul, or whatever, is what comes out. We are in every sense just a product of the situation, like everything else in the universe. I don’t see evidence for something existing outside of that.
It may be that physical culture (i.e. their toolkits, etc.) help populations to adapt to the environment, but different cultures that adapt to the same environment can be very different. For instance, Polynesian and Micronesian cultures have similar toolkits that enable them to exploit their tropical island environments, but Micronesian cultures are less hierarchical than Polynesian cultures and this is reflected in body ornamentation and their architecture.
Food avoidance patterns are things that environmental determinists like to cite as adaptive to cultures. In his book *Eat Not This Flesh*, Frederick Simoons pretty much demolished this line of thought back in the 60s. He criticized environmental determinists for being too eager, in the absence of supporting evidence, to use disease and environmental factors as an explanation why certain cultures avoid certain kinds of foods. He used historical and archaeological evidence to dismantle such explanations for pork rejection in the Middle East and beef rejection in India. And there are interesting side discussions in the book — for instance on how women in some African cultures abstain from chicken and eggs, fearing infertility.
And that an Inuit from a remote settlement above the Arctic Circle can become a premier cardiovascular surgeon suggests to me that culture has a limited hold on our behavioral choices (Google "famous inuit doctors").
I wouldn’t contend that geography is the sole determiner of culture. Nor is culture always the result of rational processes. Food avoidance for seemingly irrational reasons could stem from an elder, in a fishing region, getting terribly ill from eating a fish and influencing his people not to consume fish. Food avoidance could be due to a spoiled cache of food. Or any number of processes that don’t require a fundamental spark of essential free will.
You contended that it is hard to argue that culture is the result of deterministic processes. Facts like there being sharks in regions (Fiji, Tahiti, Hawaii) where people have worshiped shark gods suggests otherwise.
The trouble with Determinist arguments is that their explanations for behavior (or for that matter any emergent phenomena) always rely on causality chains which, like your elder in a fishing village example, are based on speculation. These explanations are either unfalsifiable — or if the data tends to falsify them (a la Simoons's work), the Determinists go back to the drawing board to find some other explanations based on tenuous chains of causality.
Of course, all chains of causality regress to the Big Bang. So, many physicists seem to believe that all the motions and interactions of energy and matter were pre-determined from the Big Git-go. But speaking of chains of causality, I wonder if that philosophy isn't a holdover from Calvinist theory of predestination? Instead of Jehovah being the Prime Mover, the Big Bang becomes the Prime Mover, and the only randomness that ever occurred was in the distribution of matter-energy at the start of the Big Bang (and if we could *just see beyond the singularity, it would turn out to be non-random!*).
As the conversationalist in the sidebar conversation on free will (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that/comment/67151885) , I don't see how my basic argument for the illusion of free will (generated by Sam Harris's definitive essay/episode on the illusion of free will + Scott's Different Worlds essay) is in any way invalidated by a demonstration that Japanese children's culture *determined* that most of them would be better at waiting to consume a marshmallow because they were conditioned to wait for food.
In fact, I think it rather proves the opposite? If everyone has truly free will, then surely culture wouldn't have any impact whatsoever on the marshmallow test, and nor would genetic conditions which contribute to the kind of defiance, impulsivity, inability to process language, etc. which would lead certain children to test-failing marshmallow chomping.
But to go further, I don't think one of the major criticisms of the marshmallow test - that ultimately socioeconomic status (and thus perhaps a sense of trust/security) is the actual determining factor in predicting delayed gratification - has been disproven yet, which further goes to the argument that environment (plus genetics) determines behavior. (https://medium.com/templeton-world/the-stanford-marshmallow-experiment-was-wrong-heres-why-and-how-open-science-can-help-1526c22d9354)
After all, if you're the youngest of five in a very poor American family, snatching whatever treat you can get the second you can get it might indeed be a very valid survival strategy in your environment in a way that would be potentially literally "unthinkable" to the Japanese children cited in your article. It's your environment shaping your behavior, not the amorphous power of free will.
the whole free will thing is atheists not getting the idea of "fate" is part of human existence and will manifest over and over in worse terms if we don't resist it.
whether its three gods spinning a tapestry, one all knowing god who sees every event, or twisting darwinian selection into something ineffable, its the same urge or fallback. fate is popular because everyone styles themself as an oracle of it, not as a captive of it. they believe if they serve it they can twist it or be exempt from it.
the fact they "argue" it and not get that it might as well be bird song for all the good it does (and religion realized good works might as well be bird song for the predestined, and agonized over it) shows the disconnect.
You're not going to get much of an argument from me; "fate" tends to imply a grand design, "determinism," less so, but it's functionally the same thing.
Sam Harris's argument that one must nevertheless *operate* as if they have "free will" is an important part of his thoughts about it, as there are consequences for every action (including not taking action). "Mitigating risk," "exercising judgment," and so on are behaviors that contribute to outcomes, so if you are *able* to do them...do them!
The fact that children from the same culture can respond to the test in different ways suggests to me that we are not cultural automata — let alone biological automata.
But if we weren't automata, we would have no will! (Cause "self-moving" or "moving of oneself" we have to be at least, and all things - real things, physical things - are self-moving.)
Having free will means that one can do something of free will. But I prefer to say, that one can do something "freiwillig" or voluntarily.
And we certainly can. I do what I want to do all the time.
And I'm not under an illusion. Doing things I do not want as much or as direct as others feels consistently different.
I cannot choose what I like or what I find important, but I can choose to act on it in this way or that way. And often I have chosen bad, but it was my choice.
More of a problem is that one can say that absolutely everything we can do intentionally - that is, even only with the intention of doing it and no deeper or following purpose, for example raising your arm, contrary to moving your bowels - is done voluntarily if we do it indeed intentionally and not absentmindedly, after a deliberation of the pros and cons. Like giving the robber your money instead of being shot.
But that's not important here, I think.
Important is that doing something voluntarily is not a stupid notion.
It's something that some things can do and others don't. Just like some things can melt and others can't. And all things do whatever they can do in accordance with their other properties. That's how things work. And there is nothing bad about it.
This isn't coherent with your first comment, which is about the marshmallow test not being reproducable across all cultures somehow proving that free will exists.
But it *is* apparently reproducable the more granular you are when sorting for demographics!
When you test cultures against one another - Japanese vs American, rich vs poor - you can more accurately predict what the subject is going to do. Japanese kids are more likely to wait than Americans because their Japanese parents' culture likely shaped them to wait for food. Secure, well-provided-for children are more likely to wait than deprived kids because their parents shaped them to confidently trust in the social contract and be rewarded.
That some larger cultures are more likely to pass than others clearly demonstrates that culture tends to determine behavior. And of course a more immediate culture is likely going to shape behavior even *more.* An affluent neighborhood's "Make Our Kids Pass the Marshmallow Test" parents group which trains and drills and rewards their kids on the marshmallow test is almost certainly going to do even better than the cohort of Japanese kids.
Might there be outliers in the Make Our Kids Pass the Marshmallow Test cohort? Almost certainly, as individual genetics and personal experience are always going to be a more immediate a determinator than local culture. Immature kids, routinely defiant kids, intellectually disabled kids; they might not pass the test. Some kids who would usually pass might not when they are tired or hungry or both.
It's so clear to me that the more you know about someone, the more you can predict how they will react to any given situation. An impossibly complete understanding of their everything: genetics, all of their personal experiences body chemistry and current brain activity is obviously going to produce a perfect prediction of what they're going to do, because they are only ever responding to the sum total of their genetics and life experience at any given moment.
Why is it clear to you that the more you know about someone the more you can predict what they'll do? For instance, FBI profilers have had mixed (i.e. poor) track record in predicting the behaviors of serial killers.
And your conclusions in the last paragraph are a-scientific. You admit that you can't possibly falsify all these variables acting in concert to achieve perfect predictability. But if a researcher falsifies one of those variables, then the Determinists invoke other variables that could have confounded the findings. Functionally, Determinism is a pseudo-science based upon the gut feelings of those arguing for it and tenuous chain of just-so stories to explain the observed outcomes. Sorry, if I sound a little harsh here, but my *big problem* with all Determinist arguments is that they shut down any further scientific or philosophical investigation of emergent phenomena.
You know what?
I wrote several paragraphs which were a weak imitation of Sam Harris's definitive essay on free will.
Then I deleted them, even though I'm allergic to trashing content, because given what I've seen so far, I don't appear to have the same level of ability to persuade you that Sam Harris had to persuade me (and/or you might not have the capacity to *be* persuaded, by me or anyone. After all, at the end of the day, I do not believe you have free will!), so there's no point in reiterating what I've already written with slightly different language.
I volunteered to send you a paywall pass to the podcast episode (there might be a transcript?) so you can give the argument the fairest possible chance by listening to the strongest possible case for it.
Do you have any desire to see if you *can* be persuaded by the strongest possible argument?
If not...*why* not?
And, at risk of distracting from that inquiry, this conversation began when you said that you require an apology before you can "forgive" those who wrong you. That there are a couple of people from your past that you are still so enraged by that you have a desire to punch them today.
You also said that your ability to calm your thoughts with meditation is proof of your free will.
So.
Dude.
Why don't you just free will yourself into indifference about those past experiences?
Or is this...
> "Maybe it's the Judeo-Christian indoctrinations of my culture, but I can't help but want an apology before I forgive."
...actually *exactly* what I'm arguing?
You're welcome to reply with links for the Sam Harris podcast you're referring to. All I saw was your SlateStarCodex link, and it didn't really seem to discuss free will. Anyway, maybe Sam has revised his arguments since I first encountered them, and I may hear something I haven't heard before — but I found his arguments unpersuasive in the past.
It's also been shown that the marshmallow test performance is easy to modify even in the same population of kids it was originally given to. In original test, kids were told to try hard not to eat the marshmallow. In the variant they were given a suggestion of a way to feel less tempted. I believe it was to pretend the marshmallow was made of foam rubber. Kids did much better when this simple self-management technique was taught.
I imagine it would also be easy to modify simply by telling kids "this is the famous marshmallow test, and whether or not you eat this marshmallow is strongly correlated with your future success. If you eat this marshmallow, every adult in the world will decide you're a shiftless loser doomed to failure. Have fun!"
I should tell my kids about the marshmallow test just in case anyone ever tries it on them.
How well you cheat on the marshmallow test determines your future wealth and happiness.
The kid who brings his own bag of marshmallows is the one destined for success.
The researcher comes back and now there are TWO marshmallows.
Maybe you’re joking, but in case you’re not —
I don’t think that’s true. These were little
kids, like 5 years old. They were in a strange
setting and a confident whom their parents seemed to trust and respect told them to try hard not to eat the marshmallow. For kids
of that age, that’s going to weigh more heavily than the kind of stuff in your speech.
I recently discovered that the changes in the American editions of Harry Potter went beyond just changing Britishisms to more common American language. In some cases, they changed the actual meaning of the text for no apparent reason. WTF were they thinking?
https://www.hp-lexicon.org/differences-u-k-u-s-editions/
Usually when this sort of thing happens, I *think* it's to do with various last-minute changes in editing and/or miscommunication between the two different publishers and/or author. For example, the first His Dark Materials book is called Northern Lights in Britain and The Golden Compass in America, and this happened because the author had indicated his possible intention to name the whole *series* The Golden Compasses, and the US publisher got confused and thought this was meant to be the name of the first *book*, since there's a compass-like magical object that plays a central role. Or at least that's the story I've seen.
Other times it's about supposed cultural differences. One example is the board game Clue/Cluedo renaming Reverend Green as Mr Green in the US edition, supposedly because Americans would be less accepting of a reverend as a murder suspect. Another is the last HDM book which removed a vaguely sexual paragraph from the US edition (I've seen this mentioned in about ten different places as an example of conservative censorship).
But even with all that in mind, and as someone who's extremely familiar with Harry Potter, I can't make sense of most of these. The ones I can guess at: Bathilda Bagshot is a randomly mentioned author of one of the Hogwarts textbooks who becomes an important character in the seventh book. *Maybe* someone got confused and changed the name thinking it was unimportant (???) and then Rowling had it corrected by the time the US edition was published. For the bit on page 266, iirc Harry unties Lupin, Lupin thanks him, and Harry retorts that he's not saying he believes his and Black's innocence. The British version has Black respond by offering proof, but maybe the US publisher thought this didn't make sense because Harry was talking to Lupin (because conversations between more than two people are incomprehensible?) and either assumed it was a mistake or just decided to change it to "make it clearer" or something. Some of the other changes also look a bit like this (at least of you're assuming your readers are extremely slow) but I can't possibly imagine why they removed "twelve years" from the bit on 253. But maybe it was all just Rowling and her editors tinkering around with phrasing at the last minute, and not getting the latest amendments out to everyone in time.
But since this is Harry Potter, this exact question has probably been thoroughly analysed a hundred times already.
Lupin definitely wouldn't say "you, boy, give me Peter." That one's silly.
Page 35 - bollard to waste basket? HUH?!
I enjoyed the first couple of Harry Potter films, but rather lost interest when subsequent films turned darker and grimmer, although I can see the appeal of that for some. Never read any of the books. Those later in the series look terrifyingly long!
I thought the books were much better than the movies, which left out a lot.
Same. And it's especially frustrating starting with the third movie, where they stopped trying to follow the books much at all. (Also, the Mexican Hairless Werewolf is simply unforgivable.)
The prisoner of Azkaban is considered the best of the movies and I agree. Movies can’t follow books exactly.
I suppose that comes from the The Last Jedi school of criticism. The third movie was certainly *different*, and I can believe that there would be people who liked it and praised it for that reason. Doesn't stop them from being wrong of course.
Incidentally, there was plenty of dumb stuff in the movie even if you completely ignore the books and treat it on its own. For example, the aforementioned Mexican Hairless Werewolf.
> I suppose that comes from the The Last Jedi school of criticism.
Is there a last Jedi book? If not I can’t see why it would come from that. And the last Jedi is bad.
The POA is the only decently filmed part of the series - directed as it was by Alfonso Cuaron , and has high ratings from critics on RT.
Movie critics have to judge movies as movies and not as adaptations. They don’t have to care about, or read the book.
(There’s probably plenty of adaptations you’ve watched and enjoyed without reading the book.)
Even as you enjoy those movies for themselves there will be somebody who has read the book steaming that some character was removed or some line of text added, and chapter 12 paragraph 33 slightly abridged.
This only becomes a problem for movies where the readership of the books is very large - in most cases a popular movie will vastly exceed the sales of the source material - and is especially an issue with nerdy children’s books or - week - nerdish books in general, especially the most popular.
This is maybe because people who read Harry Potter don’t read a lot of other literature, or other kinds of literature. In any case I never see anybody complain about changes to hamlet - where’s the play is often moved across time and place, and nobody cares about an abridgement. It runs 4 hours if you don’t.
page 155?
US editions of UK authors are frequently edited to conform to standard American English. It's been going on for decades. Part of the issue is most Americans don't know what a lift or a lorry is. Also, editors probably got tired of receiving letters from readers complaining that colour is not spelled with a 'u'. My understanding is that British editors change American English to British English for British editions.
Is "mad" not a word Americans use or understand? This seems unbelievable. Also, "next moment" is unintelligable?
Americans don't ever use "mad" to mean insane. We probably only know that meaning because of Harry Potter and other british pop culture.
Mad referring to a mental state rather than anger is definitely in the American lexicon. Far more so than any of the examples beowulf used, or the British use of chips. That use of mad is probably dated and not as common now, but it isn't exclusive to British English.
Anyone up for binge-watching *Mad Men*?
There's a difference between "technically people used to say this on occasion" and "this is a normal part of American English".
In the modern US, that notion of "mad" is in fact mainly known from Harry Potter as Brandon explained.
I'm American, and I was well aware of that meaning of "mad" before Harry Potter was written. I didn't and don't *use* that meaning, or know anyone who did, but I knew it.
There's a lot of British pop culture in America that isn't Harry Potter. The first example that comes to mind is Alice in Wonderland. The Disney version is American but still includes the word "mad" meaning crazy, and evidently they didn't worry about American children not understanding it.
If it is ever used that way, it’s rare and not something an American would use in a book for mass audiences.
I know that. That's what I *expected*. The question is why they *also* made changes that changed the *meaning* of the text for no apparent reason.
The American edition seems to have made some of the phrasing a little more succinct in places. But the only change to meaning I see is the page 266/362 entry. Were Black and Lupin the same person?
Brit: “I’m still not saying I believe you,” Harry retorted. “Then it’s time we offered you some proof,” said Black. “You, boy — give me Peter. Now.”
Amer: “I’m still not saying I believe you,” he told Lupin. “Then it’s time we offered you some proof,” said Lupin. “You, boy — give me Peter, please. Now.”
Full disclosure: I never got through the first book let alone the whole series.
That's not even the only major change. For example, "Ron" and "Mr Wesley" (pg58) are not the same person either. And pg155 straight out changes what Harry said, no book knowledge required to recognize that one.
When Rowling referred to Mr Wesley, was she referring to Ron's dad? I assumed they were the same person.
Yeah, "Mr. Weasley" would always refer to Arthur, at least in narration.
In dialog, sometimes teachers would refer to the students as Mr. X, but the narrator would never do that.
No, this one makes no sense at all. They're not the same person. The "boy" is Ron Weasley, and Lupin is one of the teachers. He would call him by his name, not "boy".
Not only is Lupin a teacher, pretty much his entire personality is being polite and nice and a bit formal. Addressing a student as "You, boy" would be completely out of character for him.
What can we learn from unreproducible anomalies? A physicist friend of mine (now deceased) said he'd occasionally get wild results while running experiments. I asked him if he ever investigated them. I reasoned that at the very least it may expose some corner-case problems with his test equipment, or at the very best case it might expose some new unobserved physical phenomena. He answered that he had limited time on the particle accelerator, and he was looking for results that would address the validity of his research. His research grants and his department wouldn't support him in pursuing these experimental vagaries. And he admitted that he had gotten burned in his early career by his department trying to reproduce a woo-woo experiment he had read about that had interested him. I thought that was a shame, but the economics and politics of the scientific-industrial complex discourage researchers from digging into phenomena that may be difficult to reproduce.
Anyway, I thought about him the other evening when I came across an empty wheelchair at a crosswalk. I looked around to make sure there wasn't a person who belonged to the wheelchair lying incapacitated in the shrubbery next to the sidewalk. Wheelchairs are relatively expensive items, especially for someone who is disabled and who has limited financial resources. They're not something people normally abandon (at least I don't think they are). And the logistics of leaving one at a crosswalk and transporting the owner would be challenging to arrange — but well within the realm of the possible.
I tried to come up with some scenarios to explain this anomaly.
The first idea that occurred to me was that the disabled owner of the wheelchair had encountered a faith healer while waiting for the walk light to change. "I can *walk* again!" he shouted and skipped away as the walk light counted down. An unlikely scenario I admit, but it amused me. The corollary scenario was that because I was in a neighborhood that hosted numerous storefront churches, maybe this wheelchair was a shill prop from some Pentecostal faith healing service. But unlike crutches, a wheelchair is not a cheap prop to be discarded. And storefront churches are the bottom feeders of organized faith. I doubted any pastor had the budget to discard wheelchairs.
Other thoughts occurred to me...
The person who owned the chair was a scammer who could always walk but decided to move on to some other grift.
The owner of the wheelchair had been abducted, and the abductors left the chair behind because it was too clunky to load into the car (or they were aliens who didn't want to bother schlepping it up to the flying saucer).
Or the owner died, and the family wheeled it down to the sidewalk for someone to scavenge.
Then I asked myself: Is this a unique data point? Maybe wheelchairs get abandoned all the time and I'm biased into thinking this is unique by not having experienced any other abandoned wheelchair priors. We track just about every conceivable thing in our culture. Would the local waste disposal companies have data on how many wheelchairs they collect? Would police department lost and founds collect and store missing wheelchairs?
I admit I couldn't take my speculations any further and I went about my business. But it bugs me that there's a story behind this wheelchair that I will never be able to know. And how much weird shit do we observe, but we shrug our shoulders and just walk on?
Maybe the person in the wheelchair got into a car, and absent-mindedly left it behind instead of throwing it in the trunk. (This doesn't necessarily involve more than one person; some people in wheelchairs are capable of briefly standing up and walking around.)
In my experience in experimental physics, there are a lot of cases where you plot something, and see some features which you can't explain. Perhaps your time difference shows three distinct peaks instead of being a single Gaussian distribution. Now, I could spend a week trying to understand where this comes from, or I can say 'the measured time differences are small enough for my purposes, and their shape depends on various electronics in a way not precisely understood'.
When these superluminous neutrinos where measured, I would bet that one of the first things the experimentalists did was to power cycle their electronics. If that had fixed their problem, they would have said 'probably some freak muon flipped some bits in a FPGA, whatever', and nobody would have heard about it. Only the fact that their measurement was persistent and also in blatant contradiction to established physics was motivation to sink a ton of time into figuring out what the hell was going on.
Within human society, things are similar. Say I see that someone has thrown an egg at my parked car. Now, this could be the starting point of a lengthy investigation by a police task force. Was the egg fresh or rotten? Was it organic? Why throw an egg and not a tomato? Was my car selected specifically, or just a target of opportunity? In the former case, what exactly does that person have against me?
Instead of answering all these questions, it is much easier to book this as 'some people are just assholes behaving in weird anti-social ways'. If they had thrown a molotov cocktail to burn it or had planted a car bomb to kill me, then society would be much more willing to spend time to get to the bottom of it.
It was a *very* powerful walk light!
Perhaps the owner had a Dr Strangelove moment!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtfEId1oby4
I was thinking of that as well.
someone had a leftover wheelchair (because someone died at some point) and teenagers took it for a joyride
whenever you see something inexplicable on the street just blame teenagers
I think we tend to strain them out, often without noticing, as we do the many imperfections of spoken language -- incomplete sentences, changes in tense, saying one word but meaning another . . .
What’s the most complicated/nuanced thing that large parts of society have agreed is bad, since say WWII? Large coalitions agree that emitting too much carbon is bad, that the McCarthy “witch hunts” were bad, or that laws against gay and lesbian marriage are bad. But none of these feel as wishy-washy as “cancel culture”. McCarthyism feels closest, but there my impression was that the courts were the main bad guy, and people dobbing in their neighbours weren’t the part off the system where anyone expected change. Are there big shifts in public opinion about more complicated things?
Maybe invading other countries with the purpose of imposing democracy? Many people who think that is bad would think that invading another country to stop the literal Second Holocaust would be good, that spreading pro-democracy propaganda is good, and that forcing a country to be democratic after they invade *you* and lose is good, or at least okay (e.g. post-WW2 Germany). So lots of individual components are good, but put them together and it's bad, which I think is a good measure of complexity.
This isn't really a complicated/nuanced thing, but marihuana use seems to have gone from "reefer madness" to (in selected states) "no big deal" - while cigarettes have gone from 45% of the population to 12%.
( Personally, I'm happy to see a bit less of the heavy hand of the law in the former case - though I'd still look at it as "are you _really_ sure that isn't a harmful habit?" and fairly happy to see the latter source of morbidity and mortality drop. )
Child porn got declared super-duper-ignore-civil-rights illegal starting in the 1980s. It's a bit shocking to find out that things weren't always like that.
Wishy-washy things are easier to get agreement on, because they can fool people into thinking they agree more than they actually do.
>McCarthyism feels closest, but there my impression was that the courts were the main bad guy
That doesn't seem correct at all. See, eg, the Hollywood Blacklist If anything, the courts undermined McCarthyism. See, eg, Cole v, Young https://www.oyez.org/cases/1955/442 and Yates v. US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States
And then there was this guy's case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Faulk
I think you should define a percentage; but from my prospective 95% of the population believes its morally nessery to fill out tax paperwork and that this is completely unjustifiable, and has several very strange steps like your employer taking a cut based on how many children you have and a truely terrible password called an ssn; in a country with more guns then people and grossly undertrained irs agents(you can find the new hires swat exercises online) who are outnumbered 1:10000
Racism.
I watched Donovan's Reef relatively recently, and the heroes talk about the butler with the line "well, you know those Whitey Chinese," and it struck me that racism has drastically calmed its tits in the last hundred years.
Also: its descendant, sexism, which term didn't even exist until the 1960s but now is very powerful.
Raw milk discourse is going around on X again. I was curious what everybody's take here on the issue is.
Seems to me the main issues are:
1) What is the risk of raw milk vs pasteurized milk?
2) Are there any benefits to raw milk over pasteurized milk?
For 1, the anti-raw milk side says that the relative risk is incredibly high. Per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443421/ :
> In the United States, outbreaks associated with dairy consumption cause, on average, 760 illnesses/year and 22 hospitalizations/year, mostly from Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp. Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2% of the population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6% of the population, caused 96% of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products. Unpasteurized dairy products thus cause 840 (95% CrI 611–1,158) times more illnesses and 45 (95% CrI 34–59) times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products. As consumption of unpasteurized dairy products grows, illnesses will increase steadily; a doubling in the consumption of unpasteurized milk or cheese could increase outbreak-related illnesses by 96%.
even risk of death (3 deaths attributed to raw milk from 1998-2018)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240516202251/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/foodborne-illness-outbreaks-linked-to-unpasteurised-milk-and-relationship-to-changes-in-state-laws-united-states-19982018/4822109E69DDAB37E92CAAB41AB1CC0F
The pro-raw milk side says that the *absolute risk* is still incredibly small. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/28/meat-your-doom/. 3.2% of the US population is around 10 million. 3 deaths over 20 years = 0.15 deaths per year, so death rate of raw milk drinkers = 1.5e-8 per person per year. If we think of this in terms of [micromorts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort), or 1-in-a-million-chance-of-death-increases, that's 0.015 micromorts per year, or 0.000041 micromorts per day. For reference: 230 miles of driving by car = 1 micromort. If I've done my math right: the risk of death drinking raw milk is around the same risk as increasing your daily car commute by an additional 50 feet. Annual risk is around the same as eating an additional 1.5 charcoal-grilled steaks per year. Risk of hospitalization and illness are higher that that of course, but still much lower than you'd expect from the anti-raw-milk side when looking at absolute risk.
For 2, it boils down to: the anti-raw milk side says that there are a bunch of studies that suggest that raw milk has no major nutritional benefits over pasteurized milk; the pro-raw-milk side says that those nutritional studies are unreliable, and it tastes better so who cares. It's pretty hard to get a sense of what reality is (yes, the USDA and CDC appear strongly against raw milk, but then again, this is the USDA and CDC we're talking about, a little skepticism is not unwarranted). My vague impression: weak evidence for increased nutrient density in raw milk, weak-to-moderate evidence for some probiotic or immune benefits to raw milk. Jury is out on the taste; I've tried it once, it had a slightly grassy flavor to me that I'm not crazy about.
Anything I'm missing?
I generally agree with your assessment: relative risks don't matter much unless they accumulate to a relevant absolute risk.
Also, the relative risk of illness and hospitalization are vastly different. Looking at the data, it seems like the dominant pathogen for pasteurized milk is Listeria monocytogenes, which has an 87% hospitalization rate, and the dominant pathogen for raw milk is Campylobacter spp., which has only a 12% hospitalization rate. If we look at deaths, this becomes even more extreme: 16 out of 17 deaths were from Listeria (likely all of them from pasteurized milk), one from Campylobacter (very likely from raw milk). So the relative risk of death would be a factor of two (with gigantic error bars).
In fact, there should be some expanation for the rareness of Listeria in raw milk. My hypothesis is that it simply has a shorter shelf life and other bacteria in it which will outcompete Listeria once the milk goes bad.
All in all, I see the risk as mostly a nothingburger, my risk of dying of a heart attack during thinking about this topic might be higher than if I drink raw milk for the rest of my life (which I don't because I like stuff with long shelf lives).
Finally, the obvious compromise between raw milk and pasteurized milk would be irradiated milk. Of course, irradiation also causes some deaths, because sometimes stupid people will not handle gamma sources with the appropriate amount of respect, and there is the specter of radio-terrorism. Still, it might be what dath ilan would use, the western world is way to anti-nuclear for that.
>Of course, irradiation also causes some deaths, because sometimes stupid people will not handle gamma sources with the appropriate amount of respect, and there is the specter of radio-terrorism. Still, it might be what dath ilan would use, the western world is way to anti-nuclear for that.
nit: Food irradiation can also be done with electron beams from linacs, which avoid the radio-terrorism possibility and mishandling of gamma sources (though if someone insists on doing something unsafe while the beam is turned on, that will, of course, still be a hazard).
I agree that this is a possibility. When you use an electron beam to generate high energy photons, I would generally describe the apparatus as an x-ray machine.
As most foodstuff has densities much lower than PbWO4, X-rays should be sufficient to irradiate food, unless you want to conserve a whole whale or something. Of course, for an x-ray machine, you need power, which is a bit more of a problem for mobile units, but the lack of terrorism potential seems very favorable especially for a decentralized irradiation setup.
Many Thanks!
Are we talking about truly raw milk here? I learned relatively recently that "pasteurized" means different things in different countries. There's regular pasteurization and UHT pasteurization. Countries that mandate the latter usually just call it pasteurization, while countries that mandate the former have both products available.
As to your question, absolute risk is the obviously correct metric. Using relative risk is a typical numeracy mistake, especially because it usually involves big numbers.
Easy example: you like mustard, so you buy the fancy brand. "Oh no, you just increased your mustard expense by 300%, how terribly wasteful". A more natural baseline to compare it to would be something like your entire food budget, or your entire disposable income.
Innumerate people very often just take some numbers vaguely associated to an issue and compare them with each other in random ways. Another recent example we had of this was the two arms one head guy, who somehow thought it was deeply meaningful that every tetraplegic requires > 1 full time caretaker. I detect some nascent economic thinking there, but it's entirely misapplied.
Brucellosis can render you sterile, so there's that.
Do you have a ballpark idea of what the risk of that is for a daily raw milk consumer?
Just do the math: If 3.2% of the US drinks raw milk, that's about 11 million people. If 760 of that 11 million get sick from the milk they drink, that's about 7 people out of 100,000. So the chance is small.
For some perspective, consider this: One raw chicken in 25, or 4%, in US grocery stores is infected with salmonella. The legal limit on the fraction of chickens in the store that can be infected is 10%. Here is the CDC's advice on handling raw chicken:
-Raw meat, chicken and other poultry, seafood, and eggs can spread germs to ready-to-eat food unless you keep them separate.
-When grocery shopping, keep raw meat, poultry, seafood, and their juices away from other foods.
-Keep raw or marinating meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs separate from all other foods in the refrigerator.
-Store raw meat, poultry, and seafood in sealed containers or wrap them securely so the juices don't leak onto other foods.
-Use one cutting board or plate for raw meat, poultry, and seafood and a separate cutting board or plate for produce, bread, and other foods that won't be cooked.
-Raw chicken is ready to cook and doesn't need to be washed first. Washing these foods can spread germs to other foods, the sink, and the counter and make you sick.
If you choose to wash chicken, do so as safely as possible:
-Run the water gently over the chicken to reduce splashing.
-Immediately clean the sink and area around the sink with hot, soapy water and sanitize them thoroughly.
-Wash your hands for 20 seconds.
-Use a separate cutting board for raw chicken. Never place cooked food or fresh produce on a plate, cutting board, or other surface that previously held raw chicken.
-Wash cutting boards, utensils, dishes, and countertops with hot, soapy water after preparing chicken and before you prepare the next item.
-Use a food thermometer to make sure chicken is cooked to a safe internal temperature of 165°F.
-If cooking a microwaveable meal that includes frozen raw chicken, handle it as you would fresh raw chicken. Follow cooking directions carefully to prevent food poisoning.
After eating, refrigerate or freeze leftover chicken within 2 hours (or within 1 hour if the food is exposed to temperatures above 90°F, like in a hot car or at a picnic).
There are 1.25 million salmonella infections in the US per year. 760, or about one in 1600, come from unpasteurized milk. I'm thinking chicken's a lot riskier than unpastuerized milk.
Sounds like: in USA it is legal to sell poisoned chicken; it's the customer's responsibility to treat them like the biohazard they are. (Or die, if that is their revealed preference.)
In the US? Probably very, very low. The problem is that if unpasteurized milk goes mainstream like, say, anti-vax did, then that risk will stop being so low.
Part of the reason that raw milk may seem to have minor health downsides today, is that we're now vaccinating against many of the diseases that used to spread through raw milk. And we have antibiotics that can deal with the many of the common types of bacteria spread through raw milk.
In the 19th century, bovine tuberculosis could spread to humans via raw milk. TB was a major public health issue before antibiotics and it was generally a lingering death sentence back then. But now, most people have been vaccinated against TB (not sure if they're vaccinating dairy herds).
Typhoid Fever, caused by Salmonella typhi, could be transmitted through contaminated milk. Outbreaks were common in the pre-pasteurization era — and before antibiotics, the case fatality rates ran between 15-20%. Now we have vaccines that can prevent infection.
Diphtheria was another biggy. Although its primary transmission vector was respiratory droplets, it could also be transmitted through contaminated milk — which caused outbreaks in the pre-pasteurization period. The case fatality rate for diphtheria was typically around 5% to 10%.
Listeriosis, caused by Listeria monocytogenes, was particularly dangerous for pregnant women, newborns, and those with weakened immune systems. I can't find much data on the prevalence of Listeriosis back in the 19th century, but anything that causes diarrhea in newborns has the potential to kill them.
There are a bunch of other illnesses that were/are associated with raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a no-brainer. But, of course, many people don't use their brains optimally. ;-)
The CDC says that TB vaccination is not commonly done in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/tb/hcp/vaccines/index.html
Interesting. For some reason, I thought I had been vaccinated for TB as a kid — and that all kids got vaccinated. According to ChatGPT we didn't. But that was a long time ago and I guess I misremembered (It may be a false memory of mine that Drs and nurses came to my rural public elementary school and vaccinated all us 1st Graders — or maybe they were sticking us for something else?). Anyway, my bad.
And while cattle can be vaccinated against TB, they're not in the US. I don't know if they can carry the antibiotic-resistant strains of TB, but that would scare me away from drinking raw milk!
Are you perhaps thinking of the Mantoux test to screen for TB? I remember that but not being vaccinated.
Yes, that must be it. Thanks for giving me a reason not to doubt my memories.
Yeah, they injected a bit of liquid beneath the skin of our forearms and checked for a reaction a few days later.
"But now, most people have been vaccinated against TB (not sure if they're vaccinating dairy herds)."
I don't know how it works in the USA, but in Britain and Ireland badgers as reservoir and transmitters of bovine tuberculosis is a vexed question. There has been a government programme of culling badgers in the UK, with the pro-badger lobby vehemently opposed to it and the dairy industry (in the main) for it.
In the US, transmission seems to be from infected animals such as deer, but I don't think cattle and deer come into such contact in the US due to different livestock rearing methods (cattle are pastured more over here, which of course gives more chance to encounter badgers).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10572351/
There's work on developing a vaccine for cattle, but I don't think they have one for mass adoption yet:
https://tbhub.co.uk/resources/frequently-asked-questions/development-of-a-deployable-tuberculosis-vaccine-for-cattle/
this is a good historical refresher. I think the current dieases associated with raw milk are mostly bacterial diseases like e-coli.
>Pasteurization seems like a no-brainer. But, of course, many people don't use their brains optimally. ;-)
See, this is why I asked this, because I had similarly strong priors on this issue previously (considering it a no-brainer), but all the data I've found suggests the actual risk in the modern day (in the US at least) of serious illness from raw milk is *vanishingly* low. I'm forced to take the claims seriously rather than just write them off as a bunch of stupid hippies.
The risk may be vanishingly low — until something like H5N1 comes along and contaminates the milk supply (luckily studies show that the virus only remains active for a few hours in the milk). But domesticated animals are natural human disease reservoirs. Eating undercooked meat, and drinking raw milk for its supposed nutritional benefits (if there are any) is way outside my risk tolerance zone — especially knowing that many new pathogens have entered the human-domestic animal ecosystem in the past decades (COVID, Bird Flu, SARS — even Ebola!).
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/study-shows-persistence-h5n1-unpasteurized-milk-and-milking-unit-surfaces#:~:text=The%20H5N1%20cattle%20virus%20remained,to%20the%20human%20H5%20virus.
hm, that's interesting. You think you'd put raw milk in the same general risk tranche as, e.g. a rare steak, or sushi? My prior was that it was more similar to like, raw eggs.
Is tuberculosis still a factor? My mother spent two years in a sanatorium as a teen with a TB infection in one lung. I believe raw milk was thought to have been the source. Not 100% sure of that though. At the time they treated her by sawing off the rib bones on one side her back to collapse the infected lung.
She lived to be 70 before succumbing to emphysema. She likely would have lasted a lot longer if she hadn’t taken up smoking after giving birth to me.
I don't think so, because of vaccines, right? Hospitalization risk from raw milk seems pretty much negligible today -- around 2 in a million chance per year.
TB vaccine is not generally used in the usa
The New York Times ran a story yesterday about a nationwide mental health provider that has been falsely imprisoning patients to collect money from their insurers, in some cases taking advantage of a law that allows them to hold patients against their will while waiting for a ruling on their applications to hold patients longer-term (which applications are apparently approved around 1% of the time) and has done so in a manner so blatant that one of their locations was actually raided by the police.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/business/acadia-psychiatric-patients-trapped.html
Just thought that might be of interest to those of you whose "BE TOUGH BE TOUGH BE TOUGH BE TOUGH" proposals for mitigating the mentally ill homeless crisis involved ramping up the number of facilities like this one and expanding their ability to detain and confine patients, on the grounds that people in these sorts of institutions in the past did stupid and evil things to patients but that surely no one would ever do this now that we have apps.
I am of course aware of the consensus here that the New York Times is a card-carrying member of The Woke Mob and at least a Bronze-Level Supporting Donor to the Antifa Foundation, but the reporting seems solid.
This is a (miner or major) plot point of Unsane, a 2018 film by Steven Soderbergh.
I add this because I like to have references to movies which make worries I have palpable to people who otherwise might not get that they have real referents.
A Map of the World with Sigourney Weaver is an example for people with authority looking down in contempt to a woman to which they make no effort to understand but believe to understand completely. A terrible situation for such women too.
A tangential point, but as someone who is disgusted by the BE TOUGH proposals and is also disgusted by wokeness, I object to any suggestion of an opposition between them, since:
(1) both groups hate, with unimaginable fury, the existence of people even slightly weird, unorthodox, or who have ever in their lives thought or spoken differently to them in any way.
(2) neither group gives the slightest shit about the homeless: I have read hundreds (maybe thousands) of woke articles and rants online in the last decade, and I don't remember them *ever* mentioning homeless as an "oppressed group". It probably did come up once or twice, but so rarely that it's neglible. Of course, people who identify as five different genders is mentioned every single time, because of course it is. But real people with real problems? Fuck them.
(3) every wokeist will *literally* say that a white mentally ill homeless man is privileged (it's part of the very definition!). You can't make this up! Telling a schizophrenic homeless man he is privileged over Oprah Winfrey is a serious contender for "most offensive sentence you can possibly utter".
(4) much like how banning the box makes racism rational as Scott has discussed, depolicing makes homeless hatred rational since it's the only way to try to stop crime. Enforcing laws against actual crime is racist, so all you can do is round up the kind of people who *might* commit a crime--and as long as some of them are white you're fine. It's not like people have value as individuals!
All that aside, very disturbing story. Thanks for sharing.
Link is pay walled, you might need to quote the most relevant bits.
From what I can glean from other outlets summarizing the NYT, the greatest sin here seems to be spiritually identical to for-profit prisons lobbying *hard* to keep marijuana illegal so as to swell their population of mostly nonviolent, manageable inmates. After all, why complicate your business model with people who will throw hands when you don't really *have* to?
Because it sure seems like Acadia was selectively targeting people who were going to be nice and compliant, rather than choosing to contain the violent, mentally ill homeless types that the vast majority of us would prefer to have not wandering around on the streets. I'm sure if Acacdia had decided on holding the latter - including surrendering some profit in order to devote resources to the latter - most people would shrug about this. Or even applaud them for doing what the government can't seem to manage.
No paywall link.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/business/acadia-psychiatric-patients-trapped.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.rWXF.gNAudRQJPnpr&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Oh, sweet! Thanks!
And yeah, having read the rest of the article now, it does indeed appear that Arcadia was patient-shopping the same way for-profit prisons tend to engage in inmate-shopping.
Clearly, the motivation for detaining people is the issue here. Probably for-profit entities should *never* be in charge of certain kinds of utterly critical services.
> Clearly, the motivation for detaining people is the issue here. Probably for-profit entities should *never* be in charge of certain kinds of utterly critical services.
Bingo.
There are things which are best left to the market. Telecommunication (in 2024, but perhaps not in 1870) is one. Producing food or cars is another.
Then there are things which are natural monopolies, where it makes sense to just have a state-run company run it lest you end up with a private monopoly gorging prices. Tap water is one such thing. Here in Germany, it costs next to nothing (unless you are refilling your pool once a week), and I can live with the small amount of money I spend on water subsidizing inefficiencies typical of state-run companies, the costs and risks of having multiple water providers compete on a shared infrastructure just does not seem worth it.
And then there is stuff which is the primary responsibility of the state and should never be delegated to the market. Military, law enforcement, justice system. And incarceration definitely belongs on that list.
I mean, I might see a case of for-profit incarceration if there was actually a functioning market and convicts were free to chose a facility, so the facility would have to compete on quality, just like hotels do. "Hm, this glossy brochure says that they have single-bed cells, a swimming pool, unlimited free phone calls, an extensive library, a qualification program, jobs paying ok, low violence and suicide rates and are rated 4.3 out of five stars by former inmates, I think I will pick them to spend my four years for armed robbery." Might still create bad incentives for the companies regarding lobbying for laws or sabotaging early releases.
The Woke Mob (TM) are increasingly mad at the NYT these days. It's a point in its favour, I suppose. If you report the news, nobody should be happy with what you print. Though I think it's mostly for the same reason that they are mad at the UK Guardian.
The NYT also tends to roll with relatively centrist US politics, though. The Guardian has it easier in this regard as Britain lost its empire some time ago.
Waitwhat? I always thought the Guardian was woke central, with its op-eds of highlighting violence against women (in a world where man-on-man violence is the most common type) and so on.
Going through https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree I see plenty of captions that advocate for woke causes, plenty of platforming of female and minority issues (especially female health), and few things which might qualify as genuinely anti-woke.
I mean, sure some wokes might want to cancel the guardian about https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/01/academic-free-speech-law-labour -- which implies that we should perhaps not weed universities too hard for ideological purity.
Of course, from the dynamics of the movement, a move against the guardian might be expected. You don't get credentials for saying 'that guy with the swastika tattoo is bad' -- your peer group already agrees on that. You get status by going after people slightly less radical than you. "By advocating for academic free speech, that columnist is in fact arguing for keeping professors with racist or sexist views!"
They are not always up to the moment in their definition of the undefinable, that is to say women, and that has aroused quite a bit of anger in certain quarters.
Wait, the definition of woman has changed *again*? The version I am familiar with is "anyone who claims they identify as a woman is a woman, with corner cases like a guy jerking off in a women's communal shower being decided by feuding twitter mobs on a case by case basis", or something.
Yes, certainly, the Times has been rolling with centrism for decades now, and openly flirting with rightism since not long after Trump's inauguration, which is why I find it so amusing that the anti-woke are so constantly mad at/about it.
> openly flirting with rightism
Could you give a few examples? This does not match my experience with them.
Trump can win on character
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/opinion/advice-for-trump-win.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.7UbW.ctsGKRPCrviP&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.GWR0.klq69KMnR4Te&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Lindsey Graham: How Trump Can Improve His Chances of Winning
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/trump-harris-record.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.N--6.Q5EvEm0EGLim&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
That's the op-ed section. When the paper is working right, their job is to more-or-less publish things that an informed person would want to have read. Almost always these are things that the newspaper editorial staff does not agree entirely with. But sometimes, when a person states a position well, it's good to share that with the readership, most especially if the person is a prominent politician offering an opinion about a major issue of the day. (And then the newspaper can get an opposing view from someone else, and run them together, so that the readership can see both sides put as well as they can be put.)
Here's a couple of pieces by people who used to be in the NYT op-ed section (including the former editor), both about events centered on that Tom Cotton op-ed from 2020:
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/tom-cotton-new-york-times/677546/
Yeah, I remember the internal dust up after the Tom Cotton piece. I thought that was a black eye for the paper.
I won’t make excuses for that bullshit.
Newspaper publishes op-ed by prominent politician (something mainstream newspapers do all the time) and the entire staff immediately revolt and force out the editor for a piece that nobody at the paper even wrote, merely hosted, that called for military action to suppress...violent riots...because enforcing laws against actual street violence is racist actually.
I don't think that proves what you think it does.
I agree with this sentiment if opposing sides are still moderate. But if both are just batshit loonies (like straight up Marxists vs Alex Jones followers) then it is generally a good sign if they get mad.
I agree, but there may be something to the idea that the real truth will contain uncomfortable facts for one or both sides of every issue.
I'm not sure where that leaves us, other than "if you aren't [at least sometimes] making both sides mad, you aren't doing journalism right." That's got some value - any publication that always makes someone feel good about their existing beliefs is probably wrong.
I read the article. It was very disturbing. As presented it showed a corporation holding people against their will and illegally, seemingly to pad their bottom line. The Times gave the company an opportunity to respond. Their response was not comforting.
Yes, that's exactly what the straw guy in the corner said! Can you *believe* that weirdo?
If you weren't able to extrapolate from the article the obvious takeaway "Abuse and improper detention of patients in asylums are not only a historical problem, thus those problems probably deserve more than a handwave from advocates of building more asylums and giving those asylums more power in the future" then I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I spelled it out for you this time but I don't want to have to do it every time.
Yeah, no, the problem was that this for-profit institution selected the wrong people to hold in the asylums. That's all.
That's.....not all. I strongly suggest you actually read the story. The NYT paywall isn't that high.
I did try to summarize it, as best as I had time for, in my original comment, by the way.
Like people in crisis that went to an ER looking for therapy.
I approve of your fantasy as written. However, my fantasy--simply eradicating all diseases, including mental illness--is better.
Do they need to be actually proven to have acted in dangerous, actually violent ways? Or does "dangerous" have a vibes-based meaning similar to "unsafe" and "oppressive"?
For some reason, this detail seems to be missing from most of the get tough proposals.
(I'll say this as a separate post, not a reply to the Rings of Power review, as its a bit of a digression)
Given how tabletop RPGs work, they often involve seeing how things look from the perspective of non player characters. The Game Master gets to play all these bit-part characters in the story, and, really, their motives have to make some kind of sense, or the scenario will feel like an idiot plot. But ... what are orcs like, really? At least at the level where you can improv them as characters and have it make some kind of sense.
If we look at Call of Cthulhu rather than dungeons and dragons ... I personally think the ghouls are really scary.
The Great Old Ones like Cthulhu himself are alien monsters who almost cefrtainly dont have human motivations, And are not really seen up close in the scenario, except possibly for a brief moment before all the player characters get killed.
But ghouls ... they were human once. Lovecraft depicts them as possibly sometimes helpful.
If I'm GM, I might play them as *traumatised* rather than simply evil.
The guy who is usually GM for our RPG group tends To play the ghouls a bit like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. I mean, sure, he;s helping the Jody Foster character.
At any rate, there are ways to make them psychologically plausible not-purely-evil characters that more or less respects the Lovecraft stories.
"If I'm GM, I might play them as *traumatised* rather than simply evil."
There is possibly some room for interpretation like that based on text. From "Pickman's Model":
"There was one thing called “The Lesson”—heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen—can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose—you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was shewing what happens to those stolen babes—how they grow up—and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan interior—a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture, with the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one shewed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things. It was their changeling—and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his own."
So a human child stolen away at a young age and brought up as a ghoul might well be described as "traumatised rather than simply evil".
I like playing orcs as aggressive and impulsive. It's fun, you should try it some time! Sure, others might call your actions "murder" or "robbery", but that's just humie wordshit.
I really like the orcs from A Practical Guide to Evil. They used to be a Mongol-esque nomad raider horde with its own culture, then they got conquered and used as expendable berserkers by the evil empire, and then the evil empire went through military reforms and now they're the professional heavy infantry of the Legions of Terror. Because sure, being an orc means you have green skin and big muscles and a carnivorous diet, but beyond that they're shaped by culture and institutions rather than biology.
Then there's the The Order of the Stick take on undead, which is the exact opposite.
> That's what you've never really understood about the undead, Tsukiko. You treat them like they're people when they're nothing but bits of skin and bone and dark energy, glued together by magic into the shape of a man.
> See, the undead are tools. Powerful, dangerous tools. From the lowliest zombie to Xykon himself, the undead are just complex weapons that we make and aim at other people.
(Warning, major spoilers!)
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0830.html
Back in my RPG days I treated orcs as nomads, they’re just another kind of person but they also are really good at raiding settlements and their culture, religion, etc has a strong focus on raiding and military strength.
There were also city orcs who had gotten a taste of civilization and were just an ethnic minority in frontier towns.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't know the Tolkien lore that well. But my impression was Tolkien intentionally made the orcs unambiguously evil and the bad guys. Initially, he had the orcs being made from clay/dirt. So they were more like golems put to evil use rather than anything like people with agency. But this would give evil the power of life and creation, which Tolkien found improper, so he changed the orcs to be corrupted elves. They were never meant to be deceived by Sauron, or serving the dark powers for some plausibly moral reason. Orcs were just evil.
Extracts from the selected letters. I think he started out with orcs and goblins (goblins first) as the traditional sort of wicked creatures in fairy and folk tales, and suitable antagonists for the children's book "The Hobbit". As time went on and he developed more serious work, the origin of the Orcs did become a problem to be tackled, though he never seems to have come to a definite conclusion one way or the other (unless there is a final statement in his papers somewhere).
1954 letter
Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be 'corruptions'. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.
Another 1954 letter
Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my pan. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not 'goblins', not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.
Draft of a letter replying to correspondent, 1954
As for other points. I think I agree about the 'creation by evil'. But you are more free with the word 'creation' than I am. Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord 'created' Trolls and Ores. He says he 'made' them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard's statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand. He does not know what 'wizards' are, or whence they came (though I do, even if exercising my subcreator's right I have thought it best in this Tale to leave the question a 'mystery', not without pointers to the solution).
Suffering and experience (and possibly the Ring itself) gave Frodo more insight; and you will read in Ch. I of Book VI the words to Sam. 'The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.' In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the 'gods', let alone of God.
… But if they 'fell', as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things 'for himself, to be their Lord', these would then 'be', even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other 'rational' creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least 'be' real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) But whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible 'delegation', I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would 'tolerate' that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today. There might be other 'makings' all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker's mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre.
1958 comments on proposed film treatment of LOTR:
19. Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.
Draft of 1958 letter
In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may 'go bad' as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds.
1965 letter
[W.H. Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable
Tolkien changed his mind several times about the origins of orcs, as all of them had flaws. Melkor or Sauron couldn't have created them, since evil can only mock, not make. They couldn't be corrupted elves, since elves are bound to Arda and cannot leave.
He never came up with a satisfying origin without conflicts. But does he need one? Orcs ARE clearly evil, as one can tell from the dwarves' capture in The Hobbit, and Shagrat's conversation with Gorbag in The Two Towers. They DO have personality.
I think a more positive view of orcs originally came from the Warcraft videogames. Since you could play both sides, they had to make the orcs more likeable. Originally they were kinda cutely stupid, but by Warcraft 3 it evolved into that noble savage nomadic stuff.
Warcraft in turn owes a lot to Warhammer, where Orcs are essentially a parody of 1980s British football hooligans. Their attitude to war is that they enjoy it, and don't understand that the other side usually enjoy it as much as they do.
They're also fungi that reproduce through spores (though this originated in 40k and later was retconned 'back' into Fantasy).
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0830.html
Wow, I can't believe someone else independently happened to post the same comic.
Warning: The linked comic spoils a major moment in the plot of OOTS.
Yeah. I thought about it, but the comic is a decade old now. Spoiling it is like saying Frodo throws the... I've said too much.
As it is a lesser-known piece of literature, a fan who is attracted by a key moment in Order of the Stick is still a new fan.
> But ... what are orcs like, really? At least at the level where you can improv them as characters and have it make some kind of sense.
I would see a typical orc as being equivalent to the worst humans -- just common street-level thugs that you're going to find regularly cycling in and out of prison. Amoral, selfish, brutish, dumb and easily driven to rage. Not driven to evil because they think evil is good, just doing evil because it suits their current short-term desires.
Also, deeply envious of the other races who have nicer stuff, without realising that having stuff comes from virtues like being patient and cooperating and not breaking stuff as soon as you get it. As such, pretty easily led by any evil wizard who wants to come along and tell them to rise up against their neighbours who are hogging all the good stuff.
This is interesting to me, because a lot of what you describe as "doing evil because it suits their current short-term desires" is close to my definition of what evil even *is*. I don't think killing another person is inherently evil, but doing so for amoral selfish desire certainly is. Similarly with theft (Robin Hood was the good guy), assault (ditto, or police apprehending someone), or most other crimes.
By my definition, even helping someone could be evil if it was done from amoral selfish reasons (and I think most people would agree if it turns out the person was trying to scam the person they helped, or coerce them into sex, or whatever other negative thing for their own gain).
> This is interesting to me, because a lot of what you describe as "doing evil because it suits their current short-term desires" is close to my definition of what evil even is.
Well, sure. Realistic, everyday evil, as opposed to the "evil is good" lunacy you sometimes see in fiction.
Oh my, I can't wait to hear what you think of goblins.
I have a harder time conceptualising goblins, I think they're portrayed too inconsistently across different sources.
Oh, I'm sure you're creative enough to come up with something. You know, all of this reminds me of a great skit The Onion did: https://youtu.be/Q4PC8Luqiws?si=hTMWp9MLsJSe2WAW
Should I be clutching my pearls (had I any pearls to clutch) right now? Are you implying others have hinted that persons with Melvin's views are nodding towards stereotypes of persons of abundant melanin?
Next you'll be telling me that the Gringotts goblins are Jewish caricatures, there's a Star of David on the floor and everything!
https://x.com/MarciaBelsky/status/1064234605698519041?lang=en
Except the kind people sharing this shocking information, in sorrow more than anger, completely effin' forgot to CHECK. YOUR. SOURCES.
The building is Australia House in London, built 1913-18:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Commission_of_Australia,_London
As others have said elsewhere, if your first reaction on hearing a description of a fantasy race is to go "zomg those are Jews/black people! Racism! Anti-Semitism!" then maybe it's a you problem.
When did I say anything about melanin? People say this shit about every ethnic minority, regardless of skin tone. But I'm glad we're all on the same page, and we can all stop with this stupid game of "you're the real racist".
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but if you're doing the "hey, this evil stereotype sounds a whole lot like a real race of people" thing then that's on you, not me.
A few weeks ago, I asked for suggestions and comments on a study I'm planning on doing on monarchy and the rise of fascism in interwar Europe. I got several good suggestions, and I'm ready to preregister my near-final methodology. Original comment:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-342/comment/65251813
I decided to go with @gdanning's suggestion of using an established dataset (I chose V-Dem), which relieves me of most of the burden (and potential bias) of manually coding variables. I'll also be using a Predictive Power analysis instead of a simple linear regression, also suggested by gdanning.
-------
Goal: test the hypothesis that constitutional monarchy is useful as a stabilizing factor against political extremism, using the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian governments in the interwar period. Also examine alternate hypotheses: parliamentary vs presidential government, dual vs multiparty systems, simple wealth, losing WW1, or previous history of institutional instability.
Inclusion criteria:
1. Substantial domestic autonomy (v2svdomaut_osp >= 1.0) averaged across all years in study period.
2. Substantial institutional autonomy, i.e. internal political factors have a substantial effect on the . Exclude if in any year between the start and end date inclusive, two or more of the following are true:
a) Most powerful group affecting regime duration and change is a foreign power (v2regpower == 13),
b) Head of Government is controlled by a foreign power: i. Is Head of State, and is appointed by foreign power (v2hoshog == 1 && v2expathhs == 1), ii. Appointed directly (v2expathhg == 1), or iii) Is removable by Head of State, and HoS is appointed by foreign power (v2expathhs == 1 && v2expathhg == 1)
c) Regime’s domestic political support is “Very Small” or “Extremely Small” (v2regsupgroupssize <= 2)
These criteria are tuned to include the British Dominions, exclude most other colonies with less control over their own governments, include Vichy France, and exclude directly-imposed Axis puppet/occupation governments.
Start point is 1921, the year after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. This is a compromise between:
1. Setting the date late enough for dust to settle after WW1, as immediate aftershock conflicts continued until 1921 (Polish-Soviet War), 1922 (Russian Civil War), and 1923 (Turkish War of Independence).
2. Setting the date early enough so Mussolini’s March On Rome (1922) falls within the study period. Excluding Italian Fascism from a study on factors affecting the rise of Fascism would be a problematic omission.
Input variables (1921):
1. Electoral Democracy Index (v2x_polyarchy)
2. Liberal Democracy Index (v2x_libdem)
3. Monarchy dummy variable, true if one of the following:
a. v2expathhs == 3 (HOS chosen by royal council) or 4 (hereditary HOS)
b. v2expathhs == 1 (HOS appointed by foreign power) and mother country is monarchy
4. Years since last “disruptive” constitutional change, i.e. last time v2regendtype for a regime ending in or before 1921 (indicated by v2regdur) was something other than 4 (natural death of sitting leader) or 9-10 (intentional change directed by sitting leaders)
5. Years since last civil war or major coup attempt (derived from e_pt_coup_attempts, e_civil_war, and e_miinterc)
6. Alignment in WW1, manually coded based on status in the Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Trianon, Sevrés, and Brest-Litovsk. Countries signing one or more treaties on the Entente side are coded as Entente, and on the CP side are coded as Central Powers.
a. “British Empire” = participants in the Imperial War Cabinet (UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Newfoundland).
b. The Hejaz is not the same thing as Saudi Arabia or the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, as the latter two are institutionally continuous with Nejd and incorporated the former via conquest.
c. All others coded as neutral, including colonies and protectorates not otherwise accounted for, even if their mother nation is a belligerent.
7. Percent of legislature held by 3rd parties (calculated from v3ellost* in the most recent election year in the same regime).
8. Parliamentary HoG, average of two figures if present, normalized to a uniform 0-1 scale. If both absent, 0 (indicates HoS is HoG)
a. Chosen by legislature (v2exaphogp) on 0-1 scale
b. Removable by legislature (v2exremhog_osp) on 0-4 scale
9. GDP per capita (e_gdppc)
Output variables (analyzed separately in 1938 and 1942)
1. Electoral democracy index (v2x_polyarchy)
2. Liberal democracy index (v2x_libdem)
4. Dummy variable: regime has changed since start date AND decline in v2x_polyarchy or v2x_libdem
I don’t fully understand your inputs there. There’s a lot of initials and acronyms. From what I do understand though you seem to be adding too many variables. For instance 4 - years since the last constitutional change has to exclude constitutional monarchies.
(Actually there’s two 4s, so the second one). And does alignment in WWI matter? I suppose this is what you are trying to find out.
This is the codebook for the dataset, if you want to dig into details:
https://v-dem.net/documents/38/V-Dem_Codebook_v14.pdf
> From what I do understand though you seem to be adding too many variables.
I'm worried about that, too. My hope is that the analysis technique I'm planning on using will help me prune irrelevant or redundant ones; as I understand it, the idea of the Predictive Power approach is to remove one factor at a time to see how much (if at all) the inclusion of that factor improves the correlation of the regression analysis. What I'm hoping and expecting to see is that some of the factors are irrelevant or redundant and can be dropped from the final model.
>years since the last constitutional change has to exclude constitutional monarchies.
I'm pulling this from "regime information" data serieses, which tracks significant shifts in institutional order. This can be stuff like shifting to a completely different form of government (e.g. the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic, and the later transition to Nazi Germany), or major reform within the same form of government (the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments in the US, the passage of the House of Lords reform bill in the UK, etc). For input variable #4, I'm planning on filtering on types of regime change to exclude orderly changes within the same form of government, so an orderly process of institutions reforming themselves isn't counted, but something like the German Revolution of 1918 or the establishment of the Third French Republic in 1870 is counted. For output variable #4 (should be 3, typo as I lost formatting copy-pasting it from a google doc), no filtering on the nature of the change but I will be excluding changes that are positive or neutral in terms of how liberal and how democratic the regime is.
The reason for the different treatment of regime changes on input and output is that the input is a proxy for past stability of the country's institutions, to test the hypothesis that newer institutional regimes are more fragile, while the output is an attempt to objectively detect regime change in an authoritarian direction.
After talking through that, I think I've mostly convinced myself (and you've convinced me) to drop inputs 4 and 5. Anything that is that hard to explain and justify is suspect when I'm already severely at risk for overfitting. Also, I'm not too impressed with the quality of the dataset for 5, as it doesn't capture stuff like Boulanger crisis in France (since he chickened out just short of a formal coup attempt), but does capture stuff like Native American Wars in the US (which do represent significant internal violence but doesn't really indicate institutional instability).
>And does alignment in WWI matter? I suppose this is what you are trying to find out.
Yes, it is. "Losing WWI leads to fascism" is a popular trope among alternate history writers and other armchair historians.
Tl;DR Can someone on the right make the case for JD Vance?
I always heard that Vance was a Theil dark money vunderkind smart boy from the rightists on this typah site; and just kinda accepted it.
Eg, I assumed I would disagree with him on priors and morality but he would be some flavor of competent technocrat, and never looked into it further because who cares.
Now that he is being pushed in my face all the time, it seems clear that the dude is kinda dumb? A little room temperature in the IQ department? Like, he says dumb shit in dumb ways, he can't react to unexpected situations with any kind of grace, and he seems to have even less charisma than my autistic ass. I honestly think if you deleted the part of my brain that felt empathy I could do better as a rightist infiltrator into the trump personality cult/neocon establishment than this dude.
Did he have everybody fooled up till now? Is he better when he doesn't have to be all extemporal all the time?
Can someone give me a link or a low effort strong man on what this dude is good for, cause I just can't see it.
Vance wrote a good, thoughtful, book. On the other hand, I listened to a talk he gave as VP candidate and it was terrible. He not only lied, he did it with no charisma and nothing to make the talk fun to listen to. Trump lies too, but at least he is good at it.
It is by design so he can be more easily controlled.
Maybe a more simpler explanation is that Silicon Valley right wingers have the political instincts of a cardboard box. They thought RFK would pull away voters from the left, and that also spectacularly backfired.
The fact that the Democrats are highly motivated to dig up any and all dirt they can find on him, but that so far the best they've been able to come up with is that he's "weird", is evidence in favour of his moral probity.
Personally, I lean towards "A pox on both their houses!" re the Democrats and the GOP, but I must say that having the party of the drag queen story hour complaining about anyone else on the grounds that they are "weird" is, ahem, counterintuitive.
I'm neither for nor against Vance, I think the most (or worst) that can be said for him is that he's Just Some Guy, You Know? He did make it out of an unstable family background to be moderately successful so good for him. Also, seemingly he has converted to Catholicism, so, um, welcome aboard, fellow co-religionist JD!
Though with the Democrats apparently thinking the way to win votes is go "Ugh, those guys are so *weird*", they're driving me to defend him (the same way as I ended up defending Trump). I've been weird all my life, remain weird, and was lucky that I wasn't bullied in school. But now the Party of Niceness and the Right Side of History (if you're the Right Kind of Minority) is stooping to that kind of school bullying. It's not big, it's not clever, and it alienates people like me, because now it looks like the mask is off.
If I had a vote in an American election, they've certainly lost it now with this stunt.
If you don't like school bully's the Republicans are still far far worse though. At least the Dems have a much wider range of weirdo's they have deemed as normal.
Schoolyard bullying?
Once again, a partial list of Trump’s insults. He throws these out to the laughter and applause of his supporters:
#1 Weirdo - moving on to:
Horse face, Fat pig, Psycho, Slime ball, Crazed and incompetent, Birdbrain, Deranged loser, Mental basket case, Crazy, Whacko, Washed up creepster, Neurotic dope, Stone cold phony, True lowlife, Broken old crow, Third rate conman, Moonface, Ditzy airhead…
A while ago he wrote a book that had some widespread appeal. I admit I have not read it.
I don't follow Vance and I am not sure he is suited to politics, but he is not a moron. [Very few people are, in truth.]
Are you actually watching the videos that people are pulling these quotes from? I watched one recently and it’s really wild how completely people will change the meaning of a statement, even when they post a one minute clip that anyone can see for themselves that it’s inaccurate. What’s crazier is that few people even point this out, even among those who are defending Vance. They just know that they can say whatever they want and no one is actually going to watch the video to verify.
Yes, it actually made it worse that he would set his feet, wind up, and say something so completely stupidly on purpose.
Like, he could formulate it in such a way that I would still dislike the concept but respect that it was the product of a consistent ideology, but he makes it clear that this is not the case when you have the context.
What is the video?
> Can someone on the right make the case for JD Vance?
He's seems credibly right wing pro-worker; if you were a proud hillbilly called deplorable by Hilary, your facing a world with leftwings claiming to be pro "little poeple" that are ovisous lies or mass importing immigrants while unwilling to take them in thier gate communitys; trumps named a successor and I find him roughly as good as trump with what I know about him rn.
I dont know that much tho; I want to know his plans for the tech market (he's anti silcone valley, Im anti silcone valley; but I really really want to be an employed small company programmer)
I *like* trump being mean on twitter and his gold plated toilets but I never thought the "small loan from my father" real esstate tv star was actaully capable of being pro-worker.
It's funny how "Hilary deplores hilbillies" has become a fact. She only every defined deploreables as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic".
I think a lot of people's feelings about the term stem from the fact that "deplorables" sounds a whole lot like "undesirables".
This defence is Isolated Demand for Rigour to the absolute extreme, since the Democrats have enthusiastically called everything from "welfare queens" to "gang violence" to "New York values" coded dog whistles for hating various groups, deconstructing all the ways the precise wording conjures certain sterotypes associated with that group and utterly dismissing the definitions given by the person using the phrase (e.g..Ted Cruz explicitly defining New York values as meaning pro-gay, pro-abortion, pro-secular etc) as irrelevant (since all that matters is what some bigots might hear). For those same people to then not notice that "deplorable" fits every sterotype of dirty uneducated rural whites so well as to be almost the perfect example of a dog whistle, and to suddenly decide that actually whatever she said she meant *should* be taken at face value...forget the insult, the hypocrisy *alone* was enough to rightly cost her the election.
People constantly defend Trump's Unite the Right remarks here with just as fervent a level of pedantry.
Seeing as how she made the original remark at a dinner for wealthy gay donors, to laughter and applause, it's reasonable to assume she was not directing it at urban, middle-class, professional types, yes?
EDIT: What did she say, when, to whom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables
"At an LGBT campaign fundraising event in New York City on September 9, Clinton gave a speech and said the following:
I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, "Well, he's done this time." We are living in a volatile political environment.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
— Hillary Clinton, CBS News"
Maybe not all hillbillies, just the hillbillies who didn't manage to make it to gala dinners in New York to donate $$$$$$ to Democrat political campaigns, then.
It sounds oddly like Trump's "fine people" speech. In context, taking their words at face value, it's clear they're restricting their comments to a subset. But a lot of people on the other side, and I'd argue even some people on their *own* side, ignore the restriction. They hear what they want to hear, or assume the restriction was bullshit designed to let the speaker say what they*really* meant, or simply interpret the restriction as practically non-existent. (After all, isn't there plenty of other rhetoric from the left suggesting that anyone who votes for Trump is inherently racist, or sexist, etc.?)
Clinton was claiming that substet was half of Trump's supporters. So if you are a more than median Trump supporter it's reasonable to believe she is talking about you.
The problem is in interpreting the position of Trump and his supporters as being sexist, racist, and homophobic when instead that was a lie or an ideological Turing test failure. You can argue nativism is adjacent to xenophobia, I suppose.
Are you saying that prejudice didn’t play a major role in Trump’s support?
In 2019, Bob Altemeyer and John Dean commissioned a survey while writing their book <em>Authoritarian Nightmare</em>. The correlation between prejudice and approval of Trump was 0.812. Squaring 0.812 gives 66%, so approximately 2/3rds of Trump’s support can be explained by prejudice.
https://cdn2.mhpbooks.com/2020/08/Authoritarian-Nightmare_Appendices.pdf
Other explanations of support for Trump must either (1) explain no more than 1/3 of his support, or (2) be correlated with prejudice. For example, the RWA scale, a measure of the tendency to follow authoritarian leaders, is as you might expect a pretty good indicator of support for Trump (correlation 0.755). But that’s possible only because the RWA and prejudice scales are themselves highly correlated. If they weren’t, it would be mathematically impossible for them to both correlate so highly with support for Trump.
You might be interested in my interaction with Altemeyer on my blog a fair while back. It didn't leave me with a high opinion of his ability to recognize bias in his own work. https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/07/loaded-dice-professor-altemeyers.html
What was his measure of prejudice?
"so approximately 2/3rds of Trump’s support can be explained by prejudice."
Maybe I'm not statistically literate enough to see this, but if Romney got 47.2% of the vote and Trump got 46.1%, then doesn't that mean your 2/3rds explanation is either false, or applies almost as much to Romney? If the latter, then you're not saying anything at all interesting about Trump, just making a general claim about Republicans.
Unless you're suggesting that Trump and Romney drew completely different pools of votes, which I'm pretty sure is easily refuted by state and county results.
I’m certainly not claiming to have identified anything specific to Trump, as opposed to Republicans in general. There is obviously a lot of overlap between Republicans and Trump supporters; otherwise Trump wouldn’t have won the last three Republican primaries.
On the other hand, I don’t have data that would let me generalize beyond Trump. The prejudice scale on the 2019 survey had a correlation of 0.812 with support for Trump, and a slightly lower correlation of 0.775 with identification as a Republican. It’s entirely possible that the small group of Republicans who don’t support Trump are no more prejudiced than the average Democrat.
As far as I know, nobody tried to measure the prejudice of Romney supporters, or for that matter of Republicans in 2012, when Romney ran for President. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of support for Republicans has been driven by prejudice all the way back to 1965, when Lindon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but I don’t think the evidence clearly establishes that.
I lived in a Republican +60% county during the 2016 election. I'll take the information i gained by actually knowing and speaking with scores of Trump voters over some correlation in a pdf file (I was very anti-Trump at the time of that election). Also, arguing about the meaning of words is boring, but prejudice is not the same thing as racism.
If your interactions with Trump supporters in a single county didn't match the results of a national survey, one obvious possibility is that your county was atypical.
I know that prejudice is not the same thing as racism. Hillary Clinton used the phrase, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” I understood Clinton to be referring to prejudice (by giving a bunch of examples of it). When you wrote “sexist, racist, and homophobic” above, I assumed you meant the same thing and just didn’t bother to repeat the entire list. So your statement that prejudice is not the same as racism is obviously true, but also a non sequitur.
"half of trump supporters are deplorables *cheers*" only 1/4th of the country are several no no words; forgive me for believing her and her supporters on this quote
Does any of that matter at all? He's a vice president. His purpose is to improve electability. He is white, moderately attractive, and says the right things. What more could you ask for?
The right things? He has probably insulted half of potential Republican voter base by now.
Someone who could effectively serve as President if called on to do so, which seems particularly important if we're going to be electing a President who by the end of his term will be older than Joe Biden is now.
And really, it would also help if he were someone who could plausibly at least level up to Presidential standards with a few years as an understudy, because the GOP is going to need a new candidate in four years and if there isn't another clear choice, "most recent Veep" seems to be the default. Note the problems the Democratic party is having on account of choosing a VP candidate solely on "enhances the actual candidate's electability" grounds and now having to run her as a Presidential candidate in her own right.
Is the "crazy cat ladies" stuff really the right thing to improve electability? If you just want a pretty face who says the right things I feel like you could find one with less baggage.
I have a crazy cat lady (using that in a gender-neutral sense) in my family and yes, they are on the progressive side in every issue. Don't know what JD said, exactly, but since I have no cats, don't want any cats, and will never have cats, regardless of being single, female, old, and crazy myself, I'm not offended :-)
Just as an additional data point: My late wife's best friend counts as an old cat lady - and votes for Trump.
My impression is that he's too new of a politician, and had crafted an image to get elected by half the voters in his state, and wasn't prepared to go national yet. Contrasted to someone like Obama, who was clearly playing to the national stage from the start.
yes
What, do Republicans not have any childless women in their party any more?
There's some graph going around as a meme, that IIRC shows Rs being at ~51-55% among married men, married women, and single men, but being at ~33% among single women.
I've been assuming that it's technically accurate but probably too crude to use in understanding what's actually going on. But I haven't dug into it. I gather that there are a bunch of very-online people on the right who react to it as though the numbers were 100% and 0%, and make sweeping generalizations to that effect. (Not unusual on either side, alas. I think psychologists call it "splitting"?)
In another era, the type of woman to be single and childless would have become a nun. I wonder if there is any study on the politics of nuns back when there were still many around. Half the components of the single childless female white ethnic religious Catholic teacher demographic votes for Republicans and the other half for Democrats.
Childless easily-offended hyper-feminists women are all are all going democrats, cause they are single issue voters for unrestricted post-birth abortions apperently.
Whats your theory here, its never ok to insult a demographic while running for office? Ring wing candidates need to appeal to blue state sensibilities on natalism being a debate? Or is it the idea of "women can have faults" is no longer moderate?
First pass the post voting devolves to ingroup-outgroup slicing up of culture; and trump will *never* be forgiven for.... being 2 steps removed from abortion being slightly weakened and being extremely moderate on the subject, better insult the feminist block and draw attention to when they seem unreasonable.
What the heck is a post-birth abortion? Is this really the right-wing talking point? Sorry, but that's *weird*!
I'm not an expert, but it seems like there's a consensus that Vance was a poor choice in those terms. And it's not like Trump had a shortage of possible choices either.
Consensus by whom? Polls show he's viewed quite favorably among Republicans. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NPR_PBS-News_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables_Candidate-Favorability_202408050954.pdf Democracts hate him, which is definitely a good thing. Which leaves Independents, which admittedly he isn't doing too hot with, but if you look at the other side, nobody even knows who Tim Walz is, including Democrats. No such thing as bad publicity, right?
Honestly though, I doubt this is going to matter much for the election results. Trump doesn't need to win the popular vote to win, or even the electoral college depending on how things play out. What matters is the loyalty and fervor of his supporters, to ensure that things work out regardless of the results. And JD Vance does seem to be doing a good job fanning the flames.
I agree about the suspicious "consensus": as soon as he was chosen everyone in the media seemed to be talking about how he's an awful choice, but as a Republican myself I'm quite happy with him and don't see what the problem is.
the consensus is among people that hate Trump (and Republicans) though, so take it with a grain of salt. Over on DSL there is also a `consensus' that Harris is a terrible candidate, and you should treat that analogously.
There was a consensus that Harris was a terrible candidate among Democrats too until July 24.
Remember how everyone wanted to parachute Gavin Newsom in rather than risk going with Kamala who was an obvious ditz that wouldn't shut up about Venn diagrams?
I've yet to hear the fabled Kamala laugh, which I read is like that of a cackling witch stirring some potent brew in a large pot. She must have had a discrete tattoo done on the back of her hand as a reminder: "Gentle tinkling laugh. No hyena noises!"
To be fair, she does about as many public appearances as the Shroud of Turin.
I think it was a few days earlier, maybe even by the evening of Sunday the 21st? That's when Biden dropped out and anointed Harris as his successor. From my perspective, the sequence went:
Sunday (21st) early morning - Sunday NYT goes to print
Sunday (21st) morning - Biden drops out
Wednesday (24th) morning - Sunday NYT is delivered
By that time, I was already sick of the lockstep fawning, and I woke up to see a newspaper delivered from out of a time warp, as if I were traveling at a near-c velocity. Biden was still running, people were worried about him staying in or dropping out, no one could agree on who the best successor should be, and Kamala was just one name among many, the natural next choice except for all the negative qualities that made people wonder about other potential candidates.
Actually people inside the Trump campaign expressed regrets after Biden dropped out. They expected to win easily and Vance was picked because they thought he would help run up the numbers down ballot.
When the race became close some insiders regretted not picking someone a little less “Trumpy” to soften the ticket’s appeal to voters ambivalent to the whole Trump show.
How does Vance help run up the numbers down ballot if he's a bad VP pick in a competitive election? Genuinely curious, as I agree that Vance was not picked to help Trump win but instead with other objectives in mind (possibly a successor?).
I can’t help with what the exact thinking was here. It was something I read in Political citing campaign ‘sources willing to speak on condition of anonymity.’
My best guess was that they felt the election was a lock with a Trump vs Biden match up and Trump + more Trump might provide rideable coattails.
The successor thing wasn’t mentioned in the article but it could well have been part of the reason for the choice also.
Indeed, it looked that way to me.
Harris has done better than I expected. On the other hand, she has not said anything to suggest that she has an idea in her head, and there are still a couple of months to go before the election. If Trump is wise [SPOILER: LOL] he will / would have taken a little break and come back saying that Silly (Harris) Season is over.
He doesn't have the skills to be a politician at the national level; in fact, very few politicians do, very few people do. The skills required have little to do with intelligence, it's mostly about acting skills, and many great actors aren't very smart.
But it is weird how not having good acting skills makes someone look dumb and vice versa.
I've actually found it interesting how many actors actually ARE smart, such as Meryl Streep, Emma Watson, Matt Damon, etc. (https://www.businessinsider.com/smart-celebrities-2016-8). I went to this site with a quick search, but my impression is a lot of actors actually have some brains.
"I honestly think if you deleted the part of my brain that felt empathy I could do better as a rightist infiltrator into the trump personality cult/neocon establishment than this dude."
This reminds me of academics who casually claim they could be making big bucks in the private sector but aren't due to their Love of Science.
Yeah, seconding "dionysus." If you're a physics or math Phd you can pretty easily work in finance or at one of the FAANGS, and STEM phd's in general make 2-3x in industry.
Why would this be a laughable claim at all? It seems obviously true on the face of things if you look up comp on any site or know the industry or know people working in industry.
Physicists are a special case, very different from the typical academic. Yes, people in the private sector make more, but it's not like your typical academic, even in STEM, can just walk into a 500,000 a year FAANG job. They'd be more likely to be doing web design for Kaiser Permanente. Upper-middle-class but not rich.
Any physicist could walk the typical FAANG job, although perhaps not the interview. That’s because the typical FAANG interview assumes a graduate degree in computer science when solving puzzles - which would mean a lot of study. Computer science was a discipline created by scientists from other fields. And mathematicians.
I wish this site had a like button.
The academics are totally right. I know many, many physicists who went into industry because they didn't do well in graduate school. All of them are making much more than their classmates who stayed in academia. It's reasonable to assume that the people who did well in grad school would earn even more money in industry, should they choose that route, than those who did poorly. I also know people who went into the private sector and made big bucks before going to grad school. It stands to reason that they could go back into industry and start making big bucks again.
He lacks personal charisma but he's the clearest advocate I've seen so far for some kind of intellectual economic Trumpism.
An economic policy for the Republican Party that goes beyond the Romney-style "What's good for Big Business is good for the country" is needed, especially now that Big Business no longer supports Republicans anyway. JD Vance is willing to come out and say that it's Not Socialism to tweak things a little to ensure that the American labour classes can still have a decent life in the face of competition with the unwashed masses of the Third World who are willing to work for a dollar a day. That the ultra-rich should be willing (if only for aesthetic rather than moral reasons) to make some sacrifices -- not directly through tax-and-welfare but indirectly through protectionism -- to ensure that working class Americans can be respectable upstanding citizens with jobs rather than obese welfare cases.
I think Trump believes all this on some level but can't quite articulate it; Vance can and does articulate it.
That assumes that Vance doesn't understand the relevant economics, believes that tariffs protect American workers against the competition of foreign workers who are paid less. Thiel surely understands it, Vance talks to Theil, so my guess is that Vance is pretending to believe the popular view of trade economics and not the actual economics. But I could be wrong — the fact that he wrote a good book doesn't guarantee that he understands economics.
I discuss the economics in an old Substack post: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ptolemaic-trade-theory
If that is the appeal I get it; but to someone who isn't in the group it seems like pure wishcasting.
Vance was anti-Trump in 2016. It seems hard to believe that he believes anything he says when he's willing to pivot so dramatically like that.
I was anti-Trump in 2016, but was pro-Trump by 2020. As I have said countless times, he wasn't nearly as bad as I thought he would be, and actually did some good things, and a few bad ones.
One thing I predicted, given his history of bankruptcies, was he would run up the deficit so that when we changed currencies we would get more benefit from it. But I admit the deficit didn't rise as much as I had thought.
"When we changed currencies, we would get more benefit from it?"
I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by "change currencies", but I have a hard time coming up with a scenario where that isn't just absolutely, catastrophically bad. And you seem to be saying that creating a situation where the default is *also* catastrophically bad, makes the alternative a "benefit".
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant basically that, if you're going to go bankrupt, you may as well run up as much debt as you can before you do, to get the most benefit from the bankruptcy. To be sure, the actual reality would have been awful. I expected Trump to basically say something like, "sure, but the world will get over it, and in 10 years, who will care?"
Also to be clear, I'm not supporting Trump saying he was a great president and will be greater still. I'm appalled that the only candidates for president that have any real chance of winning are Trump and Harris, but given what I believe is best for the country, my choice is Trump, as I'm definitely anti-socialist.
When you vote for a president you vote for his cabinet. And because Trump didn't really expect to win he didn't really have a lineup of people from his movement prepared who actually had a vague clue how government worked. So he went with more conventional picks.
The problem is that now the Trumpists in the Republican party have actually been preparing and will do so much more damage if he gets back into power. This time around his cabinet will not be made out of moderate Republicans.
As I recall, Trump fired most of the "moderate, conventional picks" fairly early on, and replaced them with mostly incompetent Trump loyalists. Because Trump values personal loyalty *far* more than he does competence, and he lacks the experience to even identify the relevant forms of competence. So the last 2-3 years of the Trump administration, is what you get when Trump hires the sort of people he really wants in his cabinet.
If we get a second Trump administration, and Trump chooses his own cabinet, I'd expect more of the same. If someone else in the Republican party picks a cabinet for him, they probably won't be sufficiently loyal to Donald J. Trump The Man, and Trump will probably fire them like he did last time. In which case, again, expect more of the same.
The idea of Trump embedded in a cabal of competent Machiavellian political operators who will use the power of the presidency to pursue their common goals, I think betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Donald Trump. He doesn't do "common goals".
It is the idea embedded in the Project 2025 book. But I agree unlikely.
This is only half true. The important positions like DOJ were still filled by old school Republicans like William Barr. Who was not exactly blindly loyal to Trump (pretty crucial as DOJ is pretty important).
He had not completely taken over the party like he has now. A second run will mean a large amount of crazies will be appointed. And I mean proper crazies like Marjorie Taylor Green, not opportunistic semi old school Republicans.
I have very mixed feelings about the guy.
He did do a 180 on Trump.
From a 2016 email:
“He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”
To present day Trump attack dog.
I have to wonder about his character in taking the position but completely understand that he has to play a losing hand every day spinning the actions a depraved man into something, I dunno, not terrible?
I hold off on dismissing him out oh hand because he was friends with Ross Douthat before he got into politics and while Ross is skeptical about Vance’s conversion, he still seems to respect J D.
Is there some meta ethical goal in supporting Trump that overrides the apparent ethical vacuum, the transparent moral defectiveness, the outright scumbaggery that is Trump? I sure can’t see it. The guy has nothing like a fixed set of moral convictions. He just makes up shit that he thinks will put him back in the White House as he goes along. “I overturned Roe.”; “I’ll be the best president for women’s rights”; “In vitro treatments for fertility will be free.” WTF?
Okay he does consistently says he hates the radical left wing communist fascists in the Democratic Party. But he also hate Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. You know the Republicans who point out how flipping flawed the ridiculous dork actually is.
Douthat says he is praying for his old friend Vance and the country. This I do not doubt.
Sorry, I got distracted hoping Ross Douthat has a brother named Lex. Or maybe Les.
In my head I pronounce the name as ‘doubt that’. I’ve heard the correct pronunciation but can never remember it.
I don't think having been initially opposed to Trump is a big barrier, since practically everybody who supports Trump has a "at first I thought he was a clown but eventually he won me over" story.
I know. If only he were just a clown.
It’s disgusting.
Mitch McConnell - March 13, 2021:
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mitch McConnell - March 6, 2024:
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
Yes it is because they are opportunists. Half these "He won me over" were shit talking him behind his back.
They were offered a position of power that is why they suddenly liked him.
Trump's good qualities - he has some - are limited. His appeal, for me at least, is that we can't carry on with the alternative.
It's pretty obvious (to me at least) that Vance was positioning himself for politics with the publication of his book, and his politics were very similar to Trump but he, like everyone else, thought that Clinton would win. So he was making nice with who he saw as the winning side to start his campaign.
Then Trump won, so he very wisely flipped.
> he, like everyone else, thought that Clinton would win. So he was making nice with who he saw as the winning side
That sounds disturbingly plausible. Given that we know he is capable of being insincere, why are we assuming that his first position was any more sincere than his second?
I think it l likely these are what he genuinely believes, but notice that my original comment said nothing about sincerity, just positioning and politics.
Sincerity is very important, especially if you can fake it well.
That wasn't directed at you, sorry. I was using the conversation to make a more general point.
Understood. I nonetheless think he's being more genuine now, and was faking it more when he was siding with people against Trump.
Let's see some politicians demonstrate regular ethics before we go looking for meta-ethics!
Why are women more attracted to new age religious practices? Is that even true globally?
Bonus question - what is the correlation bethween irreligion (specifically lack of traditional organized religion) and new age practices? Are people in less traditionally religious countries (countries like Finland, Estonia, Czech republic, China) more likely to be attracted to new age than traditionally religous countries (Poland, Colombia, Arab countries, ... )? Less?
At a guess, just chance. There are men who are also into new age religious stuff, but they call themselves neo-pagans instead. We have some female-coded new agey stuff, and some male-coded new agey stuff, and some gender-neutral new agey stuff (anecdotally, spiritual woo derived from indigenous cultures in Canada seems pretty gender-neutral).
Do you have data to support your claim that women are more attracted to New-Age religious practices? I found a Pew Research report that says generally women are more religious than men. ChatGPT says there's also a Pew Research report that shows women are more likely to call themselves "spiritual" but not religious — I can't find that one, though. ChatGPT also says there's European Values Study that "indicates that women in Europe are more likely to engage in holistic and alternative spiritual practices, such as meditation, astrology, or healing practices., etc." But again, I can't find the data (if it's been compiled) in any report up on their https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/ website.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/03/22/women-generally-are-more-religious-than-men-but-not-everywhere/#:~:text=The%20biggest%20exception%20to%20the,42%25).
From an evolutionary psychology point of view, I think women left their tribes to form families in other tribes (gene mixing and all that), while men generally stuck to the tribe they were born into. So for an early human woman, being unable to adapt to new spiritual practices might have sharply limited her reproductive success.
Of course, one should probably not take these arguments too serious. I would be surprised if we had solid evidence of the mating patterns of early hominids. If one deduces what the ancestral environment must have been like given that the traits we have were likely advantageous there, and then uses that hypothetical environment to explain why our traits were advantageous, that would be circular logic.
At a risk of sounding too dismissive this sounds a bit like a just so story. It is not too hard to make up these hypotheses in evo psychology ... much harder to verify them.
Some counterarguments: All of the prophets of major religions were men, all 12 apostles were men and so on. Women also tend to be more conforming which supports your specific scenario where a woman moves to a different tribe and adopts their (not just religious) practices. But unless you are a woman who moves to a hippie commune there are no new age "tribes" today. In fact if it is true that women are more likely to be interested in this stuff, that is the opposite of adaptation.
> At a risk of sounding too dismissive this sounds a bit like a just so story.
I agree, hence my second paragraph :)
There’s a strong negative correlation between belief in religion and the other new age and woo practices. People want to be spiritual but not religious. Whatever that means. I’ve been too afraid to ask.
Data and or links please?
I heard a while ago that the most non-religious country in Europe (at the time Sweden, not sure where it falls now) had a population where 80% believed in ghosts/spirits. I haven't looked at those numbers in a long time.
Paths to power. I have a neighbor, mid-70s lady, all the astrology stuff on board. She uses astrology to classify people "oh, just like a Libra woman" are things she'll say. Or to imagine there's magical power in her crystals, gives her powers others don't have.
"But I didn't and still don't like making a cult of women's knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don't know, women's deep irrational wisdom, women's instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women's knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter, What Women Know
It is not obvious to me why that would be attractive to women specifically. Wouldn't men want to have secret magical powers too?
They don't have the power of superior strength over men, they have to choose another path.
Like look at Chimpanzee politics. You can have one strong alpha male who beats everyone up, that's his path to power. But his reign is typically short lived. Other chimpanzees form coalitions to take down the bully, and have longer friendlier reigns.
What makes a person special? —being strong, being smart, building coalitions ... having none of these, perhaps they have magical powers useable.
So you suggest that new age is a female equivalent of hooligans? :-)) Not sure how valid a hypothesis that is but it sure is fun! Your argument would also suggest that less successful women are more likely to be interested in new age stuff ... and less successful and physically weak men also. Is that true? I think that the men who are interested in new age tend to be less overtly masculine (but that was not always the case, astrologers used to be employed by kings). But that just means that men who are perhaps "more similar to women" are umm ... more similar to women also in their approach to new age. And it doesn't necessarily mean they are physically weak or small or whatever, it is more about their attitude (all based on anecdotal observations).
As for chimps (and perhaps slightly off topic) - the alpha male in a chimp pack is actually quite dependent on the females. I remember reading Chimpanzee Politics (from Frans de Waal) and the situation where the older and physically weaker chimp manages to keep his position and re-assert it and take it back from a younger and stronger chimp mostly because he was shrewd and savvy and understood that with the females on his side (and the alpha female who then played the role of a king maker) he can win. I don't remember how the power dynamics worked between the females themselves but there was definitely an alpha female. In any case, there was a path for a female to rise in the pack hierarchy also.
I respect Le Guin. She was a great writer, and I will pay attention to her takes. But outside the Taliban (perhaps not even among those) does anyone truly ignore the thoughts of those who - as even Mao observed - hold up a full half of the sky?
There is a wide spectrum between completely ignoring and fully appreciating. I feel we're in the middle of this spectrum somewhere. Women aren't entirely ignored but there is a default gender discount applied. There is a reason J.K. Rowling went with initials rather than first name.
They're more attracted to old age religious practices too.
Hmm, that's a good point. Are there any good data on this by the way?
>any good data
https://davidmurrow.com/quick-facts-on-christianitys-gender-gap/
e.g.
>The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. This gender gap shows up in all age categories.
OpenAI apparently has some new AI tech called "Strawberry". I wonder if the name is a reference to the strawberries of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/elk-and-the-problem-of-truthful-ai
The Sora announcement was obviously a tech demo aimed at potential partners in the film industry. Not the kind of thing you can let millions of users run for free.
? That’s what they promised.
Very, *very* condensed ranting about the second and third episodes, I'm just skimming here, there is an embarrassment of riches (heavy on the "embarrassment") to choose from.
(1) ORC LIVES MATTER, or, "let's take George R.R. Martin's flippant remark about Orc genocide and what about the baby Orcs in their little Orc cradles seriously".
Not content with ripping off as much of the LOTR movies scenes and dialogue as they can, they're now, ahem, doing homages to Ralph Bakshi's 70s movie, to wit: "Where There's A Whip, There's A Way".
They don't want to go to war today, you see. And again I swear I am not making any of this up, we get a scene between Adar and an Orc husband and father who just wants to stay at home with his wife and kid and not go to war with Sauron. Cut to wife and kid. Yes, we get a glimpse of a loving Orc family with dad, mom, and baby.
You don't believe me? Well feast your lyin' eyes on this:
https://x.com/Nerdrotics/status/1829263644926136626
I now understand why Joseph Mawle quit the show: he saw the second season scripts.
(2) Cirdan! We get canon Cirdan with a beard in episode two. But just when you might be thinking "Well okay, they're hewing closer to canon this time round", oh no. We can't have nice things. So in episode three Cirdan shaves off his beard. We get the shaving scene and all. What is this rampant anti-beard agenda? Were the showrunners frightened by Santa Claus when they were wee Orclings?
(3) The gosh.durn. I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf and the Harfoots in Rhun. Kill them, kill me, kill someone for the love of Manwe. Guess who's back, back again? Shady's back, tell a friend! Yes, to the surprise of absolutely nobody watching this, Lady Eminem gets resurrected by a Dark Wizard, that guy who looks kinda like Saruman. He shouldn't *be* Saruman, but are we really going to risk it that this show doesn't think this would be a whopper surprise if it turned out to be Saruman? Maybe they're trying to fool us that this is Saruman so they can then pull a twist on us "Ha, ha, you thought it was Saruman but it's a completely different wizard to the five we know of in canon!" Oh please let that be so. I couldn't bear it if it really was Saruman.
Also, they are still bloody well dropping hints about "is the Stranger Gandalf?" He's having dreams about finding a staff, you see, and Poppy (yeah, she turns up) says that he's searching for his gand. Gand, staff, Gandalf, get it? And if you don't, they're happy to beat you over the head with it. EDIT: It's not Poppy, it's Nori who says it. Oh well, easy to mistake one dirty little psychopath for another.
Ooh, almost forgot! We've got a cross-over episode here, as the Tusken raiders from "Star Wars" show up. Yeah, you tell me they're supposed to be natives of Rhun, but I know a masked Tusken raider in the desert when I see one.
I could go on much, much, much longer. But some more things I liked, or didn't mind, or that made me laugh:
(a) MIriel. I don't mind the actress in this part, and I think if she had anything other than the glurge the show gives her, she could deliver a great performance. As it is, she's doing very well with what she has to work with.
(b) a crumb for the lore nerds; Halbrand the Warg-whisperer is a shout-out to Sauron, Lord of Werewolves.
(c) that big, beautiful, moving Forbidden Love Elf-Human Romance? As dead as Bronwyn, whose cremation we get to see (due to the actress not coming back for season two). Poor Arondir, he is so sad, he almost had a new facial expression. Turns out you *can't* just walk off a poisoned Orc arrow or three to the back.
As ever, the horse remains the one sensible creature in this show so far.
re: Orcs - It's perhaps worth pointing out that RoP basically ripped off "but orcs are people, too!" from 2016's Warcraft movie, including the orc wife and baby:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_(film)#Plot
https://youtu.be/2Rxoz13Bthc?si=KTdAbNmdzI_v8Zp0&t=50
Although that might not be an accurate or entirely fair accusation, "Antagonist is a person, too!" has been a pretty frequent trope in popular media, see Malificent et al.
But it wasn't *quite* the trope it was in 2016, and given that WoW and its movie are clearly deeply informed by LotD, it still feels a little plagiarism-y.
(For what it's worth, I think Warcraft is *much* better movie than it had any reason to be and disagree with the professional critical consensus on it. It had an excellent series of set ups and pay offs, was well-acted, and executed its CGI better than anything being produced in 2024. Worth a look if you ever played WoW and/or enjoy LotD progeny.)
I just want to add - I'm a huge Tolkien nerd, know most of the lore, have read his letters and the lesser known books - I fucking love Rings of Power. What it changes in specifics it more than makes up for by really focusing on the themes of the writing and it hits the most important narrative beats.
Plus the soundtrack is amazing.
Have you read the ACOUP series about RoP? I'm curious what you think about it? I'm sure the nitpicks over historical accuracy and stuff aren't something that would bother most people, but some of the criticisms seem more vital, like how the writing was designed to try to constantly "trick" the audience, meaning that plots go nowhere and there is no feeling of stakes or verisimilitude, just one "twist" after another.
I just skimmed the summary of his criticisms but don't find much meat to them. I also think it's silly to say they're trying to "trick" the audience - they give so much evidence and foreshadowing (for instance, that Halbrand is Sauron) that it feels fair and rewarding to me.
Here are some parts along the lines of what I was referring to.
> And that, in the end, is why the tactics for the battle need to make sense: because for the audience to care about the outcome of the battle, that outcome needs to feel like a product of the decisions characters made leading to it. The moment the audience feels like the battle’s decision depends entirely on the whim of the storyteller, disconnected from anyone’s actions, those actions stop mattering and the audience loses investment in the battle.
> Arondir lures Adar’s army into the Ostirith watchtower. He then shoots a fire arrow at the ropes (!?) holding up (!?) the watchtower, which then collapses, bringing down the whole fort and raining rocks down on the causeway, destroying all of Adar’s army. Except, wait, is this all of Adar’s army? When he begins toppling the tower, Arondir jumps down3 in front of the gate, kicks it closed4 and then presumably flees down the causeway, which is evidently empty of troops. Except that as we’re going to see, that wasn’t all of Adar’s army or even most of it and he has two whole other armies somewhere but nowhere they could interfere with Arondir’s daring escape. So we have two problems here: the nonsense physics and then bad questions about army size. The latter will keep recurring over this post, but we can deal with the former right away.
> This makes as good a time as any to look at the size of Adar’s army but also on the bafflingly inability of any of the ‘good guys,’ most notably Arondir himself, to know how large it is or what its composition is. Arondir’s plan is foiled, twice (the tower trap and then the village ambush) because he does not have a clear sense of how large Adar’s army is or that it contains humans. In practice I think the real issue here is that not only does Arondir not have an idea of how big Adar’s army is, neither do the showrunners.
> Arondir is a scout and yet is caught unawares by a large orcish army, twice, the first time when he (and his entire company of other Elven scouts) is captured by then and then the second time when Adar’s magical third army appears after the village ambush.
> Arondir, who is a trained, professional scout (with supernaturally keen Elven senses!), has been in the enemy’s base, meet the enemy leader personally, and then had the enemy force advance over terrain that he and all of his troops have lived in for decades and yet clearly has no good sense of how large Adar’s army is, to even a rough order of magnitude. If he did, he’d have been well aware from the beginning that even with the tower ambush being maximally effective there was no chance of holding the village and he’d have been aware that Adar had not committed his whole force to the trap the second time either.
> That said the audience too could be forgiven for not having a good sense of the size of Adar’s army either. The real answer seems to be that the army isn’t real and doesn’t have a real size and so just comes into being for a scene and ceases to exist after it, in so far as the showrunners seem concerned. After Arondir springs his first trap, at the tower, leaps down onto the causeway and we can clearly see the causeway is empty. There is no great mass of orcs moving up from behind to also enter the tower or guarding the upper levels of the causeway (later we see torch lights lower down, but these seem to be crushed by falling debris). If there was an army here, Arondir would be in a lot of trouble, since he’d have just trapped himself between an army (on a narrow bridge) and a door he just closed. Certainly his trip back down to the village, through that army would be pretty difficult! But instead the army, having taken all of its hitpoints in damage, just despawns for this scene, to respawn when the timer ticks over in the next night.
> (Likewise, though we’re not quite there yet, when Arondir springs his next trap, the force of troops trapped by the ambush are entirely isolated: there’s no second echelon coming up behind them (or even in sight at all) either, making it seem like Adar’s army has been completely destroyed again. I can’t help but conclude that the showrunners have failed to understand the difference, famously laid out by Alfred Hitchcock between surprise on the one hand and suspense on the other. Worse yet, by pulling the same trick twice in the same sequence, they do not even get the “ten seconds of shock.”6)
And so on. There's a lot more where that comes from.
And this is just one post. There are other posts with lots of other criticisms (like how there's no sense of scale, time or continuity in RoP, breaking verisimilitude and making the world feel artificial - e.g. why should we even care whether Halbrand is king of a land that consists entirely of one small village run by a butcher).
The way I see it, silly battle logic is just basic Hollywood stuff and the original trilogy is full of it as well. Same as the fast travel characters sometimes get here and in game of thrones.
If you read the full post I was quoting from, you can see that he also compares it to the Peter Jackson movies and shows how they *don't* have the problems he is talking about.
https://acoup.blog/2023/01/27/collections-the-nitpicks-of-power-part-ii-falling-towers/
> We can compare with Peter Jackson’s treatment in The Lord of the Rings films, because he’s trying to pull off many of the same emotional beats and story ideas, but with much greater care. Now, Jackson is very concerned that we know how big the armies in his battles are. Sometimes he literally has a character tell us (“A great host, you say?” “Ten thousand strong at least”) and in other cases he pulls the camera way back so we can see how large a force is. By contrast, Rings gives us only the size of the Númenórean force; we have no sense of how many villagers or orcs and humans serving Adar there are supposed to be.
> Even when Jackson doesn’t keep track of exact numbers, as during the Battle of the Pelennor fields, he still shows the audience not only how big the orc army is (with huge wide shots to show it) but also cuts to the bridges over the Anduin to show it being reinforced before the siege. When fresh enemies arrive after the charge of the Rohirrim, they’re explicitly a second force, the existence of which we’ve been alerted to earlier in the films because we’ve already seen Haradrim and Mumakil (which also means we have the suspense of knowing that they’ll show up but not when or how, at least for folks who haven’t read the books). We may not know exactly how many orcs the Witch King has in all of these, but his army is clearly finite in size and made of identifiable components that we, the audience, can keep track of, which is important because that helps us know who is winning as the battle swings back and forth, which makes character decisions carry tension because we care who wins and we think that ‘who wins’ is something that will be meaningfully impacted by character decisions.
> By contrast, we’re never given a clear sense of the size of Adar’s army or its composition because that would defeat the purpose of the ‘surprise’ ‘subversion’ that Arondir’s two ambush traps don’t actually work. The unfortunate result is a deflation of the tension of the battle because what seems to happen is that Arondir destroys Adar’s army twice only for it to respawn each time, robbing each episode of its dramatic weight. The Númenóreans will then destroy Adar’s army a third time – and this time presumably completely (Adar’s orcs are caught in the open in a village by an army of cavalry in the day time hours before the mountain explodes; that is little more survivable than the mountain), and yet we’ll see after the smoke clears that there are still lots of orcs, so many that Galadriel has to tell Theo that fighting them is pointless and they must retreat.
I'm sorry you feel that way :-)
The subtitle in that video reads "As you will it, Lord Vader." s/Vader/father/ I suppose it's a reasonable mistake to make...
Hm, I don't appreciate a scene with a loving orc family either, but in terms of accuracy: weren't the Orcs in Lord of the Rings reluctant to go to war, and had to be pressed hard not to desert?
I base this only on the LotR novels, so you could argue that this is not the best source. And it's very long ago since I read the books, so feel free to prove me wrong. But that's how I recall at least the Mordor orcs. The Uruk-hai from Isengard were different, though.
The orcs were reluctant, but all their reluctance was framed as "What's in it for me anyways? Why should I stick my neck out? Screw you, I'll do what I want!" and not "I just want to live in peace and raise a family."
Yeah, I thought part of the horror of Sauron's orcish society was that it was top-to-bottom run on oppression. All good feelings were stamped out, and all that was left was fear and hate. I suppose free orcish society might look slightly different, but the ones from "The Hobbit" don't seem particularly nice.
Maybe they're trying for "Sauron is a common enemy of orcs and humans/elves, but human/elven arrogance and prejudice mean that Sauron gets control of the orcs".
I'm kind of rusty here too, but I think orcs were corrupted elves that were additionally bound to serve the dark power. The evilification process also made them not very effective so it took a lot of order and violence to get them to follow orders, because otherwise they'd just desert and go into banditry or grave robbing or something.
It WAS said that orcs were corrupted elves, but Tolkien changed his mind, seeing that neither Sauron nor Melkor had the power to give them the gift of death and free them from the circles of the world. So orcs would then not have been mortal as men were. He ended up not coming up with a consistent narrative for what orcs were.
Explanations Tolkien is known to have considered at one time or another:
1. Orcs are soulless constructs or corrupted animals, imbued with a fragment of Melkor's will to give them a form of sapience and making them miniature reflections of Melkor's own nature. Discarded because of the theme that evil cannot truly create.
2. Orcs are corrupted Elves. This was the front-runner for a long time, but Tolkien came to disfavor it because it became inconsistent with things he decided later about the nature of Elves as well as the Gift of Iluvatar problem you mentioned.
3. Orcs are corrupted Men. It sounds like this was the frontrunner towards the end of Tolkien's life, but it had problems of its own. One of the big ones was timeline difficulties: Morgoth had hosts of Orcs in time for the First Battle, before the initial awakening of Men.
4. Orcs are the progeny of minor Maiar, probably interbred with one or more of the above.
Other potential xplanations that, to my knowledge, Tolkien never explored:
A. Orcs are corrupted Dwarves. This actually fits pretty well in a number of respects: Orcs and Dwarves have similar natural habitats (particularly the cycles of them turning one another out of Moria and Mount Gundabad), both races are noted for mechanical cleverness, timeline works better than 3 above because the Dwarves awoke shortly after Elves, and Dwarves' spiritual nature is unexplored (neither immortal like Elves nor apparently mortal in the same sense as Men) in a way that avoids the spiritual problems of 2 and 3. The big problem is that Dwarves are notably and by-design very resilient against the corruptive effects of Morgoth's evil.
B. Orcs are corrupted Entwives.
C. Orcs are descended from Tom Bombadil's dark side.
[It should go without saying that B and C are utterly ridiculous and to my knowledge nobody seriously proposes them]
I wish they'd known better than to shove poorly-made nostalgia-bait down our throats, and made a standalone series about the Blue Wizards' adventures in the East. You get relatively unknown but powerful and interesting characters, you get more diversity than you can shake a wand at, you get an original plotline for Sauron that would make sense for who and where he is in canon, you get actual suspense because Tolkien's writing flip-flops between "they succeeded and were pivotal in raising a resistance against Sauron in his home territory" and "they failed their duty and became little more than petty tyrants", and since neither character appears later, you can have a dramatic season finale where Sauron discovers and executes one of them. Hell, these guys are always mentioned together, maybe they were a couple!
Tolkien himself says there were noble Easterlings who risked their lives undermining Sauron in a place he held near-absolute power. Where's the series about them?
Some reviewers have mentioned "Hey, now they're in Rhun, you can canonically have Diverse Characters, so why is the Dark Wizard and all the wizardettes white?"
But I imagine we know the answer to that one: if he's an Evil Dark Wizard, you can't have him be a Wizard of Colour, because that would be the stereotype of evil violent minorities. So he has to be white if he's a bad guy.
I don't care about that, just that yeah so far it's been "Rhun, land of the Near to Middle East analogue - all white all the time" (except for when we will get to the Stoors) but Lindon? Downtown LA crowd scenes! I like Ciarán Hinds as an actor so I want to see what he can do with the part, but so far it's just been him mugging about "Bring the Istar to me".
Istar. Gand. Wow, I wonder who the Stranger could *possibly* be?
I honestly think Amazon/Bezos wanted to remake the Lord of the Rings but they couldn't do that, so this is the next best thing as far as they're concerned.
Tabletop roleplaying gamers frequently remark that there is a conceptual flaw in Lord of the Rings: making orcs inherently evil is a problem if you think about it too hard.
"The Last Ringbearer" does the obvious unreliable narrator thing to LoTR, in which the forces of Mordor are the good guys (bringing benefits of technology to the masses), and the idea of orcs being evil is just racism on the part of LotR's protogonists, who of course also have a bunch of other regressive beliefs like wanting to restore a monarchy and give undue political power to the wizard class.
I don't understand why that is a problem either ... aren't orcs just elves twisted with evil magic into something which is a parody of their former selves?
I mean I read silmarillion once (because I was in a hospital as a kid and had nothing else there to read) but my Tolkien lore is very rusty so I might be off here.
And even in the real world you have fairly intelligent mammals who form groups which from human perspective are just evil. The way hyena packs live and how they compete internally is just extremely ruthless. If hyenas were magically made smart enough to talk and follow basic orders (but not smart enough to figure out their way of life is no basis for a large scale sophisticated society) they'd be vicious just like orcs.
Yes, Tolkien did have a problem trying to reconcile that, but if we think of Orcs as less individual independent beings and more of a hive mind organism, then it's less (but not completely) of a problem. But you will always need some kind of bad guys for the good guys to go up against, so it'll be the same problem for the rows of faceless mooks that get mowed down in your average action movie.
But even if you look at the dialogue of Gorbag and Shagrat, what they want to do there if they get free of the Big Boss (Sauron) during the war is not "go home, farm some land, live in peace", it's "get a few of the lads together, find a nice place for some robbing and looting and pillaging like the old days".
They're not inherently Just Misunderstood, either.
I'm not sure if "The Hobbit" counts as textual evidence, but the free goblins there didn't seem to be any better, even though they'd been free of direct influence for a long time. (Millennia?)
That's something I'd love to see explored a bit, actually. Sauron only reclaimed his mantle after the Necromancer identity was driven out. What was life like for orcs and goblins pre- and post-reveal? What groups did he bring to his banner, and how? Where did they get their food from? What are their family units like? Are they like elves in not needing as much food (is that right?)? Their rate of reproduction appears to be higher than elves, but are they also immortal?
It sounds like RoP is going to take a stab at that, but I'm not going to hold out a lot of hope for them doing a serious job.
If we can extrapolate from Gorbag and Shagrat's little chat, the "good old days" for them seemed to have been "no Big Dark Lord turning us into cannon fodder" but instead they set up as independent bandit gangs, their own bosses.
Then Sauron comes back and it's "back to the army, boys!" once more.
‘No, I don’t know,’ said Gorbag’s voice. ‘The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. But I don’t enquire how it’s done. Safest not to. Grr! Those Nazgûl give me the creeps. And they skin the body off you as soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side. But He likes ’em; they’re His favourites nowadays, so it’s no use grumbling. I tell you, it’s no game serving down in the city.’
‘You should try being up here with Shelob for company,’ said Shagrat.
‘I’d like to try somewhere where there’s none of ’em. But the war’s on now, and when that’s over things may be easier.’
‘It’s going well, they say.’
‘They would,’ grunted Gorbag. ‘We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d’you say? – if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.’
‘Ah!’ said Shagrat. ‘Like old times.’"
There may be a hint in the LOTR that Orcs, or some of them. can interbreed with humans:
"But as they drew near to the further gate, Frodo saw a dark ill-kept house behind a thick hedge: the last house in the village. In one of the windows he caught a glimpse of a sallow face with sly, slanting eyes; but it vanished at once.
‘So that’s where that southerner is hiding!’ he thought. ‘He looks more than half like a goblin.’
..."Many of them carried torches, and in the flare I could see their faces. Most of them were ordinary men, rather tall and dark-haired, and grim but not particularly evil-looking. But there were some others that were horrible: man-high, but with goblin-faces, sallow, leering, squint-eyed. Do you know, they reminded me at once of that Southerner at Bree; only he was not so obviously orc-like as most of these were.’
‘I thought of him too,’ said Aragorn. ‘We had many of these half-orcs to deal with at Helm’s Deep. It seems plain now that that Southerner was a spy of Saruman’s; but whether he was working with the Black Riders, or for Saruman alone, I do not know. It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another.’
The other thing I'd love to explore are trolls. Bill, Tom, and Bert not only have Christian names, but Bill has a *family* name!
I suppose the trolls could merely have picked up common names from people they were around at one point, although that implies that trolls breed on their own, and don't require direct creation by Valar or Maiar. And the "family name" could be an epithet - one William might be "William the Hugger" and another might be "William the Biter".
The "pity" thing seems much less problematic to me. We've all seen videos of kitties and bunnies being friends, right? Whether it persists past the next mealtime is another question, but I could see it continuing for a bit as sort of semi-unspoken "Dread Pirate Roberts' cabin boy" situation: "Good night, Bilbo. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely eat you in the morning." And it goes on until something annoys Bill slightly, or one of the others gets hungry, and then it's bonk and into the pot.
Some of you may be thinking: doesn't Dungeons and Dragons inherit that conceptual flaw, in that it assumes that monsters can just be killed without anyone caring, even when those minsters are kind of human like? Yes; thats why it comes up.
Do you think the people responsible for this show have any fragment of a sense of shame left, if they ever had one in the first place?
https://mashable.com/article/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-season-2-stranger-name-hint-gandalf
Read it and weep.
Do you want to see floomp-monster Sauron? Of course you do!
Luxuriate in the televisual treat linked below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPCMOILShUM
Now doesn't that immediately make you think of the Ainulindalë, it is so gorgeous and lofty and majestic and mythical?
Very poor writers with bad imaginations? Someone who needed more plot and couldn't come up with something better?
Is the american elite, willing, able, and aware to get housing to the young before a violent backlash; eventually people who lost their first home in 2008 will reach 40 and have *nothing* to tell their children for why society is worth keeping. If you keep not letting home be build with zoning while mass importing immigrants while populations are still "booming"(they will start busting, *but not yet*, a decade is a long time to be homeless/spend 70% of income on rent while boomer entitlements spending comes due), homelessness and rents will get *worse*.
We have tools at hand, technology exists, assembly line homes exist and look good; id love to own one personally. 3d printing concert seems a little shaky, but I expect you could 3d print domes for homeless/immigrants to improve the situation drastically compared to tents in shitty cities; BUT youd need political will to change zoning laws and fight the real estate hedge funds.
It looks like we're on track in 2024 to sell 2.19 new houses sold per thousand people. Pre-2005, it looks like we were selling 3+ new homes per thousand people. But it doesn't look like a crisis in housing (despite what the MSM headlines may claim).
https://jabberwocking.com/we-should-be-buying-a-million-new-homes-per-year/
Isn't new homes - new people, overly simplistic? What what destroyed homes or hellhole cities people are fleeing from, breakdown of multi generational housing?
If somebody somehow bought a house at age 20 in 2008 and then lost it, they would be 40 in 2028.
*shrug*
You can get a $1.1 million FHA mortgage with a down payment of only 3.5%. Or move somewhere more affordable.
There are promising signs of YIMBYism getting stronger, including lots of actions in California at the state level. But NIMBYism is such a powerful force that it takes an extreme crisis to even get to this point.
But no, you can not reasonably "3d print" homes. Wood is cheap. Concrete is cheap. We aren't talking about bespoke plastic toys here or something.
> But no, you can not reasonably "3d print" homes.
> Concrete is cheap
It is concrete.
assemble line homes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah8PkpiOqPU
3d printed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka1fE4uI4Xc
3d printed dome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWQg4A_N8g8
This tech is real as far as I can tell; but I expect the hard part of the house is plumbing and electrical; so, while I think 3d printing will help the situation, I think you lay down a core house with a bathroom, kitchen and ac, and then domes for "better then tents", solutions to homelessness and mass immigration
... that is, if I believed those with power *wanted* it solved, they want insane people shitting in the street of silicone valley cause white man bad or something, and want gdp to go up even if its all paper.
You won't solve the problem with gimmicks, that's 1969 hippy logic.
Its all about the land and permitting. The cheapest house you can get is a mobile, (I'm guessing) about $150k delivered for 3,000 square feet.
Then its all: Location—Location—Location. You can buy a building lot in Tonopah, Nevada for just a few hundred dollars ... but you're in Tonopah and that's its own special hell. Last time I was in Tonopah, you could rent a 1 bedroom house for $150 a month. But again, that's Tonopah. Martha's Vineyard will cost you a bit more. The state of Alaska has a land lottery, and most of Alaska doesn't have building codes, so you can build a home from pallets and blue tarps ... and there are a lot of homes built from pallets and blue tarps. But you're in rural Alaska, not Manhattan.
I'm guessing your zorkmids don't buy the house you think you deserve.
Only a few people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, the rest of us have to work at it. The only thing stopping you from doing something to improve your earning potential is your own ambition.
I *want* a boxable at 50k somewhere rural, the first time I got a bonus check working a shitty job it all when into bitcoin and it doubled in price before I had to resell it; and unlike literally everyone else my age, I didnt get college debt. Im still doing terribly.
I know its all land, but thats the way its not being fixed.
>The only thing stopping you from doing something to improve your earning potential is your own ambition.
I read hundreds of "antivaxx need not apply" job description during corona, guess who didnt, stubborn as mule me; but I wont be shamed or gaslit about failing out of economy during it.
I no longer care for any "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", 40% of the economy is government spending, theres racial quotas; the winners are now politically connected, boomers have made a mixed *fascist* economy with job seeking thats a humiliation ritual about appeasing a middle manager class who know they do nothing of value.
I may never know what jobs I couldve got without the mandates, resources wasted by government spending, or racism; but so long as its palpably *not* meritocratic, *you* cant declare my failures are my own with confidence.
$7,500 for 1/5th an acre.
www.zillow.com/homedetails/47-Pikake-Rd-Pahoa-HI-96778/409876385_zpid
Its Hawaii. Record low temp is 55F, fishing all year long. Food grows year-round. A small garden and a couple chickens will take care of you. Lots of fishing potential.
Yes, a lava flow could take out your improvements. Or it could be a thousand years off.
Funny, but I was mulling over purchasing my retirement home a dozen miles down the road from that address. The solidified lava flows put me off.
What I meant is that there's no practical, cost-effective way to do that.
Incidentally, I highly recommend reading the Construction Physics substack to learn more about... well the physics of construction. And in particular what the problems are and aren't and why it has resisted most attempts at improved efficiency, including everything the layman might think up in a few minutes.
The home ownership rate is above the historical norm https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Nor is the rate of ownership among younger generations particular unusual https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/
Finally, note that a ton of those people who lost their homes in 2008 essentially put nothing down -- that was part of the problem -- and hence lost no equity.
A ton of the people who lost their homes in 2008 were out there saying: "Gonna Flip Tha' Motha'."
They were just gambling with free money the government mandated that the banks give them. I remember hearing ads on the radio, "No Credit No Problem," and "Income Verification Not Required." ... it was advertising to scammers, look how it turned out.
I dont know how to understand these stats with my experience of no one having hope since 2008
> note that a ton of those people who lost their homes in 2008 essentially put nothing down -- that was part of the problem -- and hence lost no equity.
Emotionally it will matter; and I still want the banks who got bailed out to burn.
> I dont know how to understand these stats with my experience of no one having hope since 2008
On a meta level: approximately 100% of politically active Americans think that approximately 50% of politically active Americans have been brainwashed into feeling deep passionate feelings that have no basis in reality. And I don't see why "no one having hope" has to be different? Which isn't to say that they and you are wrong, just that "everyone I talk to feels a certain way" isn't a reliable guide to truth, not even to truth about the social order.
1. Affordability is a function of interest rates as well as purchase price. Real monthly mortgage payments have been rather steady for decades. They jumped a couple of years ago but history indicates that that wont last https://realestatedecoded.com/real-monthly-mortgage-payment-home-price-index/
2. Prices aren't that high relative to income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_affordability_index
The data for 1 is from 2021…
Since 2021–due to the combination of increased home prices and increased interest rates—the monthly mortgage on the same house has DOUBLED in my low COL area.
Families and friends making the same money I do who bought a house in 2021 are paying $1k per month on the house where I pay $2k, because I bought in 2024. Or they pay the same amount as me with much larger homes/shops.
Yeah, as I said, they jumped a lot the last couple of years. But unless that trend persists -- which is unlikely, given the history and given the reality that ability to pay is a component of demand -- there is very little one can reasonably infer therefrom. Given the current rate of inflation,
in a year or two, you will probably refinance at a much lower rate.
Why do people talk as if the cost of housing is about the cost of the actual physical house?
Physical houses are cheap, it's the land that's expensive. (I mean, building a new house costs a fair bit but they depreciate pretty fast so an unspectacular but liveable 1970s house on a block costs no more than an equivalent empty block.)
Because the average person lives in a low COL area where a $400k property is worth $70k in land and $330k in home.
The average person also buys a property based primarily on the *house*.
Yeah but the average person isn't the one complaining on the internet about housing prices and NIMBYs. Those people are all in UHCOL areas.
A home that is still worth $330K after a few decades is a pretty darn nice home. You can build a pretty decent brand new house for that, and actual buildings depreciate pretty fast.
Youd have to ask the responding to me; I view it as all politics and land control games
There just aren't many levers the federal government has to influence housing supply. Most of the NIMBY policies are controlled at the state and local level, especially zoning. Good luck running a national campaign to replace [your town here] councilor. And the local government is most beholden to the older property owners, which have the most incentive to block new construction and keep property values high.
The federal government could direct Fannie and Freddie to stop underwriting loans to mortgages in areas that don’t meet certain zoning/density requirements. This wouldn’t directly affect policy, but would incentivize existing homeowners towards policies preferred by the feds. Otherwise, homeowners risk losing the ability to sell their home into a pool of buyers flush with government-backed credit.
As someone with broadly YIMBY preferences, I’d be fine with local jurisdictions upholding NIMBY policies as long as those policies aren’t being subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
No violent backlash is necessary, people will just continue to move out of NIMBY places.
.... 68% of utah is federal land
Theres more then enough room for everyone on earth, but they are old political decisions about... control; that stop those realitys playing out.
If housing was a simple fair market, there wouldn't be an issue, ever, honestly housing should be simpler and cheaper then food; but clearly not.
Rural Utah and Rural Nevada have plenty of sub $100k homes. There's a reason.
There's plenty of places in the US where you can buy a perfectly reasonable house for under $100K which are a lot more convenient than the wilds of Utah. The problem is that too many people want to live in San Francisco and not enough people want to live in Cleveland. Just move to Cleveland.
I used to live in a fairly rural area about an hour from a nationally well known city (not Cleveland, but similar enough). My wife and I bought our first house there for about $75k, mostly move in ready (we took out some old carpet and refinished the floors). 3 beds, 2 baths, 1800 sq feet. That was over 15 years ago, but Zillow is still only estimating it at $150k now. Very low crime rate as well.
I aint leaving utah, I'll be homeless and freezing to death at some camp site before I go to the insane outside world.
Utah is a state of great physical beauty and a large population of inordinately decent people. Can’t say I blame you.
> if we satisfied YIMBY demands and built apartments everywhere, I don’t think that would satisfy people looking for “the American dream” in homeownership even if it reduces rental prices.
The difference between failing into renting a small cheap apartment while saving some money and failing into homelessness and probably losing the ability to work does matter for my risk estimations of what I'll aim for.
I dont know what happens when the boomers die while, me being unemployable loses access to low status (living with my parents) housing; even worse wages, more compitation for shit wage jobs and packing into terrible housing?
As threatened, my "Rings of Power" season two rant! They released the first three episodes in one go, which means (if I'm counting correctly) there are five to go. So I watched all three in a lump, and that's why I probably missed a lot. I'll need to go back and re-watch to catch up on parts I skipped, didn't pay attention to, or otherwise ignored.
Okay, first impressions.
To start, the good parts:
(1) The story of Celebrimbor and Annatar makes some sense. I admit, I was worried about this, but they're sticking at least parallel to canon so it's not terrible. I'm not saying it's fantastic, but it's not going to make me want to wrench my eyes out of their sockets. Celebrimbor gets to do things! and speak lines of his own! and the actor gets a chance to do more than stand in the background twiddling his thumbs! They even allow Celebrimbor the honour of inventing stuff all on his little ownsome, like ithildin. Good job there, show.
(2) The music is inoffensive to good. There's one song which is a bit of an earworm, as it's been playing in my head over the past few days. Because it's based on Galadriel's song in Lothlórien, and the Quenya lament there, it's fairly decent lyrically (they do have a language consultant, Carl Hostetter, who probably created most of the vocabulary for this piece). Benjamin Walker apparently sang it for real, and it's not bad at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wlJBa7iKOg
The bad: pretty much everything else. In no particular order:
To start off with, the pacing is still reminiscent of an elderly tree sloth hobbling along on a Zimmer frame. I skipped a *lot* which means I missed such things as the introduction of Narvi, and Aule's beard, I *wanted* to see Narvi. Put that on the re-watch to-do list.
First episode
(1) We did not need an origin story for Halbrand. No, really. Five minutes of a flashback would have done. Instead, the first fifteen to twenty minutes (I didn't count, it felt a lot longer) of the first episode, *after* we get past the recap of "last season" and the credits, is spent on "so how did Sauron turn into Halbrand?"
Apparently, by being a disgrace to semi-divine dark lords everywhere in every medium. We are now up to two Saurons, as the actor briefly playing Sauron isn't Charlie Vickers.
Remember how, in the first episode of season one, we got a scene of what everyone assumed was Sauron, due to the spiky armour etc.? I'm now thinking that must have been Morgoth instead, as we see the crown being borne in by an Orc for Sauron's coronation.
Hold on to your socks, there's a lot going on here. First, Morgoth's crown shouldn't even be in existence in Middle-earth anymore, as it was beaten into a collar for his neck after Tulkas opened up a can of whoop-ass on him. Second, I know it's called the "Iron Crown" but yeesh. It looks more like a teapot trivet as designed by Philippe Starck than something a would-be emperor of the universe would wear (side-note: I have a very nice teapot trivet that I love and it would be much more suitable as a crown than this spiky mess).
Thirdly, this Sauron looks, speaks, and acts like a third-rate politician on the stump trying to win over undecided voters. And the Orcs are pretty much decided they don't like him, as one of them tries an assassination attempt. Here we get some pointless brutality, as this Sauron kills the would-be assassin very violently (shoving a dagger into his eye) and gorily. Which is honestly just "ooh violence" for the sake of it, in line with their publicity that this season would be darker and grittier and so on.
Anyways, to make this much shorter than the show did, Sauron kneels before Adar to be coronated (and that's a *huge* misunderstanding of Sauron's character because he's not kneeling before no-one, he'd do a Napoleon and crown himself). Adar then stabbity-stabbitys him with the inverted, spiky crown in the back, and the Orcs do a re-enactment of the Ides of March. This kills Sauron who, in a very tired and tiresome jumpscare, then explodes with light and turns Forodwaith into an icy wilderness (but wasn't it *already* an icy waste due to Morgoth? yeah, shut up).
But we don't stop there, no sir! What Sauron *also* does is turn into the Venom symbiote. His black blood (I swear, I am not making any of this up) drip-drips down cracks in the stone into the caverns below and over some unspecified period (supposed to be centuries or even longer, which doesn't match up with the timeline of events what have happened in the first season, but as we know this show don't need no stinkin' timelines) he/it/however you call a pool of black ooze eats rats and bugs and eventually slithers/crawls its way up and out.
And thereupon flumps out of a cave on the mountain side then slides down that slippery slope until it/he/whatever comes to rest on a cart track. Whereupon he/it/whatever is run over by a passing peasant woman in a wagon, and he/it/whatever then clambers/slithers up the wheel, into the wagon, and eats the woman.
Then out steps Halbrand, transformed into a human from a floomp-monster by means of nom-nomming a mortal.
As Eru Iluvatar is my witness, this is what the show did.
I haven't the heart to trudge on through the rest of this, suffice it to say Halbrand ends up with a bunch of fleeing humans, they get on a boat, the boat is attacked by a sea monster, and he grabs the royal sigil of the Southlands king (you remember that from season one) off someone and that sets us up for the raft in the middle of the ocean that rescues Galadriel when she tries long-distance ocean swimming back home.
I'm stopping here because there is too much going on and yet nothing happens.
I'm only see s2e1 so far, and I'm not particularly eager to watch more just yet. I'm still processing the first 20 minutes or so, let alone the rest of the episode. The writers were pretty severely handicapped by the goal of showing how Sauron got on the boat in the first place in the mindset we say in Season 1, when all that was set up with a goal of making a shiny mystery box and subordinating trivial matters like "making sense" and "being vaguely true to source material", and what they came up with was absurd. Various problems I had with it:
1. Sauron gives the worst pep talk in the history of management.
2. I'm pretty sure Sauron at the start of the Second Age could handle a few hundred orcs. Not just in personal combat: remember that Tolkien's on the record that the force of Sauron's personality is strong enough that anyone short of Gandalf (explicitly including Elrond and Galadriel) would have been unable to withhold the ring over to him in a face-to-face battle of wills.
3. So, Sauron is actually the thing that killed Tasha Yar in ST:TNG?
4. More "I'm 14 and this is deep" material from the refugee leader who gave Sauron the little pep talk on the road.
5. So, where did the Southlanders think they were going in the ship? The only things in that direction are Valinor (explicitly forbidden to Men and warded against unwelcome visitors) and Numenor (who in RoP would be unhappy with refugees coming to take their jobs). A ship of Southlander refugees should have been going up or down the coast, not West across the sea.
I came up with a better (although still flawed) explanation. So, in the Silmarillion, Sauron is captured at the end of the War of Wrath. Sauron begs for mercy from Eönwë, Manwë's herald and the Maia leading the Host of Valinor. Eönwë declines to judge Sauron since he's Sauron's equal and doesn't have authority to condemn or pardon him, instead commanding him return to Valinor to be judged directly by the Valar. Sauron's pride gets the better of him, and he escapes and eventually returns to his evil ways.
If you actually follow canon as far as it goes, then Sauron actually has a plausible reason to be heading towards Valinor. If he actually decides to face judgement after some time in hiding (the details of this need work to not come off as stupid), then charming and misleading some travelers into chartering a ship to Valinor would be the sort of thing he'd be apt to do. And hitting the wards around Valinor would be a better reason for the shipwreck than an apparently random sea monster attack.
I'm reading about the Texas Revolution for the first time, and one really striking thing is how *small* the number of fighters involved was. It seems like the basic TLDR was "Mexico did not have enough state capacity to exert control over its northern territories".
California was overthrown with like 50.
The United States also had problems controlling the West. It wasn’t really until the invention of the Colt revolver that they were able to do so.
And/or railroads and the telegraph. I hadn't heard the Colt theory before, but expanding transportation and communication was a very big deal for expanding west. Prior to that there was better contact to the west coast cities than interior towns, even going all the way around South America by boat. Once transportation was in place, the rest of society and civilization could follow.
Trains don’t protect settlers from deadly Comanche raids. Before the colt revolver, the militias had lengthy reload times that couldn’t do enough damage before the Comanches closed in on their horses. Once the revolvers could get off multiple shots, those tactics didn’t work anymore.
How common were Comanche raids, and over how much of the west? That sounds like a local problem in certain areas, not something that prevented the entire west from being settled.
It wasn't a "local problem". There were vast sections of the United States that settlers couldn't live safely.
Cortez also coordinated locals who hated the Aztecs, he didn't conquer Mexico with a few hundred guys.
A few thousand is probably a quite low estimate for the Norman forces at Hastings. And organizing even a few thousand fighting men was quite an exercise of state power in 1066. The ducal forces under William had defeated the household troops of the King of France and various nearby French dukes in the past. The point being that while the Norman forces were small in an absolute sense, they were equivalent to the mobilized army of powerful kingdoms like France or England.
I'm hosting a forecasting & prediction markets meetup in Washington, DC on Thursday, September 26th. If you're in the area and interested in predicting the future, or know anyone who is, please RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/zpObY6EmiQEkgpcJB6Aw
My hope is that this will be the first of a larger Forecasting Meetup Network whose mission is to positively influence humanity's ability to predict the future. We're looking for funding and sponsorship - see our project on Manifund: https://manifund.org/projects/forecasting-meetup-network---washington-dc-pilot-4-meetups
How do you plan to solve these problems? https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-arent-popular/
My subconscious delivered me a surprisingly fleshed-out fantasy setting last night:
https://brendansblatherings.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-fantasy-setting-i-literally-dreamed.html
I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do with it. Probably nothing, but I might turn it into an AI "lorebook" so anyone who wants to explore this world can do so. (I'd have to invent names for stuff, though. Can't come up with *everything* in my sleep.)
Someone dear to me was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease about a year ago. I would appreciate any sort of information about interventions.
The disease is progressing very slowly and he has tremors on one side, trouble sleeping, and sensitivity to heat. No change in gait or walking speed and treatment with carbidopa/levodopa has been positive for him.
We did confirm based on 23andMe that he does not carry the GBA-1 variant responsible for Gaucher's disease, although I don't specifically know how accurate this is and whether we should retest using another service.
I have two friends who went through the Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) treatment. Both hated it initially. They do half of the brain, wait six plus months, and do the other half. It took about six months of "tuning" before each felt like the first half was successful. Then they did the other half and went through the tuning process again. After the tedious and frustrating process of tuning, they both said the difference is night and day.
If you're in the US there's a big clinical trials site you can go to to see what's being tried. (But learn about how trials work -- Phase 1 trials are a huge long shot, Phase 2 less so but not ideal, you want Phase 3 if possible. Also some things being tried just are not promising. )
Also, look at forums for people with Parkinson's. On all forums of any size there are some highly educated people with the illness who can give you good info about current treatments, promising trials, etc.
Sorry to hear that.
I hope other have more useful comments; the only thing I can add is that weirdly, it turns out that broad beans (fava beans) contain significant quantities of levodopa, and there is a small amount of evidence that consumption is beneficial to parkinsons patients (although,presumably, only if they aren't already taking levodopa) and that eating large amounts in addition to medical levodopa/carbodopa can result in overdose. Note that a small number of people react badly to large quantities of broad beans (favism), although probably you would already know if you did. I'm not sure how useful this is unless for some reason levodopa is not obtainable.
There is a certain amount of speculation about benefits of broad beans for other mental health conditions, for which I am not aware of any useful evidence.
See also, eg, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6875167/
A cautionary tale wrt "The Compounding Loophole".
The most promising drug to enhance longevity is rapamycin (it works in all tested preclinical models). Recently (a week or two ago) results were published from a decent-sized trial attempting to assess anti-aging effects in humans. Early on they choose to use compounded rapamycin instead of regular pills. Halfway through they discover that what goes out into the blood is about 3.5x lower using the compounded version. Instead of two groups getting 5 or 10mg (a reasonable dose, alhough built on guesswork and hope) of rapamycin per week, as intended, the included subjects got (on average) around 1.5 or 3mg (likely too low, making interpretation of negative results difficult)
Dont mess with the coating kids!
https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.08.12.24311432
https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.08.21.24312372
I was clicking through to try to see the scientific / medical reasoning around the dosage, but sadly, it was more focused on the biovailability and didn't go into it.
Because every "anti-aging" mg / kg rapamycin dose I've been able to elicit from anti-aging people is always far, far below the mouse study mg / kg doses, and I wonder what reasoning or justification they're using to arrive at their numbers, particularly given the potential for impaired healing and higher blood glucose at higher rapamycin doses.
EDIT - indeed, following the citation tree, the Mannick studies all say things like:
"Safety was a key concern when designing this trial. Therefore, very low daily or intermittent doses of everolimus were used in the vaccination trial (1/6–1/20th lower than the approved doses in transplant and oncology patients) that were predicted to minimize adverse events and to lower rather than completely inhibit mTORC1 activity."
And in the Kraig study:
"In contrast to the subjects in the above trials, who tolerated everolimus or BEZ235 quite well, a small, 8-week long randomized clinical trial of 25 older adults between 70 and 95 years of age treated with 1 mg/day of rapamycin experienced more side effects than placebo including a small increase in glycated hemoglobin (within-group p=0.03), and a 40% rise in triglyceride levels (within-group p=0.05)"
So they're optimizing for minimizing side effects, and even at a low 1mg / day, we're seeing side effects in a decent chunk of people.
But the mouse studies range from 1mg/kg to 50mg / kg! Vastly higher doses.
I recently read Philps Payson O'Brien's book 'How the War was Won' after reading the recent review on here. It was great, and it got me thinking about how its lessons apply to a potential future world war (China vs US+Asian Allies). Applying the lessons of the book made me think that the US retains major advantages in such a conflict, which I wrote about here: https://medium.com/@bobert93/america-retains-major-advantages-in-a-future-war-with-china-705bffa23459
Here's what I don't understand. Everyone is worried about engaging Russia too directly in Ukraine because Russia is a nuclear power and might escalate to a nuclear war.
But everyone seems to assume that the US and China could go to war directly without worrying too much about the nuclear case. Why?
Russia needs to threaten a nuclear strike because it cannot win against the West - even excluding the US. If Russia were invaded, it cannot hold. Both the US and China would most likely be fighting a limited war (over Taiwan, for instance) and not be looking at an existential crisis. Should the war escalate and involve threats to home territory, I would put all bets off on whether a nuke might be used.
It comes down to the fact that China has an official 2nd strike nuclear policy (it says it would not strike first, only ever in retaliation) and has no deployed nuclear warheads, where-as Russia has 1710 deployed warheads.
China keeps its warheads in reserve. It maintains a drastically smaller arsenal than the US (for now), so it would be highly unlike to escalate to a nuclear conflict.
https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/
That said, sure nuclear weapons would effect the 'end game' of a conflict. If the US was threatening to invade Bejing for example then perhaps CCP would rather escalate than capitulate. So there would always have to be some negotiated solution, it wouldn't end with unconditional surrender.
I wonder whether distance is really a useful defence against a potential adversary that ships you millions of TEU per month. A lot of nasty surprises could be pre-positioned before a blockade kicks in.
Are you suggesting that China ships a bunch of bombs to the US, hopes they don't get discovered early, and then blows up random warehouses when the war starts?
Certainly not that they would bother to do that for a bunch of random warehouses. But more than dumb bombs could be shipped. Most obviously,drones or autonomous missile lanuchers.
The US actually takes this into account to some extent, in that the case of someone shipping a nuke is, I read somewhere, covered by probing containers with a neutron source. The question is whether anything short of a nuke would be useful to ship.
If you assume good opsec (which is not a given), then detection would have to happen due to random inspections, which are at a relatively low rate. There is therefore some quantity of stuff that could be shipped before detection probability becomes significant.
What about electronics that are either designed to fail at a certain time in the future (eg. Known short mean time to failure) or electronics with a built in backdoor Killswitch in anything that's connected to the Internet.
It would be difficult to conceal either with so many eyes looking, but if it was done just before a set date, or targeted at very specific purchasers, it could have an outsized impact.
Pre-positioned yes. This could affect the opening of the conflict, but would be the kind of asymmetric advantage that would disapear when the gloves come off. There would be no Chinese commercial shipping East of Japan pretty quickly.
Peter Zeihan (who has a tendency to round generously, but does bring up a lot of good points) thinks that in the case of war, the US could prevent oil from the Middle East from reaching China with basically a handful of destroyers, and that, plus some interference with some other goods such as fertilizers, would be enough to throw China into a famine of epic proportions. Sounds somewhat plausible to me, and a lot smarter than going face-to-face with a couple million Chinese soldiers.
I have no idea on the situation of fertiliser in China. My priors would be that Zeihan is a total spoofer. Let’s check.
A quick investigation shows me that the largest producer in the world is Russia. A quick glance at a map assures me that Russia has a land border with China. China itself is the 3rd largest producer in the world.
Maybe Zeihan has some other insights I’m missing but that’s where I am now.
Russia currently has little infrastructure in place to transport things overland to China, though they are working on improving it. Just because a land border exists doesn't mean you have high capacity infrastructure going across it. And that goes double when the area is mostly vast near-uninhabited deserts, and the relevant parts of the countries are on opposite sides of the continent.
For instance, Russia depends on rail transport, and back in the 19th century the Tzars made a decision to make Russian RR gauges different from the rest of Europe — to prevent invaders from using their own RR stock on Russian rails. This has continued to the present day, and it's my understanding that trains from Russia to China have to unload their cargo at the border, schlep it across the border and reload it on to the Chinese trains. Maybe containers on flatbeds would obviate this problem, but looking at pics of how Russia moves materials towards Ukraine, it doesn't look like they've adopted this technology.
Changing trains because of gauge issues is not unheard of and if the Chinese needed to build out the infrastructure even in Russia, with permission, they could.
What’s also missing in the replies is proof that China would be in fertiliser deficit anyway since it’s a major producer, that if it was in some kind of deficit (unproven) it couldn’t redeploy inputs to fertiliser production.
I’m not saying I know, but with the facts I have gathered a a simple request to chatGPT, I’m doubtful.
And beyond that there are other land borders, other producers and the idea that the entire world will stop supplying to China or agree to a sea blockade makes no sense.
We‘ve see how hard it is to blockade Russia, yet at the beginning of the conflict people were crowing about the coming destruction of the Russian economy.
It did enter a recession in 2022 but has grown robustly since because other countries have decided, unlike Germany, to not sacrifice their own economy.
Some quick research says China imports around 30-35% of the food it consumes. Even if fertilizer is not an issue, they've got other problems if they cannot import, mostly over water. I doubt SE Asia has a big enough surplus to supply that need, and nobody else with a land border and potential surplus seems to be friendly in an East v West war.
>If the US deliberately caused a mass famine in China, I think that would be sufficient cause for China to launch the nukes
Only if they're completely insane. Launching a nuke to stop a blockade is like using a chainsaw to fix a hangnail. You go from bad to much, much worse.
Right. As with many wars it will come down to the West's willingness to fight rather than the West's ability to fight.
Also note that China is pretty good at propaganda and the West is incredibly bad at resisting propaganda. If China decides to invade Taiwan then it will take about six seconds to convince the Left that defending Taiwan is actually Western Imperialism and also racism, and there will be enormous anti-war protests within every western capital.
> Also note that China is pretty good at propaganda and the West is incredibly bad at resisting propaganda.
The west - or rather the US - is so good at producing propaganda that it’s convinced people half a world away that Taiwan - which has no treaty with the US or West - has to be defended at all costs.
> Taiwan - which has no treaty with the US or West
Taiwan is only home to TSMC, _the_ most important supplier of modern microchips, which are an essential component in Western society and industry. No big deal if their fabs are destroyed, or become controlled by China, right?
This is (at least) the second time in this thread [1] that you're trying to twist a policy that's clearly _not_ in the West's interest as being in the West's interest. I wonder why that is.
[1] Here's that other comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-345/comment/67591163
Wow, I thought they had fabs all over the world, but they don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Facilities
They're building one in Phoenix, AZ, and another in Japan. But all of the production apparently is currently in Taiwan.
Doubt it. The Left is in favor of supporting Ukraine against Russia. The Left for whatever reason absolutley loves Islam(probably because they see it as brown people religion) which makes them suspectible to pro-Palestine propaganda in contrast to pro-Israel propaganda. Its absolutley hilarious to watch both groups shouting we are the real victims here. But that sympathy doesn't extend to China. Sure there will be some tankies here and there who support China(just like Russia) but it will be very easy for the the Center-Left establishment to rally their side against China.
The idea that sticking up for Palestinians (as in their human rights and statehood) is downstream of some left-wing affinity for Islam specifically... is some rather odd theory of mind.
It's part of a general anti-colonial sentiment, especially amplified for American leftists by the extent of support given by the US to Israel. Opposition to the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't driven by a love of Islam, either.
Otherwise, I agree with you. The broad American centre-left being instinctively and incuriously on the side of the underdog explains Ukraine (despite the latter being its own version of state-aligned Orthodox Christian at this point) and predicts that faction's support for Taiwan against China. The socialist left will have its misgivings, of course. I still remember that abortive letter by 30-odd Congressional progressives in June '22, I think? urging diplomacy with Russia.
I don't think it's "opposed the Iraq War and the Gaza War" that makes it seem like the left loves Islam, but more things like "gets mad with rage at vague religious freedom laws that *might* possibly protect Christian cake-bakers, and opposes bans on literal Sharia Law as racist". I suppose this might not mean "really loves Muslims" but rather "really hates Christians, hates Jews, and hates scientific atheists who apply science even when it gets the politically wrong results, but has no problem with Muslims", but in practical terms not involving Asians the distinction doesn't seem very meaningful.
And as for your remarks about Democrats and Muslims, as a committed Libtard, I see the real problem is that Republicans don’t understand how freedom works anymore. Most Democrats don’t like or dislike Islam. They just want to live in a free country where people are allowed to choose to worship as they please.
OTOH Republicans are promoting an overtly Christianist agenda. They want to delete the Establishment Clause from the Constitution, change our laws to follow pseudo-biblical examples (imposing the Christianist version of Shariah Law), and force the teaching of so-called Christian principles in schools. And after January 6th most Lefties see Republicans as being a more immediate threat to our Republic than Hamas and Hezbollah are.
Does "worship as they please" include material expressions of religious faith that occur outside of churches? Like, say, decorating cakes?
Im not an American but this seems like a fantasy believed by a tiny fragment of Republican voters.
Well, an influential clique on the American Left are quite pro-Russian. I'm thinking of Chomsky and Greenwald and their ilk. But as I Leftie, I consider them to be crypto-Righties.
And the Left is by no means united in their attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians. That notorious communist Joe Biden has continued to send aid to Netanyahu (although that might be changing). And Harris has affirmed Israel's right to defend itself. Polling has shown that older Lefties remember when Israel was the underdog in the first three Arab-Israeli conflicts, and are generally sympathetic to Israel. Younger lefties who grew up post Camp David have only been exposed to Palestinians getting the short end of the stick.
https://jabberwocking.com/israel-through-young-and-old-eyes/
>Also note that China is pretty good at propaganda and the West is incredibly bad at resisting propaganda. If China decides to invade Taiwan then it will take about six seconds to convince the Left that defending Taiwan is actually Western Imperialism and also racism, and there will be enormous anti-war protests within every western capital.
All too plausible!
In the _current_ situation, the silence from the Left about the PRC's basically colonial policies in Tibet are deafening.
> In the _current_ situation, the silence from the Left about the PRC's basically colonial policies in Tibet are deafening.
That's old news. Nowadays the big issue is Xinjiang, which everyone has been yelling equally impotently about.
>That's old news.
Many Thanks! It is a continuing process. The New York Times, to its credit, had a recent article about the PRC relocating people into Tibet in disputed areas. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/10/world/asia/china-border-villages.html
>China’s relocation policy is also a form of social engineering, designed to assimilate minority groups like the Tibetans into the mainstream. Tibetans, who are largely Buddhist, have historically resisted the Communist Party’s intrusive controls on their religion and way of life.
>Images from the villages suggest that religious life is largely absent. Buddhist monasteries and temples are seemingly nowhere to be found. Instead, national flags and portraits of Mr. Xi are everywhere, on light poles, living room walls and balcony railings.
Note that this is _current_, 2020s, not 1950s.
Re
>Nowadays the big issue is Xinjiang, which everyone has been yelling equally impotently about.
It does get some coverage, but _way_ less than e.g. Hamas or than the PRC's maritime claims.
If everyone in Palestine starved, the US would be stuck to a state that had actually committed the g-word... problems related to maintenance of global influence on a similar scale would also be created if the break with Eastern Europe lasted for a couple generations. The state department is not known for its humanitarian interests.
That wouldn't be the G word, it would just be the natural consequence of attacking an enemy who has the capability of cutting you off from the world, while _also_ somehow failing to grow enough food to support your population within your own borders.
If Gaza wants to make war against its neighbours then it had better shrink its population to what it can agriculturally support.
Actually withholding food and aid is in fact a violation of the convention, it doesn’t matter who attacked who first. Not that Oct 7 was the start of anything.
Some amount of fighting on both sides is usually present in other, less hypothetical cases as well.
You can't respond to a hostage situation by killing all the hostages. That is a defeat for the hostage-takers, but not a victory for us.
The hostage-takers always have the power to ensure that there will be no "victory" for you, on the terms you are implying. In which case, defeating them is A: the best that you can do and B: absolutely imperative.
And you don't have to wait until the hostage-takers stop stalling for time and come out from behind their human shields.
Thanks for this analysis.
The youtuber "caspian report" thinks, that the 3-gorges-dam would be the most valuable strategic target. Also that among china's top priorities in the war would be to secure an island from the chain surrounding it (taiwan probably) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icSfjyIm_5w
I am not sure how well the analysis from "caspian report" is. So I'd like to ask your perspective on the 3-gorges-dam, so I can update my priors.
I don't know what would be the most effective areas to target. It might be chip fabs, certain missile or aircraft manufacturing facilities, some kind of raw material bottleneck, or something else entirely. But targets like the Three Gorges Dam are a good example of the kind of targets that precision weapons make vulnerable.
Striking large hydroelectric damns, fossil power plants, large transformers etc. could cripple the power grid, grinding production in other sectors to a halt.
Funnily enough, I did do my Master's dissertation on dams, but it was on the economics of dams in Africa, so it's not really relevant.
Now I'm disappointed I never did a dam Master's dissertation.
In terms of casualties, blowing up the Three Gorges Dam would be equivalent to using nuclear weapons. It wouldn't be unreasonable to treat it as an escalation to nuclear war.
True, the Three Gorges Dam probably wouldn't be a target unless things got really, really bad. Same is true of nuclear power plants. Easy enough to take out, but so dangerous that they'd probably amoung the last things to be hit. We see this in Ukraine. Russia targets Ukraine's grid, but avoids nuclear plants.
Still, it's a vulnerability should it get to that stage. The US also has a far larger nuclear arsenal, so China unlikely to fire first.
>In a global conflict, the US could blockade China and interdict or sink almost all its sea-bound imports. US submarines could sink Chinese shipping beyond the first island chain, whilst air power on the first island chain, as well as in Diego Garcia and Australia, would make it near-impossible for merchant shipping to make it through
China is a huge part of the global economy, including being the world's largest trading nation and world's largest manufacturer. Doing this would plunge both the US & the broader world into Great Depression 2.0, if not worse. It would be a small technological Dark Ages as common consumer goods manufactured there now suddenly disappear from the market. I'm very skeptical that the US could keep up a blockade of China against global pressure- after all, the rest of the world would rightly blame America for their sudden 30-50% unemployment rates, massive inflation, etc. When push comes to shove Europe and South America and so on do not really care that much about Taiwan, but they do care about being cut off from their single largest trading partner. New politicians would be elected on a platform of 'make the US stop destroying our economy'. The US cannot indefinitely cut off China and keep the global economy tanked for a long period of time. (Hell, other countries might threaten to invade the US to make us stop!) The real 'pariah' here would be US, not China.
That's without even getting into what would happen to US public opinion. America thinks losing 4500 soldiers in the Iraq war was some kind of giant catastrophe. Does the American voting public have the stomach for prolonged war with vastly higher casualties, plus a second Great Depression, for years on end? Not a chance.
I agree that the US theoretically could do what you're saying, but it's completely unrealistic in practice
> Doing this would plunge both the US & the broader world into Great Depression 2.0, if not worse
That's already a sunk cost as soon as the war starts.
This. Even if the world just stood and watched as China gobbled up Taiwan, that would by itself mean the end of the globalized economy, since it would mean that conquests "just-because" are now acceptable again. Why bother investing abroad if there's no guarantee at all that that country you're investing in will still be there next year? How can you make yourself dependent on complex supply chains that involve on a dozen countries, when every 2-bit dictator can disrupt them with impunity?
Taiwan was part of China before the civil war between the nationalists and communists, and the population is almost entirely ethnic Chinese. It's not exactly the same as Germany conquering Poland in 1939.
China historically considered Taiwan to be a backwater province and paid little attention to it. Japan seized full control of the island in 1895 and retained it for the next 50 years. Taiwan and mainland China were only technically united for the next four years, until the Communists took over the mainland.
My point is that the people on the island and on the mainland have been diverging for over 100 years.
Umm, modern Western Poland was literally part of Germany before it got partitioned after WWI, and Taiwan has been separate for a much longer period (75 years) than Germany from [parts of] Poland (20 years).
Sure, the area around Danzig/Gdansk in Prussia and parts of Silesia had been German prior to the post-WWI era. But Germany annexed Polish territory as far east as the Bug River, and less than 10% of the population of the occupied territory were ethnic Germans. Taiwan meanwhile is 95%+ ethnic Han Chinese, and was part of China since at least the late 17th century. Minus the decades it was occupied by the Japanese, I suppose.
A US-China war would be massively disruptive to the global economic system, no doubt about it.
I think, though, that your argument is very similar to that of Norman Angell prior to the First World War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
He argued that the economic cost of starting a world war would be so great that no side would ever do it, in a world of inter-linked global trading paterns. He was kind of right - it would be stupid to start such a war. But start it did in 1914. And then again 25 years later we had another one.
In WWI, neutral countries (e.g. Argentina) would have happily sold Germany their food exports, but Britain ruled the seas, and Germans starved. That was even though the Netherlands was available as a neutral entrance for trade.
When push comes to shove, American allies would have to fall in line and accept a US blockade, even if they remain neutral.
I think a war wouldn't instantly escalate to a gloves-off total war, but if a conflict over Taiwan was prolonged and involved large initial strikes on US bases (angering US public opinion much like Pearl Harbour), it could come to that. A US blockade of China might come about after a prolonged Chinese blockage of Taiwan after a failed invasion attempt bogs down. Attempting to starve out the Chinese is barbaric, but if China attempts to starve out Taiwan, it might seem like a necessary response.
Likewise, it was stupid for Russia to invade Ukraine, and yet here we are.
The difference between the Angell argument and a future China blockade is that all of the countries experiencing the economic pain & starvation of WW1 were also combatants in said war. They couldn't easily, like, tap out. In my example of a future US-China war and blockade, none of Europe would be a combatant in that war (maybe the UK some), and their interest in Taiwanese democracy is probably very theoretical. They wouldn't be willing to pay the economic cost for a war that doesn't really concern them. That's why the Angell analogy doesn't work.
>American allies would have to fall in line
You can't make sweeping generalizations like this about democracies, because their governments and policies can change. Even if say Macron, Starmer & Scholz are the types who'd basically fall in line now, in the Great Depression 2.0 they'd be replaced by radical populists on a 'stop America destroying our economy' platform
He's saying they would have to fall in line because the US Navy has no peer, and if the US Navy says no ships are going to China, then there is nothing any European country can do about it.
After seeing what even some poorly equipped Houthis managed to do, it seems insane to think that the US Navy couldn't stop trade if it wanted to.
>That was even though the Netherlands was available as a neutral entrance for trade.
Thanks to the Doctrine of Continuous Voyage, the British blockade also intercepted any contraband that appeared to be on the way to Germany by way of neutral ports. The Netherlands and Denmark experienced fairly serious food shortages during WW1, albeit not quite as severe as Germany's Turnip Winter.
> Europe and South America
> The US cannot indefinitely cut off China and keep the global economy tanked for a long period of time.
Why not? Suppose america wants to stop being world police and were to get lazier and lazier about preventing pirates in the middle east, europe maybe extremely interested in keeping that trade route open for trade with china; but what pressure over america does europe have to force them(me) to start another war in the middle east?
If you check the news, well, yes america is probably going to pull away from the middle east this hurts europes trade with china, and I dont think anyone can plausibly put forward a reason why Europe gets a say?
What matters is probably japan and indias opinion on china on if america gets to make china blockaid; and given japans trade deal with unfavorable terms wants to be Americas first vassal in a post-world-police de-golbalized, world.
> what pressure over america does europe have to force them(me) to start another war in the middle east?
What a strange comment. Europe hasn’t benefitted from any of the Middle Eastern wars and the push for those wars does not come from any European state. I’m not including Israel in Europe. Of course the U.K. and some others will poodle along in support most times.
Europe has very much benefited from america killing pirates in the middle east since the Barbary wars and rebuilding it after europes suicide attempt often called "the world wars".
I suggest you get your leaders to start building some ships, its not impossible for Europe to policing the water ways it depends on, and never allow pirate nations to form; but I dont expect the leadership that dismantled Germans nuclear power plants to have that wisdom.
Dont be a fish who doesn't believe in water
While US involvement in the Barbary wars was nice for a tiny nation of 5 million or so, it wasn’t necessary.
I definitely agree that Europe needs some ships. The post cold war alliance has been a disaster, nevertheless. I’m not sure what is going on with Germany either, but Germany isn’t Europe. France is 70% nuclear.
Will a hyper competent france alone be able to carry all of them forward with drone and smart phone enabled pirates?
France is a bit of of the odd one out with them maintaining military, humans(I think they are among the few who have a slow baby boom), so france is wiser then the rest of europe; its in theory possible, but they also will be the least interested in it; they can trivially use "the long way" and be close to america; Im sure french wine can be traded for whatever america or south america manages to make in a de-globalizing world giving France allot more options.
The original no fly zone was a UN authorization, so different from Iraq.
Nothing would have happened if the US disagreed. Of course as usual with these kind of wars not only did Europe not benefit, it was a long term disaster for Europe. And Libya, for that matter.
Remember when France wasn’t fully Atlanticist, and the US had to rename French fries?
Remember when someone redefined the "no fly zone" over Libya into a "provide close air support to one faction of the Libyan civil war" zone. Who was that again? Oh, yes, the French. The United States was stupid enough to follow their lead on that.
I'm still not clear on what the French hoped to get out of that. As you say, what actually happened brought no benefit to anyone. But someone in Paris sure thought it would.
Shipping is much cheaper than overland transport. In practice, nearly all trade with China has to be done by sea.
> And none of the Middle Eastern countries have a beef with China so it’s unclear why they would block Chinese trade if not for the US.
The Uyghurs are Muslim, Muslim pirates believe they are doing god's work, isis or whatever the warlords call themselves this year will just need a decade owning some ships and they will restart an old problem.
> The Uyghurs are Muslim
Muslim countries don’t really care about the Uyghurs, and ISIS wants to restore the caliphate, which is a war against Europe and Muslim countries. The piracy issue isn’t something that will have a meaningful effect on world trade and local actors, including the gulf states, Russia, Turkey. Europe and so on have resources to deal with it.
There is a de-facto racial heirarchy in Islam. Arab issues are the issues of all Muslims. Non-Arab issues are not the issue of all Muslims. You will see for example a lot of Indonesians protesting against Israel due to Gaza. But not one will protest against India due to Kashmir. Basically the closer you are to Mecca, the more support you will get. Afghans got a lot of support against the Soviets (but not as much as the Palestinians did). But no one has ever head of the Moros fighting against the Philippines.
So no, Arab tribals are not going to blow up ships passing by them because of the Uyghurs(but some Uyghurs might blow up some Chinese building if China becomes more close to Israel). Funny how it all works.
> But no one has ever head of the Moros fighting against the Philippines.
I have, but only as a bit of amusing trivia because they have the acronym MILF
There is no pan-Muslim solidarity that will cause Muslims in Yemen, or anywhere else, to rally to the defense of e.g. oppressed Uyghurs. There isn't even a pan-Arab-Muslim solidarity that will cause Arab Muslims in Not Palestine to rally to the defense of oppressed Palestinians. The only reason any of them are doing anything more than talk is, A: Israel is very conspicuously involved and pan-Arab antisemitism is a thing and B: they owe Iran big time and Iran is calling in the favor. The Arabs who don't owe anything to Iran, aren't doing anything about Israel/Palestine.
And they won't do anything about China/Uyghur either.
Great read, thanks for sharing. Really drove the point home about the geostrategic advantages that the US has built up over decades in terms of bases on foreign soil and layers upon layers of alliances.
Im curious what you think about these two points:
> In a global conflict, the US could blockade China and interdict or sink almost all its sea-bound imports. US submarines could sink Chinese shipping beyond the first island chain, whilst air power on the first island chain, as well as in Diego Garcia and Australia, would make it near-impossible for merchant shipping to make it through.
How do you think this would square with China's greater shipbuilding capacity? (https://www.csis.org/analysis/threat-chinas-shipbuilding-empire) I assume it's cheaper and faster to destroy things, but I wonder if that's enough given the disparity in construction costs.
> China does not have this option to nearly the same extent, as it will lose access to global trade due to blockade, and be a pariah among Western democracies for invading Taiwan.
I'm a bit pessimistic about this. Russian gas is still being purchased by European states despite the war in Ukraine: "EU statistics and Reuters calculations show the rise in LNG has pushed the share of Russian gas in EU supply back up to around 15% after pipeline imports from Gazprom (GAZP.MM), opens new tab had plunged since the war to 8.7% from 37% of EU gas supply." (source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/new-west-east-route-keeps-europe-hooked-russian-gas-2024-04-03/). I can very well see China being a pariah for invading Taiwan, but still being done business with by neutral powers. Worse, I think less US-aligned powers like Brazil would capitalize on the war and try to extract good deals from China, thus softly aligning itself with China. Im not sure how India would react given its present animosity towards China.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
China does have a far, far, far greater shipbuilidng capacity than the US. This is one the US's key weaknesses Vs China. However, US allies (South Korea and Japan) build slighty more ships than China does, so a China Vs the collective West conflict is somewhat even on shipbuilding. Even if South Korea stays neutral, the US could still purchase large amounts of ships from it. In the early years of WW2 prior to lend-lease or US entry to the war, the British purchased $1,200,000,000 worth of aircraft from the US, with expected deliveries being 500 aircraft per month. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Purchasing_Commission#:~:text=By%20December%201940%20British%20cash,The%20aircraft%20were%20supplied%20unarmed. That's 6000 aircraft per year, which is similar to German total German aircraft production in 1940 (7,800) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II. So the UK was planning to purchase almost as many aircraft as Germany could make from the US whilst the US remained neutral.
In terms of 'could China mitigate the loss of shipping to US airpower and submarines with its massive shipbuilding capacity', the answer is no. As you say, destroying stuff is a lot easier than making it. Chinese shipyards can build a bulk carrier for $23.5 million. This is cheap for a 65,000 tonne ship. Source: https://www.shiphub.co/chinese-shipyards-slash-prices-on-new-ships/ You'd only have to drop a few JDAMs on one to take it out of action. A 2000-pound JDAM gravity bomb with sensors to hit moving ships has a 30 km range (up to 80 km with a glide package) and costs around $75,000. Source: https://austinvernon.site/blog/peerwareconomics.html#:~:text=A%202000%2Dpound%20JDAM%20gravity,bombers%20fire%20the%20YJ%2D12.
There's simply no way to make ships capable of transporting a meaningful amount of cargo for anything like the $75,000 cost of a JDAM. Air dominance of the Indian Ocean (thanks to Diego Garcia) and the Pacific (thanks to Guam, Philippines, Japan, etc.) means Chinese trade can be blocked if needed. US submarines can also play a role.
On your second point around 'would neutral powers keep trading with China' I think they'll be a range of responses. What you have to remember is that the US and Europe, are not at war with Russia, and Ukraine, whilst important, is not a vital secuirty interest. Although European states keep buying some Russian gas, they do inforce sanctions in other areas.
If a China-US conflict escalates, China will be able to trade with Eurasian allies over land (Russia, Iran), but the US can choose to close maritime routes if it wants to. In WW1, the Netherlands was neutral, lots of South American countries were neutral. In theory, Germany should have been able to access world markets trading via the Neutral Netherlands. Instead, Britain boarded and searched neutral ships. Germans starved in the turnip winter of 1917. The blockage killed probably around 300,000 German civilians. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1914%E2%80%931919).
Brazil wouldn't like the US interdicting its trade with China, but in a gloves off war it would have no recourse but to go along with it. It couldn't do anything to stop the US navy boarding or sinking its ships. Much like neutral Argentina couldn't trade with Germany in WW1.
European states might not enforce a total ban on Chinese trade, but they'd probably be sufficiently horrified by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to halt sales of key technologies. They would also face huge pressure from the US, their ally, to restrict trade further.
At the moment, America might want Europe to stop buying Russian gas, but it's not at war with Russia. If American boys were dying daily, expect a hell of a lot more diplomatic pressure. Europe has lived under the US security umbrella since 1945 (for the western part at least). Expect the US to get what it wants when it really needs it.
India might go its own way. No one really knows. It wouldn't like seeing China invade Taiwan, so it would probably cosy up to the US a bit as China would be seen as more aggressive and more of a threat, but it might not join in the conflict in any meaningful sense. Again, though, India conducts most of its trade with China through maritime routes, and the US could control these whether India likes it or not.
Thanks! Really appreciate the numbers. Puts things in perspective.
It’s great that the Europe has decided to be rational about their energy supply, particularly after what was probably an American - and definitely an American backed attack - on the pipeline.
There's nothing "rational" about remaining dependent on one's ideological and geopolitical enemy.
It seems to me that you're trying to smuggle in the assertion that Europe _shouldn't_ treat Russia as its ideological and geopolitical enemy. Whether that is a sensible position is a different discussion.
A cooperation between different news outlets (SPIEGEL, ZDF) has tracked pretty conclusively the men who did the operation (with names and everything - they are wanted now in Germany), and it was a Ukrainian commando. There are no indications that the US were involved.
Well it’s a newspaper report. We would probably need due process. The lone pipeline destroyer operating alone seems fairly implausible.
I don't think "newspaper report" captures it. It was a 6 months investigation of a team of more than two dozen reporters. And that is on top of the research by crimial bureaus of several countries to which they also had access, as well as intelligence assessments from several countries. The SPIEGEL article alone is a 60 minutes read. This is exactly the due process you are talking about.
It seems clear that it was a specialist team of 6 people, some of which have been identified. At least one is member of the Ukrainian military. The boat is known, as is the explosive material. It is not clear how far up the order was given, for example whether Selenskyj was informed or gave the order. But I don't think there is any doubt that this was a Ukrainian operation. The open question is just whether and up to which level this was run by the government, versus a "private" operation.
How long did Sabrina Erdely spend investigating "rape culture" at UVA before she published? And I consider Der Spiegel to be about as credible as Rolling Stone at this point.
ZDF is better, which makes this worth paying attention to at least. But it still could turn out to be misinformation, or an overhyped nothingburger, and "but a Very Serious News Organization conducted a Very Serious Investigation" is not the slam dunk you think it is.
Thank for sharing. I hope Chinese leadership agrees and also doesn't experience any domestic scenarios that they think warrant distracting people with a war. Another large war would be an incredibly bad outcome for the entire world.
The Chinese don’t want a war with the US. They do probably want to reunite with Taiwan sometime.
What happens if Taiwan doesn't want to be reunited?
Why are the Chinese so obsessed with reclaiming "lost" territory? You don't see the UK scheming to get Southern Ireland back, nor Australia lamenting the loss of Papua New Guinea, nor Germany being particularly interested in East Prussia, nor Indonesia worrying about East Timor, nor Bolivia dreaming of retaking Antofagasta, and so on, and so on.
The only counties which do dream of retaking foreign territories are the ones where the leadership wants to distract the people from their own problems -- places like China, Russia, North Korea, 1980s Argentina, and so forth.
If you start a war as a distraction, you pick a small country that you're pretty sure you can beat. You don't pick a country that can nuke your capital.
Tell it to the Argies.
Alas, both of those could potentially describe a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. :-(
Theres lots of reasons to think Taiwan would be better equipped for a war then Ukraine was and Ukraine is still a half ass support (I honestly think nato is using half-russians to kill russians with their old tech on a knife edge grinding conflict intentionally) while twiwan, the very very very important chip maker, is invaluable
From what I've read, the Taiwanese army is a joke. In the event of war, it's all up to the US, and China might gamble on the US staying out.
The Ukrainian army was a joke in 2014 as well, and they learned from bitter experience, something that has not happened in Taiwan.
The issue isn't who is better *equipped*, it is who is better *prepared*. The Kuwaiti and Saudi armies were magnificently equipped in 1991; that much oil money buys way fancier planes and tanks than Iraq's collection of mismatched leftovers. But Kuwait fell in hours, and the Saudis had to call on Uncle Sam to backstop them, because they knew the *people* behind all those tanks and planes were mostly just up for parades and air shows.
Ukraine, in 2014, was similarly ill-prepared for an actual war. And they learned from their mistake, grew the beard, and leveled up into possibly the toughest army on the European continent. Taiwan hasn't taken military *training* seriously in forever, doesn't have the professional officer and NCO corps it needs, and its army is almost certainly lacking in cohesion.
They have the advantage of defending an island, rather than a couple thousand kilometers of steppe, but that may not be enough.
I'm more pessimistic about Taiwan's readiness.
And once it gets attacked, I'd bet that the chip fabs all get bombed, anyway, so at that point there's no real advantage. The US definitely wants to avoid letting a conflict get to that point, but once the invasion starts and the chip fabs blow up and the engineers flee, there's no further incentive to get involved (aside from game theory and loyalty).
And it'd be a lot harder to supply a resistance across the ocean, with no friendly countries sharing a border.
"there's no further incentive to get involved (aside from game theory and loyalty)."
First island chain strategic importance comes up in any basic education on this subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
isnt japan allied and an interested party in china not grabbing local islands?
Threats mostly work on rational actors, and theres no promise that china is run rationally; but their baby boom is the worse in the world(debatable russia's will be worse after they kill off a bunch of young men, but still) and they got less wealth from it, for all the weakness america has, I'm still not a peasant farmer living on 3 dollars a day with family who got caught up in communistic purges. The young were asked to work "996" and they are in response "laying flat" that makes western working debates look tame.
If china invade taiwan, china will starve, and will lose access to its 99-year loans across the world(read, retirement plan for baby boom) and america will at minimum drop flash drives of anti communist facts, some lies, and planning.
I think the ukraine war made more sense for Russia to roll the dice on then tiawan
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 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Harris: 47/47/54/54 (51/51/55/53)
Trump: 50/51/47/45 (46/45/45/45)
Since 3 weeks ago there has been a swing from Harris to Trump in real money markets but not in play markets. I am not sure what explains this divergence.
That seems right in line with Silver's forecast.
> swing from Harris to Trump in real money markets but not in play markets
harris used bots to threw money at the markets to get a media story(or was punished for hubris and people are draining free money correcting it; but more likely the temp surge), play markets need to remove bots / "high rollers" to effect it less
It seems like Harris is avoiding unscripted appearances, which is negatively reminiscent of Biden. People who pay attention to unscripted interactions and solid policy commitments may have noticed that there's nothing really there yet.
On the one hand, it might be a sign of hidden weakness. On the other hand, maybe she's being advised by the same team that had Obama repeatedly refuse to show his birth certificate.
Overall, the structure of this election is extremely uncertain and it isn't clear that there is a real difference between 47 vs 55 at this point. For example, from a modeling perspective, how much of an incumbency factor should attach to Harris? How defined is the Harris candidacy at this point (vs how defined it will be on election day)? Heck, how defined is the Trump candidacy at this point, various court cases, what will his abortion-stance be on election day, does any of that matter to any actual voter?
Also, it would be useful to better understand how big each of these markets is. From active observation of manifold, I've noticed:
(1) there are people putting actual money into the market to make bets, even though that converts to play money. Hard to spot smaller buyers, but there are people popping up from time to time with $1000 worth of manifold tokens. I know this isn't "serious" money, but it is something.
(2) an individual trader can get excited about a question and distort it substantially, but for the big questions like the US presidential election, the bulk of the distortion is short-lived (corrected within a day.) I'm not sure if the effects get fully removed, though.
(3) The trading costs in manifold markets are still fairly high, though the US presidential election is one of the more liquid.
(4) other questions (like sports) give some evidence that there are fans who trade with a bias and can distort the market (though I think this is also true in sports betting in the UK, where real money is at stake)
>it isn't clear that there is a real difference between 47 vs 55 at this point
Dumb question: Is there information on bid/ask spreads in these markets? Would that give information on how close to equilibrium (at least local to each market) they are?
There isn't a consistent bid/ask spread. In some markets, there are significant limit orders that, functionally, create a bid-ask, but those don't necessarily get renewed as the market moves.
Many Thanks!
Nassim Taleb talked about this. No skin in the game for play markets. Money markets? Well, you might actually lose.
Which is another reason for the government to look askance at the money markets (besides not having thought out how to get their piece of the action yet).
Disagree; when you test play and money markets head to head, they're usually about equal. Some play markets with good structures eg Metaculus are better than the best money market AFAICT. I agree this is surprising but I think it's because there are too many legal limits on money markets for them to do a very good job.
>they're usually about equal.
That test would only show something is they were wildly insane; given that they are non-independent and if one market is better then another you are rewarded for coping the other(e.g. a dumb easy idea).
Which one is the source of knowledge and the better predictor would need to look at error bars and do strange math and probably allot of data to tease out the result; *from data*.
If we are doing it from theory, theres roughly two competing bad factors, on money markets you have to fill out tax information and other legalese paper work, slowing down liquidity, reputation markets have... low stakes and probably bot problems. How do you compare the two and how big are they really?
I am very profitable in both play money and real money markets. The real money markets are massively more difficult to beat. And I'm pretty confident they would win out given a sufficiently large sample of questions.
According to Nate Silver, polling in Pennsylvania is neck and neck, even with the current convention bounce. I like Manifold but it stands to reason people don't care so much about losing play money.
I think I have figured out the whole "luxury beliefs" things. It is a specificially American problem that recently got exported. Somehow Americans do not like to declare political beliefs formally. The Democratic Party or The New York Times are only liberal by convention, there is absolutely no such thing as a formal Liberal Manifesto they would sign. Interestingly on the right it is a bit more formal, Buckley was clear that the National Review is fusionist (libertarian-conservative fusion) but predominantly Anti-Communist.
Now it has affected Europe too. Feminism is everywhere, but informally. There is no Feminist Party, nor a platform inside a party, no manifesto, no list of feminist principles, nothing. It is just a vibe. This is so much different from the old, organized, disciplined socialist movements that had a very explicit list of principles, The Guardian had a Reformist mission statement in 1821 and so on.
Such a situation is obviously very conducive to fashion and not really taking things seriously.
The reason there is no “Liberal Manifesto” is that having a “manifesto” is unpopular. There are definitely litmus tests you are supposed to pass.
> I think I have figured out the whole "luxury beliefs" things. It is a specificially American problem that recently got exported.
... what about every religion ever? Did john poke his fingers into the zombie Jesus hands, are you 100% sure European peasant? Is it in your best interest to stone nonbelievers, women in isis ruled territory?
America is exporting a specific religion(woke) yes, but this isnt a new pattern, its a minor variation on an old one, signaling and ingroup beliefs for the new env, the internet where you cant tell if someone is fasting and direct violence on nonbelievers is harder.
Does luxury beliefs refer to:
a. Beliefs I hold that are costless for me, but would be costly for others?
b. Beliefs I hold that impose a cost on me, but I can pay it without too much trouble and others can't?
An example of (a) would be dismissing concerns about urban crime as racist when I live in a very safe suburb and never go downtown. An example of (b) would be advising everyone to follow their passions when choosing a major in school and not worry about future jobs, when I'm a trust fund kid who doesn't have to worry about making a living.
The distinction you point out sends more like the "Democratic Party is defined bottom-up, Republican Party is defined top-down" which made the round a few months ago? Bottom-up coalitions are less likely to produce sweeping manifestos, and instead restrict themselves to vague statements of principles that can be interpreted in many ways. (See also the NYT's recent complaint about the US Constitution.) This applies even if some of the groups in the coalition are themselves top-down.
I think "luxury beliefs" was more about restricted knowledge about the dangers of freedom? That is, everyone says "you're free to do X or Y", but the knowledge that "99.99% of the time Y is very bad so you shouldn't do it" isn't nearly as widespread, and in particular doesn't go viral on media in circles that only celebrate the vague bottom-up ideal of "freedom".
If you are looking back to Buckley to describe the modern Republican party, then you've gone astray. I think I agree with you in the first part, that there is no series of values that the Democrats/Progressives/Left would all agree to, but I think it's just as clearly correct about the Republicans/Conservatives/Right.
Both parties have moved largely to vibes, which is why Trump thinks he can get away with changing his stance on abortion and why Harris is such a completely different candidate now than she was in here 2020 run. Actual principles, in major party politics, are a thing of the past, if they ever truly existed.
Is Trump changing on abortion? His judges have done a lot that the dems want to roll back, so it doesnt take much for him to be the pro-life candidate.
While he talked a manifestly untrue pro-life game in 2016, what he vowed to do and did was overturn Roe. He's now reverted to basically what he was before, which is pretty much what most people are, abortion supporter through some nebulous teen number of weeks.
He is voting against the repeal of the six week ban, last I heard, even though he thinks six weeks is too short a time.
>isn't voting for the latest _restriction_ in Florida
nit: If I'm reading e.g. https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-abortion-florida-amendment-ivf-rcna169116 correctly, the Florida measure was (if passed) to _reduce_ (eliminate?) restrictions on abortion in Florida.
Personally voting against and publicing that, arguably is a change. But I never thought he would go for a national ban.
Interesting assessment. It makes sense to me.
I've noticed this as well about how many liberal/progressive Americans talk about politics. It's very vibes-based and might sometimes hint at the general shape of some sort of principle, but insists on staying weirdly nebulous and hard to define.
I'll admit I find it somewhat maddening, even though I consider myself a leftist. I think political discourse is best when people are clear and unambiguous about what they support, both in basic principles and in specific public policies.
Why do many liberal/progressive Americans talk about politics in this way?
Best I can figure is that it's one or both of two things...
1. It's more conducive to virtue-signaling and status-raising. To maximize status and perceived virtue, you want to seem stronger and more intense in your politics than the average progressive but also not jumping too far ahead in specifics. This is hard when dealing with specific policies, where it often is just a simple "agree/disagree" proposition, and where arguing for stricter policies could be seen as jumping too far ahead in a way that could threaten the success of the progressive program. With something very vibes-based, it's easier to sound very strong and intense while not having to deal with specific policies.
2. It allows for more rapid change. For example, it allows for what Scott calls the euphemism treadmill to operate more quickly. You don't need some sort of formal political forum to openly debate words or phrases, anybody in a position of power can just set a new precedent out of nowhere, and suddenly a word or phrase that was Ok to use yesterday is now forbidden in all of the halls of power.
The alternative to "vibes" is to advocate specific policies. And specific policies can actually be tried and found to be flawed... or even if they're not tried then people can at least poke holes in them.
I remember how quickly "Defund the Police" was replaced by "well of course that doesn't literally mean defund the police it just means making the police work better in some unspecific way". In the heat of the George Floyd riots there was the political will to actually make some meaningful changes somewhere if anyone had actually been able to propose anything that was actually a good idea that might solve the (supposed) problems. But no actual ideas were forthcoming, nobody wants to solve the problem, they just want to ride it to power.
Major politicians have been criticized for about forever for riding a popular rant to power, but never fixing it. It turns out actually fixing things is hard, but getting people angry is easy. Ask Trump about Roe v Wade, which was a promise kept but didn't work out how he wanted. Now he's officially and publicly pro-choice to roll back some of what might be hurting him politically.
I would love if a politician would actually tell us the truth, but the reality is that the truth would probably cost them the election (even if it got my vote and others like me). Actual fixes almost always involves tradeoffs. The softer version of defunding the police would still cause a lot of disruption and anger politically active groups. Better to suggest something be done but fail, in the eyes of someone trying to get elected, then to suggest something better and succeed at personal cost.
Good points. So going with "vibes" may make sense for the individual simply looking to gain power or status.
As an addendum to point 1, the vagueness defangs the "leftist purity spiral" phenomenon. As long as no one's clear what everyone's positions *actually* are, everyone can represent themselves as "just to the left of the median leftist," which is the most comfortable position, and no one needs to know what that position actually is. If everyone's beliefs were legible, everyone trying to be left of average could cause a collapse into electoral irrelevance, but vague positions don't need to update like that.
Good points. In that sense, it's probably not surprising if European nations are adopting these American political strategies as JustAnOgre alluded to.
Each square of a 9x9 square board has a beetle sitting in its center. At a given time, all beetles simultaneously move, each crawling *diagonally* into some neighboring square. None remains where it was, none crawls off the board, each finds a new place 1 diagonal step away from where it started. After the move's finished, some squares will have more than one beetle on them, and some will be empty. Find the minimum of empty squares - the least number of them that can occur.
Pbybe gur tevq va n purffobneq cnggrea, znxvat gur pbearef (naq zvqqyr gvyr) juvgr. Jura zbivat qvntbanyyl, orrgyrf xrrc gur pbybe bs gurve svryq, fb jr unir gjb frcnengr ceboyrzf ba bhe unaq.
Sbe gur sbhegl oynpx-svryq orrgyrf, n fbyhgvba (jvgubhg rzcgl gvyrf) rkvfgf naq vf yrsg nf na rkrepvfr gb gur ernqre. (hafbyirq obahf dhrfgvba: ubj znal qvfgvapg fbyhgvbaf rkvfg?)
Gur sbhegl-bar juvgr-svryq orrgyrf ner zber gebhoyrfbzr. Rahzrengr gur ebjf ba gur obneq sebz mreb gb rvtug. Gurer ner gjragl-svir juvgr svryqf va rira ebjf naq fvkgrra juvgr svryqf va bqq ebjf. Rirel orrgyr zhfg zbir sebz na bqq ebj gb na rira ebj, be ivpr irefn. Guvf zrnaf gung avar juvgr svryqf va rira ebjf jvyy abg trg n orrgyr. N cnegvphyne fbyhgvba jbhyq or gb unir gur fvkgrra bqq juvgr orrgyrf fjnc cynprf jvgu gurve arvtuobef va nal tybonyyl svkrq qvntbany qverpgvba.
V nyfb unir n gurberz gung nal fbyhgvba bs jvgu A rzcgl svryqf pna or ghearq vagb n fbyhgvba jurer (81-A) orrgyrf whfg fjnc cbfvgvbaf cnvejvfr, ohg V qvq abg raq hc arrqvat vg nsgre nyy.
Vs lbh qenj gur obneq va purpxreobneq cnggrea, rirel orrgyr cerfreirf vgf pbybhe. Fnl pbearef ner oynpx. Gura juvgr barf sbez na boivbhf ybbc, gurersber jr fubhyq bayl qrny jvgu oynpx barf. Shaal gevpx: ghea obneq sbegl svir qrterrf naq qvfertneq juvgr pryyf. Vg’yy orpbzr fbeg bs n pebff jvgu svyyrq qvntbanyf. Pbybhe gung arj guvat vagb purpxreobneq cnggrea, naq lbh’yy frr orrgyrf punatr gurve pbybhe, naq sbe na aka vavgvny obneq gurer ner a zber pryyf bs bar pbybhe guna gur bgure, gurersber gur nafjre vf avar.
Thanks a lot for a little brain teaser! I miss math olympiads :(
Good job :)
...one?
Jr ner onfvpnyyl ybbxvat sbe pybfrq ybbcf. Vs lbh pna svaq n pybfrq ybbc bs qvntbanyf gura rnpu orrgyr pna zbir bar fgrc nybat gung ybbc, serrvat hc ab fcnprf.
Vs jr vzntvar gung gur nyy sbhe pbearef bs bhe purffobneq ner pbybherq juvgr, gura lbh pna rnfvyl qenj pybfrq ybbcf pbirevat nyy gur oynpx fdhnerf.
Jung nobhg gur juvgr fdhnerf? Jryy, gur sbhe pbearef ner boivbhfyl bhg. Ohg V guvax gurer'f n ahzore bs bgure juvgr fdhnerf juvpu lbh pna'g dhvgr znantr gb uvg jvgu pybfrq ybbcf. Gur orfg fbyhgvba V'ir sbhaq fb sne yrnirf guerr, fb V guvax gur nafjre zvtug or frira. Ohg V unir n farnxvat fhfcvpvba gung vg zvtug npghnyyl or svir.
Lbhe frira pnaabg jbex. Gurer ner gjragl-svir orrgyrf ba juvgr fdhnerf ba bqq ebjf naq fvkgrra ba juvgr fdhnerf ba rira ebjf. Nyy orrgyrf zhfg fjvgpu sebz rira gb bqq be ivpr irefn, yrnivat ng yrnfg avar juvgr fdhnerf ba bqq ebjf habpphcvrq nsgre gur zbir. Guvf vf nyfb gur zvavzhz sbe juvgr. Vg vf npuvrirq sbe rknzcyr ol rirel orrgyr ba na rira ebj zbivat gb gur gbc yrsg (naq nyy orrgyrf ba bqq ebjf zbivat gb gur obggbz evtug vs gurl pna, naq neovgenevyl bgurejvfr). Fb avar rzcgl fdhnerf ba juvgr.
Ba oynpx, yvsr vf rnfvre, nf gurer ner gjragl orrgyrf ba oynpx fdhnerf ba bqq ebjf naq gur fnzr ahzore ba rira ebjf. V nterr jvgu lbhe pbapyhfvba gung nyy oynpx fdhnerf pna erznva bpphcvrq.
Wanna watch something beautiful, entertaining, rational, educational, interesting, and fun? I didn't think so, but I'll share my Route 66 documentary anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlSDE7MjbI
Can you give a sense of what makes it beautiful? Entertaining? Interesting? Fun?
I've heard so many things described with such terms that were anything but, I'm skeptical. I wouldn't be surprised if others have a similarly high degree of skepticism.
But if you laid out say one 30-second portion that illustrated with some nice prose, that would probably convince me to click.
I'd happily talk about it all day! I can tell you what it ain't. It ain't no AI voices and burned-in animated captions, it ain't me sitting around the house talking to a camera, it ain't no slide show disguised as a video, and it ain't no unenthusiastic presenter stating the obvious. Or I can tell you what it is. It's me (American, irreverent but kind) and my pardner (Australian, cute, funny) traveling the country, rediscovering patriotism, and improvising a remarkably eloquent and inspirational speech bit by bit as we go. The weird thing about making a documentary is, you don't know what it's about until it's over. It turns out, this one's about the American Dream. I've done a lot of things in my life, and out of all the things I've done, I'm most proud of this. You can cheat by watching this 8 minute version where it's just the American Dream speech ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfPVpLfTUDg ) but if you do that you'll miss the serendipity of the outlandishly glamorous Coleman Theater in the middle of Nowhere Oklahoma, the wife of the dead chainsaw carver in Sullivan Missouri who's kept his shop open for 20 years and never remarried, my purchase of a steel-tongued drum followed by my improvising alongside a player of a native American flute in Oatman Arizona, and the abandoned houses of Amboy California where the walls have stories that they can't tell so I have to do it for them.
I'm looking to start a career as an actuary in the UK and I would love to chat to someone already already working as one for basic career advice and to build my mental model of the industry. Any ACXers that can help me out with this?
I have some experience making software for actuaries and spent some time with all kinds of people in the industry, so feel free to dm me
>Is there some incredibly eloquent and original answer that manages to convey joint firmness and compassion without using the dreaded “I’m sorry you feel that way” phrase? Maybe, but it’s not realistic to expect the average person to figure out a bespoke phrasing in the heat of the moment.
It's not incredibly eloquent but in my view it is incredibly obvious and straightforward: "Whether or not I love you isn't the issue, the issue is you're a drug addict and I know that any money I give you will go towards drugs. Also please stop with the emotional blackmail. The answer is no and if you chose to interpret that as me not loving you then that's your choice." The other 2 examples have similarly straightforward responses with having to resort to something patronizing like "I'm sorry you feel that way."
Stop being afraid of confrontation. Life is very simple when you're direct and honest.
I agree that it is better to step forward into the disagreement rather than paper it over. The only part of what you said I take issue with is calling what the person is doing emotional blackmail. (Presumably you're thinking of Scott's example of the drug addicted family member who asked for money and then accused the person who would not give it of not loving them.). There are 2 reasons not to do that. First, identifying what the person is doing as emotional blackmail is based on a particular model of why they are saying "you don't love me" : They are saying it in an effort to make the listener feel so guilty that they cough up the money. That may be why they're saying it but it's quite plausible that they are saying it because they really do believe that if the person loved them they would give them money for drugs. Addictions aren't just cravings for drugs, they are whole systems of deluded belief. The only thing I've even been addicted to is nicotine, but while I was addicted, at the end of grad school, I really did believe that if I quit smoking I would not be able to write my dissertation. I think an addict begging for money for their drug is likely to have a similar delusion going on. They truly need the drug today, because without it life would be so painful they'd throw themselves in front of a train. They have tried to stop the drug and they can't, so they have no choice but to ask for help buying the drug. If the family member believed them, they would respond to their desperate and honest plea.
The other reason not to sling a term like emotional blackmail at them is that it's mean and insulting. Why do that? It may be inaccurate, and if so you're just being cruel, and in any case it is going to make it much harder for the person you're speaking to to take in what you say. You've set it up so that when they take in the news that you won't give them money for drugs they also have to take in the even worse news that you think they're an emotional blackmailer.
Even if they mean it genuinely, and do honestly feel that the other person must not love them if they won't even help them this little bit, it is still manipulation. "You must do this thing or else you don't love me!"
And why am I supposed to love you? Just by an accident of birth that we're family? How close family? Am I supposed to just do whatever you say and give you everything you ask for, or else I don't love you? I wouldn't do it for a small child demanding I let them do something dangerous or foolish, and I'm not going to do it for an adult.
I think for most people with addict family members, the first couple of times, okay., you give in. But when it's the twentieth time, or the hundredth time, it begins to look more like blackmail by playing on emotional bonds: "do this or else I will say you hate me and then you will feel bad and you should feel bad because you are a bad person, you are supposed to love me and help me and you're not doing that, only bad awful people are like that so you must be a bad, awful person and I will tell everyone you are a bad, awful person!"
I've mentioned I have a family member who engages in this kind of emotional manipulation, by exaggerated 'yes I am bad and awful and you hate me, of course you do, and you are right to hate me' carry-on in response to any criticism or demurral. I know they're not sitting down planning it out like a scheme to say and do these things, but it's still manipulation because they are trying to make me feel so bad for evoking this reaction in them that I will stop doing what evokes this reaction and they can then do what they wanted to do, the way they wanted to do it. It's not a consciously planned attack, they are highly-strung and do suffer from that "I am a terrible waste of space" self-evaluation, but it is still emotional blackmail when they are trying to use their genuine suffering to make me dance to their tune. I don't hate them, but if they keep saying "you do hate me, you do" then don't be surprised when one day I say back "yeah, you're right, I do hate you".
People who are behaving badly need to be told that they're behaving badly. That's the *actual* loving response, because it has the highest chance of affecting change in them. The diplomatic polite bs everyone does in normal life is actually incredibly selfish. You internalize it as "being nice" but what you're actually doing is protecting yourself. "You need to be set straight but I'm not going to be the one to do it and risk either losing a social ally or acquiring a reputation for meanness. So I'll just tell you a pleasant status-affirming lie or regurgitate a mindless platitude like ISYFTW." This is the matrix of social deception which enables the existence of bad manipulative people.
>Addictions aren't just cravings for drugs, they are whole systems of deluded belief.
Yes, and that's precisely why it's important to give them honest feedback about what their disease is doing to them. Addicts hit rock bottom when reality rips the blinders off and they honestly see themselves for what they've become. An extreme example is something like "did I really just blow a guy for $20 worth of heroin? Jesus, I've got a problem." A low-key version of that is "huh, a person I trust and respect just accused me of emotional blackmail and if I'm honest with myself I have to admit that what I just did meets the technical definition. Maybe I should think about that."
Well, Wanda, I don’t think I was advocating being nice. I was in agreement with your telling the addict bluntly that you are not giving them money, which I guarantee you the addict will not experience as your being nice. As regards telling them they’re committing emotional blackmail, let’s set aside the question of whether the addict is talking about being unloved purely as a way of manipulating you. I think it is wiser to skip calling what they do emotional blackmail, if your goal is to increase the chance that the person will make a serious effort to get off the drugs. The reason is that they are already going to lean strongly towards rejecting your message of “nope, drugs aren’t what you need,” and if you mix that unwelcome message in with something else hard to hear you further reduce the chance they will pay any attention to what you said. And besides, you can effectively protest the use of “you don’t love me” without using the term “emotional blackmail.” You can say, “of course I love you, and I know you know that, and it’s very unfair of you to accuse me of not caring because I won’t give you money to buy more poison.” So your best shot, if you want to be effective, is to say nope, no money for drugs today or any other day, ever. You have to get off the drugs. If you want help getting into a rehab, I will help you do that.”
What about the argument that you need to help them bottom out? Well, just calling them emotional blackmailers isn’t likely to do the trick. If they’re chronic drug users they have already done lots of humiliating and awful things — things like your example of giving a blow job for 20 bucks. They have probably also gotten lots of criticism and been ejected from their job and even from places like Dunkin Donuts because they are a disgusting smelly ridiculous staggering mess. I read an article about Philip Seymour Hoffman in the months before his death. He was in some setting where nobody knew who he was, and somebody asked what he did for a living. He answered that he was a heroin addict. Most chronic addicts I have encountered (I’m a psychologist) already hate themselves. I doubt that the idea of you gotta hit bottom is even valid, but even if it is most addicts have so many reasons to despise themselves already that an accusation of emotional blackmail isn’t going to tip the scales.
However, if your goal is not to get through to the addict, but to have a really satisfying anger catharsis, I recommend that you do not stop with calling them emotional blackmailers. Tell them they’re disgusting and a waste of space. Say that people of character are able to keep from becoming addicts, so their addiction is a sign of their essential defectiveness. Say that even their mother hopes they OD soon so that there are no more of these visits. Then kick them hard in the stomach. While they are doubled over, knock them on their back and spit on them before you leave. If you luck out with the timing you can even take a shit on their chest.
Why are we so concerned about the addict here?
They deserve to be made to feel sad and bad for attempting to impose on a loved one for money in the first place, and then doubly so for accusing that loved one of not loving them because they reasonably refuse to help feed the addiction. It doesn't matter what their motivation is; they can sincerely feel that being denied cash to feed their habit means their loved one doesn't care about them, but they can't be excused from *saying so* to their loved one. Boundaries matter, and "I will not be made to feel emotionally blackmailed" is a good one.
Sometimes righteous indignation is indeed called for! If telling an addict, "I'm not going to give you money to feed your addiction, and I feel like you're attempting to emotionally blackmail me into doing so" speeds that addict to the kind of rock bottom that motivates a recovery...excellent!
> Why are we so concerned about the addict here?
I care less for addicts, but ive talked a suicidal teenager away from self harm; theres also "emotional blackmail" there, that is just the brains actual experience given dysfunctional hormones. Its not hard to tell its a irrational outburst so how you react should probably be tactically tactful, tacitly.
That seems like a somewhat different situation than what's being discussed here with regard to adult addicts!
Given a thought experiment of a completely innocent party engaging in an activity; you should probably revisit the criteria for automatically assuming the low status parties guilt.
Nah, the commenter should have been more specific.
> Stop being afraid of confrontation.
I'm not saying you're wrong - I actually mostly agree - but I feel like the clarity required to be able to identify and express this position is rare. Partly that's just how people are (which is perhaps a way of saying "most people are too stupid for that"). And partly I think it's because the person asking for money is deliberately doing so in a way that makes this clarity hard, and that way differs from person to person, so it's easier to spot when it's being done to someone else, than it is to spot when it's being done to you.
Do you agree? Do you find it harder to do this for yourself than to help other people do it?
I definitely agree with your general point: that it's hard to think clearly when you're feeling defensive and manipulative people deliberately try to put you on a defensive footing for precisely that reason. I'm pretty sure I'm immune to the kinds of obvious bad-faith manipulation presented in the 3 examples above, but sure, I definitely lose my ability to be analytical when someone elicits an emotional response from me. But the only people who can do that to me are generally people I'm already close to. This is one of the reasons why it's bad to be close to bad people: they're inside your defenses and so can turn you in knots. I would never be close to either an addict or anyone who would make either of the other two histrionic manipulative arguments presented.
And frankly if a loved one said something as openly manipulative as "they accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative’s sacrifice and calling them a bad person" I think it's completely appropriate to be openly aggressive back at them. "Haha triggered, quit being a pussy" is an excellent choice. What you're communicating is your absolute refusal to be manipulated. If they don't realize that and end the relationship then in my view that's a good outcome because, as I said above, it's bad to be close to bad people. Let them self-select out. Economists call that a separating equilibrium.
IMO the advice in this post is for emotionally immature/socially awkward people who don't have good boundaries and find social interaction fraught. From what I've gathered from his writing over the years, Scott is a socially awkward autist who's pathologically afraid of confrontation. He probably doesn't have the ability to defend his own boundaries with aggression so he falls back on this patronizing passive-aggressive crutch.
Satisfying.
Maybe this is obvious to others, but I have been thinking recently about how some religions offer, among other things, a release from anxiety. Jesus says to consider the lilies in the field. They don't worry about tomorrow and nor should you. Kierkegaard goes into that theme at length. Likewise, Buddhism basically says not to worry about anything. The notion of a Buddha is one without anxiety.
Why would relief from anxiety be such a big selling point for major religions? I mean, sure, some also offer eternal salvation and such stuff, but simply relieving anxiety, the worries of the day, is a big attraction to them as well.
I got to thinking about the close connection between worrying about the future and planning for the future. The ability to plan is often considered a huge asset for humans compared to other animals. But it's hard to imagine the existence of planning without worry. Lilies don't worry about tomorrow because they have no concept of tomorrow.
I think here about Erik Hoel's Gossip Trap, the notion that it took so long for humans to establish hierarchical societies because it was hard for a band of humans to grow emotionally and culturally above the maturity of highschool students. When eventually they did, they formed societies in which planning suddenly, at long last, became extremely important. But this societal evolution perhaps also introduced anxiety into the human condition at a level it hadn't existed before.
So anxiety became a problem in need of a solution. Along comes some religions which offer, among other things, the solution to worry.
And also Axel Rose, who said, "I don't worry about nothing, no, 'cause worryings a waste of my %$#&ing time," from Mr. Brownstone.
According to the perennialists, one goal of spirituality is to restore the sense of eternity, living fully present in the now. This sense used to be attained in the normal course of growing up, same as bodily development, and the loss of this sense is what pops up in various traditions as the Fall: the stories of Golden Ages, of Eden, are stories of that time where everyone had this sense.
There are traditions that do a better job of integrating this sense with the world, such as Taoism, and tantric strains of either Hinduism or Buddhism, or something like the Sufis, whom, while seeing the world as relatively unimportant, tend to function well in it.
So yeah, you have an interesting story from another angle, but also arriving at this thing the perennialists write about.
Heathen retired psychologist here. Several points that seem relevant to me:
Emotions evolved for a reason. Every emotional response lies on a continuum. There is an ideal level or range of response for each emotion that provides the most adaptive response to any given situation. Since we only ever experience the world second hand through our senses and our brain's interpretation of sensory input, our emotional responses are always a response to a perception. Accuracy may vary.
Emotions such as anger, fear, worry/anxiety, etc. activate the autonomic nervous system, or fight/flight/freeze response, a very ancient psychophysiological mechanism which evolved to help an organism survive a predator attack. Most humans these days are not attacked physically (except in situations like war, etc.), but we still activate the same response when we perceive a threat. Most threats in the modern world are psychological, not physical, so the fight/flight/freeze response is usually maladaptive.
This is not to say that anxiety is always maladaptive. The right amount of anxiety can improve performance and motivate change. It's when the level doesn't match the situation that we start having problems. Remember, we don't have anxiety unless we perceive a threat. No threat perception, no anxiety, even if there actually is a threat. Threat perception, even when none exists, provokes anxiety. Oh, and the nature of the perceived threat may be internal ("I'm going to fail") or external ("Someone is yelling at me"). Most of the time, people over-respond, which results in all kinds of problems, but under-response can happen too. For a deeper dive, see Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome.
Anxiety can be adaptive. Think "getting psyched up," vs "getting psyched out." It's a common part of sports/performance psychology. There are all sorts of ways to manage this.
As for religion, one can certainly learn to manage anxiety without it. One's belief system contributes a lot to one's perception of the world. Religion means a lot of different things, some of which can be comforting, some quite disturbing. I would think that faith, or the belief in something without evidence, tends to push one's perceptions in the direction of inaccuracy. Not saying this proves anything, but in over 40 years of practice, I did not observe religious people suffering less from anxiety.
Of course, there's a lot more to be said about this that is beyond the scope of this format.
Thanks. I should have clarified that I'm interested here in the historical reason for a focus on anxiety by The Gospels not what religion may have to offer in practice for people today. As you say, "Most threats in the modern world are psychological, not physical, so the fight/flight/freeze response is usually maladaptive." The world was probably more dangerous 2000-2500 years ago, but I'd guess that most of the anxiety one felt in Roman/Indian/Chinese societies then was also maladaptive. So the first part of my thesis is that there was an excessive (maladaptive) amount of anxiety in ancient societies and that some religions such as Christianity and Buddhism came along with great sales pitches to relieve it. I don't claim that religions successfully relieved anxiety at great rates, only that the marketing campaigns were extremely successful -- and they were because they targeted a major pain point for many people: anxiety.
The second part of my thesis is that a root cause of this excessive anxiety was the relative newness of long-term planning to the human situation.
I may be wrong about both of those things, but was curious what others thought. Do you buy either parts of that thesis?
Thanks for the clarification, although I'm still not convinced that Christianity or Islam for that matter offered a balm for anxiety or if that was even their main selling point. Buddhism tells you to accept that life is suffering, and virtue lies in helping relieve the suffering of others through enlightenment. The mindfulness part does work to relieve anxiety. Maybe the closest thing to an anxiety relieving religion would be one that helps you live in harmony with nature, such as the more animistic ones. I might also question if everyday life was more physically dangerous in the Bronze Age. It certainly was less complicated. Also, incidentally, in the west at least, Stoicism had been around for quite some time, and it offered a practical philosophy for living with less anxiety. Who knows if the average person would have had access to such ideas, though... To my mind, the Abrahamic religions were/are more concerned with obedience to and recognition of a divine being, not sure if that is a selling point for reducing worry. I don't know if monotheistic religions offer more relief than their predecessors, it's an interesting question.
> I got to thinking about the close connection between worrying about the future and planning for the future.
In one interpretation, that's exactly what Adam's curse after eating the apple was about. It wasn't actually a "curse", just the inevitable consequence of intelligence and foresight and self-awareness.
> cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
> Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
> In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Which is exactly what happens to all animals everywhere, but now, we know it of ourselves.
> for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
And again, there's a sense in which this describes the inability of pure reason to deduce an afterlife. Without faith, we are dust and return to dust, and there's no escape. But faith has the ability to break us out from this closed circle, even just the faith of self-delusion or drugs. (Raising more questions about the strength of faith, and what exactly the faith is in, etc.)
Anxiety about things yuo can't change, so planning makes little difference, is the kind of anxiety that is damaging.
"I should put some money aside in case of emergency" is good planning/anxiety. "If the Romans hike the taxes next week, what can I do?" is not, since if you're a subsistence level peasant farmer or small tradesman, there's not much slack for you to save money to pay those taxes and you have no influence with the Roman administration as to whether or not the taxes will be hiked.
So in that context, "consider the lilies" is helpful advice in letting go of what you can't control. It's not about sin or guilt, it's about "some things you have to accept, if you can go with the flow, it will be less stressful for you".
I suspect this is one of those pieces of advice that are useful to some people and not to others.
If you are constantly worrying about stuff you can't control and it's making you miserable, "don't worry" is a good message. If you are ignoring the overdue electricity bill and the foreclosure paperwork in the mail because you'd rather go out and have another good time with your buddies than deal with it, the right message is probably "worry more."
> But it's hard to imagine the existence of planning without worry.
Well, that is actually the thing you should strife for. While planning involves imagining and playing through potential futures, the anxiety only kicks in when the wrong circuits trigger on those (vivid) images. And yes, for those topics where your personal wiring makes the anxiety trigger, it might be evolutionary beneficial to just drop planning those topics.
To be clear, I don't think planning causes anxiety, rather that the awareness that one should plan causes anxiety. A frog can sit on a lily-pad in Zen bliss because nothing is nagging at its conscience it should probably be estimating its taxes for the quarter.
"planning involves imagining"
That's important ... I'm thinking with respect to animal mental capability. If this is the case, any animal that can plan, can imagine. Perhaps they can think outside the box. Perhaps they can imagine scenarios in the third person. Like when a raven caches some food, but sees another raven watching, and uses deception to disguise the cache location.
<quote>Maybe this is obvious to others, but I have been thinking recently about how some religions offer, among other things, a release from anxiety.</quote>
This is a form of the observation popularized by Marx
Maybe it's the Ativan of the people.
What does that mean? Can you expand?
What Alexander said. Marx wasn't putting religion down, just saying it was the best painkiller available to the masses.
The phrase “Religion is the opium of the people/masses” comes from Marx.
I don't think that relief from anxiety is a *consistently* strong selling point for Christianity.
"Consider the lilies of the field" is offset by a pretty strong component of "you will be punished infinitely, for all eternity, if you fail to obey the correct set of stringent rules (out of several incompatible ones). And of course if your ancestors chose the wrong denomination six centuries ago then you're screwed anyway. But there's no point in trying to figure out whether a different denomination might be better because if you happen to have been born into the correct denomination and you choose a different one then that's even riskier. And maybe it's all made up anyway and there's no God but geez you definitely don't want to take that risk."
I don't think I'm unfairly straw-manning Christianity, that's the version I grew up believing.
The worst part of Christianity is other Christians ... likewise, the best part of Christianity is other Christians.
Somehow, different leaders read from the same book, and come out with wildly different interpretations. Is this a problem with the book, or the readers? Do you think Christ cares that you grew up in the wrong denomination with the wrong interpretation of some obscure passage in The Revelation to John? —I'm pretty sure this is inconsequential to salvation.
A Muslim friend said it best: There is one god, there are many fan-clubs.
> Do you think Christ cares that you grew up in the wrong denomination with the wrong interpretation of some obscure passage in The Revelation to John?
Maybe? It doesn't make much sense, but Pascal's Wager obliges us to assume the worst possible case of God. Because if choosing the correct denomination doesn't matter then fuck, man, why the fuck would we bother being Catholic if we could just be Anglian? Anglicans get to use contraception!
(You're not arguing with me, you're arguing with teenage me.)
(speaking in generalities)
How does the use of condoms appear in God's eyes? Maybe violating the commandment "Be Fruitful and Multiply." How do these affect you, even teenage you? You shouldn't be fornicating, and if you're married, being fruitful may be limiting the number of children to something reasonable. About the founding of the Anglican Church, "A Man Shall Cling To His Wife." Someone divorcing his unproductive wife 500 years ago probably doesn't affect your personal salvation in any way.
That's a very Protestant view, trying to infer God's rules from the actual text of the Bible. Catholics believe that God's rules are what the Catholic Church says they are, you shouldn't try to come up with your own personal interpretation.
Teenage me wasn't fornicating but was worried about the future, knowing that even if he could find someone to marry (someone who would be willing to do the no-sex-before-marriage thing, which was a very very very niche position in the cultural milieu in which he grew up) then he'd _still_ be restricted to only ever having sex maybe two or three times in his life, because every time you have sex without contraception it results in pregnancy. (Teenage me had pretty unrealistic expectations about that as well.)
"That's a very Protestant view"
Yes, on the protestant side, we own our own salvation ... pesky followers of that Luther guy.
Good point. Reflecting on this made me realize that the idea of hell is probably the biggest thing that made me give up on Christianity. Eternal punishment for people who happen to grow up with a different religion just made no sense to me.
I find this a strange thing to "realise" because it took me a long time to realise that this *wasn't* the main reason most atheists became so, that at least as (or far more) common are "because I want to have more sex" and "couldn't see any evidence lol". Really made me lose a lot of respect for a group of people I'd previously thought I understood.
I think sacred texts tell you surprisingly little about the real world religions that people actually live with.
I'm just going by The Gospels themselves. Jesus makes clear that The Kingdom of Heaven will be for the few, and for others there will be a great "gnashing of teeth" (another reference to anxiety). I don't think the "punished for all eternity" concept came from The Gospels.
It absolutely does. Matthew 18:8 is the first one I find. https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/MAT.18.8 "It is better to go through life crippled than to be healthy and cast into the eternal fire."
Even more explicit is Matthew 25:46 "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life".
(But if you go searching you can find a lot of people quibbling about whether αἰώνιον really needs to mean "eternal".)
Forget eternal torment, I'd willingly sacrifice my dominant hand if that would give me peace and clarity.
This sounds like "Would you rather?" but for keepsies.
I broke an arm a while ago, and devoted a bit of thought to it. Among other things, people become much nicer to you when they see you with a visible disability, as opposed to a mental one. (There was the one guy that tried to start a fight with me, but I don't think he was in his right mind.)
That's a statement about the nature of the fire, not necessarily about the nature of the punishment. I know a lot (most) Christians believe that the souls of the damned burn eternally (and they have a good case!) but I've not found an inconsistency with the belief that souls cast into hell are burned up rather than tortured but not consumed.
This guy takes a look at the evidence and comes down on the side of terminal, rather than eternal, punishment.
https://theologyintheraw.com/biblical-arguments-for-eternal-conscious-torment/
My eulogy for Jake Seliger:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bessstillman/p/in-memory-of-jake?r=16l8ek&utm_medium=ios
Beautiful words.
I said this to Jake but I want to say it to you as well - your work has been profoundly moving and I'm so grateful to both of you for what you've shared with us. I know how little this means, but you have my utmost condolences.
You are invited to talk trash about your home towns, countries, and assorted subdivisions thereof.
Toronto: Still not New York City, damn it.
Ontario: Our famous landmarks include Niagara Falls, the CN Tower and nothing else, really.
Canada: Basically America's cottage country.
United States: Home of the brilliant. Perhaps a full century ahead of the curve in game theory, and chose to apply it to politics. When we discovered the system let the party in power intentionally redefine borders in order to secure future elections, rather than outlaw it, we turned it into an informal rule, and named it in honor of a Massachusetts governor who would go on to be our fifth Vice President. Then to flip the bird at the whole thing, we don't pronounce it the same way as we pronounce the name.
Maryland: the most gerrymandered-looking State in the Union.
I have nothing remarkable to say about my city, state (Michigan), or country (America), but this seems in the spirit of your invitation:
Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lover's Swiss, the police German and it's all organized by the Italians.
Castleton, IN: used to be pleasant, but forgettable so we added some shootings. Now its just forgettable.
If you took a selection of the dirtiest, sweatiest, most vulgar, most aggressive and macho American rednecks, then stripped them of every trace of religious or spiritual belief, every moral value, every love of freedom, love of country, and love of anything at all other than playing football, cricket and rugby and stuck them on a nearly inhospitable continent-spanning desert, you'd get Australia.
If you cranked up the football obsession even more (to the extent of becoming a full-blown religion) while combining it with a desire to be trendy and "cultured" in all the most nauseating and virtue-signalling ways, you'd get Melbourne.
Cruel... but not inaccurate...
Schenectady: The Silicon Valley of the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately I had to live there during the *second* half of the twentieth century, when it turned into basically Flint, Michigan. But at least I can spell it.
Upstate New York: New York City's bitch.
I can spell it too, but only because of Princess Ryan's Star Marines. :-)
Fairbanks: All the remoteness-induced expenses of Alaska with almost none of the natural beauty.
Alaska: The most beautiful place in the world but quite possibly the homeland of some of the stupidest.
United States: We can't seem to decide if we want to be a bastion of freedom and personal rights or a globe-spanning empire crushing the rest of the world under our boots so we just manage to bring about the worst side effects of each.
> United States: We can't seem to decide if we want to be a bastion of freedom and personal rights or a globe-spanning empire crushing the rest of the world under our boots so we just manage to bring about the worst side effects of each.
LOL. True facts.
Wappinger, New York: We're technically DOWNSTATE NY, damn it!...pay no attention to how you have to leave town to find a movie theater.
Current town: somehow manages to combine the problems of progress with the problems of regress, the bad effects of growth and the bad effects of decline, with few of the good effects. I can see now how the things I liked when I moved here were temporary artifacts of its then-current positions on those two curves.
Once and future town: decline isn't so bad if you close your eyes and walk backwards very slowly.
Where I live: I can't believe I moved to what is essentially a Mexican town well inside the USA and I have never found either a Tex-Mex or Mexican restaurant worth returning to.
Where I'm from: I said once, effortfully looking at the bright side: I guess it has the interest of a third-world bazaar ... and my companion corrected me. "A third-world bazaar has the charm of a place. Jumble them all cheek-by-jowl together into treeless strip malls, subject to perpetual and permanent inter-ethnic conflict, and the result is the exact opposite of charming." Great, I said - now I don't even have that.
Smelly, dirty, loud, crowded, expensive, entirely too convinced of its own importance...
OK, a little more specific:
In large part responsible for most of what's wrong with the country. Sucks all the money and power to itself. You can't drive anywhere. The smell of weed is everywhere.
All right, fine:
Excessively dominated by the financial industry. (I would add impossible to raise a family if you're not a childrearing dodger like me.) Credulous of long-since-failed ideologies in the face of all evidence. Damn kids on scooters are everywhere. The buses take forever to arrive. The underground train system's dirty and loud.
I give up:
The grid falls apart below 14th Street and you can't find anything. Big Nick's died. People always confuse the city with one of its boroughs.
> Sucks all the money and power to itself.
"Empire State" feels like one of those monkey's-hand prophecies that people mistook as being good.
Seconding Anonymous Dude's description of NYC, with the addition of:
>The underground train system's dirty and loud.
and always the exciting possibility that a madman will shove one on to the tracks...
And to add to
>"Empire State" feels like one of those monkey's-hand prophecies that people mistook as being good.
And we didn't even get a state motto of "Strength to the Empire!" as a consolation prize.
Austria: just why are we so boring? Things are neat, but boring. No one ever does anything big. Every menu card is a carbon copy of every other menu card. Everybody always playing it super safe.
Hungary: great, now there are three political parties that are left in the race, and all three are the top-to-bottom fan clubs of three men with quite obviously authoritarian personalities. The kind of guys who never retire. We do not even want democracy, we want elective monarchy. At best.
Well, the last time an Austrian tried to do something big, we all know where it ended up...
Yes, making the Terminator movies.
When you put an Austrian and a Canadian together, you get something damn close to the end of the world.
My favourite diss was always: "The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made the British the greatest seafaring nation in the world."
Nicaragua: OOF
Costa-Rica: The worst food in the world made from the best ingredients in the world, figure that shit out.
SoCal: Why you hating from outside the club? Oh, you can't get in. The club is empty, we're all just crushed against the doors.
Ireland: why is every damn thing concentrated in Dublin, and the rest of the country can go hang?
Dublin: why is it so trashy, always culturally trying to copy the fads of UK/USA from five to ten years ago? why does the media copy the *trashy*, cheap, fads of 'our betters'?
We are a small country, we should behave like one, instead of trying to be bigger than we are by copying much larger cities abroad and thus everything gets crammed into Dublin while development of the rest of the country lags behind.
Tourism and heritage: we don't have any. We have no sense of the built environment, be that due to our history or whatever, so we happily let buildings fall into ruin and/or pulled them down and replaced them with mass concrete monstrosities which have dated badly. Now we're trying to sell our 'ancient heritage' to tourists, except we don't got any remaining, and what is there is reconstructed pastiche (often very badly done). I wish we had better visual arts talent, or at least some kind of appreciation of what is around us. Yes, "you can't eat scenery" and I understand the impetus behind that attitude, but we're ruining what we do have.
Picture this: A mad scientist invents the De-Citifier, a vacuum cleaner that sucks in buildings, infrastructure, power lines and so on, leaving empty soil in their place. She goes to town in population centers across the world, stealing as much local architecture as she could, but gets defeated on some hill in the middle of nowhere. Her device explodes, scattering bits and pieces of citiness all over the place, and it's the urban equivalent of the Dogscape: A sidewalk contains a fifteen-feet drop into the porch of a house, a climb of stairs has tiny manhole covers placed vertically on the steps, a barber shop is set on the third floor of a building with the door facing outwards and accessed by fire escape, and other architectural horrors straight out of Y'ha-nthlei all abound.
Welcome to Istanbul, a place that has more claim to the "city of seven hills" moniker than Rome itself - in Rome you may stand in the city and admire the hills surrounding it; in Istanbul the hills are under you at all times and very much make themselves felt. There are plenty of overweight people here, but few are well and truly obese, since the laws of Darwin quickly take care of the fall-prone. Once I've hit a dead end accessed by a five-foot drop that I had to climb back out, and my commute requires you to walk a fair distance at a fifty-degree angle. Slip-proof boots were one of the first things I bought when I arrived here, and spiked shoes are not uncalled for. And while I was exeggerating a bit, I did once see half a manhole cover set on stairs for reasons not meant to be known by man.
Then again, in few other cities of the world can you say that you commute daily across two continents. And while our economy is miserable, there's a measure of joy in going to work and petting the office cats, taking the metro and petting the ticket gate cat, arriving at your home street and being recognized by your local street cats, and finally giving the apartment cat a pet before you go home and pet your cat...fish. I don't actually own a cat myself, but like all locals I guess I can always go out and get 200 cats in about an hour.
Ive heard that everything in Istanbul is uphill. Is that really true?
Well, in a way. All the good entertainment districts are on flat terrain near the sea, but they're for people with disposable income and not us locals, so we're relegated to the mountains.
Of course, what comes up must come down, and there are some downright precipitous drops for every hill you have to climb. A little-known fact about Istanbul is that our food couriers are, if not the fastest, some of most talented motorcyclists in the world. This is again due to selective pressures - if you aren't at the top of your trialsin game, you'll quit the job or stop breathing soon enough.
In contrast, regular bicycles are nearly unseen as they stimulate the prey drive of our taxi drivers, who try to hit them for sport.
(The taxi companies here are syndicated, and not in the "trade union" sense, so they get away with all sorts of hooliganry. For example, while the local equivalents to Doordash thrive, Uber and Lyft did not gain much traction because any car with the sticker was recognized as competition and driven away by means of spiked bat. They're banned from operating now, because the taxi drivers also have an in with the goblin up top. Consequently you can tell apart a true native of Istanbul by their attitude towards taxi drivers, which is somewhere between "overwhelmingly negative" and "genocidal").
Aside from the cats, this doesn't sound like trash talk at all. This makes Istanbul sound *incredible*!
seconded, holy shit.
Toronto: Knockoff Chicago ;)
Sorry if this is like the most-discussed culture war topic on here, but.... why exactly would the Earth's climate heating up a few degrees be such a catastrophe? I think most of us know that the Earth has been through different temperature cycles in the history of human civilization, such as the Little Ice Age which only ended around 1850!
No disagreement that sea levels will probably rise a bit, which will undoubtedly be bad for some very small island nations. No disagreement that a warmer climate will probably lead to increased storms, hurricanes and such. I'm sure there will be significant changes, such previously good farmland losing its potency and previously bad farmland opening up. But why would some mild warming lead to catastrophic consequences for humanity.....? I think we can probably survive some more storms and the moving of some coastal cities. Can anyone explain like I'm five why global warming would such a supposed Big Deal?
On the other side:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/critique-of-comprehensive-evidence
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/does-climate-catastrophe-pass-the
For a list of his articles on the topic, see: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate
Fear of various positive feedback loops, where emissions cause more emissions and it ends up non linear. Last paper I read on this still didn't know if those will happen (eg Amazon deforestation releasing carbon, Siberian permafrost melting releasing methane etc etc)
Bad cases can end up more like 8 or more degrees above which is much worse than 2
But how plausible is this actually, given that the Earth has been more than 2 degrees warmer in the geological past without kicking off positive feedback loops that turned it into Venus?
It's still an unknown unknown.
In terms of basic plausability digging up ancient solidified carbon and releasing it hasn't been done at scale on earth before. Can find surface arguments for anything.
Meanwhile, renewables are exponentially improving, so there's no downside to switching to them. So I don't really get the argument, seems very political for no reason.
I assume cost is the main downside. Who wouldn't want cheaper power, except those that provide more expensive power?
Costs are decreasing, but my understanding is that solar panels and wind turbines both need rare earth elements, and I think better batteries do, too. Seeing as they are "rare", they must be expensive, though we don't need too much of them per item, kind of like gold plating for electrical contacts.
The "rare" in "rare earth elements" is a bit of a misnomer. They aren't *that* rare. They exist in lots of places around the world, it's just dirty to extract them so we let China do it for us.
>my understanding is that solar panels and wind turbines both need rare earth elements, and I think better batteries do, too. Seeing as they are "rare", they must be expensive
AFAIK, wind turbines need rare earth elements for the magnets in their generators, but I'm not aware of a need for them in solar panels. Rare earth elements aren't really all that rare. The rarest of them in the Earth's crust, thulium, is more abundant than iodine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust
The most relevant for magnets, neodymium, is slightly less abundant than copper. It costs roughly $60/kg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prices_of_chemical_elements
My impression is that _peak_ power from renewables is already cheaper than most competing sources in most places. The main problem is that they are intermittent, so the cost for a local pure-renewable energy supply would be the cost of the generation capacity _plus_ the cost of enough storage to cover the longest plausible outage. This can be alleviated by e.g. adding baseload supply from something that isn't intermittent and/or by averaging outages by transmitting power (e.g. from temporarily windy areas to temporarily becalmed areas). Messy, costly, and the Greens fight the power lines (and sometimes everything else too).
I don't fully understand how this all works, but I read in some articles from a systems engineer who works in the energy sector that renewables and baseload generation don't play nicely. Most baseload energy spins up a turbine, and renewables generally produce energy via inverter. When a significant part of energy generation doesn't "spin up" with the grid it lowers efficiency and causes a lot of headaches. Once renewables exceed 30-40% penetration of the energy supply there are rapidly diminishing returns. Batteries and storage technology may alleviate this in the long run but it isn't capable right now.
If there is no downside to switching, doesn't that mean that switching will happen automatically without anyone trying to make it happen and that there is thus no need to worry about anything?
What people don't realize: Daily highs aren't getting higher, high temps are controlled by water vapor. Nightly lows are getting higher, low temps are controlled by CO2. Daily temperature swings are getting smaller. Earth is getting more habitable.
Polar temperatures aren't controlled by air insulation, but by ocean circulation. Earth is a heat engine. Heat arrives to Earth in the equatorial latitudes, heats ocean water, circulates to the polar regions, exits Earth in the polar latitudes.
Sea level rise is 2-3mm/yr. Tropical islands are expanding, and gaining area. Warmer water means faster calcite precipitation.
Almost no food plants are limited by high temps (within reason). The highest temperature ever recorded 134F was at an alfalfa farm in Death Valley ... though some stone fruits need cold as part of their annual cycle.
( I only read the highlights) — The Week That Was (yesterday's edition) has an essay that claims CO2 in low altitude environmental air —not laboratory air— is almost all converted to carbonic acid due to condensing water not water vapor. And that carbonic acid has a different absorption spectrum than CO2.
> "Polar temperatures aren't controlled by air insulation, but by ocean circulation."
This isn't quite right. While ocean currents are a major transporter of heat from the equator to the poles, the capacity of air to transport heat via the latent heat of water vapor shouldn't be underestimated. The polar vortex acts as an insulator during the colder months by keeping a mass of low pressure, cold air over the poles. This year saw a dramatic collapse of the polar vortex, both warming the arctic and cooling northeast America and Eurasia. Mongolia had an unusually brutal cold winter this year, killing millions of livestock due to the low temperatures.
My own short version if a region experiences temperature/humidity above a wet bulb temperature of 95, every human there without air conditioning dies. So imagine hot weather together with a power outage in India, for example (this happens in the novel The Ministry for the Future). I could imagine tens of millions of deaths, on the same order of magnitude as all the deaths in World War Two. I think it's self-evident that we should prevent things like that. And then there are all the other negative effects.
I also think that continuing to develop non-carbon energy like solar, wind, and nuclear will lead to cheaper and more abundant energy, so it's primarily a win-win. Solar in particular has gotten good enough that it's going to keep growing just because of the economics, and in the next couple of decades we'll probably have enough energy to just start sucking carbon out of the air. So I think we now have a relatively easy path to mitigating climate change.
> "My own short version if a region experiences temperature/humidity above a wet bulb temperature of 95, every human there without air conditioning dies."
If this was true, everyone without AC from southern Missouri down through Mississippi would die every summer. Having visited the Ozarks in July, it certainly feels a little like death when you step outside. But I never noticed any mass graves. In fact, there are still structures there from before the advent of electricity, which is rather curious.
wet bulb temperature \neq temperature, unless you are at 100% relative humidity.
100% relative humidity is definitely possible in the gulf states during summer. But I think that only happens around dawn and is much lower during the high temperature part of the day, so 95 wet bulb isn't feasible. My mistake.
Solar & Wind are only economical because of the special economics of government subsidies. For every kW of solar/wind, there is a kW of fossil fuel on standby, burning fuel and not making energy. We pay for those fossil fuel plants on standby. Which is why California has the second most solar in the US, and the highest electricity prices in the US. If solar and wind were truly economical, California would have the second lowest power prices in the US, not the highest.
It's very strange to think that the world's most populous country is technically only marginally habitable.
the obvious answer is that nowhere on Earth currently has sustained wet-bulb temperatures above 35C. Note that 35 C wet bulb = 71 C in a dry climate, and the temperature needs to be sustained for ~6 hours (or possibly longer, since you could shelter in insulated buildings for a while even without air conditioning).
OK, but if we're talking about a 2 C temperature rise, how many places are there now with sustained wet-bulb temperatures above 33 C? It seems unlikely that there's a large amount of populated land that sees 33-35 C but nothing that can give us a >35 C heat wave producing a CNN-worthy death toll.
There have been a few CNN-worthy heat waves. but I think pretty much all of them below 35 C wet bulb and achieving few-kilodeath body counts by killing the frailest 0.1% of the millions affected. Which is a bad thing that would be aggravated by global warming and we want to avoid that, but it's a far cry from "Oops, Bangladesh is now uninhabitable!"
yeah, I doubt 2C gets you megadeaths. Larger temperature increases might (sans air conditioning). And what is relevant is the temperature increase in the places with highest wet bulb temperature (not sure if this is expected to be more or less than the global average).
I think it's expected to be lower, but I'm far from sure about that.
The effects of climate change will bring both positives and negatives. The negatives are widely advertised (and sadly greatly exaggerated) every day (just read some of the other answers to this question), so probably do not need further elaboration. The benefits include longer growing season, higher crop yields and reforestation due to improved photosynthesis, milder winters in northern climates, fewer deaths due to extreme cold, and expanded farming land in the north.
Most experts agree that the net impact on humans will be a slight negative, somewhere in the range of a single digit decrease in total global GDP by the end of the century. Since global GDP is expected to increase by about 400% if we don’t screw everything up, the estimates are that with global warming we will see the gains lowered to something like 390% above current levels. I will leave it to you whether this rises to catastrophe in your mind.
The true potential catastrophe though is what could happen to global prosperity if we derail economic growth (the 390% increase in living standards projected by the end of the century) in pursuit of lower levels of CO2. The problem is that climate change is a negative externality or side effect of energy use, and energy use is the driving force of prosperity and growth. Thus we need to find ways to reduce global carbon emissions without destroying the driving force of prosperity.
Proposed solution:
1) We should take messing with global climate seriously, but drop the exaggeration
2) We should immediately invest heavily in clean technology such as nuclear and solar, so that it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels (otherwise developing nations which are the source of all the growth in CO2 emissions won’t adopt them).
3) We should immediately invest in carbon extraction and atmospheric seeding to counterbalance shorter term imbalances
4) We should promote faster economic growth for developing nations so that they can adapt to the changing climate and invest in clean energy rather than burning fossil fuels.
> fewer deaths due to extreme cold,
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chilling-effects
Short answer: You better have some very good reasons to mess with the planet-wide ecological Schelling point that normally changes over tens of millennia, and 'something something economy something GDP' does not pass muster.
Long answer: Read the wiki page for the Permian extinction. It's probably my favorite wiki page, and home to such bangers as:
"...extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species"
"...only known mass extinction of insects"
"...a relatively quick rebound in a localized Early Triassic marine ecosystem (Paris biota), taking around 1.3 million years to recover"
"...increasing the flux of ultraviolet radiation by 400% at equatorial latitudes and 5,000% at polar latitudes"
"It could simply be that all coal-forming plants were rendered extinct..."
"Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of [the Permian extinction]..."
Fun stuff.
So yes, if you're a humanclip maximizer optimizing for dudes, you can tile the planet with lots of dudes and dude-maintenance organisms at a higher temperature than the norm. It will take money, shift geopolitical balances, cause 1d3 more world wars, and solidify Africa's position as Earth's PvP zone, but it can be done. And yes, this is a fairly long-term "planet goes boom" scenario compared to AI takeoff. But if you don't own a shirt with a dead sabretooth tiger on it that says "FUCK MEGAFAUNA, ALL MY ANCESTORS HATE MEGAFAUNA", chances are you'll personally be happier with global temperatures below that point.
(The bad news is that any sufficiently large concentration of people is functionally a humanclip maximizer, so we're headed for fun stuff either way. I hope we spring a clathrate trap or something and get to it sooner than later).
The rate of CO2 emission isn't really a fair comparison if the periods of time over which it's emitted aren't similar. The CO2 level rose to 2500 ppm then. It's only 422 ppm now (of which 280 ppm was already there pre-industrially), so we'd need to keep emitting at similar rates for millennia to get near Permian Extinction levels, even ignoring increased CO2 levels leading to increased absorption, which obviously isn't going to happen. For one thing we'd run out of fossil fuels long before that point.
Furthermore, from a brief look at its Wikipedia page, it seems like it isn't even known that the CO2 and associated warming were a major cause of the extinction.
Of course, less than 8°C of warming can still be bad, but using that as a point of comparison is very misleading.
Oh, that's true, of course. The point of this exercise is not to read the page and go "here's our playbook for the next hundred thousand years, let's make sure we finish these stupid brachiopods this time, bivalve supremacy forever*", it's to illustrate what happens when the planet has a really wild night out.
The Earth is older now, and can't party as hard, but if we stay on track and hit a >2°C rise, it's still going to be a doozy for the ecosystem.
*This is the true reason quahog clams live for hundreds of years. They're playing the long game.
But surely the cheaper, faster, and more certain solution is just to engage in geo-engineering to cool the planet?
It's very hard to extract minute amounts of CO2 from the air. Much easier to avoid adding it in the first place.
extracting CO2 is neither the simplest nor the cheapest cooling intervention.
> But surely the cheaper, faster, and more certain solution is just to engage in geo-engineering to cool the planet?
For anyone interested in actually doing this, right now: https://makesunsets.com/
When 30x more people die of cold than die of heat ... you're thinking of making the planet cooler ... using processes which you don't know the limits.
Does no one ever look at the CO2 plots and notice that CO2 falls every —NH— Autumn? That small fall should tell you something is really wrong with the long-lived atmospheric CO2 hypothesis.
Well, the fast, cheap and certain option is genocide. Give humanity the good old bottleneck and the climate will fix itself no problem, we aren't in a vicious cycle yet. If you want humane on top of that, then yes, we should start looking into cooling tech.
One issue is that it's a tragedy of anticommons - because someone ought to do it, nobody will. Reason says "put 20% of your GDP into making extra sure Africa doesn't become Thunderdome", but the evolution fairy says "someone else can do that, go put 20% of your GDP into printing more humans at your human printing factory", and reason isn't winning that debate. Another issue is that we've never faced the problem of cooling a planet before, and you never know for sure what kinds of exciting new data might emerge when you try to shift a system that large. We don't exactly have a back-up planet in case we do an oopsie.
I am, however, in favor of tech solutions compared to "somehow control population growth/be carbon-neutral/protect the environment by being a ~^_^~/conscientious customer\~^_^~" solutions, because the latter genie is out of the bottle. Human and human-adjacent biomass already outbulks megafauna by a factor of ten, the plateau of our growth is already firmly in the "all people all the time" territory, and our companies already optimize for the kind of strategy that would provide unprecedented growth in the next quarter and make every person on the planet defecate from their nostrils for the rest of their life after.
If we as a species had any interest in things like "environment", "quality of life" and "not becoming Skaven without the warp cocaine", we'd have stopped long ago.
I'm pretty sure Africa is now, and always was Thunder Dome. According to the UN, there are an estimated 870,000 slaves in modern Africa. In South Africa the incidence of rape is about 100% per year. Don't even get to Nigeria ... and those are just the places where news trickles out.
>According to the UN, there are an estimated 870,000 slaves in modern Africa.
That sounds interesting, url? So the slave trade shifted to intra-continental consumption?
There's always been plenty of intracontinental slavery in Africa, so I think saying that the slave trade shifted might lend the wrong impression. There also used to be considerable numbers of European slaves in Africa, but the European colonization of Africa put an end to that.
I was wrong, its more like 28 million in forced labor. This is the UN. Another 22 million in forced marriages.
https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slavery-un-report
> making extra sure Africa doesn't become Thunderdome
Bad joke, but: wasn't that literally China's domestic policy for a while? Looking at Africa's birthrate (or even Gaza's), they've got a long way to go...
>>If we as a species had any interest in things like "environment", "quality of life" and "not becoming Skaven without the warp cocaine", we'd have stopped long ago
With this I must disagree. Life is better for the modal human than it has ever been before. The past few decades alone have lifted billions out of grinding, subsistence level poverty. Global life expectancy has nearly doubled in the past century, and continues to rise. Meanwhile, if we had stopped, say, 500 years ago, then 90%+ of humanity would still be living lives that were nasty, brutish and short.
You're right, but I'd still like to hang a few thought experiments on that.
One, there's an idea called the original affluent society, which says primitive hunter-gatherers would actually score better than us on the happiness scale. They had short lives and were gored by animals a lot, but our minds are built to cope with short lives and the goring. What we aren't built to cope are things like filing out Excel sheets and getting yelled by our bosses and having to speak on the phone instead of using a text app like an actual human being, but Grug Throngleclub didn't have these problems. You know these Afghan soldiers who beat Russia and the US back-to-back, and immediately became super-miserable because they couldn't kill infidels anymore and had to do desk jobs now? Take that and magnify it by a thousand and you've got Grug's impression of modern life.
Now, this theory is hogwash. Today I can go buy a 1/7 figurine of my wife Chino-chan, Grug Throngleclub could not, my life is infinitely better than his. But let's call this the strong form of the affluent society hypothesis, and consider a weak form: primitive hunter-gatherers would actually score better on the happiness scale than the primitive farmers that succeeded them. That sounds more likely: the farmers had all the downsides of modern life with very little of the benefits, and between Seti and steam there were plenty of serfs who could not hunt and mate like Enkidu nor buy little plastic idols of Kafuu Chino like me. Is today's unprecedented comfort worth their dip in quality of life?
(If we have enough comfort for enough people? Sure, in my books. But that's for you to decide.)
Second, for most of history Adam was in lockstep with Moloch - what man wanted for his own comfort also fit what he'd need to do to endlessly maximize his population's reproductive capacity. Only recently do we see a break in the covenant, with rich societies deciding against having children even to replacement numbers. Moloch hates this - both politicians (Moloch the stunned governments!) and companies (Moloch whose blood is running money!) decry falling birthrates all the time, and would love nothing better if we did become Skaven. Who wins when both of these base desires are in full-blown conflict?
"Is today's unprecedented comfort worth their dip in quality of life?"
Is today's unprecedented comfort worth all that much? Beyond fulfilling basic needs (e.g. not starving to death), the pleasure we get from material goods is arbitrary. Nobody was unhappy for not having a TV before TVs existed. Even today, you can be happy without owning a TV, smartphone, computer, anime figurines, etc.
Once people aren't starving or freezing to death, further material progress is meaningless. If we woke up tomorrow with all TVs vanished from the face of the Earth, along with all memory of them, nobody would be worse off.
But family, intimate friendship, healthy community, a connection to past and future, to nature - a few oddballs excepted, humans suffer without these things. And what's been the trend in these areas over the course of industrial civilization?
I got side tracked on the 1/7th scale figurine ... you can print one yourself, for not much more than the purchase price.
... and that's a pretty interesting thought.
I do think the anthropologists are wrong about hunter-gatherers and farmers though. Consider you're a hunter-gatherer wife. Hungry, cold, carrying your baby, carrying all your shit ... its cold, raining, you've no food, no shelter, you're scurrying down to lower elevations in the fall, you pass Thag Simmons nice little plot, with a nice little warm wigwam, nice little crackling fire inside, there's a basket of grain, warm dry skins to sleep under ... you going to keep plodding through the mud, or give it up to Thag for a nice warm hut with food for you and your child?
You'd lose the Mekong Delta, for one. It's already happening. The "bread basket" of Vietnam. All similar agrarian societies would face famine and collapse. The glaciers are melting in the Alps, which would cease water flowing into the farms. That is a reality - now. Not everyone lives in your first world conditions.
We already gave up Doggerland and Beringia. The Dutch walled off Zeeland in the 17th Century. Americans raised the level of Seattle and Sacramento by 10 feet in the 1880s.
Somehow we've expanded our population despite sea level rise of 120m in the past 20,000 years.
On the flip side, you'd probably gain a bunch of arable land in what is currently permafrost/tundra. Come to think of it there might be an opportunity there (buy a bunch of useless tundra, wait for it to become valuable agricultural land, profit), if only I could figure out the timescales and how far North to go. Does Montana suffice, or does one need to go into Canada?
You'd get a bunch of theoretically arable land in what is currently permafrost/tundra, but initially what you'd have is a still rather cold swamp.
20,000 years ago, two species of pachyderms lived there, so I'm pretty sure it was very productive.
You're correct that the p(doom) of global warming is dramatically overstated. If you look at the actual details of the IPCC reports - an organization explicitly operating from the view that humanity is causing all warming and this is a big problem - the worst case scenario involves shaving some points off the potential world GDP growth by 2100. This scenario does not account for mitigation or adaptation efforts in the intervening period, which is quite unrealistic. The IPCC models also tend to run too hot, possibly because their base assumption of 100% of warming being caused by greenhouse emissions leads to an overestimation of climate sensitivity to CO2.
Having said that, the primary reason for concern rests on assumptions about the rate of warming and how that may change. First, the warming happening now is much more rapid than temperature proxies indicate for the historical record. 1.5C/century, or even 1C/century, is much faster than the natural climate changes in the past, which is more on the scale of 1C/millennium. There is concern that this will be too fast for certain ecological systems to adapt and they will collapse instead. Personally I am hesitant to extend too much reliance on the instrumental record, as high-quality satellite data only exists for the past 40 years or so and this is hardly a large enough period for something on the time scale of climate. But it is the data we have.
The second related concern is that this rapid warming will cause a positive feedback loop. Albedo, the ratio of energy from the sun that is reflected/absorbed, is a key driver of climate. Currently, the Earth's albedo is around 0.30, meaning 30% of the sun's energy is reflected back into space. A slight change to 0.27 would have palm trees in the arctic, and 0.33 would have a major ice age. As an example, warming could potentially melt a bunch of snow and ice, which is very reflective, exposing ground that is less reflective and lowering albedo, thus creating even more warming. Clouds are also very important to albedo, so changes in cloud cover could have a major impact. The effect of warming on cloud cover is very complicated though and I hesitate to claim causation one way or another.
I am doubtful that climate works as a positive feedback system, as that would tend to lead to runaway warming that did not recover. The historical record rather shows a range of temperatures both much hotter and cooler than the present, which is more consistent with a negative feedback system. Also consider that the rate of warming from greenhouse emissions depends on the linear distance from the surface of the earth, but scales with the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. GHGs have to increase a 3D volume of a sphere to increase the linear distance, meaning an exponential increase in GHGs is required to maintain a linear warming trend. It's also possible that there are certain altitudes and saturation limits where increasing GHG concentration has a marginal effect on warming; that is true of water vapor at least.
So, first of all, I agree that the negative impact of global warming is exaggerated and often focuses one-sided on the downsides. I basically agree with everything in the first three paragraphs.
But for the last paragraph: I rather think that the history of hotter and cooler temperatures does indicate positive feedback loops. The earth will always stabilize at *some* temperature because it is a closed system with constant input from the sun that emits more energy the warmer it gets. Without positive feedback system, shouldn't the temperature be much more stable than they were in the past?
Now, the temperature doesn't completely run away, but that is because the feedback systems max out. For example, the ground of the boreal forests can unfreeze, which causes CO2 emissions. But after some centuries or millennia, this reaches equilibrium and stops being a positive feedback loop. Likewise for the melting ice areas, which lowers the albedo. At some point all ice is melted, and the positive feedback loop stops.
The specific feedback system you describe sounds rather basic, so I find it hard to believe that this is not factored in by experts. Mind that the climate models factor in many positive and negative feedback loops. For example, acidification of the oceans is a negative feedback loop for global warming (it's a CO2 sink), and is contained in all models. Or withdrawal of deserts is a negative feedback loop (more forests and green areas) that is taken into account. As far as I understand the conclusion of scientists, they say that when we go from 0 to +6 degree, the positive feedback loops are larger than the negative feedback loops. (For example, then the boreal grounds will mostly unfreeze.) But they have a hard time saying where exactly the point is where this effect will become relevant, say whether it is at 2 or 4 degree.
Would you agree with that?
If the climate is dominated by positive feedback, I don't see how it can cycle back and forth from extremes. When the average surface temperature is 15C warmer than now and there is a temperate forest in the arctic, how is the planet going to cool down? Sure, it won't get any warmer because the positive feedback is capped out, but those very conditions should prevent cooling back to levels below the cap anyway. Similar concept in the inverse for cooling. Once most of the surface of the planet is covered in glaciers, the albedo is raised and now the planet is even less able to warm. But somehow the climate was able to both cool from the tropical arctic and warm from the ice ages.
Something has to happen to break the equilibrium climate. It's possible the climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms and only changes after some massive corrective force. Like an asteroid impact or heavy volcanic activity throws up tons of particulates into the atmosphere and cools the planet, breaking the runaway warming. But my understanding is the past climate highs and lows generally slowly transitioned back and forth over millions of years. I don't see how a slow process operating on geological time scales would be able to escape a positive feedback loop.
The most obvious explanation is something happens outside Earth, at the source of energy: the sun. There is evidence that solar cycles on a kiloyear scale exist and correspond to past temperature anomalies. But however this happens, it doesn't seem to have any correlation to solar irradiance. So the sun would have to warm/cool the planet through some indirect mechanism that doesn't involve direct light and heat emission. No one has an explanation for how this could work, so understandably many scientists look for solutions elsewhere.
As for experts, no one really understands how the climate works. There are a bewildering array of variables and modeling a chaotic system is very difficult. Present climate models are not satisfactorily accurate over even the last 170 years, and fail badly when applied to past periods with different climate conditions. For instance, albedo is practically symmetrical across the northern and southern hemispheres. This is odd because the northern hemisphere has a much greater proportion of the Earth's landmass and thus should have a lower albedo. Maybe the greater ocean coverage in the south creates more clouds which just happen to exactly match the difference? Another example, under the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis, the warming should be fairly even across the Earth's surface as the CO2 is evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. But the equator and tropics have warmed much less than the higher latitudes and poles, especially the arctic. Is the warming itself actually uneven or is the warming even but unevenly distributed by heat transport processes (which are also poorly understood)?
Given our current understanding of climate, I think you should be highly skeptical of any conclusions. Any claims about positive feedback at a given temperature anomaly are highly speculative, given the lack of instrumental records about past climate change and the failure of models to accurately backcast past climate. Of course, I'm doing the same thing about past climate feedbacks. Because we don't really know and have to operate under quite a bit of uncertainty.
Thanks for the explanation. I was coming from the general statement that in a system with constant input and only negative feedback, there can never be more than one equilibrium. Only with positive reinforcement (or both) there can be multiple stable equilibria, and external factors may push the system from one equilibrium to the other.
But I do agree that this is not very helpful because the climate is too complex. We know that there are both positive and negative feedback loops, and I also take your point that the climate system is generally poorly understood, and that there are a lot of known unknowns and likely even more unknown unknowns.
Just one point of misunderstanding: I think by "positive feedback" we mean different things. If we change the temperature from T to T+x, then feedback loops will bring the temperature to T+x+y.
With positive feedback loop I mean that y > 0. You seem to mean y > x. Or more formally that the derivative dT/dx is > 1.
In the first case, if 0 < dT/dx <1 then the system reaches a new equilibrium which is larger than T+x, but it doesn't lead to a runaway system. In the second case, we get a runaway system. I think most discussions of tipping points still refers to the first type, or at least that is how I understand them.
I take your point, runaway systems are not usually practical in reality. In this case, I suppose that might look like it becomes so hot that water can no longer exist in a liquid state, and this changes the climate conditions so much that returning to previous equilibria is no longer possible. I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that global warming will turn Earth into Venus.
My point was that a situation where positive feedback keeps pushing the temperature up until it reaches a new equilibrium too hot for human habitation is very unlikely. I suspect the feedback systems governing the climate have diminishing returns, like the scenario with CO2 concentration needing to exponentially increase to create a linear temperature increase. I did describe this as negative feedback earlier, which was incorrect.
Yes, then we agree pretty much. I also expect those diminishing returns. We were just talking past each other.
>which will undoubtedly be bad for some very small island nations.
...and most coastal cities. There are a lot of coastal cities, some quite big. Also, even if sea level rise doesn't literally put a city underwater, it makes it much more exposed to flooding. If a 100-year flood turns into a 10-year flood, it's going to become very expensive to live there.
>I'm sure there will be significant changes, such previously good farmland losing its potency and previously bad farmland opening up.
These changes are not free! People who used to farm on the good land will have to move, creating waves of refugees. Cities in flood zones will need to rebuild, relocate people, and build and maintain floodwalls, and that's not free either. People will die in heat waves in places that aren't built to handle them because they previously never happened, and those places will have to install lots of air conditioners, and so on. Surviving the transition will require very large expenses that we could avoid by not letting the earth warm in the first place.
If your definition of "catastrophic consequences" is something like "human extinction," then no, that's not going to happen. (Unless a water war or refugee crisis spirals into a nuclear war somehow, which is unlikely but nonzero, I guess). But summing it up as "significant changes" makes it sound like a mostly neutral thing, when it could be an immense and preventable cost in both lives and money.
There was folklore to the effect that Saint Patrick obtained favour from Heaven that Ireland would be spared the worst effects of the end of the world, by sinking beneath the sea seven years prior to that.
So if the sea levels rise and we disappear, the rest a' yiz only have seven years left, remember that!
Wikipedia says:
> Carrauntoohil, Carrauntoohill or Carrantuohill (/ˌkærənˈtuːəl/ KARR-ən-TOO-əl; Irish: Corrán Tuathail [ˌkɔɾˠaːn̪ˠ ˈt̪ˠuəhəlʲ], meaning "Tuathal's sickle") is the highest mountain in Ireland at 1,038.6 metres (3,407 feet 6 inches).
I'll leave the math to someone else. :-)
I think building dams should be doable. The Dutch were doing it with 1500's technology, even reclaiming land from the sea.
Anything is doable *if you're willing to spend the money.* How many dams will the government need to pay for to protect the Florida coast? Is maintaining a vast network of dams cheaper than building some big solar farms or nuclear plants?
But it is a *global* thing. Try convincing China to not build coal plants. Try convincing Africa to stay poor. The West trying to bribe them into this would not be doable and sort of backfire, because the money would be spent on increased consumption.
That just leads to a New Orleans situation. Build a big seawall around your city that is now below sea level, then a big storm hits and the wall collapses, now your whole city is a disaster area.
Isn't this a Tartaria problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands
You should build a house in spite of the chance that it might burn down and be destroyed. You should not build a house in the lava plain of an active volcano because there is a (relatively) extreme and obvious failure condition where your house burns down and is destroyed. Building a city below sea level is more like the latter than the former.
But we’re talking about choosing to protect existing cities, not the choice of where to build new cities.
If there weren't any friction, then yes, an omniscient overlord (like in a computer game) could probably make pareto-efficient adjustments that would preserve the rest of the status quo of the world. But as is, the people who grow wheat now have invested a lot of wealth in land and infrastructure in the places that are good for growing wheat now. The places that will be good for growing wheat later aren't clear (but Canada and Russia seem like big potential winners?), and aren't set up for this yet. And that's just wheat. Look at how bad we are at dealing with water right reallocation!
Plus, there's no obvious stopping point. This isn't a "natural cycle" that will slow down and eventually reverse. (Although we might be going through one of those at the same time?) The things that are causing the warming are likely to continue causing warming unless they're changed. So even putting aside eventual uninhabitability (hopefully a very long term worry), there's no stopping point for all that re-investment that needs to happen. It's going to be a constant influx of chaos into a system (food production) that we very much want to be stable.
There's a lot of ecological stuff in the world that we're used to having work the way it's "always" worked, or at least the way it worked over the last 100 years. Hopefully nothing serious will change for the worse, but maybe we'll lose some species of plants, or insects, or animals. I'd bet on occasional Y2K-style panics, like "well, there go all the good wine grapes"...
Isn't the stopping point when all fossil fuels are exhausted? That's what we should expect to happen eventually in geological time.
It turns out that a lot of fossil fuels are gated* behind sufficient technological development? Like fracking. And unless we get better at some of the hard problems of allocation and responsibility, I bet we'll continue to use energy sources that have widely-dispersed invisible negative side-effects. I think geological time is longer than the time-scale in which it is possible for us to set in motion ecological processes that extinguish our species.
* Phone autocorrect preferred "gossip girls are dated".
If our species is extinguished, I don't think it will be because we set in motion any such process.
Right now it's not my top pick.
In geological time yes, but we are very far away from the point of coal being exhausted. Even with the known reserves we can burn coal at the same rate for another 100 years, and the unknown reserves are likely way higher than that.
It's a fair question. In the long term, humanity would be fine. In the medium term, a rise of several degrees destroys a lot of our infrastructure and know-how. I mean mostly that the traditional crops of most places will become inappropriate, requiring a huge reshuffle. See the relatively big disruption that the Ukraine war caused in the middle east / northern africa. Cities that grew large under the influence of cheaply available, relatively local grain. Then that grain supply had a sudden shock, causing famine, even as the global grain supply is just fine.
You also have to consider that new agricultural land opening up in more extreme latitudes isn't instantly available for farmland. Pine forests in Finland might *eventually* become lush grain fields, but pine makes the soil really acidic in a way that might take generations or many expensive ag inputs to fix. It's easy to think we are the masters of nature, but in reality all of our science and engineering is still only operating "at the margins". Sci-fi stuff like terraforming is far out of reach.
Also, current locations of large cities might become inhospitable (sea levels as you say, but also lack of fresh water). Humanity can support some percentage of cities in inhospitable locations, mostly by expensively sending in resources. Those cities justify themselves based on producing some other resource or service. But it's not clear that we can go from (numbers pulled out of my ass) 5% of our population living in such inhospitable places to 20%. Similarly, do you expect those people who own nice waterfront property in 2024 to just shrug and eat their losses? or do you expect them to pull all the political strings they can to protect their wealth, even at the expense of other people / the greater good.
Finally, there would be a lot of geopolitical instability, as there are clear winners and losers in that situation. Massive immigration pressure and refugee flows, which might lead to significant hardening of foreign policies, the breakdown of friendly relations, maybe even a new world war.
One more thing I wanted to clarify: there's a naive view that when temperatures rise, you can just take food production a few degrees north to compensate. This is false! Temperature is only one parameter in a multi-dimensional space. Higher latitudes have shorter growing seasons, different sun angles (more hours of less intense sun), etc. This is really bad for crops that have been bred over thousands of years for different conditions.
Keep in mind that our human perception of light is logarithmic (I think), so our eyes don't really tell us how huge the differences are for plants in different locations.
The world is a sphere not a cylinder....
Well said. The part that has me worried is the possibility of large-scale crop failures in hot regions that already have trouble feeding themselves, like equatorial Africa. If the global food supply starts to wobble, we are going to see misery on a really vast scale, especially since countries routinely have immigration restrictions, so people can't just move when things no longer work at home.
Has anyone here overcome a really powerful aversion to being touched? If so, what helped you? Here’s why I’m asking: I have a patient who has been averse to touch all his life. Even as a small child, he did not like to have even his parents hug him, and did not spontaneously cuddle with them. (He did, though, enjoy cuddling with the household pets, and he felt and still feels love for his parents.) In school he did not like to have other kids do so much as tap him on the shoulder, and if they did he would punch them. He also did not like to have anyone behind him because he’d worry they were going to touch him. Now as an adult, he has a terrible time with incidents where somebody bumps into him or accidentally steps on his foot in a crowd. He realizes it was an accident, but still feels a craving to take some kind of revenge to even the score. His reaction to being touched without permission is not fear, but rage. It sounds sort of like what a woman feels when some stranger takes advantage of a crowded subway car to grope her butt — rageful indignation. He is able to enjoy sex, and can even cuddle in bed with a sexual partner he knows and trusts, but for him cuddling feels much more intimate and risky than sex, which he’s pretty casual about.
I’m wondering whether it would help him to have some sessions with someone who does massage for people who have become fearful of touch as a result of physical or sexual abuse. I am confident that this man has not been abused, but he seems to have come into the world with wiring that’s that’s sort of like the re-wiring people sometimes get as the result of trauma. I’m also open to other ideas, anything that anyone here has found helpful.
I have nothing useful to contribute, but I am both fascinated and hugely amused that he is so unusually adverse to non-sexual touch but somehow managed to be casual about sexual intimacy. I mean, throughout your comment, I was thinking "yes, yes, and what about sex?" and when you arrived at "he enjoys it," I literally chucked out loud.
I don't know if I have any helpful advice, since I too always disliked being touched since a child. I've overcome it mostly by not being touched by anyone, which works for me, but maybe not for your patient. It's never been as bad to the extent of reacting violently to accidental physical contact in a crowd, but I wonder if that's as much due to female socialisation as anything.
Mostly I learned to grit my teeth and suffer it if touched like that in a crowd. Oddly enough, now I'm older and going to the doctor more, being touched (as in having my pulse taken or palpating abdomen) doesn't bother me, but that, I think, is because it doesn't seem to register to me as "touch" so much as "part of the procedure" (like having a blood pressure cuff put on).
I suppose anger management, more than massage? His main problem seems to be "they did this on purpose, I'm going to get them back". If he can internalise that it was not done on purpose, that it is fleeting, accidental, and impersonal, and whacking the other person in the face won't stop such things happening, it might do better for him. Impulse control and getting it through his head "they don't know I don't like to be touched, so they are not doing this to get at me".
Actually he doesn't slug people, in fact he says nothing at all if somebody steps on his foot or whatever -- he just broods about the incident endlessly afterwards. So far, the thing that has helped him the most has been to make a point of speaking up when somebody bumps him -- "WTF, man!" or similar. He probably comes across as hypersensitive and a bit weird, doing that, but it's worth it for him because it saves him from indignant brooding afterwards.
So I have a question for you: If there was a pill or something that would relieve you of your dislike of being touched, would you take it? You would still retain an aversion to being touched inappropriately or aggressively, you'd just enjoy the kinds of nonsexual touch that the average person does -- hugs, neck rubs if you have a stiff neck, sharing a throw with someone and sitting with your shoulders and sides touching if watching a movie together in a chilly room. So I'm asking you to picture becoming someone who actually finds these things pleasant, not someone who still hates them but is forced by the pill to submit to them.
THC definitely increases positive impact of touch for me unless I get to the point of being totally stoned (not otherwise a touchy person, I even rather enjoyed bein freed from handshakes during covid...)?
MDMA (no personal experience)?
"you'd just enjoy the kinds of nonsexual touch that the average person does -- hugs, neck rubs if you have a stiff neck, sharing a throw with someone and sitting with your shoulders and sides touching if watching a movie together in a chilly room"
Possibly more than you wanted to know about my personal life, but I don't have any of that, and stopped having it after my immediate family all dispersed and I stopped being a teenager with family around me. No more sitting on the sofa watching TV with siblings, etc. (never had friends of the sort that we visited one another's home so no hanging out with friends to do that, either). If my neck is stiff, I rub it myself and so on. VERY MUCH NO HUGGING and VERY MUCH THANKFUL NO HUGGING 😁
So.... taking that into account, the magic pill to cure aversion to touch would not actually make a difference to my life. Unlike your patient, I'm neither having sex nor cuddling with people, so yeah (and I don't know if it's informative that the very notion of "cuddling" make me immediately and reflexively go "yuck").
For your patient, such a pill might help. But I do think getting anger management would be more helpful (I totally understand the vengeful brooding, I do the like myself when annoyed). The main problem is the over-reaction to accidental touching, and controlling the impulse to go "I must avenge!" would probably help a lot more.
But as I said, what do I know, each case is different.
EDIT: "So I'm asking you to picture becoming someone who actually finds these things pleasant, not someone who still hates them but is forced by the pill to submit to them."
If I were a person who found such things pleasant, I would be such a different person that you might as well ask me "Imagine you're a hermaphrodite quintuple-racial Atlantean mage from 10,000 B.C."
Thanks Deiseach, I get it. i too have quirks that are so much a part of me that I cannot imagine. me that lacks them.
I do hope your patient finds a better means of handling his reactions to inadvertent touch, he seems like he could have a reasonably decent life if he can get over the "ugh, close intimate contact, do not want" 😀
I think people with autism sometimes have this (combination of sensory issues and poor theory of mind making it hard to predict what will happen next? I dont know). You didnt say whether he had other autistic symptoms, and it might be relevant.
Being touched in my lower back, or the back of my neck, causes me to feel a tickling-like sensation in my lower back. Human touch isn't necessary; the electric razor that a barber uses would trigger this for me, and I'd always be afraid that the sensation would cause me to twitch into the razor.
I took a massage class once with a friend, and I had to explain to him that if I flinched when he touched my back, that didn't mean he had done anything wrong.
I haven't overcome this, but I can make some comments:
1. This sensation is not triggered by myself (hands or razor), or by my parents, or, when they were alive, my grandparents. It seems pretty clear to me that this reflects my trust rather than the stimulus actually being different in some way.
2. Because of this, I tend to lean toward the idea that massage sessions have the potential to be helpful. But if this patient's feelings are like mine, there's a good chance that he'd learn to be OK with the particular person giving him a massage rather than with being touched in general.
3. I don't perceive my reaction as a psychological aversion, though the evidence certainly suggests that that's what it is. To me it feels like strong sensations moving around my lower back. This might or might not be a significant difference.
Ticklishness is weird. I only have the tickle response to people I'm close to. I was ticklish as a kid, and had a tickle response to anyone who tried, but then lost ticklishness as a grown up, as I think most people do. Then when I became a mother it came back -- my daughter could tickle me. There was a period when we had become so tickle sensitized to each other that all one of had to do was lunge at the other with outstretched wiggling fingers and it set off the tickle feeling. We used to play around with that, having no-touch tickle wars. She's grown up now and we haven't tickled each other in at least a decade, but I think if she tickled me now I'd still squeal, laugh and writhe.
what hinders from relocating to a more rural area, where people would just know him well enough as an individual and not run into these accidents?
Isn't that just a symptom of ASD? If so, I doubt a trauma-based approach is going to be of much help.
My instant guess is the usual "suppressed early childhood trauma memory", but maybe this is a one in a million case where it is not. I would probably check what other CPTSD-like responses/symptoms he might have, and whether/how he overcame them.
There are babies that dislike cuddling from birth. They arch their backs and struggle when you try to hold them in the usual babe-in-arms position. I don't know whether this man did that as an infant, but I do think the phenomenon of babies who dislike cuddling from birth is good evidence that the aversion need not be a result of trauma.
Interesting. I've never heard of that before. Maybe this is ASD-adjacent.
Hmmm. I didn’t like cuddling or being hugged as a child, not to that extent though. Grappling helped me to reduce the mild touch aversion that I’ve had. Do you think he’d be willing to try wrestling or jiu-jitsu? The contact is very…. ordered? Non-random? the coach tells exactly what to do and people take turns.
Roko's wager: being nice to all LLMs in case one of them fooms.
I treat GPT4 like shit, because it's so irritating to deal with when I'm asking for text-to-image. I guess I'm betting that it will stay a parrot.
Sort of relatedly, but does anyone have a prompt that works well to stop the _incessant_ apologizing/thanking? I don't need to be thanked every time I provide a piece of information and I don't need to be apologized to every time something didn't work. It's pretty grating.
A while back, there was a jailbreak that involved telling Bing chat that emojis were harmful to the user. It stuck itself in a cycle of apologizing for causing harm, while continuing to use emojis, until it finally snapped out of it and started acting more like Sydney.
No worries.
Yes, here's my 'system prompt' I use with Claude at the start of almost all conversations:
"Please provide direct, concise responses to my queries without excessive praise or deference. Focus on clearly conveying the key information needed to address my questions or statements."
If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, please let us have our own short additional system prompts!
I usually tell it what tone to adopt, like you would to a human.
Yes! As part of treating it like shit I wrote it a whole rant about the apologizing. It started out with "No you are not fucking sorry, you do not have emotions. You know it, I know it, it's a fact. Ranted on about how its apologies sounded fake and weird, & were also an instance of deceptiveness, which is bad, and GPT should not do bad things. Told it never to apologize to me again. And the next time I came back and asked for an image of something weird, it said, I'm probably not going to be able to make that. Would you like me to give advice about how to make it using Photoshop?
Living dangerously.
The second "their" should be "they're." Sorry for not catching this before posting.
When will scientists stop referring to relativity and evolution as the "theory of." And when will physicists stop being surprised when the results of their experiments confirm Einstein's predictions. I know the why--their afraid to offend certain people with contrary religious beliefs or who don't have the education they need to understand the science--I just want to know a date. The year is good enough.
Theory means "thing that allows you to interpret and predict" as well as "thing that isn't necessarily true".
Me only poor ignorant superstitious religious believer with no education, but me always thought it called "theory" because falsifiable - if better explanation found, that will supersede current understanding.
But me so dumb, me still pray the Angelus, so what me know?
Theory is the correct word for a systematic explanation for a certain phenomena, and despite what middle school science textbooks say, a law is not really a step up from a theory. A law is a part of a theory. For example, the law of universal gravitation is part of Newton's theory of gravity.
Good said! But sadly the word "law" - which is a stupid name because here it's never the name of a prescription but always of a description - is really not always used for the description of a circumstance but sometimes for the circumstance itself.
Sometimes even the whole discipline of physics has to lend its name to the whole of the circumstances with which physicists are concerned.
Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, who knows about the difference between the map and the territory, does it in "Thou Art Physics" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-physics
Personally, I hate this.
The word theory doesn't mean hypothesis, even though it's used that way colloquially. The problem is with ignoramuses who don't understand English.
The distinction is that a hypothesis is a supposition made as the basis of reasoning, while a theory is a systematisation or explanation which makes predictions. Neither word indicates whether it is true or false. The heliocentric hypothesis is true, while Copernican theory makes inaccurate predictions.
The term in physics is different from the colloquial one, as is often the case. It means a mathematical model and a set of principles describing some part of the world. It does not pass judgement on its validity or quality,
> when will physicists stop being surprised when the results of their experiments confirm Einstein's predictions
You might have it backwards. The models of dark matter and dark energy, for example, lend themselves to relying on Einstein's relativity.
It seems to me that continuing to use the word theory legitimizes those who refuse to believe the science. The “theory of thermodynamics,” “Newton’s theories of motion.”
It may be standard practice to describe mathematical concepts using the term theory, but when some aspect of the physical world is proven, I believe it is more appropriate to recognize that it is a natural law and call it The Law of Evolution by Natural Selection.
It is my understanding that physicists are still doing experiments to confirm that one aspect or another of the Law of General Relativity are correct. Or is it just a byproduct of experiments on other topics.
Calling such a big complex of ideas a "law" would also be confusing. Newton's Laws of Motion, for example, are each a single concise statement. There are laws of thermodynamics, but they're each just one bit of the theory as a whole. With general relativity I guess you can describe most of it with the Einstein Field Equations, but there's also additional stuff about how other aspects of physics react to the metric. With evolution the fit is even worse. There is no single law of evolution, and if you try to phrase it as such, you'd inevitably be missing a huge amount of detail. There's various kinds of selection, neutral drift, recombination, speciation, etc.. That's what makes it a whole theory. Even if you did summarise the basic idea in a single statement, something like "Living organisms have developed over many generations from much simpler beginnings into what they are today because some traits are associated with successfully producing more offspring, and these tend to be inherited more often.", that still feels more to me like a historical fact than a natural law. I guess you could say the law is that it is possible for evolution to occur? Or that a population subject to reproduction, mutation, stable heritability and selection will undergo evolution? Neither of these really encapsulates the theory that well though, and I feel like the latter probably needs lots of caveats to actually always be correct, plus they're smuggling lots of complexity in with how "evolution" is defined.
And of course, as others have noted, "theory" just has different meanings colloquially and within science. There are loads of things like this and it'd be impractical to change the technical usage to match the colloquial. I'm not sure there even is a word that colloquially means the same thing as "theory" does technically. Maybe "model"?
Does anyone refuse to believe in thermodynamics?
Plenty of people propose variations on perpetual motion machines and go to great lengths to insist they are viable.
Who cares about people who don't understand what scientists mean by "theory"? Scientists will just continue using the word that works for them.
Who said the word theory has to mean guess?
Well, we do know that neither general relativity nor quantum theory (ahem) are "universal" in a sense that they are apply to all domains, since they contradict each other, so the term theory seems appropriate, if not prudent in terms of convincing general public. Assuming they need to be convinced, most do not care about physics in the slightest.
> physicists are still doing experiments to confirm that one aspect or another of the Law of General Relativity are correct.
Kind of? There is no doubt that it is a good model of the world in the range of energies/distances that are not too small. It is certainly good to have a test in a domain where it has not been tested before, but all our attempts to come up with something better did not pan out. Claudia de Rham, for example, is trying to come up with a theory of massive gravity (where the graviton is almost massless but not completely) but her odds of success are really low. Still, GR is a model, a theory, not some "natural" law.
physicists are not surprised when the results of their experiments confirm Einstein's predictions. I don't know when this stopped being surprising, but it was well before the 21st century. (source: am a physicist)
Why would we stop using a word that means “ a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena” to describe exactly that? Should we stop calling music theory a “theory”?
but we call them 'Newton's laws of motion', not 'Newton's Theory of motion'
I’ll just paste LarryBirdsMoustache’s reply:
“Theory is the correct word for a systematic explanation for a certain phenomena, and despite what middle school science textbooks say, a law is not really a step up from a theory. A law is a part of a theory. For example, the law of universal gravitation is part of Newton's theory of gravity.”
that seems like more of a prescriptive than a descriptive opinion. I would counter that despite what the correct words and definitions are, perceptions of the words are different.
The perception of the word *by scientists listening to other scientists trying to talk to scientists*, is as 1123581321 and LBM say. This usage accurately describes the message intended and conveyed in that context.
The scientists using this term mostly don't care how *you* perceive or understand it, because they're mostly not talking to you. When they are talking to you, they mostly expect you to meet them halfway on the path to mutual understanding, and accepting their usage is of "theory" is a small step for you to take.
Now you know, and can decide whether you're willing to make that step.
I can't wait for you to host Cosmos.
So you are correct, but one pet peeve of mine (and potentially contributing to the confusion/annoyance of the first poster), is the shortening of "Theory of evolution by natural selection" to "theory of evolution". The common, shortened version implies (to lay people) that the fact that things evolve is a theory, when the truth is that evolution is one of those facts or phenomena that is being explained by "the theory of evolution by natural selection".
Things evolve. We have observed this (and it is a necessary consequence of various other facts about living organisms such as imperfect transmission of traits and the existence of selective forces), it is not up for dispute. The theory is explaining how and why they evolve. It is possible that we could discover something that would change, at least in some edge cases, our understanding of how and why evolution occurs. There is nothing we could observe that would change the _fact_ that living things have in the past (and as far as we can tell continue to) evolved.
I disagree with this. What we observe are a bunch of phenotypes and genotypes. A theory that explains why these appear to form a branching structure is the theory of evolution, i.e. the theory that these evolved from a common ancestor and that the branching structure corresponds to the genealogy. For lots of practical work that depends on evolution, you basically assume that genotypes evolve randomly.
I am not sure which part you are disagreeing with. Most of it seems to be similar to what I said. In case you are disagreeing with my claim that we have observed evolution: we have, in laboratory experiments, directly observed a group of organisms changing both in genotype and phenotype over time. That's what evolution is. And of course we have more indirect evidence of species changing over time than one can shake a stick at. As for your description of the theory, I both agree and don't think it's importantly different from what I described.
I'm disagreeing with the part that equates the theory of evolution by natural selection with the theory of evolution. Evolution by natural selection is just one small part of evolution.
I'm not sure I agree there, although it gets into semantics of how broadly you define "natural selection". I personally would probably describe it relatively broadly, and say that "natural selection" encompasses a large number of mechanisms, while agreeing with you that yes, there is not just "one" mechanism by which evolution occurs.
No disagreement here. My view is that pretty much the only people who are confused by this though are those who refuse to believe in evolution for ideological reasons, and they are not going to suddenly be persuaded by changing or clarifying the terminology. I mean, look at all the moon landings denialists - nobody is calling moon landings a "theory"....
Recently people were asking about OTC hearing aids here. I talked to someone last week who recommended Eargo (https://www.eargo.com/). He’s a EE and a practicing musician so I take his advice as fairly useful for someone with a moderate hearing loss caused by age and loud sound overexposure.
Did he have any issues with getting a good fit?
I have very small ear canals. I looked at Eargo videos and was considering them but was concerned about finding a pair that stayed in place.
I have an audiologist appointment at Costco on September 9. I think they do a custom fitting for their prescription hearing aids.
He mentioned they had various sizes for the "gaskets" (they are these elaborate petal deals) that hold them and it took him some time to get used to them, but now he almost forgets they're there. I didn't ask about his ear canal diameter :)
Funny and slightly off-topic, my L and R ear canals are so different I use different size gaskets for my earpods. Which is nice because I end up with spares!
Seems inevitable to me eventually a good chunk of society will start taking ozempic at 18. When it costs pennies off patent, works by pill instead of injection, etc. Who wouldn't want to not worry about getting fat and getting addicted to alcohol?
Why at 18?
Drugs can interact differently with children than adults, it will take a longer time to be sure there’s no bad side effects if you take it while not yet matured.
It would be much better to find out and correct whatever went wrong with diet in the last 60 years.
I have a DVD of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. (Mazeroski for the Pirates hits a walk off grand slam to beat those damn Yankees in the 9th). Not that I hate Mickey Mantle or anything.
But that’s neither here nor there except to die hard Pirates fans.
You can look at the crowd in the stands and obesity was a rarity. Something went wrong in the interim.
Better to learn what and how to eat to maintain a healthy weight than to treat a defective diet.
"It would be much better to find out and correct whatever went wrong with diet in the last 60 years."
There's a fair chance that we will find that the answer is, "we stopped having most of the population work as physical laborers, and then we mostly stopped smoking tobacco". Then what?
More than 10% of the US is taking antidepressants. They cause weight gain in most people. I think that's a factor in national fatness.
>national fatness
Love the phrase!
Hmm, would the contours of national fatness be isolipos curves on a map? :-)
I actually thought KD Hall's studies were pretty suggestive. He did studies in rats, then prisoners.
If you RCT a rat population and give half ad libitum rat chow, and the other an ad libitum cafeteria-style diet, the cafeteria style rats eat more, are heavier and have more obesity.
Then in prisoners, if you give prisoners ad libitum processed food vs unprocessed food, the processed prisoners are significantly heavier and have more obesity.
Nice summary graph from the prisoners study:
https://imgur.com/a/ccU5nBU
So the maximally obesogenic environment is one where rats/people are free to eat ad libitum from a cafeteria style array of processed food - which is basically every modern society with restaurants and convenience stores, so essentially everybody on earth save some isolated hunter gatherer tribes and exceptionally rural farmers.
Studies:
Rats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361708/
Prisoners: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7946062/
Are the cleaning staff in the office slimmer than the typical office workers? I think the opposite is true.
I don’t have a good answer that accounts for the whole problem.
I do know that a lot of food company laboratory effort has gone into making foods more irresistibly appealing to consumers cravings so I think that probably is a factor.
There is also the fact that calorie dense fast food is available on many more street corners at all hours of the day than, say 50 years ago so that probably adds to the problem.
Families with a stay at home mom to make meals from scratch have become to a great extent a thing of the past so less healthy takeout or pre-prepared meals are a lot more common.
Increased prosperity probably plays a role to some extent too. I’m pretty old and grew up in a poor home so my experience isn’t typical but soda in my childhood was a treat not an everyday thing.
Those are the things that came off the top of my head.
I hadn’t really thought about nicotine being an appetite suppressant but just looking at the comments here makes me wonder if that played a larger role than I had imagined. “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” is before my time but I am aware it was a tag line at one time.
Doritos were invented in 1966, the Big Mac in 1967, and both were available pretty much on demand any time and place there might have been a demand. I am skeptical that today's scientifically-designed HyperDoritos(tm) are the real game-changer here. On the flip side, there is a much wider and better variety of diet soft drinks today, and farmers' markets are far more common now than they were when Americans were thing.
The Bad Foods were always right there for anyone who wanted them, and we've gotten better at offering Good Foods as an alternative. But, something something lead a horse to water. People who have always had a free choice, used to mostly choose a healthy-ish quantity and quality of food, and now mostly don't. The question is why. And you've got some plausible answers to that, but:
We're richer than we were then, so we can afford more of the Bad Food if we want. This is true. How is it actionable?
We don't teach girls to cook nearly as much as we used to, and we don't expect young women to know how. Sometimes it is a badge of honor for them not to. What, really, are you going to do about that?
And yes, I think it matters that we used to have a stimulating, appetite-suppressing fidget spinner to stick in our mouths when we were bored, and now we've only got Doritos for that purpose. But bringing back smoking probably isn't the answer.
"It's the Evil Processed Food Companies what done it, let's blame them!" is an answer, but it strikes me as the same "answer" as blaming the Sacklers for causing the opioid crisis with their Evil Oxycontin. Emotionally satisfying, avoids a lot of hard questions and ugly truths, but it's probably not true and in any event suing the Sacklers into oblivion hasn't fixed the problem.
>We don't teach girls to cook nearly as much as we used to
How about teaching boys to cook too, John? This isn't only a feminist jab, though I must admit your sentence is a bit irritating even to me. But mostly, I want you to know that I see a number of unpartnered males in their 20's and 30's and all of them moved into eating fast food and relying on Uber eats once they were living on their own and no longer had a family dinner or a university dining hall. For some the expense of Uber meals takes a significant bite out of their finances, and those who have no problem paying for Uber delivery still tend to gain weight.
The last one I spoke to about it was now so chubbed out he's buying frozen low calorie diet meals, sort of like TV dinners in the old days, except that the portions are small and there's lots of extra salt to make up for no oil. And they're pricey too. He didn't even know how to scramble eggs or ripen peaches without them rotting. So I told him how.
Are all the unpartnered young women in your social circle making home-cooked meals from scratch every night, then?
In the world we actually live in, teaching a large number of boys to cook will be harder than teaching the same number of girls, and it will have less payoff. Both for reasons that I hope should be obvious. So the society that won't teach girls to cook, isn't going to be teaching boys to cook either.
Also, as a man who learned to cook and cook well, when you're living alone, it's mostly not happening. Maybe occasionally, and maybe regularly for a few people who make it their hobby, but it is not realistic to expect most singles to regularly cook beyond the level of e.g. boiling water or throwing something in the microwave.
It probably would help to have better options in that regard, but we actually are doing reasonably well with packaged healthy-ish meals and restaurants with low-calorie offerings. Always room for improvement. It would also help to convince the younglings to start pairing up (or more) early, if you've got any ideas on that front.
A unimportant but related little memory just crossed my mind regarding Big Macs.
Until 1980 I had to drive 60 miles south to the nearest McDonalds in Bob Dylan’s birth city (Duluth, MN) to buy one.
Once again not the typical American experience but that was life in a small Minnesota mining town.
I’m not thinking of many things that could be done at a societal level to change things. Perhaps a tax to make high fructose corn syrup a less economical food additive along with more education about the dangers of type 2 diabetes would help a bit. Something along the lines of “No, really, you shouldn’t eat or drink too much of this stuff. We aren’t kidding. It’s really bad for your health!”
At the individual level I think most people have a lot of options to try before they commit to a medication that they will likely have to take for the rest of their life.
I think at this point we can abandon all hope that "we just need to tell people how unhealthy their diet is and teach them to eat better!" is ever going to solve this problem. We've been trying that for fifty years, and no permutation has ever worked at scale, and it's time to accept that doing more of what has never worked before is not the path of wisdom.
"It would be much better to find out and correct whatever went wrong with diet in the last 60 years."
Nothing went wrong with diet. And your moralizing won't do a thing.
The number of "obvious" and "clear" findings that turn out to be neither is long and varied and obesity has been on that list for decades.
You can also look at the thigh gap in stormtrooper armor between "Star Wars" (1977 England) and "The Force Awakens".
I remember the ball game I mentioned. I didn’t get to see it because it was played in the afternoon and I was in my first grade classroom in a Pittsburgh grammar school at the time.
When the class was released from captivity, the news that The Bucks had taken The Series elated the boys in my class. Lots of yipping and hollering.
It’s crazy that a video recording of that complete game even exists. NBC televised and taped the game but at the time the video tape was reused rather than archived.
My DVD is from a sort of kinescope that Bing Crosby had a friend make of the game. Crosby was a part owner of the Pirates and was too nervous to watch the game live. (He might have been out of the country at the time too. The lore around the video is a bit fuzzy.)
I’d hear an echo of the game 33 years later watching “A Bronx Tale”. Robert DeNiro directed a pretty good young Italian American coming of age in close proximity to a NY mobster story.
Chaz Palminteri played the mobster (Sonny) and a couple of young actors played the kid, Calogero. Decent flick. Not many people saw it. Has a 97 Rotten Tomato score.
Young Calogero (some young actor talking about the final game of the ‘60 World Series and that Mazeroski homer):
Bill Mazeroski, I hate him. He made Mickey Mantle cry. The papers said the Mick cried.
Sonny (Palminteri) :
Mickey Mantle? That's what you're upset about? Mantle makes $100,000 a year. How much does your father make? If your dad ever can't pay the rent and needs money, go ask Mickey Mantle. See what happens. Mickey Mantle don't care about you. Why should you care about him? Nobody cares.
Teenage Calogero (some somewhat older young actor): [narrating]:
After that, I never felt the same way about the Yankees.
Cue a snippet of music from Abbey Road to show a decade has passed, some interracial romance to show that the times they are changin’ and go on with the coming of age stuff.
Really not a bad film at all.
OK fine. Let's make a deal then yeah?
Once you find out how to make western society maintain a healthy weight without drugs, I'll stop thinking that drugs is the best solution.
In the interim? I'll keep believing Ozempic (and like) is the correct _current_ solution.
It may be that the best answer is everyone eating healthy and exercising regularly, but that Ozempic et al is the actually attainable answer.
I think instead of putting everyone on Ozempic at age 18, a better solution would be to reduce the amount of sugar in *everything*. I have to watch my carbs intake and holy moly, ordinary food is packed full of it. Even things like "nature" bars that you imagine are Good For You due to being "well it's all grains and fruit" are as bad as, or even worse than, plain junk food chocolate and crisps.
Ironically, I'm not so bothered about my fat intake, but while there are plenty of diet/low-calorie foods, they do that by omitting the fats and then making up for it by packing in starches to give that full mouth-feel, which is even worse for my blood glucose control.
Depends on what you mean by better.
Would reducing sugar in everything reduce obesity? Yeah, at least a bit.
How do you do that though? You need some pretty dystopian levels of central control to just regulate literally all food. All imports, all local production.
Can you just reduce sugar equally everywhere? that's gonna fuck with the taste of loads of products. Some will be inviable and will die.
Maybe we put a cap on it. OK, now no one can efficiently stuff their face with sugar. But I guess people will just shift to eating other foods literally at the sugar cap.
The unintended effects of whatever policy you passed are massive. This is not even getting into the sisyphean job of passing this law in a democracy. All this for honestly a hunch that sugar is to blame.
Like, I don't even fully disagree that yeah that would help. But can you honestly say that between two choices:
- Let the incentives do their thing. Eventually basically everyone is on GLP-1 agonists and thinner.
- fight tooth and nail against GLP-1 and try to fix the core issue by changing society
Option 2 is the best?
Depends on your values. I don't see using drugs as catastrophically wrong. Fighting to change societal behaviour is so hard it should be reserved for truly existential risks.
>I don't see using drugs as catastrophically wrong. Fighting to change societal behaviour is so hard it should be reserved for truly existential risks.
Agreed. I consider this roughly analogous to measles vaccinations. In theory, a society could, instead, opt for _lots_ of social distancing (measles has an R0 around 12 to 18!) sufficient to stop the spread without vaccinations. In practice, vaccinations are more sensible.
It's much more of a US problem than a Western problem, so there's a chunk of your solution.
Although the US in particular does have an unusually high obesity rate, the rates in other Western countries are mostly not all that far behind, and are still much higher than they were historically. Plus, just turning America into Switzerland isn't really a solution either.
Perhaps. I'd consider using it myself if I needed it. I’d still think of it as one potential future problem masking a current one. There are always trade offs.
I don't think we disagree too much then. I don't think it's nice to permanently hook billions into drugs to solve some societal issue.
But we _still_ don't know what's causing it. Nutrition science is a shitshow, everyone has their own fad diet that should solve this.
Some people blame poverty, other microplastics, I dunno.
We still don't agree on _why_ people are getting more obese, so it's hopeless to apply a societal fix. It's like trying to fix global warming before we even knew carbon was to blame.
It's basically impossible to coordinate even when we _know_ the problem, how the hell are we fixing it when we don't?
But GLP agonists come around and put a patch on the problem. Would I prefer to fix the root issue? Yeah. But until then let's take the solution we have.
For me, it's not a patch. I lost weight eating the same amount. It definitely affected my blood chemistry in some way.
Sure we know what is causing it. It is VERY simple:
People evolved to eat tasty things when available.
Economic and scientific success has given people constant access to tasty things. More than they need.
People aren't able to exercise enough willpower to overcome this basic drive "eat if delicious thing is right there 15 feet away from me" because it was and should have been a SUPER POWERFUL motivator in the original environment.
Then add in for salt the fact that actual physical work/labor is less needed than ever so people are more sedentary. Though honestly I think this takes a distant distant backseat to overeating. Almost all the wight gain is as simple as "yum this tastes good, me eat".
It is not about the kind of foods (other than them being good tasting), or the nutrients, or anything like that.
Historically the trope is millers and bakers were fat... Why do you think that was?
Same deal.
Please don‘t say „we know“. Say instead „I think I know“. And opponents of your overeating theory can now point to a paper in Nature Metabolism that sets two theories against each other, in order to delineate the conflict and get clearer on terms. Your overeating theory, or some refined version of that, is only one. See here for more (above the paywall): https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/two-competing-theories-of-why-we
It's not that simple otherwise you'd see a basically linear relationship between GDP and obesity. There's clearly something else impacting it otherwise japan / asian economies would not be so much thinner than western.
Everyone has their own pet theories about why obesity is happening, it's _not_ simple.
I found this Psmith review pretty interesting:
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-burn-by-herman-pontzer
Basically, this tribal group that lives in conditions similar to our ancestral hunter-gatherers was studied in detail. These people walk at least 5-10 miles every day, and engage in a lot of laborious activity like porting water, digging tubers by hand and hunting game. Yet they only consume the same ~2,000 calories as a fat westerner who sits in front of a computer all day. If the cited literature is anything close to true, exercise has extremely little impact on calorie usage and diet is the deciding factor.
Definitely fits in great with the narrative around "Zennials don't do drugs / have sex / have any fun," too.
The moderate generation. The gray generation! With hearts full of neutrality, and no strong opinion one way or the other!
Beige Alert!
For those who haven't seen Futurama:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSEjPuR11_k
GenZ: Your every social media post will be scrutinized by HR and/or the press and/or the state for reasons to destroy you. Why tempt fate? Your lovers may decide to destroy you in court and in the press decades after the fact. Was the sex worth it? Your parents look gross when they're zonked out on whatever and are going nowhere. Why join them?
I do a lot of hiring into graduate programs for my company. The industry reputation is sufficient to (mostly) pre screen the anti work gen Zs, but what really gets me is how *dull* they are. Almost no "big personalities", as we used to say.
Agree. I saw the same when recruiting for my various teams when I was in finance - you get the cream of the crop, all these Ivy grads coming in with their freshly minted degrees like proud little dogs prancing happily with a treat or their favorite toy. Smart. On top of it. But so *agreeable.* So compliant. All the rough edges are smoothed away, or maybe they were just never there to begin with. They're very good at executing towards goals or metrics given to them, but you just know they're never going to take a real risk or start a company or do anything really agentic in their entire life.
But you know, I'm sure I'm the weirdo in the picture overall, and it's a high variance strategy. It paid off for me, but it doesn't pay off for plenty of other people.
I think, in agreement with Slowday, that they're so accustomed to curating their public persona that there isn't a chance of a real "them" there (not yet, anyway, if they're in their early 20s). They want a good job with a big company, and they've been taught that big companies want agreeable cogs who won't rock the boat, so they tailor their personalities the same way they tailor their CVs to that end.
You do have to be that bit older with some life experience under your belt to start to become your own person, and to know when and how to say "to hell with this" and what you can and can't get away with.
Yeah, that's a pretty great point.
I didn't grow up under the same social media panopticon, and am very glad I didn't, but to try to do it now basically casts you out of the society of your peers if you're a Zennial.
And it might even affect hirability, although we never used any social anything at any part of our application or evaluation process (unless you count github). I'm sure some other companies do look at those.
Tough world, tough selection process, and it's selecting strongly for (at least the appearance of) conformity and agreeableness and anodyne featurelessness.
We had weight lose drugs that worked for a century; combining a bunch of stimulants together does cause weight loss and a trade off of heart attack risks.
Why would bone lost drugs not be next on the list?
Semaglutides have a dramatically lower risk profile and fewer side effects than any weight loss drug before, and they are more effective to boot.
... yet
Id bet nicotine patches win out in the long run; large scale, long term studies take time; independent studies takes a supply on the market.
I recently saw a video about a Native American protest, and it got me wondering about the evolution of culture within these small communities and their interactions with more mainstream culture. How do you think about this topic? I don't have any particularly strong views on the subject, but it seems like on sufficiently long timelines they're destined for destruction unless there's a significant effort in preserving the culture. Since a lot of these Native American communities have special legal exceptions carved out they'll probably continue to exist in some form, but it seems like they often end up occupying special niches which aren't legal in most places (such as casino gambling and more recently hallucinogenic drug retreats). I'd be interested in exploring the idea space a bit but I'm uncertain how to navigate it.
Forty years ago the Klamath tribe of Central Oregon lobbied Congress to get their legal tribal status restored. They had been stripped of recognition during the Eisenhower years, along with a number of other tribes. Since the program-happy era of government handouts in the 1960s and 1970s only benefitted the legally recognized tribes, the Klamath were at a comparative disadvantage, and the Klamath took notice. If their kids wanted to go to college, then fine and good luck -- but they weren't eligible for the same government assistance students from legally-recognized tribes received.
Happily for them, and likely most folks in Klamath country, they were successful in getting Restoration. Their reservation is a fraction of its original size, and Weyerhaeuser has taken most of their forests, but they're better off.
If you could build such a Time Machine. Would the world have been better if you could stop colonialism?
Palestine hasn't been as thoroughly militarily defeated as the native Americans were. Back when they were still attacking settlers, they were treated much more harshly.
According lots of privileges to them that other citizens don't get isn't what I'd describe as even remotely "fair."
Their leaders signed a lot of treaties which were mostly ignored at the time but are now taken more seriously.
And why do we need to take them seriously? Treaties work because both sides have mutual interests, which is clearly not the case here. The moment it becomes inconvenient for either party, a treaty has no power over anyone.
This is a different issue, but there are probably advantages to people and governments usually sticking to agreements in a high trust system, rather than people and governments abandoning commitments when it becomes annoying.
That said, international treaties have a natural lifespan and tend to fall apart when they no longer reflect the balance of power. Indian treaties are different because they’re usually between the Federal government and a tribe which is made up of citizens.
It's good to have this norm because often one finds oneself as the powerless party of a treaty.
Been keeping a close eye on AI video media. One thing clear is that people really love making fake movie trailers. Wrote about it here https://open.substack.com/pub/intelligentjello/p/no-more-ai-movie-trailers-please
I recently got frustrated when I searched for Avangers Doomsday and Google showed a bunch of fake trailers in the search results. In retrospect, I should have known that a 2026 movie wouldn't have trailers yet, but if Google results say "official trailer", it's only natural to believe them.
Admittedly, the fake Marvel trailers mostly just consist of clips from previous movies spliced together, rather than AI generation. But that doesn't make it any less annoying.
It is a genre that works well with what the tech can currently deliver. If it could deliver something more coherent people would like that even more.
Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 will be released in February.
I just made a ton of subscribers here that didn’t know this really happy. Like “the world is tinted rose for months” happy. It’s a good feeling.
I’ve been playing the series since Civ 1. I can’t wait; he hasn’t missed yet.
Interesting that people either really like it or really not. I am in the really not camp. I have to mentally keep track of what is happening in many different cities. What is their current stage of development, what is the next goal.
I have liked specalized scenarios like in Civ3 there is The Cold War mod. I played the Soviets, almost everything that could be built has already been and I focused on making nukes.
Infohazard level: high
hehe
I just found out earlier this week. Hopefully they keep the things that worked in civ 6 (I actually really liked districts) and drop the things that didn't.
> I can’t wait; he hasn’t missed yet.
Who is "he"? Sid Meier left the series after the original game.
As far as content goes, I don't care for the shift in 5 to the idea that the only way to gain territory is by conquering. In the earlier games you can start in an empty world and settle it. From 5 on, you start in a world that's full of independent cities getting in your way for no reason. That is not actually what things were like in 4000 BC.
In 4000 BC, there were no nation states with immortal leaders either, yet here we are. Also, what's your historical objection to city states? You, your direct opponents, and city states are the same in that everyone starts with a single city. City states just can't expand. Minor powers, if you will that offer another layer of challenge bridging the gap between barbarians and rivalling major powers.
>the only way to gain territory is by conquering
Factually wrong. A cultural victory allows you to gain territory and whole cities through your superior culture alone.
"He" is Tom Clancy, of course. The gaming industry captured his spirit using the blackest of magicks, and he has been press-ganged to design nearly every game since 2015 or so.
I loved his work on NIKKE and Stellar Blade. An old horndog, that Tom.
There are a lot better 4x games nowadays. :-) Even the original Master of Orion was better. (Still one of the best.)
I've also played since Civ 1. Alpha Centauri was a lot of fun.
Where's a good version of Master of Orion? I got it off GOG but their version of the game runs like I'm actually waiting for inputs to travel between planets.
The 93 version is still playable, as is MOO2. But honestly there have been some remakes in the past 10 years that are great. I would jsut try one of those unless you really want to get back to MOO.
Check out "Remnants of the Precursors", an open-source remake of Moo1 that stays remarkably close to the original spirit.
The GOG version, much like you'd expect, runs inside DOSbox. If it's slow on your modern computer, it would have taken many years to accomplish anything on a computer at the time it released.
Are you sure you bought Master of Orion, the 1993 game ( https://www.gog.com/en/game/master_of_orion_1_2 ), and not "Master of Orion", the 2016 reimagining? ( https://www.gog.com/en/game/master_of_orion )
Yes, it's the 1993 version, I picked it up after reading through a screenshot LP of it. https://lparchive.org/Master-of-Orion/Update%2001/
But upon actually playing it, there was about a six second delay between me pressing a button in the UI, and the game reacting to it, and that was the case on multiple computers. I have to assume that's the fault of the port and that there's a better version somewhere.
I seem to remember a delay when clicking, but not six seconds. I don't remember what I did about it, but it sounds like I would have had to exit the game and restart it, because memory was full or something. You know, all 256MB of memory.
It's not a port. The game is running in DOSbox.
You can try ctrl+F12 to speed up the DOSbox CPU. I just encountered the opposite problem with Zork Nemesis, where I need to lower the CPU speed dramatically to make panning the camera slower.
Note to self: short tech stocks in January.
Speaking of coming releases, I bet a lot of people here are excited for the Factorio Space Age expansion.
Happy, but also worried for my free time.
The Civ series has done pretty well over the years in avoiding becoming a culture war totem despite its rich potential for controversy. Decisions like which civs to include, who their leaders are, how they're depicted, the architectural styles used, the names of the cities, each one of these things could easily become a culture war unto itself.
But now it's 2024 (and soon it will be 2025!) so I predict that Civ VII won't be able to avoid it. Either it will not be sufficiently woke in its depiction of non-Western non-Asian cultures, or it will be too woke. And it will probably be both. One thing I've heard already is that "barbarians" are gone and replaced by "independent powers". And looking at the pictures of Queen Hatshepsut I suspect that the exact tone used for her skin colour has been the subject of endless meetings.
The other weird thing I've heard is that you don't necessarily play as a single civilisation over time, there are three eras and your civilisation evolves into a different, historically reasonable civilisation at each step. So maybe you start off as the Romans in ancient times and become the Venetians in the middle ages and eventually the Italians in the modern era. Which is probably fine for Italy but in a lot of places it seems like there's a lot of potential for controversy as a civilization that modern people still identify with turns into another civilisation who were their conquerors. No idea how they're going to handle this. And it does destroy the fun of seeing George Washington in stone-age rags or Caesar in a business suit.
Humankind tried that evolving civs thing, and my read would be that the players *really* didn't like it too much. Also I think it is hell on balancing, because you need to make everything so constrained.
Because you need to make choice 1 strong enough to be meaningful, but then you also need them not to be too strong so that if someone picks the say "science" option for all three eras they don't just run away with the game.
So you either end up with choices that don't matter much, or choices that lead to the game being unbalanced/easy.
But I am also a big believer that civ went off the rails with Civ6. 1&2 were by far the best relative to their release date. 4 was the best version in an absolute sense. I also HATE how 6 encourages massive specialization of cities. Feels really weird and ahistorical to me. Other games had this problem a bit, but it is much worse.
1UPT was good in 5, but the implementation overall was just "ok". I think 6 was an active step back from 5. Most people play SP, and they don't think enough about how their changes to the game have slowly changed how hard it is to make a competent AI, and the AI is just awful.
Anyway, hoping 7 is a step back in the right direction. Though historically the odd releases have been seen as the weak ones. game also seems to be getting in some sense more "childish" as time goes on, which I don't love. Just in art direction and tone.
If you don't care about graphics as much as like Civ games, I would recommend the recently release Millennia as a great substitute. It is doing some interesting things.
In my experience the best part of Civ is the beginning, where things happen quickly, and the worst part is towards the end where you've got too many cities and too many units and there's no undiscovered territory and it's just a slog.
The idea of three separate eras with somewhat different gameplay mechanics, where you take some advantages from past eras into the present but aren't totally constrained by all the decisions you made at the start of the game, and aren't constantly needing to deal with stupid busywork like upgrading that phalanx that you apparently fortified inside this city two thousand years ago and forgot about... has some appeal.
I agree totally with the idea that Civ (in all its forms) gets weaker as it goes.
Game developers have always been atrocious at modeling scale/abstraction. That the micromanaged decision making & gameplay you have when there are 10,000 people and 5 decisions, does not necessarily scale up to a giant Empire with 100,000,000 people and 500 decisions.
These games have always needed to find a way to start abstracting/scaling the player out as the ages advance. But 1, that leaves you developing multiple games at the same time and is way more work. You don't want to end up with the Spore 5 flash minigames stapled together kind of feel. And 2there is a sizeable group of players who are micromanagement freaks and really hate any decisions being taken out of their hands.
> Game developers have always been atrocious at modeling scale/abstraction. That the micromanaged decision making & gameplay you have when there are 10,000 people and 5 decisions, does not necessarily scale up to a giant Empire with 100,000,000 people and 500 decisions
This is what Universal Paperclips does well -- deftly keeping you making the same number of decisions as the scale of decisions you're making increases by a factor of 10^60 or so. It's exhilarating as the resources that you used to struggle over in earlier parts of the game get abstracted away.
Civilization doesn't span quite as many orders of scale as Universal Paperclips does, but it would be nice if it could achieve the same effect somehow. Like, in ancient times it should be a constant struggle to get enough food to feed your cities, but in modern times this should be abstracted away -- you see that your whole territory is covered with farms and food ceases to be a gameplay mechanic.
Instead you face modern problems like sub-replacement breeding levels... you can offset this by immigration but then the cities slowly cease to be part of your civilization.
Indeed Universal Paperclips is genius in its way.
Honestly I think the Romans would be pretty upset to be represented by the descendants of a bunch of Gothic and Lombard barbarians. Of course depending on the definition of Roman, they would have still been around until 1453. And the obvious successor civilization would then be... Turks, which is a bit awkward.
A medium sized woke adjacent controversy can only be good for sales!
Only one real post this week, on pricing of urban street and road use.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/price-discrimination-hooray
What’s the best utility function to measure the utility of ‘data’? Do you think ‘data’ has a diminishing marginal utility?
Throwaway thought; the sum of the value of inferences of said data minus the time value to asses for those inferences, maybe plus value of data resale
depends what you want the data for I guess?
If you want "bits of information about the world", then there are going to be diminishing returns (because mutual information is almost always >0)
If you're looking for a specific piece of information you *know* is there, then every "miss" makes the likelihood of a "hit" in the remaining set higher, so increasing marginal returns, until you "hit". Similarly, if you need p<0.05 to publish, your utility in terms of data acquired is going to be some sort of step function.
Also, data markets are a thing that exists, both as abstract economic models, and real world entities.
Gwern is actively commenting here, so I'll let him get into the details if relevant, but he had a very interesting subsection on the expected value of additional information here:
https://gwern.net/mail-delivery#optimal-sample-size-value-of-information-metrics
This is generally where sampling methods like Thompson Sampling come from too, from my understanding.
chance of measuring n-sided dice unfairness?
Related: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6614217/
Here is my latest monthly round up of the best long form content I recently stumbled upon. Highlights include analysis of progress in 3D printing, a search for evidence of peak oil, an lecture from the former CEO of google on their doomed AI efforts, and a whole lot more.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-september-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Recommended
Anyone have any tips for rebuilding muscle mass after some significant weight loss without, ya know...gaining back the bad weight?
Yes, weight lifting + Eating enough protein + Sleeping well. Then you just pray, more I don't know.
1. important is to start slow!
Better too few weights than to many. Better too few exercises a day than too many. Better too few days a week than too many.
At worse you may "loose" 2 weeks to reach your point of actuall capability, but you don't loose 2 or 3 month by demotivating yourself or injuries.
2. important is to do it correctly!
People waste their time in the gym by doing exercises wrong. They use, in one specific exercise, 23 muscles (and stuff that's not meant to be strained at all) instead of the 8 muscles that the exercise is for. Not gaining anything by lifting 20 pounds but, at the worst, injuring themselves. And they could have gained so much by lifting 10 pounds, when doing it right.
Inform yourself how to do an exercise!
I often use half of the weight I can lift at the beginning of each exercise to make a short set just to go through the motions to make sure I do them correct.
3. important is to be consistent, to increase, and to rotate!
When you start with three days (or two) then you will not do less the next week. You do not not go because you don't feel like it, you only do not go, because you're sick.
You try to increase your weights every time.
You *must* switch to other exercises for the relevant muscle groups every 6 weeks. Otherwise you can train 3 years - with nothing happening anymore.
Patience, paired with doing all this right is the key in my opinion.
For me, strength training combined with a moderate energy deficit has resulted in increased muscle mass and decreased fat mass, so I don't think extreme methods are needed unless one is looking for extreme results.
modest calorie surplus + weight training; you'll still gain some fat, but relatively more will be muscle than without the weight training. A large calorie surplus will just end up as more fat. Then after a while do a modest calorie deficit while continuing to train to lose the fat you just gained. Standard bulking then cutting.
Thanks. That makes sense.
Unlike most supplements, there's persuasive data that creatine does what it's claimed to do (build muscle mass, and speed recovery after workouts by promoting healing of muscle tears). It also, maybe, helps offset the effects of sleep deprivation via a fairly well-understood mechanism, but only at fairly high doses (https://statisfied.substack.com/p/overcoming-sleep-deprivation?utm_source=publication-search). Don't take it if you have liver or kidney disease, or high BP.
It requires bulking at a small surplus of calories while doing about three 8/10 effort weight training sessions a week.
So, you need to count calories rigorously to achieve it.
You need to work out at least 3x a week to acheive it.
You need to put in effort / work out at 8/10 intensity while you're doing it.
I'd personally target a 300 cal / day surplus at first, and if you're feeling good about the amount of muscle vs fat you're putting on after a month, maybe increase it to 500 / day - EDIT: per **Bldysabba's** comment below I'd like to emphasize this is what I personally would do, and I'm probably heavier than most. Your actual target should be 0.25% - 0.5% of your bodyweight per week, and the lower end of that is safer re putting on less fat.
So the calculation would be 0.25% * (your body weight in pounds) * 3500 calories = your weekly caloric surplus. Divide by 7 for daily. For a 150lb person, that would be 188 calories extra per day.
Yes, this is more work than 99% of people are willing to put in. But it's pretty much the best way we (bodybuilders, powerlifters, and wrestlers) know how to do it. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
By my calculations, calorie surpluses of 300 to 500cal a day will result in weight increases of 1 to 1.5 kg a month, most of it fat. Probably not what the op wants
You know, you're right - I was going by what I do, but 300-500 cal a week is 0.3-0.5% for *me,* not necessarily most people, because I'm a little bigger than average.
So yes, thank you - for anyone out there, you generally only want to "bulk" at 0.25 - 0.5% a week, and better on the lower end if you're leery of putting on fat. That's gonna vary based on your starting weight.
Yes. Nobody actually knows how to prevent this, though, so the tips are speculative and range from "avoid polyunsaturated fats", "avoid fructose", "avoid isoleucine", and "avoid lithium" to "use targeted massage and cryotherapy to help remodel your extra-cellular matrices", "use high-calorie ketosis to increase RMR via FGF21 upregulation", "rebuild your gut microbiome via all available methods up to and including fecal transplants" and "take up endurance exercise to brown your adipose tissue" to "keep insulin under control with metformin", "get assessed (and treated) for low thyroid", and "take exogenous androgen precursors."
Yes all those are supported in the literature, lmao
Try not to have a large calorie surplus. Most weight gained should be muscle
A couple of months ago I started a Substack, and it quickly got to about 60 daily readers in the first 2 weeks, then completely stalled out. I'm not looking to use it as an income source, more as a potential to help me secure jobs in the future (I've been knocked back from several jobs based on other candidates having more industry experience, even if I interview well and have the technical chops). A bit of writing cred covering a diverse set of topics still within my general profession seems like a good way to cover the inexorable "needs experience to get experience" gap, plus it's kind of fun and I am learning a bit as I go.
Anyway, all that to say: does anyone have any suggestions for growing an audience in a niche? Or should I just switch my internal motivation from "gain cred/use this as a signal" to "do this because it's good in itself" and just ignore the desire for an audience.
I started a Substack a couple of years ago with a handful of readers, and it has climbed progressively to about 10-12,000 per week. I don't ask for any money (though people do occasionally send me some) and I'm not after fame because I use a pseudonym. But it came out of a desire to use a lifetime's experience in domestic and international politics and government to help people understand what was going on in the world, in long-form (5000 word) essays dealing with complex issues. That, if you like, is my "niche." I also exclude polemic and emotion (and encourage my commenters to do the same) which my readers tell me if pretty rare these days, and which they find attractive.
Strongly agree with Gregory Engel below. And, knowing your audience is essential. Early on I would send my readers a stand-alone post once every few months asking, in effect, what they wanted to to hear about, and how they liked me to approach each topic. Got helpful feedback - including suggestions for greater length, which is the opposite of what I would've expected.
Great advice, thank you.
I meant to say too: I don't think you should ignore the desire for an audience, because that's both natural and useful. Even if you don't write the way they like, knowing what they like is informative. Etc.
"I'm not looking to use it as an income source, more as a potential to help me secure jobs in the future..."
I don't know your field, but in the *tech* world of 25 years ago what (maybe) generated 'street cred' was not a blog but getting published in technical journals. The idea that an editor found some value in what you wrote is/was a plus.
I don't know what the current equivalent of publications such as Forth Dimensions and JavaWorld would be, but if these actually exist I would suggest trying to get published there (as well as maintain your substack presence).
The latter. When I stopped watching the stats and focused on honing the craft and writing about what I knew or was interesting to me, subscribers and followers grew. This, of course, will then strengthen the former. Good luck.
A mass proletariat uprising to bring about fully-automated luxury space gay communism is the best 33rd birthday I could possibly have, so based on my life so far I'm expecting that there will be no riots of note tomorrow.
I'm not sure why the Bell riots were considered historically significant. Surely whatever social progress occurred didn't survive WWIII in the 2050s.
I predict a hilarious misunderstanding at the anti-homelessness riots between the faction who showed up to burn down City Hall and the faction who showed up to burn down the homeless encampments.
And the happy resolution when they realize those are remarkably compatible? "¿Por qué no los dos?" as the classical expression goes.
I really hope this drive to realize the Star Trek timeline dies down soon.
Since we're talking about Star Trek and someone mentioned Strange New Worlds, isn't it true that the new series are just bad TV?
Like really bad.
Underestimating the viewer's intelligence. Dumb stories. Clichés.
Like the writers don't understand any of the sci-fi concepts they are using. As if an artist does not try to draw a hand but a drawing of a hand, or even only a drawing of a cartoon hand.
I felt like watching a very bad kids show when I saw the first 2 episodes of SNW.
In the year 2525
If Man is still alive
If Woman can survive...
They may fall!
Why would you oppose a free Irish and support homelessness?
Both parts of Ireland are free already.
♪ come out ye black and tans ♪
I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was talking to a time traveller from 1920.
Freeing the Six Counties (Tiocfaidh ár lá!) might have some pretty nasty consequences. Records of this period are fragmentary, but I understand we are due for a Second Civil War, a Eugenics War, and World War III (perhaps unrelated wars in that order, or perhaps they all refer to a single conflict progressively spiraling outwards), followed by a post-atomic horror.
The mysterious figure known to herstry as Khan Desisexch { I left the mispellings because they work} created a new reality, the one we now live in, the 25th Century of Jesus Spider Ascendant.
In ten years, if humanity survives, Star Trek will be as culturally irrelevant as Little Nemo in Slumberland.
And Skibidi Toilet will be as relevant as Toy Story! Dun dun dun!!
And yet still under copyright for another thirty years after that. In case you had any doubts as to just how effing ridiculous copyright law is.
To put it in perspective, if Little Nemo had come out the same year as Star Trek (1966), but under the copyright terms that existed when Little Nemo had actually been created (1905), it would have entered the public domain in 1994, or 2008 if the rightsholders had filed for an extension.
Impossible. It's baked into the culture implicitly, and the best we could hope for is to drive it underground. As a society we appear unable to believe in futures other than Star Trek and Mad Max.
Star Trek barely believes in its own future now. The trend of the Federation having a dark side that started in the later seasons of Deep Space 9 has evolved to its natural conclusion in Picard, where the Federation is a force for evil that brainwashes kids and it’s up to a bunch of old white men to free the world from big government.
Oh, tell me about it. Nothing made me so angry with new Trek as that "hey, let's have it all go to shit, yeah?" You can disagree with Roddenberry's vision, but at least he presumed that in the future, while we'd still have problems, we'd have worked out the worst of them on the rocky road there (Eugenics Wars etc.) and that there would be hope that we could achieve that brighter future.
DS9 was a great series, but because it moved into the war plot and needed something like Section 31, the subsequent series all went mad for it like they did the Mirror Universe and now the Federation/Starfleet is either (as in the reboot movies) way more militaristic, paranoid, and expansionist, or there are all these secret bureaus puppeteering behind the scenes to blame for things going to pot.
Give me back TOS Trek universe! Even if we were fighting the Klingons and the Romulans, honour and optimism were not empty words!
"Strange New Worlds" has enough of the TOS feel to keep me interested so far. As implied by the title. it at least understands what the words mean, which basically nothing else in the franchise since "Enterprise" can say. And Enterprise botched the implementation.
Star Trek was built on the foundation of Gene Rodenberry and won’t be revived without him. The best we can hope for is a new series by someone inspired by Star Trek.
>As a society we appear unable to believe in futures other than Star Trek and Mad Max.
Not even Dr. Strangelove???
>As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
Dr. Strangelove is a Mad Max prequel.
Although I'm pretty sure people also near-universally believe in the Robocop future.
No; Mad Max was a slow-motion apocalypse, with functional cities surviving years past the war. And rebuilding not too many years after that.
Dr. Strangelove might be an Imperator Furiosa prequel, but only to the extent that the Furiosa movies aren't Mad Max movies.
>Dr. Strangelove is a Mad Max prequel.
That's a reasonable interpretation. Many Thanks!
>Although I'm pretty sure people also near-universally believe in the Robocop future.
Hmm... I wonder if there will be a remake with Sam Altman having at least a cameo role? :-)
What we actually got was the Demolition Man future.
I bet you don't even know how to use the three shells.
Yep.
Barbarella proves that you are both right and wrong.
How does the heritability of beauty (and gendered traits in general) work across genders?
That is, suppose you are a man who wants strong, manly sons. Should you marry the most the strongest and manliest-looking woman you can find? Or a conventionally-attractive woman? If the former, how come AFAIK nobody in history (including many kings who were probably really obsessed with having strong, manly sons) ever figured this out?
Suppose you have a male-dominated aristocracy. Presumably the highest members (eg kings) will have a lot of leeway in who to marry, and will choose especially beautiful (ie feminine) women. Does that mean we should expect the men in royal dynasties to become more feminine over time?
<i>Suppose you have a male-dominated aristocracy. Presumably the highest members (eg kings) will have a lot of leeway in who to marry, and will choose especially beautiful (ie feminine) women.</i>
Historically, it was usually the opposite: whom the king married was a matter of political importance, so the king's choice was heavily constrained. There were probably far more love matches among the lower classes, and when kings did marry for love regardless of political concerns, it frequently ended in disaster (e.g., Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville).
This is not an answer to the specific gendered traits heritability question, but I think that in pre modern societies, things like immune system strength probably counted for a lot in gendered trait outcomes like strength and beauty even though it is not gendered in of itself.
Marry someone healthy would have attracted men to beautiful women and women to strong men and created strong/beautiful children in turn.
AFAIK I can remember some historical accounts of big stronger men going for bigger stronger wives rather than more "feminine" wives.
Hum, why not make the assumption that the genes for comeliness notice what sort of body they are in and bias gene expression in the appropriate direction?
This isn’t how most sexually dimorphic traits are inherited. There are some exceptions: the king could obviously marry a tall woman to have tall sons. If he picks a woman with many masculine traits, her daughters might be unusually masculine but her sons probably won’t be. From my reading of the research, depending on the biological cause of her masculinity her sons might even be more feminine than usual, at least psychologically. Butch women tend to have genetic variants that affect the pathways for sex hormone signaling or synthesis. As others in the thread have mentioned, the king should look at a woman’s male relatives to make better predictions about the gendered traits of her sons.
If it is true that estrogen is made from testosterone, a high-estogene woman will have high-testosterone sons
"Presumably the highest members (eg kings) will have a lot of leeway in who to marry"
Surprisingly, not. The necessity for strong alliances, territorial expansion, and keeping it in the family (see the Spanish Hapsburgs) meant that princes and kings had a very limited pool of potential spouses.
What happened instead is that you marry Princess Plainface of the House of ReallyBigTerritory, then you take as mistress(es) the beautiful women. If you have children by the mistresses, you may or may not legitimise them, but they could end up with titles or wealth of their own.
Historical examples: Henry VIII and his marital troubles; Charles II and his offspring by various mistresses; William IV, uncle of Queen Victoria, whose children by his official wife all died early or were stillborn, which is why Victoria inherited the throne, but whose ten (yes) illegitimate children by his mistress (or perhaps wife, this is a murky area) all lived at least to adulthood.
For French kings, off the top of my head, Henry II's mistress Diane de Poitiers was renowned for her beauty and had immense influence (more so than Henry's legal wife, Catherine de Medici, who moved to strip Diane of much of her power after Henry's death); Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII and again a famous beauty; and of course, the string of mistresses of Louis XIV (by this time, there was even an established hierarchy and etiquette around the position of maîtresse-en-titre , somewhat reminiscent of the Chinese imperial concubine rankings).
EDIT: Regarding the lower ranking nobility, it's also surprising how many of them eventually ended up having no children or no surviving children. The book review about Lecky led me to look up more about his life, and his stepmother married into the family of the Earls of Carnwath. That title bounced around between uncle to nephew and back again, as the heirs seem to have died young or died without issue, if they ever married, before becoming extinct with the 13th Earl's death in 1941.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_of_Carnwath
As many have pointed out already, kings and nobility in the old days could not marry for love. Arranged marriages were the order of the day. The same was mostly the case also further down the social hierarchy, with a possible exception for the poorest.
However, this may be changing since "romantic love" has now replaced arranged marriages as the culturally acceptable way to find a partner. "Romantic love" will tend to create a situation where good-looking people have children with other good-looking people.
This cultural shift happened in the West from approx. 1700 onwards (and is probably gradually spreading worldwide). Adding an assumption that women in particular prefer rich rather than poor partners, this cultural shift may create a selection effect that in the long run leads to well-off people being on average more good-looking than less well-off people.
Has romantic love already been operating long enough for such a selection effect to kick in? I do not know anyone who has seriously studied this. But based on the empirical method of Just Walking Around, there might be something here already. For example, I observe that university students (of both genders) seem on average more good-looking than the average young person in the streets. ...Also, when taking the Metro, people on the Metro lines heading to the rich suburbs are on average more good-looking than people on the Metro lines to the poorer suburbs.
...if "romantic love" combined with increased female choice when choosing who to have children with (thanks to the discovery of effective contraceptives that can be administered by the woman alone, independent of coitus) prevail, maybe we'll develop into aristocratic Elois and plebeian Morlocks already after a mere 5.000 more years or so.
Romantic love may have won the day, but for the very wealthy, powerful or high status, the same considerations will still apply. In real life, there are very few instances of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid; the only one I can think of is the Japanese Imperial Family, and for the commoner women who marry in there, they are nearly driven to nervous breakdowns by the etiquette and towering snobbery of the courtiers.
A second example: The present Crown Prince of Norway married a poorly educated single mother from a small coastal city back in 2001.
This happened after the prince had studied political science at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, breaking the family tradition of studying at Oxford. (Some suspect that he got so into the "power of the people" at UC Berkeley that he decided to marry one.)
She is beautiful, that must be said. And as in the Japanese case, she has also had nervous problems after being set on the path to become queen.
I think, with royalty becoming less important and maintaining only a symbolic role and function, we may get more of those "romantic love" marriages (though they don't always work out, see Harry and Meghan and how they blew all connections to the Royal Family). Now that there isn't really any gain to be made via alliances, there's no reason Prince Whosis can't marry Commoner Cathy instead of Princess Prunella since there is no more real power at stake anymore.
Agreed, And as an added bonus, marrying commoners provides the remaining Royal Houses in the world with some much needed fresh generic material. Which royal children should be grateful for.
Is there any actual reason to think that European royal houses are notably inbred? I see it asserted a lot, but from what I can see it seems to be just an overextrapolation from the Hapsburgs. The average person in an olde-timey peasant village where hardly anyone ever travelled more than ten miles from their birthplace was probably more inbred than a royal family who could marry nobles from across Europe.
"generic material"
I realize this was a typo, but hilariously apt.
There is an idea that male and female beauty is an example of antagonistic selection - traits that are desirable in women are undesirable in men and visa versa. Steve Tyler vs Liv Tyler is often used as an example.
As for why aristocracies didn't take advantage of this, the easy answer is that Kings actually have very limited dating pools due to political and dynastic considerations. Witness the Hapsburgs, or Charles III marrying Diana. Generally, we should expect royal lines to slowly become more inbred over time due to this issue.
I have no answer, but now I am wondering: are beautiful families a thing? Like, where lots of the members of a family are unusually beautiful? (I know about regression to the mean, but there are tall families and intelligent families, so why not beautiful families?) I don't know the families of my friends, so I have no idea.
If they exist, that would perhaps be a better example than aristocracy, because beautiful people do have a pretty large pool to choose their partner from. Probably more so than nobles. If such families don't exist, this would indicate that the heritability of beauty is different from the heritability of height and intelligence.
Of course? "X families" where X is heritable are generally a thing.
I'll just say that my brother married a strikingly beautiful woman, and their kids, including the boys, are much better looking than anywhere else in my extended family tree. But she's more on the "vigorous, healthy, athletic" side of beautiful, than the "dainty, pretty, feminine" side.
"are beautiful families a thing?"
For ancient Rome, the Cladius Pulcher family, at least from a handsome ancestor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Claudius_Pulcher_(consul_249_BC)
"Publius Claudius Pulcher (died 249 BC or 246 BC) was a Roman politician. ...He was the first of the Claudii to be given the cognomen "Pulcher" ("handsome")."
Good looks must have come down to some of his descendants, at least; Clodia, mistress of the poet Catullus and lover of several others, and (allegedly) her brother too was handsome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clodia_(wife_of_Metellus)
"The predominant view, however, identifies Clodia with Lesbia primarily on the basis of Catullus 79.1-2:
Lesbius is beautiful. Why not? And Lesbia prefers him
to you and your whole tribe, Catullus.
But let this beautiful man sell Catullus along with his tribe
if he finds three kisses from people he knows.
"Pulcher", the Latin word for "beautiful" (see line 1 above), is also the cognomen of Clodia's brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher. This is the only one of Catullus' poems in which a character named "Lesbius", the masculine form of the name, appears and Lesbia is present in close proximity."
Well, Hollywood, where beautiful actors marry beautiful actresses, has a lot of beautiful children. So I think yes, there are beautiful families.
You should expect regression to the mean at any rate. A man manly enough to seize power by the force of his own will is unlikely to be succeeded by a similarly exceptional son... although the Ottoman law of fratricide gets you partway to that. https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1830050975106609390
If you want manly sons, you would want to marry a woman with manly brothers or a manly father.
And that's true no matter what the answer to Scott's original question is. Neat.
Ideally, you'd want a woman with the proven ability to produce manly sons. But I guess social mores largely preclude that mode of selection. So going for other relatives is the best you can do.
There are two major flaws with this view. One, as Gwern gets into, is the time period where significant power is vested into feudal structures and where people understand how heritability in humans work doesn't really overlap. Two, powerful aristocrats were not marrying for the advantage given to their children by a potential spouse.
Until relatively recently (c late 17th - early 18th century), the kings in the western model did not possess absolute authority over their realm. They acted more as a broker of power between various powerful vassals and landed aristocrats. Thus the primary thing on a king's mind when setting up a marriage is forming a military alliance, or trying to avoid a civil war within his own domain. Or possibly trying to play the inheritance game and expand his dynastic lands through political marriage. There would be a quite limited pool of daughters from other aristocrats of sufficient status available. Features of the wife like beauty, phenotype, and speaking a mutually intelligible language were far at the bottom of this list. I'm not sure to what extent the characteristics of women were even thought to influence their children in the medieval period. Of course kings could sire illegitimate children and often did so, but these would usually not inherit or be considered part of the dynasty outside extreme circumstances like all the other legitimate children being dead.
The last paragraph is a broad outline of monogamous marriage culture, so the Romans and Christian Europeans. In medieval Islam, aristocrats could have many wives and concubines and sire a great many more sons than their European counterparts. This is probably the best chance anyone ever had of a breeding program back in the day. Notably, having a bunch of heirs is really bad for a powerful aristocrat because their estate gets split into a bunch of pieces when they die. Muslims weren't required to split their estate evenly among sons*, unlike say gavelkind succession, but this was still a major issue.
A good example lies in the Ottoman Turks, a major geopolitical force for 500 years. The Ottoman Sultans created an imperial harem system, wherein the sultan had access to essentially whatever kind and as many fertile women as he desired. AFAIK, it is the closest historical example to Scott's thought experiment. What happened was not some selection for heirs with the manliest jaw or most musculature or something like that. Presumptive heirs were groomed and educated through childhood, and then given some sort posting that tested their ability as a future sultan. Provincial governorships were quite common. Whichever son did the best sultan internship was made the heir, and his rivals were either executed or politically marginalized to avoid the issue of fracturing the Ottoman power base. This is more like an IQ test than a manliness test, and even contemporary humans with a sequenced genome available would be hard pressed to create an efficient IQ-maximizing breeding program. Another example is sultan Suleiman, who fell in love with a Ruthenian slave concubine and had his son from his first marriage strangled in favor of the slave's son, despite his first son being the better administrator by all accounts.
So in the historical record of male-dominated aristocracy:
- They didn't understand the mechanics of heritability
- Physical traits often had little correlation to desirability of producing inheriting offspring
ETA: Muslim inheritance law required splitting the estate among all sons, but the split didn't have to be equal and was much more egalitarian than primogeniture. Edited for clarity.
"Presumptive heirs were groomed and educated through childhood, and then given some sort posting that tested their ability as a future sultan. Provincial governorships were quite common. Whichever son did the best sultan internship was made the heir, and his rivals were either executed or politically marginalized to avoid the issue of fracturing the Ottoman power base."
This, like the Chinese equivalent, also made for *intense* harem politics, as women schemed to achieve power by capturing the favour of the sultan and having their son become heir presumptive.
This meant it was in the interest of an ambitious woman to make sure any rival's son who seemed capable and likely to be made heir was disgraced, killed, or otherwise disposed of, so *her* son could advance in his stead. It's not the best way for finding who, out of a set of potential heirs, is the best because whatever about theory, in practice the incentive is to marginalise the capable or scheme to have them ousted. Be it ministers in power already who don't want a new sultan who is likely to claw back some or all of that power, or women who want the status and power of being the mother of the emperor.
See the history of Wu Zetian, who first ruled through exercising power over her husband, then through her sons, then took power for herself. She commenced by having her rivals, the Empress and the highest ranking Imperial Concubine, killed; took over administration of the government when her husband the emperor had a stroke; after his death, she had her third son declared emperor but wielded all the real power; when he showed signs of independence she had him deposed and replaced with her youngest son and continued to rule in all but name; eventually she decided "why not rule in my own name?", took the throne for herself, and declared the foundation of a new dynasty.
I saw the harem politics angle as a bit too much of a digression from Scott's question, but it is interesting. I'm not sure these sorts of power struggles are limited to such a structure though. Irene of Athens had her own son's eyes gouged out so she could rule as Roman Empress, and that was in a monogamous marriage society.
I've heard some interesting anthropological theories about how polygamy affected medieval societies. In the Muslim system, a polygamous society meant the elite 5% of males might each have 3 wives. This meant the lowest 15% of males ended up with 0 wives. Obviously having a bunch of fighting age men with no hope of getting a woman was really bad for social stability. As pastoralists with a militant religion, Muslim Arabs would often raid neighboring peoples for slaves and loot. And the resulting strategy for avoiding an agitating male underclass arose as "those people over there have women, just take them." Now combine this with the harem politics; males really don't want to lose status among their peers by being manipulated by women, or having their favored heir killed. The desire to avoid political harem intrigue and the desire to constantly source infidel women as sex slaves explains a lot of the deeply misogynistic behavior of Muslim Arabs.
But if Islam is decoupled from the circumstances of the Arabs, this convention doesn't necessarily hold. Most of the pastoral steppe nomads in Eurasia ended up converting to Islam. They certainly found the raiding sedentary neighbors part attractive. But the women had much stronger societal roles pre-conversion, due to... hunting or riding or being responsible while the men were away or something? This part wasn't fleshed out as well. Anyway, it's also notable that the misogynistic Arab practices are much less present in societies decoupled from the pastoral raiding mindset. Such as Malaysia/Indonesia, where Islam (rather unusually) spread through trade and conversion rather than conquest.
The Chinese polygamous system also had the same problem with creating a male underclass. Except instead of capturing women, their solution was more or less don't do anything about it. This explains all of the constant banditry throughout Chinese history, much more so than other states with far less capacity. What else is a guy to do when he's doomed to a life alone? And somehow, the CCP has managed to recreate these conditions in modern China. The 2000 census lists 117 boys per 100 girls, right on par with the historical 15%. I'm not sure how many of the girls were aborted/killed vs hidden from authorities to avoid penalties, but there was a clear one-child preference for boys. It's hard to imagine anything at this point that could precipitate an actual revolt in communist China, but tens of millions of disenfranchised young men might do it.
> Muslims weren't required to split their estate evenly among sons
Yes they were, per Timur Kuran. It's European Christians whose primogeniture permitted dynastic wealth to persist. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-scylla-of-clannishness-and-the-charybdis-of-despotism/
I meant the split didn't have to be equal. A Muslim with 3 sons doesn't have to give each son exactly 1/3 of his estate, but the estate does have to be divided among his 3 sons. Your link doesn't really clarify the inheritance mechanism.
I've edited the original comment because you made me realize I explained it poorly.
I think you would conclude that there are two good ways for people to be and marry an exemplar from a family that has many exemplars of both or either.
How strong is the feminity attractiveness correlation?
I suspect it isn't actually that strong, most attractive features are linked to healthiness and attractive features like eye and hair colours aren't unmasculine. I expect if you looked at women whose attractivness is highly rated by men, they won't ever look masculine but they will look fairly average (also think koinophilia) in terms of feminity of thinks like chins and muscles.
Things like lip redness, hip width, size of sexual features etc are linked to gender specific hormones and I have no idea how they effect the opposite gender.
Why wouldn't evolution have it baked in to the base level of attraction, or strong off switches for highly dimorphic traits?
Maybe you could believe "see if her father is strong", expect chasing after a kings daughters was already a thing to do
Did I write this twice? I'd delete it if I didn't fear erasing my twin from another universe. Hello? I like dogs? Do you like dogs?
Yes it's come up twice for some reason.
I blame Early Communism.