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?
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’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.
"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 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?
“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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".
"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)."
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!"
"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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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’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.
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'm sure James Madison had heard of Julius Caesar. He's a pretty famous guy.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
"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)."
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!"
"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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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!
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
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!
Yes, that must be it. Thanks for giving me a reason not to doubt my memories.
"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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
I have a harder time conceptualising goblins, I think they're portrayed too inconsistently across different sources.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?