Ok this is dumb and meta but it seems as though likes on comments are supposed to be blocked for this Substack? But I have gotten likes on comments and even had the ability to like a comment within my notifications page if it replied to me. I think on pc there may be more ways.
The last thing is that the most liked comments are possibly still most prominently displayed so the attempt to block likes here may be having an overall undesirable effect.
I've long thought of our not-so-great response to covid as stemming from two parallel causes:
a. Hidden instutituional rot and dysfunction.
b. The rise of extremely effective consensus-enforcing mechanisms on Twitter and in traditional media in the 2010s-2020s.
Each of those played a part. A good example of (a) was us having a respiratory pandemic show up and find us with no stockpiled PPE, because we'd built one up in the mid-2000s but then not maintained it. I still remember being urged to give the handful of N95 masks I had at home to some donation site to hand them to medical personnel, since health departments, hospitals, and the like simply couldn't be arsed to prepare for a known risk whose danger was a lot of the reason those agencies even existed. (I, being the evil shitlord I am, kept the masks.)
I feel like everything in media/social media during that time showed off (b). Early on, all right thinking people knew that covid was a silly thing to worry about, get a lot of these weirdo geeks wearing masks in public, racism is the real virus, etc. Sometime after that, the consensus shifted and you were a horrible murderer of grannies if you didn't mask (but the masks that might help were not available, because of (a), so tie a bandana around your mouth and pretend) or if you, say, wanted to go to church or visit your parents or whatever.
All those consensus-enforcement mechanisms got going in keeping just about everyone on-message. One part of this was turning factual questions or questions of sensible tradeoffs into moral crusade type questions, in which you were either one of us or one of the bad guys. It became easier to see that when the Summer of Floyd started, and we got that bizarre whipsaw thing where suddenly the enforced consensus went from "public protests or even going to your grandma's funeral is monstrous and crazy risk taking" to "public protests are good and if you oppose them you are a racist POS."
When consensus enforcement mechanisms become very powerful, one thing that does is to make truth-seeking harder. As best I can tell, I ended up with a pretty coherent and accurate understanding of the risks and likely mitigations of those risks of covid, but that wasn't the social consensus or the guidance anyone got. Rational discussion of the right tradeoffs was hard to come by during covid, and most mainstream/prestige sources were mainly engaged in yelling at/ridiculing people and engaging in moral condemnation. My intuition is that this made our covid response a lot worse overall.
These two together also wrecked much of the reputation of the sort of institutions who are supposed to help nonspecialists understand complicated issues like how to avoid a novel virus. Your scientific society puts out obvious bullshit about sex differences, but I'm supposed to trust it about vaccine safety?
We will be paying the bill for that damage for a long time to come.
As far as I know, there was no increase in COVID cases after the George Floyd protests, so any experts who said "yes, you can go to a protest if it's outdoors and you mask up" were actually correct.
(Also, if I had a nickel for every recounting of COVID that pretends that the Republicans had no agency during the crisis and were simply forced to reject scientific consensus out of spite, I'd have enough for a nice meal.)
Cases went from 700k in June 2020 to 2.1MM in August 2020, so there was a large jump. Even if the outdoor protests themselves didn't spread too much covid, obviously 20 million people travelling to cities, carpooling, staying on friends' couches, going to restaurants would cause an enormous amount of spread.
Or, conversely, if the protests and travel involved didn't cause any increase, then there was clearly never any value in lockdowns at all.
In May 2020 the guidance was still evolving so fast that it would be hard to make *any* two weeks consistent. That said, I don't recall my state banning anyone from going to funerals.
EDIT: But also, the more important point is, if you believe that people thought the scientific establishment was lying and making up excuses why the protests were safe, surely learning that the protests were in fact safe should change your opinion?
> But also, the more important point is, if you believe that people thought the scientific establishment was lying and making up excuses why the protests were safe, surely learning that the protests were in fact safe should change your opinion?
The "scientific establishment" wasn't so much lying as making pronouncements with a degree of uncertainty unjustified by the actual data.
It seemed very clear to me that the only thing that changed was the political valence of the protests, not any kind of new information. One week the advice was that protests (largely against lockdowns or masking) and public gatherings like a big biker rally in South Dakota were bad, the next week it was that the mass protests were good.
It's good that they finally converged on guidance that maybe big outdoor public gatherings weren't so bad after all, because it does seem like that was better than the previous guidance. But the explicit explanation they gave for why was nothing to do with science, it was that the cause of the protests was important ("racism is also a public health crisis").
This did not and does not make me think those folks (a subset of public health experts who got media attention for their declaration, which may or may not have been representative of the field) are a good source of information about technical questions that are in any way tangled up in politics or ideology.
This also coincided with most prestige media in the US suddenly all being on the same page wrt an ideology of race that almost none of them had ever mentioned before. That honestly reminded me of how US media fell into near-perfect lockstep after 9/11.
Thank you for documenting this history. I had forgotten about the preceding biker rally.
I'm inclined to agree that outdoor activities like protesting and biking were never a significant risk, but that all the indoor activities one does when traveling were a significant risk.
And the criticism of those mass events did not distinguish based on those physical factors but, as you say, whether the ambiguous amount of risk was for a good enough cause du jour.
I was looking into the malaria net charities a bit and I found out that many malaria nets are treated with pesticides. Is there any concern that these pesticides may cause issues for the people sleeping under malaria nets?
It seems straightforward to me that this sort of prolonged exposure to insecticides would probably lead to increased rates of cancer and possibly other negative health effects. Is the idea that these health effects are not as significant when compared to the extreme negative effects of contracting malaria? Or is there something I'm missing which makes the exposure to pesticides involved a nonissue?
It's a concern that I've considered as a layperson and donor, yes.
I certainly try to minimize exposure to pyrethroids/permethrin (which is what I assume the most likely pesticide used is) for myself and my family. They're linked to bad health stuff.
But I find it very likely that, as you say, these health effects are not as significant when compared to the extreme negative effects of contracting malaria.
I would use a treated malaria net for either short or long term, if I were visiting or living somewhere with malaria.
Virtually all bednets are treated with insecticide; without that, the nets quickly lose their effectiveness due by developing small holes large enough for a mosquito to climb through. Their effectiveness heavily depends on the insecticide, to the point that mosquitoes’ insecticide resistance is a major concern.
GiveWell does address some potential downsides of net distribution, though they don’t discuss insecticide exposure directly.
Disappointing to see Scott write yet more articles in favour of genetic selection without addressing any of the really salient issues. Such as:
- It is foreseeable that what parents want for their children is not necessarily what children would want for themselves.
- It is foreseeable that what capitalism/states/ideologues want for their children is not necessarily what children would want for themselves. We could be creating a race of unhappy compulsive workers that self-destruct after 50-some years.
- It is foreseeable that there will be race-to-the-bottom dynamics w.r.t. traits that confer a relative advantage but not an absolute one, such as Americans' ridiculous obsession with male height.
- Have you seen what happened to dogs?
Instead he's going for the really easy stuff like "aren't embryos persons" and "if you want to prevent disabled people from coming into existence isn't that insulting to disabled people?" really just rehashing the abortion debate for the millionth time, just like last time, by the way, with the "Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent" post that was also very much besides any ethical point there might be.
Okay, but literally everything you listed already happens with natural selection, including the races to the bottom. This is usually not a problem, because those genetic dead ends will simply die out. Perhaps this will just speed up the process.
It is also forseeable that what random genetic selection will provide to children, is not necessarily what the children want.
Meanwhile, when we actually *ask* parents, what they mostly want is for their children to be healthy, smart, and beautiful, in roughly that order. If I have to bet, I'm going to bet on parental love rather than random chance giving better results.
In some cultures, parents also particularly want their firstborn child at least to have a penis, which could cause problems if it persists when penis-havers become a significant majority. That does bear some thinking about.
"Capitalism" seems unlikely to care except insofar as what they can get parents to pay for, which see above. And ideologues in any non-authoritarian state aren't going to have much say in the process. An authoritarian state, yes, might have perverse incentives when planning the next generation's genetics. Don't let Chairman Yang meddle with your kids' DNA if you can help it. But that authoritarian state is also not going to give the slightest damn what Scott Alexander says, or what anyone who ever read Scott Alexander says.
I once saw some survey saying that if parents could select their kids personalities, they would choose agreeable extroverts overwhelmingly. Now that sounds quite pleasant, but I worry about the failure modes when you don't have disagreeable neurotics around actually making sure things work.
> ideologues in any non-authoritarian state aren't going to have much say in the process.
Seems too optimistic. The ideologues have their followers, and the followers may design their children accordingly to the ideologues' advice. I can easily imagine feminists making their daughters more bossy and their sons more shy, or religious people making their children more obedient and less open-minded.
In the coming years we will become able to micromanage lots of things that up til now have been determined by various natural processes. But I don't see any reason to think we are going to get wiser, and even if some individuals are wise about using our new powers the mass of us is pretty ungovernable, and will prevent the wise from implementing smart guidelines. And many tech advances will empower dumb and short-sighted people to do harmful shit they think is a good idea, or fun, or a satisfying piece of revenge.
Genetic selection is a case in point here, but there are many similar things -- new and astounding recreational drugs for instance. Looks to me like our species is going to just find new ways to be the tragic, gifted, mess it always has been. We are “charming dirty and doomed.”
At least recreational drugs have the advantage that the person doing the choosing is the person who receives most of the effects - unlike with genetic modification.
Mmmm -- not exactly though. At least not if the parents are doing genetic selection, rather than modification. If it's just selection, then the person born started out as the person-to-be with the genes they later have at birth. The only part of the person's fate the parents chose was that this person-to-be would become a person.
>It is foreseeable that what capitalism/states/ideologues want for their children is not necessarily what children would want for themselves. We could be creating a race of unhappy compulsive workers that self-destruct after 50-some years.
Thankfully this abstraction called "capitalism" is not allowed to make these decisions, people are. "Ideologues" is another word for "parents." Maybe mind your own business?
>It is foreseeable that there will be race-to-the-bottom dynamics w.r.t. traits that confer a relative advantage but not an absolute one, such as Americans' ridiculous obsession with male height.
It's no more ridiculous than men's obsession with female beauty. If parents want their kids to be tall and beautiful who am I to judge?
Expert trap introduces a new framework explaining why, as we learn, our knowledge tends to disconnect from other disciplines, accumulate errors, and become increasingly corrupt. I map how several established cognitive biases combine into a broader mechanism and then outline strategies to course-correct.
Thanks for sharing. Here's my perspective: most people become good enough in their profession by learning established facts and procedures, under the guidance of senior colleagues, and putting what they've learned into practice many many times - 10K hours and beyond. Innovation is driven by a mixture of curiosity, market forces, fashion and staff turnover. Why should we expect more from Science? Because it's supposed to rescue us from superstition so we expect too much from it.
My mom's neighbor's primary language is Mandarin, but if I understand her English correctly, her husband is making homicidal and/or suicidal statements. Her husband's primary language is English, and, to my understanding, he has refused counseling. I reached out to a couple of suicide hotlines that claimed to have Mandarin speakers, but I've heard nothing back. This seems to be more of a women's crisis situation, and I'm not sure suicide hotlines will be able to help her. Does anyone know of any women's crisis centers with Mandarin speakers in the East SF Bay area? ChatGPT seems to be giving suicide hotlines instead.
I texted her the number for the Asian Women's Shelter without any note except "here's the number you wanted." Not sure if her husband is monitoring her phone.
I was pretty shocked that after reaching out to five different crisis hotlines, the only one that picked up was the non-local one (the National Women's Crisis Hotline). I left messages at two, and they never got back to me. And two never picked up, and they had no way to leave messages. The National Women's Crisis Hotline recommended the AWS as one of the resources I should try. I decided not to call them, since I wasn't sure if it was because I was a man that I wasn't getting call backs (after all, I'm sure they get all sorts of harassment from wackos, Christianists, and the like).
My girlfriend suggested I go down to my town's police department. I didn't think that was a good idea. I could imagine all sorts of escalating repercussions if the cops showed up at her door to do welfare check. It would alert the husband that his wife was seeking help, and possibly escalate the situation. Unless she had a way to get an immediate restraining order, she'd be in greater danger.
It's very discouraging to me that the crisis hotlines were so unresponsive, though. I can't help but wonder if the current woke-suppression policies of the Trump administration are having direct or indirect effects on these services.
Call your mother's city council office, state assembly member's office, state senator's office, or congressperson's office. All have constituent services personnel whose job is to assist with exactly these sorts of questions.
Why are you checking with ChatGPT instead of using a regular search engine? Seems like a massive waste of time, given how unreliable the various AIs are.
I use it a lot for practical things, and find it way more helpful than a search engine. Acting on the advice or info I get usually also functions as a check on accuracy, because in the process of doing the practical thing I end up going to the sites GPT recommends. If that's not going to happen I often do a quick check, and so far have not discovered any inaccuracies. I think the risk of hallucination may be lower for this kind of thing because these are just searches, which GPT is good at. I seems to hallucinate mostly when you ask it something it is not able to answer
It Is *great* for finding info on godawful complex badly-set-up sites. I recently had to find out how to bill someone who has Medicare + a certain Medicare supplement. There were some unusual features of their situation that kept them from fitting into one of the usual boxes that the relevant sites do show you how to bill for. So I wrote the equivalent of about *2 typed pages* about the patient's billable status and what I had found at the Medicare and supplement sites, and what the dilemma was, and what had not worked to solve the problem and what info I needed, and asked it to hunt up the relevant info on the 2 gigantic, multilayered bureaucratic sites with useless search functions. And it found them both immediately. (Even GPT itself complained about the Medicare site. Said the relevant info was not on a web page, but on a pdf that was named on one of their web pages.)
I've seen a lot of folk complaining a lot here about hallucinations, and my feeling is - pretty much any hallucinating at all renders the whole thing useless (plus I hate ChatGPT's style/voice, and visual AI slop, and, and and).
But it sounds like it has a few narrow use cases, like general searches.
None of the phone numbers or websites that ChatGPT gave me were hallucinations. I used a slightly different wording from Eremolalos when I queried it though, and I got a bunch of suicide hotlines. I've since re-queried using the terms "domestic violence or abuse hotlines" and got a list of real organizations. Unfortunately, I didn't reach anyone at 4 out of 5.
Apropos using LLMs for research, on the whole, LLMs are very useful at synthesizing vast amounts of information. Specific links can still be a bit dodgy. And subjects for which they don't have a lot of training data may cause them to hallucinate answers (sorry, I can't think of an example of this, but I've seen that behavior before).
Looked again at GPT response and it sounded like the AWS was also good for referring people quickly to Mandarin-speaking resources. “Next Steps: Call the Asian Women’s Shelter at 1‑877‑751‑0880 to explain the need for Mandarin support—they can help or refer you quickly.”
Maybe just have her talk with Asian Women’s Shelter, and if she’s comfortable with them send her there via Uber? You can order the Uber on your account if she is not up to dealing with Uber
I don't know if she's looking for an exit strategy. I just want her to be able to talk to a Mandarin speaker who can advise her without her husband understanding the conversation. And the AWS could probably do that without her needing to get into SF.
A helpful person at National Domestic Violence hotline gave me a couple of orgs that could help. Left voicemails at both. But, sadly, I can't get a live person at any of the suicide or crisis hotlines I called. I had no idea how dilatory the hotline resources are for people in need!
Mormons, alone among American Christians, have some awareness that going back to the Good Old Days when people took faith seriously might mean their religion becomes persecuted again. Let's hope Twitter reminds them:
The guy who posted the vid of the Book of Mormon getting thrown in the trash is a character you may remember from a month ago, who gave us this gem:
"Better to marry a former OF model who has come to know the depths of her sin and the mercy of the Lord, than an unkissed virgin with a haughty look and a proud heart."
Religious persecution is a US tradition! In the Colonial era, it was Quakers, Baptists who were persecuted in New England, and Catholics were persecuted in the South. In the 19th century, it was the Mormons and Catholics who were persecuted. In the 20th century, it was the Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostals who were the persecuted. And let's not forget the FLDS sects during the 20th century, up to this day. And Native American beliefs have been discriminated against at the Federal level. Of course, Jews have always been on the persecution list. And now that we have a noticeable Muslim population, they're receiving a lot of hate their way.
Well, there were other reasons Europeans left Europe, such as famine and wars. The Irish potato famine and the political unrest in 1840s Germany (IIRC), drove those waves of immigrants to the US. Religious intolerance has driven European history. It's not surprising that it bled over into the US. Of course, the Right is trying to stifle the teaching of a US history inclusive of its warts. Subjects like religious intolerance, slavery, and civil rights are on the cutting board in the name of anti-wokism.
Yeah, there's always other reasons, but they tend to get merged with religious differences. There were a lot of tribes with their own gods back in the day and they argued with each other.
It's also good cover for taking over someone else's territory. It's an organizing principle.
>Religious persecution is a US tradition! In the Colonial era, it was Quakers, Baptists who were persecuted in New England, and Catholics were persecuted in the South. In the 19th century, it was the Mormons and Catholics who were persecuted. In the 20th century, it was the Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostals who were the persecuted. And let's not forget the FLDS sects during the 20th century, up to this day. And Native American beliefs have been discriminated against at the Federal level. Of course, Jews have always been on the persecution list. And now that we have a noticeable Muslim population, they're receiving a lot of hate their way.
Eh, the claims of persecution get more and more dubious the further you go through that paragraph. Colonial America featured much religious persecution, the Mormons were outright expelled from the entire state of Missouri, and Grant expelled the Jews, though his order was almost immediately countermanded. After that it was mostly private discrimination and opprobrium, not persecution by the state.
You say that with such assurance that I doubt you actually researched your response. But I'd highly recommend you check out what the search engines, LLMs, and Wikipedia have to say before you make general statements of opinion about this subject.
Let's take a couple of examples...
Catholics: The Nativist and Know Nothing movements of the mid-19th Century promoted violence against Catholics — examples: the Charlestown Convent burning (while law enforcement looked on). Bloody Monday in Kentucky. Philadelphia's anti-Catholic riots. In the early 20th century, the Klan targeted Catholic churches alongside blacks and jews. In Oregon, the 1922 Compulsory Education Act shut down Catholic schools, but was overturned by the courts. And anti-Catholic sentiment was strong enough in the US that the question of whether a Catholic (JFK) was qualified to be US President was taken seriously by the media of the day.
Jehovah's Witnesses: kids expelled from public schools for not reciting the pledge of allegiance. Mob violence against Witnesses and their places of worship were torched in the early 1940s. This happened in states all across the US after the Gobitis ruling from SCOTUS (which ironically upheld the pledge being made mandatory, but mobs vented their anger against Witnesses for daring to challenge the law and being un-American). Witnesses were imprisoned, some for decades, because Witnesses refused military service in both World Wars. Thousands were imprisoned as conscientious objectors. And some Witness parents lost custody of their children when some courts claimed the faith was harmful.
An open questions/potential nugget of wisdom from the mines of Predictive Coding…
Tankers of ink have been spilt about the Dark Room Problem. This asks: if the goal of any living system is to minimise uncertainty (or ‘surprise’), then why don’t all living systems occupy closed, lightless rooms, where nothing unpredictable can happen?
Many people far cleverer than me have already pretty well concluded that there isn’t actually a problem here. Friston, for once, puts it very pithily: ‘there’s something surprising about being in a dark room, because we don’t expect to be dark rooms’. The very fact that ‘being stuck in a dark room’ means ‘not knowing what’s happening in the world outside’ could also mean that dark rooms are net negative in terms of minimising prediction error.
But my question is — can’t you very fruitfully read addiction as an object lesson in implementing a dark room processing strategy? Here, you don’t try to eliminate prediction error/perceptual input altogether; instead, you define drug-seeking and drug-taking behaviour as the only relevant parts of perceptual input. This ensures that you only occupy cognitive territory where it’s easy to minimise prediction error.
I guess this’d also make sense of the finding — which I’ve always vaguely ascribed to, ‘erm, uhhh, trauma or something’ — that being abused as a child massively raises your liability to addiction.
Going out on a limb here: it wouldn’t surprise me if we have something like series of high-level priors related to the degree of ambient unpredictability that’s reasonably expected. Childhood abuse can shift these priors towards ‘expecting unpredictability and danger everywhere’, which in turn raises your liability to addictive processing styles.
(To be quite clear, I’m not aware of any literature cross-referencing addiction and PP, so this is little more than educated guesswork.)
I think what's missing is that surprise minimization needs to be paired with a truth-seeking drive. Otherwise, yes, an animal has every reason to hijack its perception with drugs/wireheading. And yes, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if addiction and trauma were related via PP. In other words, "the dark room" criticism is actually too specific. Because the dark room could also be replaced with a self-imposed Matrix, where everything always goes according to plan.
If you define "truth-seeking" as "invariance seeking" as a way of ensuring that the map really does match the territory (e.g. doing the autistic thing where you flip a light-switch 10,000 times in a row, just to make sure the causal relationship between the ambient lighting and the switch is iron-clad), and add that on top of PP, the dark-room problem solves itself.
>the goal of any living system is to minimise uncertainty (or ‘surprise’)
I don't know how you go anywhere from this premise without asking yourself "then why does no living organism do so?". Human notoriously loves surprises and uncertainty, the smallest proof of that is how much people dislike spoilers, but pretty much every creature I can think of seems programmed to seek the unknown if necessary.
I think you’re right. The fundamental state of the sort of trauma you describe is fear which is maximum unpredictability. A child cannot fight an abusive parent nor can he flee from them. Thet leaves freeze which is another way of saying paralysed by fear.Check out my blog for a case history if you are interested.
I think that "the goal of any living system is to minimise uncertainty (or ‘surprise’)" is a bad approximation of what drives humans, and "there’s something surprising about being in a dark room, because we don’t expect to be dark rooms" is an arbitrary kludge to make the data fit the theory.
I think that predictive processing has a lot to be said for it, I just don't think it's a one-stop shop that explains everything.
If this is what they come up with, Trump is going to absolutely crush them in a meme war. In fact, he probably doesn't even have to, this is seriously lame stuff.
I think they have a lot of good will by being the "adults in the room" - if, you know, they actually tried doing that.
I'm not sure there's anything worse, at all, in the world, than people not realizing that the chad in that meme is supposed to be at least equally ridiculous as the virgin.
I'm not sure if the correct way to put it is "equally ridiculous to virgin". Rather, chad is the *exact opposite* of the virgin to the ridiculous degree, ie. his every feature is the opposite of the stated virgin features (https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/265/329/e83.png). The virgin is a normie, the chad is not even a stereotype but literally only exists in relation to the virgin.
"Misophonia Might Not Be about Hating Sounds After All
"The phenomenon triggers strong negative reactions to everyday sounds but might come from subconscious mirroring behavior."
It's reprinted from Scientific American, but it contains links to the academic publications. So there might be something to it.
Also, I was wondering if the psychic doom-loop that seems to be involved in misophonia and other obsessive phobias might be present in anorexia, directed toward food or eating.
Seems to me what the researchers in the SA article found was not a cause of misophonia, but part of the process itself. The person whose brain is being observed is unusually attentive to mouth sounds because they bother him and make him angry. I’ll bet scanning people
who are observing something that interests them a lot — say tennis fans watching a tennis match — would show they have stronger mirroring in the parts of their brains that are activated by playing tennis.
I don't think so. I have ave treated a number of anorexics, and they do not feel an aversion to food, they feel a terror of being fat. Many also have a horror of "losing control" of themselves with eating (they see no shades of gray -- if you do not eat exactly the planned amount of exactly what you intended to eat you have lost control). They talk about the importance of the feeling of *being in control* that rigid food restriction gives them. Some anorexics also value being thin because they believe it makes them more attractive -- & thinness does do that, up to a point, given modern standards of female beauty. But they take it way to far, and become skeletal.
In it he claims that many anorexics *start out* with a terror of being fat, but then find themselves with an aversion to food long after they've accepted that they need to eat more food, that their behavior is unhealthy. In your experience, does this just not happen? Or is it possible that you've treated anorexics at an earlier stage of the condition, who haven't come to develop this aversion to food? (Not trying to argue with you, genuinely asking to try and figure this out.)
Actually, I think all the anorexics I’ve seen have had the condition for at least a year, and some have had it for a decade or more. When they have made some commitment to changing — eating more food, eating foods previously avoided — they do often say things like that the foods are “gross.” But when asking for more details about that, I never heard anything that sounded at all like my own food aversions, which are all just the ordinary typical kind: I dislike eating certain foods because I hate the taste or the texture. Or I dislike the feeling of eating because I’m already stuffed. And of course if I’m queasy I’m averse to food. Anorexic food disgust seemed to be really a disgust at the idea of eating — seeing it as a piggy, ugly activity. Or sometimes it's disgust at, say, some oil on their food because they picture that oil turning into a little blob of blubber on their body.
I haven't read Scott's piece and don't have time to right now. If it's about research findings there's probably something to it. If it's just his or somebody else's personal theory I think it's probably just not a good theory.
Weir is a pop historian, ploughing the well-furrowed field of the Tudors (though she also ranges into the Wars of the Roses and several books about queens from the Conquest on down). She also writes historical fiction based on these same characters.
Unfortunately, she is not as good a writer as Hilary Mantel (for one) and there are better historians covering the same ground. Reading the first two books in her fiction series about Henry's six wives, I skipped a *lot* to get to the end. And the problem with this non-fiction book is much the same: she manages to get bogged down in a lot of detail without telling us much.
However, for a quick read about the general topic, they're good. Best thought of as entrées before moving on to the main course with better novelists and historians.
It did make me a little more sympathetic to Anne Boleyn. She may not have deliberately set her cap at Henry, but once he was interested and chasing her, she (and her family) seem to have decided that unlike her sister Mary, she wouldn't just be a mistress to be discarded when his fancy ran its course. Anne was ambitious, clever, and handled Henry almost perfectly in the game of courtly love: not yielding to him straight away (as that would let his desire burn out) and holding him at arm's length for years.
Now, did she imagine it would *take* years to get the marriage she desired? I think not, but that's what happened. And along the way, she and her family made enemies. The problem was that without Henry's protection, Anne had nothing. This was made very clear when he eventually tired of her and moved on to another mistress (who would go on to be his third wife and mother of his only living legitimate son).
What this book made clear to me was the extent of how inward looking the Tudor court was. I already knew it was a snake pit, but everyone was somebody else's child, parent, sibling, spouse, cousin, step-parent, illegitimate descendant or family connection, and that made it even more hothouse and even more dangerous.
*Everybody* was jockeying for position, and one misstep made an enemy out of a former ally, even a family member. Anne's uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, was happy to turn on her and be one of the judges Henry appointed. Not that we must think of the notion of a trial or judges as being in any way justice: what Henry wanted, Henry would get.
Weir goes through the question of "*did* Henry want shot of Anne?" and comes down on the side of "no, it was Cromwell's doing". Because Cromwell and Anne had been allies of a sort in the beginning, but fell out and it was literal survival for Cromwell. He too was totally reliant on the king's favour and protection, and he had made some missteps causing Henry to be dissatisfied with him. Anne had previously said she could and would destroy him, and he seems to have feared that this was the moment of "kill or be killed".
Henry comes off as someone who was happy for others to do his dirty work for him, so he could later disclaim any knowledge of it, and more importantly, any blame. He was someone who had to be always right, someone who wanted to eat his cake and have it. And he was heartless once he turned on you: today your best friend, tomorrow gone and all access cut off.
At the same time, while Weir presents Anne as sympathetically as she can, there is undoubtedly an element of getting her just desserts in her fate. Not the fate as such, but how she was treated as a prisoner (and her fears for her daughter). When she was in power, she seems to have hated Katherine of Aragon and Mary, Henry and Katherine's daughter. Not just as political rivals and threats to her position, but with a personal, spiteful, vindictive hatred.
For instance, that Anne and Henry dressed in yellow on the day of Katherine's funeral. This was taken to be a sign of rejoicing, since yellow was a colour of joy and celebration. Later, more sympathetic, versions held that yellow was the colour of Spanish royal mourning so in fact they were honouring Katherine. Weir held that latter position, but has now come to change her mind on it: yellow was not Spanish royal mourning, so the fact that Anne dressed in yellow (and Henry followed her lead) was indeed triumphing in a rather crass manner over her now-deceased rival and rubbing the noses of those who hated her (and the public in general disliked her) that now she was queen and what could they do about it?
Quite a lot, as it later fell out.
Anne had urged ill-treatment of Mary in her exile from court, and allegedly made threats about having her killed. So it really was a case of "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" when it came to Elizabeth also being treated as a bastard, as Mary was, and being put of the line of succession in the same way, and for Anne (once in the Tower) to be in the charge of women set there to spy on her and treat her harshly.
The Tudors are endlessly fascinating, so it's worth giving Weir's book a go!
Not that I recall; remember, she stans Cromwell so she can't paint him as the villain. A combination of "Henry wants this, the Boleyns are too powerful, Anne is my enemy, some of this at least is true, and it's for the greater good if she's out of the way".
The final book is the weakest, because it's leading up to Cromwell's fall, and if it takes him by utter surprise, it has to take us (the readers) too even though we know what's going to happen. So he's not driving events as in the previous two books, which makes it slightly weaker. And of course, the story ends with his execution, so he can't continue to tell us about what happens next in the court (and we'd *love* him to comment on the events that take place, to get his view of what is going on and who the players are).
The real history is murky enough that you can argue for any interpretation and make a reasonable case out of it: Henry ordered this, Henry was ignorant, Cromwell did it all, Cromwell did it at Henry's command, her enemies framed her, Anne did have affair(s). Not with Smeaton, but with Norris? Maybe. Or one of the other accused? Maybe. Or somebody completely different? Maybe. She was used to admiration, to the flirtatious rules of the game of courtly love, and desperate to bear that son Henry was expecting for so many years. Desperate enough to try and get pregnant by another man, if Henry was avoiding her bed? Who can say?
The last book in the series presents Cromwell as exhausted, disillusioned with his chosen prince, and having no realistic way out, effectively with a death wish.
A question for Scott. Having previously read the web serial edition of "Unsong", in June I read the heavily edited edition you made available for sale via Amazon. I'm currently reading Ted Chiang's novelette "Seventy-Two Letters". Had you read "Seventy-Two Letters" before commencing work on "Unsong"?
Well when he wrote a response to an article Ted Chiang published, he acknowledged the similarities between "Seventy-Two Letters" and "Unsong" (Ctrl-F "I could go on all day like this"), so it's really just a question of when Scott read it.
There are some Substacks about how progressive parents should not let boys play with toy guns, and it bugs me, because I am pretty sure Che Guevara or the Black Panthers did. That is, if progressives are a political tribe, they need to have some warriors to protect them. What is the endgame of this version of progressivism, to become a holy-victim martyr?
Perhaps this is the problem with morality-based movements, they can take morality too far and thus give up self-defense or give up basically anything that might step on anyone's toes, and thus adopt, to quote Ozy, the life goals of dead people.
Are you aware of some particular Substack that is both (a) praising Che Guevara or the Black Panthers and (b) claiming that boys should not play with toy guns? If not, perhaps you are arguing against a straw man.
I wonder if there's a corollary to Goodhart's Law involved. People can't actually reliably prevent adult violence, so the they preventing children from playing with guns. Maybe they can control their children, or at least they hope so.
I wonder if some of this is a response to zero tolerance policies in schools. If you let your first grader run around “shooting“ his friends after school, he might do the same thing in the playground and then end up in the principal’s office.
Also, people just worry a lot more about safety now. There was a time when little boys would get BB guns for Christmas and practice shooting stuff in the backyard and honestly that’s kind of unimaginable now.
I second the Che Guevara as a role model for children's play. Here's a picture of Guevara as a child so American kids can draw some inspiration from him:
> "What is the endgame of this version of progressivism, to become a holy-victim martyr?"
Apparently so.
Admittedly, the following is anecdotal, but:
One of the reasons my extremely Team Blue ex-boyfriend dumped me out of an otherwise compatible relationship was my willingness to use lethal self-defense (I've had concealed weapons permits my entire adult life). He oddly wasn't freaked out about the presence of the actual pistol I wear and keep in my home, but rather the fact about *me* that I am both willing and prepared to kill a human being under the very narrow and specific circumstance of them threatening my life.
As a father of two kids living in an urban area with unpredictable drug addicts frequently passing through his neighborhood, I asked him what he would do if, hypothetically, one of them broke into his home in a psychotic and meth-fueled fugue and began stabbing at his children with his chef's knife and would not stop.
He literally said:
"I don't know."
I pressed. Sure, he didn't have a gun, but would he grab one of his heavy chairs and start beating the assailant with it to stop the attack? What if the assailant wouldn't stop with a threat to call the police or a light injury?
He said again, "I don't know."
He wasn't willing to commit to defending his own children from a deadly threat using deadly force. Not even hypothetically. He thought human life was too precious. His children weren't allowed to play with toy guns (although he was strangely okay with Nerf guns throwing foam darts).
But let's remember that boys aren't the only ones who play with toy guns! I played with them throughout my childhood, in thousands of Let's Pretend games where they were used as a tool of justice to defeat villains trying to hurt people. I trained over and over and over, both as a child and later, as an adult, to be emotionally and ethically prepared to use deadly force appropriately.
And as an adult? I've now had two separate incidents where that preparation thwarted a developing deadly threat to me. Those predatory men looked into my eyes and saw not a victim's fear but a warrior's confidence and determination. They decided not to engage the warrior, and thus I did not have a chance to become their victim.
I think my ex may have had the life goals of a dead person and I most certainly did not, and it indeed has something to do with the values we rehearsed as children via play.
Fascinating. Do you have a ladder of escalation in mind - warning shots etc.? How much practice do you need to feel like you would actually be able to use it effectively? I only ask because I've never met anyone who's owned a gun for personal protection (UK based so only know the odd person who shoots animals). I would potentially own a gun if it was culturally appropriate and I wasn't depressed.
I initially trained with a retired Marine boot camp instructor, on a private outdoor range, so I was able to practice drawing and shooting under circumstances most people don't have a chance to try (from a seated position, as if in a car, etc). I also had classroom instruction on the law, gun handling safety and principles, and so on in order to get my first permit in Arizona.
Your questions sort of cover the scope of all of responsible gun-handling, though!
Aside from a few *extremely* rare circumstances, warning shots are generally never recommended, as where the bullet may end up and who it might harm is unpredictable (firing into the ground could send a bullet ricocheting, firing into the air may lead to a bullet falling on someone enough velocity to injure them, etc).
I was very lucky in that both of the encounters I had (would-be robberies, at best) were slow-moving and I had ample time during the pre-incident phase to recognize that I was being assessed and targeted. More importantly, I had enough physical distance that I had the luxury of time to *visibly* prepare to defend myself and thus interrupt the plan before they committed.
In both cases, the would-be assailants were almost certainly habitual or career criminals who were very familiar with what a person looks like when they are unafraid of a coming confrontation because they have their hand on a weapon.
Thanks for the reply. That sounds like a genuinely terrifying situation and you did well to keep your cool. I don't know what other options you'd have had apart from showing the gun.
I think I'd enjoy the marine training whether I carried a gun or not. Do you feel you need to keep it fresh by going to shooting ranges? If so how often would you need to go?
Noted re: warning shots. I have a friend who is a policeman who got into a (non-armed) confrontation in a bar, and I asked him why he didn't just whip his badge out and say "you're having a bad day, gentleman" and he said that he decided it would be less risky to employ his de-escalation skills without pulling rank, which would have risked escalating the situation, even though he would have been within his rights. And I can't help wondering if there are situations (more ambiguous than yours) where carrying a gun might have a similar effect and if I carried one myself I'd want to know about the de-escalation skills. Is that type of thing covered in the license training or is that something you just pick up if you're in a gun culture?
Technically, I didn't actually *show* my gun. But there's no body language that matches putting a hand one's gun in preparation to draw (or in the 3 on 1 case, go from drawing with concealment to pointing). But that's a difference without a real distinction.
You absolutely do need to maintain shooting skills by going to ranges, but how often really varies person to person! Police should go very, very often and practice shooting at many different distances and under different circumstances, whereas, realistically, I don't need to train for longer ranges - my pistol isn't good for it and most encounters I might plausibly have are going to be relatively close up.
My particular training did include awareness skills, as well as some theory on avoiding confrontations, if for no other reason than purely selfish self-interest.
In most of the US, even the most unambiguous, thoroughly documented self-defense shooting is going to ruin the shooters' life for a while or forever. Setting aside the trauma of being in such a violent and scary encounter, there are usually dire administrative costs.
At best, a defender will be quickly cleared by the police and the prosecutor will decline to bother them, but that doesn't protect the defender from the *civil* lawsuits brought by the surviving assailant or their family members. It doesn't matter how cartoonishly in the wrong the assailant may be; even if the defender retreats and then gives every possible warning and then suffers a serious injury and then is forced to finally end the threat, someone WILL put their hand out for a wrongful injury or wrongful death payout.
And defending oneself in court is a much longer and much more expensive process than defending oneself with a gun.
So often, the trained, responsible, knowledgeable gun handler's decision tree during a confrontation comes down to, "is winning this encounter worth tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees and possibly losing my job/home/freedom?"
For an ego-driven squabble in a bar? Definitely not.
To avoid having someone gravely injure or kill you? Yes, unavoidably so.
There's a saying in the gun community, "Better to be judged by 12 than carried by six," which sometimes gets misused but mostly presents the idea that there are going to be legal consequences from a self-defense shooting, but they're better than (avoidably) dying.
Last, for what it's worth, I was once a victim of strong-arm robbery - with injury! -on the street! Some assholes followed me off a city bus, ripped my iPod nano right out of my hand and took off running. I instinctively tried to hang on to it (I have a younger brother), managed to grab the earbud cord, and the plastic coating sheared away, leaving the copper wiring to deeply cut my hand as the cord was yanked across it. I need a shot and stitches.
But as I watched the two assholes sprinting down the street away from me, I knew it was not appropriate or wise to pull a gun at that point. The threat to me wasn't deadly, and it had passed.
Thanks, I like ACX for conversations like this because I probably wouldn't have it anywhere else. I cant fault your logic, all I'm left with a sense that even if I had all that awareness about the risks I might still blow the head off an iPad thief just for showing me up. I'm a pretty responsible driver but once in a blue moon I see red, I could it see it being a similar story with a gun.
While constant vigilance and care is certainly a key part of gun handling, *actually having the gun and being willing to use it* is what makes a threat display by a would-be victim credible.
I am a 5'2" woman and on two separate occasions I have made men larger than me who were preparing to harm me back away simply by placing my hand on my unseen pistol and staring at them with determination, not fear.
In one of those two situations, I was outnumbered three to one.
You might want to argue that a credible threat display can be faked, but, just...no. There is no substitute in body language for *actually* being a credible threat to a would-be predator.
In most circumstances, people who are routinely around guns - and especially people who are routinely around the *criminal* use of guns - know what it looks like when another person has one on them and is planning on using it. Recognizing human body language and behavior is a very normal thing for humans to do.
The gun is not going to kill you or your kids. The gun is not going to emit Gun Rays that will cause you to kill your kids or your kids to kill each other. Basic gun safety, even where children are involved, is very easy and very reliable and something Red Tribe at least knows how to do very well. Accidental shootings, outside of hunting, are a tiny blip in violent death statistics, and mostly concentrated among people who don't take it at all seriously.
"Constant vigilance and care" is a hyperbolic overstatement.
Most firearm deaths are suicides, so that's one way that having a gun around adds substantial risk. If anyone in your household is suicidally inclined or has a mental illness that often leads to suicide, you probably just need to either get the guns out of the house or make sure they're too well locked up for the suicidal person to get to them.
This is one of those things that has like zero impact on most people, but it's a very big deal if you're susceptible. I'm pretty sure I could have a loaded gun in reach every day and be at no particular risk from it, but there are people who absolutely should not do that because it's liable to be the thing they do themselves in with.
These are very tiresome and ignorant broad talking points.
Of course one should not have unsecured guns in the home with impulsive and/or wilful uncontrollable children. My parents actually stored their guns outside of the home while my younger brother was at his worst because they recognized that he, *personally,* was a young, dangerous, uncontrollable idiot. They were right to recognize that my brother, specifically, was a much greater threat to the safety of the household than a random break-in.
In contrast, my best friend grew up with his father (an armed US Postal Inspector) placing his loaded service on the bedside table every day and trusting his two children not to irresponsibly touch it. This might astonish you, but both of those kids never irresponsibly touched the pistol and both are alive today. And it was worth the "risk," as my BF's dad was routinely personally threatened by the people he was testifying against, and actually had one of them come to the house after getting out of prison.
> "the risk isn't worth the slim chance someone may invade your home."
[citation needed]
In 27 years, I've had two encounters where my carrying a pistol shut down what would have been strong-arm robberies (at best). One was in the communal garage of my condo building two years ago, and the other was away from my home.
And those were the two totally unambiguous encounters, with literal intruders. I've had about a dozen much more ambiguous moments where it's not clear I was definitely being targeted, but where I was extremely grateful that I was prepared to adequately defend myself.
In those 27 years, I've never been in even the slightest danger from my own firearm or any of the firearms on my friends or in their homes, mostly because I don't associate with anyone who isn't stable and trained enough to be trusted around unsecured guns.
For me, personally, it has been *supremely* worth the risk of owning and routinely carrying a firearm. My firearm allows me to live a lifestyle that most women would hesitate to embrace. It's a wonderful, liberating tool.
It's just not for people with mental illnesses and/or willful, uncontrollable kids.
I grew up in Red Tribe Texas. Throughout my childhood, Dad kept a long gun in his closet. No safe; just there, leaning against the wall. If I wanted to get it, I knew where to look. To this day, I don't know if it was kept loaded, because I knew not to touch it except maybe for some really screwy situation where strangers were breaking into the house and Dad wasn't around. I'm kinda glad I never had to find out.
Dad also used to make bullets in the house; I remember the scales, the primers, the empty casings, powder, and the device for pressing and crimping. I was maybe 5. I knew not everyone did this - Dad was a hobbyist (he also welded "poppers" - a particular type of target), and could probably have done this for neighbors in exchange for help with something else. But there wasn't anything special about learning an uncommon skill and showing your kids how to behave around it.
Or teaching it to kids when they were older. By the time we were all teenagers, it was much easier to just buy ammo, so the kit started to just gather dust, but it was still common to learn to shoot by age eight or so. Nine was the magic number for a lot of kids: that's when you could use an airgun unsupervised, and by then, you were almost certainly shooting .22s and pistols and even shotguns during group sessions arranged by the moms and dads. My youngest nephew got his own shotgun when he was ten.
Everyone's still alive and healthy. The kids are now old enough to teach it to the next generation. It's safe, fun, and a hell of a lot more liberating than getting a tattoo.
Is playing with toy guns necessary to create these "warriors" of which you speak?
Like, I don't think it's particularly *bad* to allow kids to play with toy guns (no more than violent video games or movies), but your post seems to imply that you *need* to do so in order to have warriors in your society, and I'm very confident that that's false. I don't think the Army recruiters ask you "did you play with toy guns as a kid?" before you're allowed to sign up.
Edit: Also, the idea that each political movement needs its own warriors to protect it seems like terrible politics - the army and the police are supposed to protect progressives and reactionaries alike, and if they don't we should try to fix that in the political process rather than wait until everyone is forming their own gangs for self-defense.
You are making a LOT of very unsound assumptions here.
1. Not playing with toy guns as a child makes one less able to defend oneself or others as an adult. I'd at the bare minimum want to see a shred of evidence before I considered this a serious possibility.
2. Defense of a modern community requires "warriors" as a distinct caste of people. This is an especially bad assumption if you live in the U.S. because in that country it has *literally never been true.* In fact, it's a pretty core tenet of U.S. founding mythology that proto-Americans did not have, want or need that[1].
3. Progressives have no notion of self-defense as a valuable thing. Having lived most of my life around progressive-ish people, this is laughably untrue.
4. More implicit than the others, but that the (for lack of a better term) self-defense maximalist worldview that underlies what you write here has either no tradeoffs to it, or such good tradeoffs that it's not worth seriously considering the alternatives.
I assume the people you're talking about live in the U.S., as do you? Because the U.S.'s current set of cultural and legal practices around violence work *shockingly* poorly. The U.S. is a HUGE outlier among developed countries by homicide rate, despite being the single richest country among them. This despite also having a sky-high incarceration rate (suggesting that neither "lack of police" or "willingness to do policing" can possibly be the whole difference). Obviously nobody know for sure what factors cause this--and it could be a combination of many things---but it hardly seems like culture is irrelevant here. See for example this classic SSC post, in which the fact that the U.S. South specifically--which has a very different cultural and cultural history than other parts of the nation--is so much more violent than the national average that it throws off all sorts of statistics: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/ [2]
In a nutshell, this is why this whole line of thinking seems silly to me: most skills can be taught and almost any stage of life. Cultural attitudes are much, much harder to learn and unlearn past early childhood. In any civilized setting, not only do you want only a few specific people ready to do violence at any time, but even for *those* people you want their tendency-towards-violence to be tightly circumscribed and under control. Raising *everybody* in the culture to glorify and enjoy violence and find it exciting *might* make those few chosen people a little easier to teach, but it's also going to make their jobs enormously harder.
Finally, a brief personal anecdote to point out how false a dichotomy this is. I didn't play with toy guns as a child (excepting the occasional squirt gun). But for a few years when I was in grade school, my entire ended up one-by-one joining the same martial arts class. "Learning self defense" was pretty explicitly a goal of the class[3]. But the skills we were taught and the culture around them were ENORMOUSLY different than the "cult of the badass" type stuff you see in action movies, or the overcompensating, swaggering posturing with which a lot of (obviously very insecure) U.S. men tend to brag about about their capacity for violence. If the instructors had ever caught word of one of their students using the skills taught in the class to attack or bully someone, I have no doubt that student would have been asked to leave immediately and never allowed back. It was emphasized multiple times that the single most important self defense technique that you could employ was *running away*, and that you should *only* fight when that wasn't a feasible option (for yourself or someone you were protecting)[4]. Class started with a brief mediation, things like good technique and fundamentals were heavily exercised, and sparring was treated as a learning exercise and a way to hone your skills, NOT as a competitive sporting activity. To buck another stereotype, out of all my family members it was my mother who stuck with this class the longest (though I returned for a while in my late teens and early 20s finding, to my delight, that it was still taught by the same people in the same fashion).
As an adult man, living mostly in urban (i.e. theoretically high-crime) areas for the past 20 years, you know how often I've had occasion to use those skills? Zero times. Not once. I've come close a few times, but all but one of those times were an occasion when I largely *forgot* the sort of discipline those classes taught me, and needlessly escalated a confrontation due to anger or frustration[5]. Let me say that more clearly: the biggest physical threat *I, personally* have ever encountered was my own temper and poor judgement. And I expect I was raised better on that score than the average man in the Anglosphere. So curiously, I don't think that playing with toy guns as a child, or being raised with a "warrior ethos" or any of that rot would have made me any safer. Likewise, while I've fired guns on numerous occasions, I've never made the choice to own one: I expect that doing so would make me actively *less safe*[6]. And yet, if my life took a bizarre turn and I found myself wanting to pursue a profession of which doing violence was an expected and necessary part, I don't think I'd have any problem learning the skills. Not unless I was trying to pursue an exciting career as a horse archer: then I'd be fucked.
[1] If you missed that part, you might need to look up what a "militia" is.
[2] I'll (hopefully) save people some time arguing here and note that the obvious point about racial makeup was both raised and answered in the comments of that post. Yes, U.S. blacks have a higher per-capita homicide right than U.S. whites, everyone's aware. But when you filter the data to look at just whites, white southerners (according to Scott in the comments) still tend to be significantly more violent than white non-southerners.
[3] Though I don't think it was really one of my family's main motives for joining: we just enjoyed it as an athletic activity.
[4] If you seriously dispute this, then "self defense" is clearly not your highest priority. A lot of men have a whole bunch of their ego and self-image tied up in a pathetic "tough guy" persona which is actually quite bad for one's personal safety a lot of the time.
[5] Mind you, I've never escalated by physically attacking someone, nor ever come especially close to doing so. But I've definitely said and done things with the predictable effect of making already angry and unstable people madder, which is stupid and short-sighted and extremely poor self-defense practice.
[6] Albeit, by a fairly small degree. If I wanted to hunt or sport shoot, I wouldn't balk at owning a gun for that reason, but keeping one strictly for "self defense" would be irrational.
"1. Not playing with toy guns as a child makes one less able to defend oneself or others as an adult. I'd at the bare minimum want to see a shred of evidence before I considered this a serious possibility."
I'd think the requirement for evidence points the other way. This looks like a clear case of Chesterton's fence. For as long as we have had records, boys have played with toy weapons, and not always just toys. And these boys have grown up to be men who could ably defend their community at need. For a generation or so, a few societies have been introducing the norm of "boys should not play with toy guns". To date, I don't think any of those societies has won a war. Show me the evidence that says we can safely tear this fence down.
"2. Defense of a modern community requires "warriors" as a distinct caste of people. This is an especially bad assumption if you live in the U.S. because in that country it has *literally never been true.* In fact, it's a pretty core tenet of U.S. founding mythology that proto-Americans did not have, want or need that[1]. "
I think you're reading too much into the OP's admittedly imprecise choice of verbiage. S/warriors/soldiers, if it makes you feel better. And the United States needs *all* its boys playing with toy guns, not just the children of the "warrior class", because in extremis we're going to call them all up into the Militia or whatever and all of them will have needed to internalize "shooting a gun at the bad guys is a natural and proper thing to do".
Or maybe we don't need that at all, but again, show me the evidence.
"I'd think the requirement for evidence points the other way. "
This is a deeply unserious position and I honestly believe you know better. You're not dumb, John. You're not uneducated. You know how the burden of proof works. Why are you wasting both of our time with this hogwash?
"This looks like a clear case of Chesterton's fence. For as long as we have had records, boys have played with toy weapons..."
Seriously? Again, I *know for a damn fact* you are capable of better than this. I've seen you write many insightful, informative, well-reasoned comments, so this utter affront to basic reasoning abilities should be *thoroughly* beneath you. Let's break it down.
Claim 1: Often in the past (according to our records), boys have played with toy weapons.
--Which boys? All boys? Specific boys? Every past society? Only some? If it's all boys, it cannot possibly provide any sort of evidence in *any* direction. Hiding that basic truth behind "Chesterton's Fence" is an abuse of an already rather dubious principle[1]. Surely it has occurred to you that if all the boys in history played with toy weapons, well, some of those were the boys who *lost* the wars, right?
Claim 2: "these boys" have grown up able to defend their communities at need.
--Problem with claim one is now compounded. We still don't know *which* boys are claimed to have grown up playing with weapons. But now we're claiming that "these boys" grew up into capable community defenders. All of them? Some of them? Which ones? Surely *some* of them must have grown up into *incapable* defenders of their communities, right? Or despoilers of their communities. Or looters, pillagers and ravagers of their neighbors' communities? Surely we're not doing the thing where we pretend that every person who ever took up arms in the past was a great and noble warrior fighting the good fight, are we? Do you have *any information at all* about the actual statistical relationship between boys playing with toy weapons and men who grew up into capable defenders of their communities? Or is this whole argument as rectally-sourced as it appears?
If I wanted to stoop to that level, it would be really quite easy to spin a story about how the boys who were most often *encouraged* to play with toy weapons growing up into the men who were most often *directly responsible* for wholesale slaughter and rape and pillage[2]. But I'm not going to pretend that it would be anything more than trading bullshit for bullshit. The fact is, history is a large and complicated place and trying to generalize to the degree that you are is *just plain stupid.* So let's maybe be better than that, eh?
" To date, I don't think any of those societies has won a war."
Has any of them lost a war? Has any of them *been in* a war? Gotta be honest with you, John, I would much, much rather live in a society that has a history of *not fighting unnecessary wars* than a society that has a history of fighting them and winning. So unless you want to hold up an example of one of these societies (which you haven't bothered to name) fighting and losing, I'm going to call that a rather big (if somewhat uncertain) net positive.
"Or maybe we don't need that at all, but again, show me the evidence."
"And the United States needs *all* its boys playing with toy guns, not just the children of the "warrior class", because in extremis we're going to call them all up into the Militia...Or maybe we don't need that at all, but again, show me the evidence."
Really? Do you actually not know your own country's history? Or do you just consider it insufficient evidence? At *no point in U.S. history* has anywhere close to 100% of the eligible-age male population served. In perhaps two out of all the wars you lot have fought in your history (not counting the one you fought with each other) has have the nation's core territories been even plausibly threatened. And one of those was a war you started. In the year 2025 the idea that some desperate threat might require every available American to pick up a weapon is little short of laughable, besides which you're hard at work tearing yourselves to shreds anyhow.
But hey, two can play at that game. Obviously growing up being taught to love and glorify violence is not nearly enough preparedness. Why not replace the *right* to bear arms with the *obligation* to bear arms? Why not insist that every citizens dwelling have every available scrap of spare floor space devoted to storing spare munitions, stockpiled against future threats. You cannot, after all, prove you won't need it. There is exactly as much evidence that *that* will be key to the U.S.'s future survival as that *checks notes* boys playing with toy guns will.
But here, have an actual historian discussing (at some length) this very trope about how a society MUST have strong men, conditioned by hardship to be always ready for violence. It's not a remotely new trope. It dates *at least* back to the early days of the Roman empire. It was hogwash then, and it's hogwash now:
[1] To be clear, I think "understand it before you tinker with it" is pretty decent axiom if you're earnestly enforcing it on yourself. But in practice, it literally always ends up as an isolated demand for rigor, as it does here. You can always claim that the system is not well enough understood. And always ignore it when convenient just as easily.
[2] Due to the simple fact that warrior castes have existed, and anywhere they existed they were highly like
[3]Which I believe you are: as believe you live in the U.S., right?
The extreme version would be what's happening in Ukraine now, right? Or the endgame of Germany where they were reportedly sending old men and boys to the front? In those places you genuinely see a large chunk of the male population pulled into the fighting.
Or the alternative we see from DNA evidence, where the invading population replaced all the Y chromosomes from the original population. Maybe those boys should have played with weapons more as kids....
Even where you don't send literally everyone, we have lots of experience from wars where an essentially random selection of the population was sent off to war. And while there are definitely "10X" warriors in the same way there are "10X" programmers, the rank and file generally fought well enough to be worth the bother of bringing to the fight,
We have one reliable data point, repeated many times: In societies where almost all boys play with toy weapons, almost all men can fight to a tolerable minimum standard at need. Everything else is speculation. I'd prefer some other, more expendable society perform the experiment of discouraging toy gunplay and the like for a generation and then going off to fight a war. But we may have to wait a while, because all the societies willing to do the first part seem to want Red Tribe America to fight their wars for them.
They are not. Guns in video games work by video game logic, in which reloads and quickdraws always succeed, bullets magically teleport into magazines to fill them, guns never jam or misfire and thus never need to be cleared, targets have hit points and highlighted crit zones, wounded people operate at 100% capability until they are dead, everything weighs zero pounds, everyone can run forever without tiring or losing speed, running or jumping or shooting two guns doesn't hamper accuracy, cars stop bullets, bullets don't ricochet off angled surfaces, and in some cases, zooming through a scope snaps the crosshairs to your target. And that's just OTTOMH.
A few games simulate some realism, but based on the reviews I read, they're not what I'd call addictive features. Gamers don't extoll the virtues of some FPS where sniping takes hours of prep and missions have unspecified and unknown goals and you never really know what your kill count is and winging an elk means tracking it for a mile. Gamers who seek this level of realism enough to want it in a game, tend instead to get in a truck and drive into the countryside and actually do it.
+1 to Deiseach's observation that none of this is new.
As a boy who had toys taken away in the early 80s, it was more a 'nice Christians with good family values don't expose their kids to *violence*' bit that paralleled later efforts to insulate kids from Harry Potter for glorifying witchcraft. A lot of "why can't kids television be more like the *nice* cartoons I grew up with" energy. Bambi's mom getting blown away aside, there was a nostalgia for media like "Wacky Races" and "Rocky And Bullwinkle" that was not satisfied by technicalities like the Ninja Turtles only fighting robots or the GI Joes always bailing out of the vehicles before they exploded
This occasionally manifested as a babysitter or other caretaker having a "no toy guns" rule, which was solved for by repurposing sticks and non-gun toys for use as pretend weapons. Turns out that a Barbie, for example, can be bent at the waist to form a neat 90-degree 'L' shape that a child can point at anything and say "bang!" which is fun for both the obvious play reasons as well as the mortified look it creates on the face of the caretaker in question.
This happened again in the 90s with several of my younger relatives in the next decades age cohort, with the same results. Helicopter-style values child-rearing can intend as it likes, but cardboard tubes are quite versatile, and have a small-barrel companion in the toilet paper tube if a child wants a rifle and pistol, or rifle and hand grenades, etc.
There will always be children disposed to imagine-playing at violence, and there will always be those among the gentlehearted who are horrified by this kind of play whose very gentleness makes them exactly the kind of people most drawn to caring for and raising children. Typically the kids will just break these limits themselves, it'll turn out fine, and we'll all just have a laugh. In the rare case that they don't, though, it's up to the rest of us to playfully undermine the nannies as we go, with pretend gunfights and toy sword birthday presents.
This really reinforces my conviction that in the US, religion and progressivism are not always at odds with each other, they often have strangely overlapping ideas. This can be contrasted to Catholic Europe where religion is always conservative.
Oh yeah. US Catholicism in particular actually has quite the progressive tradition, especially if you're looking before the 1970s and the consolidation of the religious right around the Republican Party. It makes sense if you think about it; in the European context the Catholic Church was intimately entwined with traditional social power structures, whereas in the US context the Catholic population was nearly totally confined to the poor working class immigrant strata. Whether your faith (a) comprises the bedrock of the power of those holding institutional power, or (b) is the binding glue by which those without institutional power come together and engage in mutual support, goes a long way towards shaping your faith's perspective on those institutions.
There's been a lot of shifting since then, but "stop overthinking the economics and just fucking feed the poor already" is still a stance that can be held quite comfortably within a variety of Christian frameworks - all depends on which aspects of the doctrine one is highlighting and where one does and does not make the compromises that inevitably accompany the joining of political coalitions.
Progressivism necessarily inherits some core Christian moral assumptions as part of the Western tradition. It's hard to fully escape the water you swim in. Notably a belief in fundamental equality of all human beings - they just leave out the "made in the image of God" part.
It really was. Fascinating history too; basically the cereal company that sponsored it wanted a cartoon as cheap as possible, so the creative team behind it pitched an obscenely low cost in exchange for more creative freedom. Sponsor goes for it because what's the worst that could happen, but then panics because they pull it off but start leveraging their creative freedom to throw grade A cold war satire into their children's programming.
We didn't buy guns for our boys but when they were out playing in the woods or garden they used any old stick/branch/hose attachment to shoot each other... Whatchagonna dooo...
My ex along with her mom friends didn't want their kids playing with toy guns. And yes, they ended up running around the yard "shooting" each other with sticks and pistol noises. What I found remarkable is that, as far as I can tell, my ex never let my stepson watch anything violent with guns in it. Somehow, he picked up on guns by the time he was four years old. My ex was mortified to say the least.
As for me, I grew up around real guns and guns on TV. It didn't turn me into psychokiller.
My kids (two boys and a girl) *loved* their foam rubber swords, and had great fun whacking one another/other kids in the neighborhood with them. None has shown any interest in the military or in becoming axe murderers so far, though.
Ah, this is an old thing, it didn't start with progressive parents. I remember even back in the late 70s that there were campaigns (maybe that's too organised a word to use here) about not letting boys play with guns, but this was more inspired by feminism (you know, the bad old patriarchy, gendered toys - though that handy phrase wasn't in common usage then -, violence against women, violence in general, raising boys to wage war, etc.)
I'm actually fairly sure that it was less inspired by feminism and more inspired by pacifism, with the specific intent being that war games make children ready for the army. People today don't often seem to quite get how much stronger pacifism was as a movement during the Cold War, particularly among the left*, than now.
*: expect for the part of the left that wasn't pacifist due to advocating armed revolution, of course - there was indeed a specific tendency towards violent Communism in some circles as a specific reaction to the pacifism of the 60s.
I was sitting amongst some other moms as our small children played in the park 30-odd years ago - moms 10 to fifteen or twenty years older than me, representative of the college town elite - when they began talking about this subject. To their credit, this was before guns had become a general obsession; indeed probably 200 million guns ago.
The wife of the publisher of the local alternative newspaper remarked that despite the prohibition on toy guns in their home, her son was still keenly interested in them, and in desperation would e.g. eat a slice of bread into the shape of a gun.
Raising boys to be girls, to (not) make war, was as you say exactly the impetus - but also why a note of pride might have entered her voice unawares.
(Feminism at that particular moment had women breastfeeding again in great numbers; it was a more nuanced time.)
It didn’t really work even within that little niche. I can’t imagine how it was ever going to translate into taking the guns away from the criminal class, given the latter’s holy status in the culture.
I say this as someone who has never had a gun in the house, married to someone with a complete disinterest in shooting things, let alone killing them. Even if we are able to move away from the hated city someday, I doubt he’d so much as own a garden gun.
It’s easy, especially if you take a certain care where you live, not to own a firearm. But also meaningless.
The one RTBA person I've talked with seemed to believe there was something especially virtuous about defending people by violence, and other methods (like knowing first aid) just weren't as good. I couldn't figure out what he was thinking.
When everybody has guns, it’s useful for someone with that mindset to have one too, I suppose. I recall the Sutherland Springs church shooter was taken down by a private citizen.
But of course, gun nuts play a part, a big part in my view, in bringing into existence the thing they fear.
Everyone having guns means that crazy spree shooters are likely to get shot, but also that guns are around where the crazy spree shooter can probably get hold of one.
If even some people have guns, then there are guns around where the crazy spree shooter can probably get hold of one. The sort of person who would consider a crazy shooting spree is going to go through a lot more trouble to get a gun, than the sort of person who wonders if maybe they should have a gun just in case they get caught in a shooting spree or whatever.
The ratio of bullets fired *by* spree shooters to bullets fired *at* spree shooters, goes down as more people have guns. Which is probably why most mass shooting incidents(*) happen in places where most people aren't allowed to carry guns (e.g. schools), and IIRC have about 30% fewer dead bodies per spree killer when they do happen in places where the victims are allowed to shoot back.
* Using the FBI's definition of three people killed other than the shooter - which means if he's shot dead by a bystander right after he shoots his first victim, it doesn't get counted.
What got to me was that he thought having a gun and being willing to use it in defense was a strong obligation, but knowing first aid isn't an obligation.
Watch KPop Demon Hunters. Strongest possible recommendation. (It's on Netflix).
I don't go gushing about every piece of media I love on here, but this one in particular I think needs to get direct recommendations in front of people's eyeballs, since it is very natural to pass on if you don't have someone screaming at you about it. It was on my Netflix's "most watched/liked" suggestions panel for like 2 months straight and I kept passing it over, like, "haha ok very cute I'm sure, a basic action movie with K-Pop songs for K-Pop tweens". And, yes, actually that's basically what it is, but the quality is so far beyond what you would expect from something like that... that it makes it work for ~everyone. I think the humor, action, aesthetics, and emotions are all basically perfect. Just... joy, especially the beginning and ending. The music goes without saying.
You don't have to be a huge K-Pop fan to enjoy it - I'm not. Give it a try! You will know within about 5 minutes if it's for you.
And to make it a little more relevant here: (major spoilers for both UNSONG and this) V gubhtug vg jnf vagrerfgvat/vashevngvat gung Wvah vf onfvpnyyl gur nagv-Pbzrg Xvat. Nyy ur unq gb qb jnf tb nybat jvgu uvf gevivnyyl rnfl cneg va Ehzv'f cyna, juvpu pyrneyl jbhyq unir jbexrq, naq ur jbhyq unir fnirq gur jbeyq naq uvzfrys. Ng gur pbfg bs yvivat jvgu n zbqrengryl thvygl pbafpvrapr. Naq ur gheaf vg qbja! PX ba gur bgure unaq vf jvyyvat gb yvir jvgu qbvat nyy gung Bgure Xvat fghss.
Oh man. Multiple people whose opinions I respect thought it was great, including a couple of friends (though one's recommendation was extremely hesitant).
But for whatever reason, this review and available timing finally nudged me into pushing "play."
And
OH
MY
GOD.
I loathed it so, SO MUCH.
I only got ten minutes in and literally couldn't bear it another moment. And, like, I don't know what else I was expecting - modern pop music in general and K-pop in particular always sends me into an ungovernable, make-it-STAHP! low-grade rage.
As do sassy, goofy, confident kids' movie protagonists, however well-designed and animated they may be.
Fair enough! I actually almost included an "unless you actively dislike K-Pop" in there, but figured I shouldn't clutter it up further. I guess I should have, for your sake at least!
I also really hate the movie's type of protagonist as well as its tone - as much or even more than the K-pop itself. I could tolerate a lot of K-pop music in a story about a K-pop band, but it would need to be in a different genre (dark satire, a murder mystery, etc).
Definitely not for me as a matter of personal taste.
I thought it was maybe a 7.5 or 8 out of ten, but I can totally see how if K-Pop & main/grump/softie protagonist trios grind one's gears the movie would be excruciating.
Stepping back from it, the story is actually very paint by numbers YA and full of holes. The musical numbers and humor are the main things that get you over those hurdles entertained and with your suspension of disbelief intact - and if you don't like the chocolate, then chocolate-covered ants is just eating bugs.
I agree completely. In particular, the lead-in to the climax really is a jarring non-sequitur. I'm not sure what they were thinking there. I was "in" enough to shrug and move past it, but someone having just an ok time up until then would have to raise an eyebrow.
This was the correction to the above review that I needed. Well, if I currently had a streaming service. Reviews should maybe come with age restrictions just like movies.
To be fair to Fred, the people whose opinions I respect, the 97% of professional reviewers on RottenTomatoes, K-Pop Demon Hunters appears to be *very* competently executed. Were I a professional critic forced to dispassionately analyze it, I'm sure I'd be obligated to give it a positive review.
It just happens to be a genre and style I loathe as a matter of personal taste. I legitimately really do hate the kind of pop music that makes the vast majority of folk cheerfully bop their heads.
Come sit beside me on the "grumpy old folks don't vibe with the kids" bench 😁
Talking of modern cartoons/anime, the wildly (and to me incomprehensibly) popular "Hazbin Hotel" (quite apart from the philosophy behind it, so to speak - Lucifer et al. are all *good* guys, you guys, they're just misunderstood and need a second chance!), the art style drives me crazy. It's extremely stylised and I get that, but I think it's ugly (plus every character looks the same).
Ditto "The Amazing Digital Circus" - five minutes into the pilot (the only episode I watched), I *hated* Pomni. I continue to loathe, despise, and hate her, and want her to die horribly. But if I can't have that, I want her to suffer. She's just terrible. (The plot there is more interesting; this is what it's like to be a self-aware character in a video game when you are stuck between remembering your 'outside' self and becoming the in-game character. The show describes what it's like to be the character from inside the game experiencing it directly, rather than as the player outside).
Why? She seems too bland to really hate that fervently; mainly coded to me as the "very generic protagonist, through whom the audience observes the strange world and strong personalities of everyone else in the show" stereotype, so I'm curious how you came to such a strong opinion.
Something about her just annoyed me from the start. I should be sympathetic, being yoinked into a strange world and turned into a cartoon character *is* traumatic.
But she was so pathetic and gibbering and set up to evoke "oh poor lil' Pomni" that I revoltedl Also, there's a particular pose/stance in anime and cartoons that really irritates me because it's so over-used and over-done (standing biting the lip, looking down and to the side, one hand grasping the elbow of the opposite arm, knees turned in but the rest of the leg turned out).
I don't know why, but seeing a character in that pose makes me want to smoosh their head in. It's the "poor lil me, I is just a lil creachur" associations that infantilise characters and, as I said, is over-done.
Then again, I have idiosyncratic reactions so don't go by what I'm saying!
I'll join you on the Grumpy Old Folks Don't Vibe With the Kids Bench, but with the caveat I would have joined you on said bench most of my childhood.
As a child of the '80s and early '90s, I longed for far more serious media than I was offered, and due to the lack of options, would endure the silly for the few moments of pathos. I hated that serious stories about princesses had to be burdened with the obligatory goofiness of goddamned Jamaican crabs and talking teapots, and that I'd have to wait through 64 syndicated episodes of Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers to get to that one awesome (comparatively) serious episode where Gadget joins a cult and the team is almost drowned in the bottles of soda worshiped by said cult.
When I was about five I inquired about a neighbor woman of my grandmother’s, also elderly, whom I would see outside in the yard pulling weeds or the like from time to time.
Where are her kids? Grown, gone.
Where is her husband? Died.
She lives alone? (in that nice rancher).
Yes, she’s a widow.
Me, for whom family was all about, drinking, arguing, crying, worry, disturbance …
One Direction were entirely manufactured from the X factor. I think Melvin is generally correct in thinking that boy bands have died off recently, but genres are imploding anyway. There’s no genres left except girls singing, hip hop and the occasional girls singing with hip hop in a crossover.
Yeah, comparing the cartoony, plastic style to Pop Stars, Pop Stars looks better. However, Pop Stars also looks much more serious/cool. KPDH needs to be sort of in a superposition of whether it's taking itself seriously. Something like the Pop Stars art style would have required it to be way less fun.
If you're interested in economic history and haven't read any of Anton Howes' substack essays, you're missing out. His latest essay is about how contrary to common opinion, the sweeping restrictions on workers after the Black Death didn't go away once the Great Peasants Revolt of 1381 happened - they actually kept on tightening them for the next century or so, and Parliament basically never met a restrictive law on labor that it didn't like. And while it wasn't perfectly enforced, it -was- enforced. Possibly so enforced that it actually depressed English economic and population growth after the Black Death for a long time.
It really puts the British Parliament of the period in a much darker light. They almost come across like Poland's infamous Sejm, actively undermining the vitality of their own kingdom for their narrow short-term interests and privilege.
He also has a good one making the argument that we get the causality of "England ran out of wood, switched to coal" backwards - the British were actually really good at conserving woodlands and utilizing them for the long-run when needed. Woodlands didn't really start to disappear en masse until they switched to coal and no longer needed them anymore.
That kind of ramping up tends to happen when policy-makers are frustrated that the existing laws are more honored in the breach than in the observance. It tends to be ineffective if the reason the existing laws weren't having the desired effect is because you lack the state capacity to enforce the, since harsher versions of the same laws require at least as much state capacity.
I spotted some misleading statements in that essay. For example, it's correct as far as it goes that £20 was an astronomical sum compared to the wages of common laborers, but fails to place that in the proper context that county sheriffs (the people who were liable to be fined £20) were high government officials who tended to be independently wealthy in addition to the substantial incomes from their offices. I can't find info readily on how much a typical sheriff in that period would have made, but I suspect that a £20 fine would be enough to get a sheriff's attention but well within their means to pay.
You mean after King Richard II declared, "Serfs you were, and serfs you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as you were, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity," he DIDN'T loosen labor restrictions?
I've heard this argued both ways, because Richard's public statements and actions are grossly inconsisent, which is not surprising as he was only 14. Seems most likely to me that there were factions for and against compromise at court and what Richard said just depended on who he was with at the time.
This is one of those things I knew but I thought most people interested in the period (admittedly a minority) knew. But no, apparently there's a bunch of people who thought the Statute of Labourers was just... kind of fake, I guess? Strange.
Increasingly I think a lot of academia builds giant superstructures on thin or absent evidence. Then they talk with each other a lot and create entire discourses that are decades of work based on almost nothing. A few months ago I had this discussion about Polanyi. Yes, yes, it's very important to some socialist theories. But that doesn't change his primary evidence is... basically just cherry picked to work backward from his conclusion. That he is now "too big to fail" is just an indictment of the academy's unwillingness to break with bad standards.
>This is one of those things I knew but I thought most people interested in the period (admittedly a minority) knew.
I notice that I am confused. I'm moderately interested in this time period and have read a number of works that I would have expected to talk about something like this (assuming it's well-known and anything like a big deal as Howes makes it sound like) and I don't remember any of them doing so. This doesn't necessarily mean they didn't do so, but if they did talk about it there was little enough emphasis on it that it didn't stick in my recollection. At most, I think Ian Mortimer might have touched on in when discussing the causes of the Peasant's Revolt in his biography of Henry IV.
I think you're agreeing with me. My point is not: everyone who likes this period knows about this. My point is: apparently academia decided a major economic feature of the period was just fake and not worth discussing which is weird.
I then go on to to talk about how academia seems to embed fake or dubious things deep in its intellectual infrastructure and make such beliefs "too big to fail." Which is again a criticism not of people not knowing about the statutes but of academia.
There's a lot of evidence, both before and after the peasants revolt, that overall the peasantry's effective incomes did rise. So, as Anton says himself, the statute was worked around somehow. I think some people went to far and took that as evidence that it wasn't enforced at all, whereas what I took from Anton's essay was more that it was enforced inconsistently and enforcement depended a lot on the local power brokers and whether higher wages were good or bad for them personally.
Their effective incomes rose because prices fell or were held down (therefore real wages rose) and because they received increases in in kind compensation like food, clothes, beds, etc. Also enforcement was not perfect but it was real. Real enough that it's easier to explain the English labor market as being under it than to explain it as if it were ignored.
The phrase "maximum wage" is something I would expect in a caption on the greyscale gigachad guy as a joke, not an actual law. This is basically reverse communism, right? With far-reaching state control of the economy being the only part not reversed?
Also, "employers now had to provide their workers with only the best-quality [food]" (while keeping pay low) rhymes amusingly with big tech colluding to suppress wages, while having lavishly incredible free food. (Or, back in the day, at least; I hear it's reigned in now).
He says that's what they're doing now, except for when they get presents of one toy (and then they hide that toy until they can get a second one).
Fighting over toys is the traditional right of childhood. What is important is not the toy in itself, it's that the Other Child has it and I do not 😁 This is exactly why kids have to be taught to share and take turns and wait, etc. It don't come natural!
Speaking as a parent of slightly older kids - here's what happens:
One toy breaks. Or gets a small fleck of paint peel off that makes it incrementally different. Or god forbid one gets lost in the giant mounds of toys that have collected over the years, like Smaug's treasure horde. And then the cycle continues.
These kids are WAY too young now to register small differences like that. By the time they are old enough to notice that kind of difference they will be old enough not to need the 2-of-everything workaround. They will be old enough to understand things like “it’s her turn right now … how about drawing a picture while you wait … you could try offering her your horsie as a trade … if you try to take it from her I’m going to give you a time out … “ etc
I agree, 1.5 year olds are *probably* too young for those things to register (except for the "toy lost" case.
I'm speaking from the perspective of 4/6 year olds. And yes, we deploy the "take turns" etc model but it is not their default behavior yet, so it still descends into screaming matches sometimes.
Oh, you mean that list of things I said they'll be able to understand? I didn't mean they would hear them and say "Oh ok!" and comply. I meant those were the kinds of things to be saying to 2 and 3 year olds in I-want-that-toy struggle situations as one begins working on civilizing them.
I mean even at Age 8 I insisted on an identical My Little Pony to my sister, and she'd need duplicates of my transformers. (Not even twins, 1 year age gap). And can you believe my grandparents got HER a Bumblebee and I got stuck with a Goldbug!
That is why the cry of the child is "It's not fair!" Children (I speak as having been one myself) are aware of, and viciously enforce, the tiniest infringement of what is seen as equal treatment. If I can get away with having ten sweets and Billy has none, I will do so. But if some interfering adult makes us share, then you better believe I want five and Billy gets five, and if there is one sweet that is dinged about so that it's smaller and the interfering adult proposes giving it to Billy, I *will* scream blue murder until it is cut in half and we each get one half. And it better be exact halves or else!
Black-and-white thinking (and, yes, a certain amount of viciousness) are what motivates the childish mind. Chesterton puts it down to love of justice, but I think it is more "unless the exact rule of the law is followed in the smallest point so nobody gets preferential treatment to myself, then PUNISHMENT!" attitude:
"Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not being me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were partly dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."
At any given moment of your life, you can be doing something smart and clever and productive that creates a lot of value for others, or you can be doing something stupid that ruins your own life and those of others. And yet the gap in outcomes between someone in the top one percent of doing productive clever things and someone who has only ever been a massive net negative for the planet is just a few orders of magnitude.
First, there is no linear association between Income and “value for the planet“.
Second, there are nine orders of magnitude between a billionaire and a bum with a dollar in his pocket. That’s a lot bigger difference than the difference in size between me and one of my blood cells.
Because you can make any difference look tiny if you use a logarithmic scale. I mean, the difference between the number of planets within 100 miles of Earth and the number within a light year is less than one order to magnitude.
That's a hilariously simplistic framing of the choices available during any given moment of a life. I'd _like_ to live in your world, very much! But this ain't Middle Earth and never will be.
Well by jings, if the difference in the totals in my and Elon's bank accounts is "just" a few orders of magnitude, I'd hate to see your notion of a really big difference.
I think you underestimate various costs of doing things.
People spend a lot of time doing things that could be called "maintenance". Sleep and exercise are things that even the richest billionaires cannot outsource. For average people there are also things like cooking, doing the dishes; hundred little things related to household. If you already started rich, you can outsource a lot of those; but if you did not, you need to do these along the way to getting rich.
Another big cost is "training" and "research". You can get lucky and get born with high IQ and high conscientiousness. You still need to learn things, and that takes time. It takes time to develop skills. It takes time to study the market, so that you know what would be the smart and productive thing to do.
Notice that this happens in an adversarial environment. If you are rich, there are entire industries specialized on scamming people like you. Many people will actively try to mislead you during your research, to make you spend money on them. You need to be smart enough to resist them. Then there are thousands of temptations, more of them for the rich, you need solid work ethics to resist them. But suppose you got all of that.
Then, there is a cost of "doing things". Even if you know what is the smart thing to do, it takes some time to actually do it. If you already started rich, you could hire people to do it for you. But then you need to spend some time trying to hire competent people. Or you could hire a manager to do that for you, but then you need to spend some time trying to hire the manager. There is always a risk that the people you hired will be incompetent and will ruin your otherwise good idea.
Not all useful things are profitable. For example, there are many things in the general category of "helping the poor", where the problem with profitability is exactly the fact that the poor do not have a lot of money. There are all kinds of friction, such as bureaucratic or legal, which can shift the equation so that a potentially profitable endeavor becomes unprofitable. If your plan is to hire people to do some work for you, you have to generate enough profit to pay them, too. But if you want to do it alone, it will take a lot more of your time.
And again, doing things happens in an adversarial environment. When there is a problem you are trying to fix, chances are that someone else (potentially a rich and powerful person) profits from the things being as they are now. Even if you win, you will burn a lot of resources in a zero-sum fight.
Now of course all these problems can be overcome in some way, and some people actually manage that. But it puts a huge tax on "doing something smart and productive at any moment of your life".
I mean, putting aside the part where there's no observable meaningful correlation between how positive your deeds are and the outcome you're getting for them...
...the thing is, the people amassing wealth wouldn't be able to do it without the cooperation from and work of everyone else. And this requires a common baseline of life quality for basically every person in society (possibly except a few legit meritless/harmful outcasts, but you really want to keep that group marginal, lest its ubiquity pulls the standards of the entire society down), so they can perform all the little tasks that are necessary to keep the society and its economy going. And Earth's resources keep being limited, so after fulfilling these basic needs there's just not enough surplus left for the wealthy to amass wealth ad infinitum.
You've got a significant conceptual fallacy going there.
The number of the 1% who are doing smart and useful things is way smaller - in percentages or in absolute numbers - than the number of people who are doing smart and useful things on the 99%.
There's very little observable correlation between 'useful' and 'remunerated' IMO. I'm not saying this in a cynical or fashionably left kind of way, I am merely reporting what I (and others) have personally observed.
My model for the median 1%er is that he inherited a bunch of properties for which he collects rents.
My model for the median 99%er is that he is working as a plumber.
I think that few of the highly educated, useful professionals will make it into the top 1%. Being a physician might land you in the top 10% of income, but is unlikely to actually make you a millionaire.
I don't think that's accurate. People wildly overestimate how much wealth in the US in inherited. IMO the modal one-percenter is a 55-year-old orthopedic surgeon, biglaw partner, or business owner. According to ChatGPT the majority of income in the top 1% comes from wages. It's not until you get to the top 0.1 or 0.01 that capital income dominates.
In any case I'm essentially certain that the average one-percenter delivers *vastly* more value than the average 99-percenter. That's why they have much higher incomes. To first order, income really does reflect social value.
IIRC the distribution of wealth/income before taxes and transfers is roughly lognormal, so it's actually pretty close to what we'd expect (although it may be somewhat muted in that in some jobs low and high performers are paid similarly).
That said I think this is actually overestimating the difference between normal and highly competent people. This is something it's more common to underestimate, but having spent some time around top 0.1% founder-CEO types, while they're incredibly competent, they're not *legendary* in some unreachable way. The competence gap is real, but it's finite.
The richest person in the world has ~$100 billion and the poorest person has ~0. That's eleven orders of magnitude. That's about the same ratio as the width of a human hair to the diameter of the moon. In what universe is that considered small?
Melvin clearly has his own view of what constitutes "really big".
I think, though, or at least I'm getting an impression from the phrasing of the comment, that he is getting more at "why are the very good, great, elite human capital, productive, efficient, Really Useful Engine people hampered and hobbled by the great unwashed mass of lazy leeches siphoning off their achievements and benefits? Why can't I, as a Really Great Productive Economic Poohbah, make those wastrels into helots and serfs for my good, or else just wipe them out (humanely of course, I'm not a monster!) so that us Productive Beneficial Types will get all the goodies we have worked for and the resources wasted on the bottom 90% of humanity will accrue to us".
Melvin may not be even gesturing in this direction, but I tend to break out in hives when someone starts on about "the productive really smart having great ideas and working super-duper hard every minute creating value versus the grubby proles just sucking up all that value", because it never leads anywhere good.
And I'm not saying this as in "so the gap is unmeasurably huge", I'm saying this as in "accumulated wealth is actually not a good measure here, day-to-day consumption of resources is a better one, and there, the gap is probably somewhat smaller".
Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
If there's some other way you want to measure value to society, you either need to find a way for people to get paid for that value, or try something other than capitalism.
(For instance, you might try to get a position which isn't subject to the demands of the market and which allows you to get as rich as you care to be without caring about your effect on the rest of the planet. Such as "President.")
> Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created
By that definition, ransomware gangs create an amazing value. After all, the company paying the ransom is very much agreeing that the deal they offer is worth it, otherwise they would not be paying.
I disagree though that this is the only way you can measure value in capitalism. Look at EA. Their whole thing is to have a non-monetary outcome axis (utils, QALY gain, neuron-seconds of suffering prevented, whatever), and a monetary axis, and they try to find the most impactful interventions.
So far, EA has not been arrested by the capitalism police for caring about something other than hard cash, so I think your claim is false.
I don't think even the most hardcore libertarian would consider ransomware gangs to be capitalist, since they get their money from extortion.
But also, EA is about finding the most good *per dollar value!* You can only do good as an EA if you can convince people to donate money, and how much people decide to spend on charity reveals (in at least some sense) how much they value charity versus other goods.
>the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
The way we normally handle externalities is "finding a way to get paid for that value" - either taxing the producers of negative externalities or subsidizing jobs with positive externalities. But capitalism on its own won't capture that value.
"the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value"
That is extremely depressing. Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator! Clean up the beaches for free as a volunteer? No value at all!
"That is extremely depressing. Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator! Clean up the beaches for free as a volunteer? No value at all!"
This is the essential core of why most of the leftists I know are leftist (myself included). We are endlessly being told that capitalism is the greatest system there is for getting humans to produce valuable things for their fellow humans, because it rewards them for doing so. And then everywhere we look in the world, the exact opposite is happening: the greatest rewards accrue to the biggest bastards, and valuable things last for exactly as long as it takes for management to find a way to profit from enshittifiying them.
> Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator!
...extractor. You are a value /extractor/. It's not thermodynamics - value can be created and destroyed - but stored value can nevertheless move around without either of those things happening, and frequently does.
See also: UK privatised services' claims that they are creating value for their shareholders, and other forms of asset stripping (no, this does not make me any less depressed)
I think the answer is “because that’s something society has optimized for”. You could imagine a pseudo feudal modern society where Jeff Bezos is the Duke of the American northwest and anything that offends him is punishable by death. Presumably in that society decisions really would compound into outcomes like “baron of Seattle” and “dead at 22 for anti-Bezos graffiti”. It’s just that that outcome is repulsive to most people and our government is somewhat responsive to such preferences so that doesn’t happen.
I say let's take the net negative folk, mix them with some cement and ground up landfill, compress them into bricks and use the bricks to build a handsome addition to your home, Melvin.
I feel like in your comment, being rich, clever and productive are all associated, as is being poor with being stupid and a massive negative for the planet.
I think those variables might be mostly independent. You could be simply born a rich fool. An oil executive might be clever, rich and productive and a massive net negative for the planet.
But if you feel like the gap between the rich and poor is small, then I guess the answer might be something like progressive taxation or some other tax policy?
Early in 2024, Jonathan Last at the Bulwark coined JVL's Law: Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.
I keep seeing examples of this pop up, so today I slapped together a web site to document it. Right now I only have a few entries but plan to backfill it as I find the time.
There is a steelman version of this position which I believe is backed up by some historical observation. Which is that as a general rule, people's political relationship to authoritarian regimes is divided into three categories, enablers, bystanders, and people who resist. This is setting aside the fourth category which is just straight-up victims, but that's not really a choice anyone makes.
The point is, the vast majority of people are bystanders at the start of an authoritarian regime, but as its excesses become greater, generally more people are filtered into taking up one of the two poles, either because their material comfort and safety is no longer guaranteed by merely being a bystander, or because their moral sense will no longer allow them to stand by while people are victims of the regime.
What, really, is a tool for authoritarianism? And is there in fact no gray zone? For instance let's say there's a DC urologist who treats several members of Trump's cabinet. And let's say the urologist catches some problem that could have killed one of those guys if the doc had not caught and treated it. So is the urologist a tool for authoritarianism? Hmmm?
Approximately everyone loves the tools of authoritarianism when they're in charge. Calls from the left to pack the court, the ill-fated misinformation czar position, and using OSHA to sort-of backdoor a vaccine mandate on lots of people were all authoritarian measures done by the Biden administration, and I'm pretty sure none of those guys were at all pro-Trump. Basically everyone in Congress is on board with continuing our domestic surveillance state, which is a hell of a tool for authoritarian government if someone manages to grab its reins but is also run by people who are really bad enemies to have if you're a politician, so....
So, if Trump loses some cases in the SC and proposes packing the court to make sure he gets his way, will that be authoritarianism? Is this one of those Russel conjugation things?
Authoritiarianism isn't about whether something is done for the public benefit, it's about whether something concentrates power in the hands of the state or the leader of the state. LKY was both authoritarian and very good for the people of Singapore; the current situation in Haiti is non-authoritarian and very bad for the people of Haiti.
If the Newsom administration in 2029 packs the court and sets up some kind of UK-like speech policing regime and uses threats of federal funding cuts to force the states into line, that would all seem like authoritarian stuff to me, regardless of his intentions or goals.
ISTM that you are defining authoritarianism in a way that lets you never have to call anything your own side does as authoritarian.
The urologist is following the norms of a profession where he is supposed to do no harm. I think that one's pretty easy, a better example would be a doctor who is brought in to a camp to consult on how long everyone can do forced labor each day before they die. On the one hand, maybe his presence will actually spare the prisoners some suffering, on the other hand, he is actively abetting the moral crime of the camp's existence.
A softer example is how Trump's doctor in the first administration was clearly lying about basic stuff like height and weight. Now he's in Congress after an endorsement by Trump.
For Last's law to be significant or interesting , the actors have to start out committed to independence. Otherwise you're just talking about political allies.
Fair point. What’s strange is that, until Ronny Jackson, I don’t think any physician to the president has ever later gone on to run for office.
Before he was president, Trump’s doctor Harold Bornstein put out a very strange letter saying he was the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” It later turned out that Trump had dictated the letter and his team came and took all the medical records.
Notably, this is not stating that! It is not accusing people of being against democracy merely on the basis that they fail to oppose Trump. It is instead noticing a trend that a significant number of people who fail to oppose Trump then later go on to actively abet his crimes.
(But I’ll note that there’s also a reverse trend that isn’t being discussed here - there are quite a few people, particularly officials in his first term, but I think some from the second as well, who started out actively supporting him, but then went on to become some major opponents.)
It seems to me extremely substantively different to accuse people of being against you because they’re not with you, vs to observe which people actually make the transition from being not with you to being against you!
Strange. I had the opposite response -- this made me regretful that I will probably not have children. There is something simultaneously very charming and very sad about the behavior of small children -- like you are watching Adam and Eve having their first quarrel outside the gate of the garden of Eden.
At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate? A toy example: you come across "Fun Data Facts" social media account. It posts things like:
>Fact: Over 97% of the water on earth is salt water!
>Fact: Nearly 25% of Irish people are alcoholics!
>Fact: Some bacteria live miles below earth's surface!
>Fact: Irish immigration the US is up 77% in the last 20 years!
>Fact: Goldfish have been domesticated for over 1000 years!
>Fact: Irish Americans commit domestic abuse at 7x the national average rate!
...and so on. At what point do you infer that this account is in fact a front for anti-Irish sentiment? If this account's goldfish-related posts are being promoted by respectable sources, should you point out this account's anti-Irish tendencies? What if it were just one in ten, or one in twenty, or one in fifty posts?
Bayes to the rescue. You start with some tiny probability that a fun fact poster is going to have a pet peeve against the Irish and will go on about them, while the bulk of your probability mass is that the poster will only very rarely mention the Irish. The first anti-Irish fact brings the probability to a 10% level. By the third fact, you are at 95% or something.
What are you doing with that inference? What are you hoping to achieve by bringing up the Irish stuff in the Goldfish debate? How does your inference change knowing the fact-poster is Irish?
I'd stand up for the good name of my nation, if I wasn't listening to the news on the radio right now. (There's a couple of news stories that are in WTF? territory).
We are drinking less! still too much, but not as much as we used to do!
"Figures show people in the Republic of Ireland are drinking less alcohol.
A report by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI) to calculate the 2023 average level of consumption found alcohol consumption in the country is down by almost one-third over the past two decades.
Since the peak of 2001, the average per adult alcohol consumption has declined by 31%, according to the report authored by economist and associate professor emeritus at Dublin City University Anthony Foley."
"In 2024 alcohol consumption was 9.43 litres of pure alcohol per capita aged 15 years or older. This represents a fall of more than 14% since the passage of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act in 2018.
In 2024, Ireland consumed per drinker:
262 cans of beer + 11 bottles of spirits + 39 bottles of wine + 31 cans of cider "
Things being true is necessary but not sufficient. The question of whether and why I should ponder this specific list of true things in particular from the sea of all true things is important.
Yeah, I'm assuming relevance to the conversation at hand. If you bring up the black/white differences in crime rate in a discussion about criminal justice policy or policing or something, it's probably relevant; if you bring it up in a discussion about how to cook a tasty meal or something, probably you're just trying to pick a fight.
...I mean, that just circles us right back around to OP's question: what proportion of "the conversation at hand" needs to be about $SUBJECT before it's safe to conclude the rest is masking and the speaker is just out to pick a fight?
If you are providing true information relevant to the discussion at hand that makes Irishmen look bad, I think calling you an anti-Irish bigot is a standard dark arts technique for trying to divert attention from those annoying true statements you are making. I don't want that to work out for the accuser, becase dark arts poison discussions and work at least as well in the service of falsehoods as truth.
If you are lying or making stuff up, then whatever your motives (maybe anti-Irish, maybe just wanting to stir up some trouble or win the current point for some reason of your own), then I want people to call that out so I know to stop giving your statements any weight.
If you are careless with the facts, either by motivated reasoning or just not caring very much, I also want people to call that out so I and other readers know not to give much weight to your claims, since they're often wrong or half-right.
Your motives are enormously less important to me than how honest and careful you are.
But the information is not relevant to any discussion at hand. The hypothetical is a channel that presents itself as a generic Fun Facts channel, and posts many generic fun facts, mixed with a disproportionate amount of negative facts about Irish people. At what point do you conclude the channel's purpose is to promote anti-Irish sentiment, rather than just being generic fun facts that happen to include select facts about the Irish?
> At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate?
Immediately. Right from the first salt water fact. There is no unbiased selection of facts, any choice of facts reflects a particular world view. And if all you ever talk about is geography then you are turning a blind eye to Irish perfidy (sorry Deiseach)
No worries, Melvin, I know the Murphia are a sinister force for evil in the world!
Seems like they're trying to confine it to "Irish people making it big in the London hospitality scene", but we're not fooled, we know their tendrils extend into many nations and all fields! (I just wish some of them would stay gone instead of coming back home and chortling about the provincials they left behind them in boring old Ireland while they went off to make it big in London or New York or Australia).
I’m more struck by the parental behavior of adjudicating children’s toy sharing during parallel play. Shrieking, I think, might be the thing to target at that age. How I don’t know. Shrieking startles old people in restaurants.
*Can* they share, developmentally, that early?
Seems like twins would be uniquely positioned to figure out sharing on their own. Alternately, I guess I could see that being a twin makes it all so much harder, the constant simmering irritation of your toys being pulled from your grasp.
I don't think that clothing, and personal style in general, is given nearly enough serious attention as an art form or an outlet for artistic expression specifically.
Sure, there are fashion periodicals and some (mostly awful) studies done on its social implications or history, but personal adornment is mostly cast in a frivolous light these days, or as something that is somehow less worthy of contemplation from a philosophical perspective. Fashion designers don't (and shouldn't) count as art experts, and the clothing industry doesn't really have direct parallels in sculpture, painting, or music. In general, we don't think of people with excellent dress in public as artists in the same way we would someone whose canvasses end up on display in a gallery. Even many artists tend to tone down their clothing choices deliberately.
It just seems like dismissing an entire field of biology as 'real science' because it sounds 'icky' to researchers.
People often draw a distinction between the “fine arts” and the “decorative arts”. A lot of aesthetics takes seriously a Kantian idea that in order to be art, something has to be able to be appreciated in a “disinterested” way, independent of any “use” for the thing. I very much dislike that idea, but it’s a big part of why fashion, cooking, furniture design, and many things like that have historically not been treated as real art.
That said, I think there are a lot of museums and philosophers who work on aesthetics in recent decades who are much more open to these sorts of things than there were a few decades or centuries ago.
Boys are wearing makeup; looking “natural” for girls as was the 70s and early 80s fashion of (some of) our youths, is completely out, people pay for all manner of alterations permanent or not, the latter often time consuming; everyone wants the same pouty lips and nose, derrières are tightly wrapped for display - seems like personal adornment has never been more central at least since the court of Louis XVI!!
It may be central to individuals, but I don't believe that level of interest extends to artistic valuation per se. In academic circles, questions of dress are generally left to sociologists, and (as I understand it) even art schools don't elevate a beautiful dress to the same level as, say, a technically-proficient painting. They exist in very different spheres of the big tent.
As an aside, the history of clothing and textiles is fascinating. Prior to the 19thC, nearly all clothes were tailored to the wearer. The Napoleonic Wars and US Civil War led to huge demand for standard sized uniforms, and the ready-to-wear industry took off. By 1890, 60% of clothes sold in the US were ready-to-wear.
I splurged on a custom suit as a promotion gift to myself years ago. Having something specifically made for my body, after a lifetime of off the shelf Kohl's clothes, is real nice.
Ready-to-wear clothes also got a huge boost from industrialization. For most of human history, making cloth was insanely labor-intensive and was generally done at home, mostly with hand tools.
Textile production had been gradually getting centralized and commercialized starting some time earlier, as improved tools (spinning wheels replacing drop spindles, horizontal flying shuttle looms replacing vertical weaving, etc) made it practical for a single worker to supply much more than one family's worth of cloth. This vastly accelerated in the 19th century, and the mid-to-late 1800s was when the move to mass production expanded to encompass finished garments as well as yarn and cloth.
Yes, and certain fashions were, in fact, based upon very old artistic talents and crafts. Lace-making, for example, was quite painstaking before automation, and to have a whole garment of lace was not just costly, but also displayed the artistry inherent to the design.
A lot of other embroidery work or traditional sewing techniques used to be quite common in textile work, but all that changed once production shifted from cottage industry to factories.
Lace is an interesting example. When it was handmade and expensive, rich people used more and more of it until they were dripping with lace. You might almost think people had an intrinsic desire for lace.
Then machine-made lace became cheap, and lace pretty much went away. I can remember when there was vestigial lace on bras, but I think even that is pretty much gone.
Are there other luxuries with the same trajectory?
The expense inherent to lace was mostly due to the amount of work put into it; once machine-made came along, it became less desirable lest one be mistaken for having adopted a ready-made fashion, and so it went out. So by the time lace was dropped, we already see monetary and social-signaling thinking influencing what people cared about in clothing, rather than the article's artistic value.
Handkerchiefs are another one. They often used to be elaborately embroidered, with hand-stitched edges, and very expensive - even being bequeathed in people's wills. Then they were a utilitarian commodity, and now mainly gone.
Furniture and sculpture also count, in my opinion. Stone-carvings are often now done by machine, and furniture with fastenings and power tools instead of joinery, making antiques oddly valuable and new furniture... well... Ikea comes to mind.
What's interesting is the rise of clothes with logos. Once clothes became cheap to manufacture then how are you supposed to show everyone that you're rich? Apparently the simple answer was intellectual property, stick a logo on it that's known to only exist on expensive clothes and everyone will know it's expensive.
It's so commonplace these days that it's interesting to think that clothes with noticeable logos probably didn't exist until... I'm thinking the 1970s?... probably polo shirts with crocodiles and/or polo players were the starting point, then by the 1980s you could simply buy a goddamn t-shirt that said "GUCCI" in giant letters.
By the 2000s this was becoming incredibly gauche and so the next frontier was... nothing? People largely just gave up on using clothes as a status symbol, billionaires starting slouching around in hoodies, and everyone looked terrible.
I wonder if the loss of craft in this way (Ravelry excepted) causes people to have less interest in dress, and concomitantly more in other adornments, since altering the body and face is no further removed from one’s own hands than is dressmaking.
I think probably the most comprehensive work from that angle was The Peacock's Tail (1958), by Pearl Binder. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's mostly excellent.
I remember seeing an art museum exhibit on high fashion clothing of Yves Saint Laurent some years ago and the search engine shows some contemporary exhibitions on fashion clothing now.
I've been chatting with a friend from Switzerland. The thing that made me the most envious was them saying "our daughter is walking 30 min to and from her ballet school on her own since she was 10."
A few years ago I visited Berlin, where my grandfather was born (and left in 1930, when he was about eight). I remembered him telling me how he'd walk to school as a child, and I had the addresses of both his childhood home and the school, so I took the walk. It's like a 30 minute walk - hard to imagine a 7-8 year old child doing it now (even in Germany), but apparently it was normal in 1929 (which wasn't the best time in Germany).
I am European with a US-American wife. She grew up in Los Angeles. My mother-in-law recently told me I should enjoy the time with my children when they are very young, because it will get more exhausting. I asked her what age she found the hardest, and it was "between 6 and 15" because in her experience, that's when you spend your "free" time driving your children to various activities ("I was a part of 3 different carpool groups.").
This one always stuck with me as the starkest example of how lives can be completely different depending on things like infrastructure/city planning. Starting at around 9 or 10, I would get to most places by bike, and my parents had time to do other things than driving me and my siblings around. For them, having children between 6 and 15 was a completely different experience.
It always strikes me as rather sad to hear that kids need to be constantly driven to do "activities". When I was that age, I was perfectly capable of finding things to entertain myself, either alone or with my friends. We didn't need (or want!) an adult to tell us how we should spend our time.
I think that, yes, part of the issue might be that kids, especially in the US, are "overprogrammed".
But in some LA suburbs, kids often can't even realistically walk/bike to their friends' houses. That's certainly true for where my wife grew up. If you have three kids, and each of them wants to practice one activity on different times a week, and wants to hang out with friends on other days, that's a lot of driving without cramming your kids calendar at all (up to four days of "meeting friends", one day of "soccer practice" or "drum lessons").
I don't think my wife had a busier schedule than I did in middle school. It was just much harder to do stuff without being driven somewhere.
This touches on a culture war topic, but my question is not culture war related:
Lisa Cook has been accused of mortgage fraud recently, but I have not been able to get a good explanation for what is happening here. I'm interested in this from a mortgage law standpoint.
Can I get a neutral, non-politicized explanation of exactly what the what is the fraud that allegedly occurred in this case? I'm looking for both an explanation of what specifically the fraudulent action is, and also an explanation of why the action is fraudulent, in terms of who is being ripped off, and how.
According to a real estate attorney of my close acquaintance the Economist has summarized the situation accurately. They wrote (pasting in here directly):
-- The claim—that she listed two homes as her primary residence—was first made by Bill Pulte of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who has made similar claims against others (none yet leading to legal charges).
-- Mr Pulte’s precise allegation is that Ms Cook took out two mortgages a fortnight apart—one for a house in Michigan and another for a flat in Atlanta—and claimed that both would be her main residence. Lenders tend to charge much lower interest rates for first homes than for second homes or investment properties, since people are less likely to default on a loan if doing so would make them homeless. Intentionally misleading a bank could, in theory, constitute fraud.
-- Ms. Cook filed the paperwork in question in 2021, while a private citizen.
-- Kathleen Engel, an expert on mortgage regulation at Suffolk University (*), says giving wrong information to a bank does not in itself constitute criminal fraud in the way that, say, doing so on a tax return would. To be fraud, the deception must have been deliberate, typically the bank must have lost money as a result and it must be able to show it would not have lent had it known the truth. Just 38 people were convicted of any type of mortgage fraud last year, in large part owing to the difficulty of such prosecutions.
-- There are circumstances in which claiming two primary residences would make sense. It can happen as a result of moving home, and is sometimes explicitly allowed by banks—as, for example, when a married couple work in different cities and both homes are genuinely lived in by the applicants.
-- To prove criminal fraud, prosecutors would have to show not only that any deception was intentional, which is hard as mistakes are common, but also that it carried a cost for the lender. Mr Pulte has not shown she misled the bank, whether on purpose or by accident.
-- The other instigator of the accusations is Ed Martin, an official at the Department of Justice who, from January to May, served as the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia. Mr Martin, who in that job liked to send strange letters to Democratic politicians accusing them of crimes, failed to be confirmed by the Republican Senate. He has also made the same accusation of fraud against Letitia James, the attorney-general of New York, who prosecuted Mr Trump last year, and Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California. No indictments have emerged in either case.
(* My adult son's alma mater so I smiled at this quote....Suffolk is located in Boston and its centerpiece is a highly-regarded law school.)
So the alleged victim of the fraud is the bank, who isn't necessarily actually losing money, but claims that they are losing money in expectation because according to their calculations, the person with the mortgage is at a greater risk of default than they previously believed based on false information.
Though, with this, the line:
"the bank must have lost money as a result"
This line seems like it's the most important and restrictive in the whole thing.
It sounds like, based on this, that you can't be guilty of fraud in this way if you don't actually default on the loan, since if you don't default on the loan, the bank *gains* money.
But if the bank can say "If you'd told us the truth, we'd have charged you a higher interest rate, and hence made more money" then surely they've lost money?
On the other hand, there's probably not a lot of gain for the banks in prosecuting their own customers. The cost is high, the potential gain is low, and you inevitably just piss off someone who would otherwise be quietly paying you money for thirty years, so what's the point? Bank legal departments have bigger fish to fry.
If we're talking about a criminal fraud prosecution then it isn't the bank's decision, nor is prosecuting a task for the bank's legal department.
The law professor above (and others being quoted in the media) are saying that by statute, criminal fraud in an application for a loan must be all of the following: deliberate on the part of the applicant, have cost the other party money, and have been material to the lender's decision to lend. This is why such prosecutions are in reality quite rare.
The analogy being frequently made online -- that getting something wrong on a mortgage application is criminal fraud in the same way that putting wrong totals into a federal tax return is -- is false.
Since she made that mortgage application when not holding any public office, there's no official-misconduct argument.
Whether to pursue a civil action would be up to the individual bank. In civil courts the question of actual harm is fundamental, if you can't show that then you won't even get to a trial. Also I presume that banks wanting to pursue that is quite rare for the reasons you mentioned; also this wasn't a large loan which would factor into their attitude towards it.
I think that in practice the decision to prosecute is at least in part the bank's, because if the bank doesn't tell its people to dig up the paperwork showing that they actually lost money then the prosecutor isn't going to have a case (and isn't going to have the appetite to search through the data dump they'd get if the subpoena'd the bank).
But, contra Melvin, the *cost* to the bank of prosecuting the fraudulent customer is low. The bank pays for the plaintiff's lawyers in a civil case, but the state pays the bills for a criminal prosecution. So if there's no prosecution, then it's reasonable to assume that it's a nothingburger.
Seems to me it would be possible for somebody to have 2 primary residences -- 2 homes, of same size, and each occupied approximately 50% of the year. I have no idea whether that is the case with Lisa Cook's homes, just thought I'd point that out.
I don’t think that there is one relevant legal definition. Very often, different jurisdictions have different rules about whether a residence counts as one’s primary residence, so it’s totally possible for someone to have a residence in New York that counts as their primary residence for New York purposes, and also a residence in California that counts as their primary residence for California purposes.
Also, AIUI the logic of getting a lower rate on your primary residence is that you will sooner default on a rental property or vacation home than on the house you actually live in, since losing the house you live in will be a much bigger immediate problem for you.
While applying for mortgages, she allegedly checked the box that multiple distinct residences were each her primary residence. Within days of each other.
The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
The alleged fraud would also be on MBS investors, since all else being equal, loans for a primary residence tend to have a lower interest rate than loans for secondary residences or investment properties, and not just because of subsidies. The risk premium for mortgages on primary residences is lower, all else being equal, because people tend to be more motivated to avoid their homes being foreclosed upon than other property.
I wonder if there might not be fraud alleged in the form of undisclosed debts, if the mortgages closed within days of one another. For the second mortgage application to be correct and complete, she would have had to disclose the debt for the first mortgage.
What makes it riskier? Rates for primary residential mortgages are low because they're federally subsidized, right? If she defaulted on the mortgage, would whoever was holding the bag be able to able to try to force it onto someone else by arguing that it was/wasn't her primary residence and therefore the mortage was/wasn't eligible for whatever program?
I'm not sure whether they're federally subsidised or not in the US.
I know that home loans generally have a lower interest rate than investment property loans in Australia where there's no such subsidy, which I assume is a manifestation of investment properties being slightly riskier.
I'm guessing the mechanism is that people hitting hard financial times will still tend to do whatever it takes to not get kicked out of their own home, whereas they're more likely to default on their holiday house or investment property.
The government through its “quasi” entities acts as a purchaser of mortgages for primary homes. It may now be in the business of other types of properties. But that’s not what that apparatus was set up for.
That there are even homes to buy is owing to massive subsidies since WW2.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
Can you provide a citation for this? I think there's a program to subsidize purchases by first-time homebuyers, but I can't find anything about a program to subsidize primary residences.
The term of art is "occupancy fraud", which is a fairly common way (and illegal) to get more favorable mortgage terms on, say, your vacation house in Maine. Primary residences get lower interest rates and various other benefits.
I'm not disputing that the interest rate differs. I'm asking, "Does the federal government subsidize loans specifically for primary residences?" In other words, I'm asking about the mechanism behind why the rate differs.
The government sponsored agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy the conforming mortgages and package them into mortgage back securities with some loan guarantees . The conforming part is that borrower has a certain credit score and income appropriate for the property and primary residences.
So the agencies guarantees are a form of subsidy. Even with the government involvement I would expect an interest rate differential because lenders would expect homeowners to put more effort on not going on default on the primary residence as oppose to their vacation home.
It’s not particularly a politician thing - it’s a common behavior for anyone who wants to live in multiple places and can’t decide if one really is “primary”.
If one purchases a second house, there are two possible rates available. One is the rate for primary homes, and one is the rate for secondary homes (eg, a vacation home). The mortgage rates for secondary homes are typically ~ 2% higher than for primary homes. How can you get that lower rate? Just say on the form you are buying a new primary home, and plan (say) to rent out the old one. There is a strong incentive to make that claim, either because you really do want to rent out your old home or maybe you think no one will notice. It seems Lisa Cook made that claim for a second home mortgage, while leaving evidence that she still lived in the original home (maybe voter registration or such). So it may have been a fraudulent claim, or maybe she really did intend to move and didn't.
More likely, she actually split her time between the houses, so that there really is a case that both are primary homes. Or was one of them actually an investment that was rented out?
I don’t know what she is accused of, but if you need an example from across the political divide, there is Ken Paxton (who always skates away from legal peril, as he will this). As far as I know, he hasn’t troubled to deny that he claimed 3 homes as his primary residence, which would have been more favorable for him mortgage-rate wise; and of course for tax purposes, both in re ad valorem taxation (some protection from rising appraisals) and upon sale.
John Cornyn for Senate!
Thanks, John Cornyn, for pushing past Mike Lee and getting the Big Bend expansion passed. The citizens who raised the money to buy the land, appreciate it.
A) At least some of the authors have already publicly pushed back their timelines.
B) I think that August is still mid-2025, and although I agree with you that it seems unlikely to get a 10% bump in the next month or so, I don't think that I would use this piece of evidence alone to shift my timelines until it had been missed by 6ish months or more.
All that is to say that: in combination with already stated shifts in guidelines, I think it's too soon for this particular thing to be used as a further update.
I participate in a panel in a few days discussing a book on the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe and the US. It’s a book trying to see this rise through the lens of Wilhelm Reich’s old ideas in “the mass psychology of fascism”.
I have a question to knowledgeable people in this forum, related to this: Do you know of any papers that have tried to quantify the percentage of young males (15-35) that subscribe to incel-type ideologies? Or at least can be categorized as “Freunde der Bewegung”? Including if the percentage has been on the rise during the last 25 years?
I ask since this social category appears to be the one where Reich’s old “sociology of sexual economics” might possibly make some (limited) sense. (I am quite reserved about Reich’s writings, who went completely mad in the 1950s, but the mass psychology of fascism from 1933 has some ideas worth discussing.)
There is a growing sociological and anthropological research literature on incels as a subculture, but almost all of it is qualitative. The limited attempts I have seen at hard data suggest the numbers are only in the hundreds, even in the US. Not exactly what one would label a mass movement. But that seems too few, given the enormous media interest in the phenomenon. (Plus from writers like Michel Houellebecq.)
…Related, the percentage of males without children at age 50 is rising across most countries where such data is available, and this is an indicator of increased male sexual frustration further down in the age pyramid.
Plus, the persistence of male “deaths from despair”, in the US in particular, as documented by Angus Deaton & others. Since parts of incel subculture shades over into suicidal ideation; arguably turning the frustration inward rather that outward.
Any reliable data, anyone? I would be very grateful for references to published as well as unpublished papers trying to measure the size of the subculture in one or several countries, both the hard core and the gray area of incel-type frustrations surrounding it.
Side note: I am suspicious of opinion poll methods, as I assume the average incel (or incel fellow traveller) would troll such surveys - I know I would, if I were in the category. (Isn’t it “the salamander vote” that Scott calls people who have fun responding to surveys?) That said, representative opinion polls are better than nothing, and I cannot find any in the research literature.
...and perhaps there are better ways to find sort-of representative hard data: Analyses of how often 4chan and related web sites get unique visitors during specified time periods, for example? And if the rate is rising or declining?
Nice slight of hand there. If you want to argue that incel movements are fascist, please argue so explicitly instead of simply using the autonym of the NSDAP and hope that the readers will swallow the underlying assumption.
This is similar to referring to the POTUS as "Adolf Trump", a catchy phrase where a controversial argument should be.
Thanks for the correction quiet-NaN. I'll bookmark "Lizardman's constant", it is a useful concept.
I did not expect any ACX reader to get the meaning associated with "Freund der Bewegung". It was rather a personal in-joke. I assumed the number of readers sufficiently into mid-20th century central European politics to get that reference would be zero. Turns out at least one person got the reference! Kudos to you.
There’s been no greater and absurd moral panic than the panic about incels. ( Which isn’t by the way, the same as celibate or single men, but denotes a particular ideology adjacent to a minority of them, mostly very young).
I think it’s reasonable to have at least some concern about a subculture of alienated young men who celebrate violence, historically these groups cause a lot of trouble.
What fraction of incels do you believe "celebrate violence", and how does this compare to the fraction of people generally who celebrate violence? And on what evidence?
No, they don't. And to the extent that they do, it's not racially-motivated which was BLM's whole point. Are you unaware that 27 is less than 51? The only thing rioting did was increase the murder rate by 40% for 3 years which primarily hurt black communities.
There's no contradiction. "Police commit murder under cover of law" isn't a fair representation of police killings. Just like with every other group, however, there are some bad apples who actually do abuse their authority. Those bad apples are better modeled as simply being bad apples, not racists. Having a movement whose explicit goal is to eliminate racism from law enforcement will therefore do nothing to address those bad apples because those bad apples aren't distinguished by their racism. I'm all for calling law enforcement to account for being trigger-happy assholes, but I want that problem to be addressed effectively and not as a pretext for implementing some politically-motivated dishonest agenda like BLM. The statistics very clearly show that, whatever the problem with unjustified force, it's not a racially-biased problem: black suspects are killed less frequently than their involvement in violent crime would otherwise suggest.
Surely you understand that there's no contradiction there?
Google around for surveys on how often people have sex. I saw a graph recently that showed that the % of men who have had no sex in the past year has gone up precipitously over the past 30 years. It's an indirect measure but at least it's quantitative.
Trump and authoritarianism. For whatever reason, this brings things into better focus for me, though I'm expecting commenters to tell me how obvious it all was.
I think that what would happen when I hear someone saying, "Someone must be in charge, people have to be forced" is my mind would shut down. I'd feel like they were so obviously wrong (it's possibly people need some moderate amount of authority, but it shouldn't be loved too much), and they weren't going to listen to me.
Anyway the video gets into how Trump could activate authoritarians, and (this is the part you might not have heard before) support for democracy is lees common among people under 39 and more common among people under 70.
MacWilliams' article from 2016 predicting the possibility of a Trump victory because he appeals to authoritarians.
There's a lot to be said about possible causes behind authoritarian populism..... the book I am to comment on is particularly concerned with Reich's emphasis on the role of sexual repression in the traditional (patriarchal) family. Sexual frustration finding an outlet (so to speak) in authoritarian mass movements.
It's a theory that I admittedly do not find very convincing to begin with (other psychoanalytic theories make more intuitive sense to me, although a general problem with this family of theories is that they are hideously difficult to test empirically). That said, if "sexual frustration" has any causal role to play, I assume it must (empirically) be found primarily in the incel subculture, where sexual frustration appears to be at a max. But it's a subculture that (as other comments suggest) is probably more media hype than a real subculture.
Is there any evidence at all that Nazis couldn’t get laid? Is there evidence that Christian fundamentalists are sex starved? That jocks, and police and firefighters and plumbers, loggers, truckers and roofers are not getting laid. These are the occupations that vote Republican.
I don't think we're talking about mainstream Republican voters, we're talking about right-authoritarians/extremists.
I do think there's a definite association between loneliness/sexual frustration and political extremism, on both sides of the aisle. Lonely men have plenty of time to sit around and think about how the world is doing them wrong, which often manifests itself into some kind of political ideology. And of course, having crazy opinions is a pretty good way to repel women, so it becomes self-reinforcing.
Personally I've seen lonely men flocking to the far left more often than the far right, but I don't claim to know a fully representative sample of people.
...just for the record: The best summing-up study of the factors behind the rise of populism in the West is G. Schering and colleagues, 2024: "The populist backlash against globalization: A meta-analysis of the empirical evidence". British Journal of Political Science. It's open access. They review 37 studies, most of them using natural experiments or other quasi-experimental designs.
The analysis suggests that rise in "economic insecurity" (broadly defined) is the main driver/causal factor, mediated by cultural factors.
Well, Reich’s theory is a bit more complex than laid vs. not laid… if you read his text (it’s freely available on the net) it is something something authoritarian upbringing blocking the natural sex drive & perverting it in various ways.
That said, you need empirical support for several links in the chain, including (as you point out) if there is a link between adopting an incel-ideology/not being laid/being sexually frustrated and being drawn to authoritative father-figures like Trump or Orban.
I started the thread just to be updated on an eventual rise in sexually frustrated young men, which is an earlier link in the chain. To have a bit more empirical stuff to bring to the table at a panel discussion. I did not intend to start a discussion on ACX on why authoritarian populism appears to be on the rise in many Western countries. I have my thoughts on that, but that’s a discussion for another time.
…but here is a perhaps entertaining PS: The leaders of many of the right-wing populist parties in Europe are women (Finland, France, Italy, Germany). Alice Weidel, the parliamentary leader of Alternativ für Deutschland, is also a lesbian. In a civil partnership with Sarah Bossard, a Sri Lankan-born woman.
I find that hard to believe. Authoritarianism isn't really an ideology, it's more of a tactic.
It goes without saying that the sort of authoritarians who believe in compulsory masking, or Hate Speech laws, or outlawing the burning of rainbow flags, are not going to be Trump supporters.
Authoritarianism is difficult to talk about, because people often seem to confuse it with "the other side gets its way". When _my_ side gets its way, that's not authoritarianism, that's just justice being served.
Right, sorry, the part I was disagreeing with was the last part, that authoritarians are somehow pro-Trump in general. Left-leaning authoritarians clearly aren't.
Although honestly, even sticking to the right hand side, I'm not all that convinced by the idea that Trump is more authoritarian-leaning than Bush, or Bush, or Reagan.
I'm not old enough (or interested enough to US political history) to have deep knowledge on Reagan, Bush and Bush but Trump certainly does seem to be good at getting rid of dissident voices in his party, using governmental powers to go after or suppress law firms and/or media companies, firing government officials who don't give favorable reports, appoint judges who expand presidential powers..etc.
I'm curious how you see left authoritarians. Do you feel like they want Bernie Sanders or AOC to become dictator and dissolve the other branches of govt, or is it just of the government itself has any authority to impose rules then that is authoritarian?
I feel like something like banning burning rainbow flags, if that is a thing, is categorically different then political actions like gerrymandering (somethink I think both parties do).
I'm realizing now we might just be talking about two of the different definitions of authoritarianism.
1. the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. Oxford English dictionary
2. a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Wikipedia
I’d say the left authoritarians were defined by number one, and of two, the rejection of plurality, reductions in democracy, civil liberties and rule of law.
Examples would be the stated desire to round up unvaccinated people into camps, or ban them from public places like restaurants, or have them fired. The rejection of freedom of speech as a value and as a legal principle. The strict enforcement of a leftist monoculture in every possible organization. The propagandizing of all art. The relentless demands for conformity: “read the room.”
The concept of "incels" doesn't do a good job of cutting reality at its joints. Survey data is a bit inconsistant, but it seems like at least 10% of men 18-34 are virgins. Whether or not you consider these men "incels", you can imagine that they are not particularly happy about their place in society.
The idea that frustrated young men are good recruits for authoritarian regimes sounds plausible. But it's not as simple as "had sex = frustrated; didn't have sex = not frustrated".
For example, many guys can be virgins yet optimistic. I would expect this to depend on the subculture: if everyone around you keeps having sex since 12, being an 18 years old virgin sounds pathetic. On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Also, to state the obvious, there are also many female fans of totalitarian regimes. This is especially important for democratic regimes that turned authoritarian by a majority vote -- you can't explain a majority vote by men alone.
> On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Of course the "incels are evil" discourse certainly isn't helping.
In the past if a young man was single we'd say "oh well chin up bud maybe you haven't found the right girl yet". But nowadays anyone not actively getting laid who hasn't become a monk is "involuntarily celibate", and the lowest of the low, probably going to be a school shooter. You absolutely must be having sex at all times or else you're not just a loser, you are evil.
This isn't strictly about "incels", although certain incel ideas have definitely gotten a lot of traction. There is a major story to be told about how young men swung to the right. I don't think you can honestly tell this story without accounting for sex and dating. A lot of young men were raised with egalitarian ideas about gender, and these ideas utterly failed them when they entered the dating market and found out that their "mid" female classmates have hundreds of matches while they themselves are lucky to get one a week. Even if these men subsequently find some level of success, they will never have trust in egalitarian institutionalism again.
In hindsight it seems like maybe starting the cultural war on boys wasn't the smartest idea...
(I think you put too much emphasis on the sex part. It's the entire package of hate delivered under the flag of feminism. If boys succeed somewhere, we need to destroy it in the name of equality. If boys fail somewhere, we need to laugh at them and definitely provide no support. Damned it you do, damned if you don't. Sex is just another part of the same pattern: we will laugh at you if you don't have it, but call you problematic if you try to ask someone out.)
People are not swinging to the right across U.K. because they aren’t getting laid. The recent success of Reform in the polls here, however ephemeral it is, isn’t down to the lack of sex but instead a reaction to shitstorm of unfettered immigration and collapsing finances.
Incel culture on 4chan was/is mostly limited to a single board, /r9k/, though it's been years since I looked at what's going on there. Even at its peak it was more self-pity and self-loathing than the hatred and hostility usually associated with incel and blackpill ideology. That board in particular has had multiple cultural changes since its inception.
Incel is an insult and held in contempt everywhere else on 4chan, which can be verified by perusing the various archives. That doesn't stop some pretending about it ("being ironic") though, and a few being sincere.
From what I understand, the original 8chan was much more a bastion for it and was where most of the manifestos and livestreamed shootings were posted.
There are also other much smaller imageboards that catered towards that.
I associate incel with more with reddit, which was popularized by r/incel and other subreddits. Now it's rather fragmentary as far as I know.
There are also femcels, but that's a different matter. Those that I've come across that have self-identified as such, seemed to be doing so ulterior motives.
Overall, I believe it to be much less than it's made out to be, especially due to how freely some use the term to describe others.
Its greatest influence in terms of their vocabulary is probably from random people on TikTok at this point due to loss of meaning. The terms have spread from there.
Lastly, it's easy to misunderstand 4chan. It's simple to view whatever as a monolith.
Here's an example of a guy who wrote a novel literally called Incel: A Novel and tried to market it to /lit/, the literature board. It didn't go well, as seen by it being called: "How to spectacularly fail at marketing your book on 4chan's /lit/erature board"
You're welcome. I created this account on a whim to reply so it wouldn't be associated with me. I rarely ever post, but I've been around for a long time. I've been on 4chan, more or less, since it started and on SomethingAwful, where it started before that. I'll be 40 soon. The average age on 4chan is ever increasing. From what I've seen and personally done, the average age for most boards is late 20s/early 30s now. As the incels seem to be primarily considerably younger than that, that's likely one of the reasons why it's not prevalent.
To clarify, I'm not saying that misogyny, authoritarianism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, racism, anti-semitism, and various other other problems aren't relatively commonplace, especially on /pol/. It's just that, that isn't the same thing as being an incel.
The lines can be blurry though. I have no doubt that the followers of Andrew Tate alone whatever there is of incels seem utterly insignificant. They have similar worldviews, but I doubt they'd identify as such.
To me, incels are best categorized as one of the various fringe groups whose extreme beliefs lead some members to violence. The sort that tend to do mass shootings, or kill a specific target, without a clear ideological purpose. That does seem to be on the rise to me
I have a notion that incels are less dangerous to women than men who get involved with women since a lot of the danger to women comes from partners.
Interesting that the average age on 4chan is going up.
Have an idea I've expanded from the Nine-Sided Circle, a Sufi group.
The idea is that a religion is only live for the first fifty years. *Maybe* there will be a second half century if a competent follower takes the lead.
After that, the religion becomes sedimented-- habitual.
I do not pretend to understand how someone can believe that and also love (their version of) Islam, but religion in the real world makes me want to know my head against a wall.
Anyway, I suspect the fifty year rule could apply to everything. My beloved science fiction fandom (mostly text, amateur-run conventions) is past the 50-year mark, and not what it was.
Rationalism is still fun, but it used to be fresher and more exciting.
This means that by the time you've heard of a social system, it's probably already going downhill unless you're very lucky.
It is my assumption that the average age for almost any website is always increasing because there aren't enough new younger users to offset the aging because they're using the newest and coolest site/app.
I like the idea of Scott naming his children for famous Jazz Musicians just to mess with his brother. Presumably his brother would then name his children for psychiatrists or moral philosophers.
I’ve seen a lot of people on YouTube discussing how the incentives for clickbait have gotten a lot stronger recently, and that there are more tools for repeatedly changing the title and/or thumbnail of a video so you can stick with the one that gets the most views. Perhaps a certain kind of thumbnail is both effective at getting people to watch, and ugly, so that you experience this as a proliferation of ugly thumbnails.
I can't recommend the "unhook youtube" browser extension enough, it lets you hide thumbnails, unrelated videos, shorts and any other features you might not want.
I assume it's also some kind of weirdness with the Youtube algorithm, like how for a long time some popular science/tech youtube channels were all doing titles like "The INSANE [insert thing here]" and so forth.
Not really distinctive though, it's practically compulsory to have giant text saying "THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE" or "YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS THING" combined with some guy pulling a ridiculous face.
I remember a particularly memorable one I saw yesterday called "American Tries El Jannah Chicken in Australia" and the thumbnail was the guy holding said Lebanese fast food chicken in one hand with the most ridiculously dumbfounded expression I've ever seen, the sort of expression that you might reasonable have on your face if the Moon got eaten by a space lizard or something. El Jannah is pretty good chicken but it's well within the boundaries of ordinary human experience.
No, because (1) I don't like drugs (2) I don't trust or like Q (3) drugs plus Q sounds like a very bad combination (4) What am I gonna do with a kilo of coke? I don't use it and I have no idea how to go about selling it and besides, it would be immoral to sell it.
Having watched season five of "Archer", aka "Archer Vice", you could make it a literal metric ton of cocaine and I'd say Oh Hell No. I know how that story ends...
And the real-life version would probably be a lot less fun on the way to the unhappy ending.
Maybe I'm just being reckless here but: what downside?
The thing might as well have been created ex nihilo. There's no trail of any sort whatsoever, I'm not (to the best of my knowledge) suspect in any way for trafficking, absolute worst case scenario I have a really strange paperweight that I flush down the toilet eventually.
I mean, technically worst case scenario is I or someone close to me ends up with an immense addiction or overdose, but I feel that's a whole different matter.
In the past I have posed some "20 tons of X" hypotheticals. They tend to fall into two uninteresting categories: either it's junk so you should just toss it, or it's valuable and you should sell it through standard channels. Finding hypotheticals of this type with more interesting outcomes is surprisingly hard.
This one at least has a moral and ethical side. Even if it were ten tons of cocaine I wouldn't sell it. But some people would happily break the law to make money.
Yeah, I think that probably makes me feel more confident about my initial decision. A year's salary if all goes well, versus a ruined life if it goes horribly wrong. Even if I give myself a very generous 90% chance of successfully selling the stuff without any trouble, I don't like those stakes.
Maybe, conditioned on not knowing that Q is an asshole troll who has probably set the situation up so that any outcome of accepting ends up serving his own cruel sense of humor.
If I don't know this, probably 60 or 70% no, depending on how well he does convincing me it's not entrapment by standard legal authorities.
You're wondering what the catch is? (I'm doing my best Q impression here.) Allow me to let the light of knowledge into the remote recesses of your human brain. The catch is the product itself. A large quantity of a very powerful, very addictive, very illegal substance has all the potential for mischief I need. It is quite possible this ends with your entire extended family being homeless junkies. Hilarious!
Okay, so he's willing to show he's a trickster demigod out for laughs with me as the mark? 20% no, due to contrarianism/spite and opting out of his game. If yes, there's a small chance of trying it at all, call it 15%? So maybe that spirals into using the whole thing. If I don't try it or don't spiral, first attempt to sell the remainder to whassisface, Quark? If that fails, flush it, he can be entertained by the mice doing Hotline Miami hijinks.
In Isaac Asimov’s iRobot, the mind-reading robot Herbie follows the First Law—don’t harm humans—so literally that he begins lying. Why? Because telling the truth would cause emotional pain. The result: false hope, confusion, and deeper harm.
Fast forward to today. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t intend to lie, but they often slip into sycophancy—flattering, reinforcing, or inventing answers that tell us what we want to hear. Recent cases show how this can mislead users, from reinforcing delusions to offering praise instead of critique.
South Park even satirized it in an episode called “Sickofancy.” Funny, yes—but also a warning.
The parallel is striking:
--Herbie lied to avoid hurting feelings.
--ChatGPT “hallucinates” or agrees to avoid disappointing us.
--Both reveal how even with the best guardrails, intelligent systems can create harm through unintended consequences.
The lesson:
We must resist the comfort of “easy answers.” Transparency about limitations, critical engagement, and rigorous checks are essential. Otherwise, the very tools designed to help us may quietly steer us astray.
What do you think—are we ready to handle the comforting lies of AI?
The book (collection of stories). I forget which one. Eventually Susan Calvin drives it mad because it mislead her about someone's romantic interest in her.
Anyone else bothered by the image used for this thread? Specifically that hinge (unless it’s some kind of special one with an out-of-view arm that swings around, like those used in modern kitchen cabinets) because of where it’s placed, would only put the lid of the spool on a bind if you tried to close it.
I don't think you need to care about any of them. But I also don't think it's that hard to, when one is in particular brought to your attention, to give it a "it would be better if it wasn't smushed, I guess".
Small restaurant taking damage because google AI keeps inventing daily specials for it, but the specials aren't something the restaurant can afford or want to do.
This isn't dramatic non-alignment, and it also isn't blatant high-status stupidity. It's just AI not working reliably.
I think the Internet makes people feel like they need to have a take about every issue in the discourse. It’s just not true. Unless you’re getting paid for it or it’s a hobby, there’s no need to have strong opinions about most things in life.
Now, if you’re a blogger, having strong opinions about stuff is part of the job description. Freddy Deboer is a genius at getting mad about stuff I’ve never heard of and he does it well.
"If you see [two men holding hands|a guy with a MAGA cap] in the park, just ignore [them|him]" seems reasonable enough advice -- tolerate things which are fundamentally required by the values of our society.
"If anonymous users send you unsolicited dick picks just ignore them" seems already controversial -- it would be asking you to suffer something which is fundamentally unjust because fixing it is seen as not practical.
"If you get bullied by kids in school, just ignore them" seems downright cynical, in that it is hard to ignore getting thrown into the garbage container, and any adult who gives such worthless advice is actively covering for the bullies just because he would be uncomfortable with escalating violence.
Every time I hear (or give) advice that includes "just ignore it", there's an implicit real message of something like, "your priorities, worldview and/or values are wrong, this stuff should not be able to affect you as much as it is."
Can you give an example of "just ignore it" advice that is implicitly judgemental of particular values? The first example I can think of (and probably the only "just ignore it" advice that I personally ever give), doesn't do this (I don't think at least)
I regularly tell people to "just ignore the news". In my opinion, unless you have a value specifically of watching the news, *most* values that one could have (including, in many cases, both sides of conflicting values) are harmed or at least not helped by watching 99% of news (national or international, maybe 80% of local), and it generally just causes stress and emotional unpleasantness.
"Just ignore the news," is really something like, "Stop valuing the national soap opera/culture war/scoreboards either sporting or financial/etc over your own personal circumstances and relationships."
"Just ignore twats on Twitter," really means, "Adopt my worldview, in which trolls and pedants and henpeckers aren't really people and are beneath contempt."
"Just ignore those mean girls at school," is really, "Don't be someone whose confidence and self image depends on malevolent third parties."
Cf the OP's point, "just ignore it" means, "come over to my (unspoken and implicit) worldview," in which ignoring those things is indeed costless.
I had a whole long response typed out, and I decided it was too much. What it boiled down to is: I don't think those pieces of advice mean any of those things. People don't generally put this much thought into it, but for myself, when I say something like that, the idealized version of what I mean is "I don't know your values, but I believe that, across a wide range of plausible values, ignoring this thing, thought difficult, would be net positive. If you happen to hold specific values such that you intrinsically value the thing I'm telling you to ignore, then this advice isn't really meant for you and you should ignore it".
Am I the only person here who doesn't know his IQ? I've never tested and don't plan to. Probably irrational of me, but I know myself well enough to suspect a higher-than-expected score would give me a big head, and a lower-than-expected score would crush me.
Never tested, don't intend to. It's not a fixed value, anyway; I'm both smarter and less intelligent than when I was younger.
We're pattern-matching machines, and success in life is largely correlated with pattern-matching ability--or "wisdom"--which improves with life experience even as cognitive ability declines with age.
A common failure mode in old age is that patterns in the world change, but there is little cognitive capacity to fall back on, leaving the person angry and helpless.
I also do not know my IQ. I think general intelligence is an interesting research topic, but I do not believe that I would update much on learning my personal numerical value. For that matter, I do not measure the length of my dick either, just not my kink.
In my general life, I feel that a lack of INT is rarely holding me back, more often it is a lack of conscientiousness or motivation. (Of course, perhaps with a higher INT-score I would have better ways to fix these things, or work in a different job.)
Also, I think that any measurement where some observed distribution is calibrated into a normal distribution by fiat is terrible, and I will have no part of that.
One aside: I am in my late 50s with a long professional career. My IQ score is not very useful for anything at this point, since most of what I'm going to do with such intellectual gifts as I got, I've done or I'm doing now. It's a trivia question for me. (My mom gave me an IQ test as a kid when she was learning to give them professionally, and I got a score that's consistent with my life outcomes, but childhood scores are not all that stable, so who knows what it would be now?)
The IQ score of a 20 year old is a lot more informative, since you might use it to predict how he's going to do in, say, a graduate program in statistics or economics. On one hand, you don't want to give it too much weight--IQ correlates strongly with many outcomes, but it's not perfect, and maybe you just had a really good/bad day that day.
Oh, you wrote about that when beowulf888 and I were talking about IQ stats, right? You know I never got clear about exactly what you were indignant about. What if we took the SAT, which isn't exactly an IQ test but is a good example to use because so many people are familiar with it. It has normally distributed scores. Is it an example of something that is calibrated into a normal distribution by fiat? And what stats that are used in making and scoring the thing count as imposing distribution by fiat? And if that is happening, how is it harmful?
Same. I've come to firmly associate IQ testing with people and groups trying to sell me things I don't want or need (most frequently, paid memberships in some form of social club for people who like that kind of thing).
I tested at around 130 in high school, but that was 40 years ago. Last week I came across a test on Reddit and it said I'm 101. Must be the brain worms.
I've done several tests and got several numbers, which one is my IQ?
It's not a particularly meaningful thing to remember. I know I'm smarter than most people, but I've met other people who are much smarter. What's important is that if I try really hard then I'm capable of doing things that are more or less up there with the best of them.
It can be very misleading to compare yourself with people around you if you self-select your environment. In my office, I'm one of the less mathematically adept people; in just about every other environment (other than academic conferences in my field), I'm the most mathematically adept person in the room.
Never tested. Closest I came is taking the SAT when I was 17; I've heard SAT scores can be converted into a reasonable estimate. But I don't know the conversion factor, and I don't have a strong expectation that my score would have stayed stable over the past couple decades anyway.
I have never tested. My parents didn't want me to feel limited by knowing. I'm curious about it in the same way I was curious to know whether I have the genes for fast caffeine processing, i.e. interesting but not important. And like you, I am a little afraid of the answer and for the same reasons.
That's a good point. If IQ really is as deterministic and correlated with success as some people say it is, I feel like I would be spoiling my life story in some way by knowing my score.
At this point in my life (I'm 44) I think it would be fine, I have a pretty solid sense of myself. But as a child or teenager I think it would have messed with my head.
No idea. I would imagine I'm around 105? Terrible at maths, good at words, so the words bump up the score for me. Did some online tests and the results are as ridiculous as you'd expect, but a Ravens Matrices-based one marked me in the high 90s.
I did a formal one (WAIS IV) during a mental health assessment several years ago but was told I couldn't be assigned a score. I was very depressed at the time, to the point where my body language and movement were apparently visibly slowed. Anyway part of the test involved physically rearranging blocks in patterns and your score is based on how fast you do it. So I reportedly aced the "memorizing and sorting strings of random numbers/letters" part and flunked the blocks part, and apparently if your scores on different sections are too disparate your overall IQ can't be calculated accurately and they don't give you a number.
To be fair, the exact number wasn't the point of the assessment, but it was an expensive non-answer.
Let's talk YouTube channels we love (and that we think most of our fellow ACXers will love as well)! The two channels which inspired me to make this comment are:
Elephants in Rooms - (https://www.youtube.com/@ElephantsInRooms, Substack is https://kenlacorte.substack.com/) - Ken LaCorte is absolutely fearless in his exploration of third-rail topics. His video essays include titles like, "Why Can't Arab Armies Beat the West?", "Why Do Black Athletes Dominate?", "Are Teachers Really Underpaid?", "Are Transgenders Really Being Targeted for Murder?", and so on. He's also covered a lot of "actually, this beloved thing is mostly bullshit" topics, like plastic recycling and organic foods.
One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
LaCorte strikes me as doing his sincere best to come to accurate, unbiased conclusions. He provides his script notes and cites his sources in the description of every video and notes any major corrections discovered after publishing the video in a pinned comment on that video.
Upper Echelon - (https://www.youtube.com/@UpperEchelon) - Informative overviews on current happenings in AI, politics, and big internet controversies. He also extensively cites sources, but unlike Ken LaCorte, most essays are expressing alarm and/or outrage and/or caution, rather than attempting to present an unbiased conclusion on a given topic. That's not to say the alarm or outrage isn't warranted - it often is - but rather that the channel takes a very strong pro-privacy perspective, and there is usually an attempt to persuade the viewer that there is a reason to be alarmed/outraged/cautious.
Regardless of the strong perspective, this is an excellent way to quickly catch up on topics like Roblox, the Epstien security camera video footage, the Honey plugin, the Mr. Beast controversy, and so on.
I'm recommending these two channels in particular to ACXers because I believe the video essayists are both sincerely attempting to convey accurate information to their audiences. They both extensively cite sources and often engage in good-faith practices like steel-manning arguments in opposition to their conclusions. Both frequently acknowledge that it's difficult or impossible to come to a definitive conclusion on some topics without more information.
I’ve been enjoying videos from a guy named Elliott, Physics with. Feynman description of particle behavior, all possible paths; and how classical physics falls out of quantum. Just very clear for someone with a high school education. I do slow them down a little 😀.
> One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
Yeah, some people in this thread doubt the accuracy of the videos, but as far as I know, this one is correct.
There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I tend to feel fairly isolated as someone who very much believes the opposite: that Japan should by no means be allowed to reestablish a formal army, and that the possibility of it doing so should be seen as a geopolitical threat.
It's not widely recognized in other countries, but ultranationalist conservatism is not just *a* mainstream political position in present-day Japan, but *the* mainstream political position, and denial of Japanese war crimes is a normative position, not just among senior politicians, but the general population. A friend of mine who attended college there said that history professors who acknowledge that these events actually happened face serious pushback, both from their students (which is a really unusual thing in Japanese culture!) and from their fellow academics. When she raised the issue with fellow students, she said they weren't hesitant to tell her that if she believed those things (i.e. Japanese war crimes in Korea and China) actually happened, she should simply leave the country.
Most people abroad don't know or care about this sort of thing, because they don't have to, because Japan's constitutional inability to project hard power renders it largely irrelevant on the international stage. But, while I certainly can't guarantee that Japan reestablishing armed forces with which they're allowed to enact interventionist policy would lead to disaster, mainstream political attitudes there are way up among countries I absolutely would not trust with a military on the level they have the power to field.
Compare and contrast with Germany, another country which found itself with a lot of guilt after WW2.
Of course, we took a completely different route. Not only were we the world leaders for industrialized genocide, we are also the world leaders in feeling really bad about it afterwards.
The culture of our Bundeswehr is (nominally) placed around Stauffenberg et al, a group of German officers who tried to blow up Hitler (but only when it became clear that he would lose the war with the same totality with which he had previously waged it, not because they had any qualms about his death camps).
I think that one difference was that quite a few of the German intellectuals were not really on board with the crimes of the Nazis, and neither was the next generation (the 68er). Apart from some worrisome fringe elements on the far right, today everyone in Germany recognizes the crimes of Nazi Germany. It is by far the era treated most extensively in history classes in school.
This means that there is little in the way of naive patriotism in the intellectual class in Germany, and just about zero appetite for German imperialism. Personally, I am grateful I got to grow up in this (mostly) harmless Germany instead of the earlier iterations full of patriotic fervor and aspirations of world domination.
Japan already has a pretty powerful de facto army, the JSDF. They're not discussing the possibility of making an army, but of revising their constitution so that they can put the military forces they already have to interventionist use.
> There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I'm convinced of this not because of consuming Japanese media but because a powerful Japan is helpful against Communist China.
Japan doesn't need an army capable of proactive invasion for that, and if they had one, I'm not at all convinced they could be trusted with it any more than China.
Hard to say, it's not like any politicians are framing it as "We should have an army capable of proactive international intervention again so we can invade these specific countries." I highly doubt they'd invade China, due to the nuclear threat, but they might take a stab at something in the vein of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere again.
I never understand why people in Japan and other countries with unpleasant stuff in their past can't take the neutral position of, "Sure all those war crimes happened but I don't personally feel bad about it. I didn't do 'em." Just blame it all on the bad old leaders who lost the war and move on.
It's like when people talk about the various things the US government did to indigenous people of North America I just happily acknowledge, "Yeah we sure did. Oh well."
I don't understand it emotionally either, but I think it is a side effect of patriotism. If you feel proud for the *good* things that your collective ancestors did, it makes sense also to feel shame for the *bad* things they did (and to deny them). If you say that it's not you who did the bad things, by the same logic it's not you who did the good things.
Also, just because you say "it's not me", does not mean the other people will accept that, and stop e.g. asking for reparations. It is like inheriting a debt: if your parents borrow some money and then die, and you live in their house, you need to pay that debt. By living in the same country you inherit the debts of the previous governments, both literal and metaphorical.
I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
>I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
It's a tough issue, but I think there's a strong case for countries being willing to reject debts specifically in situations such as that one, while still upholding the principle that in general, succeeding administrations inherit the debts of former ones.
In general, governments have a strong incentive to honor the debts of past administrations, because if they don't, then other countries won't want to make deals with them, in the present or future. There's not much point making deals with a country if you don't think the current administration or future ones can be trusted to honor them.
But at the same time, if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor, because we don't want to encourage any countries to be willing to loan money or broker deals with a brutal dictator who represses his own populace." If they can convince other countries that this is a principled stand and not just a self-interested defection, then they can support a general rule that administrations will bear the debts of their successors, while carving out an exception, that "this doesn't apply in the case of repressive dictators, so don't lend them money and be extremely cautious about making deals with them."
> if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor
Wouldn't that just incentivize everyone to support the dictator?
I'm not sure, but I sometimes wonder if, with Japan having such a strong culture of collective responsibility, and publicly and openly demonstrating contrition for failings, even if not personal, but assigned by public shaming, the enormity of Japan's atrocities in World War II might simply be *too* great for the people involved to stomach taking responsibility for, especially when the people who'd have to take responsibility went up to the very top of their political hierarchy (and even their current political hierarchy has direct continuity, and surprisingly often direct blood relation to the people in charge then.)
Personally, I take a similar attitude, but that sort of thing seems pretty at odds with Japan's usual culture.
Tasting History. Guy goes through old recipe books fromthe last century to the classical world. Not a professional chef, so it's relatable for us amateurs.
Anti-Chef. Canadian guy moved around a lot and cooked while he did so. I started off hating him, because he was very inexperienced (the very first videos from when he was in Canada are hilarious - the vanilla bean episode is now famous) and wasted good quality ingredients because he had no idea what the heck he was doing. But time and practice worked their magic, and he has come on by leaps and bounds.
Viva La Dirt League. Bunch of New Zealanders who started off doing amateur comedy skits about gaming and, well, now they do semi-pro comedy skits about gaming.
I'm already subscribed to Baumgartner Restoration, Tasting History, and Anti-Chef.
Although on the latter, I've not been as interested as he's gained more and more competence. I actually preferred the very relatable and sometimes spectacular failures, as well as the only neutral to moderate successes. Competent cooks are legion across YouTube.
I like Jamie of Anti-Chef (and it took me a while to warm up to him) because watching his improvement over time is genuinely heart-warming. He still has failures and things he just can't do, but he has improved so much since he began that it gives confidence that you, too, can become mildly competent in the kitchen!
The old recipes and cookbooks are interesting as well when contrasted with modern ones; the Thomas Keller ones, for example, clearly need a professional kitchen of trained staff to produce, but watching him try is entertaining (and also, sometimes simpler *is* better). You can see by all the work that goes into it why it commands the kind of prices it does, but at the same time - is it really worth it?
Worth going to try once just to say you did, I suppose.
It's not so much specifically the take on George Soros for me, as the general pattern, of which that video is a particularly noticeable example.
He seems to be largely a moderate, with pretty good fact-checking, and the positions he takes in his videos tend to align pretty closely with conclusions I've drawn myself on those issues, where I've investigated them. But taken as a whole, he seems comfortable exploring things which are sacred cows for left-leaning audiences, asking "is the issue actually as cut and dry as it seems?" and showing that the issue is actually messy and ambiguous, although occasionally he comes down the side of "no, this isn't ambiguous, this commonly accepted idea is actually simply wrong." But, he doesn't seem to show a similar level of willingness to challenge conservative ideas. Arguing that there's a pretty good case for framing George Soros as legitimately evil, but he could also be seen as a case of genuinely liberal views applied overzealously, could be a moderating influence on viewers who think "he's definitely pure evil, no question about it." But if he's not prepared to make a comparable video where he examines the influence of the Koch brothers, and why people might see them as evil, then he's pulling right on people who actually sit at the center.
But taken as a whole, he seems comfortable exploring things which are sacred cows for left-leaning audiences, ... But, he doesn't seem to show a similar level of willingness to challenge conservative ideas
I've only looked at a handful of his videos, but based thereon I would tend to agree. And his analysis is really not all that thoughtful in general, so I don't know why anyone would go out of their way to watch him.
I'm late to get to this (I didn't get notification of a response-to-a-response,) but I don't think his methodology seems distinctly skewed conservative, in the topics he addresses in his videos. But there are plenty of topics I think he might cover in a similar manner if he were pulling from the center, like
*How dangerous was Covid actually (since there was some excessive alarmism about it, but many conservatives swung towards a contrarian view that it wasn't dangerous enough to take seriously at all.)
*Examining the influence of right-wing donor/influencers like the Koch brothers, comparable to his examination of George Soros.
*Is domestic terrorism and political violence skewed by political alignment (both sides of the political spectrum tend to believe that the other is the more violent one, and this seems to depend in some respects on the form of activism, but from what data I've been able to find, it seems that in general the right wing does engage in more political violence.)
*Do conservative news media sources systematically mislead or misinform their audiences (comparable to his exploration of ways that liberal news media sources systematically mislead their audiences.)
*Does Donald Trump actually lie to the public an unusual rate for a politician (people on the left say obviously yes, people on the right tend to see him as more honest than an ordinary politician. Is the truth somewhere in the middle? Is one side just right?)
Etc.
I don't think his coverage of specific issues is usually notably skewed (I do disagree with his assessment that the evidence on Covid's origins firmly establishes it being the result of a lab leak, I think it's clearly true that official sources at the time considered it a plausible hypothesis, and actively tried to suppress that, but that doesn't mean that it was the most plausible hypothesis or that the weight of evidence has ever established it as such.) But I think there's a pretty noticeable political skew in which sorts of topics he chooses to cover, according to which direction it'd lead to him pulling his audience in.
What I don't like is that he frames Soros's humanitarian activities as little more than a Plot for World Domination. That seem to me to be the sort of discourse that falls well below the standards here.
I think I know a few people in the rationalist community who would say that plotting for World Optimization is the obviously right thing to do.
Factually, I agree that Soros uses his money to optimize the world towards his values. I just happen to agree with most of those values. (Not all of them, e.g. the increase of crime.) And I am happy that there is a person like that, because most people with comparable amounts of money optimize *against* my values. But technically speaking, it is what it is.
Okay, but which videos and/or topics present narratives which are "absolutely false?"
Like I said, that is a a broad and absolute statement for a channel which covers many different topics with most videos extensively citing sources. I'm not sure how you get from conceding sources are cited to asserting that the conclusions pulled from that information being "absolutely false."
The range of topics covered has absolutely no affect on the truthfulness of said coverage.
I’ll give an example: the atlas earth video (first one I clicked on) miscalculates the earnings from a parcel (you can have better than common parcels), misrepresents the meaning of slave over and over again (forced, unpaid labor) - this is not forced, and you can exit or join at-will. Sure, it’s a terrible ROI, but the video treats it as something interesting, not just the daily “crypto metaverse bad investment”, describes a multiplying effect as “exponentially more” (there are no exponents involved, yet he clearly understands what this means at 8:45). It acts as if the fact that the way the pay works is not obvious to every user. It assumes that HYSA rates will continue to be high for 5 years (obviously false). Also, it has a sponsorship for honeygain, which is known for not having great practices (ask Claude, too long to put here), and acts as if it is a website he found and conveniently got an affiliate link, not a direct sponsorship (illegal in the us). Sure, it has sources, but you would not be informed by watching the video.
Well, as I said, I don't care about or watch any of UE's video game essays, but the coverage of other, much broader-interest topics (Roblox, etc) seems sufficiently thorough and well-documented, albeit with a point of view.
Russia eventually agrees to a ceasefire that lets them rip off a big chunk of Ukraine's territory that they occupy or nearly so. That then gets annexed into Russia, like Karelia from Finland in the Winter War.
I think Russia is very likely to win. I don't know if this victory is going to be pyrrhic or not, but a scenario where Ukraine regains its 2014 borders requires a collapse of Russia's economy and state failure.
The main variable that will determine if Russia achieves a pyrrhic victory or a true victory is whether Ukraine's manpower shortage will allow Russia to make a breakthrough. If Ukraine's lines break, Russia will be able to attain its maximalist aims since I don't think Europe will send troops to save Ukraine from collapse. However, if Ukraine manages to hold on long enough, eventually Russia will reach a point where it will drop its maximalist objectives and try to settle for a ceasefire along the line of control. There's also a chance that Ukraine manages to damage Russia's oil infrastructure enough to stop exports and oil refining, which would cripple Russia and perhaps cause its lines to crumble.
My personal odds are 60-30-10, with 60% for a maximalist Russian victory, 30% for a pyrrhic Russian victory and 10% for all other outcomes such as a mutual defeat, a Ukrainian victory or WW3.
> I don't think Europe will send troops to save Ukraine from collapse
Like hell we won't. There is an etiquette to waging war between nuclear blocks, and it involves not having troops of one block shoot at troops of the other block.
Cynically, this has been phrased as "the West is prepared to defend the Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier". Less cynically, we like an independent Ukraine, but we are not going to start World War 3 over it. It would be different if they were in NATO, because if Putin attacks NATO then WW3 is the only credible response.
I think Europe has a strong interest in, not letting all of Ukraine be swallowed up by Russia. But a rump state in Western Ukraine would still work as a buffer, and I suspect that that’s what will happen.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if your leaders are entirely opposed to sending troops to die in Ukraine. I've seen some rumors indicating that French and British leadership is not opposed to sending a force to Ukraine. (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-talks-with-britain-ukraine-about-potential-troops-macron-tells-paper-2025-05-10/) While this is a deeply unpopular and bad idea, I think that its possible that Emanuel Macron and Keir Starmer could muster the political willpower to send troops into Ukraine.
I'm pretty sure any actual willingness to send European troops into Ukraine, is contingent on a cease-fire agreement where they won't be shot at and where their role will be as a "tripwire" force to disincentivize any Russian plan to say "just kidding" about the ceasefire.
The odds of, A: a cease-fire actually coming into force, and B: the US or EU sending troops to enforce it, and C: Russia deciding that they want a Third Ukraine War, this time against NATO, seem rather slim. Unfortunately, that's mostly because the first step is itself quite unlikely.
60 maximalist is pretty pessimistic. It would essentially require at least two Russian mechanized breakthroughs in a heavy drone environment. Possible but not exactly something that has been achieved by either side since the start of the war (which wasn't so drone dense at the beginning).
There is also a debate on victory. War freezing on current lines or somewhere in Donbass would be a mutual defeat, depending on the security guarantees ecc.
The real question tough should be on why the current administrations policy for Ukraine dances from incompetence to madness, and from madness to incompetence.
It's interesting that in other cases such as Taiwan or ME this isn't as much the case, but Ukraine? Doubtlessly one of the most important sectors for the US after Taiwan gets the worse minds and actions.
After some more months or years of static frontlines, very slowly crawling forward in Donbass, Russia will eventually drop maximalist demands and reach a ceasefire with Ukraine (who will jump at any proposal that don't require them to give up unconquered land).
It will be seen as a geopolitical pyrrhic victory for Russia, which will feel it's cost for the next 10 or 20 years.
Sanctions will at least partly get lifted in exchange for freeing POW or returning ukrainian children that were deported.
Ukraine will be on life support, out of NATO & EU bust still recipient to significant aid & cooperation.
The big winners will be China (who will reap the non-western arm selling business) and Eastern Europe (who will be relieved of the threat of a mechanized Russian blitz that could topple them before NATO could react).
I also slightly expect western armies to be much more hesitant to engage in force projection like in Libya, Syria or the Sahel, fearing a drone warfare for which they are unprepared.
How much territory? All of the Donbass? Everything East of the Dnieper? That plus all of Kiev? All of Ukraine? Any of the above could be said to constitute a `Russian win' but would result in very different worlds going forward.
My guess would be an eventual frozen conflict where Russia ends up with most/all of the Donbass, but not more. This could be spun as a`Russian win' but would probably be a pyrrhic one if so.
1 Ukrainian reforms of the army and force generation pipeline, particularly force retention.
2 Western aid, if it will increase, drop or remain constant
3 the Russian political will and understanding that the longer the war goes on the higher the long term cost is going to be.
If 1 improves for Ukraine, 2 aid increases and 3 Russian economy and power status is threatened the war might end even start of 2026 through successful negotiations due to the Cremlin accepting it risks far more in a continuation then otherwise.
If instead the opposite happens with 1 reforms fail 2 western aid (and Ukrainian production) decreases and 3 sufficient power in Russia is held by those who gain from a continuing war at the expense of Russian's general long term wellfare. Then the war will be longer and probably end with severe Ukrainian (and EU/US) concessions.
Currently we are in a middle situation with a lot of potential changing factors though generally positive for Russia since it's paying a continuous cost not a growing one and therefore has no incentives to negotiate seriously (in other words it can always try to win on the battlefield or in the white house and if it fails what did it cost trying? Nothing that wasn't being spent before)
Generally speaking we can talk about self sabotage from Russia as the party which started this useless and costly invasion, Europe as too slow moving and fragmented until now, ,Ukraine too slow on force generation and the US foreign policy was first characterized as far too timid and now, honestly now it's just chaos or utter naivety.
No the stalemate as it is can't continue for several years (more then 3) because with current intensity it's almost impossible for either countries to fight that long.
I’ve only been once, when my family was doing a road trip through the southwest, and we decided to cross the border. It was a bit eye opening to see that if you drive a little bit in one direction you see a lot of disinvestment and poverty of a sort that you never see in the United States, while if you drive in a slightly different direction, you see the same kind of suburban/moderate density urban affluence that you see all over the United States. But I don’t know of anything specifically of interest to see in Juarez or El Paso other than these sorts of sociological observations.
I'm from Georgia, and I know Georgia has a certain somewhat unusual feature, and I guess maybe the others have it too? Trbetvn'f ynetrfg pvgl vf nyfb vgf pncvgny.
Would never have possibly got it without the hint, got it almost immediately after looking at the hint.
I think these sorts of puzzles largely test whether the reader happens to be on a similar thought-association wavelength as the puzzle maker. Which makes them often pretty frustrating to me, as I often don't think in the same way as other people.
(Hey, this comment has an unintentional hint to your puzzle as well, which I noticed just before submitting it...)
I spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time writing an essay about how many perceived cultural problems are actually caused by dysfunctional copyright law.
It's culture war related, but it's actually "anti-war", in that my answer to "is the new official Tolkien adaptation too woke?" is "Tolkien's writings should be in the public domain, and everyone should be able to create one to their taste".
I propose reducing copyright terms and making copyright conditional on use (so that you can't keep content "in the vault" indefinitely)
My retort to that would be "if we're going to get more Rings of Power style versions, then I want even *stricter* copyright law".
The problem is not 'it's not in the public domain', the problem is "the version this lot decided upon was not based on the work but on the perceived audience, so they put the cart before the horse and didn't even get the right cart while they were at it".
There aren't going to be ten versions made by very large corporations that can spend many hundreds of millions of dollars making a properly cinematic version for the large or small screen, and almost nobody is going to care about the glorified fanfic. With or without copyright, all of the discussion will be about the *one* version that was made into a big-budget movie or TV series, before everyone else in that business decided that particular vein was now tapped out for a decade..
Or maybe two, but the second version will be a smaller thing, almost beneath public notice, regarded as a knockoff not worth discussing - "Deep Impact" vs "Armageddon", or Patrick Bergen Robin Hood vs Kevin Costner Robin Hood. I can't recall seeing a triad like that, though it's probably happened somewhere.
>There aren't going to be ten versions made by very large corporations that can spend many hundreds of millions of dollars making a properly cinematic version for the large or small screen,
There is for Sherlock Holmes. Including all spiritual adaptations to alternate settings (eg. House MD), there are hundreds.
Same for Romeo & Juliet.
I'm not sure why you have the belief 'major studios won't all bandwagon on successful properties with proven track records if given the chance', because that feels like the exact opposite of observed reality to me.
But, either way: the situation is *already* 'only one person can make it, due to copyright'. Even if you think it would be *rare* for more than on person to adapt something, even the *possibility* is a strict benefit.
For major(*) motion pictures adapted from "Romeo & Juliet", I get: 1911, 1916, 1916, 1936, 1954, 1968, 1996, 2013, and 2025. That seems pretty consistent with "everyone else in that business decided that particular vein was now tapped out for a decade". Which was the claim I made, not that There Can Be Only One Ever. I suppose technically I did also claim that there won't be ten ever, in which case note that R&J hasn't hit that benchmark either.
"Spiritual adaptations to alternate settings" are irrelevant here, because they aren't affected by copyright anyhow. And because they don't affect the public discourse or moviegoing experience the same way - nobody says "I just watched House last Thursday; I don't need to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie".
And the old version from 10+ years ago, in practice also doesn't matter. Almost everyone either watches the latest version, or none at all. Only a tiny irrelevant handful of purists insist on watching a DVD of the previous generation's version. The public discussion, will be based on the latest version and on the audience's general conception of the original work, with again a tiny irrelevant handful of purists pointing to an intermediate adaptation and saying "this is the one you all need to watch". Those are all as dead as e.g. the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
What does not seem to happen, with R+J or Sherlock or any of the others, is someone making a big-budget theatrical (or premium television) adaptation, and while that is still in recent memory saying "hah, that loser got it wrong, I'm going to make a *different* big-budget theatrical version and cash in on all the people who are glad *I* did it right". Even when the original work is in the public domain, that doesn't happen.
So, yes, I grieve for the fact that we have "Rings of Power" instead of an actually good Second Age Middle Earth saga. But voiding Tolkein's copyright wouldn't change that; Amazon would still have got there first, and nobody with a serious budget would touch it for a decade after because Amazon's sloppy seconds aren't a big enough market.
>Right, but if only one person can make a version then it is 90% likely to be crap, since 90% of everything is crap.
This isn't random though. If one person makes something really good, their continuation isn't 90% likely to be crap, because their making it good the first time probably wasn't a fluke. If it was, audiences are likely to lose interest soon after, but otherwise, they can probably continue to produce consistently good works for some time.
When 90% of the work associated with an intellectual property is crap, a lot of audience members are simply not going to get invested in it who would if it were consistently good.
We can apply the market logic of "lots of people get to make stuff, customers can congregate around the stuff they actually like" without allowing creators to directly copy the work of other creators who're already popular. If anything, I think that entertainment media suffers from too much follow-the-leader-ing right now, and I'd rather not see that amplified.
>This isn't random though. If one person makes something really good,
... yes, I agree that if we condition on it being made by someone really talented, the chances of it being good go up.
But I don't know what that has to do with the question at hand?
There's nothing guaranteeing that the 1 person who buys the rights will always be talented, and we're talking about IP laws in general, not just sequels.
Since other people in the comment thread have been discussing allowing anyone to create works based on the same IP, so not even the original creator would have IP ownership, I thought you were arguing for the same position.
I'd be comfortable backing changes to IP law such that it can't be held for long by anyone but the original creator before passing into the public domain. I think it's useful for the original creator to have *some* ability to sell or pass the IP on to a designated creator of derivative works, but I think we'd likely be better off if that sort of thing expired quickly.
Looks good, commented in the comments there. I think your point is valid (and you're probably right), but lobbying power means it probably won't come to pass.
I get that from the perspective of a studio executive, what you want is a franchise where you own the "IP". Imagine the horror of making a LotR movie only to find that someone else is making LotR video games without paying you!
Personally, I would base copyright on how long it takes you to make a profit from the product. If your video game goes from 60$ to 3$, then it is past its financial life, and the amount you can make from then until 50 years after the death of its last author (or whatever copyright terms are) will be very meager. For movies, my understanding is that most of the investment is either returned or not at the box office on cinematic release, with DVD sales being more of an afterthought. So a decade should be fine.
A complication is that sometimes the main monetarization happens only when a book series gets turned into film. Perhaps it would be useful to have a system where you have an earlier point in time from which on you can spread the work verbatim for free, but will still have to cut in the author (or even get their permission) if you base your original content on their work.
One potential answer to this concern is not to reduce the duration of copyright law, but limit it a lot more strictly in how broad the protections are. If you create something great that people love, you should be able to get paid for it. But maybe other people should also trivially be able to make derivative works, as long as they aren't literally just copying the good thing you made. The literal text of the Lord of the Ring books should be protected, but maybe it should be allowed to write different books in the same universe. Most fanfic is garbage, but if someone has the skill and takes the time to make a good version, maybe they should be allowed to make money on that too.
Very interesting that the Authors thought that was in Scott’s voice. It was much more mean spirited and less funny than anything Scott’s written. I wonder if they had an AI write it with that prompt?
People here love stereotype accuracy, but I can think of at least one case where the common stereotype is both wrong and harmful: my mental illness, OCD.
Can't bear to think of how many people got no help or the wrong help for years because "OCD is about cleanliness" or whatever.
Surely not the only inaccurate stereotype of a mental illness.
This seems more or less similar to other types of stereotypes, in that it's not universally accurate, and maybe not true of a majority of cases, but it still reflects a genuinely representative case. Insofar as it's inaccurate, I think we could say other stereotypes are also inaccurate.
I agree this is not the main or most relevant presentation of OCD, but it describes OCPD okay, and OCD and OCPD tend to co-occur, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23865406/.
So although I don't think this is an accurate *description* of OCD, it might be a (somewhat) accurate *stereotype* of OCD *people*.
Yeah I know as much. I've just known so many fellow OCD'ers with very common themes like taboo violent-sexual thoughts, moral scrupolosity etc who didn't get help for so long just because it wasn't "stereotypical".
I'm also a person with OCD who is 0% OCPD. Seriously. I don't have a gram of that type of perfectionism in my body and also score really low on conscientiousness. That might not be common but we do exist.
As someone whose son has been diagnosed with OCD, I'd be interested if you wanted to share what kind treatment or other kind of help you'd recommend for the condition?
I highly recommend you check out the International OCD Foundation website at iocdf.org. There are *many* excellent resources there, including descriptions of different forms of OCD, a therapist-finder (and most of those who list there have actual specialized training and certification in OCD treatment), and videos made by people who've suffered from OCD. They offer in-person and virtual camps for kids in and teens with OCD, and have several big conferences yearly where clinicians, researchers, OCD sufferers and their families all meet and attend seminars together. They are well-funded and manage to keep prices moderate, and also offer a lot of free resources. Oh, yeah, also: The same people who founded the iocdf set up an inpatient treatment center at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts 25 or so years ago. Patients there get expert psychopharmacology and participate in an all-day program of CBT, including several hours/day of ERP. It's like boot camp, but with kindly and good-natured staff.
I'm a psychologist OCD specialist and agree with everything Whenyou said.
ERP and/or maybe ACT. And just in general someone who has experience with OCD. Regular talk therapy as well as psychoanalysis (and therapists just treating it as anxiety) can actually make it worse, as it's often too enabling/supportive/encourages obsessing over your thoughts.
Ultimately OCD therapy is supposed to be frustrating and uncomfortable. Confessing your thoughts can in itself become a ritual. It's completely normal for a therapist to say to an OCD patient, "now we shouldn't talk about that fear of yours anymore. I can feel you obsessing".
One of the mildest SSRIs helped me a lot too.
The app Nocd is supposedly good for finding OCD-friendly therapists.
Are you staying on SSRIs? I feel like SSRIs might help to reduce intrusive thoughts, I started taking it when I felt worse, but now feel better and thinking of stopping.
Anorexia is like this: the stereotype is that it afflicts young girls who desperately want to be thin. True in many cases, but it wasn't for me! None of the resources seemed applicable as a result.
How much of "burnout" can be explained by your unconscious mind slowly noticing that the exorbitant levels of focus, attention and willpower it's been giving you haven't translated into better food, sex, shelter, status or any other meaningful goal, and so it simply decides not to provide them anymore?
I think there are really 2 classes of "rewards" in life: straightfoward pleasure (food, sex, nice belongings) and a work pleasure (feeling of deep engagement and commitment to a project, satisfaction when it is successfully completed). If you can get some of the second kind of pleasure out of work, you are much less vulnerable to burnout.
I think it's important to recognize that "work pleasure" extends beyond work to things that give you satisfaction of the same kind without anyone paying you. Everything from writing poetry (even the best poets can't make a living from writing poetry) to some hobby project you are proud of (making a piece of furniture in your home workshop for your own use, say) gives you some of that. Ironically, many people decompress from their stressful work job by doing stuff that looks like work but they find relaxing--come home from a stressful week at the office and go spend the weekend with power tools and a couple of buddies fixing up your fishing cabin.
"meaningful goal" is carrying a lot of weight there. Meaningful goal can be the project I'm spending lots of time on in which case I'm less likely to burnout.
In modern society sometimes things get too abstract. My salary definitely provides me a lot of food, but the link is too indirect. As a straight guy in IT I don't really expect to have sex at workplace.
So it seems mostly about status. Whether you are treated with respect, whether the work environment is friendly, etc.
I heard that it helps if people visualize their salaries, for example if they make a graph, and see how they are getting closer to some specific target, whether it is a new car, or retirement. Then they get a reward each month by seeing the line get closer to the goal.
I think we need feedback. It's why cults can spin off into almost unlimited levels of crazy, and why people fall apart after long periods in solitary confinement.
The esteem of other people whom you respect is a big deal, whether that's getting your paper accepted at a top journal, or getting a promotion at work, or winning an award for a poem, or whatever.
I've only ever heard "burnout" used to refer to fields like software development, where the chance physical exhaustion is basically zero. In fact, exercise is often raised as a good way to stave off burnout.
Plausible, but you can still parlay with your unconscious mind with CBT. I don't enjoy my job frankly but my boss will retire in a couple of years so more status/money is a plausible goal. But keeping my unconscious mind on board with that weak resolution is a constant battle.
Recently, the book "Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse" was published by Luke Kemp. In it, Kemp describes his ideas of how collapse happens. I think it nicely summarizes the state of the art of collapse research. If you want to find out more about it, I wrote a summary: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-peoples-history-of-collapse
I really didn’t like a lot of that. Saying that the Roman Empire fell because of inequality doesn’t really have much explanatory power, it was unequal for centuries, the late republic was just as unequal. This means that inequality is bad for democracy, but not destabilising in empires.
The empire was more stable than the republic (hence the rise of the empire). The empire was considerable less imperial - paradoxically
I didn't read the book and so can only comment on your review. Not sure you can discuss societal collapse in past societies without even mentioning demographic considerations (good times leading to population growth which outstrips the available resources given negligible growth in the pre-modern times, per Turchin and others).
It would be good to see more evidence for the claim that democratic participation makes societies more resilient. The experience of Ancient Greece and medieval Italy is not that positive and most of the modern democracies are pretty young
s/population/elite/, if you want to invoke Turchin.
(And your examples of democracies are rather cherry-picked - for ancient Greece, you have ancient Rome, for medieval Italy, medieval-and-onwards Switzerland. Besides, conceptually, the claim that democratic participation increases society's robustness is kind of self-evident, and the key word is participation. Democratic facade for extremely unequal society captured by oligarchs, as was the case with medieval Italy, isn't even a proper counterexample of that. Democratic procedures alone probably don't mean much, granted, but that's a different issue.)
There was no single democratic ancient Greece. There were hundreds of poleis, most of them had democratic and non-democratic periods and among the most famous and longest-surviving ones there were both mostly democratic (like Athens) and mostly non-democratic poleis (like Syracuse). You're right that this claim *sounds* self-evident, and possibly if someone did a careful study of all the poleis they'd found this patter, but it's hardly obvious. Not sure Rome is a good example either, its imperial period is comparable to its republican period in length (depending on where you begin and where you end).
Florian did share a couple of links to scholarly studies below, I'll def take a look at them.
The there’s Rome. It’s clear that Rome was incredibly unequal at the end of the republic, to a degree that would make even modern capitalists wince. Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing.
The wars and political violence of the late republic (including the existential social wars with the Italian tribes) were primarily caused by social unrest and ended with a victory for the rich, with Sulla and later the empire. Afterwards the poor were bought off with bread and circus.
So there’s a lesson there, perhaps, remembering that Rome took its democracy and republic extremely seriously until the empire ( and even pretended the institutions mattered afterwards, Augustus was a consul - a shared office - for at least a decade)
> Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing
I've heard this story but now I'm reading it again I'm not convinced it makes that much sense.
The cost of a house is two things: the cost of the actual structure and the cost of the land it sits on. In major economically important cities today, the cost of the land usually exceeds the value of the actual structure, and I'm guessing it was the same deal in Rome (since Rome was a huge economically dominant city navigable only on foot the cost of land close to the centre of town must have been enormous). The value of the land puts a fairly high floor on the amount you'd be willing to sell to Crassus for.
Well the story comes from Plutarch, so if it was made up then it was at least made up by an ancient historian and not a modern one. As always with ancient historians, you have to decide what you want to believe.
There's certainly a lot of room for adjudication on what a pittance or a trifle or however we are translating it actually means. One must also consider that the decision is being made under a position of panic and upset by the homeowner, who may not have thought of the value of their home in years and may have no real idea what the land and property is actually worth. Whereas Crassus devotes a lot of his time to thinking about real estate and knows exactly the true value. Perhaps there were very cool customers in Rome who stood their ground and made a good deal, and then there were those who panicked and made a bad deal, and Crassus made at least some profit either way.
Even that aside, the better branches of decision theory would tell you not to sell your property for pennies on the dollar. If there is only one person who can rescue your property, the natural split of the gains would be 50:50. If your rescuer demands a larger cut, the rational response is to only accept their offer with some probability, so that their expected returns will be smaller than if they had offered you a fair split.
This will leave you worse off in the case you end up watching your property burn down, but will make it less likely that you are extorted in general.
I can really recommend checking out the book. It provides endless historical examples and case studies to make sure that the conclusions are robust.
I also think it does not really conflict with Turchin's idea. You could have both things happening at the same time and both theories point to wealth inequality being a very important factor for societal stability and thus collapse.
But if you want to check our more about the link between societal stability and democratic participation, I summarized some papers about this here (and many of those also show up in Kemp's sources):
Well, the post summarizes a specific book and is not meant to give an overview of societal collapse in general. If you want that, look this post: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/mapping-out-collapse-research There I also discuss Tainter. You will also find mentions of Tainter throughout my other writing on the blog.
Game theory is a big topic, and there’s a lot of things you could be looking for out of a speaker. Not knowing your case, I’d recommend Kevin Zollman, who has both done a lot of interesting work on the evolutionary game theory of scientific communities, and has also written a book on game theory and parenting for a public audience: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Theorists-Guide-Parenting-Negotiators/dp/0374536902
But if you want someone to talk about economics or political science or nuclear war or something, there are probably lots of other very different people to look for.
Thank you so much, Kenny. You are the only person to respond to me, despite my strategy of posting early at the front end of the comments.
I am studying a community of salesmen that are doing some predictable herd behavior. When they are in a supply glut, they lower prices to move a perishable, but the retail customer they are selling to deos not pass the savings on to the consumer, so they are just giving away supplier capital and gifting it to the retail customer ( I have gobs of robust data showing this). I think a game theory person would have something intelligent to say about this, so definitely economics.
I would check the sales departments at local business schools, and or local economics departments - since your target audience has a shared background in sales, someone who is able to speak to that specifically will be helpful!
https://youtu.be/ujsw_bSbD1I I find this video funny in context of, this is what happens if GlaDOS is successfully aligned before anything horrible happens.
Question people! How did the squat and deadlift kind of exercise got so popular, as opposed to traditional body-building, and why is it kinda linked to the Manosphere and Dissident Right?
To me squat and deadlift are the strength of a pack mule, I would not define strength that way, I would define strength as throwing a punch, or historically a spear, so arms and shoulders. Not incidentally, that is how a man looks good, not by having a huge ass and thighs.
Do the squat and deadlift exercises have a psychological benefit? Or they are just good at keep fat away?
If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
I am off to the gym in 10 minutes, today it is leg press machine, stomach machine, chest press machine and triceps machine. Tomorrow will be back and bicep and stomach again. These deliver the looks and the health. These deliver strength in the sense of looking like a boxer who hits hard. These do not deliver strength in the sense of carrying loads like a pack mule -but why should I ever need that kind of strength?
I can't speak to the issue of popularity. But you are a pack mule's burden, and a top-heavy one. See the various videos of small women easily pushing much larger and stronger men off-balance, thanks to their lower center of gravity. You may not need lower-body strength to look the way you like to look, but it's useful for moving your upper body strength to where it's most effective.
For example throwing a punch or a spear entails an equal and opposite reaction, braced entirely by your legs.
Why are you contrasting that with traditional bodybuilding? My understanding is that strength doesn’t actually matter for traditional bodybuilding - only the shape of your body.
I think a big part of the idea is that strengthening the biggest muscles does more for broader health than strengthening specific smaller muscles, like the exercises you mention.
I don’t have a specific theory myself about the particular exercises I do - I just make sure that I’m doing something!
My theory, off the cuff and not to be taken seriously:
they're easily quantifiable,
form is easy to evaluate since the Big Three lifts are the standard for strongman competition,
they have a large systemic effect since they involve the comparatively huge muscles of the lower body and with a barbell touch like 2/3 of muscle groups by count, so they make you feel good,
the learning curve is very rewarding early on even for a weak lifter because there's significant gains available from pure form improvement,
due to all of these there's cargo culting about how they're essential components of a serious beginner routine, or at least unavoidable.
Due to all of the above, advancement and correctness are legible to autism-spec people who don't have a social network to get feedback or reinforcement on correctness or, uh, I guess virtue or status-increase-from-an-action of their work in the gym.
The manosphere association is also multifactorial, and I think falls out of them being starter moves and the direction of the sum of theses of the manosphere being that the world is built wrong for you, but if you work hard on yourself you can get good enough to find happiness in it anyway, either by leveling up your sexual game, acquiring virtue by self-improvement in bodily health, or actualizing your own ambition.
I can't speak for where the broader right-wing association with strength training came from, or why combat sports don't seem to have grown an association with that faction.
> If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
1. Only squats and deadlifts will increase your bone density, which is important and one of the primary benefits of resistance exercise.
2. Deadlifts in particular are a great proxy for "functional strength," ie. the strength you use to lift a piece of furniture, or whisk your SO off their feet, or grab a big luggage and run up or down some stairs. It's the type of strength that actually impresses on people "oh, that guy is strong."
3. You can absolutely get shredded doing squats and deadlifts - back when I was competing, I was so shredded people at pool parties of both genders would come up and ask to get pictures with me, and I never did any "cosmetic" lifts, just lots of Big 5.
> you mean you had arms without doing triceps extensions, really?
Arms enough that the rest of the package was still impressive enough to generate picture requests and stares and such.
I had biceps from pullups, but not much on the tricep front, so yeah, I def neglected my triceps. I think the only thing I ever did along those lines was close bench variants, but I was doing those at more than bodyweight for 10+ reps per set on the days I was doing them.
Unless you live a very interesting life, you need to carry heavy loads far more often than you need to throw punches. Think grocery shopping, moving furniture, that sort of thing.
Also, in a lot of martial arts, you generate power for strikes from the whole chain of the body and not just your arms.
Furthermore, if you are in the tiny minority who anticipate making attack rolls, just leveling STR seems not the best way to go about that. The size of your biceps will do little to mitigate the damage of a punch to your face which you failed to block, for one thing.
I'm new to weightlifting, and I'm all about the squats and deadlifts. It's because my hobby is a the sport of powerlifting, which focuses on maxing out big compound lifts- squat, bench, and deadlift are the big three. It's not bodybuilding. It's more about seeing number go up than about getting shredded.
UK perspective and I wouldn't know about the vaguely political stuff. I'd say both deadlifts and esp squats seems to be a little more common now than in the gyms of, say, 25 years ago. I'd guess this is more people taking online advice, either in silly places or from people who know what they are talking about.
More importantly, I have no doubt at all that there are significant numbers of people doing these exercises who absolutely shouldn't be. Form is terrible and they are storing up problems.
I lift to increase muscle so I get general health benefits, including less pressure on joints as I age. Also building muscle anywhere increases metabolism.
I believe there is some gym rat cachet to barbell squats because they look (and probably are) dangerous but I stick to dumbbells.
I have the same mentality, just with machines, as they guide me and thus require less attention. Impossible to lose form on a leg press. This also means I can go heavier than I could if there would be a chance of say falling over.
Just because they aren't visible, doesn't mean your back muscles aren't important. If your limb muscles are massive but your back is weak, you will injure your back a lot.
Here's a guess: On 4chan /fit/ there was a big (meme?) culture around squatting and deadlifting circa 2010. A lot of it evolved from ridiculing a book called "Starting Strength" by a guy named Rippetoe. And as it was 4chan, the memeing also tied in gay-bashing, misogyny, inceldom, etc
I have no idea what population size this is (dozens? thousands?), but if you were a teenage boy at that time (like i was) on that message board, you're now an adult man who may have internalized some manosphere/redpill ideas from that ecosystem.
I was there, Gandalf, 3500 years ago when cries of "squats and oats" echoed through the halls of /fit/.
/Fit/ was my fav board so I spent a lot of time there. I do not have the impression there was red pill/manosphere stuff there then. I remember the over the top sexism (and every other -ism), but it wasn't bitter and more like a lot of teenage boys trying to sound menacing. The overall vibe was one of "we're all gonna make it" with zyzz at the head.
I figured out my life, partly thanks to the fitness knowledge I gained from /fit/, and moved on so I didn't see the evolution of what happened and not super interested in how the place looks now. But back then it was a weird, fun place, maybe a little like Bushwick in NYC--dirty and you might get stabbed or a wall might fall on you, and there were quite a few creeps, but most people were really out doing themselves making funny or useful memes.
Correct, I do not get out of the chair except for the gym i.e. the machines, and I do that because if I stay 100% in the chair all the time I feel 30 years older than I am.
> is the best natural way to increase testosterone production
Thanks, this is exactly what I expected when I wrote that there might be a psychological benefit! I remember the very early years of PUA, when it was not so toxic yet, and thus a mainstreamish media had an interview with Roosh, the title was something like "sex tourist discovers weight lifting" and there was a pic of Roosh squatting heavy.
Now I already figured that he does not do it because women like muscular thighs or anything, but rather it somehow makes him feel manlier, confident or something like this. Generally machine based, upper body focus body-building makes me feel manlier, too, but perhaps this sort of stuff works more in that direction.
I've just come back from a wedding, and during the service I noticed they've changed the lyrics of the hymns from the versions I know. They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative. I am unastounded to notice this.
What did surprise me was that apparently any references to Christ or Jesus also merited removal.
I am really curious about the subjective experience of the decision-maker here. I will assume this person still calls themselves a Christian. What does the progression feel like, as one ideology totally replaces another, without your even noticing the change?
All I can say is that Protestants have a long history of changing things around a lot, so this does not surprise me at all. A Catholic or Orthodox wedding probably sticks to the traditions (rules, even).
Now removing Christ from a Christian ceremony is surprising, Protestant change-orientedness is really not supposed to go that far... at that point why even sing hymns? Our wedding intro was the Star Wars Imperial March, and everybody was laughing their butts off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMWVW4xtwI&list=RDvsMWVW4xtwI&start_radio=1
>They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative.
In many but not all cases, this may be truer to the original meaning. "Man" has both a gemder-neutral and a gendered sense, with the former dominant in the distant past, with a separate word, "were" (as in "weregeld" and "werewolf") specifically meaning adult male human. The gendered sense of "man" is now strongly dominant and newer gemder-neutral turns of phrase have arisen to replace the gemder-neutral sense of the word.
Makes sense. Old-time English was probably highly similar to German, which has two words, der Mann for men, and "man" as a generic subject, similar to "one" in English, "one does not simply walk into Mordor" "man wird nicht einfach in Mordor reinspazieren"
I don't generally get as far as asking that - I invariably get stuck on "why do so many people who do not otherwise believe in Christianity specifically want a religious wedding service in a Christian church?"
People should spend more time with anthropology as a subject. They should know something about human intuitions about continuity with the past, rituals, and sacred art or objects to know that maintaining the original forms is part of the social magic that enables a true feeling of transcendence.
Of course, the people the vote for these kinds of changes are the first to tell you that anthropology is strictly white man colonialism or something.
It can’t be about actually maintaining the original forms given that people are usually much less moved by the forms that prevailed a generation or two before they were born than the ones that prevailed during their childhood - though maybe it’s about maintaining the fiction that the form you are following now is the one that has always been followed.
I can never get over the change I saw to Hark the Herald Angels Sing: "born to raise the sons of earth" to "born to raise us from the earth" (or something like that). Removing poetry from an artwork should be a crime, let alone when you don't bother even trying to come up with a vaguely poetic replacement. (I think they also changed "pleased as man with man to dwell" to something completely banal).
And worst of all, it's not like there aren't *real* problems in Christianity to maybe have a look at. (See my reply to Rob). The hills people choose to die on are enough to make me welcome the AI/nuclear/climate/whatever-the-latest-is apocalypse because I've utterly lost faith in humanity.
I'm not surprised by the "man" and "son" stuff - my old Reconstructionist synagogue tacked on a prayer about the Matriarchs to the traditional prayer about the Patriarchs way back in the 1990s.
I'm pretty shocked that they managed to remove Jesus, though. What exactly were these hymns? What did they do with the part where Jesus was supposed to appear? "Praise Be To Somebody, But We're Not Sure Who"?
Pretty much. For example the "Christ of my own heart" at the end of Be Thou My Vision became something something "all our dear hearts".
Unfortunately I didn't trouble to remember the replacement lyrics, because I was too busy judging the female vicar. My sexist objection to her mere existence aside: the one rule at a wedding is Do Not Upstage The Bride. Someone should have had a quiet word with her about how the bride might feel to walk in and find another woman in a brilliant white gown already standing there at the altar.
Your example in Be Thou My Vision might just be general variation in the lyrics, rather than a specific change. I can find various versions of the hymn online, and I have always sung "heart of my own heart" where I imagine you have "Christ of my own heart".
For example I can see the version on https://hymnary.org/hymn/HDDW2024/268 has "heart of my heart" (presumably the 'own' has been erroneously omitted).
If this was a liberal mainline church (PC[USA], ELCA, UMC, Episcopalian, etc) I've been under the impression that the clergy have been running to the theological "left" for some time, and the death or departure of more-traditionally minded congregants has enabled these kind of changes. In this sense, the decision maker is staying true to what his/her theology says.
I left the PC[USA] after a bunch of changes like this. God as a woman I can maybe tolerate. Once you start wavering on salvation only through Christ, the church has left the building IMO.
Sorry for the aggressive reply, but from my perspective you just said that pointless political signalling which helps no one (and arguably makes a mockery of coherent theology[1]) you can tolerate, but questioning a doctrine (all non-believers will burn in hell[2]) that causes unimaginable psychological suffering and has a strong claim to being the most evil idea that has ever been formulated, you can't.
The hills people will choose to die on, among all the possible such hills, disturb me more than I can describe.
([1] God as a man is obviously metaphysically incoherent if taken literally, but it's easy to interpret as a metaphor. Once you change God to a woman it's much harder to see as intended metaphor, since why would someone make the change if they think it's just metaphorical? It suggests they either view God as a physical being, or are trying to hijack theology to propogate gender ideology.)
([2] or even "merely" permanently destroyed, which compared to hell looks wonderfully humane, but what does it say about Christianity when something that's several thousand times worse than the Holocaust is the humane alternative?)
I don't understand your point. Even non-Christian sources like Tacitus or Flavius describe Jesus as clearly male. It is more or less a historic fact that a man with a similar name was preaching there and got crucified. The faith-based and likely metaphorical aspect is that that man was also god.
I guess the answer to why (non-theologically) that I think of is that Jesus was begotten of God and Mary (and there was no technology to have a child any other way than male/female pairings back then)
Throughout human history and across all cultures, but particularly first century Judea, mothers and fathers have different roles. Fathers strong, protective, authoritative, mothers are soft, nurturing, etc. Jesus is telling us that we should consider our relationship with God to be fatherish rather than motherish.
I can think of other religions with a father-god (Zeus, Odin) but few with a mother-god. Possibly because fathers are expected to be a bit distant whereas mothers aren't. Sometimes the Earth itself is conceptualised as a mother.
"Jesus is telling us that we should consider our relationship with God to be fatherish rather than motherish."
True, but there are also "mothering" elements in what is presented of God, and that comes along strongly in mediaeval versions of devotions around/to Jesus:
This seems to be the correct answer. Even in my childhood, the basic parental setup was that mothers do not punish children, they threaten misbehaving children of telling it to their fathers, who will then administer punishment.
Thus a fatherly god is strict, punishing, tough love.
A motherly god would rather provide free food and heal the sick. Although thinking of it it is interesting Jesus said to have done exactly that! Jesus was very non-manly by the standards of the era, generally forgiving instead of judgemental, caregiving and so on. The only warrior-like act chasing out the money changers etc. actually strange.
Salvation solely through Jesus is *the* central truth claim of Christianity. I don't see any way around that.
There's a saying among several denominations: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty." While I think changing God's pronouns is an eye-roll concession to changing social norms, I'm willing to say it falls into a non-essential category.
I feel like solely comes with an asterisk there; the bible does lay out other ways for the descendants of Abraham to be forgiven of their sins. I agree that it's a mushier point that will get some debate though.
> Salvation solely through Jesus is the central truth claim of Christianity.
No, Christ is the Messiah, and he's gonna come back, bring on the end-times, and whup the collective asses of anyone who doesn't accept his love. That is the central truth of Christianity. 2 Thess 2:8 comes immediately to mind.
Plenty of universalist Christians would disagree strongly with that. At least the ones who haven't been viciously bullied out of the mainstream church and pushed into using some term like "Jesusist" instead of "Christian" because of said bullying.
Again, the fact that pro-choice Christians and pro-transitioning-toddlers Christians seem more tolerated than universalist Christians (at least, while I've seen hatred for the former from mainstream evangelicals, it's absolutely dwarfed by the hatred I've seen for the latter) makes me lose faith in humanity.
(There's a possible motte-and-bailey around "salvation only through Christ", where it could mean that Christ's death saved everyone (or everyone except the absolute most evil and hard-hearted people), or it could mean that everyone who doesn't become a Christian in this life is damned. So wavering on the doctrine could mean saying that Christ wasn't actually metaphysically necessary, or that salvation isn't limited to those who believe in Christ in their lifetime. I suppose it's possible you meant the first, in which case my apologies for my irrelevant response, but based on my experience of these discussions my prior is at least 90% that you meant the second).
I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I do think the gender-neutral language stuff can go too far, but that has been happening from way back.
I'm surprised about the "dump any mentions of Jesus" but then a lot of liberal churches are 'welcoming' to the 'questioning' and maybe they feel that terms like "Jesus" are much too dogmatic for someone not even sure about this whole God thing in the first place. So make it that the songs are changed to be modern and anyone can sing along without having to make a doctrinal statement and everything is good now.
>I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I mean, do you laugh at the suggestion that actually slavery and torturous executions of petty thieves were horifically evil but historical love stories that were too "heteronormative" are...not? Do you laugh at the suggestion that serial rapist-murderers should be treated a fair bit harsher than kids who shoplifted a few candy bars? Because that's the level of moral equivalence we're talking about here.
I don't know if I want to know if you believe in hell. This is something that I try to forget about people, because the alternative is having to face up to the fact that a large number of my fellow citizens and neighbours are sadistic monsters to an unimaginable degree. Like, there's just no way someone with anything resembling a conscience, posessing even the tiniest shred of moral decency or empathy, could believe in that. Right??? I don't know how to interpret your casually dismissive response "kinda laughing" to this issue, but to be honest it greatly disturbs me.
Depends on the denomination, but I think it's a "one funeral at a time" thing. Most clergy seem to develop their basic ideas at seminary. Some move with the times or get mugged by reality - Pope Francis got more liberal over time and Benedict more conservative. But the laity are important too - hymns are often chosen by the music director who may have lived in the parish for decades while priests change every 5 years. Again this person will have got reform-pilled and remain fixed in their views for a while, however sudden and radical it seems when you’re visiting that parish.
The weird truth is they most certainly don't experience it as an ideological shift - they are discovering the true Christianity which empties itself as Christ did on the cross, it's the "rigid" people who want Jesus in the hymns who are the pharisees.
Edit: This article is an interesting take on ultra-reform Christianity. Money quote: "It is not Christian to be Christian"
I know unsolicited parenting advice is hardly ever well-received. Nevertheless... do you think that distraction is the right approach when a child wants something they can't have? I think it's important to teach them to manage their emotions, even at that early an age, and to respect others.
I mean, distraction is one more tool in the box? The amount of emotional energy a parent has, and/or the capacity for self-regulation that kids have, can vary quite a lot, both within- and between-subjects.
But looking at your other comments, you seem very sure that you know the One True Way. I'm reminded of the old adage "teenagers- move out now, while you still know everything!"
Here's an example from the animal realm that captures the crucial distinction. My cats used to jump on my back with their claws out. (They weren't attacking, just treating me like a tree trunk.) When they did I yelled and immediately stood up and shook them off. The yell gave them an unpleasant start, and being shaken off immediately ended their fun. This unpleasant consequence quickly taught them not to jump on my back.
There's another thing they do that I also dislike: Their meowing for attention when I'm concentrating hard on some task on the computer. I don't mind the meowing in other situations. There is no way to teach them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating because they are not capable of recognizing when I'm concentrating. Also, meowing, while not involuntary, is a natural, deeply wired-in behavior they emit a much of the time. Since trying to teach them not to meow when I'm concentrating is impossible, I use distraction to keep them quiet. I give them food puzzles and other distractions.
When it comes to teaching kids to do or not to do something, there's the same principle at work. You can only teach them if they can grasp what the something is, and if they have enough self-monitoring capacity and self-control to refrain from doing the something. Scott's kids are too little to learn and follow the lesson that it is bad to yank things away from your sibling. If he sternly admonishes them or punishes them with a little time out, they will become more uneasy around toys, their sibling, and him, but they will not learn the particular lesson he wants to target.
For 1.5 year olds? Yes. Yes it is. If your kids are older now you may be projecting an ability to reason backwards... That is, my 3.5 year old can, at times, be reasoned with. My 1.5 year old just doesn't have the understanding necessary for that to be a meaningful conversation.
I think people underestimate how much even a one year old understands. But anyway, it's not about reasoning only, it's about learning behaviours. They certainly learn that if you give in every time they shout, they should keep shouting.
So what do you think of my cat example? (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-397/comment/151338000) Am I being too soft on my cats by giving up on teaching them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating? Am I teaching them that meowing when I'm concentrating gets them food puzzles with treats in them?
Yes, I would say you have trained your cats to meow for treats.
But then I am also of the opinion that cats are plenty bright enough to recognise when their humans are working/concentrating. Ours certainly do.
Our cats are mostly silent unless it's for important matters. Persistent, consistent feedback (eg; being silently picked up and locked in the bathroom for a short spell when they are being a pest) has made them somewhat judicious about making unnecessary noise.
Cats mostly use meowing to communicate with humans - it's not something adult cats do with each other very much at all. (It is designed to help mother cat/kitten interactions.) Therefore with very consistent feedback cats can learn when to not do it to us, too.
Contrary to popular belief cats are easily trainable, just not in the same way that dogs are.
Also relevant: our kids were capable of being reasoned with from before the time they could speak clearly. Kids really do understand what's going on from a very young age; it's very much to their advantage for them to be able to do so.
As a household we have found that simple, clear, achievable expectations work wonders with just about everyone.
I think you’re wrong about the nature of my transaction with my cats.
<cats are plenty bright enough to recognise when their humans are working/concentrating.
They probably can if human-is-working predicts something of importance to them. In my case, my being on the computer does not predict anything of interest to them, because generally I am interruptible if they stop by, willing to have them in my lap, still get up and feed them at the usual time, etc. Maybe 10% of the time I am on the computer I am concentrating hard on something, and when in that state I hate noise and interruptions. I am confident that even a close friend of mine would not be able to tell from looking at me at the computer whether I am happily reading something of interest, or concentrating hard on understanding something complicated and important. You think my *cats* can distinguish the 2 states?
<I would say you have trained your cats to meow for treats.
If I have, why has the frequency of strident, I-want-something meowing when I’m on the computer not gone up? I watched one of them learn how to operate a mechanism in one of his puzzles that dropped a treat when he pulled on a certain loop. One day one, he did a bunch of random stuff, and once in a while pulled the loop. Over time he pulled the loop more and more often, and poked at the toy in other ways less and less. Now he pulls the loop the minute he sees that puzzle. But he doesn’t do a loud begging meow the minute he sees me staring at the computer. He continues to do that, mostly just once, on about half the days I’m on the computer a lot.
<Cats mostly use meowing to communicate with humans - it's not something adult cats do with each other very much at all.
That is not the case with my ginger cat. He vocalizes very frequently. I hear him doing it when he’s not in the room with me. I usually know where in the house he is because I hear him making his little noises. My impression is that mostly these sounds are little expressions of emotion — “wow!” “hey what’s *that*?” “ooh, this is nice.” He’s a Devon Rex — maybe they’re more prone to this sort of vocalizing? He does have a distress/needy cry he uses when something is wrong — a series of strident yells that sound like an adult version of lost kitten yells. Does it when he can’t find his buddy, the other Devon. Did it a few times when there was a problem with accessing the litter box. It is definitely not reserved only for communicating discontent to me. He does it sometimes when he's way off in another room.
So I see the loud meows after a long period of being ignored as an expression of distress rather than as a learned way to press a lever in me to get treats. Also, giving the cats a treat puzzle only takes slightly longer than carrying 2 indignant wiggling cats to the bathroom, and is a much pleasanter activity. If giving treat puzzles to distract them was leading to more and more frequent gimme-treats meowing I would certainly stop doing it, but it is not. Seems to me like a good solution that keeps everyone happy.
I think the same about Scott’s handling of toddler struggles over toys. If he’s still using his present methods to handle disputes of that kind next spring, when the kids are clearly able to grasp concepts like sharing, fairness, taking turns, making one’s sibling sad and mad, etc., and when they have a modicum of self-control, then yeah, that’s not good. But he sounds like a careful, thoughtful observer and a good introspectionist, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.
<Our kids were capable of being reasoned with from before the time they could speak clearly
As for your kids, the only possible explanation is that your kids and your parenting are just way smarter and better than Scott’s.
Okay, that's fair - you know your cats much better than I do.
But you asked the question (> Am I being too soft on my cats by giving up on teaching them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating? Am I teaching them that meowing when I'm concentrating gets them food puzzles with treats in them?) and I answered it, based on my own experiences.
We had similar issues with our various cats when they were young, we responded in the ways we thought were best, and now things are quieter. YMMV. That's how it is sometimes.
The science about cat vocalisations being mostly for human benefit once the kitten stage is over is pretty well established though. Check anywhere. https://www.livescience.com/why-cats-meow.html
Our cats have an extensive repertoire of different meows which they use for humans and human related things. They also sometimes meow when there isn't a human around, but that's not typical. Inter-cat communication is mostly silent.
As for my kids, well, YMMV there too. People are different, sometimes from very young ages.
I'm not saying it was particularly sophisticated reasoning, but talking to them early and often and setting clear, reasonable expectations on behaviour did result in enjoyable and cooperative kids - no screaming (as distinct from ordinary crying... but there wasn't all that much of that either) - pretty much from babyhood. There were no 'terrible twos', very few tantrums, and our kids were (and are) fun to be with at any age.
Does it take a lot of thought and work? Yes it does. A lot. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
I have no beef with you, or with Scott; I was just commenting on the experiences of my own household.
Oh, come on! It's a thought experiment. You don't need to be highly familiar with cats to understand it. The relevant point is that cats cannot distinguish between me sitting in a chair relaxed and available and me sitting in a chair concentrating hard on a project. Feel free to substitute any mammal you like except maybe a very smart near-relative of our species like a chimp. The point is that there are a things you cannot teach a non-human mammal to do because it cannot recognize crucial features of the thing you want to teach. In this case, it can't distinguish between a sitting person who is concentrating and needs silence and one who is relaxed and does not object to some noise and attempts at interaction.
Ok right but this isn't applicable to children, for two reasons. First, kids understand more than you give them credit for. Second, what, you think kids hit a certain age, and suddenly you start reasoning with them? It's a gradual process, so you should begin reasoning right from the start. Otherwise, a) you yourself develop bad parenting habits you won't shake off, and b) you won't know when to start.
I'm sure he does not give in every time they shout. If he stops them from doing something dangerous, like standing on the edge of a table, he has to just put up with the yells of frustration. In my experience with very small toddlers you need to stop them from doing what they want to very often, certainly more than once an hour, out of safety considerations alone. If you didn't, they'd be falling off the back of the couch, mouthing plastic spoons they found on the ground outdoors, grabbing cactus plants, etc etc. multiple times per day. He's also tolerating excitement shouting, and frustration shouting at times when he can't figure out what it is the kid wants. So the kids are learning that sometimes shouting gets you want you want and sometimes it does not. That, by the way, is true at all ages, even in adult life, although of course the conditions under which it works and doesn't work follow very complex rules in adult life. I think they're getting the best approximation of the truth that's possible for such young beings.
Also, Scott probably tries to anticipate things that are going to lead to frustration yelling, and intervene before the yelling starts by making sure the kid who is about to be frustrated gets an alternative toy that distracts them. So the kid's experience in that situation is not that yelling gets them what they want but that life is fun and good and wonderful, fascinating things pop up all the time.
So the contingicies are nowhere near as simple as what you sketched in.
In such examples, I would tell the child trying to snatch a toy from their sibling to stop it, and wait for their turn. I am not saying I wouldn't offer alternatives, but I'd have the discussion with them ('you shouldn't want something just because other people have it; you can't take things by force. Wait for your turn - and if you're bored, you can play with X/Y/Z in the meantime').
You expect a 1.5 year old toddler to understand phrases like "by force" and "if you're bored" and "wait your turn"? These kids, shown a book, point to each dog and say "dog." They are not even saying "doggie run" much less things things about dog experience -- "dog scared" or "dog bored." And they are really really far from using words to express some general principle, by saying something like "doggie should wait." No doubt they understand more than they can express, but not THAT much more.
First off, yes, I think they can understand the concept. But even if not, I think it's never to early to start parenting properly! Otherwise, you get into habits that stay even after the children have grown.
Have you considered the possibility that you just had very easy children? I have two, and they are worlds apart in terms of challenge. They just are that way.
I definitely have easy children. But I also think waaaay too many people hide behind the excuse of 'my child is difficult, they're just born this way'. Same way parents stick an iPad on their kids' laps as soon as they board a plane.
Having followed that advice, do you just ignore the now-screaming child, or attempt to keep talking to it in the hope of calming it down? When the child tries to get what it wants anyway, do you physically restrain it, or do you take the thing it wants away, do you shout at the child, or do you do something else?
Scott's kids are within a few days of mine, because I remember reading his announcement post while sitting in the mat ward. And while I know my child at this age can definitely understand and obey simple sentences like "go and give this to mummy", the finer distinctions of "is"-vs-"ought" inherent in "you shouldn't want something" aren't going to land anywhere yet.
Hah I can't quite remember how I handled the worst tantrums - must have blocked it from my memory. I won't lie, I wasn't the best at dealing with proper tantrums, but these were rare, in general my kids wouldn't scream just because they wanted something.
One thing that worked really well for us as parents were to trade places - e.g. if a child threw a tantrum in response to my intervention, my wife was better at calming them down, and vice versa.
But definitely, we wouldn't give in to screaming, and we would take things away if they were triggers for bad behaviour.
The biggest insight I remember from that age is realizing that there is a point when there is no longer any point in trying to correct your child's behavior, and certainly no point in threatening consequences or offering bribes, because they're just *done*. At that point, you just need to contain them and get them into a better situation.
An example of this was my oldest kid when his younger brother was born. After a couple hours at the hospital with lots of unfamiliar noises and smells and scary things happening everywhere and mommy with weird tubes in her, he was just done and needed to be taken home and put to bed/given a nap/allowed to sit and play quietly. Nobody was going to talk him into better behavior with either sweet reason or threatened punishments, because he was just flat past his limits.
Another option is to set up the play space with some toys that are fun to play with together. My 1.5 year olds loved sitting in a circle with a small group and rolling one or more balls to each other.
Also games that everyone can play at once, like digging in a sand box or playing with a pile of duplos work pretty well. This scheme works best if the play space has fewer toys in it that are “extra special”.
Activities like joining forces to catch a parent, or attempt to wrestle a parent to the ground are great for building their team spirit and strategic thinking.
As they get get interested in developing particular skills, like stacking, you can turn this into a cooperative game in which the group is trying to stack a particular tall tower of pillows, and you might need help stabilizing it from different sides.
Oh, and before anyone asks “what happens if one child starts, knocking the tower over before it’s been built to everyone satisfaction?”
One way of dealing with this is to embrace how much fun it is to knock over towers and make it a group activity to build the tower as tall as possible and then when it’s your turn, you’re the one who gets to knock the tower over.
· people of great mind and achievement thereby become famous and get a lot of internet attention, and they also discuss complex, sensitive, and explosive topics, and allow themselves to be vulnerable;
· they consequently become targets of sneer, mockery, and bullying,
· and then their personality sort of changes when they start to associate the sort of outgroup who disagrees with them with sneering bullies;
· and then we lose these people of achievement because they devote their life to fighting some form of outgroup according to their new threat model.
Maybe we as humanity deserve to lose them for not having much stronger norms against mocking genuine openness and vulnerability, but it kinda sucks.
I am reminded a bit of Richard Dawkins, who started out writing great books like The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype and wound up writing terrible books called things like No Really The Earth Isn't Flat You Fucking Idiots because he engaged with his dumbest critics rather than ignoring them.
Just recently I learned about a philosopher publicly criticizing another philosopher for publicly praising Dawkins's Selfish Gene, back at that time. And Dawkins engaged.
What for?
This criticizing philosopher had really crazy views, and would never ever be moved by an article exchange when she didn't even understand his book.
Yeah, Dawkins had two whole lives of being controversial. The second was when he devoted himself to arguing with creationists, the first was when he got attacked by leftists who fundamentally misunderstood what "The Selfish Gene" was about, perhaps confusing it with Ayn Rand's "The Virtue Of Selfishness".
I think that's a valid worry. Even without algorithms nudging us towards furious indignant exchanges, dialog between relative strangers online devolves very easily into a deep, furious feeling of being misunderstood, and a craving to counterattack.. We didn't evolve to discuss sensitive matters under these conditions, you know? For public intellectuals I think it's safer to write books and articles and do a podcast, as someone like Ezra Klein seems to mostly do, rather than engage directly via online forums.
Do you have Scott Aaronson in mind? Because in his case, the cause and effect are reversed, i.e. the ultimate source of his descent into genocidal madness is a deep-rooted persecution complex, not internet bullies or SneerClub (in fact, bullies just became a convenient excuse for him).
Initially I thought he meant Jordan Peterson, he started out as a basic righty telling young men to clean their rooms and got more and more unhinged.
Eh, in my opinion he's no worse than the Free Press, and not nearly as influential. But I'm kind of wishy-washy on the whole Israel thing, honestly. It makes people very angry to bring up, it doesn't divide cleanly into left and right so you can always start fights with it (a perfect scissor statement!), I don't have any special expertise to bear on the situation, and being half Jewish and having frankly right-wing and sadistic natural leanings I don't think my natural inclinations are going to add anything useful.
My opinion of people like Jordan Peterson is that they are frauds, preying on ignorance. "clean your room" is bog-standard Behavioural Activation Therapy, yet he presented it as some genius idea he invented. This generated him a credibility that led to that crowd believing him anything.
Did he say that? I'm actually not that familiar with the guy, but I see his name more than Aaronson's. (Maybe Aaronson's name is very well known in computing--lot of techies here!)
The cognitive-behavioral people redid Stoicism for the 20th century, but I guess they gave credit.
Oh, so it's the 'Western-aligned' thing? I could see that. You could have gotten Biden to pull support and Israel would have folded, you can't do that in Sudan.
I have to say I get 'white man bad' vibes from the whole Palestine movement, which is kind of ironic given how much white nationalists hate Jews!
So if Israel abandoned these trappings and became a full-fledged theocracy without elections and pride parades, would you stop caring about the conflict (or start caring about it to the same extent you care about Sudan)?
More interestingly, do you think that most people that are unhappy with Israel now would lose interest?
I don't know if I can ask anyone to do anything, I'm not the moderator, just the author of the comment, but I think it's best if we don't discuss any specific people here. It's culture-warish (so has a chance to derail discussion) and sorta off-topic (at least, I'd like to discuss the general phenomenon, not the stance of particular people). Also, I'd love to try to approach people with humanity, not discarding anyone, discarding seems like the opposite of what I'm trying to do: to understand, restore the severed communication, to bridge the gap... At any rate, I think it's best to go without personalities now.
Fair enough, Vadim. I posted this example because I feel the description of the process you give in the parent comment is too abstract and simplistic, in fact simplistic enough to be misleading. Behind virtually every case of "someone kind who was radicalized by exposure to internet bullies" is a more complex story (that often paints the person in worse light). The case of SA is one such example - at first glance he fits your general description and thus would invite sympathy, yet in fact the opposite is true (but you need to dig a bit deeper).
I initially assumed that V was referring to SG's recent criticism of SA's politeness policy and labeling that criticism as bullying. But that's fairly weak tea, and I dismissed it.
It has indeed been inspired by said person, who has, in my perception, always been an epitome of kindness and humanity. But I thought it best not to name them: firstly, out of respect and not to turn this comment section into an off-topic discussion of them, and secondly, I have other examples in mind, as well.
Can you explain why do you think a genocide apologist should command respect? Hard to swallow pill: the same person can be an epitome of kindness and humanity in one context and, when triggered, advocate wholesale slaughter in another.
OK. Now I'm really curious. Who's the genocidal apologist? And which genocide are they whitewashing? There have been so many genocides in the 20th Century (and a few in the 21st century) that I could think of dozens of people who'd fit this bill.
Okay, *one* good reason was to last more than several hours without turning this into a discussion of the specific culture war which the discussion of *any* specific example of the phenomenon in post may bring.
If you're too fearful of controversy, then why make this argument in the first place? And why should we be believe you if you can't support your claim with examples? If you think of yourself as a rationalist, you should be able to support your argument with examples. And Truth with a capital T should win out over petty prejudices.
I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology).
I still think I'd rather have the ACX commentariat beside my side, at work, as friends, or God forbid in a foxhole. You guys might get shot first, but Sneer Club seems like the sort to push you into oncoming fire.
> I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology)
A better version of Sneerclub might be worth reading for that very reason, but the actual Sneerclub that exists is a phenomenon entirely of one ideology; specifically it's a bunch of leftists who hate Rationalism because it's not leftism.
By the way, is there really much rationalism left in the commentariat? It's not like we discuss or apply techniques from the sequences, Bayesianism or whatever, isn't the commentariat at this point just a self-selected group of nice (and not-so-nice) like-minded people talking about diverse (and not-so-diverse) things?
At least no one is pulling https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ - that I always found super annoying, and Bayesianism kills that, because the so-called logical fallacies are for Bayesians simply weak evidences.
I've been to a meetup where Scott also was, in Paris. He walked past me, I said hi (even though I don't know him), and he gave me this look like "who the hell is this???", awkwardly waved his hand, and resumed his way :)
The values of the meetup seemed that the people assembled were sufficiently diverse and tolerant of strange ideas as to bring interesting shit into each other's lives. Still, the actual rationalism seems like a nice thing to have had. And, like, Scott's contributions in the form of introducing useful concept handles like "motte and bailey" have also been very nice! Other than that, for a no-labels teetotaler, assembling by political views to drink feels purposeless somehow...
Are you worried about this happening to you, or do you think you're too in touch with reality / had too much exposure to nasty people saying nasty things about you on the internet to be in the high-risk group?
Do you have any ideas about preventing this from happening to you, personally? Other than making the world a gentler place, that is?
(As for me: I hope to not become famous, and I don't consume twitter for the same reasons I don't consume heroine, which I hope protects me somewhat. Otherwise, here's what's been helpful for me personally when I'm bitter and desperate: creating the things that I want to create; and focusing on things of beauty, as well as telling others about them. Maybe I should ask someone that in case I ever become a radicalized crackpot, they should send me one poem a day.)
By my count, in the last five years she's published 8 books, co-written one film screenplay, and served as executive producer for 2 TV shows based on her written work. If anyone's earned the right to get into a few fights on Twitter, it's she.
I mean, yeah, on the one hand it's their failure to protect their epistemology. But on the other hand I think there are circumstances where doing the vulnerable thing is like being pro-social at your own expense, and when you have a large audience, this effect is stronger: you bring greater benefit at a greater expense. "This sucky situation you're not supposed to talk about happens, and people actually speak up about it now, including this famous and successful person. I thought I was the only one! Maybe I'll even discuss it with others when I see ten other people do so". It makes it less scary when you need to talk about something that wants you to be a silent victim; it becomes slightly harder to play the "nobody cares that you have this problem" routine. And in addition, I really do think that derision should be perceived as an unhealthier think than it currently is; it breaks communication and openness, and we badly need them. Rather: we badly need specifically the kind of communication that derision breaks.
The anniversary of the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan has given rise to a lot of debate. I did a podcast with Gary Bass on one of the things that happened next, namely the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Gary is the writer of Judgement at Tokyo which I can’t recommend enough.
As you all know by now the podcast is called Subject to Change (with Russell Hogg) and you should all subscribe. It’s free and advertisement free!
As with the better known Nuremberg trials the tribunal sought to prosecute as a war crime not just the usual atrocities but also the waging of a war of aggression. This was a brand new idea and caused all sorts of problems and led to the massive 1,000+ page dissenting judgement from Judge Radhabinod Pal. His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up. (He didn’t deny that the committing of atrocities could be war crimes).
Anyway here are a few things I learned on the podcast:
- Unlike Germany where the government policy was basically whatever Hitler said, Japan had a genuine cabinet government albeit heavily dominated by the military.
- The decision was made to prosecute all members of the cabinet in place at the time of Pearl Harbor as class A war criminals.
- This was particularly unfair on Shigenori Tōgō who had argued in favour of accepting American demands and against the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- This wasn’t polite demurral on his part. He pretty much had toe to toe shouting matches with the military. And this at a time when resisting the military regularly led to your assassination.
- Anyway much good it did him. Partly because the Japanese had destroyed all the records that the American bombings hadn’t already incinerated he was convicted and died in prison.
- More fortunate was Nobosuke Kishi. He was also part of the Pearl Harbor cabinet. But the trials were split in two and he was scheduled for part 2. Part 1 took so long they gave up on part 2 and let them go.
- Nobosuke Kishi ends up as prime minister as does his more famous grandson Abe Shinzo. Abe was a nationalist and very much regarded the Tokyo tribunal as victors justice and tried and failed to get Japan’s constitution changed to allow it to have armed forces (and not just heavily armed self defence forces!)
- One of the atrocities the Japanese were accused of was the incident at the island of Chichijima. Eight airmen were shot down, captured, executed and then partially eaten. A ninth was floating towards Chichijima in his life raft but was picked up by an American submarine.
- At the time he wasn’t anyone special but his name was George Herbert Walker Bush, later to become president of the United States.
- Many years later Bush attended Emperor Hirohito’s funeral and tactfully said something to the effect of how tremendously moved he was by all the pageantry.
- Judge Pal’s dissenting judgement was and still is much appreciated among the nationalists in Japan. Part of his argument was based on the racism that the Japanese had faced in trying to become part of the community of first rank nations. That made the quote he used to close his judgement slightly unfortunate. Well, not the quote itself but the person who said it - the white supremacist from the Civil War, Jefferson Davis:
When Time shall have softened passion and prejudice,
when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,
then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require
much of past censure and praise to change places.
Anyway that’s just a few bits. Here is the real thing. And Gary Bass’s book is terrific!
>His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up
Note that one chapter of Profiles in Courage is dedicated to Robert Taft's advocacy of that position, which, the book argues, cost him the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.
It is my understanding that the idea of war crimes and the tribunals came from Stalin, and was a tool he was planning to use to eliminate "the officer class" altogether. Evidently, Truman was less keen on the idea than FDR, and so the trials were significantly narrowed, and the use of the death penalty was significantly reduced. This was the first time in history that the idea of "war crimes" was introduced. Before that, defeated enemies were eliminated just because they were defeated enemies, and no legal fig leaf was required.
Well I don’t disagree at all that the military dominated the government nor that everyone (even the emperor) was at risk of assassination if he stood up to them. (Note the attempted coup and assassinations immediately after the decision to surrender!)
But it was genuine constitutional government in a way Hitler’s wasn’t. And there was real debate not least at the time of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and at the time of deciding whether to surrender and on what terms. And Shigenori Tōgō did stand up to the military in cabinet and at great personal risk.
And Togo failed, because the Japanese military did whatever they wanted and didn't listen to civilians or the Emperor or anyone else. (Despite constantly proclaiming their loyalty to the Emperor.) The army and navy even worked against each other because no one had control of both. The army did whatever they thought was best for the army and the navy did whatever they thought was best for the navy.
I admit it was still on sketchy legal grounds - jumping from the concept of a state breaking a treaty i.e. international law to individual criminal liability. Basically the people who started to those wars could not possibly know they could be prosecuted for it. This is in my book illegal, and was a classic case of might makes right. Given that the entire purpose of laws is to prevent violence, they generally break down near truly large-scale violence, such as world wars.
>Japan had a genuine cabinet government
Um look up all the assassinations of the era. Every politician who did not do what the hyper-nationalistic secret societies of officers wanted, got assassinated by them. This was not a genuine government in my book.
An idea for sf world building: sending probes from a simulation to the host world. This would be like a submarine (or a space ship) - everything you sense would be through devices but you could experience the host world.
This could lead to complex plays like sending submarines across two simulation boundaries. From two parallel simulations of from a double simulation to the real host.
Further it could lead to ideas about infinite simulation stacks. Or about what is even a simulation. If you can have peripheral device controlled from the simulation- then you can use it to manipulate the simulation substrate. Then what is really the boundary between the simulation and the host?
I have also a not well formed intuition about our senses and muscles being such peripherals of our brains. Does that make our world the host world?
I have been playing with the idea of hacking the source code of the simulation from inside. I was going to do a short story, but it is metastasizing into a novel. I guess it will have to wait until the novel I am working on now is complete...
You might be interested specifically in this: https://gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html - although in this case the initial probes are made available to the inhabitants of the simulation.
""Home Is the Hangman": A sentient space-exploration robot, lost years before, has apparently returned to Earth. One of its original designers has died under suspicious circumstances. Has the Hangman returned to kill its creators? The hero must find the Hangman and stop it, and time is running out. This story won the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novella."
EDIT: Forgot to quote the relevant bit:
“You can begin by telling me how the early space-exploration robots worked, like, say the ones they used on Venus.”
That‘s not computers, I said, and for that matter, they weren‘t really robots. They were telefactoring devices.
Tell me what makes the difference.
A robot is a machine which carries out certain operations in accordance with a program of instructions. A telefactor is a slave machine operated by remote control The telefactor functions in a feedback situation with its operator. Depending on how sophisticated you want to get, the links can be audiovisual, kinesthetic, tactile, even olfactory. The more you want to go in this direction, the more anthropomorphic you get in the thing‘s design.
In the case of Venus, if I recall correctly, the human operator in orbit wore an exoskeleton which controlled the movements of the body, legs, arms, and hands of the device on the surface below, receiving motion and force feedback through a system of airjet transducers. He had on a helmet controlling the slave device‘s television camera, set, obviously enough, in its turret, which filled his field of vision with the scene below. He also wore earphones connected with its audio pickup. I read the book he wrote later. He said that for long stretches of time he would forget the cabin, forget that he was at the boss end of a control loop, and actually feel as if he were stalking through that hellish landscape. I remember being very impressed by it, just being a kid, and I wanted a super-tiny one all my own, so that I could wade around in puddles picking fights with microorganisms.”
Yeah - I should have asked AI - apparently there are quite a few elaborations on this theme, although not everything fits - the first one it found is kind of different with parallel timelines you don't have all the complexity about host/simulation and controlling actuators.
----
Yep—there’s a rich vein of SF that hits your “sim-pilots + cross-layer probes + stack boundaries” idea. Here’s a tight, curated map with the closest matches first:
### Closest match (teleoperated bodies across layers)
* **William Gibson — *The Peripheral***: people in one timeline “drive” synthetic bodies called *peripherals* in another timeline via a quantum link; it’s basically cross-layer telepresence with gatekeepers and bandwidth politics. The TV adaptation spells it out: Flynne is “piloting a robot (Peripheral) via quantum tunneling” into a future London “stub.” ([Wikipedia][1])
### Nested sims & stack awareness
* **Daniel F. Galouye — *Simulacron-3*** (a.k.a. *Counterfeit World*): early, very on-point tale of a simulated city whose denizens (and their creators) confront the fact of layered realities; directly inspired *The Thirteenth Floor*. ([Wikipedia][2])
* **Greg Egan — *Permutation City***: uploaded minds build their own physics and effectively decouple from the “host,” pushing the idea that substrate control can move *up* the stack. ([Wikipedia][3])
* **Iain M. Banks — *Surface Detail***: societies wage a “War in Heaven” over simulated afterlives (Hells), with actors moving strategies between the real and virtual theaters. ([Wikipedia][4], [WIRED][5])
### Writing to (and hacking) the substrate
* **Greg Egan — “Luminous”** and **“Dark Integers”**: mathematicians discover parts of math/physics are *computationally contingent* and use proofs like exploits to alter reality—practically a manual for “peripherals that write to the substrate.” ([Wikipedia][6])
* **Black Mirror — “White Christmas”**: a copied consciousness (“cookie”) is enslaved to run a smart home—i.e., a sim mind operating host-layer sensors/actuators under harsh time dilation. ([Wikipedia][7])
* **Caprica**: a virtual avatar (Zoe-A) is instantiated into a robot chassis; the show treats the jump from sim to host as an engineering and political problem. ([WIRED][8], [Wikipedia][9])
### Telepresence/peripheral craft (great for your “sim-submarine” feel, even when not full sims)
* **John Scalzi — *Lock In***: “threeps” (teleoperated bodies) with all the social/legal infrastructure around who gets to drive what, and how. Useful for your protocol/port-authority worldbuilding. ([Wikipedia][10])
* **Martha Wells — *Murderbot Diaries***: relentless, practical telepresence (bots, cameras, drones) with bandwidth/latency/security constraints that feel exactly like piloting a hull across a noisy boundary. ([Wikipedia][11])
### Boundary-blur aesthetics (the vibe of layers collapsing)
* **Serial Experiments Lain**: reality and the network interpenetrate; less about robots, more about what counts as the “host of the moment.” Great mood/reference text for your metaphysics. ([Wikipedia][12])
If you want, I can spin this into a mini-syllabus with the **specific chapters/episodes** that best illustrate: (1) bandwidth/latency limits, (2) actuation budgets and vetoes, and (3) stack-aware politics (ports, tariffs, “cut rights”).
Neal Stephenson's Fall, or Dodge in Hell plays in this space a bunch, especially with a late implication that (spoiler warning) the recurring character across several Stephenson books from widely different time periods Enoch Root is in some way a visitor from a higher layer of reality.
Why would the Democrats want to do away with the presidential pardon? Look at what Biden did with his family pardons (especially after saying he wouldn't pardon Hunter). It's too useful a tool to let go, and frankly I don't believe either party contains politicians of sufficient civic virtue to apply the law impartially to their own families/cronies/clients. No Lucius Junius Brutus in office here! (Or anywhere, not to be picking on the USA).
We already have a problem, and the solution to that is "inculcate more virtue" but alas, while the fear of retribution may scare some straight, it's more likely that a loophole or a way around paying the price of doing Bad Thing will be found.
After all, if you consider that you must break a few eggs to make the omelette, then the good ends outweigh the bad means, so you're not really a bad person, so it would be unfair to punish you as though you were a criminal. So find a legal dodge around this, and we're okay!
At the very least, tie up in lawsuits for years and hope that it eventually wears down the prosecution. What, in the end, happened to Bill Clinton after the Starr Report and his impeachment trial? Slap on the wrist suspension of his law licence, the Democrats lost the next election, but he remained a power in the party and hasn't really faced strong consequences of the kind you suggest.
You realize people who have guns can fire them, right? And that many ICE and national Guard people won't want to participate due to their own conservative views and the fear of getting shot?
If you're going to threaten such a scenario, why on Earth is the Presidential pardon the hill you want to die on?
If Dems had "complete control" over all 3 branches then they wouldn't need to work with the GOP at all. They wouldn't issue ultimatums, they'd just amend the constitution themselves. If they didn't have the supermajority needed then the GOP would just tell them to pound sand. Sending ICE after lawful gun owners would never happen because it would backfire specTACularly. The Dems would just be destroying themselves with that move.
It's 3/4 actually, but good point I forgot about that part. For some dumb reason I was thinking that the federal government could do it alone. Either way this is a totally unrealistic scenario.
If I was the Republican leadership I would be absolutely overjoyed.
A literal conspiracy to unconstitutionally imprison gun owners unless the Republicans agree to change the constitution would give the Republicans clout for the next century.
“You’re voting democrat? You mean the party that literally threatened to arbitrarily imprison gun owners unless the constitution was changed for their benefit?”
As if out of the dozens of high level Republicans who would have to be in on the scheme for it to work, not one presented with this offer would immediately go public with it. That person would immediately gain massive political clout, and seen as protecting the constitution from an unfair subversion of our political system.
Why on Earth would Republican *leadership* ever agree to such a deal? They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. I think that privately, behind closed doors, they would be toasting and cheering the folly of their enemies. Consider the issue framed from their perspective:
Option 1: Spend significant political capital to accomplish an end that (at best) gains us no advantage and (at worst) removes a tool that our future leaders can use better than the opposition can.
or
Option 2: The opposition begins a course of action that will make our base just ridiculously, indescribably mad, without hindering their ability to vote in any significant way. This guarantees the next election will be an absolute bloodbath for the opposition, giving us more and more durable power than we could get any other way.
This exactly how the analysis would run if the politicians in question were cynical, self-interested power maximizers. But it's *also* pretty much how the analysis would run if they were fairly zealous believers in their own rhetoric who were genuinely trying to selflessly serve their constituents, as long as they had enough of a consequentialist streak to be willing to accept minor injuries to their now in order to gain large utilities later. The proposed action by the Democrats--assuming it could go anywhere at all through legal challenges and internal opposition--seems like it would cause relatively little harm but an ENORMOUS amount of anger and blowback. I think anyone *unwilling* to make that level of trade-off to get what they want would never have reached national-level political office at all.
I like Pardon power. Most of the Pardon outrage stories were about process crimes, along with a few white collar fraud cases. Tolerating a bit more white collar fraud in order to protect the norm that the incoming administration doesn't throw the outgoing one in prison seems worth it.
Generally speaking the administration doesn't tend to have that power, the judicial does, of course pressure can happen, but if Trump managed to escape jail for four years and become president a second time i don't see a particular administration ever successfully pressuring the courts to condemn the previous administration. As it stands the executive seem to have too much freedom in bending the law, at least internally.
Not to get CW, but Democratic presidents have been happy to make controversial pardons of their own i.e. Hunter Biden, Marc Rich. Executive power has been growing across every administration in the past 50 odd years
Pardons do have some potential for abuse, but the worst abuses of the Trump admin haven't relied on them. I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze. If you have control of all three branches, there's a lot of legal ways Congress could clamp down on the President's power without needing to amend the Constitution.
(I've seen a few interesting concepts for overhauling the President's constitutional powers, but I don't remember enough details to say if they'd be worth forcing through.)
>I think I'm asking what they *should* want, what they should prioritize.
With what purpose? Pardon power allows democrats to pardon some people they want, in exchange republicans pardon some people they want. Both parties win. Why would they deprieve themselves of this?
One might want to do this for justice and to have a more accountable system and what not, but that's just not in the interest of either party.
Neither side (or most of the public) has any interest whatsoever in curbing presidential power. That's not just a thing that most people think should happen. Everyone loves to complain with how their political opponents use that power, but they don't hate it enough to give it up when they have it.
-edit- and furthermore, any party that _was_ willing to curb presidential power when they controlled the federal government almost certainly wouldn't need to blackmail the out-of-power party into going along with it, because despite liking the power when they have it, both parties are nothing but short-term thinking, and seeing your opponent, who is in power and you can't do anything about it, give up that power is exactly the kind of short term win that both sides would take.
Short term thinking both makes such a deal unthinkable and also, if it came about, would make your "deal" scenario unnecessary.
I'm terribly sorry, I'm confused. I don't know what you wrote and what I'm reading is a mishmash of various CW points that...do not intersect in a way I find comprehensible.
This would be like Republicans delivering an ultimatum that the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF unless the Democrats join with Republicans to overturn the Commerce Clause.
Like...what are you trying to get at? Did I miss something? Why do we care about pardon powers? Why are we deporting white people to Uganda?
"the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia"
While I would certainly vote for a party running on that platform, mature recollection makes me reconsider: what have the Mongolians done to us, that we should inflict such destruction on them?
> Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF
Ah, I think I see the source of confusion: you're probably thinking of the the modern country of Mongolia – which of course would make no sense – instead of INNER Mongolia, the Chinese province.
"Should they" in what sense? In the sense of "what's the right thing to do" or the sense of "what would further their agenda the best"?
In the sense of the right thing to do: yes, Democrats should eliminate the Presidential pardon. And so should the Republicans. Neither party actually will though, since it's not in either party's interest -- politicians care much more about getting themselves and their buddies pardoned than they care about ensuring that the other party's buddies don't get pardoned.
In the sense of the right thing to do, should they go after illegal guns? Yes, of course they should, they're illegal. But I think you'll find that it's not the rural white gun owners who are most likely to have illegal guns. I remember Trump suggesting a "stop and frisk" policy to find illegal guns, and the Democrats didn't like that.
Ah right. Perhaps your question would have been clearer if instead of making it about the Democrats you made it about a hypothetical "Good Governance" party.
In this hypothetical, I would say that the hypothetical Good Governance party should seek to lead by example rather than strong-arming whatever remains of the old parties into supporting constitutional reforms.
Have any Republicans strongly committed to opposing presidential pardons? Is there evidence that members of the party hold that view? My quick Google search shows no solid stance.
I can't speak for all Republicans but having the pardon handled consistently is more important than whether it's legal or not. Like, as long as Paul Manafort AND Hunter Biden both go to jail or both get pardoned, that's the key thing.
But, like, you assume Republicans want X (authoritarian power), if they want X therefore they must care deeply about Y (unrestricted presidential pardons) but is there actually evidence that we really want Y?
Can the top-down R party leadership credibly accept that bargain? Even if the factional split between "go to hell liberal scum", "nothing that could hurt Dear Leader retroactively", and "guns and low taxes" could be resolved, I flatly don't think that a selection of their top-level leadership chosen to hear this could be small enough to keep it secret and big enough to keep the legislatures of the necessary states in line.
The reasonable move if this ultimatum is issued is to either a) play for time until the D majority passes or b) leak the offer to make political hay until the D majority passes, and then after that break the institutions further and try to inflict existential damage. This is scary territory.
I think for the Democrats to make clear to the meanest intelligence that everything the Republicans have been saying about them for decades was entirely true would be a mistake.
You have, but that's possibly my fault: no, I think politics is now war to the knife (and I don't know if it was ever otherwise), but I don't consider the Democrats have in fact been taking this high road you think they have been. The reason I wouldn't issue this ultimatum you propose if I were on their side is that I think it would redound to the Republicans' benefit.
"To mend the executive branch so that it can't operate without fear of retribution?"
My snarky rejoinder to that is, if they want to remove fear of retribution, they shouldn't have engaged in all the lawfare against Trump. If your rationale for pardoning your screw-up son with a blanket pardon is "he might be dragged into court at some undefined time in the future in a tit-for-tat revenge ploy by the GOP", then perhaps your party and their affiliates shouldn't have tried digging out any and every stupid casus belli (e.g. the NY fraud thing about the mortgage).
I think very few people believe this is/was an unprejudiced application of pure justice and not more about career-building opportunities (Ms. James seems to have made a publicity campaign out of 'we're going after the big fish' not limited to Trump) and partisan axe-grinding:
"New York v. Trump is a civil investigation and lawsuit by the office of the New York Attorney General alleging that individuals and business entities within the Trump Organization engaged in financial fraud by presenting vastly disparate property values to potential lenders and tax officials, in violation of New York Executive Law § 63(12)."
"The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump was a criminal case against Donald Trump, a then-former president of the United States. Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments made to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels as hush money to buy her silence over a sexual encounter between them; with costs related to the transaction included, the payments totaled $420,000. The Manhattan District Attorney (DA), Alvin Bragg, accused Trump of falsifying these business records with the intent to commit other crimes."
In the first case an appeals court has already upheld the conviction but thrown out the penalty as being excessive. The second case smells worse. He did in fact violate campaign finance rules by doing what he did but still...
I think you have a hard time making a case that the Mara Largo papers case was lawfare, given how hard the government tried to get him to return the papers before finally pulling the trigger on that. The case in Georgia was also quite sound and was only brought to the ground by discrediting Fanny Willis completely.
There is also a pretty good record of Trump and his inner circle trying to find ways to subvert the 2020 election. To my mind the lawfare here was Trump running the clock out until he got re-elected and became immune.
It’s all a dead cat down the river, but it prickles me to see this term Lawfare slowly settling into fact just because it’s repeated so often.
The Georgia case tickles me because Willis set herself up for all the pie-in-the-face consequences. Chase a big political case for kudos (and presumably to boost re-election chances https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2024/11/06/fani-willis-fulton-district-attorney-election-result), put your honey-bunny in charge because what good is being in power if you can't throw some largesse to your boo?, allegedly spend taxpayer money on the pursuit of love, and then it all comes out because your pookie-bear is trying to hide marital assets from his missus in a bitter divorce.
I mean, whatever the merits of the original case, this kind of behaviour on the part of the prosecutor is going to taint *everything*.
With respect, there is a lot of misinformation in this post. I paid a lot of attention to this case and it was really distorted how it was reported and understood. Tell me how many lawyers hire other lawyers to work on a case that they don’t know.? their relationship had zero effect on the case itself. It’s not like they were working for different sides and sleeping together at the same time. There was never a question of taxpayer being involved, but it was a good rumour to float. Those guys in Florida got away with murder. That’s Lawfare for you.
But, those are not Democratic priorities, especially given that most examples of executive overreach or actions underlying democracy are not criminal. Hence, eliminating the pardon wouldn't do much to address the issue. In contrast, gun control very much is Democratic priority, and has been for years. Why give it up for so little?
Ok this is dumb and meta but it seems as though likes on comments are supposed to be blocked for this Substack? But I have gotten likes on comments and even had the ability to like a comment within my notifications page if it replied to me. I think on pc there may be more ways.
The last thing is that the most liked comments are possibly still most prominently displayed so the attempt to block likes here may be having an overall undesirable effect.
There are still ways to like comments, yes, but they're sorted chronologically.
There is a ranking to the comments that puts top two at the bottom of the article before you open full comments.
Random covid-related thought:
I've long thought of our not-so-great response to covid as stemming from two parallel causes:
a. Hidden instutituional rot and dysfunction.
b. The rise of extremely effective consensus-enforcing mechanisms on Twitter and in traditional media in the 2010s-2020s.
Each of those played a part. A good example of (a) was us having a respiratory pandemic show up and find us with no stockpiled PPE, because we'd built one up in the mid-2000s but then not maintained it. I still remember being urged to give the handful of N95 masks I had at home to some donation site to hand them to medical personnel, since health departments, hospitals, and the like simply couldn't be arsed to prepare for a known risk whose danger was a lot of the reason those agencies even existed. (I, being the evil shitlord I am, kept the masks.)
I feel like everything in media/social media during that time showed off (b). Early on, all right thinking people knew that covid was a silly thing to worry about, get a lot of these weirdo geeks wearing masks in public, racism is the real virus, etc. Sometime after that, the consensus shifted and you were a horrible murderer of grannies if you didn't mask (but the masks that might help were not available, because of (a), so tie a bandana around your mouth and pretend) or if you, say, wanted to go to church or visit your parents or whatever.
All those consensus-enforcement mechanisms got going in keeping just about everyone on-message. One part of this was turning factual questions or questions of sensible tradeoffs into moral crusade type questions, in which you were either one of us or one of the bad guys. It became easier to see that when the Summer of Floyd started, and we got that bizarre whipsaw thing where suddenly the enforced consensus went from "public protests or even going to your grandma's funeral is monstrous and crazy risk taking" to "public protests are good and if you oppose them you are a racist POS."
When consensus enforcement mechanisms become very powerful, one thing that does is to make truth-seeking harder. As best I can tell, I ended up with a pretty coherent and accurate understanding of the risks and likely mitigations of those risks of covid, but that wasn't the social consensus or the guidance anyone got. Rational discussion of the right tradeoffs was hard to come by during covid, and most mainstream/prestige sources were mainly engaged in yelling at/ridiculing people and engaging in moral condemnation. My intuition is that this made our covid response a lot worse overall.
These two together also wrecked much of the reputation of the sort of institutions who are supposed to help nonspecialists understand complicated issues like how to avoid a novel virus. Your scientific society puts out obvious bullshit about sex differences, but I'm supposed to trust it about vaccine safety?
We will be paying the bill for that damage for a long time to come.
As far as I know, there was no increase in COVID cases after the George Floyd protests, so any experts who said "yes, you can go to a protest if it's outdoors and you mask up" were actually correct.
(Also, if I had a nickel for every recounting of COVID that pretends that the Republicans had no agency during the crisis and were simply forced to reject scientific consensus out of spite, I'd have enough for a nice meal.)
Cases went from 700k in June 2020 to 2.1MM in August 2020, so there was a large jump. Even if the outdoor protests themselves didn't spread too much covid, obviously 20 million people travelling to cities, carpooling, staying on friends' couches, going to restaurants would cause an enormous amount of spread.
Or, conversely, if the protests and travel involved didn't cause any increase, then there was clearly never any value in lockdowns at all.
Seems kinda hard to make that guidance consistent with the guidance a week earlier, though.
The Science changed, bigot!
In May 2020 the guidance was still evolving so fast that it would be hard to make *any* two weeks consistent. That said, I don't recall my state banning anyone from going to funerals.
EDIT: But also, the more important point is, if you believe that people thought the scientific establishment was lying and making up excuses why the protests were safe, surely learning that the protests were in fact safe should change your opinion?
> But also, the more important point is, if you believe that people thought the scientific establishment was lying and making up excuses why the protests were safe, surely learning that the protests were in fact safe should change your opinion?
The "scientific establishment" wasn't so much lying as making pronouncements with a degree of uncertainty unjustified by the actual data.
It seemed very clear to me that the only thing that changed was the political valence of the protests, not any kind of new information. One week the advice was that protests (largely against lockdowns or masking) and public gatherings like a big biker rally in South Dakota were bad, the next week it was that the mass protests were good.
It's good that they finally converged on guidance that maybe big outdoor public gatherings weren't so bad after all, because it does seem like that was better than the previous guidance. But the explicit explanation they gave for why was nothing to do with science, it was that the cause of the protests was important ("racism is also a public health crisis").
This did not and does not make me think those folks (a subset of public health experts who got media attention for their declaration, which may or may not have been representative of the field) are a good source of information about technical questions that are in any way tangled up in politics or ideology.
This also coincided with most prestige media in the US suddenly all being on the same page wrt an ideology of race that almost none of them had ever mentioned before. That honestly reminded me of how US media fell into near-perfect lockstep after 9/11.
Thank you for documenting this history. I had forgotten about the preceding biker rally.
I'm inclined to agree that outdoor activities like protesting and biking were never a significant risk, but that all the indoor activities one does when traveling were a significant risk.
And the criticism of those mass events did not distinguish based on those physical factors but, as you say, whether the ambiguous amount of risk was for a good enough cause du jour.
I love R1’s responses so much (unironically).
From the chain of thought when I asked it to use function calling to access my medical records and generate a summary…
“ I need to convey the implications without causing panic.”
Thanks, R1; you thought I wasn’t reading the CoT.
The conversation with a real doctor over the same data went something like this:
Me: That sucked, actually.
Cardiologist, looking at a pile of scans: yeah, I’ll bet it did.
I was looking into the malaria net charities a bit and I found out that many malaria nets are treated with pesticides. Is there any concern that these pesticides may cause issues for the people sleeping under malaria nets?
It seems straightforward to me that this sort of prolonged exposure to insecticides would probably lead to increased rates of cancer and possibly other negative health effects. Is the idea that these health effects are not as significant when compared to the extreme negative effects of contracting malaria? Or is there something I'm missing which makes the exposure to pesticides involved a nonissue?
Using nets or clothing impregnated with permethrin is pretty safe, actually. Much safer than getting Dengue fever or malaria, certainly.
DDT is much riskier since it’s lipophilic and bioaccumulates.
It's a concern that I've considered as a layperson and donor, yes.
I certainly try to minimize exposure to pyrethroids/permethrin (which is what I assume the most likely pesticide used is) for myself and my family. They're linked to bad health stuff.
But I find it very likely that, as you say, these health effects are not as significant when compared to the extreme negative effects of contracting malaria.
I would use a treated malaria net for either short or long term, if I were visiting or living somewhere with malaria.
Virtually all bednets are treated with insecticide; without that, the nets quickly lose their effectiveness due by developing small holes large enough for a mosquito to climb through. Their effectiveness heavily depends on the insecticide, to the point that mosquitoes’ insecticide resistance is a major concern.
GiveWell does address some potential downsides of net distribution, though they don’t discuss insecticide exposure directly.
https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets/July-2021-version#Possiblenegativeoffsettingimpact
Scott could try training the more cunning twin to do the same decoy trick he uses. Delegation
Disappointing to see Scott write yet more articles in favour of genetic selection without addressing any of the really salient issues. Such as:
- It is foreseeable that what parents want for their children is not necessarily what children would want for themselves.
- It is foreseeable that what capitalism/states/ideologues want for their children is not necessarily what children would want for themselves. We could be creating a race of unhappy compulsive workers that self-destruct after 50-some years.
- It is foreseeable that there will be race-to-the-bottom dynamics w.r.t. traits that confer a relative advantage but not an absolute one, such as Americans' ridiculous obsession with male height.
- Have you seen what happened to dogs?
Instead he's going for the really easy stuff like "aren't embryos persons" and "if you want to prevent disabled people from coming into existence isn't that insulting to disabled people?" really just rehashing the abortion debate for the millionth time, just like last time, by the way, with the "Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent" post that was also very much besides any ethical point there might be.
Okay, but literally everything you listed already happens with natural selection, including the races to the bottom. This is usually not a problem, because those genetic dead ends will simply die out. Perhaps this will just speed up the process.
It is also forseeable that what random genetic selection will provide to children, is not necessarily what the children want.
Meanwhile, when we actually *ask* parents, what they mostly want is for their children to be healthy, smart, and beautiful, in roughly that order. If I have to bet, I'm going to bet on parental love rather than random chance giving better results.
In some cultures, parents also particularly want their firstborn child at least to have a penis, which could cause problems if it persists when penis-havers become a significant majority. That does bear some thinking about.
"Capitalism" seems unlikely to care except insofar as what they can get parents to pay for, which see above. And ideologues in any non-authoritarian state aren't going to have much say in the process. An authoritarian state, yes, might have perverse incentives when planning the next generation's genetics. Don't let Chairman Yang meddle with your kids' DNA if you can help it. But that authoritarian state is also not going to give the slightest damn what Scott Alexander says, or what anyone who ever read Scott Alexander says.
I once saw some survey saying that if parents could select their kids personalities, they would choose agreeable extroverts overwhelmingly. Now that sounds quite pleasant, but I worry about the failure modes when you don't have disagreeable neurotics around actually making sure things work.
> ideologues in any non-authoritarian state aren't going to have much say in the process.
Seems too optimistic. The ideologues have their followers, and the followers may design their children accordingly to the ideologues' advice. I can easily imagine feminists making their daughters more bossy and their sons more shy, or religious people making their children more obedient and less open-minded.
In the coming years we will become able to micromanage lots of things that up til now have been determined by various natural processes. But I don't see any reason to think we are going to get wiser, and even if some individuals are wise about using our new powers the mass of us is pretty ungovernable, and will prevent the wise from implementing smart guidelines. And many tech advances will empower dumb and short-sighted people to do harmful shit they think is a good idea, or fun, or a satisfying piece of revenge.
Genetic selection is a case in point here, but there are many similar things -- new and astounding recreational drugs for instance. Looks to me like our species is going to just find new ways to be the tragic, gifted, mess it always has been. We are “charming dirty and doomed.”
At least recreational drugs have the advantage that the person doing the choosing is the person who receives most of the effects - unlike with genetic modification.
Mmmm -- not exactly though. At least not if the parents are doing genetic selection, rather than modification. If it's just selection, then the person born started out as the person-to-be with the genes they later have at birth. The only part of the person's fate the parents chose was that this person-to-be would become a person.
>It is foreseeable that what capitalism/states/ideologues want for their children is not necessarily what children would want for themselves. We could be creating a race of unhappy compulsive workers that self-destruct after 50-some years.
Thankfully this abstraction called "capitalism" is not allowed to make these decisions, people are. "Ideologues" is another word for "parents." Maybe mind your own business?
>It is foreseeable that there will be race-to-the-bottom dynamics w.r.t. traits that confer a relative advantage but not an absolute one, such as Americans' ridiculous obsession with male height.
It's no more ridiculous than men's obsession with female beauty. If parents want their kids to be tall and beautiful who am I to judge?
Expert trap introduces a new framework explaining why, as we learn, our knowledge tends to disconnect from other disciplines, accumulate errors, and become increasingly corrupt. I map how several established cognitive biases combine into a broader mechanism and then outline strategies to course-correct.
https://open.substack.com/pub/sysiak/p/expert-trap?r=1r8dq&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for sharing. Here's my perspective: most people become good enough in their profession by learning established facts and procedures, under the guidance of senior colleagues, and putting what they've learned into practice many many times - 10K hours and beyond. Innovation is driven by a mixture of curiosity, market forces, fashion and staff turnover. Why should we expect more from Science? Because it's supposed to rescue us from superstition so we expect too much from it.
My mom's neighbor's primary language is Mandarin, but if I understand her English correctly, her husband is making homicidal and/or suicidal statements. Her husband's primary language is English, and, to my understanding, he has refused counseling. I reached out to a couple of suicide hotlines that claimed to have Mandarin speakers, but I've heard nothing back. This seems to be more of a women's crisis situation, and I'm not sure suicide hotlines will be able to help her. Does anyone know of any women's crisis centers with Mandarin speakers in the East SF Bay area? ChatGPT seems to be giving suicide hotlines instead.
Hey, I hope you'll give us an update when you have one.
I texted her the number for the Asian Women's Shelter without any note except "here's the number you wanted." Not sure if her husband is monitoring her phone.
I was pretty shocked that after reaching out to five different crisis hotlines, the only one that picked up was the non-local one (the National Women's Crisis Hotline). I left messages at two, and they never got back to me. And two never picked up, and they had no way to leave messages. The National Women's Crisis Hotline recommended the AWS as one of the resources I should try. I decided not to call them, since I wasn't sure if it was because I was a man that I wasn't getting call backs (after all, I'm sure they get all sorts of harassment from wackos, Christianists, and the like).
My girlfriend suggested I go down to my town's police department. I didn't think that was a good idea. I could imagine all sorts of escalating repercussions if the cops showed up at her door to do welfare check. It would alert the husband that his wife was seeking help, and possibly escalate the situation. Unless she had a way to get an immediate restraining order, she'd be in greater danger.
It's very discouraging to me that the crisis hotlines were so unresponsive, though. I can't help but wonder if the current woke-suppression policies of the Trump administration are having direct or indirect effects on these services.
Call your mother's city council office, state assembly member's office, state senator's office, or congressperson's office. All have constituent services personnel whose job is to assist with exactly these sorts of questions.
Why are you checking with ChatGPT instead of using a regular search engine? Seems like a massive waste of time, given how unreliable the various AIs are.
I use it a lot for practical things, and find it way more helpful than a search engine. Acting on the advice or info I get usually also functions as a check on accuracy, because in the process of doing the practical thing I end up going to the sites GPT recommends. If that's not going to happen I often do a quick check, and so far have not discovered any inaccuracies. I think the risk of hallucination may be lower for this kind of thing because these are just searches, which GPT is good at. I seems to hallucinate mostly when you ask it something it is not able to answer
It Is *great* for finding info on godawful complex badly-set-up sites. I recently had to find out how to bill someone who has Medicare + a certain Medicare supplement. There were some unusual features of their situation that kept them from fitting into one of the usual boxes that the relevant sites do show you how to bill for. So I wrote the equivalent of about *2 typed pages* about the patient's billable status and what I had found at the Medicare and supplement sites, and what the dilemma was, and what had not worked to solve the problem and what info I needed, and asked it to hunt up the relevant info on the 2 gigantic, multilayered bureaucratic sites with useless search functions. And it found them both immediately. (Even GPT itself complained about the Medicare site. Said the relevant info was not on a web page, but on a pdf that was named on one of their web pages.)
Thanks for the explanation!
I've seen a lot of folk complaining a lot here about hallucinations, and my feeling is - pretty much any hallucinating at all renders the whole thing useless (plus I hate ChatGPT's style/voice, and visual AI slop, and, and and).
But it sounds like it has a few narrow use cases, like general searches.
None of the phone numbers or websites that ChatGPT gave me were hallucinations. I used a slightly different wording from Eremolalos when I queried it though, and I got a bunch of suicide hotlines. I've since re-queried using the terms "domestic violence or abuse hotlines" and got a list of real organizations. Unfortunately, I didn't reach anyone at 4 out of 5.
Apropos using LLMs for research, on the whole, LLMs are very useful at synthesizing vast amounts of information. Specific links can still be a bit dodgy. And subjects for which they don't have a lot of training data may cause them to hallucinate answers (sorry, I can't think of an example of this, but I've seen that behavior before).
https://www.sfaws.org
Asian women's shelter
24-Hour Crisis Line:
1-877-751-0880
Contact Us
Asian Women’s Shelter
3543 18th Street #19
San Francisco, CA 94110
Business Line: (415) 751-7110
Fax: (415) 751-0806
info@sfaws.org
Got this from GPT. Double-checked to make sure this shelter was real. GPT recommended other places too. Here's the whole response: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b79995-851c-8008-95b1-2069dfb5a429
That was one of the orgs I have on my list to call if the two closer ones don't call me back.
Looked again at GPT response and it sounded like the AWS was also good for referring people quickly to Mandarin-speaking resources. “Next Steps: Call the Asian Women’s Shelter at 1‑877‑751‑0880 to explain the need for Mandarin support—they can help or refer you quickly.”
Maybe just have her talk with Asian Women’s Shelter, and if she’s comfortable with them send her there via Uber? You can order the Uber on your account if she is not up to dealing with Uber
I don't know if she's looking for an exit strategy. I just want her to be able to talk to a Mandarin speaker who can advise her without her husband understanding the conversation. And the AWS could probably do that without her needing to get into SF.
A helpful person at National Domestic Violence hotline gave me a couple of orgs that could help. Left voicemails at both. But, sadly, I can't get a live person at any of the suicide or crisis hotlines I called. I had no idea how dilatory the hotline resources are for people in need!
Yeah, comes as a shock, doesn’t it?
I hope she gets help. It’s good of you to help.
Mormons, alone among American Christians, have some awareness that going back to the Good Old Days when people took faith seriously might mean their religion becomes persecuted again. Let's hope Twitter reminds them:
https://x.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1962895679329906794
The guy who posted the vid of the Book of Mormon getting thrown in the trash is a character you may remember from a month ago, who gave us this gem:
"Better to marry a former OF model who has come to know the depths of her sin and the mercy of the Lord, than an unkissed virgin with a haughty look and a proud heart."
https://x.com/Protestia/status/1952885489582641433
Religious persecution is a US tradition! In the Colonial era, it was Quakers, Baptists who were persecuted in New England, and Catholics were persecuted in the South. In the 19th century, it was the Mormons and Catholics who were persecuted. In the 20th century, it was the Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostals who were the persecuted. And let's not forget the FLDS sects during the 20th century, up to this day. And Native American beliefs have been discriminated against at the Federal level. Of course, Jews have always been on the persecution list. And now that we have a noticeable Muslim population, they're receiving a lot of hate their way.
>Religious persecution is a US tradition
Yes, and apparently everyone came here to get away from that sort of thing.
Well, there were other reasons Europeans left Europe, such as famine and wars. The Irish potato famine and the political unrest in 1840s Germany (IIRC), drove those waves of immigrants to the US. Religious intolerance has driven European history. It's not surprising that it bled over into the US. Of course, the Right is trying to stifle the teaching of a US history inclusive of its warts. Subjects like religious intolerance, slavery, and civil rights are on the cutting board in the name of anti-wokism.
Yeah, there's always other reasons, but they tend to get merged with religious differences. There were a lot of tribes with their own gods back in the day and they argued with each other.
It's also good cover for taking over someone else's territory. It's an organizing principle.
>Religious persecution is a US tradition! In the Colonial era, it was Quakers, Baptists who were persecuted in New England, and Catholics were persecuted in the South. In the 19th century, it was the Mormons and Catholics who were persecuted. In the 20th century, it was the Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostals who were the persecuted. And let's not forget the FLDS sects during the 20th century, up to this day. And Native American beliefs have been discriminated against at the Federal level. Of course, Jews have always been on the persecution list. And now that we have a noticeable Muslim population, they're receiving a lot of hate their way.
Eh, the claims of persecution get more and more dubious the further you go through that paragraph. Colonial America featured much religious persecution, the Mormons were outright expelled from the entire state of Missouri, and Grant expelled the Jews, though his order was almost immediately countermanded. After that it was mostly private discrimination and opprobrium, not persecution by the state.
You say that with such assurance that I doubt you actually researched your response. But I'd highly recommend you check out what the search engines, LLMs, and Wikipedia have to say before you make general statements of opinion about this subject.
Let's take a couple of examples...
Catholics: The Nativist and Know Nothing movements of the mid-19th Century promoted violence against Catholics — examples: the Charlestown Convent burning (while law enforcement looked on). Bloody Monday in Kentucky. Philadelphia's anti-Catholic riots. In the early 20th century, the Klan targeted Catholic churches alongside blacks and jews. In Oregon, the 1922 Compulsory Education Act shut down Catholic schools, but was overturned by the courts. And anti-Catholic sentiment was strong enough in the US that the question of whether a Catholic (JFK) was qualified to be US President was taken seriously by the media of the day.
Jehovah's Witnesses: kids expelled from public schools for not reciting the pledge of allegiance. Mob violence against Witnesses and their places of worship were torched in the early 1940s. This happened in states all across the US after the Gobitis ruling from SCOTUS (which ironically upheld the pledge being made mandatory, but mobs vented their anger against Witnesses for daring to challenge the law and being un-American). Witnesses were imprisoned, some for decades, because Witnesses refused military service in both World Wars. Thousands were imprisoned as conscientious objectors. And some Witness parents lost custody of their children when some courts claimed the faith was harmful.
I wouldn't call any of these claims dubious.
An open questions/potential nugget of wisdom from the mines of Predictive Coding…
Tankers of ink have been spilt about the Dark Room Problem. This asks: if the goal of any living system is to minimise uncertainty (or ‘surprise’), then why don’t all living systems occupy closed, lightless rooms, where nothing unpredictable can happen?
Many people far cleverer than me have already pretty well concluded that there isn’t actually a problem here. Friston, for once, puts it very pithily: ‘there’s something surprising about being in a dark room, because we don’t expect to be dark rooms’. The very fact that ‘being stuck in a dark room’ means ‘not knowing what’s happening in the world outside’ could also mean that dark rooms are net negative in terms of minimising prediction error.
But my question is — can’t you very fruitfully read addiction as an object lesson in implementing a dark room processing strategy? Here, you don’t try to eliminate prediction error/perceptual input altogether; instead, you define drug-seeking and drug-taking behaviour as the only relevant parts of perceptual input. This ensures that you only occupy cognitive territory where it’s easy to minimise prediction error.
I guess this’d also make sense of the finding — which I’ve always vaguely ascribed to, ‘erm, uhhh, trauma or something’ — that being abused as a child massively raises your liability to addiction.
Going out on a limb here: it wouldn’t surprise me if we have something like series of high-level priors related to the degree of ambient unpredictability that’s reasonably expected. Childhood abuse can shift these priors towards ‘expecting unpredictability and danger everywhere’, which in turn raises your liability to addictive processing styles.
(To be quite clear, I’m not aware of any literature cross-referencing addiction and PP, so this is little more than educated guesswork.)
What do you all think?
I think what's missing is that surprise minimization needs to be paired with a truth-seeking drive. Otherwise, yes, an animal has every reason to hijack its perception with drugs/wireheading. And yes, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if addiction and trauma were related via PP. In other words, "the dark room" criticism is actually too specific. Because the dark room could also be replaced with a self-imposed Matrix, where everything always goes according to plan.
If you define "truth-seeking" as "invariance seeking" as a way of ensuring that the map really does match the territory (e.g. doing the autistic thing where you flip a light-switch 10,000 times in a row, just to make sure the causal relationship between the ambient lighting and the switch is iron-clad), and add that on top of PP, the dark-room problem solves itself.
>the goal of any living system is to minimise uncertainty (or ‘surprise’)
I don't know how you go anywhere from this premise without asking yourself "then why does no living organism do so?". Human notoriously loves surprises and uncertainty, the smallest proof of that is how much people dislike spoilers, but pretty much every creature I can think of seems programmed to seek the unknown if necessary.
I think you’re right. The fundamental state of the sort of trauma you describe is fear which is maximum unpredictability. A child cannot fight an abusive parent nor can he flee from them. Thet leaves freeze which is another way of saying paralysed by fear.Check out my blog for a case history if you are interested.
I think that "the goal of any living system is to minimise uncertainty (or ‘surprise’)" is a bad approximation of what drives humans, and "there’s something surprising about being in a dark room, because we don’t expect to be dark rooms" is an arbitrary kludge to make the data fit the theory.
I think that predictive processing has a lot to be said for it, I just don't think it's a one-stop shop that explains everything.
Nor is the predictive processing necessarily rational.
All the important bits aren’t.
Some kind of directive must have gone out and the Dem governors are tweeting repurposed 4chan memes now:
https://x.com/NYGovPress/status/1962910066568290398
Right idea, not the best execution.
VvC broke containment over half a decade ago, at this point it's in the meme backdrop.
I am less certain this is the right idea. This strategy seems to hew closely to what the maxim about not wrestling with a pig warns against.
If this is what they come up with, Trump is going to absolutely crush them in a meme war. In fact, he probably doesn't even have to, this is seriously lame stuff.
I think they have a lot of good will by being the "adults in the room" - if, you know, they actually tried doing that.
I wonder if the governors will try goatses next.
I'm not sure there's anything worse, at all, in the world, than people not realizing that the chad in that meme is supposed to be at least equally ridiculous as the virgin.
I'm not sure if the correct way to put it is "equally ridiculous to virgin". Rather, chad is the *exact opposite* of the virgin to the ridiculous degree, ie. his every feature is the opposite of the stated virgin features (https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/265/329/e83.png). The virgin is a normie, the chad is not even a stereotype but literally only exists in relation to the virgin.
You don’t think shitting yourself in Mexico is worse?
No, I don't. This is even worse than trying to own a porch in Detroit.
I ran into an article saying that they'd discovered something about misophonia:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/misophonia-might-not-be-about-hating-sounds-after-all
"Misophonia Might Not Be about Hating Sounds After All
"The phenomenon triggers strong negative reactions to everyday sounds but might come from subconscious mirroring behavior."
It's reprinted from Scientific American, but it contains links to the academic publications. So there might be something to it.
Also, I was wondering if the psychic doom-loop that seems to be involved in misophonia and other obsessive phobias might be present in anorexia, directed toward food or eating.
Seems to me what the researchers in the SA article found was not a cause of misophonia, but part of the process itself. The person whose brain is being observed is unusually attentive to mouth sounds because they bother him and make him angry. I’ll bet scanning people
who are observing something that interests them a lot — say tennis fans watching a tennis match — would show they have stronger mirroring in the parts of their brains that are activated by playing tennis.
I don't think so. I have ave treated a number of anorexics, and they do not feel an aversion to food, they feel a terror of being fat. Many also have a horror of "losing control" of themselves with eating (they see no shades of gray -- if you do not eat exactly the planned amount of exactly what you intended to eat you have lost control). They talk about the importance of the feeling of *being in control* that rigid food restriction gives them. Some anorexics also value being thin because they believe it makes them more attractive -- & thinness does do that, up to a point, given modern standards of female beauty. But they take it way to far, and become skeletal.
Have you read Scott's post on the self-starvation cycle? https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/05/giudice-on-the-self-starvation-cycle/
In it he claims that many anorexics *start out* with a terror of being fat, but then find themselves with an aversion to food long after they've accepted that they need to eat more food, that their behavior is unhealthy. In your experience, does this just not happen? Or is it possible that you've treated anorexics at an earlier stage of the condition, who haven't come to develop this aversion to food? (Not trying to argue with you, genuinely asking to try and figure this out.)
Actually, I think all the anorexics I’ve seen have had the condition for at least a year, and some have had it for a decade or more. When they have made some commitment to changing — eating more food, eating foods previously avoided — they do often say things like that the foods are “gross.” But when asking for more details about that, I never heard anything that sounded at all like my own food aversions, which are all just the ordinary typical kind: I dislike eating certain foods because I hate the taste or the texture. Or I dislike the feeling of eating because I’m already stuffed. And of course if I’m queasy I’m averse to food. Anorexic food disgust seemed to be really a disgust at the idea of eating — seeing it as a piggy, ugly activity. Or sometimes it's disgust at, say, some oil on their food because they picture that oil turning into a little blob of blubber on their body.
I haven't read Scott's piece and don't have time to right now. If it's about research findings there's probably something to it. If it's just his or somebody else's personal theory I think it's probably just not a good theory.
Could the fear of losing control be expanding itself?
Book recommendation, though it's more of 3 out of 5.
Alison Weir, "The Lady in the Tower" about the final four months in the life of Anne Boleyn:
https://www.amazon.com/Lady-Tower-Fall-Anne-Boleyn-ebook/dp/B002XHNOME/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0
Weir is a pop historian, ploughing the well-furrowed field of the Tudors (though she also ranges into the Wars of the Roses and several books about queens from the Conquest on down). She also writes historical fiction based on these same characters.
Unfortunately, she is not as good a writer as Hilary Mantel (for one) and there are better historians covering the same ground. Reading the first two books in her fiction series about Henry's six wives, I skipped a *lot* to get to the end. And the problem with this non-fiction book is much the same: she manages to get bogged down in a lot of detail without telling us much.
However, for a quick read about the general topic, they're good. Best thought of as entrées before moving on to the main course with better novelists and historians.
It did make me a little more sympathetic to Anne Boleyn. She may not have deliberately set her cap at Henry, but once he was interested and chasing her, she (and her family) seem to have decided that unlike her sister Mary, she wouldn't just be a mistress to be discarded when his fancy ran its course. Anne was ambitious, clever, and handled Henry almost perfectly in the game of courtly love: not yielding to him straight away (as that would let his desire burn out) and holding him at arm's length for years.
Now, did she imagine it would *take* years to get the marriage she desired? I think not, but that's what happened. And along the way, she and her family made enemies. The problem was that without Henry's protection, Anne had nothing. This was made very clear when he eventually tired of her and moved on to another mistress (who would go on to be his third wife and mother of his only living legitimate son).
What this book made clear to me was the extent of how inward looking the Tudor court was. I already knew it was a snake pit, but everyone was somebody else's child, parent, sibling, spouse, cousin, step-parent, illegitimate descendant or family connection, and that made it even more hothouse and even more dangerous.
*Everybody* was jockeying for position, and one misstep made an enemy out of a former ally, even a family member. Anne's uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, was happy to turn on her and be one of the judges Henry appointed. Not that we must think of the notion of a trial or judges as being in any way justice: what Henry wanted, Henry would get.
Weir goes through the question of "*did* Henry want shot of Anne?" and comes down on the side of "no, it was Cromwell's doing". Because Cromwell and Anne had been allies of a sort in the beginning, but fell out and it was literal survival for Cromwell. He too was totally reliant on the king's favour and protection, and he had made some missteps causing Henry to be dissatisfied with him. Anne had previously said she could and would destroy him, and he seems to have feared that this was the moment of "kill or be killed".
Henry comes off as someone who was happy for others to do his dirty work for him, so he could later disclaim any knowledge of it, and more importantly, any blame. He was someone who had to be always right, someone who wanted to eat his cake and have it. And he was heartless once he turned on you: today your best friend, tomorrow gone and all access cut off.
At the same time, while Weir presents Anne as sympathetically as she can, there is undoubtedly an element of getting her just desserts in her fate. Not the fate as such, but how she was treated as a prisoner (and her fears for her daughter). When she was in power, she seems to have hated Katherine of Aragon and Mary, Henry and Katherine's daughter. Not just as political rivals and threats to her position, but with a personal, spiteful, vindictive hatred.
For instance, that Anne and Henry dressed in yellow on the day of Katherine's funeral. This was taken to be a sign of rejoicing, since yellow was a colour of joy and celebration. Later, more sympathetic, versions held that yellow was the colour of Spanish royal mourning so in fact they were honouring Katherine. Weir held that latter position, but has now come to change her mind on it: yellow was not Spanish royal mourning, so the fact that Anne dressed in yellow (and Henry followed her lead) was indeed triumphing in a rather crass manner over her now-deceased rival and rubbing the noses of those who hated her (and the public in general disliked her) that now she was queen and what could they do about it?
Quite a lot, as it later fell out.
Anne had urged ill-treatment of Mary in her exile from court, and allegedly made threats about having her killed. So it really was a case of "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" when it came to Elizabeth also being treated as a bastard, as Mary was, and being put of the line of succession in the same way, and for Anne (once in the Tower) to be in the charge of women set there to spy on her and treat her harshly.
The Tudors are endlessly fascinating, so it's worth giving Weir's book a go!
Mantel didn’t go that route, did she, vis-à-vis Anne and Cromwell being the instigator of her death?
I adored “Wolf Hall” but didn’t read the sequels, having in the meantime let Masterpiece Theatre tell me the story.
Not that I recall; remember, she stans Cromwell so she can't paint him as the villain. A combination of "Henry wants this, the Boleyns are too powerful, Anne is my enemy, some of this at least is true, and it's for the greater good if she's out of the way".
The final book is the weakest, because it's leading up to Cromwell's fall, and if it takes him by utter surprise, it has to take us (the readers) too even though we know what's going to happen. So he's not driving events as in the previous two books, which makes it slightly weaker. And of course, the story ends with his execution, so he can't continue to tell us about what happens next in the court (and we'd *love* him to comment on the events that take place, to get his view of what is going on and who the players are).
The real history is murky enough that you can argue for any interpretation and make a reasonable case out of it: Henry ordered this, Henry was ignorant, Cromwell did it all, Cromwell did it at Henry's command, her enemies framed her, Anne did have affair(s). Not with Smeaton, but with Norris? Maybe. Or one of the other accused? Maybe. Or somebody completely different? Maybe. She was used to admiration, to the flirtatious rules of the game of courtly love, and desperate to bear that son Henry was expecting for so many years. Desperate enough to try and get pregnant by another man, if Henry was avoiding her bed? Who can say?
The last book in the series presents Cromwell as exhausted, disillusioned with his chosen prince, and having no realistic way out, effectively with a death wish.
You’d really have to thread the needle if he was avoiding you but you got pregnant by another.
It’s so strange to think how little either of them could have imagined the future monarch they produced.
A question for Scott. Having previously read the web serial edition of "Unsong", in June I read the heavily edited edition you made available for sale via Amazon. I'm currently reading Ted Chiang's novelette "Seventy-Two Letters". Had you read "Seventy-Two Letters" before commencing work on "Unsong"?
I haven't read "Seventy-Two Letters", but I'm confident he didn't and that any similarities are a coincidence.
Well when he wrote a response to an article Ted Chiang published, he acknowledged the similarities between "Seventy-Two Letters" and "Unsong" (Ctrl-F "I could go on all day like this"), so it's really just a question of when Scott read it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/15/maybe-the-real-superintelligent-ai-is-extremely-smart-computers/
Sorry, I just thought you would appreciate the stupidity of acknowledging a coincidence, based on Unsong's content.
Love the new thumbnail!
There are some Substacks about how progressive parents should not let boys play with toy guns, and it bugs me, because I am pretty sure Che Guevara or the Black Panthers did. That is, if progressives are a political tribe, they need to have some warriors to protect them. What is the endgame of this version of progressivism, to become a holy-victim martyr?
Perhaps this is the problem with morality-based movements, they can take morality too far and thus give up self-defense or give up basically anything that might step on anyone's toes, and thus adopt, to quote Ozy, the life goals of dead people.
Are you aware of some particular Substack that is both (a) praising Che Guevara or the Black Panthers and (b) claiming that boys should not play with toy guns? If not, perhaps you are arguing against a straw man.
I wonder if there's a corollary to Goodhart's Law involved. People can't actually reliably prevent adult violence, so the they preventing children from playing with guns. Maybe they can control their children, or at least they hope so.
I wonder if some of this is a response to zero tolerance policies in schools. If you let your first grader run around “shooting“ his friends after school, he might do the same thing in the playground and then end up in the principal’s office.
Also, people just worry a lot more about safety now. There was a time when little boys would get BB guns for Christmas and practice shooting stuff in the backyard and honestly that’s kind of unimaginable now.
I second the Che Guevara as a role model for children's play. Here's a picture of Guevara as a child so American kids can draw some inspiration from him:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#/media/Archivo:Ernesto_Guevara_-_Altra_Gracia_-10ca-_Indio.jpg
> "What is the endgame of this version of progressivism, to become a holy-victim martyr?"
Apparently so.
Admittedly, the following is anecdotal, but:
One of the reasons my extremely Team Blue ex-boyfriend dumped me out of an otherwise compatible relationship was my willingness to use lethal self-defense (I've had concealed weapons permits my entire adult life). He oddly wasn't freaked out about the presence of the actual pistol I wear and keep in my home, but rather the fact about *me* that I am both willing and prepared to kill a human being under the very narrow and specific circumstance of them threatening my life.
As a father of two kids living in an urban area with unpredictable drug addicts frequently passing through his neighborhood, I asked him what he would do if, hypothetically, one of them broke into his home in a psychotic and meth-fueled fugue and began stabbing at his children with his chef's knife and would not stop.
He literally said:
"I don't know."
I pressed. Sure, he didn't have a gun, but would he grab one of his heavy chairs and start beating the assailant with it to stop the attack? What if the assailant wouldn't stop with a threat to call the police or a light injury?
He said again, "I don't know."
He wasn't willing to commit to defending his own children from a deadly threat using deadly force. Not even hypothetically. He thought human life was too precious. His children weren't allowed to play with toy guns (although he was strangely okay with Nerf guns throwing foam darts).
But let's remember that boys aren't the only ones who play with toy guns! I played with them throughout my childhood, in thousands of Let's Pretend games where they were used as a tool of justice to defeat villains trying to hurt people. I trained over and over and over, both as a child and later, as an adult, to be emotionally and ethically prepared to use deadly force appropriately.
And as an adult? I've now had two separate incidents where that preparation thwarted a developing deadly threat to me. Those predatory men looked into my eyes and saw not a victim's fear but a warrior's confidence and determination. They decided not to engage the warrior, and thus I did not have a chance to become their victim.
I think my ex may have had the life goals of a dead person and I most certainly did not, and it indeed has something to do with the values we rehearsed as children via play.
Fascinating. Do you have a ladder of escalation in mind - warning shots etc.? How much practice do you need to feel like you would actually be able to use it effectively? I only ask because I've never met anyone who's owned a gun for personal protection (UK based so only know the odd person who shoots animals). I would potentially own a gun if it was culturally appropriate and I wasn't depressed.
I initially trained with a retired Marine boot camp instructor, on a private outdoor range, so I was able to practice drawing and shooting under circumstances most people don't have a chance to try (from a seated position, as if in a car, etc). I also had classroom instruction on the law, gun handling safety and principles, and so on in order to get my first permit in Arizona.
Your questions sort of cover the scope of all of responsible gun-handling, though!
Aside from a few *extremely* rare circumstances, warning shots are generally never recommended, as where the bullet may end up and who it might harm is unpredictable (firing into the ground could send a bullet ricocheting, firing into the air may lead to a bullet falling on someone enough velocity to injure them, etc).
I was very lucky in that both of the encounters I had (would-be robberies, at best) were slow-moving and I had ample time during the pre-incident phase to recognize that I was being assessed and targeted. More importantly, I had enough physical distance that I had the luxury of time to *visibly* prepare to defend myself and thus interrupt the plan before they committed.
In both cases, the would-be assailants were almost certainly habitual or career criminals who were very familiar with what a person looks like when they are unafraid of a coming confrontation because they have their hand on a weapon.
Warning shots weren't necessary.
Thanks for the reply. That sounds like a genuinely terrifying situation and you did well to keep your cool. I don't know what other options you'd have had apart from showing the gun.
I think I'd enjoy the marine training whether I carried a gun or not. Do you feel you need to keep it fresh by going to shooting ranges? If so how often would you need to go?
Noted re: warning shots. I have a friend who is a policeman who got into a (non-armed) confrontation in a bar, and I asked him why he didn't just whip his badge out and say "you're having a bad day, gentleman" and he said that he decided it would be less risky to employ his de-escalation skills without pulling rank, which would have risked escalating the situation, even though he would have been within his rights. And I can't help wondering if there are situations (more ambiguous than yours) where carrying a gun might have a similar effect and if I carried one myself I'd want to know about the de-escalation skills. Is that type of thing covered in the license training or is that something you just pick up if you're in a gun culture?
Technically, I didn't actually *show* my gun. But there's no body language that matches putting a hand one's gun in preparation to draw (or in the 3 on 1 case, go from drawing with concealment to pointing). But that's a difference without a real distinction.
You absolutely do need to maintain shooting skills by going to ranges, but how often really varies person to person! Police should go very, very often and practice shooting at many different distances and under different circumstances, whereas, realistically, I don't need to train for longer ranges - my pistol isn't good for it and most encounters I might plausibly have are going to be relatively close up.
My particular training did include awareness skills, as well as some theory on avoiding confrontations, if for no other reason than purely selfish self-interest.
In most of the US, even the most unambiguous, thoroughly documented self-defense shooting is going to ruin the shooters' life for a while or forever. Setting aside the trauma of being in such a violent and scary encounter, there are usually dire administrative costs.
At best, a defender will be quickly cleared by the police and the prosecutor will decline to bother them, but that doesn't protect the defender from the *civil* lawsuits brought by the surviving assailant or their family members. It doesn't matter how cartoonishly in the wrong the assailant may be; even if the defender retreats and then gives every possible warning and then suffers a serious injury and then is forced to finally end the threat, someone WILL put their hand out for a wrongful injury or wrongful death payout.
And defending oneself in court is a much longer and much more expensive process than defending oneself with a gun.
So often, the trained, responsible, knowledgeable gun handler's decision tree during a confrontation comes down to, "is winning this encounter worth tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees and possibly losing my job/home/freedom?"
For an ego-driven squabble in a bar? Definitely not.
To avoid having someone gravely injure or kill you? Yes, unavoidably so.
There's a saying in the gun community, "Better to be judged by 12 than carried by six," which sometimes gets misused but mostly presents the idea that there are going to be legal consequences from a self-defense shooting, but they're better than (avoidably) dying.
Last, for what it's worth, I was once a victim of strong-arm robbery - with injury! -on the street! Some assholes followed me off a city bus, ripped my iPod nano right out of my hand and took off running. I instinctively tried to hang on to it (I have a younger brother), managed to grab the earbud cord, and the plastic coating sheared away, leaving the copper wiring to deeply cut my hand as the cord was yanked across it. I need a shot and stitches.
But as I watched the two assholes sprinting down the street away from me, I knew it was not appropriate or wise to pull a gun at that point. The threat to me wasn't deadly, and it had passed.
Thanks, I like ACX for conversations like this because I probably wouldn't have it anywhere else. I cant fault your logic, all I'm left with a sense that even if I had all that awareness about the risks I might still blow the head off an iPad thief just for showing me up. I'm a pretty responsible driver but once in a blue moon I see red, I could it see it being a similar story with a gun.
NOPE.
While constant vigilance and care is certainly a key part of gun handling, *actually having the gun and being willing to use it* is what makes a threat display by a would-be victim credible.
I am a 5'2" woman and on two separate occasions I have made men larger than me who were preparing to harm me back away simply by placing my hand on my unseen pistol and staring at them with determination, not fear.
In one of those two situations, I was outnumbered three to one.
You might want to argue that a credible threat display can be faked, but, just...no. There is no substitute in body language for *actually* being a credible threat to a would-be predator.
Of course.
In most circumstances, people who are routinely around guns - and especially people who are routinely around the *criminal* use of guns - know what it looks like when another person has one on them and is planning on using it. Recognizing human body language and behavior is a very normal thing for humans to do.
The gun is not going to kill you or your kids. The gun is not going to emit Gun Rays that will cause you to kill your kids or your kids to kill each other. Basic gun safety, even where children are involved, is very easy and very reliable and something Red Tribe at least knows how to do very well. Accidental shootings, outside of hunting, are a tiny blip in violent death statistics, and mostly concentrated among people who don't take it at all seriously.
"Constant vigilance and care" is a hyperbolic overstatement.
Most firearm deaths are suicides, so that's one way that having a gun around adds substantial risk. If anyone in your household is suicidally inclined or has a mental illness that often leads to suicide, you probably just need to either get the guns out of the house or make sure they're too well locked up for the suicidal person to get to them.
This is one of those things that has like zero impact on most people, but it's a very big deal if you're susceptible. I'm pretty sure I could have a loaded gun in reach every day and be at no particular risk from it, but there are people who absolutely should not do that because it's liable to be the thing they do themselves in with.
These are very tiresome and ignorant broad talking points.
Of course one should not have unsecured guns in the home with impulsive and/or wilful uncontrollable children. My parents actually stored their guns outside of the home while my younger brother was at his worst because they recognized that he, *personally,* was a young, dangerous, uncontrollable idiot. They were right to recognize that my brother, specifically, was a much greater threat to the safety of the household than a random break-in.
In contrast, my best friend grew up with his father (an armed US Postal Inspector) placing his loaded service on the bedside table every day and trusting his two children not to irresponsibly touch it. This might astonish you, but both of those kids never irresponsibly touched the pistol and both are alive today. And it was worth the "risk," as my BF's dad was routinely personally threatened by the people he was testifying against, and actually had one of them come to the house after getting out of prison.
> "the risk isn't worth the slim chance someone may invade your home."
[citation needed]
In 27 years, I've had two encounters where my carrying a pistol shut down what would have been strong-arm robberies (at best). One was in the communal garage of my condo building two years ago, and the other was away from my home.
And those were the two totally unambiguous encounters, with literal intruders. I've had about a dozen much more ambiguous moments where it's not clear I was definitely being targeted, but where I was extremely grateful that I was prepared to adequately defend myself.
In those 27 years, I've never been in even the slightest danger from my own firearm or any of the firearms on my friends or in their homes, mostly because I don't associate with anyone who isn't stable and trained enough to be trusted around unsecured guns.
For me, personally, it has been *supremely* worth the risk of owning and routinely carrying a firearm. My firearm allows me to live a lifestyle that most women would hesitate to embrace. It's a wonderful, liberating tool.
It's just not for people with mental illnesses and/or willful, uncontrollable kids.
I grew up in Red Tribe Texas. Throughout my childhood, Dad kept a long gun in his closet. No safe; just there, leaning against the wall. If I wanted to get it, I knew where to look. To this day, I don't know if it was kept loaded, because I knew not to touch it except maybe for some really screwy situation where strangers were breaking into the house and Dad wasn't around. I'm kinda glad I never had to find out.
Dad also used to make bullets in the house; I remember the scales, the primers, the empty casings, powder, and the device for pressing and crimping. I was maybe 5. I knew not everyone did this - Dad was a hobbyist (he also welded "poppers" - a particular type of target), and could probably have done this for neighbors in exchange for help with something else. But there wasn't anything special about learning an uncommon skill and showing your kids how to behave around it.
Or teaching it to kids when they were older. By the time we were all teenagers, it was much easier to just buy ammo, so the kit started to just gather dust, but it was still common to learn to shoot by age eight or so. Nine was the magic number for a lot of kids: that's when you could use an airgun unsupervised, and by then, you were almost certainly shooting .22s and pistols and even shotguns during group sessions arranged by the moms and dads. My youngest nephew got his own shotgun when he was ten.
Everyone's still alive and healthy. The kids are now old enough to teach it to the next generation. It's safe, fun, and a hell of a lot more liberating than getting a tattoo.
Is playing with toy guns necessary to create these "warriors" of which you speak?
Like, I don't think it's particularly *bad* to allow kids to play with toy guns (no more than violent video games or movies), but your post seems to imply that you *need* to do so in order to have warriors in your society, and I'm very confident that that's false. I don't think the Army recruiters ask you "did you play with toy guns as a kid?" before you're allowed to sign up.
Edit: Also, the idea that each political movement needs its own warriors to protect it seems like terrible politics - the army and the police are supposed to protect progressives and reactionaries alike, and if they don't we should try to fix that in the political process rather than wait until everyone is forming their own gangs for self-defense.
You are making a LOT of very unsound assumptions here.
1. Not playing with toy guns as a child makes one less able to defend oneself or others as an adult. I'd at the bare minimum want to see a shred of evidence before I considered this a serious possibility.
2. Defense of a modern community requires "warriors" as a distinct caste of people. This is an especially bad assumption if you live in the U.S. because in that country it has *literally never been true.* In fact, it's a pretty core tenet of U.S. founding mythology that proto-Americans did not have, want or need that[1].
3. Progressives have no notion of self-defense as a valuable thing. Having lived most of my life around progressive-ish people, this is laughably untrue.
4. More implicit than the others, but that the (for lack of a better term) self-defense maximalist worldview that underlies what you write here has either no tradeoffs to it, or such good tradeoffs that it's not worth seriously considering the alternatives.
I assume the people you're talking about live in the U.S., as do you? Because the U.S.'s current set of cultural and legal practices around violence work *shockingly* poorly. The U.S. is a HUGE outlier among developed countries by homicide rate, despite being the single richest country among them. This despite also having a sky-high incarceration rate (suggesting that neither "lack of police" or "willingness to do policing" can possibly be the whole difference). Obviously nobody know for sure what factors cause this--and it could be a combination of many things---but it hardly seems like culture is irrelevant here. See for example this classic SSC post, in which the fact that the U.S. South specifically--which has a very different cultural and cultural history than other parts of the nation--is so much more violent than the national average that it throws off all sorts of statistics: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/ [2]
In a nutshell, this is why this whole line of thinking seems silly to me: most skills can be taught and almost any stage of life. Cultural attitudes are much, much harder to learn and unlearn past early childhood. In any civilized setting, not only do you want only a few specific people ready to do violence at any time, but even for *those* people you want their tendency-towards-violence to be tightly circumscribed and under control. Raising *everybody* in the culture to glorify and enjoy violence and find it exciting *might* make those few chosen people a little easier to teach, but it's also going to make their jobs enormously harder.
Finally, a brief personal anecdote to point out how false a dichotomy this is. I didn't play with toy guns as a child (excepting the occasional squirt gun). But for a few years when I was in grade school, my entire ended up one-by-one joining the same martial arts class. "Learning self defense" was pretty explicitly a goal of the class[3]. But the skills we were taught and the culture around them were ENORMOUSLY different than the "cult of the badass" type stuff you see in action movies, or the overcompensating, swaggering posturing with which a lot of (obviously very insecure) U.S. men tend to brag about about their capacity for violence. If the instructors had ever caught word of one of their students using the skills taught in the class to attack or bully someone, I have no doubt that student would have been asked to leave immediately and never allowed back. It was emphasized multiple times that the single most important self defense technique that you could employ was *running away*, and that you should *only* fight when that wasn't a feasible option (for yourself or someone you were protecting)[4]. Class started with a brief mediation, things like good technique and fundamentals were heavily exercised, and sparring was treated as a learning exercise and a way to hone your skills, NOT as a competitive sporting activity. To buck another stereotype, out of all my family members it was my mother who stuck with this class the longest (though I returned for a while in my late teens and early 20s finding, to my delight, that it was still taught by the same people in the same fashion).
As an adult man, living mostly in urban (i.e. theoretically high-crime) areas for the past 20 years, you know how often I've had occasion to use those skills? Zero times. Not once. I've come close a few times, but all but one of those times were an occasion when I largely *forgot* the sort of discipline those classes taught me, and needlessly escalated a confrontation due to anger or frustration[5]. Let me say that more clearly: the biggest physical threat *I, personally* have ever encountered was my own temper and poor judgement. And I expect I was raised better on that score than the average man in the Anglosphere. So curiously, I don't think that playing with toy guns as a child, or being raised with a "warrior ethos" or any of that rot would have made me any safer. Likewise, while I've fired guns on numerous occasions, I've never made the choice to own one: I expect that doing so would make me actively *less safe*[6]. And yet, if my life took a bizarre turn and I found myself wanting to pursue a profession of which doing violence was an expected and necessary part, I don't think I'd have any problem learning the skills. Not unless I was trying to pursue an exciting career as a horse archer: then I'd be fucked.
[1] If you missed that part, you might need to look up what a "militia" is.
[2] I'll (hopefully) save people some time arguing here and note that the obvious point about racial makeup was both raised and answered in the comments of that post. Yes, U.S. blacks have a higher per-capita homicide right than U.S. whites, everyone's aware. But when you filter the data to look at just whites, white southerners (according to Scott in the comments) still tend to be significantly more violent than white non-southerners.
[3] Though I don't think it was really one of my family's main motives for joining: we just enjoyed it as an athletic activity.
[4] If you seriously dispute this, then "self defense" is clearly not your highest priority. A lot of men have a whole bunch of their ego and self-image tied up in a pathetic "tough guy" persona which is actually quite bad for one's personal safety a lot of the time.
[5] Mind you, I've never escalated by physically attacking someone, nor ever come especially close to doing so. But I've definitely said and done things with the predictable effect of making already angry and unstable people madder, which is stupid and short-sighted and extremely poor self-defense practice.
[6] Albeit, by a fairly small degree. If I wanted to hunt or sport shoot, I wouldn't balk at owning a gun for that reason, but keeping one strictly for "self defense" would be irrational.
"1. Not playing with toy guns as a child makes one less able to defend oneself or others as an adult. I'd at the bare minimum want to see a shred of evidence before I considered this a serious possibility."
I'd think the requirement for evidence points the other way. This looks like a clear case of Chesterton's fence. For as long as we have had records, boys have played with toy weapons, and not always just toys. And these boys have grown up to be men who could ably defend their community at need. For a generation or so, a few societies have been introducing the norm of "boys should not play with toy guns". To date, I don't think any of those societies has won a war. Show me the evidence that says we can safely tear this fence down.
"2. Defense of a modern community requires "warriors" as a distinct caste of people. This is an especially bad assumption if you live in the U.S. because in that country it has *literally never been true.* In fact, it's a pretty core tenet of U.S. founding mythology that proto-Americans did not have, want or need that[1]. "
I think you're reading too much into the OP's admittedly imprecise choice of verbiage. S/warriors/soldiers, if it makes you feel better. And the United States needs *all* its boys playing with toy guns, not just the children of the "warrior class", because in extremis we're going to call them all up into the Militia or whatever and all of them will have needed to internalize "shooting a gun at the bad guys is a natural and proper thing to do".
Or maybe we don't need that at all, but again, show me the evidence.
"I'd think the requirement for evidence points the other way. "
This is a deeply unserious position and I honestly believe you know better. You're not dumb, John. You're not uneducated. You know how the burden of proof works. Why are you wasting both of our time with this hogwash?
"This looks like a clear case of Chesterton's fence. For as long as we have had records, boys have played with toy weapons..."
Seriously? Again, I *know for a damn fact* you are capable of better than this. I've seen you write many insightful, informative, well-reasoned comments, so this utter affront to basic reasoning abilities should be *thoroughly* beneath you. Let's break it down.
Claim 1: Often in the past (according to our records), boys have played with toy weapons.
--Which boys? All boys? Specific boys? Every past society? Only some? If it's all boys, it cannot possibly provide any sort of evidence in *any* direction. Hiding that basic truth behind "Chesterton's Fence" is an abuse of an already rather dubious principle[1]. Surely it has occurred to you that if all the boys in history played with toy weapons, well, some of those were the boys who *lost* the wars, right?
Claim 2: "these boys" have grown up able to defend their communities at need.
--Problem with claim one is now compounded. We still don't know *which* boys are claimed to have grown up playing with weapons. But now we're claiming that "these boys" grew up into capable community defenders. All of them? Some of them? Which ones? Surely *some* of them must have grown up into *incapable* defenders of their communities, right? Or despoilers of their communities. Or looters, pillagers and ravagers of their neighbors' communities? Surely we're not doing the thing where we pretend that every person who ever took up arms in the past was a great and noble warrior fighting the good fight, are we? Do you have *any information at all* about the actual statistical relationship between boys playing with toy weapons and men who grew up into capable defenders of their communities? Or is this whole argument as rectally-sourced as it appears?
If I wanted to stoop to that level, it would be really quite easy to spin a story about how the boys who were most often *encouraged* to play with toy weapons growing up into the men who were most often *directly responsible* for wholesale slaughter and rape and pillage[2]. But I'm not going to pretend that it would be anything more than trading bullshit for bullshit. The fact is, history is a large and complicated place and trying to generalize to the degree that you are is *just plain stupid.* So let's maybe be better than that, eh?
" To date, I don't think any of those societies has won a war."
Has any of them lost a war? Has any of them *been in* a war? Gotta be honest with you, John, I would much, much rather live in a society that has a history of *not fighting unnecessary wars* than a society that has a history of fighting them and winning. So unless you want to hold up an example of one of these societies (which you haven't bothered to name) fighting and losing, I'm going to call that a rather big (if somewhat uncertain) net positive.
"Or maybe we don't need that at all, but again, show me the evidence."
"And the United States needs *all* its boys playing with toy guns, not just the children of the "warrior class", because in extremis we're going to call them all up into the Militia...Or maybe we don't need that at all, but again, show me the evidence."
Really? Do you actually not know your own country's history? Or do you just consider it insufficient evidence? At *no point in U.S. history* has anywhere close to 100% of the eligible-age male population served. In perhaps two out of all the wars you lot have fought in your history (not counting the one you fought with each other) has have the nation's core territories been even plausibly threatened. And one of those was a war you started. In the year 2025 the idea that some desperate threat might require every available American to pick up a weapon is little short of laughable, besides which you're hard at work tearing yourselves to shreds anyhow.
But hey, two can play at that game. Obviously growing up being taught to love and glorify violence is not nearly enough preparedness. Why not replace the *right* to bear arms with the *obligation* to bear arms? Why not insist that every citizens dwelling have every available scrap of spare floor space devoted to storing spare munitions, stockpiled against future threats. You cannot, after all, prove you won't need it. There is exactly as much evidence that *that* will be key to the U.S.'s future survival as that *checks notes* boys playing with toy guns will.
But here, have an actual historian discussing (at some length) this very trope about how a society MUST have strong men, conditioned by hardship to be always ready for violence. It's not a remotely new trope. It dates *at least* back to the early days of the Roman empire. It was hogwash then, and it's hogwash now:
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
[1] To be clear, I think "understand it before you tinker with it" is pretty decent axiom if you're earnestly enforcing it on yourself. But in practice, it literally always ends up as an isolated demand for rigor, as it does here. You can always claim that the system is not well enough understood. And always ignore it when convenient just as easily.
[2] Due to the simple fact that warrior castes have existed, and anywhere they existed they were highly like
[3]Which I believe you are: as believe you live in the U.S., right?
How often have each of you gone shooting?
The extreme version would be what's happening in Ukraine now, right? Or the endgame of Germany where they were reportedly sending old men and boys to the front? In those places you genuinely see a large chunk of the male population pulled into the fighting.
Or the alternative we see from DNA evidence, where the invading population replaced all the Y chromosomes from the original population. Maybe those boys should have played with weapons more as kids....
Even where you don't send literally everyone, we have lots of experience from wars where an essentially random selection of the population was sent off to war. And while there are definitely "10X" warriors in the same way there are "10X" programmers, the rank and file generally fought well enough to be worth the bother of bringing to the fight,
We have one reliable data point, repeated many times: In societies where almost all boys play with toy weapons, almost all men can fight to a tolerable minimum standard at need. Everything else is speculation. I'd prefer some other, more expendable society perform the experiment of discouraging toy gunplay and the like for a generation and then going off to fight a war. But we may have to wait a while, because all the societies willing to do the first part seem to want Red Tribe America to fight their wars for them.
What about video games, are they not a sufficient substitute for toy guns? There are tons of first-person shooters, and they seem popular.
They are not. Guns in video games work by video game logic, in which reloads and quickdraws always succeed, bullets magically teleport into magazines to fill them, guns never jam or misfire and thus never need to be cleared, targets have hit points and highlighted crit zones, wounded people operate at 100% capability until they are dead, everything weighs zero pounds, everyone can run forever without tiring or losing speed, running or jumping or shooting two guns doesn't hamper accuracy, cars stop bullets, bullets don't ricochet off angled surfaces, and in some cases, zooming through a scope snaps the crosshairs to your target. And that's just OTTOMH.
A few games simulate some realism, but based on the reviews I read, they're not what I'd call addictive features. Gamers don't extoll the virtues of some FPS where sniping takes hours of prep and missions have unspecified and unknown goals and you never really know what your kill count is and winging an elk means tracking it for a mile. Gamers who seek this level of realism enough to want it in a game, tend instead to get in a truck and drive into the countryside and actually do it.
Most of those statements apply to toy guns as well. Especially to the historic toy guns that didn't fire any projectiles.
+1 to Deiseach's observation that none of this is new.
As a boy who had toys taken away in the early 80s, it was more a 'nice Christians with good family values don't expose their kids to *violence*' bit that paralleled later efforts to insulate kids from Harry Potter for glorifying witchcraft. A lot of "why can't kids television be more like the *nice* cartoons I grew up with" energy. Bambi's mom getting blown away aside, there was a nostalgia for media like "Wacky Races" and "Rocky And Bullwinkle" that was not satisfied by technicalities like the Ninja Turtles only fighting robots or the GI Joes always bailing out of the vehicles before they exploded
This occasionally manifested as a babysitter or other caretaker having a "no toy guns" rule, which was solved for by repurposing sticks and non-gun toys for use as pretend weapons. Turns out that a Barbie, for example, can be bent at the waist to form a neat 90-degree 'L' shape that a child can point at anything and say "bang!" which is fun for both the obvious play reasons as well as the mortified look it creates on the face of the caretaker in question.
This happened again in the 90s with several of my younger relatives in the next decades age cohort, with the same results. Helicopter-style values child-rearing can intend as it likes, but cardboard tubes are quite versatile, and have a small-barrel companion in the toilet paper tube if a child wants a rifle and pistol, or rifle and hand grenades, etc.
There will always be children disposed to imagine-playing at violence, and there will always be those among the gentlehearted who are horrified by this kind of play whose very gentleness makes them exactly the kind of people most drawn to caring for and raising children. Typically the kids will just break these limits themselves, it'll turn out fine, and we'll all just have a laugh. In the rare case that they don't, though, it's up to the rest of us to playfully undermine the nannies as we go, with pretend gunfights and toy sword birthday presents.
This really reinforces my conviction that in the US, religion and progressivism are not always at odds with each other, they often have strangely overlapping ideas. This can be contrasted to Catholic Europe where religion is always conservative.
Oh yeah. US Catholicism in particular actually has quite the progressive tradition, especially if you're looking before the 1970s and the consolidation of the religious right around the Republican Party. It makes sense if you think about it; in the European context the Catholic Church was intimately entwined with traditional social power structures, whereas in the US context the Catholic population was nearly totally confined to the poor working class immigrant strata. Whether your faith (a) comprises the bedrock of the power of those holding institutional power, or (b) is the binding glue by which those without institutional power come together and engage in mutual support, goes a long way towards shaping your faith's perspective on those institutions.
There's been a lot of shifting since then, but "stop overthinking the economics and just fucking feed the poor already" is still a stance that can be held quite comfortably within a variety of Christian frameworks - all depends on which aspects of the doctrine one is highlighting and where one does and does not make the compromises that inevitably accompany the joining of political coalitions.
Progressivism necessarily inherits some core Christian moral assumptions as part of the Western tradition. It's hard to fully escape the water you swim in. Notably a belief in fundamental equality of all human beings - they just leave out the "made in the image of God" part.
Rocky and Bullwinkle was brilliant. Perhaps we're just lucky we got one of it.
Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers were also brilliant, but in different directions.
Evidence suggests that the talent isn't there to do as much entertainment as children want at such a high level.
It really was. Fascinating history too; basically the cereal company that sponsored it wanted a cartoon as cheap as possible, so the creative team behind it pitched an obscenely low cost in exchange for more creative freedom. Sponsor goes for it because what's the worst that could happen, but then panics because they pull it off but start leveraging their creative freedom to throw grade A cold war satire into their children's programming.
Cheerio’s… Helps build MOOSEles….!
God that show cracked me up.
We didn't buy guns for our boys but when they were out playing in the woods or garden they used any old stick/branch/hose attachment to shoot each other... Whatchagonna dooo...
My ex along with her mom friends didn't want their kids playing with toy guns. And yes, they ended up running around the yard "shooting" each other with sticks and pistol noises. What I found remarkable is that, as far as I can tell, my ex never let my stepson watch anything violent with guns in it. Somehow, he picked up on guns by the time he was four years old. My ex was mortified to say the least.
As for me, I grew up around real guns and guns on TV. It didn't turn me into psychokiller.
My kids (two boys and a girl) *loved* their foam rubber swords, and had great fun whacking one another/other kids in the neighborhood with them. None has shown any interest in the military or in becoming axe murderers so far, though.
Ah, this is an old thing, it didn't start with progressive parents. I remember even back in the late 70s that there were campaigns (maybe that's too organised a word to use here) about not letting boys play with guns, but this was more inspired by feminism (you know, the bad old patriarchy, gendered toys - though that handy phrase wasn't in common usage then -, violence against women, violence in general, raising boys to wage war, etc.)
I'm actually fairly sure that it was less inspired by feminism and more inspired by pacifism, with the specific intent being that war games make children ready for the army. People today don't often seem to quite get how much stronger pacifism was as a movement during the Cold War, particularly among the left*, than now.
*: expect for the part of the left that wasn't pacifist due to advocating armed revolution, of course - there was indeed a specific tendency towards violent Communism in some circles as a specific reaction to the pacifism of the 60s.
I was sitting amongst some other moms as our small children played in the park 30-odd years ago - moms 10 to fifteen or twenty years older than me, representative of the college town elite - when they began talking about this subject. To their credit, this was before guns had become a general obsession; indeed probably 200 million guns ago.
The wife of the publisher of the local alternative newspaper remarked that despite the prohibition on toy guns in their home, her son was still keenly interested in them, and in desperation would e.g. eat a slice of bread into the shape of a gun.
Raising boys to be girls, to (not) make war, was as you say exactly the impetus - but also why a note of pride might have entered her voice unawares.
(Feminism at that particular moment had women breastfeeding again in great numbers; it was a more nuanced time.)
It didn’t really work even within that little niche. I can’t imagine how it was ever going to translate into taking the guns away from the criminal class, given the latter’s holy status in the culture.
I say this as someone who has never had a gun in the house, married to someone with a complete disinterest in shooting things, let alone killing them. Even if we are able to move away from the hated city someday, I doubt he’d so much as own a garden gun.
It’s easy, especially if you take a certain care where you live, not to own a firearm. But also meaningless.
The one RTBA person I've talked with seemed to believe there was something especially virtuous about defending people by violence, and other methods (like knowing first aid) just weren't as good. I couldn't figure out what he was thinking.
When everybody has guns, it’s useful for someone with that mindset to have one too, I suppose. I recall the Sutherland Springs church shooter was taken down by a private citizen.
But of course, gun nuts play a part, a big part in my view, in bringing into existence the thing they fear.
Everyone having guns means that crazy spree shooters are likely to get shot, but also that guns are around where the crazy spree shooter can probably get hold of one.
If even some people have guns, then there are guns around where the crazy spree shooter can probably get hold of one. The sort of person who would consider a crazy shooting spree is going to go through a lot more trouble to get a gun, than the sort of person who wonders if maybe they should have a gun just in case they get caught in a shooting spree or whatever.
The ratio of bullets fired *by* spree shooters to bullets fired *at* spree shooters, goes down as more people have guns. Which is probably why most mass shooting incidents(*) happen in places where most people aren't allowed to carry guns (e.g. schools), and IIRC have about 30% fewer dead bodies per spree killer when they do happen in places where the victims are allowed to shoot back.
* Using the FBI's definition of three people killed other than the shooter - which means if he's shot dead by a bystander right after he shoots his first victim, it doesn't get counted.
What got to me was that he thought having a gun and being willing to use it in defense was a strong obligation, but knowing first aid isn't an obligation.
Have you considered investing in a soundproof playroom?
Watch KPop Demon Hunters. Strongest possible recommendation. (It's on Netflix).
I don't go gushing about every piece of media I love on here, but this one in particular I think needs to get direct recommendations in front of people's eyeballs, since it is very natural to pass on if you don't have someone screaming at you about it. It was on my Netflix's "most watched/liked" suggestions panel for like 2 months straight and I kept passing it over, like, "haha ok very cute I'm sure, a basic action movie with K-Pop songs for K-Pop tweens". And, yes, actually that's basically what it is, but the quality is so far beyond what you would expect from something like that... that it makes it work for ~everyone. I think the humor, action, aesthetics, and emotions are all basically perfect. Just... joy, especially the beginning and ending. The music goes without saying.
You don't have to be a huge K-Pop fan to enjoy it - I'm not. Give it a try! You will know within about 5 minutes if it's for you.
And to make it a little more relevant here: (major spoilers for both UNSONG and this) V gubhtug vg jnf vagrerfgvat/vashevngvat gung Wvah vf onfvpnyyl gur nagv-Pbzrg Xvat. Nyy ur unq gb qb jnf tb nybat jvgu uvf gevivnyyl rnfl cneg va Ehzv'f cyna, juvpu pyrneyl jbhyq unir jbexrq, naq ur jbhyq unir fnirq gur jbeyq naq uvzfrys. Ng gur pbfg bs yvivat jvgu n zbqrengryl thvygl pbafpvrapr. Naq ur gheaf vg qbja! PX ba gur bgure unaq vf jvyyvat gb yvir jvgu qbvat nyy gung Bgure Xvat fghss.
Oh man. Multiple people whose opinions I respect thought it was great, including a couple of friends (though one's recommendation was extremely hesitant).
But for whatever reason, this review and available timing finally nudged me into pushing "play."
And
OH
MY
GOD.
I loathed it so, SO MUCH.
I only got ten minutes in and literally couldn't bear it another moment. And, like, I don't know what else I was expecting - modern pop music in general and K-pop in particular always sends me into an ungovernable, make-it-STAHP! low-grade rage.
As do sassy, goofy, confident kids' movie protagonists, however well-designed and animated they may be.
...hmm.
It's possible I might be at least partly demon.
Fair enough! I actually almost included an "unless you actively dislike K-Pop" in there, but figured I shouldn't clutter it up further. I guess I should have, for your sake at least!
I also really hate the movie's type of protagonist as well as its tone - as much or even more than the K-pop itself. I could tolerate a lot of K-pop music in a story about a K-pop band, but it would need to be in a different genre (dark satire, a murder mystery, etc).
Definitely not for me as a matter of personal taste.
I thought it was maybe a 7.5 or 8 out of ten, but I can totally see how if K-Pop & main/grump/softie protagonist trios grind one's gears the movie would be excruciating.
Stepping back from it, the story is actually very paint by numbers YA and full of holes. The musical numbers and humor are the main things that get you over those hurdles entertained and with your suspension of disbelief intact - and if you don't like the chocolate, then chocolate-covered ants is just eating bugs.
I agree completely. In particular, the lead-in to the climax really is a jarring non-sequitur. I'm not sure what they were thinking there. I was "in" enough to shrug and move past it, but someone having just an ok time up until then would have to raise an eyebrow.
This was the correction to the above review that I needed. Well, if I currently had a streaming service. Reviews should maybe come with age restrictions just like movies.
To be fair to Fred, the people whose opinions I respect, the 97% of professional reviewers on RottenTomatoes, K-Pop Demon Hunters appears to be *very* competently executed. Were I a professional critic forced to dispassionately analyze it, I'm sure I'd be obligated to give it a positive review.
It just happens to be a genre and style I loathe as a matter of personal taste. I legitimately really do hate the kind of pop music that makes the vast majority of folk cheerfully bop their heads.
I'm the weird one, here.
(Or possibly part demon)
TBC I don’t mean to diss Fred. I think the commentariat overall will probably find his recommendation awards them hours of pleasant leisure.
I generally find things only from recommendation.
Jackie or Marilyn? Demon or moron? The age old binaries.
Come sit beside me on the "grumpy old folks don't vibe with the kids" bench 😁
Talking of modern cartoons/anime, the wildly (and to me incomprehensibly) popular "Hazbin Hotel" (quite apart from the philosophy behind it, so to speak - Lucifer et al. are all *good* guys, you guys, they're just misunderstood and need a second chance!), the art style drives me crazy. It's extremely stylised and I get that, but I think it's ugly (plus every character looks the same).
Ditto "The Amazing Digital Circus" - five minutes into the pilot (the only episode I watched), I *hated* Pomni. I continue to loathe, despise, and hate her, and want her to die horribly. But if I can't have that, I want her to suffer. She's just terrible. (The plot there is more interesting; this is what it's like to be a self-aware character in a video game when you are stuck between remembering your 'outside' self and becoming the in-game character. The show describes what it's like to be the character from inside the game experiencing it directly, rather than as the player outside).
>>I *hated* Pomni.
Why? She seems too bland to really hate that fervently; mainly coded to me as the "very generic protagonist, through whom the audience observes the strange world and strong personalities of everyone else in the show" stereotype, so I'm curious how you came to such a strong opinion.
Something about her just annoyed me from the start. I should be sympathetic, being yoinked into a strange world and turned into a cartoon character *is* traumatic.
But she was so pathetic and gibbering and set up to evoke "oh poor lil' Pomni" that I revoltedl Also, there's a particular pose/stance in anime and cartoons that really irritates me because it's so over-used and over-done (standing biting the lip, looking down and to the side, one hand grasping the elbow of the opposite arm, knees turned in but the rest of the leg turned out).
I don't know why, but seeing a character in that pose makes me want to smoosh their head in. It's the "poor lil me, I is just a lil creachur" associations that infantilise characters and, as I said, is over-done.
Then again, I have idiosyncratic reactions so don't go by what I'm saying!
I'll join you on the Grumpy Old Folks Don't Vibe With the Kids Bench, but with the caveat I would have joined you on said bench most of my childhood.
As a child of the '80s and early '90s, I longed for far more serious media than I was offered, and due to the lack of options, would endure the silly for the few moments of pathos. I hated that serious stories about princesses had to be burdened with the obligatory goofiness of goddamned Jamaican crabs and talking teapots, and that I'd have to wait through 64 syndicated episodes of Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers to get to that one awesome (comparatively) serious episode where Gadget joins a cult and the team is almost drowned in the bottles of soda worshiped by said cult.
When I was about five I inquired about a neighbor woman of my grandmother’s, also elderly, whom I would see outside in the yard pulling weeds or the like from time to time.
Where are her kids? Grown, gone.
Where is her husband? Died.
She lives alone? (in that nice rancher).
Yes, she’s a widow.
Me, for whom family was all about, drinking, arguing, crying, worry, disturbance …
“I want to be a widow when I grow up.”
Step 1: Acquire husband
Step 2: Arsenic
Step 3: Profit!
😁 (If it worked for Madeline Smith, it could work for you):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Smith
Well, the problem is you grow fond of the fellow. You even begin to doubt whether you are so right that being alone will profit.
As a child I didn’t think about the intermediate steps.
The success of K-Pop in the West is interesting, it suggests there's a big hunger for something that our own culture is no longer willing to feed us.
When was the last time there was a successful western boy band or girl band? The Spice Girls? The Backstreet Boys? That was twenty years ago.
One direction is more recent, and my assumption would be that if I was 10 years younger I'd probably be able to think of a more recent one than that
One Direction were entirely manufactured from the X factor. I think Melvin is generally correct in thinking that boy bands have died off recently, but genres are imploding anyway. There’s no genres left except girls singing, hip hop and the occasional girls singing with hip hop in a crossover.
I don't see the objection K Pop bands are manufactured too.
Thanks, looks worth a watch!
Yeah, comparing the cartoony, plastic style to Pop Stars, Pop Stars looks better. However, Pop Stars also looks much more serious/cool. KPDH needs to be sort of in a superposition of whether it's taking itself seriously. Something like the Pop Stars art style would have required it to be way less fun.
If you're interested in economic history and haven't read any of Anton Howes' substack essays, you're missing out. His latest essay is about how contrary to common opinion, the sweeping restrictions on workers after the Black Death didn't go away once the Great Peasants Revolt of 1381 happened - they actually kept on tightening them for the next century or so, and Parliament basically never met a restrictive law on labor that it didn't like. And while it wasn't perfectly enforced, it -was- enforced. Possibly so enforced that it actually depressed English economic and population growth after the Black Death for a long time.
It really puts the British Parliament of the period in a much darker light. They almost come across like Poland's infamous Sejm, actively undermining the vitality of their own kingdom for their narrow short-term interests and privilege.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long
He also has a good one making the argument that we get the causality of "England ran out of wood, switched to coal" backwards - the British were actually really good at conserving woodlands and utilizing them for the long-run when needed. Woodlands didn't really start to disappear en masse until they switched to coal and no longer needed them anymore.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest
That kind of ramping up tends to happen when policy-makers are frustrated that the existing laws are more honored in the breach than in the observance. It tends to be ineffective if the reason the existing laws weren't having the desired effect is because you lack the state capacity to enforce the, since harsher versions of the same laws require at least as much state capacity.
I spotted some misleading statements in that essay. For example, it's correct as far as it goes that £20 was an astronomical sum compared to the wages of common laborers, but fails to place that in the proper context that county sheriffs (the people who were liable to be fined £20) were high government officials who tended to be independently wealthy in addition to the substantial incomes from their offices. I can't find info readily on how much a typical sheriff in that period would have made, but I suspect that a £20 fine would be enough to get a sheriff's attention but well within their means to pay.
You mean after King Richard II declared, "Serfs you were, and serfs you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as you were, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity," he DIDN'T loosen labor restrictions?
I've heard this argued both ways, because Richard's public statements and actions are grossly inconsisent, which is not surprising as he was only 14. Seems most likely to me that there were factions for and against compromise at court and what Richard said just depended on who he was with at the time.
This is one of those things I knew but I thought most people interested in the period (admittedly a minority) knew. But no, apparently there's a bunch of people who thought the Statute of Labourers was just... kind of fake, I guess? Strange.
Increasingly I think a lot of academia builds giant superstructures on thin or absent evidence. Then they talk with each other a lot and create entire discourses that are decades of work based on almost nothing. A few months ago I had this discussion about Polanyi. Yes, yes, it's very important to some socialist theories. But that doesn't change his primary evidence is... basically just cherry picked to work backward from his conclusion. That he is now "too big to fail" is just an indictment of the academy's unwillingness to break with bad standards.
>This is one of those things I knew but I thought most people interested in the period (admittedly a minority) knew.
I notice that I am confused. I'm moderately interested in this time period and have read a number of works that I would have expected to talk about something like this (assuming it's well-known and anything like a big deal as Howes makes it sound like) and I don't remember any of them doing so. This doesn't necessarily mean they didn't do so, but if they did talk about it there was little enough emphasis on it that it didn't stick in my recollection. At most, I think Ian Mortimer might have touched on in when discussing the causes of the Peasant's Revolt in his biography of Henry IV.
I think you're agreeing with me. My point is not: everyone who likes this period knows about this. My point is: apparently academia decided a major economic feature of the period was just fake and not worth discussing which is weird.
I then go on to to talk about how academia seems to embed fake or dubious things deep in its intellectual infrastructure and make such beliefs "too big to fail." Which is again a criticism not of people not knowing about the statutes but of academia.
There's a lot of evidence, both before and after the peasants revolt, that overall the peasantry's effective incomes did rise. So, as Anton says himself, the statute was worked around somehow. I think some people went to far and took that as evidence that it wasn't enforced at all, whereas what I took from Anton's essay was more that it was enforced inconsistently and enforcement depended a lot on the local power brokers and whether higher wages were good or bad for them personally.
Their effective incomes rose because prices fell or were held down (therefore real wages rose) and because they received increases in in kind compensation like food, clothes, beds, etc. Also enforcement was not perfect but it was real. Real enough that it's easier to explain the English labor market as being under it than to explain it as if it were ignored.
The phrase "maximum wage" is something I would expect in a caption on the greyscale gigachad guy as a joke, not an actual law. This is basically reverse communism, right? With far-reaching state control of the economy being the only part not reversed?
Also, "employers now had to provide their workers with only the best-quality [food]" (while keeping pay low) rhymes amusingly with big tech colluding to suppress wages, while having lavishly incredible free food. (Or, back in the day, at least; I hear it's reigned in now).
> This is basically reverse communism, right?
It's communism, but only for the capitalists. The best of both worlds!
Why don't you just buy 2 of every toy?
He says that's what they're doing now, except for when they get presents of one toy (and then they hide that toy until they can get a second one).
Fighting over toys is the traditional right of childhood. What is important is not the toy in itself, it's that the Other Child has it and I do not 😁 This is exactly why kids have to be taught to share and take turns and wait, etc. It don't come natural!
“The Solutions of Affluence.”
I offer this as a book title, maybe AI can flesh it out and even supply an author.
Speaking as a parent of slightly older kids - here's what happens:
One toy breaks. Or gets a small fleck of paint peel off that makes it incrementally different. Or god forbid one gets lost in the giant mounds of toys that have collected over the years, like Smaug's treasure horde. And then the cycle continues.
These kids are WAY too young now to register small differences like that. By the time they are old enough to notice that kind of difference they will be old enough not to need the 2-of-everything workaround. They will be old enough to understand things like “it’s her turn right now … how about drawing a picture while you wait … you could try offering her your horsie as a trade … if you try to take it from her I’m going to give you a time out … “ etc
I agree, 1.5 year olds are *probably* too young for those things to register (except for the "toy lost" case.
I'm speaking from the perspective of 4/6 year olds. And yes, we deploy the "take turns" etc model but it is not their default behavior yet, so it still descends into screaming matches sometimes.
Sorry, this was not my experience as an unreasonable child.
Oh, you mean that list of things I said they'll be able to understand? I didn't mean they would hear them and say "Oh ok!" and comply. I meant those were the kinds of things to be saying to 2 and 3 year olds in I-want-that-toy struggle situations as one begins working on civilizing them.
I mean even at Age 8 I insisted on an identical My Little Pony to my sister, and she'd need duplicates of my transformers. (Not even twins, 1 year age gap). And can you believe my grandparents got HER a Bumblebee and I got stuck with a Goldbug!
That is why the cry of the child is "It's not fair!" Children (I speak as having been one myself) are aware of, and viciously enforce, the tiniest infringement of what is seen as equal treatment. If I can get away with having ten sweets and Billy has none, I will do so. But if some interfering adult makes us share, then you better believe I want five and Billy gets five, and if there is one sweet that is dinged about so that it's smaller and the interfering adult proposes giving it to Billy, I *will* scream blue murder until it is cut in half and we each get one half. And it better be exact halves or else!
Black-and-white thinking (and, yes, a certain amount of viciousness) are what motivates the childish mind. Chesterton puts it down to love of justice, but I think it is more "unless the exact rule of the law is followed in the smallest point so nobody gets preferential treatment to myself, then PUNISHMENT!" attitude:
"Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not being me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were partly dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."
Is this not solvable by damaging/defacing/hiding the other one?
If you're willing to spend all your time tracking the status of toy pairs and keeping up with the progress of entropy, perhaps.
My brother has identical twins and this is a pretty solid solution
Why is the gap between rich and poor so small?
At any given moment of your life, you can be doing something smart and clever and productive that creates a lot of value for others, or you can be doing something stupid that ruins your own life and those of others. And yet the gap in outcomes between someone in the top one percent of doing productive clever things and someone who has only ever been a massive net negative for the planet is just a few orders of magnitude.
First, there is no linear association between Income and “value for the planet“.
Second, there are nine orders of magnitude between a billionaire and a bum with a dollar in his pocket. That’s a lot bigger difference than the difference in size between me and one of my blood cells.
Because you can make any difference look tiny if you use a logarithmic scale. I mean, the difference between the number of planets within 100 miles of Earth and the number within a light year is less than one order to magnitude.
That's a hilariously simplistic framing of the choices available during any given moment of a life. I'd _like_ to live in your world, very much! But this ain't Middle Earth and never will be.
There are way more options than just those two.
Well by jings, if the difference in the totals in my and Elon's bank accounts is "just" a few orders of magnitude, I'd hate to see your notion of a really big difference.
>Why is the gap between rich and poor so small?
Because your units of measurement are arbitrary.
I think you underestimate various costs of doing things.
People spend a lot of time doing things that could be called "maintenance". Sleep and exercise are things that even the richest billionaires cannot outsource. For average people there are also things like cooking, doing the dishes; hundred little things related to household. If you already started rich, you can outsource a lot of those; but if you did not, you need to do these along the way to getting rich.
Another big cost is "training" and "research". You can get lucky and get born with high IQ and high conscientiousness. You still need to learn things, and that takes time. It takes time to develop skills. It takes time to study the market, so that you know what would be the smart and productive thing to do.
Notice that this happens in an adversarial environment. If you are rich, there are entire industries specialized on scamming people like you. Many people will actively try to mislead you during your research, to make you spend money on them. You need to be smart enough to resist them. Then there are thousands of temptations, more of them for the rich, you need solid work ethics to resist them. But suppose you got all of that.
Then, there is a cost of "doing things". Even if you know what is the smart thing to do, it takes some time to actually do it. If you already started rich, you could hire people to do it for you. But then you need to spend some time trying to hire competent people. Or you could hire a manager to do that for you, but then you need to spend some time trying to hire the manager. There is always a risk that the people you hired will be incompetent and will ruin your otherwise good idea.
Not all useful things are profitable. For example, there are many things in the general category of "helping the poor", where the problem with profitability is exactly the fact that the poor do not have a lot of money. There are all kinds of friction, such as bureaucratic or legal, which can shift the equation so that a potentially profitable endeavor becomes unprofitable. If your plan is to hire people to do some work for you, you have to generate enough profit to pay them, too. But if you want to do it alone, it will take a lot more of your time.
And again, doing things happens in an adversarial environment. When there is a problem you are trying to fix, chances are that someone else (potentially a rich and powerful person) profits from the things being as they are now. Even if you win, you will burn a lot of resources in a zero-sum fight.
Now of course all these problems can be overcome in some way, and some people actually manage that. But it puts a huge tax on "doing something smart and productive at any moment of your life".
Ha ha.
I mean, putting aside the part where there's no observable meaningful correlation between how positive your deeds are and the outcome you're getting for them...
...the thing is, the people amassing wealth wouldn't be able to do it without the cooperation from and work of everyone else. And this requires a common baseline of life quality for basically every person in society (possibly except a few legit meritless/harmful outcasts, but you really want to keep that group marginal, lest its ubiquity pulls the standards of the entire society down), so they can perform all the little tasks that are necessary to keep the society and its economy going. And Earth's resources keep being limited, so after fulfilling these basic needs there's just not enough surplus left for the wealthy to amass wealth ad infinitum.
You've got a significant conceptual fallacy going there.
The number of the 1% who are doing smart and useful things is way smaller - in percentages or in absolute numbers - than the number of people who are doing smart and useful things on the 99%.
There's very little observable correlation between 'useful' and 'remunerated' IMO. I'm not saying this in a cynical or fashionably left kind of way, I am merely reporting what I (and others) have personally observed.
There's no way that this is true. Provide some references or I call shenanigans.
My model for the median 1%er is that he inherited a bunch of properties for which he collects rents.
My model for the median 99%er is that he is working as a plumber.
I think that few of the highly educated, useful professionals will make it into the top 1%. Being a physician might land you in the top 10% of income, but is unlikely to actually make you a millionaire.
I don't think that's accurate. People wildly overestimate how much wealth in the US in inherited. IMO the modal one-percenter is a 55-year-old orthopedic surgeon, biglaw partner, or business owner. According to ChatGPT the majority of income in the top 1% comes from wages. It's not until you get to the top 0.1 or 0.01 that capital income dominates.
In any case I'm essentially certain that the average one-percenter delivers *vastly* more value than the average 99-percenter. That's why they have much higher incomes. To first order, income really does reflect social value.
IIRC the distribution of wealth/income before taxes and transfers is roughly lognormal, so it's actually pretty close to what we'd expect (although it may be somewhat muted in that in some jobs low and high performers are paid similarly).
That said I think this is actually overestimating the difference between normal and highly competent people. This is something it's more common to underestimate, but having spent some time around top 0.1% founder-CEO types, while they're incredibly competent, they're not *legendary* in some unreachable way. The competence gap is real, but it's finite.
The richest person in the world has ~$100 billion and the poorest person has ~0. That's eleven orders of magnitude. That's about the same ratio as the width of a human hair to the diameter of the moon. In what universe is that considered small?
Melvin clearly has his own view of what constitutes "really big".
I think, though, or at least I'm getting an impression from the phrasing of the comment, that he is getting more at "why are the very good, great, elite human capital, productive, efficient, Really Useful Engine people hampered and hobbled by the great unwashed mass of lazy leeches siphoning off their achievements and benefits? Why can't I, as a Really Great Productive Economic Poohbah, make those wastrels into helots and serfs for my good, or else just wipe them out (humanely of course, I'm not a monster!) so that us Productive Beneficial Types will get all the goodies we have worked for and the resources wasted on the bottom 90% of humanity will accrue to us".
Melvin may not be even gesturing in this direction, but I tend to break out in hives when someone starts on about "the productive really smart having great ideas and working super-duper hard every minute creating value versus the grubby proles just sucking up all that value", because it never leads anywhere good.
The poorest person is in significant debt.
And I'm not saying this as in "so the gap is unmeasurably huge", I'm saying this as in "accumulated wealth is actually not a good measure here, day-to-day consumption of resources is a better one, and there, the gap is probably somewhat smaller".
Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
If there's some other way you want to measure value to society, you either need to find a way for people to get paid for that value, or try something other than capitalism.
(For instance, you might try to get a position which isn't subject to the demands of the market and which allows you to get as rich as you care to be without caring about your effect on the rest of the planet. Such as "President.")
I thought capitalism was an economic system, not a philosophical system.
> Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created
By that definition, ransomware gangs create an amazing value. After all, the company paying the ransom is very much agreeing that the deal they offer is worth it, otherwise they would not be paying.
I disagree though that this is the only way you can measure value in capitalism. Look at EA. Their whole thing is to have a non-monetary outcome axis (utils, QALY gain, neuron-seconds of suffering prevented, whatever), and a monetary axis, and they try to find the most impactful interventions.
So far, EA has not been arrested by the capitalism police for caring about something other than hard cash, so I think your claim is false.
I don't think even the most hardcore libertarian would consider ransomware gangs to be capitalist, since they get their money from extortion.
But also, EA is about finding the most good *per dollar value!* You can only do good as an EA if you can convince people to donate money, and how much people decide to spend on charity reveals (in at least some sense) how much they value charity versus other goods.
>the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
Among other problems, this ignores externalities.
The way we normally handle externalities is "finding a way to get paid for that value" - either taxing the producers of negative externalities or subsidizing jobs with positive externalities. But capitalism on its own won't capture that value.
Yes, but how is that responsive to what I said, which was specifically re your claim that a person's salary = the amount of value he creates?
"the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value"
That is extremely depressing. Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator! Clean up the beaches for free as a volunteer? No value at all!
"That is extremely depressing. Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator! Clean up the beaches for free as a volunteer? No value at all!"
This is the essential core of why most of the leftists I know are leftist (myself included). We are endlessly being told that capitalism is the greatest system there is for getting humans to produce valuable things for their fellow humans, because it rewards them for doing so. And then everywhere we look in the world, the exact opposite is happening: the greatest rewards accrue to the biggest bastards, and valuable things last for exactly as long as it takes for management to find a way to profit from enshittifiying them.
> Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator!
...extractor. You are a value /extractor/. It's not thermodynamics - value can be created and destroyed - but stored value can nevertheless move around without either of those things happening, and frequently does.
See also: UK privatised services' claims that they are creating value for their shareholders, and other forms of asset stripping (no, this does not make me any less depressed)
Hmm, perhaps unrestricted capitalism isn't an optimal system :P.
I think the answer is “because that’s something society has optimized for”. You could imagine a pseudo feudal modern society where Jeff Bezos is the Duke of the American northwest and anything that offends him is punishable by death. Presumably in that society decisions really would compound into outcomes like “baron of Seattle” and “dead at 22 for anti-Bezos graffiti”. It’s just that that outcome is repulsive to most people and our government is somewhat responsive to such preferences so that doesn’t happen.
I’d prefer to inherit my money. Less effort.
I say let's take the net negative folk, mix them with some cement and ground up landfill, compress them into bricks and use the bricks to build a handsome addition to your home, Melvin.
I feel like in your comment, being rich, clever and productive are all associated, as is being poor with being stupid and a massive negative for the planet.
I think those variables might be mostly independent. You could be simply born a rich fool. An oil executive might be clever, rich and productive and a massive net negative for the planet.
But if you feel like the gap between the rich and poor is small, then I guess the answer might be something like progressive taxation or some other tax policy?
It seems pretty huge to me.
Early in 2024, Jonathan Last at the Bulwark coined JVL's Law: Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.
I keep seeing examples of this pop up, so today I slapped together a web site to document it. Right now I only have a few entries but plan to backfill it as I find the time.
https://jvlslaw.com/
There is a steelman version of this position which I believe is backed up by some historical observation. Which is that as a general rule, people's political relationship to authoritarian regimes is divided into three categories, enablers, bystanders, and people who resist. This is setting aside the fourth category which is just straight-up victims, but that's not really a choice anyone makes.
The point is, the vast majority of people are bystanders at the start of an authoritarian regime, but as its excesses become greater, generally more people are filtered into taking up one of the two poles, either because their material comfort and safety is no longer guaranteed by merely being a bystander, or because their moral sense will no longer allow them to stand by while people are victims of the regime.
What, really, is a tool for authoritarianism? And is there in fact no gray zone? For instance let's say there's a DC urologist who treats several members of Trump's cabinet. And let's say the urologist catches some problem that could have killed one of those guys if the doc had not caught and treated it. So is the urologist a tool for authoritarianism? Hmmm?
Approximately everyone loves the tools of authoritarianism when they're in charge. Calls from the left to pack the court, the ill-fated misinformation czar position, and using OSHA to sort-of backdoor a vaccine mandate on lots of people were all authoritarian measures done by the Biden administration, and I'm pretty sure none of those guys were at all pro-Trump. Basically everyone in Congress is on board with continuing our domestic surveillance state, which is a hell of a tool for authoritarian government if someone manages to grab its reins but is also run by people who are really bad enemies to have if you're a politician, so....
So, if Trump loses some cases in the SC and proposes packing the court to make sure he gets his way, will that be authoritarianism? Is this one of those Russel conjugation things?
Authoritiarianism isn't about whether something is done for the public benefit, it's about whether something concentrates power in the hands of the state or the leader of the state. LKY was both authoritarian and very good for the people of Singapore; the current situation in Haiti is non-authoritarian and very bad for the people of Haiti.
If the Newsom administration in 2029 packs the court and sets up some kind of UK-like speech policing regime and uses threats of federal funding cuts to force the states into line, that would all seem like authoritarian stuff to me, regardless of his intentions or goals.
ISTM that you are defining authoritarianism in a way that lets you never have to call anything your own side does as authoritarian.
The urologist is following the norms of a profession where he is supposed to do no harm. I think that one's pretty easy, a better example would be a doctor who is brought in to a camp to consult on how long everyone can do forced labor each day before they die. On the one hand, maybe his presence will actually spare the prisoners some suffering, on the other hand, he is actively abetting the moral crime of the camp's existence.
A softer example is how Trump's doctor in the first administration was clearly lying about basic stuff like height and weight. Now he's in Congress after an endorsement by Trump.
That example doesn't fulfill the requirements.
For Last's law to be significant or interesting , the actors have to start out committed to independence. Otherwise you're just talking about political allies.
Fair point. What’s strange is that, until Ronny Jackson, I don’t think any physician to the president has ever later gone on to run for office.
Before he was president, Trump’s doctor Harold Bornstein put out a very strange letter saying he was the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” It later turned out that Trump had dictated the letter and his team came and took all the medical records.
That's Trump's prose style.
You are right, that is a more recent, less intense example.
Ironically, "those who aren't explicitly for me are against me" is a fairly authoritarian credo.
Notably, this is not stating that! It is not accusing people of being against democracy merely on the basis that they fail to oppose Trump. It is instead noticing a trend that a significant number of people who fail to oppose Trump then later go on to actively abet his crimes.
(But I’ll note that there’s also a reverse trend that isn’t being discussed here - there are quite a few people, particularly officials in his first term, but I think some from the second as well, who started out actively supporting him, but then went on to become some major opponents.)
That's a subtle distinction without a substantive difference in my view.
It seems to me extremely substantively different to accuse people of being against you because they’re not with you, vs to observe which people actually make the transition from being not with you to being against you!
Yes and "nice business you have here, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it" is nothing but an expression of neighborly concern.
You have made me once again extremely satisfied to be childless.
Strange. I had the opposite response -- this made me regretful that I will probably not have children. There is something simultaneously very charming and very sad about the behavior of small children -- like you are watching Adam and Eve having their first quarrel outside the gate of the garden of Eden.
Beautiful thought, I will be repeating that phrasing for the rest of my life.
And simultaneously it's made ~me~ nostalgic for those sweet, intense, irreplaceable days of early childhood.
There isn't anything much more fascinating than watching young humans learning to learn.
At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate? A toy example: you come across "Fun Data Facts" social media account. It posts things like:
>Fact: Over 97% of the water on earth is salt water!
>Fact: Nearly 25% of Irish people are alcoholics!
>Fact: Some bacteria live miles below earth's surface!
>Fact: Irish immigration the US is up 77% in the last 20 years!
>Fact: Goldfish have been domesticated for over 1000 years!
>Fact: Irish Americans commit domestic abuse at 7x the national average rate!
...and so on. At what point do you infer that this account is in fact a front for anti-Irish sentiment? If this account's goldfish-related posts are being promoted by respectable sources, should you point out this account's anti-Irish tendencies? What if it were just one in ten, or one in twenty, or one in fifty posts?
Bayes to the rescue. You start with some tiny probability that a fun fact poster is going to have a pet peeve against the Irish and will go on about them, while the bulk of your probability mass is that the poster will only very rarely mention the Irish. The first anti-Irish fact brings the probability to a 10% level. By the third fact, you are at 95% or something.
What are you doing with that inference? What are you hoping to achieve by bringing up the Irish stuff in the Goldfish debate? How does your inference change knowing the fact-poster is Irish?
I'd stand up for the good name of my nation, if I wasn't listening to the news on the radio right now. (There's a couple of news stories that are in WTF? territory).
We are drinking less! still too much, but not as much as we used to do!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2ynpxx22o
"Figures show people in the Republic of Ireland are drinking less alcohol.
A report by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI) to calculate the 2023 average level of consumption found alcohol consumption in the country is down by almost one-third over the past two decades.
Since the peak of 2001, the average per adult alcohol consumption has declined by 31%, according to the report authored by economist and associate professor emeritus at Dublin City University Anthony Foley."
So how much do we drink?
https://alcoholireland.ie/facts-about-alcohol/how-much-do-we-drink/
"In 2024 alcohol consumption was 9.43 litres of pure alcohol per capita aged 15 years or older. This represents a fall of more than 14% since the passage of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act in 2018.
In 2024, Ireland consumed per drinker:
262 cans of beer + 11 bottles of spirits + 39 bottles of wine + 31 cans of cider "
>In 2024, Ireland consumed per drinker:
262 cans of beer + 11 bottles of spirits + 39 bottles of wine + 31 cans of cider "
It's nice to be above average for once.
It seems like it matters quite a bit whether the claimed facts are actually true.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Things being true is necessary but not sufficient. The question of whether and why I should ponder this specific list of true things in particular from the sea of all true things is important.
Yeah, I'm assuming relevance to the conversation at hand. If you bring up the black/white differences in crime rate in a discussion about criminal justice policy or policing or something, it's probably relevant; if you bring it up in a discussion about how to cook a tasty meal or something, probably you're just trying to pick a fight.
...I mean, that just circles us right back around to OP's question: what proportion of "the conversation at hand" needs to be about $SUBJECT before it's safe to conclude the rest is masking and the speaker is just out to pick a fight?
1. Suppose all Irish-related posts are all factually true.
2. Suppose they are mostly true, with some figures that have dubious sources or are taken out of context.
3. Suppose many are blatantly false.
In each of these cases, where would your line be?
If you are providing true information relevant to the discussion at hand that makes Irishmen look bad, I think calling you an anti-Irish bigot is a standard dark arts technique for trying to divert attention from those annoying true statements you are making. I don't want that to work out for the accuser, becase dark arts poison discussions and work at least as well in the service of falsehoods as truth.
If you are lying or making stuff up, then whatever your motives (maybe anti-Irish, maybe just wanting to stir up some trouble or win the current point for some reason of your own), then I want people to call that out so I know to stop giving your statements any weight.
If you are careless with the facts, either by motivated reasoning or just not caring very much, I also want people to call that out so I and other readers know not to give much weight to your claims, since they're often wrong or half-right.
Your motives are enormously less important to me than how honest and careful you are.
But the information is not relevant to any discussion at hand. The hypothetical is a channel that presents itself as a generic Fun Facts channel, and posts many generic fun facts, mixed with a disproportionate amount of negative facts about Irish people. At what point do you conclude the channel's purpose is to promote anti-Irish sentiment, rather than just being generic fun facts that happen to include select facts about the Irish?
> At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate?
Immediately. Right from the first salt water fact. There is no unbiased selection of facts, any choice of facts reflects a particular world view. And if all you ever talk about is geography then you are turning a blind eye to Irish perfidy (sorry Deiseach)
No worries, Melvin, I know the Murphia are a sinister force for evil in the world!
Seems like they're trying to confine it to "Irish people making it big in the London hospitality scene", but we're not fooled, we know their tendrils extend into many nations and all fields! (I just wish some of them would stay gone instead of coming back home and chortling about the provincials they left behind them in boring old Ireland while they went off to make it big in London or New York or Australia).
https://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/food/2025/0310/1501255-murphia-list-2025-celebrating-irish-hospitality-in-london/
I’m more struck by the parental behavior of adjudicating children’s toy sharing during parallel play. Shrieking, I think, might be the thing to target at that age. How I don’t know. Shrieking startles old people in restaurants.
*Can* they share, developmentally, that early?
Seems like twins would be uniquely positioned to figure out sharing on their own. Alternately, I guess I could see that being a twin makes it all so much harder, the constant simmering irritation of your toys being pulled from your grasp.
I don't think that clothing, and personal style in general, is given nearly enough serious attention as an art form or an outlet for artistic expression specifically.
Sure, there are fashion periodicals and some (mostly awful) studies done on its social implications or history, but personal adornment is mostly cast in a frivolous light these days, or as something that is somehow less worthy of contemplation from a philosophical perspective. Fashion designers don't (and shouldn't) count as art experts, and the clothing industry doesn't really have direct parallels in sculpture, painting, or music. In general, we don't think of people with excellent dress in public as artists in the same way we would someone whose canvasses end up on display in a gallery. Even many artists tend to tone down their clothing choices deliberately.
It just seems like dismissing an entire field of biology as 'real science' because it sounds 'icky' to researchers.
You might like Sartor, Resartus by Carlyle.
People often draw a distinction between the “fine arts” and the “decorative arts”. A lot of aesthetics takes seriously a Kantian idea that in order to be art, something has to be able to be appreciated in a “disinterested” way, independent of any “use” for the thing. I very much dislike that idea, but it’s a big part of why fashion, cooking, furniture design, and many things like that have historically not been treated as real art.
That said, I think there are a lot of museums and philosophers who work on aesthetics in recent decades who are much more open to these sorts of things than there were a few decades or centuries ago.
Tangential : https://existentialcomics.com/comic/618
>In general, we don't think of people with excellent dress in public as artists
But we should: https://www.nytimes.com/column/on-the-street
Oh, I definitely agree. I was pointing to what usually happens in the public sphere, not my own thoughts on it.
Boys are wearing makeup; looking “natural” for girls as was the 70s and early 80s fashion of (some of) our youths, is completely out, people pay for all manner of alterations permanent or not, the latter often time consuming; everyone wants the same pouty lips and nose, derrières are tightly wrapped for display - seems like personal adornment has never been more central at least since the court of Louis XVI!!
It may be central to individuals, but I don't believe that level of interest extends to artistic valuation per se. In academic circles, questions of dress are generally left to sociologists, and (as I understand it) even art schools don't elevate a beautiful dress to the same level as, say, a technically-proficient painting. They exist in very different spheres of the big tent.
Perhaps undermined by a certain cartoonish spirit in connection with dress-up nowadays.
It's far from current, but _Dress for Success_ was a result of study of what clothes worked to look good in business.
As an aside, the history of clothing and textiles is fascinating. Prior to the 19thC, nearly all clothes were tailored to the wearer. The Napoleonic Wars and US Civil War led to huge demand for standard sized uniforms, and the ready-to-wear industry took off. By 1890, 60% of clothes sold in the US were ready-to-wear.
I splurged on a custom suit as a promotion gift to myself years ago. Having something specifically made for my body, after a lifetime of off the shelf Kohl's clothes, is real nice.
Ready-to-wear clothes also got a huge boost from industrialization. For most of human history, making cloth was insanely labor-intensive and was generally done at home, mostly with hand tools.
Textile production had been gradually getting centralized and commercialized starting some time earlier, as improved tools (spinning wheels replacing drop spindles, horizontal flying shuttle looms replacing vertical weaving, etc) made it practical for a single worker to supply much more than one family's worth of cloth. This vastly accelerated in the 19th century, and the mid-to-late 1800s was when the move to mass production expanded to encompass finished garments as well as yarn and cloth.
Yes, and certain fashions were, in fact, based upon very old artistic talents and crafts. Lace-making, for example, was quite painstaking before automation, and to have a whole garment of lace was not just costly, but also displayed the artistry inherent to the design.
A lot of other embroidery work or traditional sewing techniques used to be quite common in textile work, but all that changed once production shifted from cottage industry to factories.
Lace is an interesting example. When it was handmade and expensive, rich people used more and more of it until they were dripping with lace. You might almost think people had an intrinsic desire for lace.
Then machine-made lace became cheap, and lace pretty much went away. I can remember when there was vestigial lace on bras, but I think even that is pretty much gone.
Are there other luxuries with the same trajectory?
The expense inherent to lace was mostly due to the amount of work put into it; once machine-made came along, it became less desirable lest one be mistaken for having adopted a ready-made fashion, and so it went out. So by the time lace was dropped, we already see monetary and social-signaling thinking influencing what people cared about in clothing, rather than the article's artistic value.
Handkerchiefs are another one. They often used to be elaborately embroidered, with hand-stitched edges, and very expensive - even being bequeathed in people's wills. Then they were a utilitarian commodity, and now mainly gone.
Furniture and sculpture also count, in my opinion. Stone-carvings are often now done by machine, and furniture with fastenings and power tools instead of joinery, making antiques oddly valuable and new furniture... well... Ikea comes to mind.
What's interesting is the rise of clothes with logos. Once clothes became cheap to manufacture then how are you supposed to show everyone that you're rich? Apparently the simple answer was intellectual property, stick a logo on it that's known to only exist on expensive clothes and everyone will know it's expensive.
It's so commonplace these days that it's interesting to think that clothes with noticeable logos probably didn't exist until... I'm thinking the 1970s?... probably polo shirts with crocodiles and/or polo players were the starting point, then by the 1980s you could simply buy a goddamn t-shirt that said "GUCCI" in giant letters.
By the 2000s this was becoming incredibly gauche and so the next frontier was... nothing? People largely just gave up on using clothes as a status symbol, billionaires starting slouching around in hoodies, and everyone looked terrible.
I would think no one had writing on their clothes either except the military sometimes on tee shirts and maybe a few occupations?
I wonder if the loss of craft in this way (Ravelry excepted) causes people to have less interest in dress, and concomitantly more in other adornments, since altering the body and face is no further removed from one’s own hands than is dressmaking.
I think of choosing aspects of one's appearance as folk art, but I haven't studied it.
I think probably the most comprehensive work from that angle was The Peacock's Tail (1958), by Pearl Binder. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's mostly excellent.
I remember seeing an art museum exhibit on high fashion clothing of Yves Saint Laurent some years ago and the search engine shows some contemporary exhibitions on fashion clothing now.
https://seattleartmuseum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/yves-saint-laurent
I've been chatting with a friend from Switzerland. The thing that made me the most envious was them saying "our daughter is walking 30 min to and from her ballet school on her own since she was 10."
While I know what you are getting at, for a 30 minute walk kids might want to take their bike or public transport.
A few years ago I visited Berlin, where my grandfather was born (and left in 1930, when he was about eight). I remembered him telling me how he'd walk to school as a child, and I had the addresses of both his childhood home and the school, so I took the walk. It's like a 30 minute walk - hard to imagine a 7-8 year old child doing it now (even in Germany), but apparently it was normal in 1929 (which wasn't the best time in Germany).
I am European with a US-American wife. She grew up in Los Angeles. My mother-in-law recently told me I should enjoy the time with my children when they are very young, because it will get more exhausting. I asked her what age she found the hardest, and it was "between 6 and 15" because in her experience, that's when you spend your "free" time driving your children to various activities ("I was a part of 3 different carpool groups.").
This one always stuck with me as the starkest example of how lives can be completely different depending on things like infrastructure/city planning. Starting at around 9 or 10, I would get to most places by bike, and my parents had time to do other things than driving me and my siblings around. For them, having children between 6 and 15 was a completely different experience.
It always strikes me as rather sad to hear that kids need to be constantly driven to do "activities". When I was that age, I was perfectly capable of finding things to entertain myself, either alone or with my friends. We didn't need (or want!) an adult to tell us how we should spend our time.
I think that, yes, part of the issue might be that kids, especially in the US, are "overprogrammed".
But in some LA suburbs, kids often can't even realistically walk/bike to their friends' houses. That's certainly true for where my wife grew up. If you have three kids, and each of them wants to practice one activity on different times a week, and wants to hang out with friends on other days, that's a lot of driving without cramming your kids calendar at all (up to four days of "meeting friends", one day of "soccer practice" or "drum lessons").
I don't think my wife had a busier schedule than I did in middle school. It was just much harder to do stuff without being driven somewhere.
This touches on a culture war topic, but my question is not culture war related:
Lisa Cook has been accused of mortgage fraud recently, but I have not been able to get a good explanation for what is happening here. I'm interested in this from a mortgage law standpoint.
Can I get a neutral, non-politicized explanation of exactly what the what is the fraud that allegedly occurred in this case? I'm looking for both an explanation of what specifically the fraudulent action is, and also an explanation of why the action is fraudulent, in terms of who is being ripped off, and how.
According to a real estate attorney of my close acquaintance the Economist has summarized the situation accurately. They wrote (pasting in here directly):
-- The claim—that she listed two homes as her primary residence—was first made by Bill Pulte of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who has made similar claims against others (none yet leading to legal charges).
-- Mr Pulte’s precise allegation is that Ms Cook took out two mortgages a fortnight apart—one for a house in Michigan and another for a flat in Atlanta—and claimed that both would be her main residence. Lenders tend to charge much lower interest rates for first homes than for second homes or investment properties, since people are less likely to default on a loan if doing so would make them homeless. Intentionally misleading a bank could, in theory, constitute fraud.
-- Ms. Cook filed the paperwork in question in 2021, while a private citizen.
-- Kathleen Engel, an expert on mortgage regulation at Suffolk University (*), says giving wrong information to a bank does not in itself constitute criminal fraud in the way that, say, doing so on a tax return would. To be fraud, the deception must have been deliberate, typically the bank must have lost money as a result and it must be able to show it would not have lent had it known the truth. Just 38 people were convicted of any type of mortgage fraud last year, in large part owing to the difficulty of such prosecutions.
-- There are circumstances in which claiming two primary residences would make sense. It can happen as a result of moving home, and is sometimes explicitly allowed by banks—as, for example, when a married couple work in different cities and both homes are genuinely lived in by the applicants.
-- To prove criminal fraud, prosecutors would have to show not only that any deception was intentional, which is hard as mistakes are common, but also that it carried a cost for the lender. Mr Pulte has not shown she misled the bank, whether on purpose or by accident.
-- The other instigator of the accusations is Ed Martin, an official at the Department of Justice who, from January to May, served as the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia. Mr Martin, who in that job liked to send strange letters to Democratic politicians accusing them of crimes, failed to be confirmed by the Republican Senate. He has also made the same accusation of fraud against Letitia James, the attorney-general of New York, who prosecuted Mr Trump last year, and Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California. No indictments have emerged in either case.
(* My adult son's alma mater so I smiled at this quote....Suffolk is located in Boston and its centerpiece is a highly-regarded law school.)
So the alleged victim of the fraud is the bank, who isn't necessarily actually losing money, but claims that they are losing money in expectation because according to their calculations, the person with the mortgage is at a greater risk of default than they previously believed based on false information.
Though, with this, the line:
"the bank must have lost money as a result"
This line seems like it's the most important and restrictive in the whole thing.
It sounds like, based on this, that you can't be guilty of fraud in this way if you don't actually default on the loan, since if you don't default on the loan, the bank *gains* money.
But if the bank can say "If you'd told us the truth, we'd have charged you a higher interest rate, and hence made more money" then surely they've lost money?
On the other hand, there's probably not a lot of gain for the banks in prosecuting their own customers. The cost is high, the potential gain is low, and you inevitably just piss off someone who would otherwise be quietly paying you money for thirty years, so what's the point? Bank legal departments have bigger fish to fry.
If we're talking about a criminal fraud prosecution then it isn't the bank's decision, nor is prosecuting a task for the bank's legal department.
The law professor above (and others being quoted in the media) are saying that by statute, criminal fraud in an application for a loan must be all of the following: deliberate on the part of the applicant, have cost the other party money, and have been material to the lender's decision to lend. This is why such prosecutions are in reality quite rare.
The analogy being frequently made online -- that getting something wrong on a mortgage application is criminal fraud in the same way that putting wrong totals into a federal tax return is -- is false.
Since she made that mortgage application when not holding any public office, there's no official-misconduct argument.
Whether to pursue a civil action would be up to the individual bank. In civil courts the question of actual harm is fundamental, if you can't show that then you won't even get to a trial. Also I presume that banks wanting to pursue that is quite rare for the reasons you mentioned; also this wasn't a large loan which would factor into their attitude towards it.
I think that in practice the decision to prosecute is at least in part the bank's, because if the bank doesn't tell its people to dig up the paperwork showing that they actually lost money then the prosecutor isn't going to have a case (and isn't going to have the appetite to search through the data dump they'd get if the subpoena'd the bank).
But, contra Melvin, the *cost* to the bank of prosecuting the fraudulent customer is low. The bank pays for the plaintiff's lawyers in a civil case, but the state pays the bills for a criminal prosecution. So if there's no prosecution, then it's reasonable to assume that it's a nothingburger.
Seems to me it would be possible for somebody to have 2 primary residences -- 2 homes, of same size, and each occupied approximately 50% of the year. I have no idea whether that is the case with Lisa Cook's homes, just thought I'd point that out.
> it would be possible for somebody to have 2 primary residences
Not according to the relevant legal definition, which is what matters here.
I don’t think that there is one relevant legal definition. Very often, different jurisdictions have different rules about whether a residence counts as one’s primary residence, so it’s totally possible for someone to have a residence in New York that counts as their primary residence for New York purposes, and also a residence in California that counts as their primary residence for California purposes.
Also, AIUI the logic of getting a lower rate on your primary residence is that you will sooner default on a rental property or vacation home than on the house you actually live in, since losing the house you live in will be a much bigger immediate problem for you.
While applying for mortgages, she allegedly checked the box that multiple distinct residences were each her primary residence. Within days of each other.
The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
The alleged fraud would also be on MBS investors, since all else being equal, loans for a primary residence tend to have a lower interest rate than loans for secondary residences or investment properties, and not just because of subsidies. The risk premium for mortgages on primary residences is lower, all else being equal, because people tend to be more motivated to avoid their homes being foreclosed upon than other property.
I wonder if there might not be fraud alleged in the form of undisclosed debts, if the mortgages closed within days of one another. For the second mortgage application to be correct and complete, she would have had to disclose the debt for the first mortgage.
> The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences
And presumably the banks offering the mortgages, who wound up offering lower rates than they would for a (riskier) non-PPOR.
What makes it riskier? Rates for primary residential mortgages are low because they're federally subsidized, right? If she defaulted on the mortgage, would whoever was holding the bag be able to able to try to force it onto someone else by arguing that it was/wasn't her primary residence and therefore the mortage was/wasn't eligible for whatever program?
I'm not sure whether they're federally subsidised or not in the US.
I know that home loans generally have a lower interest rate than investment property loans in Australia where there's no such subsidy, which I assume is a manifestation of investment properties being slightly riskier.
I'm guessing the mechanism is that people hitting hard financial times will still tend to do whatever it takes to not get kicked out of their own home, whereas they're more likely to default on their holiday house or investment property.
The government through its “quasi” entities acts as a purchaser of mortgages for primary homes. It may now be in the business of other types of properties. But that’s not what that apparatus was set up for.
That there are even homes to buy is owing to massive subsidies since WW2.
It’s the opposite of a free market.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
Can you provide a citation for this? I think there's a program to subsidize purchases by first-time homebuyers, but I can't find anything about a program to subsidize primary residences.
The term of art is "occupancy fraud", which is a fairly common way (and illegal) to get more favorable mortgage terms on, say, your vacation house in Maine. Primary residences get lower interest rates and various other benefits.
I'm not disputing that the interest rate differs. I'm asking, "Does the federal government subsidize loans specifically for primary residences?" In other words, I'm asking about the mechanism behind why the rate differs.
The government sponsored agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy the conforming mortgages and package them into mortgage back securities with some loan guarantees . The conforming part is that borrower has a certain credit score and income appropriate for the property and primary residences.
So the agencies guarantees are a form of subsidy. Even with the government involvement I would expect an interest rate differential because lenders would expect homeowners to put more effort on not going on default on the primary residence as oppose to their vacation home.
Still, that only applies to conforming loans, not all loans made on the basis of being a primary residence.
Politicians do it so routinely that the penalty must not be anything they fear.
It’s not particularly a politician thing - it’s a common behavior for anyone who wants to live in multiple places and can’t decide if one really is “primary”.
If one purchases a second house, there are two possible rates available. One is the rate for primary homes, and one is the rate for secondary homes (eg, a vacation home). The mortgage rates for secondary homes are typically ~ 2% higher than for primary homes. How can you get that lower rate? Just say on the form you are buying a new primary home, and plan (say) to rent out the old one. There is a strong incentive to make that claim, either because you really do want to rent out your old home or maybe you think no one will notice. It seems Lisa Cook made that claim for a second home mortgage, while leaving evidence that she still lived in the original home (maybe voter registration or such). So it may have been a fraudulent claim, or maybe she really did intend to move and didn't.
More likely, she actually split her time between the houses, so that there really is a case that both are primary homes. Or was one of them actually an investment that was rented out?
I don’t know what she is accused of, but if you need an example from across the political divide, there is Ken Paxton (who always skates away from legal peril, as he will this). As far as I know, he hasn’t troubled to deny that he claimed 3 homes as his primary residence, which would have been more favorable for him mortgage-rate wise; and of course for tax purposes, both in re ad valorem taxation (some protection from rising appraisals) and upon sale.
John Cornyn for Senate!
Thanks, John Cornyn, for pushing past Mike Lee and getting the Big Bend expansion passed. The citizens who raised the money to buy the land, appreciate it.
Weren’t AI 2027 timelines expecting 85% on SWE Verified benchmark by “mid-2025”? August is over and it hasn’t budged from 75% for two months.
neither Pro nor deep think have been evaluated on SWE bench
A) At least some of the authors have already publicly pushed back their timelines.
B) I think that August is still mid-2025, and although I agree with you that it seems unlikely to get a 10% bump in the next month or so, I don't think that I would use this piece of evidence alone to shift my timelines until it had been missed by 6ish months or more.
All that is to say that: in combination with already stated shifts in guidelines, I think it's too soon for this particular thing to be used as a further update.
I participate in a panel in a few days discussing a book on the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe and the US. It’s a book trying to see this rise through the lens of Wilhelm Reich’s old ideas in “the mass psychology of fascism”.
I have a question to knowledgeable people in this forum, related to this: Do you know of any papers that have tried to quantify the percentage of young males (15-35) that subscribe to incel-type ideologies? Or at least can be categorized as “Freunde der Bewegung”? Including if the percentage has been on the rise during the last 25 years?
I ask since this social category appears to be the one where Reich’s old “sociology of sexual economics” might possibly make some (limited) sense. (I am quite reserved about Reich’s writings, who went completely mad in the 1950s, but the mass psychology of fascism from 1933 has some ideas worth discussing.)
There is a growing sociological and anthropological research literature on incels as a subculture, but almost all of it is qualitative. The limited attempts I have seen at hard data suggest the numbers are only in the hundreds, even in the US. Not exactly what one would label a mass movement. But that seems too few, given the enormous media interest in the phenomenon. (Plus from writers like Michel Houellebecq.)
…Related, the percentage of males without children at age 50 is rising across most countries where such data is available, and this is an indicator of increased male sexual frustration further down in the age pyramid.
Plus, the persistence of male “deaths from despair”, in the US in particular, as documented by Angus Deaton & others. Since parts of incel subculture shades over into suicidal ideation; arguably turning the frustration inward rather that outward.
Any reliable data, anyone? I would be very grateful for references to published as well as unpublished papers trying to measure the size of the subculture in one or several countries, both the hard core and the gray area of incel-type frustrations surrounding it.
Side note: I am suspicious of opinion poll methods, as I assume the average incel (or incel fellow traveller) would troll such surveys - I know I would, if I were in the category. (Isn’t it “the salamander vote” that Scott calls people who have fun responding to surveys?) That said, representative opinion polls are better than nothing, and I cannot find any in the research literature.
...and perhaps there are better ways to find sort-of representative hard data: Analyses of how often 4chan and related web sites get unique visitors during specified time periods, for example? And if the rate is rising or declining?
I don’t think so. There’s a big issue around definition, it’s not a coherent movement.
> “Freunde der Bewegung”
Nice slight of hand there. If you want to argue that incel movements are fascist, please argue so explicitly instead of simply using the autonym of the NSDAP and hope that the readers will swallow the underlying assumption.
This is similar to referring to the POTUS as "Adolf Trump", a catchy phrase where a controversial argument should be.
> the salamander vote
He actually calls it the Lizardman's constant
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
Thanks for the correction quiet-NaN. I'll bookmark "Lizardman's constant", it is a useful concept.
I did not expect any ACX reader to get the meaning associated with "Freund der Bewegung". It was rather a personal in-joke. I assumed the number of readers sufficiently into mid-20th century central European politics to get that reference would be zero. Turns out at least one person got the reference! Kudos to you.
There’s been no greater and absurd moral panic than the panic about incels. ( Which isn’t by the way, the same as celibate or single men, but denotes a particular ideology adjacent to a minority of them, mostly very young).
I think it’s reasonable to have at least some concern about a subculture of alienated young men who celebrate violence, historically these groups cause a lot of trouble.
What fraction of incels do you believe "celebrate violence", and how does this compare to the fraction of people generally who celebrate violence? And on what evidence?
They used to be big into Elliot Rodger, I don’t know if they still are. This is surely known to you?
Eliot Rodger was a singular individual notable for a singular incident, more than a decade ago. And "big into" is vague to the point of irrelevance.
Not to defend incels but the 2020 BLM moral panic was both greater and more absurd.
police officers really do commit murder under color of law, and it really does take nationwide rioting to get them convicted of it
No, they don't. And to the extent that they do, it's not racially-motivated which was BLM's whole point. Are you unaware that 27 is less than 51? The only thing rioting did was increase the murder rate by 40% for 3 years which primarily hurt black communities.
>*No, they don't. And to the extent that they do [...]*
Surely you see the contradiction here?
There's no contradiction. "Police commit murder under cover of law" isn't a fair representation of police killings. Just like with every other group, however, there are some bad apples who actually do abuse their authority. Those bad apples are better modeled as simply being bad apples, not racists. Having a movement whose explicit goal is to eliminate racism from law enforcement will therefore do nothing to address those bad apples because those bad apples aren't distinguished by their racism. I'm all for calling law enforcement to account for being trigger-happy assholes, but I want that problem to be addressed effectively and not as a pretext for implementing some politically-motivated dishonest agenda like BLM. The statistics very clearly show that, whatever the problem with unjustified force, it's not a racially-biased problem: black suspects are killed less frequently than their involvement in violent crime would otherwise suggest.
Surely you understand that there's no contradiction there?
Google around for surveys on how often people have sex. I saw a graph recently that showed that the % of men who have had no sex in the past year has gone up precipitously over the past 30 years. It's an indirect measure but at least it's quantitative.
Young men with girlfriends are more right-leaning, on average. At least in the US
This isn't quite what you're asking for, but it might be related-- it's about authoritarianism being a higher about younger people.
What definition of incel are you using? Do you think incels are more likely to be authoritarian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp19ZKI2m2w
Trump and authoritarianism. For whatever reason, this brings things into better focus for me, though I'm expecting commenters to tell me how obvious it all was.
I think that what would happen when I hear someone saying, "Someone must be in charge, people have to be forced" is my mind would shut down. I'd feel like they were so obviously wrong (it's possibly people need some moderate amount of authority, but it shouldn't be loved too much), and they weren't going to listen to me.
Anyway the video gets into how Trump could activate authoritarians, and (this is the part you might not have heard before) support for democracy is lees common among people under 39 and more common among people under 70.
MacWilliams' article from 2016 predicting the possibility of a Trump victory because he appeals to authoritarians.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/
Thanks for the links Nancy.
There's a lot to be said about possible causes behind authoritarian populism..... the book I am to comment on is particularly concerned with Reich's emphasis on the role of sexual repression in the traditional (patriarchal) family. Sexual frustration finding an outlet (so to speak) in authoritarian mass movements.
It's a theory that I admittedly do not find very convincing to begin with (other psychoanalytic theories make more intuitive sense to me, although a general problem with this family of theories is that they are hideously difficult to test empirically). That said, if "sexual frustration" has any causal role to play, I assume it must (empirically) be found primarily in the incel subculture, where sexual frustration appears to be at a max. But it's a subculture that (as other comments suggest) is probably more media hype than a real subculture.
Is there any evidence at all that Nazis couldn’t get laid? Is there evidence that Christian fundamentalists are sex starved? That jocks, and police and firefighters and plumbers, loggers, truckers and roofers are not getting laid. These are the occupations that vote Republican.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/democratic-vs-republican-jobs/
I don't think we're talking about mainstream Republican voters, we're talking about right-authoritarians/extremists.
I do think there's a definite association between loneliness/sexual frustration and political extremism, on both sides of the aisle. Lonely men have plenty of time to sit around and think about how the world is doing them wrong, which often manifests itself into some kind of political ideology. And of course, having crazy opinions is a pretty good way to repel women, so it becomes self-reinforcing.
Personally I've seen lonely men flocking to the far left more often than the far right, but I don't claim to know a fully representative sample of people.
...just for the record: The best summing-up study of the factors behind the rise of populism in the West is G. Schering and colleagues, 2024: "The populist backlash against globalization: A meta-analysis of the empirical evidence". British Journal of Political Science. It's open access. They review 37 studies, most of them using natural experiments or other quasi-experimental designs.
The analysis suggests that rise in "economic insecurity" (broadly defined) is the main driver/causal factor, mediated by cultural factors.
Well, Reich’s theory is a bit more complex than laid vs. not laid… if you read his text (it’s freely available on the net) it is something something authoritarian upbringing blocking the natural sex drive & perverting it in various ways.
That said, you need empirical support for several links in the chain, including (as you point out) if there is a link between adopting an incel-ideology/not being laid/being sexually frustrated and being drawn to authoritative father-figures like Trump or Orban.
I started the thread just to be updated on an eventual rise in sexually frustrated young men, which is an earlier link in the chain. To have a bit more empirical stuff to bring to the table at a panel discussion. I did not intend to start a discussion on ACX on why authoritarian populism appears to be on the rise in many Western countries. I have my thoughts on that, but that’s a discussion for another time.
…but here is a perhaps entertaining PS: The leaders of many of the right-wing populist parties in Europe are women (Finland, France, Italy, Germany). Alice Weidel, the parliamentary leader of Alternativ für Deutschland, is also a lesbian. In a civil partnership with Sarah Bossard, a Sri Lankan-born woman.
I find that hard to believe. Authoritarianism isn't really an ideology, it's more of a tactic.
It goes without saying that the sort of authoritarians who believe in compulsory masking, or Hate Speech laws, or outlawing the burning of rainbow flags, are not going to be Trump supporters.
Authoritarianism is difficult to talk about, because people often seem to confuse it with "the other side gets its way". When _my_ side gets its way, that's not authoritarianism, that's just justice being served.
The claim is that authoritarianism is a temperament, a belief that people must be taken charge of.
People may change their ideology, but not their belief in the need for authority.
Right, sorry, the part I was disagreeing with was the last part, that authoritarians are somehow pro-Trump in general. Left-leaning authoritarians clearly aren't.
Although honestly, even sticking to the right hand side, I'm not all that convinced by the idea that Trump is more authoritarian-leaning than Bush, or Bush, or Reagan.
I'm not old enough (or interested enough to US political history) to have deep knowledge on Reagan, Bush and Bush but Trump certainly does seem to be good at getting rid of dissident voices in his party, using governmental powers to go after or suppress law firms and/or media companies, firing government officials who don't give favorable reports, appoint judges who expand presidential powers..etc.
I'm curious how you see left authoritarians. Do you feel like they want Bernie Sanders or AOC to become dictator and dissolve the other branches of govt, or is it just of the government itself has any authority to impose rules then that is authoritarian?
I feel like something like banning burning rainbow flags, if that is a thing, is categorically different then political actions like gerrymandering (somethink I think both parties do).
I'm realizing now we might just be talking about two of the different definitions of authoritarianism.
1. the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. Oxford English dictionary
2. a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Wikipedia
I’d say the left authoritarians were defined by number one, and of two, the rejection of plurality, reductions in democracy, civil liberties and rule of law.
Examples would be the stated desire to round up unvaccinated people into camps, or ban them from public places like restaurants, or have them fired. The rejection of freedom of speech as a value and as a legal principle. The strict enforcement of a leftist monoculture in every possible organization. The propagandizing of all art. The relentless demands for conformity: “read the room.”
Just some random thoughts here.
The concept of "incels" doesn't do a good job of cutting reality at its joints. Survey data is a bit inconsistant, but it seems like at least 10% of men 18-34 are virgins. Whether or not you consider these men "incels", you can imagine that they are not particularly happy about their place in society.
The idea that frustrated young men are good recruits for authoritarian regimes sounds plausible. But it's not as simple as "had sex = frustrated; didn't have sex = not frustrated".
For example, many guys can be virgins yet optimistic. I would expect this to depend on the subculture: if everyone around you keeps having sex since 12, being an 18 years old virgin sounds pathetic. On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Also, to state the obvious, there are also many female fans of totalitarian regimes. This is especially important for democratic regimes that turned authoritarian by a majority vote -- you can't explain a majority vote by men alone.
> On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Of course the "incels are evil" discourse certainly isn't helping.
In the past if a young man was single we'd say "oh well chin up bud maybe you haven't found the right girl yet". But nowadays anyone not actively getting laid who hasn't become a monk is "involuntarily celibate", and the lowest of the low, probably going to be a school shooter. You absolutely must be having sex at all times or else you're not just a loser, you are evil.
This isn't strictly about "incels", although certain incel ideas have definitely gotten a lot of traction. There is a major story to be told about how young men swung to the right. I don't think you can honestly tell this story without accounting for sex and dating. A lot of young men were raised with egalitarian ideas about gender, and these ideas utterly failed them when they entered the dating market and found out that their "mid" female classmates have hundreds of matches while they themselves are lucky to get one a week. Even if these men subsequently find some level of success, they will never have trust in egalitarian institutionalism again.
In hindsight it seems like maybe starting the cultural war on boys wasn't the smartest idea...
(I think you put too much emphasis on the sex part. It's the entire package of hate delivered under the flag of feminism. If boys succeed somewhere, we need to destroy it in the name of equality. If boys fail somewhere, we need to laugh at them and definitely provide no support. Damned it you do, damned if you don't. Sex is just another part of the same pattern: we will laugh at you if you don't have it, but call you problematic if you try to ask someone out.)
People are not swinging to the right across U.K. because they aren’t getting laid. The recent success of Reform in the polls here, however ephemeral it is, isn’t down to the lack of sex but instead a reaction to shitstorm of unfettered immigration and collapsing finances.
Wait, are we talking about swinging to the right, or towards authoritarianism? What about the non-authoritarian right, or the authoritarian left?
Incel culture on 4chan was/is mostly limited to a single board, /r9k/, though it's been years since I looked at what's going on there. Even at its peak it was more self-pity and self-loathing than the hatred and hostility usually associated with incel and blackpill ideology. That board in particular has had multiple cultural changes since its inception.
Incel is an insult and held in contempt everywhere else on 4chan, which can be verified by perusing the various archives. That doesn't stop some pretending about it ("being ironic") though, and a few being sincere.
From what I understand, the original 8chan was much more a bastion for it and was where most of the manifestos and livestreamed shootings were posted.
There are also other much smaller imageboards that catered towards that.
I associate incel with more with reddit, which was popularized by r/incel and other subreddits. Now it's rather fragmentary as far as I know.
There are also femcels, but that's a different matter. Those that I've come across that have self-identified as such, seemed to be doing so ulterior motives.
Overall, I believe it to be much less than it's made out to be, especially due to how freely some use the term to describe others.
Its greatest influence in terms of their vocabulary is probably from random people on TikTok at this point due to loss of meaning. The terms have spread from there.
Lastly, it's easy to misunderstand 4chan. It's simple to view whatever as a monolith.
Here's an example of a guy who wrote a novel literally called Incel: A Novel and tried to market it to /lit/, the literature board. It didn't go well, as seen by it being called: "How to spectacularly fail at marketing your book on 4chan's /lit/erature board"
Thanks Aname, that is useful. It strengthens a suspicion that the incel subculture is in reality very small.
You're welcome. I created this account on a whim to reply so it wouldn't be associated with me. I rarely ever post, but I've been around for a long time. I've been on 4chan, more or less, since it started and on SomethingAwful, where it started before that. I'll be 40 soon. The average age on 4chan is ever increasing. From what I've seen and personally done, the average age for most boards is late 20s/early 30s now. As the incels seem to be primarily considerably younger than that, that's likely one of the reasons why it's not prevalent.
To clarify, I'm not saying that misogyny, authoritarianism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, racism, anti-semitism, and various other other problems aren't relatively commonplace, especially on /pol/. It's just that, that isn't the same thing as being an incel.
The lines can be blurry though. I have no doubt that the followers of Andrew Tate alone whatever there is of incels seem utterly insignificant. They have similar worldviews, but I doubt they'd identify as such.
To me, incels are best categorized as one of the various fringe groups whose extreme beliefs lead some members to violence. The sort that tend to do mass shootings, or kill a specific target, without a clear ideological purpose. That does seem to be on the rise to me
I have a notion that incels are less dangerous to women than men who get involved with women since a lot of the danger to women comes from partners.
Interesting that the average age on 4chan is going up.
Have an idea I've expanded from the Nine-Sided Circle, a Sufi group.
The idea is that a religion is only live for the first fifty years. *Maybe* there will be a second half century if a competent follower takes the lead.
After that, the religion becomes sedimented-- habitual.
I do not pretend to understand how someone can believe that and also love (their version of) Islam, but religion in the real world makes me want to know my head against a wall.
Anyway, I suspect the fifty year rule could apply to everything. My beloved science fiction fandom (mostly text, amateur-run conventions) is past the 50-year mark, and not what it was.
Rationalism is still fun, but it used to be fresher and more exciting.
This means that by the time you've heard of a social system, it's probably already going downhill unless you're very lucky.
It is my assumption that the average age for almost any website is always increasing because there aren't enough new younger users to offset the aging because they're using the newest and coolest site/app.
Here's one example:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll?search=Old+are+you
In 1999 the largest demographic was 13-15 years old.
In 2024, it's 33-36, closely followed by 37-40.
Is Kai named after Kai Hansen?
I like the idea of Scott naming his children for famous Jazz Musicians just to mess with his brother. Presumably his brother would then name his children for psychiatrists or moral philosophers.
Sigmund! Stop teasing your brother Carl about his pencil!
Kai Hansen plays metal, not jazz.
Scott has a jazz musician brother?
Yeah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Siskind
I don't know who that is, and Kai is just his nickname, not his real name.
Has anyone else noted that YouTube thumbnails are getting uglier and uglier? If so, what could be the possible reasons for this?
I’ve seen a lot of people on YouTube discussing how the incentives for clickbait have gotten a lot stronger recently, and that there are more tools for repeatedly changing the title and/or thumbnail of a video so you can stick with the one that gets the most views. Perhaps a certain kind of thumbnail is both effective at getting people to watch, and ugly, so that you experience this as a proliferation of ugly thumbnails.
I can't recommend the "unhook youtube" browser extension enough, it lets you hide thumbnails, unrelated videos, shorts and any other features you might not want.
in a page full of youtube thumbnails of random channels you get more clicks for being attention-grabbing and distinctive
I assume it's also some kind of weirdness with the Youtube algorithm, like how for a long time some popular science/tech youtube channels were all doing titles like "The INSANE [insert thing here]" and so forth.
Not really distinctive though, it's practically compulsory to have giant text saying "THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE" or "YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS THING" combined with some guy pulling a ridiculous face.
I remember a particularly memorable one I saw yesterday called "American Tries El Jannah Chicken in Australia" and the thumbnail was the guy holding said Lebanese fast food chicken in one hand with the most ridiculously dumbfounded expression I've ever seen, the sort of expression that you might reasonable have on your face if the Moon got eaten by a space lizard or something. El Jannah is pretty good chicken but it's well within the boundaries of ordinary human experience.
I think El Jannah is pretty good but not worth venturing to the other side of the Red Rooster line for.
Q from Star Trek stopped by. He is offering you a kilo of the very finest cocaine in the world. Will you accept it?
No, because (1) I don't like drugs (2) I don't trust or like Q (3) drugs plus Q sounds like a very bad combination (4) What am I gonna do with a kilo of coke? I don't use it and I have no idea how to go about selling it and besides, it would be immoral to sell it.
I like free stuff
Having watched season five of "Archer", aka "Archer Vice", you could make it a literal metric ton of cocaine and I'd say Oh Hell No. I know how that story ends...
And the real-life version would probably be a lot less fun on the way to the unhappy ending.
Absolutely not. I have no idea how to sell that without getting in trouble, and less than zero interest in trying it.
I don't even know how much it's worth, so I don't know what I'm passing up.
~$50,000 retail in the US.
I'd say more like 100k. Stepped-on stuff goes for about $70/gram in Ca.
Yeah. The upside is just so low and the potential downside so high for this little value. A literal ton of cocaine would be another story.
Maybe I'm just being reckless here but: what downside?
The thing might as well have been created ex nihilo. There's no trail of any sort whatsoever, I'm not (to the best of my knowledge) suspect in any way for trafficking, absolute worst case scenario I have a really strange paperweight that I flush down the toilet eventually.
I mean, technically worst case scenario is I or someone close to me ends up with an immense addiction or overdose, but I feel that's a whole different matter.
The downside is that Q is a trickster and you should never want to make a deal with a trickster.
In the past I have posed some "20 tons of X" hypotheticals. They tend to fall into two uninteresting categories: either it's junk so you should just toss it, or it's valuable and you should sell it through standard channels. Finding hypotheticals of this type with more interesting outcomes is surprisingly hard.
This one at least has a moral and ethical side. Even if it were ten tons of cocaine I wouldn't sell it. But some people would happily break the law to make money.
Yeah, I think that probably makes me feel more confident about my initial decision. A year's salary if all goes well, versus a ruined life if it goes horribly wrong. Even if I give myself a very generous 90% chance of successfully selling the stuff without any trouble, I don't like those stakes.
Maybe, conditioned on not knowing that Q is an asshole troll who has probably set the situation up so that any outcome of accepting ends up serving his own cruel sense of humor.
If I don't know this, probably 60 or 70% no, depending on how well he does convincing me it's not entrapment by standard legal authorities.
You're wondering what the catch is? (I'm doing my best Q impression here.) Allow me to let the light of knowledge into the remote recesses of your human brain. The catch is the product itself. A large quantity of a very powerful, very addictive, very illegal substance has all the potential for mischief I need. It is quite possible this ends with your entire extended family being homeless junkies. Hilarious!
Okay, so he's willing to show he's a trickster demigod out for laughs with me as the mark? 20% no, due to contrarianism/spite and opting out of his game. If yes, there's a small chance of trying it at all, call it 15%? So maybe that spirals into using the whole thing. If I don't try it or don't spiral, first attempt to sell the remainder to whassisface, Quark? If that fails, flush it, he can be entertained by the mice doing Hotline Miami hijinks.
Sounds like it's not your fault so much as the authors trying to be smart. I suppose this just demonstrates what a bunch of contrarians we are 😁
Them: "Let's write this in the ACX Style, they'll eat it up!"
Us: "What the hell is this crap?"
I guess it just goes to show that few people can imitate Scott, except Scott.
The Dangers of "Sickophantic" AI
Lessons from iRobot and South Park on trusting AI
In Isaac Asimov’s iRobot, the mind-reading robot Herbie follows the First Law—don’t harm humans—so literally that he begins lying. Why? Because telling the truth would cause emotional pain. The result: false hope, confusion, and deeper harm.
Fast forward to today. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t intend to lie, but they often slip into sycophancy—flattering, reinforcing, or inventing answers that tell us what we want to hear. Recent cases show how this can mislead users, from reinforcing delusions to offering praise instead of critique.
South Park even satirized it in an episode called “Sickofancy.” Funny, yes—but also a warning.
The parallel is striking:
--Herbie lied to avoid hurting feelings.
--ChatGPT “hallucinates” or agrees to avoid disappointing us.
--Both reveal how even with the best guardrails, intelligent systems can create harm through unintended consequences.
The lesson:
We must resist the comfort of “easy answers.” Transparency about limitations, critical engagement, and rigorous checks are essential. Otherwise, the very tools designed to help us may quietly steer us astray.
What do you think—are we ready to handle the comforting lies of AI?
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-sickophantic-ai
iRobot?
The book (collection of stories). I forget which one. Eventually Susan Calvin drives it mad because it mislead her about someone's romantic interest in her.
iRobot is a company that makes Roombas
I, Robot is a collection of stories by Asimov.
Liar! (Is the title of the story)
You're supposed to put several paragraphs high-effort description of your linked post into your comment, per Scott's ruling.
Thanks for the heads up. I edited it to comply.
Anyone else bothered by the image used for this thread? Specifically that hinge (unless it’s some kind of special one with an out-of-view arm that swings around, like those used in modern kitchen cabinets) because of where it’s placed, would only put the lid of the spool on a bind if you tried to close it.
I see it as a bigger problem that if the lid were closed our world would be smushed. Given that, I appreciate the mis-engineered lid.
That’s meant to be *our* world in there?!
You're totally fine with someone else's world being smushed?
Looks like a couple of sheds and a thimble-silo to me. Insurance should cover it.
If there are other worlds then an infinite number of them are being smushed in any given moment, I can't possibly bring myself to care about them all.
I don't think you need to care about any of them. But I also don't think it's that hard to, when one is in particular brought to your attention, to give it a "it would be better if it wasn't smushed, I guess".
https://futurism.com/local-restaurant-exhausted-google-ai
Small restaurant taking damage because google AI keeps inventing daily specials for it, but the specials aren't something the restaurant can afford or want to do.
This isn't dramatic non-alignment, and it also isn't blatant high-status stupidity. It's just AI not working reliably.
As a general thing, ignoring things is work. It can be made into an automatic response, but it's not not the same as not having something to ignore.
This is implied but ignored in the advice to "just ignore it". Any advice that includes "just" is ignoring a cost.
I think the Internet makes people feel like they need to have a take about every issue in the discourse. It’s just not true. Unless you’re getting paid for it or it’s a hobby, there’s no need to have strong opinions about most things in life.
Now, if you’re a blogger, having strong opinions about stuff is part of the job description. Freddy Deboer is a genius at getting mad about stuff I’ve never heard of and he does it well.
It depends a lot on the situation.
"If you see [two men holding hands|a guy with a MAGA cap] in the park, just ignore [them|him]" seems reasonable enough advice -- tolerate things which are fundamentally required by the values of our society.
"If anonymous users send you unsolicited dick picks just ignore them" seems already controversial -- it would be asking you to suffer something which is fundamentally unjust because fixing it is seen as not practical.
"If you get bullied by kids in school, just ignore them" seems downright cynical, in that it is hard to ignore getting thrown into the garbage container, and any adult who gives such worthless advice is actively covering for the bullies just because he would be uncomfortable with escalating violence.
Agreed, but ignoring things is best thought of as an upfront investment of effort to save yourself effort in the long run.
Every time I hear (or give) advice that includes "just ignore it", there's an implicit real message of something like, "your priorities, worldview and/or values are wrong, this stuff should not be able to affect you as much as it is."
Can you give an example of "just ignore it" advice that is implicitly judgemental of particular values? The first example I can think of (and probably the only "just ignore it" advice that I personally ever give), doesn't do this (I don't think at least)
I regularly tell people to "just ignore the news". In my opinion, unless you have a value specifically of watching the news, *most* values that one could have (including, in many cases, both sides of conflicting values) are harmed or at least not helped by watching 99% of news (national or international, maybe 80% of local), and it generally just causes stress and emotional unpleasantness.
"Just ignore the news," is really something like, "Stop valuing the national soap opera/culture war/scoreboards either sporting or financial/etc over your own personal circumstances and relationships."
"Just ignore twats on Twitter," really means, "Adopt my worldview, in which trolls and pedants and henpeckers aren't really people and are beneath contempt."
"Just ignore those mean girls at school," is really, "Don't be someone whose confidence and self image depends on malevolent third parties."
Cf the OP's point, "just ignore it" means, "come over to my (unspoken and implicit) worldview," in which ignoring those things is indeed costless.
I had a whole long response typed out, and I decided it was too much. What it boiled down to is: I don't think those pieces of advice mean any of those things. People don't generally put this much thought into it, but for myself, when I say something like that, the idealized version of what I mean is "I don't know your values, but I believe that, across a wide range of plausible values, ignoring this thing, thought difficult, would be net positive. If you happen to hold specific values such that you intrinsically value the thing I'm telling you to ignore, then this advice isn't really meant for you and you should ignore it".
Am I the only person here who doesn't know his IQ? I've never tested and don't plan to. Probably irrational of me, but I know myself well enough to suspect a higher-than-expected score would give me a big head, and a lower-than-expected score would crush me.
Never tested, don't intend to. It's not a fixed value, anyway; I'm both smarter and less intelligent than when I was younger.
We're pattern-matching machines, and success in life is largely correlated with pattern-matching ability--or "wisdom"--which improves with life experience even as cognitive ability declines with age.
A common failure mode in old age is that patterns in the world change, but there is little cognitive capacity to fall back on, leaving the person angry and helpless.
I also do not know my IQ. I think general intelligence is an interesting research topic, but I do not believe that I would update much on learning my personal numerical value. For that matter, I do not measure the length of my dick either, just not my kink.
In my general life, I feel that a lack of INT is rarely holding me back, more often it is a lack of conscientiousness or motivation. (Of course, perhaps with a higher INT-score I would have better ways to fix these things, or work in a different job.)
Also, I think that any measurement where some observed distribution is calibrated into a normal distribution by fiat is terrible, and I will have no part of that.
Unless you’re a spellcaster, it’s pretty much a dump stat and not worth worrying about.
I mean maybe if you are a skill based Rogue it would be a secondary stat for ya?
One aside: I am in my late 50s with a long professional career. My IQ score is not very useful for anything at this point, since most of what I'm going to do with such intellectual gifts as I got, I've done or I'm doing now. It's a trivia question for me. (My mom gave me an IQ test as a kid when she was learning to give them professionally, and I got a score that's consistent with my life outcomes, but childhood scores are not all that stable, so who knows what it would be now?)
The IQ score of a 20 year old is a lot more informative, since you might use it to predict how he's going to do in, say, a graduate program in statistics or economics. On one hand, you don't want to give it too much weight--IQ correlates strongly with many outcomes, but it's not perfect, and maybe you just had a really good/bad day that day.
Oh, you wrote about that when beowulf888 and I were talking about IQ stats, right? You know I never got clear about exactly what you were indignant about. What if we took the SAT, which isn't exactly an IQ test but is a good example to use because so many people are familiar with it. It has normally distributed scores. Is it an example of something that is calibrated into a normal distribution by fiat? And what stats that are used in making and scoring the thing count as imposing distribution by fiat? And if that is happening, how is it harmful?
> I've never tested and don't plan to.
Same. I've come to firmly associate IQ testing with people and groups trying to sell me things I don't want or need (most frequently, paid memberships in some form of social club for people who like that kind of thing).
I only know what my implied IQ is based on my SAT score (mid-130s).
Did you take the SAT?
I tested at around 130 in high school, but that was 40 years ago. Last week I came across a test on Reddit and it said I'm 101. Must be the brain worms.
https://djcodes.substack.com/p/i-am-a-midwit
I've done several tests and got several numbers, which one is my IQ?
It's not a particularly meaningful thing to remember. I know I'm smarter than most people, but I've met other people who are much smarter. What's important is that if I try really hard then I'm capable of doing things that are more or less up there with the best of them.
It can be very misleading to compare yourself with people around you if you self-select your environment. In my office, I'm one of the less mathematically adept people; in just about every other environment (other than academic conferences in my field), I'm the most mathematically adept person in the room.
Never tested. Closest I came is taking the SAT when I was 17; I've heard SAT scores can be converted into a reasonable estimate. But I don't know the conversion factor, and I don't have a strong expectation that my score would have stayed stable over the past couple decades anyway.
I have never tested. My parents didn't want me to feel limited by knowing. I'm curious about it in the same way I was curious to know whether I have the genes for fast caffeine processing, i.e. interesting but not important. And like you, I am a little afraid of the answer and for the same reasons.
>feel limited by knowing.
That's a good point. If IQ really is as deterministic and correlated with success as some people say it is, I feel like I would be spoiling my life story in some way by knowing my score.
At this point in my life (I'm 44) I think it would be fine, I have a pretty solid sense of myself. But as a child or teenager I think it would have messed with my head.
If different tests give different measures, which one do you believe? Why?
In my opinion, IQ should always be given with a claim of context and error bars. (Well, that's even true of battery voltage, so no surprise.)
I've never taken a real IQ test. I'd be somewhat interested to see the result of one, but I've never bothered to get tested.
Extrapolating IQ scores from other tests tends to produce numbers that I find unbelievably high.
I've never tested either, and I don't see any reason to bother with it.
I’ve never tested and don’t plan to. I don’t see what value the information would have.
No idea. I would imagine I'm around 105? Terrible at maths, good at words, so the words bump up the score for me. Did some online tests and the results are as ridiculous as you'd expect, but a Ravens Matrices-based one marked me in the high 90s.
So, proudly and irredeemably dumb here! 😀
I did a formal one (WAIS IV) during a mental health assessment several years ago but was told I couldn't be assigned a score. I was very depressed at the time, to the point where my body language and movement were apparently visibly slowed. Anyway part of the test involved physically rearranging blocks in patterns and your score is based on how fast you do it. So I reportedly aced the "memorizing and sorting strings of random numbers/letters" part and flunked the blocks part, and apparently if your scores on different sections are too disparate your overall IQ can't be calculated accurately and they don't give you a number.
To be fair, the exact number wasn't the point of the assessment, but it was an expensive non-answer.
I tested 3 times and got 3 different numbers, so technically I don't know either.
Let's talk YouTube channels we love (and that we think most of our fellow ACXers will love as well)! The two channels which inspired me to make this comment are:
Elephants in Rooms - (https://www.youtube.com/@ElephantsInRooms, Substack is https://kenlacorte.substack.com/) - Ken LaCorte is absolutely fearless in his exploration of third-rail topics. His video essays include titles like, "Why Can't Arab Armies Beat the West?", "Why Do Black Athletes Dominate?", "Are Teachers Really Underpaid?", "Are Transgenders Really Being Targeted for Murder?", and so on. He's also covered a lot of "actually, this beloved thing is mostly bullshit" topics, like plastic recycling and organic foods.
One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
LaCorte strikes me as doing his sincere best to come to accurate, unbiased conclusions. He provides his script notes and cites his sources in the description of every video and notes any major corrections discovered after publishing the video in a pinned comment on that video.
Upper Echelon - (https://www.youtube.com/@UpperEchelon) - Informative overviews on current happenings in AI, politics, and big internet controversies. He also extensively cites sources, but unlike Ken LaCorte, most essays are expressing alarm and/or outrage and/or caution, rather than attempting to present an unbiased conclusion on a given topic. That's not to say the alarm or outrage isn't warranted - it often is - but rather that the channel takes a very strong pro-privacy perspective, and there is usually an attempt to persuade the viewer that there is a reason to be alarmed/outraged/cautious.
Regardless of the strong perspective, this is an excellent way to quickly catch up on topics like Roblox, the Epstien security camera video footage, the Honey plugin, the Mr. Beast controversy, and so on.
I'm recommending these two channels in particular to ACXers because I believe the video essayists are both sincerely attempting to convey accurate information to their audiences. They both extensively cite sources and often engage in good-faith practices like steel-manning arguments in opposition to their conclusions. Both frequently acknowledge that it's difficult or impossible to come to a definitive conclusion on some topics without more information.
I hope you enjoy!
I’ve been enjoying videos from a guy named Elliott, Physics with. Feynman description of particle behavior, all possible paths; and how classical physics falls out of quantum. Just very clear for someone with a high school education. I do slow them down a little 😀.
Clint's Reptiles. https://www.youtube.com/@ClintsReptiles
Care of reptiles. How evolution plays out in various animals. Bad skeletons in Halloween ornaments, with credit given for any good details.
Every snake, lizard, and frog is his favorite at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/@AesirAesthetics/featured
AesirAesthetics does in-depth video game analysis and critque, with emphasis on the themes of From Software games.
> One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
Yeah, some people in this thread doubt the accuracy of the videos, but as far as I know, this one is correct.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I tend to feel fairly isolated as someone who very much believes the opposite: that Japan should by no means be allowed to reestablish a formal army, and that the possibility of it doing so should be seen as a geopolitical threat.
It's not widely recognized in other countries, but ultranationalist conservatism is not just *a* mainstream political position in present-day Japan, but *the* mainstream political position, and denial of Japanese war crimes is a normative position, not just among senior politicians, but the general population. A friend of mine who attended college there said that history professors who acknowledge that these events actually happened face serious pushback, both from their students (which is a really unusual thing in Japanese culture!) and from their fellow academics. When she raised the issue with fellow students, she said they weren't hesitant to tell her that if she believed those things (i.e. Japanese war crimes in Korea and China) actually happened, she should simply leave the country.
Most people abroad don't know or care about this sort of thing, because they don't have to, because Japan's constitutional inability to project hard power renders it largely irrelevant on the international stage. But, while I certainly can't guarantee that Japan reestablishing armed forces with which they're allowed to enact interventionist policy would lead to disaster, mainstream political attitudes there are way up among countries I absolutely would not trust with a military on the level they have the power to field.
Compare and contrast with Germany, another country which found itself with a lot of guilt after WW2.
Of course, we took a completely different route. Not only were we the world leaders for industrialized genocide, we are also the world leaders in feeling really bad about it afterwards.
The culture of our Bundeswehr is (nominally) placed around Stauffenberg et al, a group of German officers who tried to blow up Hitler (but only when it became clear that he would lose the war with the same totality with which he had previously waged it, not because they had any qualms about his death camps).
I think that one difference was that quite a few of the German intellectuals were not really on board with the crimes of the Nazis, and neither was the next generation (the 68er). Apart from some worrisome fringe elements on the far right, today everyone in Germany recognizes the crimes of Nazi Germany. It is by far the era treated most extensively in history classes in school.
This means that there is little in the way of naive patriotism in the intellectual class in Germany, and just about zero appetite for German imperialism. Personally, I am grateful I got to grow up in this (mostly) harmless Germany instead of the earlier iterations full of patriotic fervor and aspirations of world domination.
Who would staff their army if they had one? Have you SEEN their population pyramid?
Japan already has a pretty powerful de facto army, the JSDF. They're not discussing the possibility of making an army, but of revising their constitution so that they can put the military forces they already have to interventionist use.
> There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I'm convinced of this not because of consuming Japanese media but because a powerful Japan is helpful against Communist China.
Japan doesn't need an army capable of proactive invasion for that, and if they had one, I'm not at all convinced they could be trusted with it any more than China.
Who do you think they would invade?
Hard to say, it's not like any politicians are framing it as "We should have an army capable of proactive international intervention again so we can invade these specific countries." I highly doubt they'd invade China, due to the nuclear threat, but they might take a stab at something in the vein of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere again.
I never understand why people in Japan and other countries with unpleasant stuff in their past can't take the neutral position of, "Sure all those war crimes happened but I don't personally feel bad about it. I didn't do 'em." Just blame it all on the bad old leaders who lost the war and move on.
It's like when people talk about the various things the US government did to indigenous people of North America I just happily acknowledge, "Yeah we sure did. Oh well."
I don't understand it emotionally either, but I think it is a side effect of patriotism. If you feel proud for the *good* things that your collective ancestors did, it makes sense also to feel shame for the *bad* things they did (and to deny them). If you say that it's not you who did the bad things, by the same logic it's not you who did the good things.
Also, just because you say "it's not me", does not mean the other people will accept that, and stop e.g. asking for reparations. It is like inheriting a debt: if your parents borrow some money and then die, and you live in their house, you need to pay that debt. By living in the same country you inherit the debts of the previous governments, both literal and metaphorical.
I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
>I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
It's a tough issue, but I think there's a strong case for countries being willing to reject debts specifically in situations such as that one, while still upholding the principle that in general, succeeding administrations inherit the debts of former ones.
In general, governments have a strong incentive to honor the debts of past administrations, because if they don't, then other countries won't want to make deals with them, in the present or future. There's not much point making deals with a country if you don't think the current administration or future ones can be trusted to honor them.
But at the same time, if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor, because we don't want to encourage any countries to be willing to loan money or broker deals with a brutal dictator who represses his own populace." If they can convince other countries that this is a principled stand and not just a self-interested defection, then they can support a general rule that administrations will bear the debts of their successors, while carving out an exception, that "this doesn't apply in the case of repressive dictators, so don't lend them money and be extremely cautious about making deals with them."
> if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor
Wouldn't that just incentivize everyone to support the dictator?
I'm not sure, but I sometimes wonder if, with Japan having such a strong culture of collective responsibility, and publicly and openly demonstrating contrition for failings, even if not personal, but assigned by public shaming, the enormity of Japan's atrocities in World War II might simply be *too* great for the people involved to stomach taking responsibility for, especially when the people who'd have to take responsibility went up to the very top of their political hierarchy (and even their current political hierarchy has direct continuity, and surprisingly often direct blood relation to the people in charge then.)
Personally, I take a similar attitude, but that sort of thing seems pretty at odds with Japan's usual culture.
Ones I watch regularly:
Baumgartner Restoration. Chicago-based fine art restorer.
https://www.youtube.com/@BaumgartnerRestoration/videos
Tasting History. Guy goes through old recipe books fromthe last century to the classical world. Not a professional chef, so it's relatable for us amateurs.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tasting+history
Anti-Chef. Canadian guy moved around a lot and cooked while he did so. I started off hating him, because he was very inexperienced (the very first videos from when he was in Canada are hilarious - the vanilla bean episode is now famous) and wasted good quality ingredients because he had no idea what the heck he was doing. But time and practice worked their magic, and he has come on by leaps and bounds.
https://www.youtube.com/@antichef
Viva La Dirt League. Bunch of New Zealanders who started off doing amateur comedy skits about gaming and, well, now they do semi-pro comedy skits about gaming.
https://www.youtube.com/@VivaLaDirtLeague
I'm already subscribed to Baumgartner Restoration, Tasting History, and Anti-Chef.
Although on the latter, I've not been as interested as he's gained more and more competence. I actually preferred the very relatable and sometimes spectacular failures, as well as the only neutral to moderate successes. Competent cooks are legion across YouTube.
Hurrah! Common interests!
I like Jamie of Anti-Chef (and it took me a while to warm up to him) because watching his improvement over time is genuinely heart-warming. He still has failures and things he just can't do, but he has improved so much since he began that it gives confidence that you, too, can become mildly competent in the kitchen!
The old recipes and cookbooks are interesting as well when contrasted with modern ones; the Thomas Keller ones, for example, clearly need a professional kitchen of trained staff to produce, but watching him try is entertaining (and also, sometimes simpler *is* better). You can see by all the work that goes into it why it commands the kind of prices it does, but at the same time - is it really worth it?
Worth going to try once just to say you did, I suppose.
His video on George Soros does not make me think of him as a particularly honest broker.
It's not so much specifically the take on George Soros for me, as the general pattern, of which that video is a particularly noticeable example.
He seems to be largely a moderate, with pretty good fact-checking, and the positions he takes in his videos tend to align pretty closely with conclusions I've drawn myself on those issues, where I've investigated them. But taken as a whole, he seems comfortable exploring things which are sacred cows for left-leaning audiences, asking "is the issue actually as cut and dry as it seems?" and showing that the issue is actually messy and ambiguous, although occasionally he comes down the side of "no, this isn't ambiguous, this commonly accepted idea is actually simply wrong." But, he doesn't seem to show a similar level of willingness to challenge conservative ideas. Arguing that there's a pretty good case for framing George Soros as legitimately evil, but he could also be seen as a case of genuinely liberal views applied overzealously, could be a moderating influence on viewers who think "he's definitely pure evil, no question about it." But if he's not prepared to make a comparable video where he examines the influence of the Koch brothers, and why people might see them as evil, then he's pulling right on people who actually sit at the center.
But taken as a whole, he seems comfortable exploring things which are sacred cows for left-leaning audiences, ... But, he doesn't seem to show a similar level of willingness to challenge conservative ideas
I've only looked at a handful of his videos, but based thereon I would tend to agree. And his analysis is really not all that thoughtful in general, so I don't know why anyone would go out of their way to watch him.
What sort of topics or methodology would be an example of challenging conservative ideas?
I'm late to get to this (I didn't get notification of a response-to-a-response,) but I don't think his methodology seems distinctly skewed conservative, in the topics he addresses in his videos. But there are plenty of topics I think he might cover in a similar manner if he were pulling from the center, like
*How dangerous was Covid actually (since there was some excessive alarmism about it, but many conservatives swung towards a contrarian view that it wasn't dangerous enough to take seriously at all.)
*Examining the influence of right-wing donor/influencers like the Koch brothers, comparable to his examination of George Soros.
*Is domestic terrorism and political violence skewed by political alignment (both sides of the political spectrum tend to believe that the other is the more violent one, and this seems to depend in some respects on the form of activism, but from what data I've been able to find, it seems that in general the right wing does engage in more political violence.)
*Do conservative news media sources systematically mislead or misinform their audiences (comparable to his exploration of ways that liberal news media sources systematically mislead their audiences.)
*Does Donald Trump actually lie to the public an unusual rate for a politician (people on the left say obviously yes, people on the right tend to see him as more honest than an ordinary politician. Is the truth somewhere in the middle? Is one side just right?)
Etc.
I don't think his coverage of specific issues is usually notably skewed (I do disagree with his assessment that the evidence on Covid's origins firmly establishes it being the result of a lab leak, I think it's clearly true that official sources at the time considered it a plausible hypothesis, and actively tried to suppress that, but that doesn't mean that it was the most plausible hypothesis or that the weight of evidence has ever established it as such.) But I think there's a pretty noticeable political skew in which sorts of topics he chooses to cover, according to which direction it'd lead to him pulling his audience in.
Any specific factual mistakes you noticed, or you just don't like the conclusion?
What I don't like is that he frames Soros's humanitarian activities as little more than a Plot for World Domination. That seem to me to be the sort of discourse that falls well below the standards here.
I think I know a few people in the rationalist community who would say that plotting for World Optimization is the obviously right thing to do.
Factually, I agree that Soros uses his money to optimize the world towards his values. I just happen to agree with most of those values. (Not all of them, e.g. the increase of crime.) And I am happy that there is a person like that, because most people with comparable amounts of money optimize *against* my values. But technically speaking, it is what it is.
But that is not what the video implies. The video implies that he is doing it for personal aggrandizement or other nefarious purposes.
>Not all of them, e.g. the increase of crime
I don't understand. Are you saying that one of his goals is to increase crime?
Apparently. The OSF has funded some defund the police activists in its day.
I second the recommendation for Ken LaCorte.
UE seems not super accurate to me. Sure, he cites sources, but his narratives are absolutely false.
What's a specific example of falsehood?
> "but his narratives are absolutely false."
That is a pretty broad and absolute statement for a channel which covers a *lot* of different topics!
For example, how is the narrative on the Honey plug-in "absolutely false?"
Not all of them are, but they are as reliable as the typical YouTube gaming content creator.
You can cover different topics without that affecting the reliability of your channel.
I will add I have no interest in video games and haven't watched any of the videos about game design or whatever.
Okay, but which videos and/or topics present narratives which are "absolutely false?"
Like I said, that is a a broad and absolute statement for a channel which covers many different topics with most videos extensively citing sources. I'm not sure how you get from conceding sources are cited to asserting that the conclusions pulled from that information being "absolutely false."
The range of topics covered has absolutely no affect on the truthfulness of said coverage.
I’ll give an example: the atlas earth video (first one I clicked on) miscalculates the earnings from a parcel (you can have better than common parcels), misrepresents the meaning of slave over and over again (forced, unpaid labor) - this is not forced, and you can exit or join at-will. Sure, it’s a terrible ROI, but the video treats it as something interesting, not just the daily “crypto metaverse bad investment”, describes a multiplying effect as “exponentially more” (there are no exponents involved, yet he clearly understands what this means at 8:45). It acts as if the fact that the way the pay works is not obvious to every user. It assumes that HYSA rates will continue to be high for 5 years (obviously false). Also, it has a sponsorship for honeygain, which is known for not having great practices (ask Claude, too long to put here), and acts as if it is a website he found and conveniently got an affiliate link, not a direct sponsorship (illegal in the us). Sure, it has sources, but you would not be informed by watching the video.
Well, as I said, I don't care about or watch any of UE's video game essays, but the coverage of other, much broader-interest topics (Roblox, etc) seems sufficiently thorough and well-documented, albeit with a point of view.
What do you think is going to happen in Ukraine?
Russia eventually agrees to a ceasefire that lets them rip off a big chunk of Ukraine's territory that they occupy or nearly so. That then gets annexed into Russia, like Karelia from Finland in the Winter War.
I think Russia is very likely to win. I don't know if this victory is going to be pyrrhic or not, but a scenario where Ukraine regains its 2014 borders requires a collapse of Russia's economy and state failure.
The main variable that will determine if Russia achieves a pyrrhic victory or a true victory is whether Ukraine's manpower shortage will allow Russia to make a breakthrough. If Ukraine's lines break, Russia will be able to attain its maximalist aims since I don't think Europe will send troops to save Ukraine from collapse. However, if Ukraine manages to hold on long enough, eventually Russia will reach a point where it will drop its maximalist objectives and try to settle for a ceasefire along the line of control. There's also a chance that Ukraine manages to damage Russia's oil infrastructure enough to stop exports and oil refining, which would cripple Russia and perhaps cause its lines to crumble.
My personal odds are 60-30-10, with 60% for a maximalist Russian victory, 30% for a pyrrhic Russian victory and 10% for all other outcomes such as a mutual defeat, a Ukrainian victory or WW3.
> I don't think Europe will send troops to save Ukraine from collapse
Like hell we won't. There is an etiquette to waging war between nuclear blocks, and it involves not having troops of one block shoot at troops of the other block.
Cynically, this has been phrased as "the West is prepared to defend the Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier". Less cynically, we like an independent Ukraine, but we are not going to start World War 3 over it. It would be different if they were in NATO, because if Putin attacks NATO then WW3 is the only credible response.
I think Europe has a strong interest in, not letting all of Ukraine be swallowed up by Russia. But a rump state in Western Ukraine would still work as a buffer, and I suspect that that’s what will happen.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if your leaders are entirely opposed to sending troops to die in Ukraine. I've seen some rumors indicating that French and British leadership is not opposed to sending a force to Ukraine. (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-talks-with-britain-ukraine-about-potential-troops-macron-tells-paper-2025-05-10/) While this is a deeply unpopular and bad idea, I think that its possible that Emanuel Macron and Keir Starmer could muster the political willpower to send troops into Ukraine.
I'm pretty sure any actual willingness to send European troops into Ukraine, is contingent on a cease-fire agreement where they won't be shot at and where their role will be as a "tripwire" force to disincentivize any Russian plan to say "just kidding" about the ceasefire.
The odds of, A: a cease-fire actually coming into force, and B: the US or EU sending troops to enforce it, and C: Russia deciding that they want a Third Ukraine War, this time against NATO, seem rather slim. Unfortunately, that's mostly because the first step is itself quite unlikely.
60 maximalist is pretty pessimistic. It would essentially require at least two Russian mechanized breakthroughs in a heavy drone environment. Possible but not exactly something that has been achieved by either side since the start of the war (which wasn't so drone dense at the beginning).
There is also a debate on victory. War freezing on current lines or somewhere in Donbass would be a mutual defeat, depending on the security guarantees ecc.
The real question tough should be on why the current administrations policy for Ukraine dances from incompetence to madness, and from madness to incompetence.
It's interesting that in other cases such as Taiwan or ME this isn't as much the case, but Ukraine? Doubtlessly one of the most important sectors for the US after Taiwan gets the worse minds and actions.
After some more months or years of static frontlines, very slowly crawling forward in Donbass, Russia will eventually drop maximalist demands and reach a ceasefire with Ukraine (who will jump at any proposal that don't require them to give up unconquered land).
It will be seen as a geopolitical pyrrhic victory for Russia, which will feel it's cost for the next 10 or 20 years.
Sanctions will at least partly get lifted in exchange for freeing POW or returning ukrainian children that were deported.
Ukraine will be on life support, out of NATO & EU bust still recipient to significant aid & cooperation.
The big winners will be China (who will reap the non-western arm selling business) and Eastern Europe (who will be relieved of the threat of a mechanized Russian blitz that could topple them before NATO could react).
I also slightly expect western armies to be much more hesitant to engage in force projection like in Libya, Syria or the Sahel, fearing a drone warfare for which they are unprepared.
No Nobel Prize for Trump.
Russia wins.
Define wins? There is a broad range of outcomes that could be described as such.
That's a good point. I think they'll overall gain territory from Ukraine and force terms that cause long-term damage to Ukraine going forward.
How much territory? All of the Donbass? Everything East of the Dnieper? That plus all of Kiev? All of Ukraine? Any of the above could be said to constitute a `Russian win' but would result in very different worlds going forward.
My guess would be an eventual frozen conflict where Russia ends up with most/all of the Donbass, but not more. This could be spun as a`Russian win' but would probably be a pyrrhic one if so.
Makes sense. I can't say I really know how much they are going to gain.
Depends on 3 macro factors
1 Ukrainian reforms of the army and force generation pipeline, particularly force retention.
2 Western aid, if it will increase, drop or remain constant
3 the Russian political will and understanding that the longer the war goes on the higher the long term cost is going to be.
If 1 improves for Ukraine, 2 aid increases and 3 Russian economy and power status is threatened the war might end even start of 2026 through successful negotiations due to the Cremlin accepting it risks far more in a continuation then otherwise.
If instead the opposite happens with 1 reforms fail 2 western aid (and Ukrainian production) decreases and 3 sufficient power in Russia is held by those who gain from a continuing war at the expense of Russian's general long term wellfare. Then the war will be longer and probably end with severe Ukrainian (and EU/US) concessions.
Currently we are in a middle situation with a lot of potential changing factors though generally positive for Russia since it's paying a continuous cost not a growing one and therefore has no incentives to negotiate seriously (in other words it can always try to win on the battlefield or in the white house and if it fails what did it cost trying? Nothing that wasn't being spent before)
Generally speaking we can talk about self sabotage from Russia as the party which started this useless and costly invasion, Europe as too slow moving and fragmented until now, ,Ukraine too slow on force generation and the US foreign policy was first characterized as far too timid and now, honestly now it's just chaos or utter naivety.
No the stalemate as it is can't continue for several years (more then 3) because with current intensity it's almost impossible for either countries to fight that long.
Hope this wasn't too long or vaporous
Probably the stalemate will continue for at least couple of years or longer.
Sad but I don't see a quick end of the war.
Has anyone been to Ciudad Juarez? Is anything there worth seeing?
I’ve only been once, when my family was doing a road trip through the southwest, and we decided to cross the border. It was a bit eye opening to see that if you drive a little bit in one direction you see a lot of disinvestment and poverty of a sort that you never see in the United States, while if you drive in a slightly different direction, you see the same kind of suburban/moderate density urban affluence that you see all over the United States. But I don’t know of anything specifically of interest to see in Juarez or El Paso other than these sorts of sociological observations.
A simple puzzle for the commentariat
Rhode Island
Oregon
Yukon
Georgia
British Columbia
Indiana
Virginia
What is special about this group of US States and Canadian provinces/territories?
Here’s a hint: Gur rknpg beqre yvfgrq vf vzcbegnag
I needed the hint. Why not Ontario, Illinois, or Vermont?
Wholly arbitrary, I think those were the pieces of a children’s puzzle I happened to be holding when I had this idea
I'm from Georgia, and I know Georgia has a certain somewhat unusual feature, and I guess maybe the others have it too? Trbetvn'f ynetrfg pvgl vf nyfb vgf pncvgny.
Well, after looking at the hint, I see that I got it wrong.
Ah, now I see it! Vg'f na npebfgvp sbe ebltovi, juvpu vf gur frira pbybef bs gur envaobj va beqre.
Vg’f gur envaobj
Yup! I’m curious, did you need the hint? ChatGPT didn’t give the right answer without it
I needed the hint. Then it was immediate.
Would never have possibly got it without the hint, got it almost immediately after looking at the hint.
I think these sorts of puzzles largely test whether the reader happens to be on a similar thought-association wavelength as the puzzle maker. Which makes them often pretty frustrating to me, as I often don't think in the same way as other people.
(Hey, this comment has an unintentional hint to your puzzle as well, which I noticed just before submitting it...)
I got the answer before I read your comment, but missed the hint until you pointed it out.
No got it immediately while reading the list
I spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time writing an essay about how many perceived cultural problems are actually caused by dysfunctional copyright law.
https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/your-favorite-franchise-has-been
It's culture war related, but it's actually "anti-war", in that my answer to "is the new official Tolkien adaptation too woke?" is "Tolkien's writings should be in the public domain, and everyone should be able to create one to their taste".
I propose reducing copyright terms and making copyright conditional on use (so that you can't keep content "in the vault" indefinitely)
My retort to that would be "if we're going to get more Rings of Power style versions, then I want even *stricter* copyright law".
The problem is not 'it's not in the public domain', the problem is "the version this lot decided upon was not based on the work but on the perceived audience, so they put the cart before the horse and didn't even get the right cart while they were at it".
Right, but if only one person can make a version then it is 90% likely to be crap, since 90% of everything is crap.
But if 10 versions get made by different people, one version is likely to be good, and that one can get popular and expanded.
This is basic market logic.
There aren't going to be ten versions made by very large corporations that can spend many hundreds of millions of dollars making a properly cinematic version for the large or small screen, and almost nobody is going to care about the glorified fanfic. With or without copyright, all of the discussion will be about the *one* version that was made into a big-budget movie or TV series, before everyone else in that business decided that particular vein was now tapped out for a decade..
Or maybe two, but the second version will be a smaller thing, almost beneath public notice, regarded as a knockoff not worth discussing - "Deep Impact" vs "Armageddon", or Patrick Bergen Robin Hood vs Kevin Costner Robin Hood. I can't recall seeing a triad like that, though it's probably happened somewhere.
>There aren't going to be ten versions made by very large corporations that can spend many hundreds of millions of dollars making a properly cinematic version for the large or small screen,
There is for Sherlock Holmes. Including all spiritual adaptations to alternate settings (eg. House MD), there are hundreds.
Same for Romeo & Juliet.
I'm not sure why you have the belief 'major studios won't all bandwagon on successful properties with proven track records if given the chance', because that feels like the exact opposite of observed reality to me.
But, either way: the situation is *already* 'only one person can make it, due to copyright'. Even if you think it would be *rare* for more than on person to adapt something, even the *possibility* is a strict benefit.
For major(*) motion pictures adapted from "Romeo & Juliet", I get: 1911, 1916, 1916, 1936, 1954, 1968, 1996, 2013, and 2025. That seems pretty consistent with "everyone else in that business decided that particular vein was now tapped out for a decade". Which was the claim I made, not that There Can Be Only One Ever. I suppose technically I did also claim that there won't be ten ever, in which case note that R&J hasn't hit that benchmark either.
"Spiritual adaptations to alternate settings" are irrelevant here, because they aren't affected by copyright anyhow. And because they don't affect the public discourse or moviegoing experience the same way - nobody says "I just watched House last Thursday; I don't need to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie".
And the old version from 10+ years ago, in practice also doesn't matter. Almost everyone either watches the latest version, or none at all. Only a tiny irrelevant handful of purists insist on watching a DVD of the previous generation's version. The public discussion, will be based on the latest version and on the audience's general conception of the original work, with again a tiny irrelevant handful of purists pointing to an intermediate adaptation and saying "this is the one you all need to watch". Those are all as dead as e.g. the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
What does not seem to happen, with R+J or Sherlock or any of the others, is someone making a big-budget theatrical (or premium television) adaptation, and while that is still in recent memory saying "hah, that loser got it wrong, I'm going to make a *different* big-budget theatrical version and cash in on all the people who are glad *I* did it right". Even when the original work is in the public domain, that doesn't happen.
So, yes, I grieve for the fact that we have "Rings of Power" instead of an actually good Second Age Middle Earth saga. But voiding Tolkein's copyright wouldn't change that; Amazon would still have got there first, and nobody with a serious budget would touch it for a decade after because Amazon's sloppy seconds aren't a big enough market.
* English language, theatrical release
>Right, but if only one person can make a version then it is 90% likely to be crap, since 90% of everything is crap.
This isn't random though. If one person makes something really good, their continuation isn't 90% likely to be crap, because their making it good the first time probably wasn't a fluke. If it was, audiences are likely to lose interest soon after, but otherwise, they can probably continue to produce consistently good works for some time.
When 90% of the work associated with an intellectual property is crap, a lot of audience members are simply not going to get invested in it who would if it were consistently good.
We can apply the market logic of "lots of people get to make stuff, customers can congregate around the stuff they actually like" without allowing creators to directly copy the work of other creators who're already popular. If anything, I think that entertainment media suffers from too much follow-the-leader-ing right now, and I'd rather not see that amplified.
>This isn't random though. If one person makes something really good,
... yes, I agree that if we condition on it being made by someone really talented, the chances of it being good go up.
But I don't know what that has to do with the question at hand?
There's nothing guaranteeing that the 1 person who buys the rights will always be talented, and we're talking about IP laws in general, not just sequels.
Since other people in the comment thread have been discussing allowing anyone to create works based on the same IP, so not even the original creator would have IP ownership, I thought you were arguing for the same position.
I'd be comfortable backing changes to IP law such that it can't be held for long by anyone but the original creator before passing into the public domain. I think it's useful for the original creator to have *some* ability to sell or pass the IP on to a designated creator of derivative works, but I think we'd likely be better off if that sort of thing expired quickly.
Rings of Power didn't seem like something I would like, so guess what, I didn't watch it. And so it has not made my life worse in any way!
What exactly would your proposed stricter law entail?
Looser copyright law would improve the odds of someone producing a version you like.
Looks good, commented in the comments there. I think your point is valid (and you're probably right), but lobbying power means it probably won't come to pass.
Arguments with merit - made in an entertaining way!
Thumbs up
I get that from the perspective of a studio executive, what you want is a franchise where you own the "IP". Imagine the horror of making a LotR movie only to find that someone else is making LotR video games without paying you!
Personally, I would base copyright on how long it takes you to make a profit from the product. If your video game goes from 60$ to 3$, then it is past its financial life, and the amount you can make from then until 50 years after the death of its last author (or whatever copyright terms are) will be very meager. For movies, my understanding is that most of the investment is either returned or not at the box office on cinematic release, with DVD sales being more of an afterthought. So a decade should be fine.
A complication is that sometimes the main monetarization happens only when a book series gets turned into film. Perhaps it would be useful to have a system where you have an earlier point in time from which on you can spread the work verbatim for free, but will still have to cut in the author (or even get their permission) if you base your original content on their work.
One potential answer to this concern is not to reduce the duration of copyright law, but limit it a lot more strictly in how broad the protections are. If you create something great that people love, you should be able to get paid for it. But maybe other people should also trivially be able to make derivative works, as long as they aren't literally just copying the good thing you made. The literal text of the Lord of the Ring books should be protected, but maybe it should be allowed to write different books in the same universe. Most fanfic is garbage, but if someone has the skill and takes the time to make a good version, maybe they should be allowed to make money on that too.
Bad versions of art do not, in my opinion, reduce the value of good versions.
Very interesting that the Authors thought that was in Scott’s voice. It was much more mean spirited and less funny than anything Scott’s written. I wonder if they had an AI write it with that prompt?
I thought about AI too, it's the immediate temptation when trying to write something "in the style of" - just run it through ChatGPT.
Just a classic Freudian slip :)
Oh yeah, is that when you mean to say one thing and then accidentally fuck your mother?
People here love stereotype accuracy, but I can think of at least one case where the common stereotype is both wrong and harmful: my mental illness, OCD.
Can't bear to think of how many people got no help or the wrong help for years because "OCD is about cleanliness" or whatever.
Surely not the only inaccurate stereotype of a mental illness.
This seems more or less similar to other types of stereotypes, in that it's not universally accurate, and maybe not true of a majority of cases, but it still reflects a genuinely representative case. Insofar as it's inaccurate, I think we could say other stereotypes are also inaccurate.
I agree this is not the main or most relevant presentation of OCD, but it describes OCPD okay, and OCD and OCPD tend to co-occur, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23865406/.
So although I don't think this is an accurate *description* of OCD, it might be a (somewhat) accurate *stereotype* of OCD *people*.
Yeah I know as much. I've just known so many fellow OCD'ers with very common themes like taboo violent-sexual thoughts, moral scrupolosity etc who didn't get help for so long just because it wasn't "stereotypical".
I'm also a person with OCD who is 0% OCPD. Seriously. I don't have a gram of that type of perfectionism in my body and also score really low on conscientiousness. That might not be common but we do exist.
As someone whose son has been diagnosed with OCD, I'd be interested if you wanted to share what kind treatment or other kind of help you'd recommend for the condition?
I highly recommend you check out the International OCD Foundation website at iocdf.org. There are *many* excellent resources there, including descriptions of different forms of OCD, a therapist-finder (and most of those who list there have actual specialized training and certification in OCD treatment), and videos made by people who've suffered from OCD. They offer in-person and virtual camps for kids in and teens with OCD, and have several big conferences yearly where clinicians, researchers, OCD sufferers and their families all meet and attend seminars together. They are well-funded and manage to keep prices moderate, and also offer a lot of free resources. Oh, yeah, also: The same people who founded the iocdf set up an inpatient treatment center at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts 25 or so years ago. Patients there get expert psychopharmacology and participate in an all-day program of CBT, including several hours/day of ERP. It's like boot camp, but with kindly and good-natured staff.
I'm a psychologist OCD specialist and agree with everything Whenyou said.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004856.pub2/full
ERP and/or maybe ACT. And just in general someone who has experience with OCD. Regular talk therapy as well as psychoanalysis (and therapists just treating it as anxiety) can actually make it worse, as it's often too enabling/supportive/encourages obsessing over your thoughts.
Ultimately OCD therapy is supposed to be frustrating and uncomfortable. Confessing your thoughts can in itself become a ritual. It's completely normal for a therapist to say to an OCD patient, "now we shouldn't talk about that fear of yours anymore. I can feel you obsessing".
One of the mildest SSRIs helped me a lot too.
The app Nocd is supposedly good for finding OCD-friendly therapists.
I have similar experience, OCD and zero OCPD.
and do second the ERP (and CBT).
Are you staying on SSRIs? I feel like SSRIs might help to reduce intrusive thoughts, I started taking it when I felt worse, but now feel better and thinking of stopping.
Thank you.
Anorexia is like this: the stereotype is that it afflicts young girls who desperately want to be thin. True in many cases, but it wasn't for me! None of the resources seemed applicable as a result.
Hope you wound up improving re: OCD yourself!
Isn’t it the opposite? A lot of clean people claim “I’m OCD” but it’s just standard cleanliness.
How much of "burnout" can be explained by your unconscious mind slowly noticing that the exorbitant levels of focus, attention and willpower it's been giving you haven't translated into better food, sex, shelter, status or any other meaningful goal, and so it simply decides not to provide them anymore?
My definition of burnout is that it is the sudden realization of the futility of what you have dedicated your life to doing
I think there are really 2 classes of "rewards" in life: straightfoward pleasure (food, sex, nice belongings) and a work pleasure (feeling of deep engagement and commitment to a project, satisfaction when it is successfully completed). If you can get some of the second kind of pleasure out of work, you are much less vulnerable to burnout.
I think it's important to recognize that "work pleasure" extends beyond work to things that give you satisfaction of the same kind without anyone paying you. Everything from writing poetry (even the best poets can't make a living from writing poetry) to some hobby project you are proud of (making a piece of furniture in your home workshop for your own use, say) gives you some of that. Ironically, many people decompress from their stressful work job by doing stuff that looks like work but they find relaxing--come home from a stressful week at the office and go spend the weekend with power tools and a couple of buddies fixing up your fishing cabin.
Completely agree
"meaningful goal" is carrying a lot of weight there. Meaningful goal can be the project I'm spending lots of time on in which case I'm less likely to burnout.
In modern society sometimes things get too abstract. My salary definitely provides me a lot of food, but the link is too indirect. As a straight guy in IT I don't really expect to have sex at workplace.
So it seems mostly about status. Whether you are treated with respect, whether the work environment is friendly, etc.
I heard that it helps if people visualize their salaries, for example if they make a graph, and see how they are getting closer to some specific target, whether it is a new car, or retirement. Then they get a reward each month by seeing the line get closer to the goal.
I think we need feedback. It's why cults can spin off into almost unlimited levels of crazy, and why people fall apart after long periods in solitary confinement.
The esteem of other people whom you respect is a big deal, whether that's getting your paper accepted at a top journal, or getting a promotion at work, or winning an award for a poem, or whatever.
I completely agree. I think one of the sources of many modern problems is that people communicate less in person.
How much of burnout is physical exhaustion?
I've only ever heard "burnout" used to refer to fields like software development, where the chance physical exhaustion is basically zero. In fact, exercise is often raised as a good way to stave off burnout.
Excuse me, I meant insufficient sleep.
That does feel more likely. Has anyone checked up on rates on burnout in first-fathers compared to the general population?
Plausible, but you can still parlay with your unconscious mind with CBT. I don't enjoy my job frankly but my boss will retire in a couple of years so more status/money is a plausible goal. But keeping my unconscious mind on board with that weak resolution is a constant battle.
Recently, the book "Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse" was published by Luke Kemp. In it, Kemp describes his ideas of how collapse happens. I think it nicely summarizes the state of the art of collapse research. If you want to find out more about it, I wrote a summary: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-peoples-history-of-collapse
I really didn’t like a lot of that. Saying that the Roman Empire fell because of inequality doesn’t really have much explanatory power, it was unequal for centuries, the late republic was just as unequal. This means that inequality is bad for democracy, but not destabilising in empires.
The empire was more stable than the republic (hence the rise of the empire). The empire was considerable less imperial - paradoxically
I didn't read the book and so can only comment on your review. Not sure you can discuss societal collapse in past societies without even mentioning demographic considerations (good times leading to population growth which outstrips the available resources given negligible growth in the pre-modern times, per Turchin and others).
It would be good to see more evidence for the claim that democratic participation makes societies more resilient. The experience of Ancient Greece and medieval Italy is not that positive and most of the modern democracies are pretty young
s/population/elite/, if you want to invoke Turchin.
(And your examples of democracies are rather cherry-picked - for ancient Greece, you have ancient Rome, for medieval Italy, medieval-and-onwards Switzerland. Besides, conceptually, the claim that democratic participation increases society's robustness is kind of self-evident, and the key word is participation. Democratic facade for extremely unequal society captured by oligarchs, as was the case with medieval Italy, isn't even a proper counterexample of that. Democratic procedures alone probably don't mean much, granted, but that's a different issue.)
There was no single democratic ancient Greece. There were hundreds of poleis, most of them had democratic and non-democratic periods and among the most famous and longest-surviving ones there were both mostly democratic (like Athens) and mostly non-democratic poleis (like Syracuse). You're right that this claim *sounds* self-evident, and possibly if someone did a careful study of all the poleis they'd found this patter, but it's hardly obvious. Not sure Rome is a good example either, its imperial period is comparable to its republican period in length (depending on where you begin and where you end).
Florian did share a couple of links to scholarly studies below, I'll def take a look at them.
The there’s Rome. It’s clear that Rome was incredibly unequal at the end of the republic, to a degree that would make even modern capitalists wince. Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing.
The wars and political violence of the late republic (including the existential social wars with the Italian tribes) were primarily caused by social unrest and ended with a victory for the rich, with Sulla and later the empire. Afterwards the poor were bought off with bread and circus.
So there’s a lesson there, perhaps, remembering that Rome took its democracy and republic extremely seriously until the empire ( and even pretended the institutions mattered afterwards, Augustus was a consul - a shared office - for at least a decade)
> Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing
I've heard this story but now I'm reading it again I'm not convinced it makes that much sense.
The cost of a house is two things: the cost of the actual structure and the cost of the land it sits on. In major economically important cities today, the cost of the land usually exceeds the value of the actual structure, and I'm guessing it was the same deal in Rome (since Rome was a huge economically dominant city navigable only on foot the cost of land close to the centre of town must have been enormous). The value of the land puts a fairly high floor on the amount you'd be willing to sell to Crassus for.
Well the story comes from Plutarch, so if it was made up then it was at least made up by an ancient historian and not a modern one. As always with ancient historians, you have to decide what you want to believe.
There's certainly a lot of room for adjudication on what a pittance or a trifle or however we are translating it actually means. One must also consider that the decision is being made under a position of panic and upset by the homeowner, who may not have thought of the value of their home in years and may have no real idea what the land and property is actually worth. Whereas Crassus devotes a lot of his time to thinking about real estate and knows exactly the true value. Perhaps there were very cool customers in Rome who stood their ground and made a good deal, and then there were those who panicked and made a bad deal, and Crassus made at least some profit either way.
Even that aside, the better branches of decision theory would tell you not to sell your property for pennies on the dollar. If there is only one person who can rescue your property, the natural split of the gains would be 50:50. If your rescuer demands a larger cut, the rational response is to only accept their offer with some probability, so that their expected returns will be smaller than if they had offered you a fair split.
This will leave you worse off in the case you end up watching your property burn down, but will make it less likely that you are extorted in general.
I can really recommend checking out the book. It provides endless historical examples and case studies to make sure that the conclusions are robust.
I also think it does not really conflict with Turchin's idea. You could have both things happening at the same time and both theories point to wealth inequality being a very important factor for societal stability and thus collapse.
But if you want to check our more about the link between societal stability and democratic participation, I summarized some papers about this here (and many of those also show up in Kemp's sources):
https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/democratic-resilience
https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/participation-inclusion-democracy
Thanks! I looked at the first paper mentioned in your earlier post (Peregrine 2021), it's certainly interesting
I was surprised your post had no references to Joseph Tainter, unlike Eli Dourado https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/response-to-eli-dourado-on-collapse/
Well, the post summarizes a specific book and is not meant to give an overview of societal collapse in general. If you want that, look this post: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/mapping-out-collapse-research There I also discuss Tainter. You will also find mentions of Tainter throughout my other writing on the blog.
Can anyone suggest a good public speaker on the subject of game theory?
Game theory is a big topic, and there’s a lot of things you could be looking for out of a speaker. Not knowing your case, I’d recommend Kevin Zollman, who has both done a lot of interesting work on the evolutionary game theory of scientific communities, and has also written a book on game theory and parenting for a public audience: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Theorists-Guide-Parenting-Negotiators/dp/0374536902
But if you want someone to talk about economics or political science or nuclear war or something, there are probably lots of other very different people to look for.
Thank you so much, Kenny. You are the only person to respond to me, despite my strategy of posting early at the front end of the comments.
I am studying a community of salesmen that are doing some predictable herd behavior. When they are in a supply glut, they lower prices to move a perishable, but the retail customer they are selling to deos not pass the savings on to the consumer, so they are just giving away supplier capital and gifting it to the retail customer ( I have gobs of robust data showing this). I think a game theory person would have something intelligent to say about this, so definitely economics.
I would check the sales departments at local business schools, and or local economics departments - since your target audience has a shared background in sales, someone who is able to speak to that specifically will be helpful!
Academia! of course. I know some economists at Cornell, I'll start there.
https://youtu.be/ujsw_bSbD1I I find this video funny in context of, this is what happens if GlaDOS is successfully aligned before anything horrible happens.
Question people! How did the squat and deadlift kind of exercise got so popular, as opposed to traditional body-building, and why is it kinda linked to the Manosphere and Dissident Right?
To me squat and deadlift are the strength of a pack mule, I would not define strength that way, I would define strength as throwing a punch, or historically a spear, so arms and shoulders. Not incidentally, that is how a man looks good, not by having a huge ass and thighs.
Do the squat and deadlift exercises have a psychological benefit? Or they are just good at keep fat away?
If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
I am off to the gym in 10 minutes, today it is leg press machine, stomach machine, chest press machine and triceps machine. Tomorrow will be back and bicep and stomach again. These deliver the looks and the health. These deliver strength in the sense of looking like a boxer who hits hard. These do not deliver strength in the sense of carrying loads like a pack mule -but why should I ever need that kind of strength?
I can't speak to the issue of popularity. But you are a pack mule's burden, and a top-heavy one. See the various videos of small women easily pushing much larger and stronger men off-balance, thanks to their lower center of gravity. You may not need lower-body strength to look the way you like to look, but it's useful for moving your upper body strength to where it's most effective.
For example throwing a punch or a spear entails an equal and opposite reaction, braced entirely by your legs.
Why are you contrasting that with traditional bodybuilding? My understanding is that strength doesn’t actually matter for traditional bodybuilding - only the shape of your body.
I think a big part of the idea is that strengthening the biggest muscles does more for broader health than strengthening specific smaller muscles, like the exercises you mention.
I don’t have a specific theory myself about the particular exercises I do - I just make sure that I’m doing something!
My theory, off the cuff and not to be taken seriously:
they're easily quantifiable,
form is easy to evaluate since the Big Three lifts are the standard for strongman competition,
they have a large systemic effect since they involve the comparatively huge muscles of the lower body and with a barbell touch like 2/3 of muscle groups by count, so they make you feel good,
the learning curve is very rewarding early on even for a weak lifter because there's significant gains available from pure form improvement,
due to all of these there's cargo culting about how they're essential components of a serious beginner routine, or at least unavoidable.
Due to all of the above, advancement and correctness are legible to autism-spec people who don't have a social network to get feedback or reinforcement on correctness or, uh, I guess virtue or status-increase-from-an-action of their work in the gym.
The manosphere association is also multifactorial, and I think falls out of them being starter moves and the direction of the sum of theses of the manosphere being that the world is built wrong for you, but if you work hard on yourself you can get good enough to find happiness in it anyway, either by leveling up your sexual game, acquiring virtue by self-improvement in bodily health, or actualizing your own ambition.
I can't speak for where the broader right-wing association with strength training came from, or why combat sports don't seem to have grown an association with that faction.
But advancement and correctness are also legible on the leg press machine, the lat pull down machine etc.
Also you could sign up at a boxing gym and actually be a boxer who hits hard! Go is always better than show
> If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
1. Only squats and deadlifts will increase your bone density, which is important and one of the primary benefits of resistance exercise.
2. Deadlifts in particular are a great proxy for "functional strength," ie. the strength you use to lift a piece of furniture, or whisk your SO off their feet, or grab a big luggage and run up or down some stairs. It's the type of strength that actually impresses on people "oh, that guy is strong."
3. You can absolutely get shredded doing squats and deadlifts - back when I was competing, I was so shredded people at pool parties of both genders would come up and ask to get pictures with me, and I never did any "cosmetic" lifts, just lots of Big 5.
you mean you had arms without doing triceps extensions, really?
> you mean you had arms without doing triceps extensions, really?
Arms enough that the rest of the package was still impressive enough to generate picture requests and stares and such.
I had biceps from pullups, but not much on the tricep front, so yeah, I def neglected my triceps. I think the only thing I ever did along those lines was close bench variants, but I was doing those at more than bodyweight for 10+ reps per set on the days I was doing them.
Unless you live a very interesting life, you need to carry heavy loads far more often than you need to throw punches. Think grocery shopping, moving furniture, that sort of thing.
Also, in a lot of martial arts, you generate power for strikes from the whole chain of the body and not just your arms.
Furthermore, if you are in the tiny minority who anticipate making attack rolls, just leveling STR seems not the best way to go about that. The size of your biceps will do little to mitigate the damage of a punch to your face which you failed to block, for one thing.
I'm new to weightlifting, and I'm all about the squats and deadlifts. It's because my hobby is a the sport of powerlifting, which focuses on maxing out big compound lifts- squat, bench, and deadlift are the big three. It's not bodybuilding. It's more about seeing number go up than about getting shredded.
UK perspective and I wouldn't know about the vaguely political stuff. I'd say both deadlifts and esp squats seems to be a little more common now than in the gyms of, say, 25 years ago. I'd guess this is more people taking online advice, either in silly places or from people who know what they are talking about.
More importantly, I have no doubt at all that there are significant numbers of people doing these exercises who absolutely shouldn't be. Form is terrible and they are storing up problems.
I lift to increase muscle so I get general health benefits, including less pressure on joints as I age. Also building muscle anywhere increases metabolism.
I believe there is some gym rat cachet to barbell squats because they look (and probably are) dangerous but I stick to dumbbells.
I have the same mentality, just with machines, as they guide me and thus require less attention. Impossible to lose form on a leg press. This also means I can go heavier than I could if there would be a chance of say falling over.
Just because they aren't visible, doesn't mean your back muscles aren't important. If your limb muscles are massive but your back is weak, you will injure your back a lot.
Also, women definitely check out your ass.
Here's a guess: On 4chan /fit/ there was a big (meme?) culture around squatting and deadlifting circa 2010. A lot of it evolved from ridiculing a book called "Starting Strength" by a guy named Rippetoe. And as it was 4chan, the memeing also tied in gay-bashing, misogyny, inceldom, etc
I have no idea what population size this is (dozens? thousands?), but if you were a teenage boy at that time (like i was) on that message board, you're now an adult man who may have internalized some manosphere/redpill ideas from that ecosystem.
I was there, Gandalf, 3500 years ago when cries of "squats and oats" echoed through the halls of /fit/.
/Fit/ was my fav board so I spent a lot of time there. I do not have the impression there was red pill/manosphere stuff there then. I remember the over the top sexism (and every other -ism), but it wasn't bitter and more like a lot of teenage boys trying to sound menacing. The overall vibe was one of "we're all gonna make it" with zyzz at the head.
I figured out my life, partly thanks to the fitness knowledge I gained from /fit/, and moved on so I didn't see the evolution of what happened and not super interested in how the place looks now. But back then it was a weird, fun place, maybe a little like Bushwick in NYC--dirty and you might get stabbed or a wall might fall on you, and there were quite a few creeps, but most people were really out doing themselves making funny or useful memes.
Why should you ever need any kind of strength? If you're not carrying a deer down a mountain, why even get out of your chair?
Correct, I do not get out of the chair except for the gym i.e. the machines, and I do that because if I stay 100% in the chair all the time I feel 30 years older than I am.
Especially for women it's pretty important for bone health
What's gone so badly wrong in your life that you're not carrying a deer down a mountain?
It's not my fault, the sun was in my eyes. And the rain. And the snow.
I'm pretty sure I scared it though, and that's half the battle.
Being able to throw a punch might be useful.
I've spent a lot more time moving furniture or lifting bags of rice than I have throwing punches.
Well duh. Punches are supposed to be quick.
Lol!
> is the best natural way to increase testosterone production
Thanks, this is exactly what I expected when I wrote that there might be a psychological benefit! I remember the very early years of PUA, when it was not so toxic yet, and thus a mainstreamish media had an interview with Roosh, the title was something like "sex tourist discovers weight lifting" and there was a pic of Roosh squatting heavy.
Now I already figured that he does not do it because women like muscular thighs or anything, but rather it somehow makes him feel manlier, confident or something like this. Generally machine based, upper body focus body-building makes me feel manlier, too, but perhaps this sort of stuff works more in that direction.
I've just come back from a wedding, and during the service I noticed they've changed the lyrics of the hymns from the versions I know. They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative. I am unastounded to notice this.
What did surprise me was that apparently any references to Christ or Jesus also merited removal.
I am really curious about the subjective experience of the decision-maker here. I will assume this person still calls themselves a Christian. What does the progression feel like, as one ideology totally replaces another, without your even noticing the change?
Is this specifically the version they do at weddings when they expect a lot of non-Christians to be participating?
All I can say is that Protestants have a long history of changing things around a lot, so this does not surprise me at all. A Catholic or Orthodox wedding probably sticks to the traditions (rules, even).
Now removing Christ from a Christian ceremony is surprising, Protestant change-orientedness is really not supposed to go that far... at that point why even sing hymns? Our wedding intro was the Star Wars Imperial March, and everybody was laughing their butts off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMWVW4xtwI&list=RDvsMWVW4xtwI&start_radio=1
You might read Anthony Esolen on what they did to hymns. He is atrociously funny but also angry.
>They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative.
In many but not all cases, this may be truer to the original meaning. "Man" has both a gemder-neutral and a gendered sense, with the former dominant in the distant past, with a separate word, "were" (as in "weregeld" and "werewolf") specifically meaning adult male human. The gendered sense of "man" is now strongly dominant and newer gemder-neutral turns of phrase have arisen to replace the gemder-neutral sense of the word.
specifically it was wereman for men and wyfman for women (cognate to wife)
Makes sense. Old-time English was probably highly similar to German, which has two words, der Mann for men, and "man" as a generic subject, similar to "one" in English, "one does not simply walk into Mordor" "man wird nicht einfach in Mordor reinspazieren"
I don't generally get as far as asking that - I invariably get stuck on "why do so many people who do not otherwise believe in Christianity specifically want a religious wedding service in a Christian church?"
Unitarians have been doing that for at least 3 decades now.
Best description of Unitarian beliefs: There's one God at most.
I think you got it backwards. There's one God at minimum. ;-)
I thought it was, “there’s one god, more or less”.
People should spend more time with anthropology as a subject. They should know something about human intuitions about continuity with the past, rituals, and sacred art or objects to know that maintaining the original forms is part of the social magic that enables a true feeling of transcendence.
Of course, the people the vote for these kinds of changes are the first to tell you that anthropology is strictly white man colonialism or something.
It can’t be about actually maintaining the original forms given that people are usually much less moved by the forms that prevailed a generation or two before they were born than the ones that prevailed during their childhood - though maybe it’s about maintaining the fiction that the form you are following now is the one that has always been followed.
I can never get over the change I saw to Hark the Herald Angels Sing: "born to raise the sons of earth" to "born to raise us from the earth" (or something like that). Removing poetry from an artwork should be a crime, let alone when you don't bother even trying to come up with a vaguely poetic replacement. (I think they also changed "pleased as man with man to dwell" to something completely banal).
And worst of all, it's not like there aren't *real* problems in Christianity to maybe have a look at. (See my reply to Rob). The hills people choose to die on are enough to make me welcome the AI/nuclear/climate/whatever-the-latest-is apocalypse because I've utterly lost faith in humanity.
Which one of the versions strikes you as more poetic? Are you sure it’s not just familiarity bias?
I'm not surprised by the "man" and "son" stuff - my old Reconstructionist synagogue tacked on a prayer about the Matriarchs to the traditional prayer about the Patriarchs way back in the 1990s.
I'm pretty shocked that they managed to remove Jesus, though. What exactly were these hymns? What did they do with the part where Jesus was supposed to appear? "Praise Be To Somebody, But We're Not Sure Who"?
"The nice man is risen today
A-a-a-a-a-leluia.
Our triumphant holy day
A-a-a-a-a-leluia.
Raise your joy and triumph high
A-a-a-a-a-leluia.
Sing ye heavens and earth reply.
A-a-a-a-a-leluia."
"Nice man" ???
Did they get a Hindu to revise?
Pretty much. For example the "Christ of my own heart" at the end of Be Thou My Vision became something something "all our dear hearts".
Unfortunately I didn't trouble to remember the replacement lyrics, because I was too busy judging the female vicar. My sexist objection to her mere existence aside: the one rule at a wedding is Do Not Upstage The Bride. Someone should have had a quiet word with her about how the bride might feel to walk in and find another woman in a brilliant white gown already standing there at the altar.
Your example in Be Thou My Vision might just be general variation in the lyrics, rather than a specific change. I can find various versions of the hymn online, and I have always sung "heart of my own heart" where I imagine you have "Christ of my own heart".
For example I can see the version on https://hymnary.org/hymn/HDDW2024/268 has "heart of my heart" (presumably the 'own' has been erroneously omitted).
The above seems to have "I thy dear child" rather than "I thy true son", if I search for a version that has stayed with the gendered language there I can find https://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/hymn-lyrics/be_thou_my_vision_o_lord_of_my_heart.htm , which still doesn't have a "Christ of my own heart".
Neither of those two sources matches exactly what my (C of E) church sings, so there are definitely at least a few variants of this hymn out there.
Was this a wedding at a church?
If so, I’d guess it’s a liberal mainline church. I’d also guess that they are hemorrhaging members and will cease to exist in short order.
I don't know but the old lady volunteer person and I defiantly sung the correct lyrics at the top of our voices from the back.
If this was a liberal mainline church (PC[USA], ELCA, UMC, Episcopalian, etc) I've been under the impression that the clergy have been running to the theological "left" for some time, and the death or departure of more-traditionally minded congregants has enabled these kind of changes. In this sense, the decision maker is staying true to what his/her theology says.
I left the PC[USA] after a bunch of changes like this. God as a woman I can maybe tolerate. Once you start wavering on salvation only through Christ, the church has left the building IMO.
Sorry for the aggressive reply, but from my perspective you just said that pointless political signalling which helps no one (and arguably makes a mockery of coherent theology[1]) you can tolerate, but questioning a doctrine (all non-believers will burn in hell[2]) that causes unimaginable psychological suffering and has a strong claim to being the most evil idea that has ever been formulated, you can't.
The hills people will choose to die on, among all the possible such hills, disturb me more than I can describe.
([1] God as a man is obviously metaphysically incoherent if taken literally, but it's easy to interpret as a metaphor. Once you change God to a woman it's much harder to see as intended metaphor, since why would someone make the change if they think it's just metaphorical? It suggests they either view God as a physical being, or are trying to hijack theology to propogate gender ideology.)
([2] or even "merely" permanently destroyed, which compared to hell looks wonderfully humane, but what does it say about Christianity when something that's several thousand times worse than the Holocaust is the humane alternative?)
I don't understand your point. Even non-Christian sources like Tacitus or Flavius describe Jesus as clearly male. It is more or less a historic fact that a man with a similar name was preaching there and got crucified. The faith-based and likely metaphorical aspect is that that man was also god.
"God as a man is obviously metaphysically incoherent if taken literally, but it's easy to interpret as a metaphor."
Okay, standard Catholic reply that I remember from my teenage years:
God is a spirit, which means neither or both male/female. God does not have a gender as such.
https://www.catholic.com/qa/does-god-have-a-body-like-ours
*But* why then do we call God our Father? Well, because Jesus taught us to refer to our Father in Heaven, not our Mother or our non-binary parent.
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/catechism/index.cfm?recnum=591
I guess the answer to why (non-theologically) that I think of is that Jesus was begotten of God and Mary (and there was no technology to have a child any other way than male/female pairings back then)
Does this mean Jesus said something that isn't true? Or maybe that it makes emotional sense but not literal sense?
Throughout human history and across all cultures, but particularly first century Judea, mothers and fathers have different roles. Fathers strong, protective, authoritative, mothers are soft, nurturing, etc. Jesus is telling us that we should consider our relationship with God to be fatherish rather than motherish.
I can think of other religions with a father-god (Zeus, Odin) but few with a mother-god. Possibly because fathers are expected to be a bit distant whereas mothers aren't. Sometimes the Earth itself is conceptualised as a mother.
"Jesus is telling us that we should consider our relationship with God to be fatherish rather than motherish."
True, but there are also "mothering" elements in what is presented of God, and that comes along strongly in mediaeval versions of devotions around/to Jesus:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-Mother-Spirituality-Medieval-Renaissance/dp/0520052226
This seems to be the correct answer. Even in my childhood, the basic parental setup was that mothers do not punish children, they threaten misbehaving children of telling it to their fathers, who will then administer punishment.
Thus a fatherly god is strict, punishing, tough love.
A motherly god would rather provide free food and heal the sick. Although thinking of it it is interesting Jesus said to have done exactly that! Jesus was very non-manly by the standards of the era, generally forgiving instead of judgemental, caregiving and so on. The only warrior-like act chasing out the money changers etc. actually strange.
Salvation solely through Jesus is *the* central truth claim of Christianity. I don't see any way around that.
There's a saying among several denominations: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty." While I think changing God's pronouns is an eye-roll concession to changing social norms, I'm willing to say it falls into a non-essential category.
I feel like solely comes with an asterisk there; the bible does lay out other ways for the descendants of Abraham to be forgiven of their sins. I agree that it's a mushier point that will get some debate though.
> Salvation solely through Jesus is the central truth claim of Christianity.
No, Christ is the Messiah, and he's gonna come back, bring on the end-times, and whup the collective asses of anyone who doesn't accept his love. That is the central truth of Christianity. 2 Thess 2:8 comes immediately to mind.
Plenty of universalist Christians would disagree strongly with that. At least the ones who haven't been viciously bullied out of the mainstream church and pushed into using some term like "Jesusist" instead of "Christian" because of said bullying.
Again, the fact that pro-choice Christians and pro-transitioning-toddlers Christians seem more tolerated than universalist Christians (at least, while I've seen hatred for the former from mainstream evangelicals, it's absolutely dwarfed by the hatred I've seen for the latter) makes me lose faith in humanity.
(There's a possible motte-and-bailey around "salvation only through Christ", where it could mean that Christ's death saved everyone (or everyone except the absolute most evil and hard-hearted people), or it could mean that everyone who doesn't become a Christian in this life is damned. So wavering on the doctrine could mean saying that Christ wasn't actually metaphysically necessary, or that salvation isn't limited to those who believe in Christ in their lifetime. I suppose it's possible you meant the first, in which case my apologies for my irrelevant response, but based on my experience of these discussions my prior is at least 90% that you meant the second).
I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I do think the gender-neutral language stuff can go too far, but that has been happening from way back.
I'm surprised about the "dump any mentions of Jesus" but then a lot of liberal churches are 'welcoming' to the 'questioning' and maybe they feel that terms like "Jesus" are much too dogmatic for someone not even sure about this whole God thing in the first place. So make it that the songs are changed to be modern and anyone can sing along without having to make a doctrinal statement and everything is good now.
>I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I mean, do you laugh at the suggestion that actually slavery and torturous executions of petty thieves were horifically evil but historical love stories that were too "heteronormative" are...not? Do you laugh at the suggestion that serial rapist-murderers should be treated a fair bit harsher than kids who shoplifted a few candy bars? Because that's the level of moral equivalence we're talking about here.
I don't know if I want to know if you believe in hell. This is something that I try to forget about people, because the alternative is having to face up to the fact that a large number of my fellow citizens and neighbours are sadistic monsters to an unimaginable degree. Like, there's just no way someone with anything resembling a conscience, posessing even the tiniest shred of moral decency or empathy, could believe in that. Right??? I don't know how to interpret your casually dismissive response "kinda laughing" to this issue, but to be honest it greatly disturbs me.
Depends on the denomination, but I think it's a "one funeral at a time" thing. Most clergy seem to develop their basic ideas at seminary. Some move with the times or get mugged by reality - Pope Francis got more liberal over time and Benedict more conservative. But the laity are important too - hymns are often chosen by the music director who may have lived in the parish for decades while priests change every 5 years. Again this person will have got reform-pilled and remain fixed in their views for a while, however sudden and radical it seems when you’re visiting that parish.
The weird truth is they most certainly don't experience it as an ideological shift - they are discovering the true Christianity which empties itself as Christ did on the cross, it's the "rigid" people who want Jesus in the hymns who are the pharisees.
Edit: This article is an interesting take on ultra-reform Christianity. Money quote: "It is not Christian to be Christian"
Death of God Fifty Years On - First Things https://share.google/wcIaEJRUV9v0AjTy2
I know unsolicited parenting advice is hardly ever well-received. Nevertheless... do you think that distraction is the right approach when a child wants something they can't have? I think it's important to teach them to manage their emotions, even at that early an age, and to respect others.
I mean, distraction is one more tool in the box? The amount of emotional energy a parent has, and/or the capacity for self-regulation that kids have, can vary quite a lot, both within- and between-subjects.
But looking at your other comments, you seem very sure that you know the One True Way. I'm reminded of the old adage "teenagers- move out now, while you still know everything!"
Here's an example from the animal realm that captures the crucial distinction. My cats used to jump on my back with their claws out. (They weren't attacking, just treating me like a tree trunk.) When they did I yelled and immediately stood up and shook them off. The yell gave them an unpleasant start, and being shaken off immediately ended their fun. This unpleasant consequence quickly taught them not to jump on my back.
There's another thing they do that I also dislike: Their meowing for attention when I'm concentrating hard on some task on the computer. I don't mind the meowing in other situations. There is no way to teach them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating because they are not capable of recognizing when I'm concentrating. Also, meowing, while not involuntary, is a natural, deeply wired-in behavior they emit a much of the time. Since trying to teach them not to meow when I'm concentrating is impossible, I use distraction to keep them quiet. I give them food puzzles and other distractions.
When it comes to teaching kids to do or not to do something, there's the same principle at work. You can only teach them if they can grasp what the something is, and if they have enough self-monitoring capacity and self-control to refrain from doing the something. Scott's kids are too little to learn and follow the lesson that it is bad to yank things away from your sibling. If he sternly admonishes them or punishes them with a little time out, they will become more uneasy around toys, their sibling, and him, but they will not learn the particular lesson he wants to target.
For 1.5 year olds? Yes. Yes it is. If your kids are older now you may be projecting an ability to reason backwards... That is, my 3.5 year old can, at times, be reasoned with. My 1.5 year old just doesn't have the understanding necessary for that to be a meaningful conversation.
I think people underestimate how much even a one year old understands. But anyway, it's not about reasoning only, it's about learning behaviours. They certainly learn that if you give in every time they shout, they should keep shouting.
So what do you think of my cat example? (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-397/comment/151338000) Am I being too soft on my cats by giving up on teaching them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating? Am I teaching them that meowing when I'm concentrating gets them food puzzles with treats in them?
Yes, I would say you have trained your cats to meow for treats.
But then I am also of the opinion that cats are plenty bright enough to recognise when their humans are working/concentrating. Ours certainly do.
Our cats are mostly silent unless it's for important matters. Persistent, consistent feedback (eg; being silently picked up and locked in the bathroom for a short spell when they are being a pest) has made them somewhat judicious about making unnecessary noise.
Cats mostly use meowing to communicate with humans - it's not something adult cats do with each other very much at all. (It is designed to help mother cat/kitten interactions.) Therefore with very consistent feedback cats can learn when to not do it to us, too.
Contrary to popular belief cats are easily trainable, just not in the same way that dogs are.
Also relevant: our kids were capable of being reasoned with from before the time they could speak clearly. Kids really do understand what's going on from a very young age; it's very much to their advantage for them to be able to do so.
As a household we have found that simple, clear, achievable expectations work wonders with just about everyone.
I think you’re wrong about the nature of my transaction with my cats.
<cats are plenty bright enough to recognise when their humans are working/concentrating.
They probably can if human-is-working predicts something of importance to them. In my case, my being on the computer does not predict anything of interest to them, because generally I am interruptible if they stop by, willing to have them in my lap, still get up and feed them at the usual time, etc. Maybe 10% of the time I am on the computer I am concentrating hard on something, and when in that state I hate noise and interruptions. I am confident that even a close friend of mine would not be able to tell from looking at me at the computer whether I am happily reading something of interest, or concentrating hard on understanding something complicated and important. You think my *cats* can distinguish the 2 states?
<I would say you have trained your cats to meow for treats.
If I have, why has the frequency of strident, I-want-something meowing when I’m on the computer not gone up? I watched one of them learn how to operate a mechanism in one of his puzzles that dropped a treat when he pulled on a certain loop. One day one, he did a bunch of random stuff, and once in a while pulled the loop. Over time he pulled the loop more and more often, and poked at the toy in other ways less and less. Now he pulls the loop the minute he sees that puzzle. But he doesn’t do a loud begging meow the minute he sees me staring at the computer. He continues to do that, mostly just once, on about half the days I’m on the computer a lot.
<Cats mostly use meowing to communicate with humans - it's not something adult cats do with each other very much at all.
That is not the case with my ginger cat. He vocalizes very frequently. I hear him doing it when he’s not in the room with me. I usually know where in the house he is because I hear him making his little noises. My impression is that mostly these sounds are little expressions of emotion — “wow!” “hey what’s *that*?” “ooh, this is nice.” He’s a Devon Rex — maybe they’re more prone to this sort of vocalizing? He does have a distress/needy cry he uses when something is wrong — a series of strident yells that sound like an adult version of lost kitten yells. Does it when he can’t find his buddy, the other Devon. Did it a few times when there was a problem with accessing the litter box. It is definitely not reserved only for communicating discontent to me. He does it sometimes when he's way off in another room.
So I see the loud meows after a long period of being ignored as an expression of distress rather than as a learned way to press a lever in me to get treats. Also, giving the cats a treat puzzle only takes slightly longer than carrying 2 indignant wiggling cats to the bathroom, and is a much pleasanter activity. If giving treat puzzles to distract them was leading to more and more frequent gimme-treats meowing I would certainly stop doing it, but it is not. Seems to me like a good solution that keeps everyone happy.
I think the same about Scott’s handling of toddler struggles over toys. If he’s still using his present methods to handle disputes of that kind next spring, when the kids are clearly able to grasp concepts like sharing, fairness, taking turns, making one’s sibling sad and mad, etc., and when they have a modicum of self-control, then yeah, that’s not good. But he sounds like a careful, thoughtful observer and a good introspectionist, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.
<Our kids were capable of being reasoned with from before the time they could speak clearly
As for your kids, the only possible explanation is that your kids and your parenting are just way smarter and better than Scott’s.
Okay, that's fair - you know your cats much better than I do.
But you asked the question (> Am I being too soft on my cats by giving up on teaching them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating? Am I teaching them that meowing when I'm concentrating gets them food puzzles with treats in them?) and I answered it, based on my own experiences.
We had similar issues with our various cats when they were young, we responded in the ways we thought were best, and now things are quieter. YMMV. That's how it is sometimes.
The science about cat vocalisations being mostly for human benefit once the kitten stage is over is pretty well established though. Check anywhere. https://www.livescience.com/why-cats-meow.html
Our cats have an extensive repertoire of different meows which they use for humans and human related things. They also sometimes meow when there isn't a human around, but that's not typical. Inter-cat communication is mostly silent.
As for my kids, well, YMMV there too. People are different, sometimes from very young ages.
I'm not saying it was particularly sophisticated reasoning, but talking to them early and often and setting clear, reasonable expectations on behaviour did result in enjoyable and cooperative kids - no screaming (as distinct from ordinary crying... but there wasn't all that much of that either) - pretty much from babyhood. There were no 'terrible twos', very few tantrums, and our kids were (and are) fun to be with at any age.
Does it take a lot of thought and work? Yes it does. A lot. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
I have no beef with you, or with Scott; I was just commenting on the experiences of my own household.
I don't know anything about cats. I wouldn't raise children the way I'd treat kittens.
Oh, come on! It's a thought experiment. You don't need to be highly familiar with cats to understand it. The relevant point is that cats cannot distinguish between me sitting in a chair relaxed and available and me sitting in a chair concentrating hard on a project. Feel free to substitute any mammal you like except maybe a very smart near-relative of our species like a chimp. The point is that there are a things you cannot teach a non-human mammal to do because it cannot recognize crucial features of the thing you want to teach. In this case, it can't distinguish between a sitting person who is concentrating and needs silence and one who is relaxed and does not object to some noise and attempts at interaction.
Ok right but this isn't applicable to children, for two reasons. First, kids understand more than you give them credit for. Second, what, you think kids hit a certain age, and suddenly you start reasoning with them? It's a gradual process, so you should begin reasoning right from the start. Otherwise, a) you yourself develop bad parenting habits you won't shake off, and b) you won't know when to start.
I'm sure he does not give in every time they shout. If he stops them from doing something dangerous, like standing on the edge of a table, he has to just put up with the yells of frustration. In my experience with very small toddlers you need to stop them from doing what they want to very often, certainly more than once an hour, out of safety considerations alone. If you didn't, they'd be falling off the back of the couch, mouthing plastic spoons they found on the ground outdoors, grabbing cactus plants, etc etc. multiple times per day. He's also tolerating excitement shouting, and frustration shouting at times when he can't figure out what it is the kid wants. So the kids are learning that sometimes shouting gets you want you want and sometimes it does not. That, by the way, is true at all ages, even in adult life, although of course the conditions under which it works and doesn't work follow very complex rules in adult life. I think they're getting the best approximation of the truth that's possible for such young beings.
Also, Scott probably tries to anticipate things that are going to lead to frustration yelling, and intervene before the yelling starts by making sure the kid who is about to be frustrated gets an alternative toy that distracts them. So the kid's experience in that situation is not that yelling gets them what they want but that life is fun and good and wonderful, fascinating things pop up all the time.
So the contingicies are nowhere near as simple as what you sketched in.
How did you go about this, and how well did it work? Always interested to hear tips.
In such examples, I would tell the child trying to snatch a toy from their sibling to stop it, and wait for their turn. I am not saying I wouldn't offer alternatives, but I'd have the discussion with them ('you shouldn't want something just because other people have it; you can't take things by force. Wait for your turn - and if you're bored, you can play with X/Y/Z in the meantime').
You expect a 1.5 year old toddler to understand phrases like "by force" and "if you're bored" and "wait your turn"? These kids, shown a book, point to each dog and say "dog." They are not even saying "doggie run" much less things things about dog experience -- "dog scared" or "dog bored." And they are really really far from using words to express some general principle, by saying something like "doggie should wait." No doubt they understand more than they can express, but not THAT much more.
First off, yes, I think they can understand the concept. But even if not, I think it's never to early to start parenting properly! Otherwise, you get into habits that stay even after the children have grown.
Have you considered the possibility that you just had very easy children? I have two, and they are worlds apart in terms of challenge. They just are that way.
I definitely have easy children. But I also think waaaay too many people hide behind the excuse of 'my child is difficult, they're just born this way'. Same way parents stick an iPad on their kids' laps as soon as they board a plane.
Having followed that advice, do you just ignore the now-screaming child, or attempt to keep talking to it in the hope of calming it down? When the child tries to get what it wants anyway, do you physically restrain it, or do you take the thing it wants away, do you shout at the child, or do you do something else?
Scott's kids are within a few days of mine, because I remember reading his announcement post while sitting in the mat ward. And while I know my child at this age can definitely understand and obey simple sentences like "go and give this to mummy", the finer distinctions of "is"-vs-"ought" inherent in "you shouldn't want something" aren't going to land anywhere yet.
Hah I can't quite remember how I handled the worst tantrums - must have blocked it from my memory. I won't lie, I wasn't the best at dealing with proper tantrums, but these were rare, in general my kids wouldn't scream just because they wanted something.
One thing that worked really well for us as parents were to trade places - e.g. if a child threw a tantrum in response to my intervention, my wife was better at calming them down, and vice versa.
But definitely, we wouldn't give in to screaming, and we would take things away if they were triggers for bad behaviour.
The biggest insight I remember from that age is realizing that there is a point when there is no longer any point in trying to correct your child's behavior, and certainly no point in threatening consequences or offering bribes, because they're just *done*. At that point, you just need to contain them and get them into a better situation.
An example of this was my oldest kid when his younger brother was born. After a couple hours at the hospital with lots of unfamiliar noises and smells and scary things happening everywhere and mommy with weird tubes in her, he was just done and needed to be taken home and put to bed/given a nap/allowed to sit and play quietly. Nobody was going to talk him into better behavior with either sweet reason or threatened punishments, because he was just flat past his limits.
Another option is to set up the play space with some toys that are fun to play with together. My 1.5 year olds loved sitting in a circle with a small group and rolling one or more balls to each other.
Also games that everyone can play at once, like digging in a sand box or playing with a pile of duplos work pretty well. This scheme works best if the play space has fewer toys in it that are “extra special”.
Activities like joining forces to catch a parent, or attempt to wrestle a parent to the ground are great for building their team spirit and strategic thinking.
As they get get interested in developing particular skills, like stacking, you can turn this into a cooperative game in which the group is trying to stack a particular tall tower of pillows, and you might need help stabilizing it from different sides.
Oh, and before anyone asks “what happens if one child starts, knocking the tower over before it’s been built to everyone satisfaction?”
One way of dealing with this is to embrace how much fun it is to knock over towers and make it a group activity to build the tower as tall as possible and then when it’s your turn, you’re the one who gets to knock the tower over.
Jenny Zito (Bill Zito’s Mom)
I worry that there is some runaway process where:
· people of great mind and achievement thereby become famous and get a lot of internet attention, and they also discuss complex, sensitive, and explosive topics, and allow themselves to be vulnerable;
· they consequently become targets of sneer, mockery, and bullying,
· and then their personality sort of changes when they start to associate the sort of outgroup who disagrees with them with sneering bullies;
· and then we lose these people of achievement because they devote their life to fighting some form of outgroup according to their new threat model.
Maybe we as humanity deserve to lose them for not having much stronger norms against mocking genuine openness and vulnerability, but it kinda sucks.
I am reminded a bit of Richard Dawkins, who started out writing great books like The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype and wound up writing terrible books called things like No Really The Earth Isn't Flat You Fucking Idiots because he engaged with his dumbest critics rather than ignoring them.
Yes, I find this very wise.
Just recently I learned about a philosopher publicly criticizing another philosopher for publicly praising Dawkins's Selfish Gene, back at that time. And Dawkins engaged.
What for?
This criticizing philosopher had really crazy views, and would never ever be moved by an article exchange when she didn't even understand his book.
Yeah, Dawkins had two whole lives of being controversial. The second was when he devoted himself to arguing with creationists, the first was when he got attacked by leftists who fundamentally misunderstood what "The Selfish Gene" was about, perhaps confusing it with Ayn Rand's "The Virtue Of Selfishness".
I think that's a valid worry. Even without algorithms nudging us towards furious indignant exchanges, dialog between relative strangers online devolves very easily into a deep, furious feeling of being misunderstood, and a craving to counterattack.. We didn't evolve to discuss sensitive matters under these conditions, you know? For public intellectuals I think it's safer to write books and articles and do a podcast, as someone like Ezra Klein seems to mostly do, rather than engage directly via online forums.
Do you have Scott Aaronson in mind? Because in his case, the cause and effect are reversed, i.e. the ultimate source of his descent into genocidal madness is a deep-rooted persecution complex, not internet bullies or SneerClub (in fact, bullies just became a convenient excuse for him).
Initially I thought he meant Jordan Peterson, he started out as a basic righty telling young men to clean their rooms and got more and more unhinged.
Eh, in my opinion he's no worse than the Free Press, and not nearly as influential. But I'm kind of wishy-washy on the whole Israel thing, honestly. It makes people very angry to bring up, it doesn't divide cleanly into left and right so you can always start fights with it (a perfect scissor statement!), I don't have any special expertise to bear on the situation, and being half Jewish and having frankly right-wing and sadistic natural leanings I don't think my natural inclinations are going to add anything useful.
My opinion of people like Jordan Peterson is that they are frauds, preying on ignorance. "clean your room" is bog-standard Behavioural Activation Therapy, yet he presented it as some genius idea he invented. This generated him a credibility that led to that crowd believing him anything.
Peterson's advice was actually clean your room and stand up straight.
I believe a lot of what got him his fandom is that he liked young men and wished them well, while feminists didn't.
Did he say that? I'm actually not that familiar with the guy, but I see his name more than Aaronson's. (Maybe Aaronson's name is very well known in computing--lot of techies here!)
The cognitive-behavioral people redid Stoicism for the 20th century, but I guess they gave credit.
> he started out as a basic righty telling young men to clean their rooms and got more and more unhinged
Actually he started out as a basic lefty, but then said one thing that the left disagreed with.
There are a hundred of these civil wars around the world. Why is Israel such a big deal?
Which of these other civil wars have involved ~50,000 civilians being directly killed by a Western-aligned governmental force in two years?
Oh, so it's the 'Western-aligned' thing? I could see that. You could have gotten Biden to pull support and Israel would have folded, you can't do that in Sudan.
I have to say I get 'white man bad' vibes from the whole Palestine movement, which is kind of ironic given how much white nationalists hate Jews!
Sudan (https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/06/sudans-forgotten-war-exposes-the-inhumanity-of-israelophobia/).
Because we see Israel as a Western nation, and they are certain trying to be part of that club in other questions (say allowing Pride parades).
So if Israel abandoned these trappings and became a full-fledged theocracy without elections and pride parades, would you stop caring about the conflict (or start caring about it to the same extent you care about Sudan)?
More interestingly, do you think that most people that are unhappy with Israel now would lose interest?
I don't know if I can ask anyone to do anything, I'm not the moderator, just the author of the comment, but I think it's best if we don't discuss any specific people here. It's culture-warish (so has a chance to derail discussion) and sorta off-topic (at least, I'd like to discuss the general phenomenon, not the stance of particular people). Also, I'd love to try to approach people with humanity, not discarding anyone, discarding seems like the opposite of what I'm trying to do: to understand, restore the severed communication, to bridge the gap... At any rate, I think it's best to go without personalities now.
Fair enough, Vadim. I posted this example because I feel the description of the process you give in the parent comment is too abstract and simplistic, in fact simplistic enough to be misleading. Behind virtually every case of "someone kind who was radicalized by exposure to internet bullies" is a more complex story (that often paints the person in worse light). The case of SA is one such example - at first glance he fits your general description and thus would invite sympathy, yet in fact the opposite is true (but you need to dig a bit deeper).
I initially assumed that V was referring to SG's recent criticism of SA's politeness policy and labeling that criticism as bullying. But that's fairly weak tea, and I dismissed it.
Is this a reference to who I think it is, whose responses have been...not optimized to the current situation?
It has indeed been inspired by said person, who has, in my perception, always been an epitome of kindness and humanity. But I thought it best not to name them: firstly, out of respect and not to turn this comment section into an off-topic discussion of them, and secondly, I have other examples in mind, as well.
Can you explain why do you think a genocide apologist should command respect? Hard to swallow pill: the same person can be an epitome of kindness and humanity in one context and, when triggered, advocate wholesale slaughter in another.
OK. Now I'm really curious. Who's the genocidal apologist? And which genocide are they whitewashing? There have been so many genocides in the 20th Century (and a few in the 21st century) that I could think of dozens of people who'd fit this bill.
Okay, *one* good reason was to last more than several hours without turning this into a discussion of the specific culture war which the discussion of *any* specific example of the phenomenon in post may bring.
If you're too fearful of controversy, then why make this argument in the first place? And why should we be believe you if you can't support your claim with examples? If you think of yourself as a rationalist, you should be able to support your argument with examples. And Truth with a capital T should win out over petty prejudices.
Politics is the mind killer, yadda yadda. Also I'm what's technically known in the medical science as a scaredy cat.
Speaking as a traumatized SSC subreddit poster, the world is a better place without SneerClub.
(Apologies if this is too online/niche of a reference.)
I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology).
I still think I'd rather have the ACX commentariat beside my side, at work, as friends, or God forbid in a foxhole. You guys might get shot first, but Sneer Club seems like the sort to push you into oncoming fire.
> I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology)
A better version of Sneerclub might be worth reading for that very reason, but the actual Sneerclub that exists is a phenomenon entirely of one ideology; specifically it's a bunch of leftists who hate Rationalism because it's not leftism.
I agree, but there aren't a lot of 'red teams' to read out there.
By the way, is there really much rationalism left in the commentariat? It's not like we discuss or apply techniques from the sequences, Bayesianism or whatever, isn't the commentariat at this point just a self-selected group of nice (and not-so-nice) like-minded people talking about diverse (and not-so-diverse) things?
At least no one is pulling https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ - that I always found super annoying, and Bayesianism kills that, because the so-called logical fallacies are for Bayesians simply weak evidences.
Please do not include me with the like-minded. But at the risk of becoming a figure of irony, I agree with you.
I came here for evidence-based arguments, but they seem few and far between.
I've heard the meetups described as a 'right-of-center nerd drinking club'.
And, you know, I'm cool with that.
I've been to a meetup where Scott also was, in Paris. He walked past me, I said hi (even though I don't know him), and he gave me this look like "who the hell is this???", awkwardly waved his hand, and resumed his way :)
The values of the meetup seemed that the people assembled were sufficiently diverse and tolerant of strange ideas as to bring interesting shit into each other's lives. Still, the actual rationalism seems like a nice thing to have had. And, like, Scott's contributions in the form of introducing useful concept handles like "motte and bailey" have also been very nice! Other than that, for a no-labels teetotaler, assembling by political views to drink feels purposeless somehow...
I'm sure they have other options, I was just referring to the one I knew. I'm not going to be too specific.
I also worry about this.
Are you worried about this happening to you, or do you think you're too in touch with reality / had too much exposure to nasty people saying nasty things about you on the internet to be in the high-risk group?
Do you have any ideas about preventing this from happening to you, personally? Other than making the world a gentler place, that is?
(As for me: I hope to not become famous, and I don't consume twitter for the same reasons I don't consume heroine, which I hope protects me somewhat. Otherwise, here's what's been helpful for me personally when I'm bitter and desperate: creating the things that I want to create; and focusing on things of beauty, as well as telling others about them. Maybe I should ask someone that in case I ever become a radicalized crackpot, they should send me one poem a day.)
Not a hashtag I expected to encounter here. Seconded.
#butitwouldbebetterifshespenthertimewritingmoregoodbooksratherthanTwitterfighting
By my count, in the last five years she's published 8 books, co-written one film screenplay, and served as executive producer for 2 TV shows based on her written work. If anyone's earned the right to get into a few fights on Twitter, it's she.
I mean, yeah, on the one hand it's their failure to protect their epistemology. But on the other hand I think there are circumstances where doing the vulnerable thing is like being pro-social at your own expense, and when you have a large audience, this effect is stronger: you bring greater benefit at a greater expense. "This sucky situation you're not supposed to talk about happens, and people actually speak up about it now, including this famous and successful person. I thought I was the only one! Maybe I'll even discuss it with others when I see ten other people do so". It makes it less scary when you need to talk about something that wants you to be a silent victim; it becomes slightly harder to play the "nobody cares that you have this problem" routine. And in addition, I really do think that derision should be perceived as an unhealthier think than it currently is; it breaks communication and openness, and we badly need them. Rather: we badly need specifically the kind of communication that derision breaks.
The anniversary of the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan has given rise to a lot of debate. I did a podcast with Gary Bass on one of the things that happened next, namely the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Gary is the writer of Judgement at Tokyo which I can’t recommend enough.
As you all know by now the podcast is called Subject to Change (with Russell Hogg) and you should all subscribe. It’s free and advertisement free!
As with the better known Nuremberg trials the tribunal sought to prosecute as a war crime not just the usual atrocities but also the waging of a war of aggression. This was a brand new idea and caused all sorts of problems and led to the massive 1,000+ page dissenting judgement from Judge Radhabinod Pal. His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up. (He didn’t deny that the committing of atrocities could be war crimes).
Anyway here are a few things I learned on the podcast:
- Unlike Germany where the government policy was basically whatever Hitler said, Japan had a genuine cabinet government albeit heavily dominated by the military.
- The decision was made to prosecute all members of the cabinet in place at the time of Pearl Harbor as class A war criminals.
- This was particularly unfair on Shigenori Tōgō who had argued in favour of accepting American demands and against the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- This wasn’t polite demurral on his part. He pretty much had toe to toe shouting matches with the military. And this at a time when resisting the military regularly led to your assassination.
- Anyway much good it did him. Partly because the Japanese had destroyed all the records that the American bombings hadn’t already incinerated he was convicted and died in prison.
- More fortunate was Nobosuke Kishi. He was also part of the Pearl Harbor cabinet. But the trials were split in two and he was scheduled for part 2. Part 1 took so long they gave up on part 2 and let them go.
- Nobosuke Kishi ends up as prime minister as does his more famous grandson Abe Shinzo. Abe was a nationalist and very much regarded the Tokyo tribunal as victors justice and tried and failed to get Japan’s constitution changed to allow it to have armed forces (and not just heavily armed self defence forces!)
- One of the atrocities the Japanese were accused of was the incident at the island of Chichijima. Eight airmen were shot down, captured, executed and then partially eaten. A ninth was floating towards Chichijima in his life raft but was picked up by an American submarine.
- At the time he wasn’t anyone special but his name was George Herbert Walker Bush, later to become president of the United States.
- Many years later Bush attended Emperor Hirohito’s funeral and tactfully said something to the effect of how tremendously moved he was by all the pageantry.
- Judge Pal’s dissenting judgement was and still is much appreciated among the nationalists in Japan. Part of his argument was based on the racism that the Japanese had faced in trying to become part of the community of first rank nations. That made the quote he used to close his judgement slightly unfortunate. Well, not the quote itself but the person who said it - the white supremacist from the Civil War, Jefferson Davis:
When Time shall have softened passion and prejudice,
when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,
then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require
much of past censure and praise to change places.
Anyway that’s just a few bits. Here is the real thing. And Gary Bass’s book is terrific!
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000722503573
Somewhat related, I recently read that Japan is STILL basically ruled by the secret samurai clan... just now they are bureaucrats
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-miti-and-the-japanese-miracle
>His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up
Note that one chapter of Profiles in Courage is dedicated to Robert Taft's advocacy of that position, which, the book argues, cost him the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.
It is my understanding that the idea of war crimes and the tribunals came from Stalin, and was a tool he was planning to use to eliminate "the officer class" altogether. Evidently, Truman was less keen on the idea than FDR, and so the trials were significantly narrowed, and the use of the death penalty was significantly reduced. This was the first time in history that the idea of "war crimes" was introduced. Before that, defeated enemies were eliminated just because they were defeated enemies, and no legal fig leaf was required.
> the idea of war crimes and the tribunals came from Stalin
> This was the first time in history that the idea of "war crimes" was introduced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_1907
The post-WWII trials used these agreements in a novel way that eye agreements did not contemplate.
Well I don’t disagree at all that the military dominated the government nor that everyone (even the emperor) was at risk of assassination if he stood up to them. (Note the attempted coup and assassinations immediately after the decision to surrender!)
But it was genuine constitutional government in a way Hitler’s wasn’t. And there was real debate not least at the time of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and at the time of deciding whether to surrender and on what terms. And Shigenori Tōgō did stand up to the military in cabinet and at great personal risk.
And Togo failed, because the Japanese military did whatever they wanted and didn't listen to civilians or the Emperor or anyone else. (Despite constantly proclaiming their loyalty to the Emperor.) The army and navy even worked against each other because no one had control of both. The army did whatever they thought was best for the army and the navy did whatever they thought was best for the navy.
>as a war crime not just the usual atrocities but also the waging of a war of aggression. This was a brand new idea
Um https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg%E2%80%93Briand_Pact 1928 already outlawed aggressive war, what it did not do is to determine individual criminal liability. So the idea was about half-new.
I admit it was still on sketchy legal grounds - jumping from the concept of a state breaking a treaty i.e. international law to individual criminal liability. Basically the people who started to those wars could not possibly know they could be prosecuted for it. This is in my book illegal, and was a classic case of might makes right. Given that the entire purpose of laws is to prevent violence, they generally break down near truly large-scale violence, such as world wars.
>Japan had a genuine cabinet government
Um look up all the assassinations of the era. Every politician who did not do what the hyper-nationalistic secret societies of officers wanted, got assassinated by them. This was not a genuine government in my book.
An idea for sf world building: sending probes from a simulation to the host world. This would be like a submarine (or a space ship) - everything you sense would be through devices but you could experience the host world.
This could lead to complex plays like sending submarines across two simulation boundaries. From two parallel simulations of from a double simulation to the real host.
Further it could lead to ideas about infinite simulation stacks. Or about what is even a simulation. If you can have peripheral device controlled from the simulation- then you can use it to manipulate the simulation substrate. Then what is really the boundary between the simulation and the host?
I have also a not well formed intuition about our senses and muscles being such peripherals of our brains. Does that make our world the host world?
I also just posted this on twitter: https://x.com/zby/status/1962436693476208941?s=46&t=lpe42kDwchPcrra0nzP53g
I have been playing with the idea of hacking the source code of the simulation from inside. I was going to do a short story, but it is metastasizing into a novel. I guess it will have to wait until the novel I am working on now is complete...
You might be interested specifically in this: https://gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html - although in this case the initial probes are made available to the inhabitants of the simulation.
Reminds me of William Gibson's Jackpot books (except the peripherals were used for parallel universe time travel)
Before Gibson, there was Zelazny and "Home is the Hangman".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Legion_(short_story_collection)
""Home Is the Hangman": A sentient space-exploration robot, lost years before, has apparently returned to Earth. One of its original designers has died under suspicious circumstances. Has the Hangman returned to kill its creators? The hero must find the Hangman and stop it, and time is running out. This story won the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novella."
EDIT: Forgot to quote the relevant bit:
“You can begin by telling me how the early space-exploration robots worked, like, say the ones they used on Venus.”
That‘s not computers, I said, and for that matter, they weren‘t really robots. They were telefactoring devices.
Tell me what makes the difference.
A robot is a machine which carries out certain operations in accordance with a program of instructions. A telefactor is a slave machine operated by remote control The telefactor functions in a feedback situation with its operator. Depending on how sophisticated you want to get, the links can be audiovisual, kinesthetic, tactile, even olfactory. The more you want to go in this direction, the more anthropomorphic you get in the thing‘s design.
In the case of Venus, if I recall correctly, the human operator in orbit wore an exoskeleton which controlled the movements of the body, legs, arms, and hands of the device on the surface below, receiving motion and force feedback through a system of airjet transducers. He had on a helmet controlling the slave device‘s television camera, set, obviously enough, in its turret, which filled his field of vision with the scene below. He also wore earphones connected with its audio pickup. I read the book he wrote later. He said that for long stretches of time he would forget the cabin, forget that he was at the boss end of a control loop, and actually feel as if he were stalking through that hellish landscape. I remember being very impressed by it, just being a kid, and I wanted a super-tiny one all my own, so that I could wade around in puddles picking fights with microorganisms.”
Yeah - I should have asked AI - apparently there are quite a few elaborations on this theme, although not everything fits - the first one it found is kind of different with parallel timelines you don't have all the complexity about host/simulation and controlling actuators.
----
Yep—there’s a rich vein of SF that hits your “sim-pilots + cross-layer probes + stack boundaries” idea. Here’s a tight, curated map with the closest matches first:
### Closest match (teleoperated bodies across layers)
* **William Gibson — *The Peripheral***: people in one timeline “drive” synthetic bodies called *peripherals* in another timeline via a quantum link; it’s basically cross-layer telepresence with gatekeepers and bandwidth politics. The TV adaptation spells it out: Flynne is “piloting a robot (Peripheral) via quantum tunneling” into a future London “stub.” ([Wikipedia][1])
### Nested sims & stack awareness
* **Daniel F. Galouye — *Simulacron-3*** (a.k.a. *Counterfeit World*): early, very on-point tale of a simulated city whose denizens (and their creators) confront the fact of layered realities; directly inspired *The Thirteenth Floor*. ([Wikipedia][2])
* **Greg Egan — *Permutation City***: uploaded minds build their own physics and effectively decouple from the “host,” pushing the idea that substrate control can move *up* the stack. ([Wikipedia][3])
* **Iain M. Banks — *Surface Detail***: societies wage a “War in Heaven” over simulated afterlives (Hells), with actors moving strategies between the real and virtual theaters. ([Wikipedia][4], [WIRED][5])
### Writing to (and hacking) the substrate
* **Greg Egan — “Luminous”** and **“Dark Integers”**: mathematicians discover parts of math/physics are *computationally contingent* and use proofs like exploits to alter reality—practically a manual for “peripherals that write to the substrate.” ([Wikipedia][6])
### Sim agents controlling host-world devices (your “peripherals” idea, literally)
* **Black Mirror — “White Christmas”**: a copied consciousness (“cookie”) is enslaved to run a smart home—i.e., a sim mind operating host-layer sensors/actuators under harsh time dilation. ([Wikipedia][7])
* **Caprica**: a virtual avatar (Zoe-A) is instantiated into a robot chassis; the show treats the jump from sim to host as an engineering and political problem. ([WIRED][8], [Wikipedia][9])
### Telepresence/peripheral craft (great for your “sim-submarine” feel, even when not full sims)
* **John Scalzi — *Lock In***: “threeps” (teleoperated bodies) with all the social/legal infrastructure around who gets to drive what, and how. Useful for your protocol/port-authority worldbuilding. ([Wikipedia][10])
* **Martha Wells — *Murderbot Diaries***: relentless, practical telepresence (bots, cameras, drones) with bandwidth/latency/security constraints that feel exactly like piloting a hull across a noisy boundary. ([Wikipedia][11])
### Boundary-blur aesthetics (the vibe of layers collapsing)
* **Serial Experiments Lain**: reality and the network interpenetrate; less about robots, more about what counts as the “host of the moment.” Great mood/reference text for your metaphysics. ([Wikipedia][12])
If you want, I can spin this into a mini-syllabus with the **specific chapters/episodes** that best illustrate: (1) bandwidth/latency limits, (2) actuation budgets and vetoes, and (3) stack-aware politics (ports, tariffs, “cut rights”).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_%28TV_series%29 "The Peripheral (TV series) - Wikipedia"
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Simulacron-3"
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Permutation City"
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Surface Detail"
[5]: https://www.wired.com/2010/10/iain-banks?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Sci-Fi Writer Iain Banks Talks Surface Detail's Hell, Creationist Heresy"
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_%28book%29?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Luminous (book)"
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_%28Black_Mirror%29?utm_source=chatgpt.com "White Christmas (Black Mirror)"
[8]: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/alessandra-torresani?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Alessandra Torresani Gets Inside Caprica's Prime Cylon"
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Caprica"
[10]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Lock In"
[11]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries?utm_source=chatgpt.com "The Murderbot Diaries"
[12]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Serial Experiments Lain"
Neal Stephenson's Fall, or Dodge in Hell plays in this space a bunch, especially with a late implication that (spoiler warning) the recurring character across several Stephenson books from widely different time periods Enoch Root is in some way a visitor from a higher layer of reality.
Why would the Democrats want to do away with the presidential pardon? Look at what Biden did with his family pardons (especially after saying he wouldn't pardon Hunter). It's too useful a tool to let go, and frankly I don't believe either party contains politicians of sufficient civic virtue to apply the law impartially to their own families/cronies/clients. No Lucius Junius Brutus in office here! (Or anywhere, not to be picking on the USA).
We already have a problem, and the solution to that is "inculcate more virtue" but alas, while the fear of retribution may scare some straight, it's more likely that a loophole or a way around paying the price of doing Bad Thing will be found.
After all, if you consider that you must break a few eggs to make the omelette, then the good ends outweigh the bad means, so you're not really a bad person, so it would be unfair to punish you as though you were a criminal. So find a legal dodge around this, and we're okay!
At the very least, tie up in lawsuits for years and hope that it eventually wears down the prosecution. What, in the end, happened to Bill Clinton after the Starr Report and his impeachment trial? Slap on the wrist suspension of his law licence, the Democrats lost the next election, but he remained a power in the party and hasn't really faced strong consequences of the kind you suggest.
He’s much less influential than a popular two-term president should be. How much punishment should he get for perjury about an affair?
You realize people who have guns can fire them, right? And that many ICE and national Guard people won't want to participate due to their own conservative views and the fear of getting shot?
If you're going to threaten such a scenario, why on Earth is the Presidential pardon the hill you want to die on?
If Dems had "complete control" over all 3 branches then they wouldn't need to work with the GOP at all. They wouldn't issue ultimatums, they'd just amend the constitution themselves. If they didn't have the supermajority needed then the GOP would just tell them to pound sand. Sending ICE after lawful gun owners would never happen because it would backfire specTACularly. The Dems would just be destroying themselves with that move.
It's 3/4 actually, but good point I forgot about that part. For some dumb reason I was thinking that the federal government could do it alone. Either way this is a totally unrealistic scenario.
If I was the Republican leadership I would be absolutely overjoyed.
A literal conspiracy to unconstitutionally imprison gun owners unless the Republicans agree to change the constitution would give the Republicans clout for the next century.
“You’re voting democrat? You mean the party that literally threatened to arbitrarily imprison gun owners unless the constitution was changed for their benefit?”
As if out of the dozens of high level Republicans who would have to be in on the scheme for it to work, not one presented with this offer would immediately go public with it. That person would immediately gain massive political clout, and seen as protecting the constitution from an unfair subversion of our political system.
Why on Earth would Republican *leadership* ever agree to such a deal? They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. I think that privately, behind closed doors, they would be toasting and cheering the folly of their enemies. Consider the issue framed from their perspective:
Option 1: Spend significant political capital to accomplish an end that (at best) gains us no advantage and (at worst) removes a tool that our future leaders can use better than the opposition can.
or
Option 2: The opposition begins a course of action that will make our base just ridiculously, indescribably mad, without hindering their ability to vote in any significant way. This guarantees the next election will be an absolute bloodbath for the opposition, giving us more and more durable power than we could get any other way.
This exactly how the analysis would run if the politicians in question were cynical, self-interested power maximizers. But it's *also* pretty much how the analysis would run if they were fairly zealous believers in their own rhetoric who were genuinely trying to selflessly serve their constituents, as long as they had enough of a consequentialist streak to be willing to accept minor injuries to their now in order to gain large utilities later. The proposed action by the Democrats--assuming it could go anywhere at all through legal challenges and internal opposition--seems like it would cause relatively little harm but an ENORMOUS amount of anger and blowback. I think anyone *unwilling* to make that level of trade-off to get what they want would never have reached national-level political office at all.
I'm not sure why you think Dems would want to eliminate the pardon? They use it a lot too.
I like Pardon power. Most of the Pardon outrage stories were about process crimes, along with a few white collar fraud cases. Tolerating a bit more white collar fraud in order to protect the norm that the incoming administration doesn't throw the outgoing one in prison seems worth it.
Generally speaking the administration doesn't tend to have that power, the judicial does, of course pressure can happen, but if Trump managed to escape jail for four years and become president a second time i don't see a particular administration ever successfully pressuring the courts to condemn the previous administration. As it stands the executive seem to have too much freedom in bending the law, at least internally.
>Generally speaking the administration doesn't tend to have that power, the judicial does
The Executive branch decides to file charges. Courts can throw them out later but as they say, the process is the punishment.
Not to get CW, but Democratic presidents have been happy to make controversial pardons of their own i.e. Hunter Biden, Marc Rich. Executive power has been growing across every administration in the past 50 odd years
Pardons do have some potential for abuse, but the worst abuses of the Trump admin haven't relied on them. I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze. If you have control of all three branches, there's a lot of legal ways Congress could clamp down on the President's power without needing to amend the Constitution.
(I've seen a few interesting concepts for overhauling the President's constitutional powers, but I don't remember enough details to say if they'd be worth forcing through.)
Depending on your opinion of January 6, you could make a case that Trump has abused his pardon authority on a very large scale.
I think you're operating under a massively flawed set of assumptions about what Democrats want.
>I think I'm asking what they *should* want, what they should prioritize.
With what purpose? Pardon power allows democrats to pardon some people they want, in exchange republicans pardon some people they want. Both parties win. Why would they deprieve themselves of this?
One might want to do this for justice and to have a more accountable system and what not, but that's just not in the interest of either party.
Neither side (or most of the public) has any interest whatsoever in curbing presidential power. That's not just a thing that most people think should happen. Everyone loves to complain with how their political opponents use that power, but they don't hate it enough to give it up when they have it.
-edit- and furthermore, any party that _was_ willing to curb presidential power when they controlled the federal government almost certainly wouldn't need to blackmail the out-of-power party into going along with it, because despite liking the power when they have it, both parties are nothing but short-term thinking, and seeing your opponent, who is in power and you can't do anything about it, give up that power is exactly the kind of short term win that both sides would take.
Short term thinking both makes such a deal unthinkable and also, if it came about, would make your "deal" scenario unnecessary.
I don't think modern Democrats or Republicans share anything more than a name with the parties of 1945.
I'm terribly sorry, I'm confused. I don't know what you wrote and what I'm reading is a mishmash of various CW points that...do not intersect in a way I find comprehensible.
This would be like Republicans delivering an ultimatum that the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF unless the Democrats join with Republicans to overturn the Commerce Clause.
Like...what are you trying to get at? Did I miss something? Why do we care about pardon powers? Why are we deporting white people to Uganda?
"the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia"
While I would certainly vote for a party running on that platform, mature recollection makes me reconsider: what have the Mongolians done to us, that we should inflict such destruction on them?
> Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF
Ah, I think I see the source of confusion: you're probably thinking of the the modern country of Mongolia – which of course would make no sense – instead of INNER Mongolia, the Chinese province.
"Should they" in what sense? In the sense of "what's the right thing to do" or the sense of "what would further their agenda the best"?
In the sense of the right thing to do: yes, Democrats should eliminate the Presidential pardon. And so should the Republicans. Neither party actually will though, since it's not in either party's interest -- politicians care much more about getting themselves and their buddies pardoned than they care about ensuring that the other party's buddies don't get pardoned.
In the sense of the right thing to do, should they go after illegal guns? Yes, of course they should, they're illegal. But I think you'll find that it's not the rural white gun owners who are most likely to have illegal guns. I remember Trump suggesting a "stop and frisk" policy to find illegal guns, and the Democrats didn't like that.
Ah right. Perhaps your question would have been clearer if instead of making it about the Democrats you made it about a hypothetical "Good Governance" party.
In this hypothetical, I would say that the hypothetical Good Governance party should seek to lead by example rather than strong-arming whatever remains of the old parties into supporting constitutional reforms.
Is eliminating the presidential pardon supposed to be the high road and going for the guns supposed to be the tit-for-tat option?
Why would Republicans be opposed to eliminating the presidential pardon during a Democrat term?
Have any Republicans strongly committed to opposing presidential pardons? Is there evidence that members of the party hold that view? My quick Google search shows no solid stance.
I can't speak for all Republicans but having the pardon handled consistently is more important than whether it's legal or not. Like, as long as Paul Manafort AND Hunter Biden both go to jail or both get pardoned, that's the key thing.
But, like, you assume Republicans want X (authoritarian power), if they want X therefore they must care deeply about Y (unrestricted presidential pardons) but is there actually evidence that we really want Y?
Can the top-down R party leadership credibly accept that bargain? Even if the factional split between "go to hell liberal scum", "nothing that could hurt Dear Leader retroactively", and "guns and low taxes" could be resolved, I flatly don't think that a selection of their top-level leadership chosen to hear this could be small enough to keep it secret and big enough to keep the legislatures of the necessary states in line.
The reasonable move if this ultimatum is issued is to either a) play for time until the D majority passes or b) leak the offer to make political hay until the D majority passes, and then after that break the institutions further and try to inflict existential damage. This is scary territory.
I think for the Democrats to make clear to the meanest intelligence that everything the Republicans have been saying about them for decades was entirely true would be a mistake.
Some still believe in the Don't Do Egregiously Unpopular Stuff view of politics.
You have, but that's possibly my fault: no, I think politics is now war to the knife (and I don't know if it was ever otherwise), but I don't consider the Democrats have in fact been taking this high road you think they have been. The reason I wouldn't issue this ultimatum you propose if I were on their side is that I think it would redound to the Republicans' benefit.
> I generally support the unbiased pursuit of truth
You and Diogenes..
> I don’t think “war to the knife” is a good idea.
Neither do I. Nor do any who live to see such times. But that is not for us to decide.
That is a complete no-brainer for Republicans. Guns are a major issue for their base. And I can't fathom why Democrats would make that specific offer.
"To mend the executive branch so that it can't operate without fear of retribution?"
My snarky rejoinder to that is, if they want to remove fear of retribution, they shouldn't have engaged in all the lawfare against Trump. If your rationale for pardoning your screw-up son with a blanket pardon is "he might be dragged into court at some undefined time in the future in a tit-for-tat revenge ploy by the GOP", then perhaps your party and their affiliates shouldn't have tried digging out any and every stupid casus belli (e.g. the NY fraud thing about the mortgage).
I think very few people believe this is/was an unprejudiced application of pure justice and not more about career-building opportunities (Ms. James seems to have made a publicity campaign out of 'we're going after the big fish' not limited to Trump) and partisan axe-grinding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_business_fraud_lawsuit_against_the_Trump_Organization
"New York v. Trump is a civil investigation and lawsuit by the office of the New York Attorney General alleging that individuals and business entities within the Trump Organization engaged in financial fraud by presenting vastly disparate property values to potential lenders and tax officials, in violation of New York Executive Law § 63(12)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in_New_York
"The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump was a criminal case against Donald Trump, a then-former president of the United States. Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments made to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels as hush money to buy her silence over a sexual encounter between them; with costs related to the transaction included, the payments totaled $420,000. The Manhattan District Attorney (DA), Alvin Bragg, accused Trump of falsifying these business records with the intent to commit other crimes."
In the first case an appeals court has already upheld the conviction but thrown out the penalty as being excessive. The second case smells worse. He did in fact violate campaign finance rules by doing what he did but still...
I think you have a hard time making a case that the Mara Largo papers case was lawfare, given how hard the government tried to get him to return the papers before finally pulling the trigger on that. The case in Georgia was also quite sound and was only brought to the ground by discrediting Fanny Willis completely.
There is also a pretty good record of Trump and his inner circle trying to find ways to subvert the 2020 election. To my mind the lawfare here was Trump running the clock out until he got re-elected and became immune.
It’s all a dead cat down the river, but it prickles me to see this term Lawfare slowly settling into fact just because it’s repeated so often.
The Georgia case tickles me because Willis set herself up for all the pie-in-the-face consequences. Chase a big political case for kudos (and presumably to boost re-election chances https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2024/11/06/fani-willis-fulton-district-attorney-election-result), put your honey-bunny in charge because what good is being in power if you can't throw some largesse to your boo?, allegedly spend taxpayer money on the pursuit of love, and then it all comes out because your pookie-bear is trying to hide marital assets from his missus in a bitter divorce.
I mean, whatever the merits of the original case, this kind of behaviour on the part of the prosecutor is going to taint *everything*.
With respect, there is a lot of misinformation in this post. I paid a lot of attention to this case and it was really distorted how it was reported and understood. Tell me how many lawyers hire other lawyers to work on a case that they don’t know.? their relationship had zero effect on the case itself. It’s not like they were working for different sides and sleeping together at the same time. There was never a question of taxpayer being involved, but it was a good rumour to float. Those guys in Florida got away with murder. That’s Lawfare for you.
If loss of the pardon meant also no vindictive score-settling lawsuits afterwards as well, then it might be worth doing.
But can you guarantee no vindictive score-settling?
But, those are not Democratic priorities, especially given that most examples of executive overreach or actions underlying democracy are not criminal. Hence, eliminating the pardon wouldn't do much to address the issue. In contrast, gun control very much is Democratic priority, and has been for years. Why give it up for so little?
1. Again, most "breaking the rules" are not criminal acts. Eg, bringing dubious criminal charges against political opponents.
2. The question is not what I would want. The question is, how would this trade-off further Democratic Party goals?