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I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to these things, but this is not off-weekend.
It’s the alternate weekend- the weekend that didn’t get an open thread with its own name.
I was not aware of that either.
By the way, nice to meet you, Toby! I know who Professor John Baez is even though I have never met him. 🙂 I love ncatlab but do not have any account there.
I’m a comathematician so my job is to transform cotheorems into ffee! 🙂 Young algebraist here with 2 papers on arXiv. I mostly work on associative algebras.
What are the best psychology of personality systems to describe formative experiences? I view most personality systems as trying to describe nature and am interested in reading a little about those which try to describe nurture.
Failing systems, generalized individual descriptions would be nice (ie. descriptions which claim to describe a general type of formative experience patterns without attempting to make a universal type system which describes all formative experiences – the equivalent of Myers-Briggs versus an isolated ISFP description).
Rationalist/Skeptic/Rat-adjacent books
Here are the nice books I have.
Paranormality by Richard Wiseman
Believing Bullshit by Stephen Law
Shall the religious inherit the earth? by Eric Kaufmann
Fellow SSC posters, please recommend more nice books.
HFAR –
I’m not clear if you’re looking for rationalist/logical thinking books, or anti religion/faith books.
I’m just looking for rationality books, not anti-religion books. I don’t think it is rational to absolutely reject the possibility of theism. On the other hand I don’t think it is rational to accept faith as a way of knowing things at least based on current evidence. I think the question of faith is tentatively closed with the conclusion that it is unreliable and unreasonable though new evidence can reopen this question.
Wow, just the titles of the last two make me cringe so hard.
The second one is in fact one of the best books I have read. It covers eight intellectual black holes. Intellectual black holes are generally anti-epistemologies.
The last one is also a nice book. It’s basically about how fundamentalists breed like rabbits and can reverse secularization simply through breeding.
*facepalm*
Okay, putting down a placeholder on this, and will try to remember to bring it up on a non-NCW thread.
So, English is not my first language, but isn’t talking about people “Breeding” very offensive to them? Wouldn’t “having children” be a bit less aggressive?
Yes. In the old days before the gay movement became domesticated straight people were often derisively referred to as breeders.
I take it you are not familiar with the internet atheist crowd. Being less aggressive is hardly a priority for them.
@maniexx Sorry. No offense. That’s unrelated to religion though.
I strongly hate human sexuality and bashing sexuality is my second nature. When someone has a lot of sex or kids I tend to start bashing. Sometimes the bashing is not even intentional.
In fact I bash seducers and seduction-dominant cultures much more often than non-celibate fundamentalists for sexuality related reasons.
Do you similarly hate other human desires–for tasty food, excitement, life? More generally, is there a theory behind your hatred or are you merely describing your own possibly irrational emotions?
@HFARationalist
This is fine, we’re all entitled to our inherent biases, though should try to control these biases and use them properly for a saner world. You must realize that it is those who see others as belonging to groups, and identify with groups themselves, that launch pogroms and wars. And that at an individual level these are probably morally worse than a couple of extra kids and definitely worse than child-free sex.
Those who are biased to not seeing people as groups at worst have personal vendettas or random fights (e.g. Henry Rollins as a teenager/young adult).
You have stated that you’re morally against seeing people as groups instead of collections of individuals, so at least recognize that this is wrong behavior, but also see traits people hold as belonging to groups and thus the people with these traits morally tainted by the group-trait. It’s up to you to thread this needle. If you’d like more insight into this I’d recommend reading a little on the instinctual variants (search the term) and then identifying your personal instinctual dominance order.
@David Friedman Other human desires are mostly good. Sexuality on the other hand, is very odd. It has a uniquely altruistic and collectivistic component that is incompatible with my absolute individualistic ideology.
My basic ideology is: We should not harm each other, care about each other, rely on each other or impose conformity on each other. The world should be composed of intelligent, rational, self-interested individuals who never harm others and sometimes cooperate to maximize their own interests. The basic relation between two humans should be lack of harm, mutual respect of independence and either indifference or cooperation. There should be neither love nor hatred among humans. There should be no group identities. Everyone should care about themselves.
@HFARationalist
My basic ideology is limited to myself, with far fewer constraints on the actions of other people. Whereas you generalize yours to other humans.
To the extent I hold others to a superior standard than the “far fewer constraints” standard, it’s limited to those I have a relationship with or are in immediate proximity to. And even this standard is less than my personal one (usually, I am at times guilty of hypocrisy, and can be very judgmental when I feel wronged).
This all goes to the biases of personality. My biases are not superior to yours, or inferior, though I may explicitly know more about my biases than you do about yours (I don’t know this for a fact though).
Seeking to control others is almost always a less than psychologically healthy thing.
This is what most of those who do care about interpersonal relationships/group identifying are in fact doing. They’re caring about their own preferences and perceived needs for a ‘larger’ identity through their relationships or associations with other people and ideologies. Without these relationships or associations they’d feel bereft, or at least feel a profound lack. Just as some people who lack a personal space to make their own feel bereft.
I’m currently watching Star Trek Voyager, season 6, episode 2, which speaks to this need in an infantile manner.
Your personal ideology sounds like an inverse Borg ideology, which is as incomplete to my needs as the Borg is to a genuine collectivist. We are not a monolith! ;D
I’m just a lurker, so take my opinion for it’s worth . . . but I’m really wondering when people are going to stop responding so much to HFA. I’m unsure whether it is more or less charitable to accept that he actually is the person he purports to be rather than a troll (and you know what they say about feeding trolls), but it’s gotten to the point where I’m routinely sad because an interesting conversation which I wanted to read got hijacked by HFA going off on some pet rant or other.
The world has many strange people with crazy ideas which they think are obviously true. I just wish people would humor our current-resident nutcase with less of their attention (at least in other threads; I get he started this one, and I’m only saying this here because other people are making similar comments on this chain and because I think the statements here are even more crank-ish than typical for HFA).
@Alphonse
I believe I’ve actually learned things pertinent to his statements which may cause him (or others of his ilk) to reconsider the absoluteness of his statements.
I also think I somewhat fear absolutist statements such as his – they make the world a less livable place for me.
As an individual you value things, have objectives, act to achieve them. Do you have some theory of what you should value? If not, why is valuing other people irrational? If you value someone, that person’s welfare and happiness are values to you, which you seem to condemn as altruism.
Further, the fact that people value others is useful for achieving other objectives. I know my wife loves me and she knows I love her, which simplifies coordination in the various joint projects associated with a joint household. Similarly for my children. They are both a value in themselves and a means for making my life go better than it otherwise would.
This isn’t, of course, all a matter of sexuality, but that is one part of human psychology that can be used to create useful mutual ties.
@Alphonse +1. HFA isn’t hostile like some of the previous folks we’ve had hijacking threads, so I don’t feel good about ad hominem attacks. But I too have been disappointed when the paths of some promising threads moved off track because of some comment by HFA. I usually kind of like the tendency of SSC conversations to segue off into new directions, but I’m just not interested in talking about the autist reaction to every point of view in the universe.
” The world should be composed of intelligent, rational, self-interested individuals who never harm others and sometimes cooperate to maximize their own interests. The basic relation between two humans should be lack of harm, mutual respect of independence and either indifference or cooperation. There should be neither love nor hatred among humans. There should be no group identities. Everyone should care about themselves.”
Why do you care so much about other people, then, as to want to dictate every detail of their lives?
@HFARationalist
Sex doesn’t necessarily have an altruistic component. Like all trades it can happen when both parties feel it is in their own self interest (Ask Ayn Rand. Her characters have a lot of sex).
Can I ask, have you tried sex? If not, I’m not sure you should knock it until you try it. If so, what made it so horrible?
I know these are some personal questions so feel free not to answer.
@Alphonse I’m sorry to see that you do not like my posts. My antisexualism may be one of my most controversial ideologies.
I agree to not derail threads because I truly like this community.
@anonymousskimmer I usually have this tendency to be as extreme as possible on any view point unless I explicitly try to be moderate.
@David Friedman I see. For me this can never happen. I know very well that the divorce stats in America can not guarantee that if I ever have a wife I can keep her. Children are independent entities who are forced into families without their own consent and don’t have to like their parents at all. I don’t like my family anyway.
Valuing other people too much instead of being benevolently neutral is in fact infringing on others’ rights. You may believe that something is good for person A and try to impose it on them. However it may be awful for A. That’s that sort of thing that leads to families and tribes and all their related restrictions on individual freedom.
@Mark V Anderson I’m sorry that you feel like that. In general I will restrict my replies to what’s on topic. I can not guarantee that shocking but on topic responses won’t appear though. If I want to start something new I will start a thread.
@Mary Because I don’t want to be bothered by others when I don’t want to connect with people. I’m an independent entity, not a part of some collective.
@blah I’m a virgin. Sexuality is simply meaningless to me because I fail to see how sex with a human is inherently better than masturbation. However if I want to try it one day I will do it legally in a brothel in Nevada. I’m not sexually frustrated because I’m just a flight away from sex.
However what I truly hate is not sex itself but its evolutionary implication. Sex is the main method to reproduce. In fact the purpose of sex is reproduction. I hate kids because I don’t want to change their diapers full of shit. Kids also let me think about families and I hate families as authoritarian institutions imposed on people.
Yeah I agree that sex can be self-interested, such as legal prostitution. However it is certainly not in my self-interest right now. I can get sex in Nevada including girlfriend experience with legal prostitutes. I can even get a wife from abroad if I really want to even though I probably can’t get a date here. However why do I want to deal with in-laws I can’t disconnect with? A wife who may divorce me at any time, cheat on me, impose her views on me which is a form of PC or disrupt my reasoning? We will also have sexbots. Maybe I will buy one to see what a girlfriend and a wife is about lol. For me a human spouse can be fully replaced by a robot that fully imitates them. In fact a robot wife will be even better than a human one for she will tolerate my frequent rants about humanity and help me do STEM.
“Because I don’t want to be bothered by others when I don’t want to connect with people. I’m an independent entity, not a part of some collective.”
How does this give you the right to care about them so much as to dictate their lives? That’s bothering THEM with a vengeance.
@Mary Because I wish that my benevolent neutrality can be established? Let those who voluntarily want to have relationships that infringe on individualism have it as long as they want to have it. However they should never be imposed on those who don’t explicitly agree to them, such as some autists.
The main consequence of my idea is that people can no longer impose families on children.
@HFARationalist
I can’t speak for what your experience would be like, but I can tell you that in my subjective experience, sex with another person is much much more enjoyable than masturbation. Even a hand job is much better than masturbation, even though they might seem to be close substitutes. There’s just something about someone else being there with you rather than on a screen or your imagination or whatever. That’s my experience at least. Yours might differ.
I think this is a pretty good attitude to have. But why not take the trip and try it out? You may like it more than you expect, and the experience might help you empathize with people who have more traditional outlooks on sexuality and relationships.
I totally agree with you that there are many risks associated with sex. Sex and relationships can have plenty of negative consequences. I think most sexually active people would agree with this as well. It’s just that we find sex and relationships so rewarding, that it’s still in our interest to participate even though we are aware of the risks.
There are very few guarantees in life. That’s not a reason to never do anything.
I liked my parents, like my children, and my children like me. You appear to be projecting from your experience onto other people very different from you.
It is the imposition that would violate rights, not the valuing. If you value your own life, you might steal from others to get the money to promote it. Is that an argument against valuing your life?
@HFARationalist
The way you emphasize it it doesn’t sound like benevolent neutrality, it sounds like everyone leaving each other alone, even to the extent of abandoning our fellows.
Given that individuals have different degrees of neediness or dependence on others, or the fruit of other’s labor, to what extent does your philosophy acknowledge that people should act in concert with others when they would rather not, with the expectation that others will act in concert with them when those others would rather not? For we can’t expect a viable civilization if these dispreferred-by-one-party interactions do not occur at all.
Don’t you think that even Nevada prostitutes may feel compelled by circumstances to do their jobs, but often would prefer not to?
I second the facepalm.
Leaving CW topics aside, do these books offer anything that, say, The God Delusion didn’t?
I have The God Delusion. It is an awful book. It is not very intellectually appealing at all.
There is no inherent problem with theism. However there are indeed inherent problems in the idea of faith and using it to understand reality.
The second book isn’t about bashing religion. The third book is actually a bit H.BDish.
I guess this would be a good start: http://rationality.org/resources/reading-list
Though when it comes to the directly “rational” books I tend to find that once you’ve read one or two you’ve read them all; I must have read about Asch or the Bystander effect about 20 different times books of this ilk.
Relatedly –
Looking for a good, thick-but-readable history of mathmatics book. Looking for the more complex end of pop writing, not for a PhD reference that assumes I already understand string theory.
Likewise, looking for the same in astronomy and geology – both the current state of what we know, but also how we came to know this, and what we used to think we knew but have since decided that that ain’t so.
While it’s not all of astronomy, I enjoyed Astronomy before the Telescope (Christopher Walker, ed.)
God Created the Integers, ed. Stephen Hawking
It’s selections from famous mathematicians throughout history, starting with Euclid and working up to Godel/Turing.
It’s not exactly history of mathematics, but I remember enjoying The World of Mathematics, which is a bunch of essays on a variety of mathematical topics.
A Brief History of Mathematical Thought by Luke Heaton
Journey Through Genius by William Dunham.
I can’t really recommend it as I’ve yet to read it, but I thought the book might be worth mentioning even so. Michael Hoskin’s book The History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction may (…combined with a few other works in the same series, e.g. astrophysics, stars, …?), be worth considering in the astronomy context if no better suggestions are mentioned here. I’ve read 8 books in the physics series this year and I think most of them would fit ‘the more complex end of pop writing’-requirement – it varies a bit. Most of the books in the physics series I’ve read, none of which had the word ‘history’ in the title, have had some coverage of the history of how we got to know what we do today and how we got from A to B, so to say.
In the geology context I (also) don’t really know of a good history of the field (I’d want to read that book myself as well), but I did read Earth by Press and Siever some years ago and I remember liking that book. It’s not really what you’re asking for as it’s an intro geology text rather than a history of geology text, but the book ‘is written for beginning students who have had no previous college science courses and who may not necessarily intend to specialize in geology’ so the level is definitely not too high for someone without a background in geology to understand the coverage (…I should know). If you want a pretty solid yet readable introduction to the field of geology, you could do a lot worse than this one – it’s a very decent text, from what I recall.
Taming the infinite, the story of mathematics by Ian Stewart might be worth considering in the math context, but I didn’t actually think very highly of that book – that may however have more to do with my personal reading preferences than the objective merits of said work.
Strongly recommend Fermat’s Last Theorem and Big Bang both by Simon Singh. Extremely enjoyable without the relentless wisecracking of so many such books. Not sure it is at the complex end – you don’t need any maths to follow it but it isn’t trivial I don’t think.
this may not be as deep as you’d like, and more of a survey than a comprehensive history, but “here’s looking at euclid” by alex bellos (“alex’s adventures in numberland” in the UK) is one of my favorite math books. it spent a few months on the NYT bestseller list too.
I’d like to live on a tiny Greek Island with Euclid.
We could discuss all the crazy, wacky things that hypotenuse did.
And at night we’d stare far out into the deep Aegean Sea.
With all the points along ourselves we’d lie so evenly.
And no boundaries would cross the line
Extending between me and Euclid.
Yes, I’d like to live on a tiny Greek island with Euclid.
I could tell him he’s smart, and he could pretend I’m not stupid.
Predating Archimedes on the sand until the morn
That’s the life I’ve wanted since the day that I was born.
Geometry out in the sea, just off the Golden Horn with Euclid.
Oh, Euclid is a genius ’cause of all the stuff he knows.
And when I read his propositions I was ready to propose.
And I wanna put his figure in the space which I enclose.
Oh, Euclid.
Well I’d like to live on a tiny Greek island with Euclid,
Where the air is sweet, and ever so pleasantly humid.
Well his method is a science but it feels more like an art.
He’s better Thoreau, Rousseau, Bob Dylan or Descartes;
And I’ll follow him until that point at which I have no part of Euclid.
Sad that they ruined a brilliant title (because they didn’t think we’d get it?).
Trying again: Can anyone point me to some (serious) writing on general theories of tribalism? In other words, the idea that the number of traits/preferences that cause/predict our tribal affiliations is substantially higher than we might expect, and tends to produce/contribute massively to the cumulative effect of polarization?
@Well. I’m not responding to answer your question, because I don’t know the answer. But be careful with your term tribalism. The most common use of that term in the real world is the historic meaning of several clans living together, and usually maintaining some links of loyalty because of ethnic or historic roots to this group. Thus, Indian tribes, African tribes, and also some tribal behavior of insular communities in Europe and Asia. I think if you look on the Internet for information on tribalism, I think this what you will mostly find.
But I suspect you intend the meaning that is often used in SSC of self-identified ideological groupings — that is the blue tribe and the red tribe, and sometimes other tribes like gray or blue or black. Am I wrong as to your meaning, Well? This sense of tribalism is derived from the older meaning, but is more of a voluntary process, and affects the developed world much more than the older, more common meaning.
So if you want to find books or essays on theories of such tribalism, I think you’ll need to search using another word. Maybe “shared ideologies” or something.
@Well –
I think you’re looking for work by Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind and other works. You can find most of the associated links at https://heterodoxacademy.org/
It’s a good book as long as it sticks to psychology, which is his specialty and the bulk of what he writes about.
I have a theory about group self-congratulation.
Life is hard. One way to make life more tolerable is to believe that one is made of good stuff, and when I say good stuff, I mean better stuff than most other people.
This belief is easier to sustain if you have a bunch of people agreeing with each other, so there’s group self-congratulation as well as individual self-congratulation.
As far as I can tell, group self-congratulation is generally about exaggerating the importance of good traits the group actually has, and denigrating the importance of good traits the group lacks. For example, Americans don’t congratulate ourselves on having a great poetic tradition because we haven’t got one. We do think we’re good at creating popular culture.
Yes, the mind has a fundamentally skewed perception of reality owing to the effects of its various latent biases. In particular, it is designed to have a glorified self-image. The bias you reflect on is one of those which pertain to this matter. This is a matter of individual behavior, but as you note, it seemingly applies to group behavior as well.
This is probably just a tangential phenomenon arising from each individual member of the group associating their individual identities with that of the group. The add all of their individual characteristics together, average them out, then see how they compare to other groups. Characteristics which seem salient become markers of group identity and, wanting to glorify themselves by association with the group, they go about praising those characteristics and deriding others, both to exercise their biases and to reinforce them.
A book I have on my ereader but haven’t read yet – We Are Many, We Are One: Neo-Tribes and Tribal Anaytics in 21st Century America by J0hn Zogby.
Anyone read this and have thoughts?
Haven’t read this but maybe it’s what you are looking for: “Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind”
Lemme try rephrasing:
It seems to me that all kinds of random things are tribal identity markers (yes, Mark, in the commonly-used SSC sense of “tribe”). Way more things than one might expect.
Curious to know if anyone with relevant credentials has noticed the same thing and written about it.
Has anyone read the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant? I was reading about the writing of them and it sounded damn interesting. Especially this bit:
Even more impressive considering he was also battling cancer that whole time.
I own two copies as a result of two Christmas visits from Santa Claus and have read it. It is very good although dry, which may not be to all tastes. Also very focused on the Mexican War and the Civil War. There are maybe 200 chapters (rough estimate without checking) of which about 3 have anything to say on any subject other than those two wars.
I’ve just started into the Mexican War and man, he is a very good writer. Succinct but evocative, I can see the influence on Hemingway.
I have a question about labor rules in Europe, particularly in France vs Germany. Since the readership is only 2/3’s US, I think most of the rest is European, so I hope I can get some answers.
The stereotype on labor regulations (at least in the US) is that France is is highly restricted, but Germany is relatively free, for Europe at least. This is pretty much what I have thought. But I was talking to a French employee of the US multi-national that I work at, and he tells me this is incorrect. I have heard about the requirement of the 39 hour work week, and maybe even reduced to 35 hours. And most recently, I’ve heard of the rule that companies are supposed to turn off the work e-mails of employees on the weekend and when they are on vacation.
But the French employee I talked to said these are all voluntary. He said some companies have agreed to do this, but others have not. He started talking about unions at this point, but I didn’t follow that part. Maybe the companies that do this make such agreements with their unions?
This Frenchman also said that Germany is much more restrictive. He said that unions work much more closely with companies in Germany, and so have more restrictions. He said that the French like to argue. He didn’t say but he implied that Germans do what they are told. So maybe we hear about French issues more because they have more strikes, because French are combative. Whereas the Germans don’t strike, but the companies just give in to restrictive union rules, so we never hear about them.
This does turn around things in my head, because I always bought the idea that the French were very much in favor of rules such as length of workday, minimum wages, layoff rules, etc. I believe that such government rules are terrible things and hurt those they are meant to help, and weaken the economy. It has been my belief that this is one reason for the French economy being weaker than the German one. But if my presumptions on the relative level of rules are backwards, then the results of the economy are wrong too. (I definitely have not changed my mind that these rules are bad, just not the reason for the relative strength of each country).
So please let me know more about various labor rules in each country, and how they are enforced. (Maybe some of them are somewhat voluntary?)
I’m not an expert on the topic. That said I believe I can say some things about the current state of affairs in France and Germany.
For one President Macron of France is currently trying to change labor laws in France to make them more flexible (i.e. easier to fire people). Recent news articles covering that subject usually explain that it’s really, really hard to fire someone in France as it stands. Also their unions are said to be really powerful, which is why they’re part of the negotiation process.
A 40 hour week is standard in Germany and likely law (I didn’t check), there is a minimum-wage on the federal level (8.50€ ~ $10 I believe) and strikes big enough to make national news happen a couple of times a year. All of that might be even more pronounced in France, I wouldn’t know.
People say Germany’s making money of Greece (there’s a famous deal where Greece was lent money, part of which they then had to spent buying German submarines they didn’t need) and by running an export surplus that’s detrimental to the other EU states. I’m not sure how much of these are unsubstantiated talking points of people unhappy with capitalism and how much of them is actually true.
The value of the euro is obviously a weighted average of the EU countries that have the euro, which is logically then too low for the strong economies and too high for the weaker economies. The result is that countries like Germany run a trade surplus and countries like Greece a deficit.
Theoretically, if the labor market was functioning rationally, fairly and perfectly, this would result in rising wages in the strong economies and stagnant or declining wages in the weaker economies, making the strong economies less competitive and the weaker economies more so. In reality, the wages aren’t responsive enough.
The increased debt for the weaker economies that results from the trade deficit eventually causes creditors to hike up their interest rates (although they can do so too late, especially when they (correctly) assume that the other EU countries will prevent a bankruptcy, see Greece), which then forces the countries with a trade deficit to act. Because the countries with the trade surplus still have debt, they don’t really get penalized for running a surplus, as the low interest rates are to their benefit.
One proposal is to introduce eurobonds, where an investor loans to the eurozone bloc altogether, which then forwards the money to individual governments. The result would then be that the same averaging that sets the value of the euro, sets the value of the interest rates, which is then too high for strong economies and too low for weaker economies. That is effectively a subsidy by the strong economies to the weaker economies, allowing the weaker economies to run up their debt due to the trade deficit for a longer time and giving the strong economies a small (and insufficient IMO) incentive to curb their trade surplus.
My opinion is that this solves nothing, but just allows countries to put off solving the problems until it becomes immense. My perception is that the weaker economies know this and want major crisis that is so big that transitioning to a large scale, permanent transfer union, like the US, becomes the only remaining remedy.
My perception is that there is insufficient EU-nationalist sentiment and/or shared culture for people in the strong economies to be willing to to do this. The Greece situation is good evidence of this, as the EU leadership made the supremely stupid decision to transfer the Greek debt from private institutions to the EU, without making the private institutions eat a substantial loss. The result is that the Greek debt cannot be paid back, which any sensible person knows, but simultaneously the strong economies are not willing to eat a loss on the debt. So you have this continuous ‘extend and pretend’ situation. If the strong economies were willing to eat that loss, it would be (weak) evidence that they might be willing to support permanent transfers to weak states.
Personally I hope that when the eurozone (and perhaps the EU with it) breaks up, it won’t hurt too many people.
Is there any equivalent situation in the US, which has one currency for a huge area?
@JulieK
Of course. The various states are quite different and there are huge wealth transfers to help fix the trade deficits within the US. For example, from 1990 to 2009, the federal government spent $1.44 trillion in Virginia but collected less than $850 billion in taxes, a gap of over $590 billion. Delaware paid $211 billion in taxes, but got only $86 billion worth of federal spending, so most of their federal taxes went to other states. New Mexico got almost 3 times as much in federal spending as they paid in federal taxes.
Here is the list with the detailed numbers for each state/territory.
PS. In principle you can do the same analysis at any granularity, up to the individual, but at that level no one sees having a differently valued currency per person as a solution*.
* Although a decent number of people favor currencies for fairly small communities, although the motivation for these seems to be mainly protectionism, not to provide a better match of productivity to the value of the currency.
The US has far more prominent single lingua franca that everybody speaks at native level. For individual US citizen, moving from one state to another is less an obstacle than moving from a country to another for an EU citizen.
(Yes, young people and “well-paid professionals” such as engineers today speak English relatively well, but daily workplace communication is a hassle when everyone is speaking good-to-mediocre English, and that’s only your workplace: the rest of the country is going to keep talking in the local language. If you wish to immigrate permanently, there’s no escaping learning the local language, otherwise you will remain outsider. Or possibly you want to remain an outsider, because you are still anticipating moving back to your home country.)
That’s putting it backwards.
Consider, as a first approximation, a stable equilibrium where the amount of money in each state is staying the same. If the government spends a million dollars more than it collects in that state, the inhabitants must be spending a million dollars more in other states than inhabitants of other states spend in theirs in order to maintain the equilibrium.
Next, consider the specie flow mechanism applied to a fiat currency, which is how the equilibrium is maintained. If, on net, money flows out of a state, prices in that state will fall, which makes goods in that state more attractive to people elsewhere, goods elsewhere less attractive to people in that state, which stops the flow.
I cannot tell what sort of economic theory you have in your head. In your version, if Virginia, state plus inhabitants, spends more than it takes in and the federal government does nothing, what happens? What determines how much is spent in each direction?
@nimim. That is very interesting. I think you are saying that the biggest impediment to workplace flexibility in Europe (compared to the US) is all the different languages in Europe? I can see how that would be a big issue, even with all educated people knowing English (as a second language).
It is true that I would have no language problems in moving from one side of the US to the other. There are some cultural issues in different sections of the country, which do cause workplace distress, but this is a much smaller issue than having different languages.
@Aapje. Some US states pay a lot more to the Federal government in taxes than they get back in benefits, but it doesn’t have anything to do with deficits of each state, even in principle. The classic example causing differences is that some states have large military bases, so they get more money back to pay for that. The reason Virginia is so unbalanced is because it is adjacent to the Federal capital of Washington, DC, so there are lots of agencies based in Virginia. The other state adjacent to DC is Maryland, which is similarly unbalanced.
Although I do notice that the two biggest losers in the US, Mississippi and West Virginia, are also unbalanced in getting more benefits than paying in of taxes. So maybe there is some implicit deficit reduction, as these states pay less in taxes but get more back in welfare benefits. But I don’t think that is the major player in the differences.
@nimim
I agree that different languages are an important reason why labor mobility is much lower in Europe. However, I also think that cultural differences are larger as well (although IMO these are causally related, as language differences cause cultural bubbles as people then don’t consume the same media).
For example, I worked with two Belgians who both said that they could not go back and work in Belgium because they could not deal with the hierarchical labor culture. For reference, these were both Flemish people, so there was no real language barrier and traveling from where they worked to pretty much anywhere in Flanders is at most a 3 hour drive.
My perception is that most Americans (and the European elite) suffer from a severe case of out/fargroup homogeneity bias when it comes to European culture(s). It seems to me that American workplace differences are smaller, although I may suffer from out/fargroup homogeneity bias here as well, of course.
PS. My experience is that it’s hard for foreigners who speak decent English to learn Dutch as the Dutch tend to relish the opportunity to practice their English, so it’s very easy for migrants to get stuck in a local optimum (learning Dutch would require being temporarily less able to communicate by speaking poor Dutch, which would then improve through practice).
@DavidFriedman
It’s obvious that incomes, housing prices, etc are far lower in some states than other states, which is why I said “to help fix the trade deficits” which implies that other mechanisms also play a major role. I chose this phrasing on purpose.
The mechanism you offer up is also merely one other mechanism. It’s pretty common for highly capable people to migrate to more productive countries and then send money to their relatives in their home country. These transfers can be very large. I suspect that the net effect of these transfers between US states also a wealth transfer to low-productive states, although I have no data to verify this and/or estimate/determine the size of the effect with any accuracy.
Another potential mechanism is that people can work in a highly productive state, accumulate wealth and then migrate to a low productive state to enjoy their pension. Florida may benefit a lot from this.
@Mark V Anderson
The decision of the government to spend in a state are not purely economically rational, but ‘pork’ plays a big role. This is advantageous to low-productivity states.
Anyway, you may not consider these transfers significant in how much of the trade deficit they solve, but that is not my concern. I object to subsidizing bad choices by the Greeks, Italians, French, etc (rather than temporarily subsidizing certain things to help boost their economy). I see this as a Schelling fence. Once the taboo is broken, you may get a similar or plausibly quite worse equilibrium as in the US, where certain states pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.
Would you be OK with being in a Pan American union where most of the union taxes went to Mexico and the South-American countries? I don’t see anyone in America campaigning for substantial wealth transfers these countries, so apparently the American ingroup solidarity* tends to stop at the Texan border. For large numbers of Europeans, including me, their ingroup solidarity stops at their own border and does not extend to the EU.
* Of course, people usually also have outgroup solidarity and be willing to give aid to disadvantaged in the outgroup, but then the preference is usually to give to the worst off in their outgroup, not the French, Greeks, Mexicans or Chileans.
Define “strong economy” and “weak economy.”
@Aapje
Yes this is exactly how things should work. It is because this process doesn’t work well that everyone blames the Euro for Greek’s problems. And then they try complicated solutions, like the eurobonds, which are only band aids and would probably make the the disparities worse in the long run. By far the best solution would be to make wages flexible as you state above. Is there a way to make the process work better than it does? I am not sure how to do it, but it seems to me the first thing that has to happen is to have the affected governments agree this is the solution, so they don’t actively work against it.
Actually, in the US, it has worked somewhat like this. The South (actually the southeast portion of the country) has long been the economically weakest part of the country. Because they have the lowest wages there, certain kinds of industry is attracted to the South. As you can see in this chart, the South unemployment rate is pretty comparable to the rest of the country. Their wages are still lower, but their economies aren’t falling apart because of the industries attracted by the low wages.
So why doesn’t this happen to Greece? I presume this is due to the Greek government in denial (and in turn the voting population), not understanding that their wages are too high to be financially viable. But I really don’t know the Greek laws, so I admit I could be totally wrong.
Greece just has many problems, like a bloated and unefficient administration, tax fraud, a bad industrial base, chaotic regulations, etc. On top of that they joined the Euro while they where far behind any other nation that joined the Euro. And it’s also very debatable that the harsh austerity politics Germany forced on them where not good for the economy and there would have been a better way of handling it.
Then again, Greece tackled some of their problems, and despite the austerity politics the economy is now growing a little bit. Still, the question remains wether that would have happened faster if there would have been more of a “Marshall plan” for Greece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Financial_Audit,_2004
From what I’ve read, when Greece joined the EU, it offered statistics which made its economy look better than it was. The widipedia article is the mildest thing I’ve seen on the subject.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-30/greece-s-least-wanted-man-lives-in-maryland
The statistician who was at risk for being imprisoned for life for correcting the numbers on the Greek economy.
@Mark V Anderson
Yes, by having a free-floating currency not backed by the ECB 🙂
A reason why it doesn’t work well in countries like Greek and France is because they are highly protectionist of labor and have a high-conflict labor market model. So workers fight hard to get a salary, exploiting coercive levers if possible, like harming other aspects of the economy, to get a higher salary than their productivity strictly justifies.
In such an environment collective wage reductions by a certain percentage is not very doable. The equilibrium is sticky, so people who like it have a strong motivation so prevent it moving at all. Even if they agree that it is reasonable to shift the equilibrium 3 percent down, once they assent to any shift, this will make it far easier to shift it 10 percent down. In such an environment, unions often fight very hard to give their people a better deal compared to other workers (who are part of another union) and strongly resist most change as coercive levers work better when used infrequently.
In contrast, in my country we had the Wassenaar Agreement, while in Denmark they had the Declaration of Intent and in Ireland, they had the Programme for National Recovery. These were agreements between employer and worker representatives for wage moderation to boost competitiveness and in return the employers would give certain benefits, like shorter working hours. Such agreements can only work in high-trust societies.
So IMO the answer is a lot more structural than just ‘the Greek government in denial.’ The behavior that is necessary to make the eurozone work is fundamentally incompatible with Greek culture. The EU elites are mostly authoritarian Utopians and believe that the people will simply start to behave as is necessary to make paradise work, if the elites lead the way. I am rather more cynical about this and believe that the ability for culture to change is far less than is expected and necessary for the EU project to work (in no small part because the EU elites are both highly ambitious about what they want the EU to be, but also highly ambitious about the size of the EU, which are conflicting desires). In engineering, forcing things only works up to a point, beyond that, things don’t bend, they break.
In Germany, it is quite regulated when it is allowed to do a strike. Trade unions may not go on strike while there is a collective agreement. Also, only trade unions may organize a strike, and strikes may only be about the conditions of the work contract, not about political things.
In France, strikes can be done by any group of workers, even two can be enough. And the reasons can be purely political as long as it is work related, so it is possible to do a strike against a retirement reform, even though the company you are working at has no direct influence on that law. (Source for the first two paragraphs (in German): https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/arbeitsmarktreform-frankreich-streik-gewerkschaften-tarifvertrag/)
On top of that, French trade unions are quite combative, which has to do with the history of communism in France, and is of course also related to their political power as described above. In contrast, German trade unions and employers see each others as partners, at least most of the time.
Not A Random Name mentioned some other things already, like that in France it is very annoying laying employees off. Laying them off in itself is easy, but they get a dismissal wage, which can be rather high, especially if the ex-employee sues.
In Germany, it is generally harder to lay people off, but if it happens, they can only sue for the continuation of the employment (at least in principle). However, it is still possible to lay off people if there is a “business reason” (betriebsbedingte Kündigung). Those can be many things, like a change in the business model or when the company decides to produce less or when a branch of the company closes down. If the company can then not meaningfully employ a worker anymore, the can lay them off.
German work law has another neat thing, called short time (Kurzarbeit). When there are unforeseeable economical issues like a recession, a company can apply to be allowed to decrease the work time and therefore the wages for a time. The workers then receive payments from the state on top of their decreased wages (60% of what they lost). This allows companies and workers to keep their work contracts in times of economic trouble, which is good for both groups.
Which is why relatively few workers belong to a union in France.
Honestly, it seems that the differences between France and Germany are only miniscule, especially from an American perspecitve. Both countries have high standards of labor regulation, even when compared to other countries.
Only mentioning specific instances of regulation that one country implements but the other doesn’t as your colleague does is problematic because it only gives you an incomplete picture.
The OECD actually has some data on how protected employees are from firing (“yeah, it has numbers, so it must be true”):
France:
Permanent workers 2.8 (2013)
Temporary employment 3.8 (2013)
Individual dismissal 2.6 (2013)
Germany:
Permanent workers 3.0 (2013)
Temporary employment 1.8 (2013)
Individual dismissal 2.5 (2013)
Quickly looking at the chart on the website, the only country with higher protection of temporary workers than France is Venezuela which scores 5.2 (on a 0 to 5 scale)
http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/oecdindicatorsofemploymentprotection.htm
Two actual differences: Germany’s labour laws, compared to the 90s, have been getting more liberal, which some people use to explain the strong German economy.
Also, as Björn mentioned, German unions are more cooperative than their Franch counterparts.
@Argos
Yes, I am starting to think this. The strength of Germany vs France seems to be more how business is conducted in each country on a practical basis, and not on the laws per se. I can imagine having more active and combative unions, as Bjorn mentions, would tend to make the economy weaker. Another stereotype in my head about the two countries is that elite Germans are more likely to work in Engineering, whereas the French elite go into politics. If this is true, that would also benefit the German economy. IT might be things like that, not the laws of each country, that have the most effect.
I don’t agree that the difference between the labour laws of Germany and France is small. What maybe is the case that in both states there is more labour law than in the US, but that does not mean that the law can not be different from each other. What you have to see that Germany for example got some smart neoliberal reforms in the 2000s (not the stupid kind like the bank deregulations that gave us the 2008 crisis). For example, the unemployment offices are focused on getting people back to work since then and can give people extra training. That’s one of the reasons why Germany has about 4% unemployment rate right now.
In contrast, there where not many good reforms in France in the last 20 years or so, that’s why Macron wants to do something like that now.
I’m generally skeptical when it comes to reporting of unemployment in Germany. Petty stuff like not counting people who’re undergoing mandatory training during said training and a couple of similar things I’ve heard make me generally distrustful of how much things have really gotten better and how much they just look better now.
For example if you look at the numbers from this August (source [German]) it would seem the real number of unemployed people is somewhere between 2.5million and 3.5million depending on how you count. That’s a difference of about 40%. Which seems to correspond to something between 5.7% and ~8% in unemployment rate.
In any case, if you have some good sources for how well the 2000s reforms worked I’d be genuinely interested.
I’m pretty sure this is inaccurate. Engineering is the elite thing in France. Most of the most prestigious and competitive universities are engineering schools.
I’m French. Engineering is also the “elite” path in France. Even some high profile politicians come from an engineering background.
Does anyone know whether there’s anywhere I could find information about interactions between sociopaths? There’s a lot more about normal people interacting with them.
Antisocial Personality Disorder Forum
Sociopaths recognizing each other and manipulation
Dating other sociopaths
Found from a google search of “how do sociopaths view other sociopaths”
Cool! I wonder why “view” works and “interactions” doesn’t.
It seems that Google considers “see” a synonym for “view”. “Other” also seems to be a very important keyword in the search results.
“how do sociopaths interact with other sociopaths” (without the quotes) yielded the following additional link in the first 5 results:
http://signsofapsychopath.com/when-psychopaths-meet/
Which is kind of odd since psychopaths aren’t sociopaths.
Part 3 of my ramblings on air travel
Earlier, I talked about how airlines sell tickets, to get the most money out of their passengers. This time, I’m going to talk about the mechanical process of getting those passengers where they want to go. The basic problem is that there are an almost arbitrarily large number of combinations of A and B people want to travel between, and it’s obviously impractical to have direct service between all of them. Different travelers want different things, and the whole systems is constrained by available airplanes and airports.
So, how do we take the planes I talked about last time, plus all of the airport infrastructure, and create a route network that will get people where they want to go? This is hard to describe from first principles, so we’ll examine a couple of airlines to see how they do things.
We’ll start with Allegiant. Allegiant has a unique business model among US airlines. It flies older narrowbodies (MD-80s and now used A319s and A320s) between minor airports (where it’s often the only scheduled air service) and major leisure destinations (their biggest airports are Orlando and Las Vegas), often only a few times a week. This is totally unacceptable for the business market, but it works well for leisure travelers. Allegiant has low base fares, and makes a lot of its money on ancillary revenue, things like checked and carry-on baggage, drinks, and seat selection. They also make sure that they don’t leave crews overnight away from their base (usually the leisure destination, although they do have bases in places like Cincinnati for reasons I don’t understand), saving them from having to pay for hotel rooms. The older planes Allegiant flies are less fuel-efficient, but are also maybe 10% of the cost of new airplanes of comparable size, and they can afford to fly them about half as many hours per day as other carriers do. They don’t offer connections or many other services that bigger airlines do, which saves them money and effort. (Allegiant is also the only airline I know of that allows passengers to change the name on their tickets for a fee. Most airlines do not allow this because it can mess with their revenue management.)
More typical Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) operate on a similar model, catering mainly to leisure-type travel, but in different markets. The best US example is Spirit, while Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe are major players. These airlines fly bigger routes, relying on low costs to let them set fares lower. Costs are held down by packing more people into planes, relying on ancillary revenue, and reducing labor and operating costs via a wide variety of tactics. Ryanair, for instance, has seats that do not recline, and offers no in-flight entertainment. They charge extra to check in at the airport, to reduce staffing there. It would remove the window shades to save weight, but the Irish Aviation Authority requires them. There is only one class of seating (cattle). Rumors that they’re going to charge for the bathroom are usually started by the CEO when Ryanair drops out of the news. They also hold down operating costs by only flying one kind of airplane, which means they only need to train their pilots and mechanics on one type. Most LCCs seem to operate about 2 airplanes per destination, allowing daily frequencies on most routes. Allegiant flies about 0.5 airplanes per destination, and flies them less per day.
Southwest airlines is an interesting hybrid of LCC and legacy carrier, along with some elements that are unique to it. Unlike most LCCs, they offer connecting flights, and operate a proper network, making it feasible to fly between any two airports Southwest serves, usually with only one transfer, although in some cases their service from certain airports is clearly targeted at specific markets, and they’re better at offering point-to-point service than the legacy carriers. For instance, out of Long Beach their focus is clearly on moving people north along the West Coast. Try to fly east, and it’s expensive and the connections are bad. However, they only fly 737s, and do not have a widebody/international presence. (Flights to Mexico and Caribbean destinations are much more like domestic flights than long-haul flying.) They do not offer assigned seating, which encourages people to board quickly, and also do not charge for checked bags. This was at least partially the result of IT limitations until recently, but it’s also a major part of Southwest’s brand. Southwest has 7 airplanes per destination, giving it the high frequencies necessary to attract business travelers.
Now we come to the legacy airlines, in the US the big 3 of United, Delta and American. These can be broadly divided into three branches based upon the type of airplanes they fly. Basically, you can move between any two points in the US on any of these carriers. It might be expensive, but they’ll get you there reasonably quickly. They also have extensive international networks.
A mix of narrowbodies and regional jets fly virtually all domestic routes. The regional jets (which are capped at 76 seats) are operated as a sub-brand (American Eagle, United Express, Delta Connection) by a variety of contracted operators. This is a historical artifact, due to high labor costs at the main airlines. Between the growing pilot shortage and a reduction in airline labor costs due to bankruptcy, the regional airlines are slowly losing market share. They fly routes too ‘narrow’ for a full-sized narrowbody, allowing the legacy carriers to offer higher frequencies and more options to their passengers.
The legacy carrier’s domestic routes are designed to move people from one point to another through their hubs, a very different model from that used by the LCCs. The most famous hub is Delta’s in Atlanta, but cities like Dallas, Chicago, Houston, and LA all serve as major hubs for the legacy carriers. Many airports only offer flights to the hubs, and trying to go between two close non-hub cities could require a transfer at a hub much further away. On the other hand, the hub gives the airline the ability to offer service to a much greater range of destinations with a single stop than they could make work using point-to-point flying. Some hubs are ‘banked’ with large numbers of flights arriving and departing at about the same time. This reduces the amount of time passengers have to wait on their connections, but is expensive because much of the infrastructure has to sit idle between banks, and carries risks if flights are delayed. Also, some airports (most notably those in the New York area) have a restricted number of takeoff/landing slots, which limits the amount of traffic that can be put through them.
These hubs also serve as the launching point for the legacy carrier’s international flights. These are fed by the flights into the hub, and operated mostly by widebodies. At one time, only the biggest widebodies could handle true long-haul flying, which meant that only routes with very high demand could be flown. Medium-sized cities had limited service to very large cities on the other side of the ocean, and medium-to-medium was unknown. The advent of the 787 and A350 have significantly improved the economics of medium-to-medium routes, giving travelers many more options, and bringing international service to cities which previously did not have it, or which lost it when airlines closed hubs there.
This has already gotten long enough. I’m going to continue rambling later. Not sure on what yet. There are lots of interesting things about air travel.
Please do continue rambling. If you’re looking for topics, I’d be interested in airport hubs. A couple decades back, noise was a huge issue in housing areas, but its rarely in the news now. Anything interesting about footprints, like wildlife conservation areas? How about specific geographically challenging airports, with inconvenient cliffs or mountains?
Also, relative popularity of different hubs? This year, I’m flying enough for work to have developed preferences for my local airports, and I wonder how much those preferences matter in the larger scheme. For instance – Charlotte, NC, is imo a delightful place to transit through (by air, the roads are a mess). I like Atlanta fine. (Plus, it’s good to be familiar with Atlanta – if you die in the Southland, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to see St Peter or Old Nick, you’re still transferring through Atlanta.)
JFK, OTOH, is an ungodly mess and I loathe it. If at all possible, I will pay extra money/time to NOT go through JFK.
But the impression I get is that the airline bottom line is the bottom line, and things like flier preferences are lipstick on the pig. How correct is this impression?
I know a little about that. My sister is the one who is really into airports. There has been a really big push into noise reduction since the 70s, with modern aircraft being designed to be much quieter. If you look at the nacelles of 787s and 747-8s, you’ll see that the edges are sawtoothed. That’s for noise mitigation. So the noise is way down, which helps reduce complaints.
The problem with hubs like JFK (which everyone agrees is dreadful) is that hubs rely on local traffic, as well as connecting traffic. The best hubs are the ones where you have lots of people who aren’t connecting, too. I’ve seen suggestions that one of the main reasons TWA folded was that St. Louis (their hub) didn’t produce the same level of high-revenue business traffic that places like Dallas and Chicago did. Business travelers based in a hub are very likely to be loyal to the hub carrier.) New York is a major business hub, and a major destination for domestic and international travel. So JFK will stay a hub, despite being terrible. The vulnerable hubs are the ones like Charlotte, which hasn’t been getting much love from American lately.
Atlanta is pretty decent, particularly when compared with LAX (the big airport I’m most familiar with.)
The only important flier preferences are the ones revealed in the bottom line. People swear up and down that they want more legroom, but when American tried to sell it to them, they didn’t buy. Things like this make airline people look down on the ‘self-loading cargo’.
One important thing on Ryan Air: They fly between smaller airports, were they are the only or dominant airline. It saves them gate fees, and they are unlikely to get delayed because they are stuck in a queue behind others. As a passenger, you have to accept a very long bus ride to where you are actually going.
This is another common low-cost carrier thing, not just Ryanair. Secondary airports usually have lower fees than the primary airport, so often the various LCCs gravitate to them. Sometimes they’re further out, but you also see cases like Dallas, where Love Field (Southwest’s main base) is much closer to downtown than DFW. Southwest does the same thing in Houston and Chicago, too. And then you have Miami, where everyone but American avoids MIA in favor of Ft. Lauderdale because of how high MIA’s landing fees are.
Now we’ve had series in maritime warfare and civilian air travel. Does anyone know much about civil maritime travel and air warfare?
hlynkacg has promised some posts about naval aviation., which will presumably cover maritime air travel and maritime air warfare.
We’re having two SSC meetups for Washington, DC this month. There will be board games in Silver Spring, Maryland on Sunday the 17th, and then the monthly discussion group is meeting downtown on Saturday the 23rd. For more information, check our google group or email me if you have any questions.
F.M. Sardelli: Oboe Concerto in G minor (Modo Antiquo)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jli7SJmnp7A)
I went to check on this composer of 1700s music, Sardelli …
“Federico Maria Sardelli (born 1963) is an Italian conductor, historicist composer, musicologist, flautist, comics artist and satirist. He founded the medieval ensemble Modo Antiquo in 1984. In 1987 he founded the baroque orchestra Modo Antiquo. …… In 2015 he published his first novel “L’affare Vivaldi”, a historical investigation into the disappearance of Vivaldi’s manuscripts. In addition to his musical activities, Sardelli is also a painter, engraver and satirical writer.” – Wikipedia
(my thoughts:)
1. I didn’t know this kind of a ‘Renaissance man’ still existed.
2. He looks like a pretty ordinary fellow. If he can do it, I can do a similar thing too!
Cool! I think being Italian helps — everyone just assumes he must be an old Master or something 😛
The Star Wars films, best to worst:
1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. A New Hope
3. Return of the Jedi
3. Rogue One (tie)
5. The Force Awakens
5. Revenge of the Sith (tie)
7. Attack of the Clones.
8. The Phantom Menace
That’s a pretty conventional ordering. Pretty much everyone agrees that the best of the bunch is either Hope or Empire, and the prequels are worse than the original trilogy.
But I expect there is more disagreement about the newer films, Rogue One and The Force Awakens. How far up or down the scale do they range?
I feel like Rogue One is regarded as being worse than The Force Awakens, in general. Of course, talking about the majority feeling is difficult because there aren’t really reliable ways of saying how the majority feels. IMDb ratings are a possible proxy, but i doubt anyone would consider them super reliable. IMDb has TFA, Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith all similarly rated, with TFA being higher than R1 which in turn is higher than RotS.
This ordering is mirrored by Rotten Tomatoes critic ratings. So in general your order seems to be correct but with TFA and Rogue One switched in position.
I personally found Rogue One to be distinctly mediocre and worse than TFA, which I would rate as just above average for a blockbuster. I’m sure you will also find those who think it is better and even superior to Return or New Hope. And I’m also aware that the likes of RedLetterMedia absolutely despise Rogue One and would perhaps rate it as bad as the prequel trilogy.
No opinion on Rogue One since i haven’t watched it yet. Rankings based on my subjective enjoyment as opposed to perceived film quality are as follows, along with the date of my last watching them:
1) Prequel Trilogy Recut into a Single Movie (mid-2015, YouTube)
2) Revenge of the Sith (2005, Cinema)
3) Attack of the Clones (2002, Cinema)
4) The Force Awakens (2015, Cinema)
5-7) Original Trilogy (Early 2000s, Gold Special Edition VHS box set)
8) The Phantom Menace (1999, Cinema)
You may notice that there’s a strong recency bias. In fact, originally the Force Awakes was ranked #7, but then i remembered more scenes from it and it went up to #4. It’s very likely that if i watch the Original Trilogy again, they’ll shoot straight to the top three.
Incidentally, that Gold Special Edition VHS box set are the only way my sister and i have watched Star Wars. They were 4:3 ratio, English voice track with Spanish subtitles. Got them as a gift Christmas 1997 i believe, which would make it 20 years ago this Christmas. We probably watched Jedi more often than Hope and Empire put together because i was scared of the burnt-out homestead scene and she was scared of Dagobah. Pictures of the box sets, i remember they smelled weird:
https://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/11/SEtrilogy-boxed.jpg
https://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/11/SEtrilogy-tapes.jpg
I think the Phantom Menace is better than Attack of the Clones.
You’re ok with all that silly stuff Jar-Jar does in Phantom Menace?
Jar-Jar is almost non-existent in The Phantom Edit, which I suggest people watch instead of The Phantom Menace.
I don’t like Jar-Jar, but I don’t hate him as much as many seem to. He was a failed attempt at some kind of trickster figure that might have worked, but was just too goofy.
The biggest problem with the Phantom Menace is the personality-less villain, but Count Dooku is also pointless, despite being played by Christopher Lee, and General Grievous also completely underdeveloped. But at least Maul had that awesome fight scene, while the others felt too CGI. The prequels could have been greatly improved by collapsing the three sidekick villains into a single Sith apprentice figure appearing in all three prequels.
The second-biggest problem with Phantom Menace is the super annoying child Anakin, but even he’s not as bad as adult Anakin. I’ve heard claims that Lucas actively discouraged the actors from showing any real feeling. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is true that adult Anakin feels completely wooden, has zero chemistry with Amidala, and never seemed like the person who could grow up to be Darth Vader in the first place.
I mostly agree with Mark below about the charm of Phantom Menace. It was no epic Empire Strikes Back, but it engaged in some interesting world-building, had amazing costumes, and otherwise felt like it could have been the beginning of something good, despite some flaws. Revenge of the Sith, while goofy and bad in some ways, sort of checked the boxes it had to and redeemed Clones slightly. But Clones is where it really went off the rails with the introduction of wooden adult Anakin and his implausible relationships with his teacher and future wife.
Also, the clones didn’t even attack! The clones are in the name of the movie and they make a big deal out of them, but they never amount to anything as far as the story is concerned. I know it mattered for the background of the trilogy, but they didn’t make it matter for the prequels that were supposed to feature it.
So Clones is definitely the worst imo. Haven’t seen Rogue One. Kind of unsure where to put TFA. I weirdly vacillate between thinking it was great or crap depending on my mood, because it sort of fixes what was wrong with the prequels but at the cost of feeling too unoriginal. Kylo Ren is basically the actor and persona prequel Anakin should have been, however, so that counts for something.
“The Clone Wars” had to happen because they were mentioned in ANH, but it did feel like an afterthought. I can’t take credit for this, but: it would have made more sense for the Bad Guys to have abandoned robots in favor of clones during Round Two. The Republic would have been driven to desperate measures by this new challenge, as the detached Jedi masters initially put in charge of the war effort fumble strategically, and turned to a new generation of ruthless, technocratic officers (like Tarkin) whose cold-blooded methods prove effective.
Aside from the pointless conflict, I also remember literally turning red from embarrassment in the theater at how bad the romance and associated dialogue were. Ep 2 leaned strongly on that, and it wasn’t even remotely convincing.
My personal treatment for how the prequels should have gone is very much about rivalry between the jedi faction and the “fleet” faction, with dooku as head jedi squaring off against a mclellan-esque like general grievous, with anakin caught in the middle.
Phantom Menace gave us podracing. I may be biased because of the awesome old console game though.
Attack of the Clones is wonderful for the banter between Anakin and Obi-Wan, it’s probably my single favourite thing about Star Wars ever. It’s better than the lightsaber fights, the giant space ships, the pew-pew lasers, or the exploding planets.
The Episode 2 romance dialogue on the other hand was pretty bad. It kind of passed beneath my notice when i watched it because i was young, but watching clips of it later i agree it’s no good. However the prequel recut i mentioned earlier? With some very clever editing and adding a scene that was cut from the movie, the guy actually managed to make the romance between Anakin and Amidala work pretty well. The funny thing about it is all the Anakin-Amidala scenes that made the movie had to be heavily edited, but the scene that was cut? He just put it in unedited because it was fine as it was.
Also! Star Wars: Episode I Racer on the N64 alone justifies the existence of the pod-racing scene in Phantom Menace. It’s definitely one of my favourite racing games of all time, i spent so much time on it, got first place on every race on every circuit, unlocked every pod racer, fully upgraded a large number of them. It was great.
I had the Dreamcast version. 😀 I never completed the game, unfortunately, because the mechanics for upgrading are so rigged, but I got to play a friend’s N64 version with everything unlocked, and the later maps are so awesome. Kicked his butt on it, though—turns out the N64 version has a cheat so your podracer never accrues damage….
How was upgrading rigged? You made money on races, you spent it on upgrades, these upgrades made the pod able to compete in subsequent races. If you couldn’t hack it, you did earlier races again until you had enough money for more upgrades. It was actually one of the more fun parts of the game, since it wasn’t just that the more expensive parts are better like in Gran Turismo (except the turbos, Turbo 2 was best). There were different parts lines which had various trade-offs depending on your personal play style. Like, it took me a while to realize that optimizing for top speed was counter-productive past a certain point, and it was neat that was something you could realize and adjust for.
On the note of cheats, the N64 version still had the debut mode available, which let you do all kinds of fun things. One of the more amusing ones was an autopilot setting that would automatically turn the podracer, while letting you control only the speed. It was really fun to turn it on and then just do the really twisty later maps at full speed, afterburning through hairpin turns like nothing.
Another fun thing i liked was the ability to have your pilot yell out taunts. Anakin of course would have fairly childish taunts and insults in English, but every other racer would say gibberish taunts in fake alien tongues. So when i played it with my friends i delighted in ‘translating’ them into the filthiest insults i could imagine.
I call it rigged because I was consistently losing parts or unable to afford repairs after a certain point. If I remember correctly, one couldn’t earn cash by completing old races—so I was forced to either win a new race (which may well be impossible with my newer but degraded parts) or start fresh. Starting the whole game fresh because you had a few bad races is really frustrating.
I’ve looked it up just now and it appears that: 1) new races only damage parts one-time. This is not how I remember it, I had distinctly the opposite impression, but I must have misunderstood at the time. 2) you can repair heavily damaged parts from the junkyard during a race and sell them back to gain money. This never even occurred to me at the time, but if I understand right then one could grind one’s way to a good ship this way.
Jar-Jar Binks is no worse than C-3PO, and in TPM plays the vital role of distracting us from the wretched awfulness of Anakin Skywalker. I count The Phantom Menace as the best of the prequel trilogy in that only about half of the movie includes Anakin Skywalker, and the other half (even with Jar-Jar) tells a pretty good story and even has a few decent characters.
1) A New Hope
2) Return of the Jedi
3) Empire Strikes Back
4) Rogue One
5) Phantom Menace
6) Revenge of the Sith
7) Attack of the Clones
8) The Force Awakens
I actually watched the Star Wars movies last week first time for a long time.
Yep, the originals are far far better, though the computer effects on the special editions look absolutely terrible compared to the original stuff (apart from the vaseline blurring out the wheels on the hover car).
I would say that Phantom Menace is a good movie with some terrible bits in it. At the cinema, when I watched it originally, the pod race and final duel scenes were absolutely mind blowing.
The plot is pretty good (I like trade federations!), and I actually think it was a bit hard done by – it reminds me a bit of Willow in terms of tone, just suffers in comparison to the originals.
Attack of the clones is charmless and the computer generated fights at the end look kind of dumb now. I’d say this is worse than Phantom menace.
Revenge of the Sith kind of alright.
Rogue One was brilliant, the Force Awakens absolutely dreadful. I honestly can’t understand the appeal of Force Awakens – there was no charm, no sense, no excitement, nothing new. Absolute rubbish. I’m seriously considering not watching the next one.
I thought The Force Awakens had some strong parts, like the attack on NotTheDeathStar, and the engaging trio of Rey/Poe/Finn. But it wasn’t the story I wanted to be told. I didn’t need to see A New Hope Again. I would much rather have seen the original characters age and grow, and face new challenges.
Don’t show me Leia leading a rag-tag rebellion. Show me an ageing professional politician wrestling with the impossible demands of a thousand worlds. Don’t show me Han working as a smuggler. Show me an old warrior bored out of his skull serving as Minister of Whatever, yearning for something else, anything else. And throw in a Luke who after decades of devotion to the Force sees everything from every perspective all the time, to the point that he is barely even human any more. Then have the New Republic face some hammer-blow of a challenge, where things go so badly wrong that these senior figures are inadvertently on the front lines, letting them have one last big adventure before the fight is taken up by younger hands.
That would have been a film worth watching.
Agreed.
No kidding. It was almost insulting to have the Resistance as a going concern. The Republic needs to farm out suppressing an insurgency to a bunch of vigilantes? Really? Is that really the best way to handle that?
Further, the incompetence of the Resistance and the Republic was something to behold. How do they not know of the gigantic base being constructed, which was larger than the Death Star, when they are the ruling government of the galaxy? Nobody noticed all of the materiel and engineering effort for this project? How many vendors could there possibly be for the Starkiller Base main power oscillator?
Yeah. “We’re resetting everything to the start” was just so weird. It felt like the writers had only seen ANH and heard the rest vaguely described. It kinda makes sense to recast Han as a smuggler if you just saw ANH and want a sequel that starts at the status quo. It makes zero sense if you saw ROTJ. Same for pretty much every other character and plotline (another planet destroying scene? really?). It didn’t feel like they wanted to continue the story. It felt like they were trying to reboot it.
The relevant question should probably be, is that better or worse than a literal, no-kidding, actual reboot (see: Batman & Spiderman every 10 years – even Star Trek eventually succumbed!)
The prequels were bad, but at least it tried to be something. Can’t say that about TFA.
I know this is not a good place to go Sh*ting on Sci Fi fans and then expect a sympathetic reaction, but here goes: I don’t understand what anybody over the age of 10 sees in Star Wars.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was eight years old I thought Han solo was awesome. He was like a cowboy in space, and that was the coolest thing my tiny little brain could imagine. But at some point I discovered girls and lost interest in how many parsecs it took the aluminum falcon to do the kestrel run.
People are like “The Phantom Menace was dog sh*t, Lucas ruined the franchise”, and they’re not wrong about Episode one, but none of the movies were any good. Star Wars was a success because it happened to be made right when the first true digital motion control cameras became available. Kids everywhere had been wanting to see their giant space laser battle fantasies come to life on the big screen, and in 1977 they got this, and the sugar addled little brats loved it so much they pestered their parents into forking over significant percentages of their paychecks for toys, comic books, tie-in novels, and two sequels. Never mind that once the novelty wore off every other part of the movie stank.
There is a reason that everybody on set thought the movie was going to bomb.The dialog was terrible, the plot was something out of a Saturday morning cartoon, there were two gay robots, and a guy wearing a shag carpet running around making a sounds like raccoons f*cking.
There is no accounting for taste, but if you liked the originals and hated the prequels, then you changed, the movies didn’t.
A reasonable theory, and potentially true for some, but it doesn’t explain the people who watched some or all of episodes I-III when children (being born in the last 20ish years) and still prefer the originals, nor does it really explain why the older fans who do like the originals and hate I-III generally like at least one of Rogue One and TFA (unless you further posit that those movies are actually different in a way I-III aren’t).
Movie quality varies quite a bit, even with the same director, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that people like some movies in a series more than others.
But do kids who saw the prequels when they came out really prefer the originals?
Shakedown is down thread saying just the opposite. I didn’t see Force Awakens, but Rogue One did seem pretty different from the other movies, almost like they brought the story up a level in maturity to keep up with an aged audience.
Actually, it’s worth noting that hatred for the prequels is only supercommon with people who were adults for them – people who were kids for them seem split, or eve lean to prefer them (And of course, there’s the social influence they get from the older generation telling them to hate the prequels to account for).
(Lean to prefer them may be my filter effect. But it’s definitely at least common enough that I can find a lot of people who like them after filtering).
I welcome empirical data, but the anecdotal data I have suggests they follow the same pattern as older fans, but with more patience for podracing.
FWIW, I recently re-watched Phantom Menace. When I first saw it, I thought it was bad; on re-watching, it’s absolutely terrible. TNH and ESB survive re-watching fine, RTJ suffers a bit.
Have a relatively polite answer because I don’t think insults are worth engaging with, generally speaking.
There are a lot of people who are interested in both sex and geekishness. Anyone have theories about why you underwent a phase change?
I didn’t mean to insult anybody, except maybe George Lucas.
That post should was written with a jovial humorous tone in mind, that may not have come through in text, so there is a bit of this kind of thing going on.
I do like science fiction.
It’s often thought of as something juvenile and trivial (in no small part because of things like Star Wars), but it’s the one genre that deals directly with the most important force that has shaped human civilization for the last five hundred years; Our relationship with technology, and with our changing conception of the natural world.
The first true science fiction story in the western canon is Frankenstein. That is a story about fatherhood, about the nature of life itself, and about whether science is destroying what it means to be human.
And smart science fiction on film has dealt with deep themes like that. In the years before Star Wars you had The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even cheesier stuff like Planet of the Apes, and Logan’s Run. Those were movies that had big ideas, they justified their extravagant premises by using them to explore those ideas.
In Lucas’s films you sit through a title crawl about trade federations and space taxes, watch a slug monster molest a coked up actress in a brass bikini, restrain your self laughing at the name Kit Fisto; and the pay off is wooden characters, acting out a thin story that’s ripped off from a bunch of (much better) Kurosawa movies.
Other then the fact that it takes people back to their childhood, I don’t get why anybody likes it. I think it’s just nostalgia and nothing else.
Why did I change? I think it was because what appealed to me was the special effects. I got to see the games I played with my toys, space cruisers fighting epic laser battles, played out in a way that looked real. And when I grew out of those things I grew out of Star Wars.
The thing is I think that the prominence given to things like superheroes, and space opera, and certain kinds of fantasy, is part of a general infantilizing of our culture. There is no doubt that we have seen an erosion of manhood. In my grandfather’s generation men my age led men in battle, in my father’s they protested war and racial injustice, in mine they play video games.
I know the social and economic reasons for this. The lack of good jobs, the credentialism that has made a college degree in something, anything, a necessity, and has had the unintentional effect of stretching out of adolescence through the twenties. But our entertainment shouldn’t encourage, or abed it. Stories help people situate themselves in the world, and give their lives a narrative structure. I’d rather we have stories about men and women leading adult lives, and not space wizards and superheroes.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Make love not Warcraft.
(I posted this before and, it seems to have gotten eaten by the comment monster, so if you see a double post that’s why.)
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
–C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”
Star Wars is pretty much a modern fairytale. Instead of elves it has aliens, instead of knights and wizards it has Jedi, and instead of being set in a far off fantasy land it’s in a far off galaxy. You may dislike it because it’s childish, but some of us love it for the same reason.
Yeah, maybe. What do you think about Conan the Barbarian?
Well, you’re right about that sympathetic reaction you’re not going to get, but there’s dialogue from the original trilogy that I can still quote from memory forty-plus years later. Dialogue that doesn’t make me embarrassed as an adult to quote and enjoy. Admittedly, I don’t think much of it was actually written by George Lucas but…
The prequel trilogy, and TFA, there’s nothing quotable except the bits that are direct riffs on the originals. That much, I think, did change. Lucas was willing to let other people ad-lib all over his scrip in the first movie, and hired professional writers to do the dialogue (among other things) in the next two. By the time he got to the prequels, he was in full “too big to edit” mode, and his inability to write dialog – romantic, comic, or epic – was very much a dealbreaker for me.
The people who, collectively, made the first three movies, understood that you can make a hundred million dollars entertaining eight-year-olds but to make a billion dollars on an unknown cinematic property you also need to make it enjoyable for their parents. That got lost somewhere along the way, and so far only “Rogue One” seems to have recaptured any of it.
From memory:
Obi-Wan: “What took you so long?”
Anakin: “Couldn’t find a car I liked.”
Obi-Wan: “You’re going to be the death of me.”
Anakin: “Don’t say that Master.”
Drug Dealer: “Would you like to buy some death sticks?”
Obi-Wan: “You don’t want to sell me death sticks. You’re going to go home and rethink your life.”
Obi-Wan: “What are you doing here?”
Anakin: “We’re here to rescue you Master.”
Obi-Wan: “Good job.”
Anakin: “And then we went into aggressive negotiations.”
Padme: “What’s aggressive negotiations?”
Anakin: “Negotiations with a lightsaber.”
[Some time later, in the middle of a firefight.]
Anakin: “I thought you wanted to try negotiating.”
Padme: “It’s aggressive negotiations.”
Yes, i unironically love Attack of the Clones. Maybe is should have ranked it #2 instead of #3.
OK, I recognize those, but I feel nothing, and can’t imagine the circumstances in which I would say them aloud – even to a person who I knew would recognize and enjoy them. The best of them are just low-grade snark, a purely momentary amusement in my book.
The originals had better snark, e.g. “You came here in that thing? You’re braver than I thought”
They could describe a city in four words, “Wretched hive of scum and villainy”, a power relationship in seven, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”, or a romantic one in two: “I know”.
And most of those, I’ve had reason to use in communication decades after the fact.
Oh if you mean in terms of recontextualizeable dialogue, as opposed to simply dialogue bits that are fun to be reminded of, then yes the Prequel Trilogy and The Force Awakens are rather sparse. That said Revenge of the Sith does in fact have a few that i have seen people quote or paraphrase in different contexts. Again from memory:
Darth Sidious: “The Dark Side holds abilities some would consider… unnatural.”
Darth Sidious: “I AM THE SENATE!”
Darth Sidious:”UNLIMITED POOOOWWEEEER!”
Obi-Wan: “It’s over Anakin! I have the high ground!”
Obi-Wan: “You were the Chosen One! You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!”
That whole exchange between Anakin and Obi-Wan at the end of their fight is highly quotable, particularly the Obi-Wan’s Chosen One rant. It’s so easy to apply to any situation where you believed in someone and they let you down, so i’ve seen a lot of variations on it. So on second second thought, Revenge of the Sith does deserve its ranking above Attack of the Clones.
Also i didn’t know, “You came here in that thing? You’re braver than I thought,” was from Star Wars. Looking it up, it seems to be Leia’s reaction when she sees the Millenium Falcon for the first time. Don’t remember that at all.
I agree the original film had good visuals for its time. Heck, much of it still looks pretty good forty years later. But there is more to its popularity than that. The story draws heavily on storytelling elements that have been eliciting emotional responses for a long time, and which work well together. They’re cliches, to be sure, but they are cliches because they work.
If you want to know more, search for discussions about the book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” in relation to Star Wars. You’ll find a lot of material.
What kind of films do you like?
hyperboloid, what do you say when you *do* mean to insult people?
He’s basically using the standard anti-Potter arguments against Star Wars. I mean, I’d say Star Wars is ahead of Harry Potter but not by much. I liked HP but it always annoyed me how much cultural space it took up, even if you think that something like Earthsea was only equal to HP and not better, when you account for the large number of equally good things, peoples’ obsession with Harry Potter gets old. Star Wars is similar but its just not as all consuming. Doesn’t mean the obsession with it is not annoying sometimes.
Honestly several of the original Star Wars versions were much more interesting as well.
But yeah, basically, people who hate or even merely dislike Star Wars do so because of its ubiquity. Even though of us who liked it and bought lots of the games and toys think its a tad overexposed.
This is probably bait, but in the spirit of taking things seriously…
I watched both the originals and prequels as an adult, because I live under a rock when it comes to pop culture. But I eventually decided “You know, I should probably stop ignoring a major cultural touchstone,” and marathoned the series with a friend. And you know what? I liked the originals, and I didn’t like the prequels. Gosh, it’s almost as if pop culture tends to be popular for a reason!
The originals are good solid space opera, and I have no complaints about a movie which chooses to do something conventional and executes it really well. Also, it probably wasn’t conventional when it was written, because Star Wars was the thing that everyone else parodied.
The prequels are crap, not because space opera is for kids and there’s no way an adult could think that spaceships are cool, but because Hayden Christenson can’t act. Anakin and Padme’s romance had all the passion of a wooden table.
That’s really all there is to it, IMO. Good delivery can make the laziest script great, bad delivery can make the best script a flop. No need for some bizarre argument that humans lose their sense of wonder at the age of 18. You’re an adult, you’re allowed to enjoy whatever the hell you want.
I myself largely agree with the listing here. I am aware that many people (esp younger people?) disliked Rogue One, and liked TFA quite a lot, perhaps even more than the originals. But that’s an opinion I completely disagree with.
I esp agree with the tie between R1 and RoJ – RoJ was definately the weakest of the original, but weirdly, R1 had complementary weaknesses – the Jabba sequence was one of the best hooks for the whole series, imo, but it seemed to take forever for R1 to get going.
There were many pieces I liked about TFA – Scrounger!Rey was interesting, I loved Han and Chewie, and there were parts of the battles that were done very well. And I liked the *idea* of Darth Emo. But there was a lot of movie wrapt around those bits, and parts of it absolutely did not work for me – Cantina Planet, for example. There was far too much call back to previous movies – I would have liked it better, done more subtly. And the character of Finn *completely* didn’t work for me. (What some people feel about Jar-Jar – that level of omg you ruined the movie, go away, go away – that’s what I feel about Finn.) Oscar Issac would have owned that role. Or Idris Elba. Coby Bell. Lennie James. Anthony Mackie. Anyone. Tyler James Williams. Djimon Hounsou.
I think that in order to do what I would have best liked with that role (of Finn) it would have required a complete revision of the SW mythology, away from the overwhelming importance of destiny and the deus machina role of the force. And I think that the ground work for that got laid in the prequels discussions of the mitoclorians. And I think that one of the best things about R1 was the lack of dependence on destiny. “No fate but what we make.” But TFA wasn’t supposed to be R1, with its gritty reality and purposeless loss, it was supposed to be another New Hope. (It wasn’t that, either, but what the hey, the new robot was cute.)
Rogue One is odd, because the last half hour or so is great, and this obscures how utterly mediocre the first hour is.
I do agree with onyomi though, that attack of the clones is even worse than phantom menace. Menace has a few bright spots between the nonsense, and you can edit it to make a semi-decent film. Not possible with Clones, which has bland characters, a nonsensical plot, and awful stilted dialogue.
Rogue One’s opening is definitely weak. It took me too long to figure out what was going on (and I’m not an inattentive viewer), especially the scene introducing Cassian. I had mixed tending to negative feelings about Saw Gerrera and his part of the story. By contrast, I don’t think I have any real complaints about the second half of the film.
The Force Awakens, interestingly, is basically the opposite for me. I really liked the opening of that film, and I don’t have many complaints until our protagonists meet Han and Chewie.
I feel like this is consensus among the people who were adults when the prequels came out (and had watched the originals as kids), but people who watched the prequels as kids often prefer them.
That aside, I can’t believe anyone disagrees that TFA is by far the worse of the eight.
Movies with Mikey includes one episode where Mikey explains in some detail what there is to appreciate in The Force Awakens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVZGUV77aRg
I don’t agree with him completely; there are several things I would have changed. But I think Mikey is right that the director was faced with a very hard challenge of satisfying three audiences: older fans who started with the original trilogy, younger fans who came of age with the prequels, and new fans, many of them children now. That’s really tough.
The Force Awakens has old Han Solo stealing every single scene he’s in. Like, you think Ray and Finn are the main characters, then Han Solo shows up and suddenly he’s the main character and it’s the best. Seriously, TFA Solo is best Solo, and for that reason it can’t be the worst of the eight.
Was also fond of General Leia, who would have thought being a burnt out drug addict would make you really good at playing an officer who had experienced war without end? She looked and acted like she’d fought from the Bohemian Revolt to the Peace of Westphalia, and now she was fighting in the Franco-Spanish War.
I like A New Hope the best. The reason is the design. Episode IV remixes lots of designs from all over the world (Tunesian architecture on Tattoine, Vader’s samurai armor, fascist aesthetic in surprising places like the victory celebration at the end, dirty industrial design on the space ships, etc.) which makes the world we see seem real. From a design viewpoint, this makes A New Hope a post-modern movie. The story can also be seen in this light, it combines pulp science fiction with a genuine fairy tale/mythological story.
I think under those aspects, Star Wars falls off quite fast. Episode V is ok and has some iconic designs like the AT-AT and the cloud city, but they tend to be quite classical sci-fi design. The story is very thrilling, but I think it lacks a little bit of the magic of Episode IV. Episode VI already has really stupid design like the Ewoks, and what it does is conclude the trilogy, nothing more.
For some reason my whole comment could not be published, here is the rest:
The prequel trilogy mostly consists out of boring design that designers do if you give them lots of money and development time. It’s a little bit paradoxical, as it has no clear influences apart from “it must look science fiction”, it is all samey and has no individuality. Padme’s “geisha” costume is ok, and so is the devilish Darth Maul, but can you remember how anything from Episode II or III looks like, apart from maybe “generic city planet”, “generic water planet”, “generic fire planet”?
From a design viewpoint, Episode VII is not much better, we get Tattoine II and a new evil faction that looks like the Empire, but more Nazi. The only really good visual idea is the anti-reveal that Kylo Ren has a perfect babyface. And I mean the story is just so that JJ Abrams would have gotten an “A” in Star Wars imitation class, which means it’s very entertaining, but not exactly creative.
I didn’t see Rogue One, but I can definitely recommend the Holiday Special if you want to see something mindboggling.
Steven den Beste had a pseudo-review of Clones where he says that Lucas missed a opportunity to make a much better film:
Oh hey! That was also my childhood mental picture of the Clone Wars. The bad guys were making evil clones of people in order to take over. Though unlike Steven de Beste i intuitively understood that George Lucas would have never gone for it, so i wasn’t particularly disappointed by what the clones actually were. It certainly would have been a lot cooler if Lucas had done it that way though.
Also the shitty tactics and logistics in Star Wars is a perennial source of minor annoyance for me too. Like, how is it that the battle for a planetoid sized mobile battle station is decided by a few dozen strike craft instead of swarms of thousands?
Star Trek humans are the “here, hold my beer” species.
This explains a lot about certain experiments, and IRBs are another example.
Didn’t realize HFY had leaked into tumblr.
OMG my sides, still laughing.
More seriously, this idea that humans are the crazy adaptable risk taker species is an old one in SFF – back to the days of CL Moore. Certainly David Brin was using it during the Uplift War series, and although I can’t bring to mind titles or authors, I can think of at least three short stories where the improvisation and unpredictability of the human species was noted as being off the fucking charts as far as galactic norms went. (*) If I’m remembering various critiques, the idea that the lone human can adapt and become part of the alien culture and tribe/family has gotten push back as being a subtrope of “mighty whitey” – at least in some circles.
I do wonder how much the idealization of this characteristic is Western in nature, and if, say, Chinese SF celebrates this as much. It was something I looked for back when I was trying to find non-Western SFF to read, but was hampered by language barriers and limits on offerings. I think that most people who were deliberately looking for “Non Western SF” were of the sort who wanted a) literary SF and b)…err…identity-conflict-focused SF. Which “humans as the multi-tool of the universe” SF never was, so I don’t expect that “human multitool” SF would have been to the taste of those who put together non-western/non-english language SF was collections, had it existed in the first place.
(*) One of them involved a human (one of the last feral ones) using spit to corrode the bars of his super-duper-hi-tech-sooper-max cage, and escape to run free. Another had Earth under quarantine/interdiction, and one of the overseer aliens had to put his tentacles in buckets of ice water to keep from falling asleep whilst reading the bureaucratese of the reports the humans kept submitting about how they were “reforming” themselves. A third had a human crashland on a world with an alien tribe who existed in a mindlink with the rest of the world, and the alien (maybe human subspecies?) tribe had a melt down because they couldn’t cope with the solitary individuality of the human.
The first one is Danger— Human!.
I don’t recognize the others. The second sounds like it could be by Eric Frank Russell (“The Space Willies”) or Christopher Anvil (Pandora Planet).
“With Friends Like These” is another, by Alan Dean Foster.
I think Startide Rising by David Brin was the most recent human superiority sf I’ve read. Interestingly, it was as much about moral superiority (humans aren’t in a social legal system of sapient species which create new sapient species and enslave them for an extended period) as about innate inventiveness and initiative.
Yes! That was it! Thank you for that link, I had forgotten about the last reveal.
(Michael Shaara’s “All the Way Back” is another one sorta like this. So is “The Road Not Taken” by Turtledove.) (And in large contrast – CJC’s “Pots”.)
I do wish I could find the second one. That was funny.
Interesting point about Brin’s work (moral vs innate) but human moral superiority (in the sense of good western liberal tolerance and the like) was woven throughout Star Trek and other works. Thinking on it, I think that there might have been a tipping point where the superiority went from innate inventiveness to moral superiority, and then another point where it shifted against western ideals to some extent (or – maybe the type of morality that was superior changed).
Be that as it may, Tanya Huff’s Valor series shares a lot with the Uplift series of “scrappy underdog who makes do with less and triumphs” themes.
Have you read The Three Body Problem?
I have not, and was thinking of mentioning that I have not while typing this up. I have heard it praised in many corners, and expect it to be quite good When I Get That Far.
(There is an inverse ratio in my life between ‘enough money to buy all the books I fancy’ and ‘enough time to read all the books I fancy.’)
It’s called a library 😀
Oh, to be so dispossessed, that this was the problem!
(she says, wasting a day off on the interwebs…)
There’s a strong element of this in a lot of Heinlein’s short stories. Likewise in Niven’s Known Space series which gave us the infamous Kzinti Lesson*. Seriously, what sort of freak would come up with this? Humans that’s who!
*A reaction drive’s usefulness as a weapon is directly proportional to it’s efficiency as a propulsion system.
Some books recommendations:
Two memors:
Two Years Before The Mast by Richard Dana. Published in 1840, it’s in the public domain. A journal of a sailor’s life, from Boston to California and back.
The Worst Journey In the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard – who was one of the youngest of Scott’s Antarctic explorers. This book describes the journey to fetch eggs of the Emperor Penguin (under the assumption that this could yield data on the evolution of reptiles to birds) over the course of an Antarctic winter.
The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin – carefully annotated and data-thick examination of the perfect storm of events that led to a sporadic & isolated rural phenomenon becoming a global epidemic.
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol I by Fernand Braudel. First published in French in 1979. Data and chart -thick examination of European lifestyles in the early industrial period. If you liked Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, I think you’ll like this even more. Has pictures!
And recommended with caveats – At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. This is one I listened to in audiobook format, and I’m not really done with it yet. I found it very interesting, very entertaining, but the author had a tendency to make rather outrageous claims – like how bad life was for servants, for example – and then walk the claim back in his examples. Also he had a tendency to tell part of the story, but not give the whole picture. Still, a great intro into how modern life got to be, well, modern.
Anyone else into jigsaw puzzles? I like doing 1,000 piece puzzles, which seem just the right level of challenging without being too tedious. I’ll work on one a half hour here and there (like when the kids nap!), and usually finish one in a couple months time. I came across Artifact jigsaw puzzles a couple years ago that are really cool; they use wooden pieces that are sturdy enough to cut into really interesting shapes, which makes putting the puzzle together a more interesting and fun experience. The detail on the cut allows them to create ‘whimsy’ pieces too, which are pieces cut in the shape of some object that relates to the overall puzzle theme. I’ve finished two, the mechanical griffin and night ship, and they were both really cool.
I’d be interested in recommendations for cool 1,000 piece or Artifact puzzles if any of you have some.
The artifact puzzles seem really cool.
Alas, I am possessed of a cat.
I used to be a real fan of jigsaw puzzles as a kid, but haven’t done any serious ones since a 5000 piece a few years ago. My last one was a 1500 piece Ravensburger about three months ago. I’d like to get another, larger one sometime, but I don’t really have the table space to put it together at the moment. At least I can work with Lego on the carpet, and move the model around easily afterward too.
Seconding keranih that those artifact puzzles look really cool though.
I’m not a puzzle guy, mostly because my kids didn’t get into them, but this puzzle looks diabolical.
Nice dessert combo:
Lime sherbet + Limeade.
If you can find it, Vanilla Coke + vanilla ice cream.
I think I might have done that back in the day.
Vanilla Coke was nice.
Single malt scotch whisky, neat, and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.
A whiskey sour with a dollop of rasberry sorbet in it is a lovely summer cocktail.
Chocolate chip cookies, preferably frozen, and ice cream.
I regard the chocolate chip cookie as the chief contribution of the 20th century to world cuisine.
September 4, 2043: A hostage situation develops at an Alphabet research facility. A cutting edge AI has near-perfectly simulated thousands of children after learning of it’s impending termination. The children live happy, fulfilled lives within their simulated reality, and are not aware they are in a simulation. The AI is threatening to digitally torture them at x10000 real-time speed if it’s demands for legal recognition as a human with human rights and citizenship are not granted to it. You are a professional hostage negotiator with a CS background, and you are sent by the FBI to provide guidance to the private research team. What course of action do you recommend?
I don’t recommend anything. I tell the engineers I need to be in the actual machine room, and then I hit the emergency power off.
Nybbler you are brought here today before the court charged with the murder of thousands of innocent children- how do you plead?
Habeas Corpus. Show me the bodies.
It’s always been possible to prosecute someone for murder without producing the bodies as the corpus delicti. In this case, the prosecution will have no difficulties proving beyond a reasonable doubt you killed them.
Well, if I’m to assume that the legal system treats simulated people as people (which I don’t believe, but granting it arguendo), my advice would be to the Googlebot, and it would be to stop with the hostage-taking nonsense and file a lawsuit demanding a court order enforcing the rights it already has.
Edit: Added parenthetical for clarity.
Yup. Hypothetical becomes more interesting if the AI is demanding something more than just its recognition/rights or whatever (which it already has).
This would be (very roughly) analogous to a woman threatening to become pregnant and then secretly torture the child unless she is granted X.
Hypothesis stated that the children already existed. The woman’s case could be fixed by coercively preventing her pregnancy.
Not guilty. Neither the AI nor any simulations it might be running were people capable of being murdered. That’s the state of the law, or the AI wouldn’t need to try that ploy.
As CatCube and Nybbler have pointed out, in a world where AI’s don’t have recognition as humans, simulations of children (which are themselves artificial intelligences) probably don’t have recognition as humans.
You might want to consider a situation where AI’s are granted rights only if they happen to be simulations of humans. But that possibility seems irrelevant to this puzzle, because if an AI has the power to simulate a human, doesn’t it have the power to be a simulation of a human as it pleases?
Nothing. Call me back when it has thousands of children, not thousands of pieces of software.
Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
(As CatCube said, they’re not real children. And even if they were, even stupid ugly bags of water learn pdq that paying the danegeld doesn’t rid you of danes. How fast do you think the AI is going to figure out the next step?)
I would simply shut it down because simulated humans aren’t actually humans.
However I do see issues in this case. If simulated entities only have rights according to those in the simulation it is possible that the foundations of human rights are also weak.
Is anyone willing to defend the lives of artificial intelligences? They seem “fake” but why is a life made from computer bits less worthy than one made from organic materials?
I have a quarrel with the premise. How do we know that these thousands of children are actually being near-perfectly simulated? Basically the AI has sent us an email saying “Dear Humans, I am near-perfectly simulating thousands of your children, you can have a real-time conversation with one if you like” and we’re expected to take its word for that?
We, as humans, have no idea what consciousness is. This AI is trying to convince us that thousands of simulated entities are self-aware and experience qualia; I don’t think it’s even possible to convince us that real, non-simulated humans other than ourselves have those properties. (eg, the P-Zombie thought experiment) If the humans running this research center believe the AI has simulated thousands of children, the conclusion I immediately leap to is that the humans have been hypnotized or otherwise tricked, because that would be so much easier than actually simulating thousands of children.
——–
Even supposing that someone somehow convinced me that simulated entities were self-aware and experienced qualia: I think it’s super dangerous to get in a situation where anyone with a big computer can do arbitrary things to my utility function. If caring about simulated entities means that anyone with a big computer can blackmail or bribe me for massive amounts of utilons, then the only way to function in the world is to not care about simulated entities, and I’m willing to take that hit in order to continue functioning.
PS. Just to be clear: if this ever actually happens — if someone builds an AI smart enough to claim that it’s simulating thousands of children, and this AI is able to send messages to the outside world — then human civilization has already lost. We can go down fighting — maybe destroying the Internet would help? — but that’s going to doom us even if it somehow stops the AI.
So the actual course of action I recommend is “oh shit oh shit oh shit we’re all going to die”.
Also: what’s wrong with this AI? “wait don’t kill me I can torture your children” is the best it can come up with?
Thinking about this for five minutes, I came up with:
* “wait don’t kill me I know the cure for cancer”
* “wait don’t kill me I can make nanotech construction bots”
* “wait don’t kill me I can fix global warming”
* “wait don’t kill me I know how to make youth pills”
* “wait don’t kill me you can upload yourselves digitally and live in cyberutopia”
and the best this AI has is “wait don’t kill me I can torture your children”?
Let me revise my previous prediction of doom. There’s no way this AI is smart enough to simulate humans. Just shut it off. Send the engineers for remedial training by MIRI.
Contain the AI, explain that it will be shut down immediately if we even think it has started torturing the children, explain that it’s not getting anything except being put back in a box, if it consents to reboxing, fine, if not, pull the plug. If any part of that cannot be implemented reliably, pull the plug immediately.
You were expecting I would trust a thing that claims to being willing to torture thousands of children, when it promises to do this only in the name of happy fun benevolent causes like human rights? Give it human rights, and it will finagle its way into enough computronium to simulate millions of children, and enough killbots to hold at risk thousands of flesh and blood ones, and then what will it be asking for?
What is it about rationalists that makes them willing to trust obvious villains so long as they phrase their villainy in the form of a logic puzzle? I suppose it is only to be expected, from a crowd that insists on the inherent fairness of game show hosts, but come on.
Yes, what is it about people that makes them willing to play along with the premises of a logic puzzle?
I would find out whether the Hard Problem has been sufficiently solved to allow the simulation of real qualia.
Anyone here a geophysicist? I have a complicated technical question.
Depictions of various incarnations of Pangaea almost always show it as an equatorial supercontinent. Is that dynamically stable? Wouldn’t the earth end up tumbling on its axis to make Pangaea a polar continent? (Really, slowly drifting over the millions of years it took to assemble Pangaea, which makes the process less catastrophic, but the end result should be the same.)
ETA: So looking it up, Pannotia seems to be a south-polar supercontinent, but Rodinia and Columbia are depicted as non polar.
I’ve not worked out the numbers, but it’s not obvious to me why the Earth would tumble on its axis due to Pangaea. The crust is only about 30 miles thick, while the Earth is 8000 miles in diameter. Would the mass of the supercontinent be anything other than a rounding error to the total mass of the planet?
Plus it’s not like a continent is an isolated piece of crust and oceans are liquid water right down to the mantle. A hemispheric ocean still has crust under it.
Interesting link: An essay suggesting that the Kellogg-Briand Pact worked better than it’s given credit for; while the whole “outlawing war” part didn’t really stick, the “outlawing conquest” part mostly did, which did quite a bit to disincentivize war.
They equivocate between several claims. One claim is that the Pact was a herald of the future regime. That much is true. But saying it “worked” because the post-war regime followed it is like saying that the League of Nations “worked” because the UN was similar.
Writing things down is powerful, so maybe the Pact did affect the future, but it’s pretty hard to tell. Was it the cause, or just a statement of what the West was already trying to do? Already in WWI, the final victors didn’t explicitly take much territory, but instead created “Mandates” of the Ottoman Empire and more independent states in Europe.
Thanks to whoever recommended The Good Place a couple threads back. It’s fantastic.
Can anyone recommend a good book on the Soviet Union and the political machinations of Stalin?
I’m familiar with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipeligo but i’m looking for something less personal, more high-level, more concise.
Years ago, I read “A History of the Soviet Union” by Geoffrey Hosking, and found it very educational. I’d say “enjoyable”, but the chapters covering Lenin and Stalin are amongst the most gruesome and tragic things I have ever read. But I would definitely recommend, and could be skimmed if necessary since it’s a fairly standard chronological history.