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What’s something you made by yourself that you’re proud of?
Not 100% by myself, because I worked with a good friend of mine, but I made my own AR-15 from an 80% lower.
Is “an 80% lower” a typo or is there some way you can make a rifle out of whatever that means?
For a rifle, in the U.S.A., there are very specific laws about what a gun is.
Modern guns have lots of interchangeable parts, and the part with the important serial number that is legally the “gun” for registration purposes is the lower.
An “80% lower” is a lower which is not functional. It is only 80% complete for being able to work with other AR-15 components to make a functioning firearm, and thus not yet a gun.
EchoChaos and his friend did the machining needed to take that lower from 80% complete to 100% complete, and then added and assembled the other parts to have a working AR-15.
Excellently explained.
That is exactly what we did.
Nit: That’s “lower receiver”, and unique to the AR-15. “Receiver” is gun-speak for “frame” or “chassis”, and in the specific case of the AR-15, has separate upper and lower halves. The lower half is the part with the serial number, and at least for now is the only part the BATF vests with the legal attribute of gun-ness.
Thanks. Sounds like a fun project.
@Enkidum
It’s tremendously fun, and surprisingly easy to pull off. Highly recommended as a project for someone who wants to learn more about modern firearms.
Plus at the end you have “your own gun” to a degree of uniqueness that you can’t get anywhere else.
A software suite to assist in the generation of neuropsychological experiments. A wooden drawer for storing several hundred comics (made it thirty years ago, but it has disappeared at some point in the past twenty years along with said comics, much to my annoyance). A bedroom in the basement of my father’s cottage.
When I was about thirteen and on an extended road/camping trip with our family, the main crosspiece of our tent broke due to fatigue. I made a replacement using my pocketknife and improvised materials, that functioned as well as the original for the remainder of the trip.
Plus assorted stuff over thirty or so years as an engineer, but that was the first thing I thought of.
When I was teaching myself welding, I built a steel and granite coffee table that I still use.
It’s crooked in spots, because I was not a very good welder and hadn’t figured out heat warping yet, but it still makes me smile. And it’s all but indestructible.
It was also the first time I ever worked with granite, which was fun. Just cutting a piece of stone to the right shape and rounding the edges, but it’s a lot different than working with metal or wood.
How do you attach steel and granite? Can the granite be removed from the steel at this point?
Glue. Really strong masonry adhesive, in this case.
The granite could be removed from the steel frame of the table because I glued it to a set of steel brackets, and those steel brackets bolt attach to the table frame with bolts.
You probably could not get the granite off the brackets easily. That was the idea of glueing them like that, anyhow.
Gluing granite sounds bizarre to me, very interesting to hear that that’s possible, thanks.
It was a surprise to me, too.
I basically decided to do the granite top on a whim, based on never having done anything with stone and it sounding fun. I had the exact same question about how to attach it to anything else, so I went and looked at professionally made furniture with granite components to see what they did.
The answer was glue.
I made a program where you’d give it a word and it’d write a poem vaguely connected to it. I’ve also written a few short stories I’m rather proud of.
I just built a PC this last week, which I haven’t done in a long time. My old one was from 2009(!), and was really slow to boot, had some display flickers and occasional bluescreens.
The precipitating event for replacing it now was my video card fan had its bearings start to go. I took it out to try to oil it to try to get a little more life out of it, and ended up hard breaking it–so that kind of tempers the “proud” part of this story. I could still start the computer with the case open and a box fan blowing into it, but I wasn’t going to be running Crysis or anything.
The thread here was invaluable. I was basically really happy with the link provided by @sharper13, and I ended up with a system pretty darn close to the one @DragonMilk was talking about.
@CatCube, Glad that worked out for you!
My own answer to the OP’s question is two-fold:
1. When I was 18 I did finish carpentry and helped build the extremely detailed woodwork inside this building.
2. My current work-in-progress novel, which might not quite fit the spirit of the question as it’s not done yet. I’ve made enough progress to know my Alpha readers really like it, though.
Wow, I have a friend who’s a carpenter but he hasn’t had any projects with near that level of detail. Really cool you got to be a part of that.
The spirit of the question is very open! I like seeing people post their writing on the internet because if I had a knack for fiction I’d probably be one of them.
That’s awesome, glad it worked out well and thanks for the source of tips. If I ever have cause to own a serious computer I might follow your example.
Thoroughly beneath many people’s standards of “making” due to impermanence, but I’ve made some really excellent 3 layer cakes, all of them delicious and from scratch. Some of them even managed to look good without ever using horrible horrible fondant.
My woodworking days produced nothing that inspired quite as much pride as my Lemon Buttermilk cake with orange flower buttercream and passionfruit ganache.
As a person who prefers experiences to “owning things,” I value the ability to make a good cake quite highly. Also if you have a picture of that cake I’d appreciate the food porn.
Alas, I am a terrible terrible photographer, on account of never taking pictures of anything.
The effect of the golden ganache was similar to this, which is the recipe on which it was based, but with passionfruit inspirations from Valrhona. A smooth, shiny, geometric cake.
Man, tanatalizing. I know what to ask my wife for next birthday.
As part of my work I regularly brazen or solder up fixes, but they’re usually inside walls and soon forgotten, but when the side fence at my house collapses I bought $400 of redwood and built a new one, despite knowing little carpentry, and it isn’t great, but it’s mine and I’m happy with it.
I didn’t quite “make” but I had machined at a local shop to my specifications a faucet with a high pressure spray diverted that I had attached to a good U.S.A. made faucet that I assembled and installed in my kitchen that I thinks works better than the stock options I know of, and I’m pretty pleased with it.
Any idea how much you saved by repairing your own fence? Regardless I’d value the pride in seeing my hand-built fence every day over having one that colors inside the lines.
@imoimo,
Since I never asked for a quote I just don’t know but I’d be surprised if the labor was any less than twice the $400 I spent on the wood.
I once wrote these two jokes:
and
Are you sure you should be proud of those?
Yes. I like them very much.
The first one’s good, but the second one has a clumsiness to it in how long it takes to get set up.
Just to be clear, my comment was trying to be the equivalent of eye rolling and groaning when people make terrible puns. I am in favour of terrible puns.
Punsters really need to let go of this internalized self hatred.
Oh, if writing counts I might have something to say … but it doesn’t seem in the spirit of things (and imagine we have loads of word artists here).
I also restore cast iron, which satisfies the spirit but not the law; I’m sorta screwed either way.
I admit I laughed at the first one. The second one I don’t have the background for, but I suspect has a low payoff/setup ratio.
The second one is probably a valid criticism with some tweaks. The set-up is about 4-7 seconds long; the actual usual hangup is if people don’t immediately know what makes red wine the way it is or don’t remember the BTTF movies that well, there’s some lag-time trying to sort out the punchline.
I think it’s relatively funny, but to be honest I like it mostly because it was hard to write and only appeals to a limited number of people. It’s like that “Heisenberg gets a speeding ticket” joke, albeit the Heisenberg one is much better.
Did you hear about the Wild Hunt alarms Geralt had installed at Ciri’s house?
The instructions say, “In case of Eredin, Bréacc Glas.”
Well I’m curious, but too lazy to research how that joke works as that went past me.
Eredin Bréacc Glas is the antagonist of the Witcher 3 and master of the Wild Hunt. He wants to make use of the magical properties of the protagonist Geralt’s foster daughter Ciri’s blood to launch an interplanar invasion. His last two names sound like “break glass,” a phrase I associate with fire alarms.
The fact that the words “Jamaican accent” aren’t in your answer disappoints me.
@Tarpitz,
Thanks!
I haven’t read any of The Witcher novels, and I don’t play video games (but I often miss post ’80’s pop culture references).
@HeelBearCub,
????
Well, I think I’ve already used up my allotments of “What’s dat?” this thread.
@Plumber
I haven’t read them either, but I’ve heard they’re great!
@Nick,
I think I saw Sapkowski’s works listed on some “If you like sword & sorcery” list, but I’m hesitant because:
1) I already have a giant pile of books I “plan” to read.
2) It’s a series not a stand-alone.
3) It’s new.
4) The protagonist is supposed to have some super powers and I prefer tales of normal humans defeating the supernatural (Moorcock’s stories have given me my fill of the reverse).
But..
.
…if there’s a short story to sample I’ll give him a try (much of my reading has come from authors I’ve discovered in anthologies), and I value your opinion.
@Plumber:
Think of a Jamaican accent saying:
“In case of everything, break glass”
I wrote a fantasy novelette about a wizard-bureaucrat adapting to the post-apocalyptic future. It was great and I love it so much, even the first, pre-editorial draft.
I also wrote other things, but either I had too much help or they aren’t really good enough for me to be proud of.
Trying to think of something physical I created. I fixed more things than I’ve built from scratch; equipment at work or appliances around the house. Shop class was a long time ago.
I’ve made some tasty dishes, Salmon Chowder, but those were from cookbooks.
I’ve made three people that are pretty neat, but that was certainly not by myself.
I’ll go back to intangibles and point back to the post from last week where I advertised my novel serial. So far I covered 125 years, from the conception of a space ship through it’s staffing and various difficulties aboard. I aim for a few more centuries at least.
Oh, there’s also the TI-83 calculator games in High School. ‘Cow Dealer’ was particularly popular. Farming sims before they were cool.
A crap-ton of work processes and report improvements to make life a lot simpler. At one point I designed a query and rebill process that saved something like $2 million annually for one major company, at this current position I’ve rejiggered most of our reporting to identify sources of variances a lot more quickly.
On a personal level
-My lawn was 50% weeds when we moved in, with tons of dead spots. It’s now mostly grass. It needs aerated and I over-water, but it’s a decent lawn now.
-My old-fashioned and gin martini are both really good.
-My braises and steaks are fantastic, and I’m pretty close to damn good burgers.
$2mil a year, that’s nothing to sneeze at!
I would’ve to make a damn good burger, but also there’s so many burger places I love eating at that there’s no motivation to out do them.
@A Definite Beta Guy,
If they don’t involve an outside grill, please shred your steak cooking secrets!
Stove top?
Oven then stove top?
Stove top then oven?
How long?
What temperature?
Help!
my favorite spreadsheet takes a file our database kicks out every day and copies it into a the master dashboard. It’s not particularly technically challenging, it’s not even the most impressive spreadsheet I’ve built, but it works flawlessly and saves me a huge amount of time. I had to figure out a bunch of different things to get it to work right, and it makes me happy every time I use it.
I feel vicarious satisfaction just hearing about that. When I code for work I’m constantly re-evaluating the trade off between automating and just doing something manually. Some of my code that I’ve been using for years has been gradually automated so many little ways that when I come back to it after a while it’s A) Nearly unreadable but B) Smart enough that I don’t care.
I made a mosfet and screw terminal board for my woodworker friend to pwm drive led lighting with. Kicad has really matured and was better than my last experience with eagle.
I’ve also been using onshape lately to design parts for machining/printing, and it’s pretty great: web based and free to use if you don’t mind your designs being public.
I know mosfet is a transistor, but otherwise these sound like things I might understand if I were at all a hands on guy.
Possible but still pretty far into electronics jargon. A mosfet is indeed a transistor, and screw terminals make it easy to attach wires to a board. Kicad and eagle are popular software packages for designing circuit boards. Pwm is a way to efficiently do variable intensity for things like lights.
One of the martial arts I study involves swordsmanship, so I own a couple of swords. The scabbard for one of them split irreparably, and I made a new one to replace it.
It’s much harder than it sounds. There’s hardly a single flat surface on the thing, but it’s not made from nice, regular, jiggable curves either; it has to be shaped freehand with a spokeshave from a blank cut around the blade, and woe betide you if you take off a little too much wood on one side. On the inside, the two have to mate very closely: it has to fit tightly enough to hold the blade firmly but still loosely enough that you can draw the weapon. Plus you don’t want wood to rub up against the edge, since that dulls it. This means laboriously chiseling out the blade channel, checking where the high points are by oiling the blade and seeing where the spots of oil go, and chiseling some more. Repeat fifteen or twenty times and then clean up the surface.
The fittings are made out of buffalo horn, which ain’t too easy to work either (I went through something like five blanks for the scabbard collar) and smells profoundly bad when worked. Like burning hair, which it pretty much is.
Just wow. Why buffalo horn? And where would you get that?
1. The factory scabbard used wooden fittings, but they’d failed on me a number of times and I wanted something more durable. Water buffalo horn is the traditional material. I wasn’t going too overboard on tradition — I used poplar instead of magnolia wood, which is just this side of unobtainable through even specialist lumber suppliers in the States, and if you look up how to work with urushi lacquer you’ll understand why I noped the hell out of that and went with spar varnish and carbon black — but American bison was close enough and readily obtainable, so why not.
2. eBay.
My guess would be “from a buffalo.” Or, perhaps, from Buffalo.
It’s not one or the other.
You could get it from a buffalo that’s located in Buffalo.
If I meant xor I wouldn’t have said “or.”
If you’re a con artist, you could buffalo a buffalo in Buffalo.
Just going to put this here.
As someone fairly deep into Modular Synthesis, i’m proud of the individual modules i’ve built as well as the system as a whole. It is a unique instrument, within which unique signal paths are created and destroyed every session via patching.
What modules did you build? Did you follow existing schematics, or design them yourself?
I build from others’ schematics – im not an electronics designer and would rather spend time making music than studying electronics. I’m currently working on a Dubmix by Lowgain Electronics, a 5×5 matrix mixer for eurorack.
Cool.
I’ve often wondered about getting into all that stuff, since I kind of know my way around EE and music theory.
I made a lot of baskets as a kid. Hands down, basket weaving was the most useful thing I learnt in primary school. And we only had it because of our male*, now retired teacher, who also taught as crafts. I don’t get why so many people make fun of useless degrees by mentioning underwater basket weaving; basket weaving is clearly a lot more useful than a lot of other degrees, and you are supposed to submerge the branches you use in water to make them more flexible.
I was also an adept user of beads, and I made crocodiles and dolphins and flower bracelets.
Making baklava took me days (mainly due to peeling all those walnuts). I also like to make this layered Russian cake, but instead of the frosting they use, I use dulce de leche.
*Female teachers somehow only use the crafts class for drawing and coloring, which, while it does make their life easier, is not cool. In the Basque country, there were many school teachers in the 80s who joined for political (language related) reasons, and many of them were highly capable.
A nice 5-drawer cherry dresser – I made it when I was working for a cabinetmaker. It reminds me that I used to be good at wood-working, which I have done very little of in the last 2 decades.
Professionally, I’m particularly proud to have done some of the initial modeling that made it into this paper on Financial Reinsurance. One of the best-ever moments at work was seeing this on my exam syllabus and recognizing figure 2 as “wait a minute that’s my graph.”
I’m coming up more or less blank for physical objects. Yes, I’ve made things, but nothing that stands out a lot. In intangibles, the blog, plus a couple of spreadsheets at work which have cut out annoying parts of my job.
The only thing I’m proud of ever having made is a script/program I wrote—I never know quite what to call it—for performing semi-algorithmic, semi-improvised synth music with a MIDI keyboard, written in SuperCollider. I guess you could call it a ‘performance interface’. Irrationally annoyed by how often electronic music shows centre around performers looking at their laptops and playing pre-sequenced pre-sequenced parts, I wrote a script for playing not-already-sequences parts without a laptop.
Not-already-sequenced in the sense that the parts were responses to what I was playing on the MIDI keyboard (mostly simple arpeggiations, but with some randomness as well), and not on a laptop in the sense that it ran as a boot script on a desktop in as small a case as I could find, which I would run without a screen, qwerty keyboard or mouse, and with only my MIDI keyboard plugged in as input. I just felt like controlling things from an actual instrument, rather than by looking at a screen and clicking on clips to trigger them, would feel more ‘live’, somehow.
Technically it was neat, but aesthetically I’m not sure the results were up to much. It could have gotten better if I’d kept working at it, but even while I was developing it I was already becoming more interested in cohesive songs than in ambient synth noodlings, so it fell by the wayside as I decided to learn to write songs instead. (I’ve written some songs over the last year or two of which I’m proud, but I don’t really count those as candidates for ‘things I’m proud of’ because in my mind they’re not ‘done’ yet, in that haven’t come out into the world yet, either as a performance or a recording.)
Neat. Ever played around with Max/MSP?
Yeah, I started that project in Max, actually, but ditched it when I found that the complexity of what I wanted to do was pushing the limits of the ‘patch boxes together with lines’ model. I haven’t used it in a long time, but honestly it might be more fun than SuperCollider for noodling and doodling.
I just made myself a shirt. I got a bolt of fabric and then copied a shirt I already own as a pattern. It turned out with more holes than I first thought, but I’m surprised and pleased at how well it turned out for my first try.
A while back our mop head broke but the wooden stick was still sturdy so I repainted it and made a new head out of a towel and string.
I forged a poker with a dragon head a while back.
Not completely ‘by myself’, since I was being instructed by a professional smith.
It’s hard to say what “made it yourself” means. I learned recently that there’s youtube videos on making an axe starting from iron ore. I’ve never come close to anything like that. (Not sure how they did it, since I believe a preliminary step in smelting iron is making charcoal, then coke from the charcoal. You need to cut down trees for this, for which you need an axe. Maybe they used a bronze or stone axe).
I built a speech synthesizer once, a peripheral card for an Apple ][. I didn’t design it, though, I worked from a plan. I didn’t write the low-level software, but I did write a text-to-speech program in Applesoft Basic.
I’ve written a lot of software, though I take it we’re referring to physical objects. Besides, I’d be officially outing myself if I mentioned the few (obscure but not unknown) which I’ve released.
If you knapped a flint axe to cut down the trees to convert to charcoal to fire the furnace to smelt the iron to make a steel axe, that would be pretty impressive, all right.
I vaguely recall Aleister Crowley recommending an exercise along these lines in one of his writings. It was glossed as a way to show the interconnectedness of things, but I’m suspicious that Crowley, who was a keen mountaineer, was mainly interested in showing off his outdoorsmanship skills.
LIke this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2ExwOAjLNw&list=PLGnWLXjIDnpBVRqu5lz5JGaQxjPs7q3CJ&index=7
He’s still trying to progress past tiny iron beads.
Not made by myself…
But over the spring and early summer, I turned a non-running motorcycle into a running motorcycle. By figuring out how to detach the carburetor from the engine, clean the carburetor, and re-attach all the components.
There was a feeling of visceral pleasure when I was able to get the engine to start up, and then took the motorcycle for a ride.
EDITED: if anyone recognizes the description “metric motorcyle with an inline-4 engine”, that is the type I was working on. That is what made removal and re-attachment of the carburetor so challenging.
I made a Minecraft Headless Horseman cosplay. Had to toss it after a while, it takes up too much space, and I don’t attend conventions enough to keep it around.
Also made a tent-sized stepped pyramid, out of nothing but cardboard and duct tape.
I’ve made more than a few music mashups that I still enjoy on my music player.
I’ve done some photoshop work that I’m pretty proud of, though nothing innovative.
Lots and lots of photographs.
The cabinet and sink area in my laundry room.
The shelves and treadmill desk in my garage.
The mantel over my fireplace.
The little A-frame birdhouse hanging in a tree in my back yard that I look out at every morning when I’m drinking my coffee.
Dinner for my family, almost every night.
Great question. Seems like it’s geared a little more toward the physical side of “making” something, and while I am proud of my projects in that regard, none seem particularly noteworthy off the top of my head.
I am proud of some speeches I’ve written (and delivered) in my life, though I don’t find the opportunity for it much anymore. There was one I gave, despite some organizational opposition at my selection as speaker, that resulted in a very substantial fundraising success for my [insert civil society organization redacted for privacy reasons] when I was in high school. That one definitely sticks with me. I think it qualifies under a reasonable interpretation of your question.
Huh definitely a cool one for its unusualness. I assume you were on student council or something? I don’t remember hearing speeches from student council in high school, only from the valedictorian.
I had to laugh at that. Student government is the last thing I would get involved in (I was an officer in plenty of clubs. I don’t really view council/gov. as the same sort of thing, though).
That particular one was entirely unrelated to school activities. I occasionally wrote speeches for my friends for school-related (non-graded) purposes, though. It was fun. I could be creative without worrying about any real judgment. I wrote one for a couple friends to jointly deliver at an NHS induction ceremony that was interrupted – really interrupted – multiple times by applause. On the one hand, it was probably the most platitude-filled, cliche-ridden piece of prose I’ve ever put together. On the other, it managed an appropriate tone for the occasion, and probably didn’t sound trite to people hearing it just once.
When I wrote for other people, I made a game of what subtle allusion or joke I could sneak in to entertain 2 or 3 folks in a crowd of a couple hundred.
I used to play Warhammer 40k, and I built a kitbashed Inquisitor that I was quite proud of.
I’ve written several scripts for RPGs I play. In addition to a full dice roller/initiative tracker for Discord, I have:
An Ars Magica library generator
A Vampire: the Requiem script to track vampires across huge spans of time
An Exalted Dragon-Blooded simulation that tracks the DNA and exaltation rates of thousands of individuals across generations
Oh, that reminds me of the excel 7th Sea character creator I made. Over time I added lots of custom elements, random name/ship/henchman generator, a graphical analysis of every swordsman school… and then my hard drive crashed and now I don’t want to play it without my spreadsheet.
I was on the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society Hugo discussion panel. This means I was one of 5 people opining about the Hugo nominees for novel, novella, novelette, short story, drama long form, drama short form, and graphic story.
There have been 39 of these annual panels, all run by Terry Graybill, and I respect her cat-wrangling ability both for getting free copies of nominees and for making sure all the panelists read/saw/heard everything.
There were six nominees per category, a change from the previous five. I’m surprised there were no ties leading to a category or two with seven nominees.
Let’s have a little culture war. One notable thing about the Hugos this year is that there no white male nominees in the fiction categories I listed. (Not counting drama, I think.) Charles Stross got a series nomination for The Laundry files, but panelists aren’t required to read the series because there just isn’t enough time.
I’ve seen claims that it was just chance (which seems very unlikely) or alternatively that there’s been so much sf by white men that they don’t have as much interesting to say (which also seems unlikely, or at least that the effect would be so extreme).
I’m inclined to think that enough potential Hugo nominators (members of the Worldcon) have been discouraged from reading stories by white men and/or liking them and/or admitting they like them to have affected the nominations. I’m quite curious about what will be on the long list of nominees that didn’t quite make the ballot.
I’m annoyed because the purpose of the Hugos (and the Hugo discussion panel) is to draw people’s attention to things they might have missed, and there was probably some excellent work by white men in 2018 that I haven’t heard about. Recommendations are welcome. My standards for Hugo nominees are that the work should be extraordinary in some way rather than just a tolerably decent example of what’s usually done. Just choosing a thing because it sold well doesn’t add information.
This being said, I wouldn’t call this an embarrassing slate– I liked a fairly high proportion and hated very little of it.
I’m going to post my thoughts about the Hugos in separate comments to keep the discussion a bit organized.
After the Puppy Wars, those who do not believe “diversity” is the number one criterion for the awards mostly simply abandoned the Hugos as lost.
I don’t think diversity is the number one criterion for the Hugos (though it’s obviously important to a lot of people) and I don’t think the Hugos are lost.
Anyway, is there any notable sf from 2018 (by white men or otherwise) that you’d recommend?
It reads to me from your article that diversity is #1 but quality is still important.
I doubt there would be absolutely zero white men without diversity being the top criterion. Now, that doesn’t mean that nobody cares about quality at all, certainly. You said that you enjoyed what you read.
As for notable 2018 Sci-Fi, I enjoyed the Iron Dragon series by Rob Kroese. Basically a bunch of people from the future crash land in Ninth Century Norway and have to build a spaceship. Well written and well researched from a historical perspective.
To be fair, it might very well be that quality is #1 but diversity is still important. If you have more than one criteria, than the work that excels in the primary criteria might still be passed over for others that rate highly in that quality but also meet secondary qualities.
Although that’s ‘diversity’ in this case, not diversity, since adding at least one white male author to a panel that had none would be more diversity in the literal, pedantic sense.
@Randy M
“Diversity may not be number 1, but it is such an important secondary criteria so as to swamp all other criteria” is a bit more of a mouthful, though.
Yeah, it’s effectively the same thing.
Randy M,
nitpick: this about diversity among the nominees, not on the panel.
Or the spread in diversity could be high but the spread in quality low. It’s not quite the same thing.
I agree the results would be the same, but since the idea is to explain the results, it’s kind of different.
@Nancy Lebovitz >
I read far less science-fiction than I did in my youth, and the last “SF” work that I’ve recently read that wasmemorable to me was first published in 1920, and I can’t think of any 2018 “SF” works.
As far as fantasy-fiction goes the most recent published book that I found that I’ve read and enjoyed was The Tangled Lands by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell.
As far as “diversity” goes I’ve indeed noticed that more new “genre” authors on the shelves are women and “of color” and the quantity of books published is higher, with no change in quality from the ’70’s on that I’ve noticed.
I enjoyed Skyward by Sanderson. It’s sort of the classic mecha anime plot, but it’s really well done.
I can’t think of the last SF release I was hyped up for, honestly. The ending of Seveneves soured me on Stephenson – the first two thirds of the book was much better – and Fall hasn’t sounded much better. Nothing new from Miéville, and the idea of new material from Gaiman is just a sad dream. Bacigalupi hasn’t put out anything for a while either. Gibson’s Peripheral sequel is perpetually pending. I don’t particularly like Scalzi, but I don’t think he has anything new. And it’s not like Lee, Novik, Rowanhorse, or Kowall are anything but good authors (the rest I don’t know). I can’t think of any outstanding short fiction from this year not by the authors nominated, either.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I think it’s useless to rant about award season without alternatives to propose.
Books that look interesting from 2018 I’ve discovered while writing this comment:
Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller
Alastair Reynolds’ new Revelation Space book (but I don’t like Reynolds, so I won’t read it)
The Great Chain of Unbeing, by Andrew Crumey (which looks to be a sort of anthology in the vein of Chronicles of Majipoor or Vacuum Diagrams of the sort I absolutely adore – I’ll be buying this one, most likely)
The Rig, by Roger Levy
The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts (straddles the line between novel and novella, for me)
Reynolds is my favorite hard sci-fi author, I read Elysium Fire and thought it was the weakest of all of them. I like space operas because they’re about Big Ideas. Alien invasions, conquest of galaxies, Deep Time, all that good stuff. It’s all about The Terrible Secret of Space. This one starts off with Mysterious Happenings with Big Implications, naq vg gheaf bhg vg jnf whfg n onfvp eriratr fpurzr jvgu ab jvqre vzcyvpngvbaf sbe uhznavgl/pvivyvmngvba/nalguvat. (note, this spoils the entire book, so don’t decrypt unless you never, ever, ever, ever plan to read it).
That said, I’m halfway through Revenger and I like it so far. I actually care about the characters, which is something I can’t usually say in Reynold’s novels. I certainly wouldn’t put it up for a Hugo though.
Can we stop pretending that the Hugos are about anything but Social Justice in SF? I’ve only been tracking Best Novel, but of the thirty novels nominated for the Hugo since 2013 without Sad/Rabid puppy support, a grand total of five have gone to white males. That’s two for John Scalzi, two for Kim Stanley Robinson, and one for Charlie Stross, all three of whom are basically self-avowed SJWs at this point. Same period, same thirty novels, and I count three with a clear white male protagonist. Given the demographics of the community, this is beyond the bounds of plausible coincidence.
For about the same period, and retroactively to the beginning of the Hugos, I’ve been ranking the best novel nominees according to reasonably objective SJ-aligned criteria including “diversity” of authors and protagonists. We are now four out of four for the nominee with the highest SJ-alignment score winning the Hugo, and the only thing that stops it from being six for six is Cixin Liu’s dark-horse candidacy in 2015 after a previous nominee withdrew because they didn’t want the stink of a Puppy nomination on their record and Liu slipped in with an uvetted book that received acclaim from both sides of the Culture War.
Yes, there’s a quality floor for nominations, but I think it corresponds pretty closely with the threshold for a hardcover print run by one of the major SF publishers. So these are mostly not-bad books and some of them are pretty good.
“Most SJ-compliant not-bad SF novel, no icky white males allowed unless they’re willing to wear a dress for the cause”, is sufficiently narrow praise that I find it offensive for it to be labeled as “Best SF novel, as determined by the World Science Fiction Convention”. We’ve already got the Tiptree, Lambda, and Gaylactic awards, and there’s room for more if someone really wants them. Count me out. And count it as a big negative for the odds of my ever reading your book, if you think “Hugo Award Winner!” is a selling point worth real estate on the slipcover.
“For about the same period, and retroactively to the beginning of the Hugos, I’ve been ranking the best novel nominees according to reasonably objective SJ-aligned criteria including “diversity” of authors and protagonists.”
This sounds like a substantial piece of research, and I hope you will post it or a link to it here.
If you have recommendations for non-SJW sf, please post them.
I’ve been reading Jon Maberry’s Joe Ledger thrillers, and I’m curious about what sort of SJW rating you’d give them.
It is at the moment just a poorly-documented spreadsheet, and I’m not sure where would be the best place to post it if I were to polish it to that level. But, yes, I probably should do that.
Haven’t read the “Joe Ledger” series; sounds like maybe I should start. From a few online reviews and summaries it looks like it would get an SJ-alignment score of about -3 due to white male author and protagonist and being borderline MilSF. That’s on a scale that theoretically runs from -12 to +12, but in practice the one-standard-deviation range was from -4.3 to +1.1 in the pre-Racefail era and -1.6 to +3.6 afterwards.
Other recommendations, white male authors publishing in 2018-2019:
James S. A. Corey, “Persepolis Rising” and “Tiamat’s Wrath” (2018 and 2019 respectively) f you like space opera and have been following the series. If not, get thee to “Leviathan Wakes”.
Derek Kunksen, “The Quantum Magician”, space-operatic caper story serialized in Analog, but now out in softcover
Jack McDevitt, “The Long Sunset”, if you’ve been enjoying his “Academy” series (spacefaring archaeologists wondering why all the civilizations they find are dead or dying) so far.
Alastair Reynolds, “Elysium Fire” if you’ve been enjoying the Revelation Space serieis so far, and “The Shadow Captain” follows 2016’s “Revenger” as an otherwise standalone YA-ish space opera that makes swashbuckling space buccaneers almost a sensible proposition.
John Scalsi’s “The Consuming Fire” follows 2017’s Hugo-nominated “Collapsing Empire”, wherein a scientist has to tell a galactic empress that FTL travel is going to stop working real soon. Hints of a global-warming allegory, but not so heavy-handed as to ruin the space opera.
Charlie Stross, “The Labyrinth Index”. Either you like the Laundry Files or you don’t, but if you like them this is more of the same (not Bob-and/or-Mo-centric, if that matters).
Peter Watts, “Freeze-Frame Revolution”, novella about the indentured-servant crew of a starship trying to revolt against the AI that keeps putting them in suspended animation and tinkering with their memories.
David Weber, “Uncompromising Honor”, not sure that I actually recommend this, but if you like the Honor Harrington series, this is the end of it, and if you’ve grown dissatisfied with the series, this is the end of it. Glad I read it, now I never have to read anything Weber writes ever again.
C.J. Cherryh gets an honorable mention for “Alliance Rising”, on the grounds that it’s the sort of book that had her publisher tell her to hide her gender behind her initials even though that never really fooled anyone. If you liked the series centered on “Downbelow Station”, this fills in an interesting bit of backstory.
And it’s not really science fiction, or even his usual alternate history, but Harry Turtledove’s “Alpha and Omega” is going to be marketed and reviewed as SF. Alternate-near-future in which we learn what happens when the Ark of the Covenant is found buried under the Temple Mount. From a mostly-secular-Jewish perspective, but with a diverse set of POVs and this is the no-shit Indiana Jones Ark, not the moldy wooden box ark.
Sigh. It’s so hard to come up with a unique premise.
Alternate-near-future in which we learn what happens when the Ark of the Covenant is found buried under the Temple Mount.
Well dammit. I’ve never read any Turtledove (never been enticed by the blurbs) but since this hits my “religious SF” buttons with exactly the right degree of pressure, I may have to check this one out!
The Catholic perspective, alas, is represented only by a lapsed-Catholic journalist among the major characters, and I don’t think we got an official statement out of the Vatican. Probably still stuck in committee, or else their people are still searching the secret vaults for the crate they thought was holding the Ark all along.
The other Abrahamic faiths get the range from mostly-secular to devoutly faithful and layman to High Priest or equivalent. And yes, with an Ark at hand, the Israelis will come up with a High Priest and start looking real hard for a Messiah. Turtledove, IMO, plays fair with all of these.
…I mean, it’s the end of the section about the Solarian war, but, wasn’t the plan always for him to write a dozen more about the (secret mustache twirling villain polity) that I don’t care about?
(Though I’m with you on the good-lord-I’m-glad-we’re-done train. I will say this one was bad, but less bad than a few of the previous; we had several intricate space battles (the reason I read them) and almost no endless discussions of revolutions on obscure planets I don’t care about where he demonstrated that he looked at an encyclopedia for pick-an-ethnicity names (Christ that was bad.) And hey, I don’t think a single chapter was reprinted wholesale from a previous book, unlike the last, what five. Oh, and Victor Cachat didn’t show up that I remember, which means no two-page description of how cool and dedicated he is!)
(At some point I think I went past the boundary of even damning with faint praise.)
@all
I stoped reading Honor Harrington after the twelved or thirteened book. I was honestly surprised to find out that there where dozenz of books after that. Is there any reason for someone who was really anoyed be all the Mary -, and Gary Sues, and the CW heavyness of it all, to start to read the books again?
(I mean I liked a lot of the world building, and the battles and stuff)
@John Schilling
Can you spread some light on what you mean by this?
@DarkTiger
This may have been a joke, in which case I hate you, but if not the correct terms are twelfth and thirteenth.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Nah, it was just a case of “second language and monday mornings don’t mix well”.
I notice a lot of the recommendations are of this or that “series.” That’s probably my biggest complaint about both SF and fantasy today. The idea of publishing a stand-alone book seems to have died (or been taken out and shot). I can understand the economics reasons for this, and it’s clear that a ton of people like never-ending series, but I find it really hard to commit to a series (or as is common in fantasy, a trilogy invariably followed by another) unless is it highly recommended and bounded*, especially if it is by a writer I have never heard or of read any work by previously.
There are a few series I read, largely because I got hooked on them and don’t want to go cold turkey. Stross’s Laundry series is the main one.
* Like A Song of Ice and Fire is bounded. Hahahahah, got me on that one, George.
@DarkTigger
There are a few bright spots in some of the later Harrington books — IIRC, some of the action with Michelle Henke out in the Talbot Cluster, and the Solarian Navy getting its butt good and kicked. But it’s buried in enough crap that it’s just not worth bothering digging for it.
@DarkTigger:
Sure. Caroline Cherry got her start writing basically military science fiction(*), in the 1970s. The bit where female SF authors were encouraged to use pseudoyms and initials to conceal their ovaries had mostly died out by the end of the ’60s, but IIRC it was her publisher’s suggestion that maybe some of her target audience would still be put off by having girl cooties on their outer-space war stories even if they were opening up to female storytellers in other contexts. So “C.J. Cherryh” was about the last in the field to use gender-blinding initials, at least until K.J. Parker in the other direction.
Cherryh was really good at writing outer-space war stories, Hugo-winning good, which meant her gender was outed very early. And it turns out the boys didn’t mind the girl cooties on their war stories. And she’s since branched out from doing war stories and war-adjacent stories, but all under her original pen name,
“Alliance Rising” is a prequel to her very first Hugo-winning outer space war story, “Downbelow Station”, a series she seemed to have abandoned about twenty years ago. It’s not technically a war story itself, because the war hasn’t started yet, but it’s a story about mostly (white-ish) men doing traditionally manly stuff like building and flying spaceships and some commerce and power politics and whatnot. Not the sort of stuff that would win a Hugo today, unlike 1982 or 1989.
For those familiar with the earlier works in the series, this is set a couple generations after the introduction of FTL travel to the twenty-ish star systems settled by STL ships, before the reintroduction of Sol System and the Earth Company Fleet to that mix, and provides at least a partial answer to the question, “Why did people bother building and maintaining a bunch of giant space stations that seem to serve no purpose other than being places adventuring space heroes can fly starships to?”
* Or at least martial quasi-fantasy; her very first works looked like bog-standard Tolkeinesque quests until you realize the questing heroine has a laser pistol and a portable wormhole generator.
Also S.C. Sykes (active starting 1981), who wasn’t very prolific but did get a Babylon 5 character named after her.
I gave up on the Laundry books when they got mean-spirited. Sure, they’d already gone from homage to parody as early as book 2, but there’s parody and then there’s parody; it’s one thing to lightly mock something that everyone knows is silly, but at some point Stross talked himself into taking up premises that he clearly doesn’t like or respect, and then to working with characters that he doesn’t like or respect, and the whole thing started to drift into a kind of self-flagellating tone. I presume it went downhill from there but I’m not masochistic enough to find out.
@Nornagest
Can you elaborate? Out of the Laundry series I’ve only read the free shorts, Down on the Farm, Overtime, and Equoid. And it seemed to me like only the last of the three qualifies, which spends a good bit of time trashing Lovecraft.
The shorts are generally fine, though as you say Equoid has some of that mean-spiritedness going on. And the first three or so full-length books are fine too. I didn’t like The Apocalypse Codex as much, which brings a couple of Modesty Blaise pastiches out of nowhere as secondary protagonists and leans a bit too heavily on lazy Bush-era evangelical tropes. But it’s still roughly in the spirit of the earlier books.
That marks a turning point in the series, though: after Apocalypse Codex, Stross stops pastiching spy fiction and starts working with broad pop-cultural archetypes. The Rhesus Chart does vampires, The Annihilation Score does superheroes, The Nightmare Stacks does elves. And that doesn’t work for me from a couple of angles: it feels shoehorned, for one thing, but what’s worse, I didn’t get the impression that Stross was having fun with it. The characters get bitter and self-critical. Long segments are devoted to pointing out logical flaws in genre tropes. And when it’s over, the premise of the week usually doesn’t end up tying back into the Laundry universe in a satisfying way.
The books start getting clumsily topical at around the same time, which I never like reading, but that’s just icing on the cake.
What Nornagest says, mostly. The Laundry Files work as a parody/homage to the Cthulhu Mythos + Spy Fiction, and it’s clear that Stross actually has an affinity for those two. But Cthulhu Mythos + Spy Fiction + Genre of the Month gets too complicated, and Stross is now picking on genres that he doesn’t feel an affinity for. I thought Rhesus Chart worked well enough because vampires are moderately Cthulhu-ish and (with obligatory masquerade) moderately spy-thriller-ish, and I don’t think Stross dislikes them as much as some of the others.
Also, he’s decided for whatever reason that the protagonist he invented at the start of this journey is now thoroughly reprehensible for various reasons, and that said protagonist’s wife is an omnicompetent and (for putting up with him) omnibenevolent saint unjustly tormented by all around her, and neither one of those is a good relationship for an author to have with a protagonist.
At this point, the books with Bob and/or Mo front and center are a net negative except for plot continuity, the ones focusing on secondary characters are still in net positive territory for me, but I can see myself dropping the series if it continues on the present course. Or, as with the Harrington series, skimming most of it for plot continuity so that I can still enjoy the good bits as they come.
The Catholic perspective, alas, is represented only by a lapsed-Catholic journalist among the major characters, and I don’t think we got an official statement out of the Vatican.
I don’t mind any lack of Catholic triumphalism, as long as the faith(s) involved get proper representatives from all viewpoints, i.e. not everyone from Jews to Buddhists holding impeccable secular 21st century liberal opinions on everything, plus God(dess)/entity/symbol you may care to use as representing aspirational values loves everybody and nothing is bad and no Hell and all dogs go to Heaven and the Ark is some kind of repository of cosmic vibration crystals that enlighten everyone to be their better selves miraculously.
But heck, even if it is Indiana Jones-style chasing around after the Ark, I don’t mind!
And then it gets more Tolkienesque. (While the qhal of the first two books are various flavors of soulless, pitiless fae, the ones in the third book are pretty close to the Eldar, down to having to make a choice analogous to Galadriel and Elrond’s.)
Well, a fair number of them hold such opinions at the start. But there’s this Ark that insists on floating six inches above any ground that isn’t the Holy of Holies of the Temple, and they mostly aren’t stubborn-minded idiots. And it’s set mostly in and around Jerusalem, so there’s plenty of devout Jews and Muslims and a few Christians – some but not all of whom are stubborn-minded idiots and find that the Ark isn’t bound to respect every bit of dogma they’ve invented in its maker’s name the past fourteen to twenty-five centuries.
Also some Indiana Jones stuff, suitably updated for the 21st century. The bit where someone thinks opening the Ark would make for a nice global reality-TV special doesn’t go quite as badly as a straightforward extrapolation from Indy might suggest, but still not a good plan. Which, duh, RTFM.
No more petty spoilers. Enjoy.
It seemed clear to me that Weber lost interest in this storyline at some point, and I guess kept writing it because the money was good.
He should have killed Honor off at the Battle of Manticore, with a final scene in which Hamish and Emily are taking Raoul to see the site on Haven where the unconditional surrender was signed, just before he leaves for Saganami Island.
He wrote himself into a corner in at least two different ways–first, by giving Manticore unbeatable technology, and second, by giving us a bunch of sympathetic characters on the Havenite side who were going to have to die/be defeated if the main characters were to win.
The new subplot (war with the Sollies and the Mesan Alignment) just wasn’t very interesting. I think it could have been done well, but everyone with any power on the Solly side was constantly carrying the idiot ball, and the Mesan Alignment were genetically-engineered supergeniuses with a centuries-old secret plot that looked like it had been cooked up by a 12 year old.
@John Schilling – can I read Alliance Rising never having touched Cherryh before?
Yes, I think it explains everything you need to know in-story, and it would actually make a decent entry point into the Alliance/Union universe.
@John Schilling
Thanks for the answer I just looked at Alliance Rising and did not see that she basically started all the way back than.
If Alliance Rising is your entry point into the Union/Alliance series, it’s probably worth noting that there are continuity issues that may be more visible if you go straight from it to, e.g., Downbelow Station vs. remembering the earlier book from a decade or three’s distance. (Not a new thing with Cherryh– IIRC Cyteen and DS also have some points at which their gears don’t mesh, Serpent’s Reach’s chronology doesn’t fit with the other books, etc.)
I don’t think it’s a major problem. The books each work on their own, and the overall shape of the larger history fits together reasonably well. But specific events, timing, how and when important organizations were founded, etc. should probably be treated as more impressionistic between books, even though individually they’re very careful about date and time issues.
Alternatively, read them as historical novels from different times and places based on the same fragmentary sources, with different choices for filling in the blanks.
I still like the Laundry files enough to keep reading them, but they’re somewhat less fun than they were.
It seemed to me that the earlier books were insider humor about British bureaucracy, while the later books about American megachurches were necessarily outsider humor and less subtle.
I’m not as sure about what happened with Bob and Mo, but I’m curious about whether his mistakes about their relationship were well foreshadowed. And I thought a large part of their problem wasn’t that he was a horrible person, it was Mo’s violin.
I find that I’m much happier reading old books, so not only is “Hugo Award Winner!” not a selling point (though it was probably a mark of quality for sufficiently old SF), neither is “published in 2018!”
Looking over at my bookcases, the most recently published fiction appears to be Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin (doesn’t really count), the Harry Potter series (not actually much of a fan as an adult), the Dinotopia series, and several genre books from the late 20th century[1] I only picked up because they were on sale for $10 or a bit more each in the Barnes & Noble leatherbound Collectible Editions series and haven’t even opened yet.
[1]Anne Rice Vampire trilogy, Eye of the World AKA Time of Doorstoppers Describing Clothes vol. 1, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys, and the Michael Crichton dinosaur novels, which I did read.
I find this kind of hilarious. Liu’s work is incredibly politically incorrect by Western standards. He doesn’t map well to Western political buckets, but a lot of his work endorses a sort of technocratic authoritarianism where strong male characters sacrifice whoever has to be sacrificed for the survival of humanity and is pretty negative towards political ideals driven by compassion or caring. Although that’s more obvious in the sequels to The Three-Body Problem. Maybe not many had read his other work since not much had been translated into English or was popular in English yet.
It’s not just the Three-Body trilogy that is that way too. A ton of his short stories explore similar themes.
Of course, his personal views may not align with his work, but that doesn’t seem very relevant since it’s hard to determine his personal views.
Maybe I’ll actually read Three-Body Problem, then. I’ve had a copy sitting on my shelf for a couple years, but l’affaire des chiots soured me enough that I haven’t actually opened it.
Of course, I kept reading the Laundry books after that, so maybe I’m just stupid.
The Three-Body Problem is pretty clearly different from most Western scifi (although I haven’t read much recent sci-fi) in the first book, but it much more strongly diverges from typical Western sci fi I’ve read in the second book and becomes more interesting. It’s relatively hard scifi too which is nice. I feel like many things labeled scifi are more space fantasy.
I highly recommend the whole trilogy.
Different from Western SF is fine with me. Actually, the last thing I finished reading, a few days ago, was The Thousand Year Beach by Tobi Hirotaka; I can’t really recommend it for various reasons, but it was interesting to see the differences from Western SF norms even though it’s got by any reasonable standards a clearly SF premise (it’s set in a virtualized environment and all the important characters are AI).
You phrase it a bit strongly, John Schilling, but I think I agree mostly that the WorldCon committee has won over the Sad and Rabid Puppies and is now luxuriating in its victory. Well, good luck to them, may they enjoy it and the kind of writing they like to read.
I really haven’t been keeping up with modern SF for a long time now, and the trouble is that the favourable descriptions of the winning authors doesn’t make me want to read their works. I’ve been told N. K. Jemisin is a great writer, and she may well be, but the critic’s reviews of, say, The Broken Sky trilogy have me going “Do I want to read a lecture? No, I don’t want to read a lecture”. Maybe the books aren’t a lecture, they’re great science fantasy novels, but the descriptions by those who are fans make me think they’re a lecture (about feminism and sexism and racism and colonialism and probably environmentalism while we’re at it).
So at the moment I’m reading a fair amount of fantasy, a ton of Sherlock Holmes pastiches (all for a good cause, the restoration of Conan Doyle’s home Undershaw, which has now been taken over by a special educational needs school, up to volume XV of new stories with the proceeds going to this!) and waiting for the writers I like to produce the next books in their series.
I’m not a fan of heavy-handed SJW-ism, but I found The Broken Earth to be excellent, and I didn’t think of it as heavy-handed. Just think “orogenes are Slans.”
I can vouch for Jemison, though I haven’t read everything she’s written. She probably gets a boost for SJW-adjacent reasons, but even without it I think she’d still be respected.
Will also vouch for Jemisin. Broken Earth doesn’t read as a lecture unless you’re looking for one, which of course some people are.
It’s not a lecture, and I found the story compelling. But there are definitely lecturey elements if one isn’t normally steeped in a certain sort of worldview.
(I’d say it’s as least as intersectional as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is libertarian, and there are definite “oh, here’s where I introduce a trans character, look!” moments.)
But my main takeaway is that Jemisen must have really liked the dilemma set up for the mages and Templars in Dragon Age: Origins. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I’m glad to hear all these recommendations, but I think I’ve been put off too much to try her writing because of all the reviews about “And when X happens, naturally this is a critique of Patriarchy and the history of men brutalising women, and Y is about slavery, and Z is the evils of colonialism and so on and so forth and the whole laundry list of correct thinking” which made the novels sound about as appealing as going to the dentist for a filling.
@Deiseach
If you can find it in your heart, give this a listen. It’s 40 minutes, and it’s free, and it’s about an Italian cook.
@Hoopyfreud,
I’m not @Deiseach but nevertheless I gave your link a listen and it made my commute better.
Thanks!
I love L’Alchemiste.
This being said, Jemison loves highly capable people to an extent which makes Rand look like an egalitarian.
This is completely, 100% true, but I like things like Ender’s Game, Dune, and Stranger in a Strange Land, so it doesn’t bother me.
It doesn’t bother me, I just think it’s funny.
No immortality for you, you mediocre person!
You know, just because, here’s the breakdown.
Non-puppies (2013): 3/5 male. 4/5 white.
Non-puppies (2014): 1/3 male. 3/3 white.
Non-puppies (2015): 1/1 male. 0/1 white
Non-puppies (2016): 0/3 male. 2/3 white. If you count Seveneves as sufficiently cross-appealing, as we’ve done with 3 body problem, 1/4 male, 3/4 white.
Non-puppies (2017): 2/6 male. 3/6 white.
Non-puppies (2018): 3/6 male. 4/6 white.
Non-puppies (2019): 1/6 male. 4/6 white.
Men are consistently just under half of Hugo nominees. White authors are consistently the majority. From 1980 to 1987, we had:
1980: 4/5 male. 5/5 white.
1981: 4/5 male. 5/5 white.
1982: 3/5 male. 5/5 white.
1983: 5/6 male. 6/6 white.
1984: 3/5 male. 5/5 white.
1985: 5/5 male. 5/5 white.
1986: 4/5 male. 5/5 white.
1987: 5/5 male. 5/5 white.
So yeah, the field has changed dramatically since then. The male/female numbers have not-quite flipped. Given that the SF readership is about even right now (find your favorite source, it’s somewhere between 60-40 and 40-60 by any figures I’ve seen), that doesn’t seem egregiously biased – the SF community has gained more women than men since then.
Ok, I don’t see how this quite works. Here’s my breakdown:
2013: NO – Scalzi, a white man, wins against Mira Grant, a white pansexual woman.
2014: NO – Ann Leckie, a white woman, wins against Mira Grant again.
2015: TIE – Cixin Liu, an asian man, wins against Ann Leckie.
2016: YES – N. K. Jemisin, a black woman, wins against Leckie.
2017: TIE – Jemisin wins against Yoon Ha Lee, a trans asian man, and Charlie Jane Anders, a white trans woman
2018: TIE – Jemisin wins against Lee
Now subjectively I’m gonna say that trans > gender > race > orientation for tiebreakers. Seems like you agree on gender > race at least, based on your assessment. In that case, we have all 3 ties turning into NOs, for a score of 1/6. If we crown Jemisin the most wokest of her years, we’re looking at 3/6.
How many have protagonists with an ambiguous race or gender?
But all of the above is really nitpicking, because the thing that really ticks me off about this is going from the statements above to saying that the Hugo award is actually the award for
Even if you were right about the Hugo awards being overwhelmingly woke, in order to substantiate a claim as inflammatory as this, you need to provide an actual counterfactual. What should have won instead? The Dragon Award winner for those years?
More generally, is anyone finding the Dragon Award to be a good source of recommendations?
Less than 50% of the nominees are what I’d call bad. There are better places to look IMO, but it’s also not The Larry Correia Show.
The Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel seems to be for “Best SF Novel according to the tastes of people who mostly read fantasy or watch TV”, though it’s a bit too early to be sure. There’s some good stuff, but also some dreck and I don’t expect them to consistently catch the good stuff.
Once again I am in agreement with Mr Schilling; the Dragon nominations have their hearts in the right place, but because they’re still a small affair, right now it tends to be the Usual Suspects nominating their favourites and a lot of it is TV/Fantasy influenced.
Give ’em time and more importantly a lot of new blood, and they should do better. I’m hoping they can survive, I’d hate to see them wither on the vine because the Hugos as currently oriented are really not friendly to “I don’t want to read Issue Fiction by any side, I just want some Thrilling Adventure In Space without tin-eared prose” readers like me. (Tor welcoming back with open arms and hearty embraces Irene Gallo after slapping her on the wrist over the Sad and Rabid Puppies ‘they’re all racists’ thing is a straw in the wind for me about this).
If men are half the (non-puppy) nominees and white people are two-thirds of the nominees, then we should expect one-third of the nominees to be white men. They aren’t.
If you offer or defend an award with the unwritten rule, “White men are not allowed to win this award”, then you are a bigot and I will call you out as a bigot no matter how many white women or colored men win the award.
If you offer an occasional nomination to a token white man, then we can talk about whether that is just tokenism or an actual defense against a charge of bigotry. That will mean looking at the numbers and their statistical plausibility, the vote counts when it comes time to determine who actually wins the award, and the extent to which the men appear to be tokens who bend over backwards to appeal to the dominant group. If the best you’ve got is “look at all the white people (who are not men)” and “look at all the men (who are not white)”, then I’m betting you don’t actually have much of a defense to offer.
True, IF the number of award-worthy works is large enough for us to be able to expect few outliers over a small period of time. I’m going to go ahead and say that there are almost always fewer than 5 SF books written per year that deserve to be immortalized in song. This scarcity is why I’m insisting on a counterfactual.
If you can offer an unnominated white man who squares up against Jemisin from the past few years, then we can talk about whether his exclusion is anomalous or actual bigotry. That will mean looking at the works eligible for an award, not the numbers in a vacuum. If the best you’re got is, “look at all people who are not white men,” then you don’t have much of an offence to offer either and we’re just going end up shouting preexisting beliefs at each other until we’re blue in the face.
From my perspective, the null hypothesis is, “the Hugo award voters try to award the best work eligible for each category,” because that’s what they claim to do. It’s worth noting that, of the books you listed for this year, most of them are sequels (and not sequels of Hugo winners like Jemisin’s were). That obviously isn’t disqualifying – so are several of the other entries – but it goes a long way to explaining, in my mind, their lack of representation. Does Provenance deserve to be nominated, while Elysium Fire isn’t? I don’t know. But that fact really isn’t budging my needle on “white men are not allowed to win this award.” Let me know when a work of Movement SF – something like The Windup Girl or Neuromancer or Lord of Light or Anathem or The City and the City – is ignored, and I’ll concede the argument. But that’s not what I’m seeing right now.
@Schilling I want to non-ironically suggest you use the word “intersectional” here but I can’t quite do it.
It looks so far as though there was no sf by men in 2018 which was so strong it was unfair that it wasn’t nominated for a Hugo.
Now, it could be that this was the wrong place to ask, since it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of people keeping up with recent sf. And I think people are pretty much just replying about novels. What about shorter works?
It also might be unfair to ask about consensus favorites. They’re pretty rare.
2013: NO – Scalzi, a white man, wins against Mira Grant, a white pansexual woman.
Okay, Hoopy, this is not against you in particular, but why the heck should I care about or be interested in what Ms Grant likes to do when she betakes herself to the privacy of her bedroom? Why not mention that Mr Scalzi is a heterosexual man (if he is that) if we’re going to drag in that as well? This is what steams my spuds about the whole “Representation!” stuff; I do not care a flying fig about pan, bi, homo, hetero or even asexual in the writers, whatever they do with the characters. If it’s pertinent to the plot that Jace F’dinqualdunk likes to play all six sides of the fence, fine. If it’s nothing to do with the insect overlords spreading their galactic empire across dimensional planes, then I don’t need or want to know about what exactly Mx Authoress in her spare time hitting the bars likes to throw a net over and drag back to her lair!
EDIT: And before anyone yaps about “cis hetero privilege”, I’m asexual aromantic and would love to read more novels with effin’ ace/aro characters so we could skip the stupid effin’ romance subplots that require the characters to act like effin’ idiots, or the exotic sex scenes thanks a bunch but I’m not either holding my breath waiting for that or stomping my foot at the Worldcon committee to pick a slate to suit my preferences.
(Okay, Chip Delany made me interested in whether Rat and Marq would have a happy ever after, but that’s Samuel Goddamn Effin’ Brilliant Writer Delany, not the rest of the bunch).
I mean I don’t disagree, but my overall point was that the claim was wrong and bad. I couldn’t give a shit.
I’m not even ace and I’m so over this stuff. Also so over sisters/wives kidnapped, traded, otherwise in sexual danger as a way to ramp up plot tension or even just, Books of Babel style, separated lovers where one may or may not move on before they reconnect/one finally tracks the other down only to find out they have a new person and/or they don’t but they had sex for some reason and have a baby and will the two be able to get over it stuff, read the book that won’t be published for 3 years to find out.
If I wanted to have that stuff I would just go on Reddit and read the not actually real crazy ass 10 update sagas on r/relationships or something.
I can do power fantasy, social commentary, and/or cool scientific/fantasy concept novel. But I’m so tired of the current trend where the book could have been written by Danielle Steel about a beach vacation with a kidnapping or something.
I’m also very tired of that moment when it looks as though the relationship which has been developing for a long time is over. No, it isn’t.
… why the heck should I care about or be interested in what Ms Grant likes to do when she betakes herself to the privacy of her bedroom?
I grew up as a voracious reader of anything even remotely SF-ish. Until I was well into adulthood I had no connection with the world of fandom. I had no idea what the sexual preferences or political stances of SF authors were. (I’m old enough to remember the dueling Vietnam ads in F&SF — I think — back when that unpleasantness was going on. They were the among the first things that revealed that Politics existed in SF. Yes, I was naive.)
Anyway, back in those ancient times, it took me a long time to notice that Andre Norton was a woman, as was James Tiptree, and that Samuel L. Delany was black (and longer before I discovered he was gay), and so on. I could go on and on; I’m sure there were tons of open secrets in the field, but until the internet, most SF readers weren’t clued in.
I mean, one could infer some political stances (Heinlein comes to mind, but later on we learned he was more complex), or guess at social stances, from their writing, but we consumers of SF and fantasy were usually in the dark. In some cases, one learned this information very late, for example that Edgar Pangborn was gay, as was Tom Disch, as was Alice Sheldon. It didn’t lessen my interest in their works, although to be honest I think Sheldon did her best work when she was being “Tiptree.”
The point is that back in the day I picked and read SF without in most cases knowing the authors’ SJW checkboxes.
Anyway, this a discursive comment that boils down to a standard belief: the internet has ruined everything.
@FormerRanger
Your conclusion is spot on.
About Heinlein, I never understood the political rumblings about him. Sure, one could read Starship Troopers and say “he’s a fascist!” But then you read Stranger in a Strange Land and think he’s a commie, and then The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and think he’s a libertarian, so isn’t it more likely that he just enjoys playing with different political premises? And of course hot young sexually liberated women who graciously make love with author’s grumpy old man self-insert.
I don’t think Heinlein was just playing with different political systems, I think he had preferences, though they changed with time.
I believe without evidence that Heinlein thought of stories and scenes, and then chose governments that would fit the stories. Anyone know the actual sequence?
Farah Mendelsohn’s The Fortunate Profession of Robert Heinlein is an examination of Heinlein’s politics through his fiction. It looks promising but I haven’t read it yet.
@Conrad Honcho,
I remember reading “The Roads Must Roll” and feeling that Heinlein was clearly anti-union, but I’d long read his work and that didn’t really bother me, I’ve really enjoyed reading Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, despite being pretty sure that I don’t agree with a lot of their politics, I’ve really enjoyed reading Fritz Leiber’s despite disagreeing with what seems like an anti-religion undercurrent in his work, but they’re limits to what I can take: Phillip K. Dick however can go to Hell for a Martian Time Slip.
> Non-puppies (2013): 3/5 male. 4/5 white.
This seems like sampling bias. If you’re throwing out all the nominees the puppies voted for, and if the puppies vote for the best white male authors in the field, shouldn’t we expect that the rest of the nominees should be not-white-males?
(I don’t actually know if the puppies vote for the best white male authors in the field. The one time I looked at their slate, it seemed like they had some popular stuff on it, so I think it’s at least possible.)
Matter of opinion, but the only work I can trace back to the Puppies that was by a white man and deserved a shot at the award was Seveneves, as noted above. E: should clarify, among the best novel nominees analyzed above.
“The Hot Equations” by Ken Burnside was puppy-nominated, and I think it was very good.
@littleby
The puppies had women and non-white authors on the slates.
Have there been years where there were only white men nominees?
196whatever, presumably.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/04/open-thread-133-5/#comment-782651
http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/
#women #nominees
1960 0 10
1961 1 10
1962 0 10
1963 1 10 (plus one with an ambiguous pseudonym)
1964 1… 9
1865 0… 7
1966 0 . 10
1967 0 . 22
1968 2. 16
1969 2 . 18
The first four sets of Best Novel Hugo nominees (1969-1962) were all white men. The frequency of all-white-male tickets drops off pretty rapidly after that, and the last one I can find is in 1988.
1969-1972, maybe?
Samuel Delaney in 1969, and LeGuin and McCaffrey in 1972. 1970 and 1971, yes, were all-white-guy slates.
OK. I was just confused by the typo. Thank you!
Just saw that myself. 1959-1962 was the original and still longest all-white-guy streak, broken by Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1963.
Ah, when I posted Hoopyfreud hadn’t made that post. For a few minutes, but I went to sleep then.
Did not really think there’d be examples as recent as 1987/88. I assumed that once Ursula K Le Guin showed up, more women would appear every year. Guess I was wrong.
One notable thing about the Hugos this year is that there no white male nominees in the fiction categories I listed.
You weren’t joking, I looked up the list for 2019 and this part had me laugh (gender flip it and see if it works the same way the writer intends):
Imagine the reaction if that was “we have a diverse range of all male authors” – oh hang on, you don’t have to imagine, that actually happened a while back! Eek, all the way back in 1987? I was sure there was a more recent example, but Google is refusing to show me anything no matter what search terms I use.
There is a white guy in the “Novelette” section and when you get to the Dramatic Presentations more of ’em – Hollywood too white? Plus some of the editors are long enough in the tooth to be around the field so long they were there when being a white guy was unremarkable.
Two of the other names I recognise – and I apologise in advance for anything that sounds uncharitable – are P. Djèlí Clark, who wrote a short story I read (and greatly disliked because it was lazy writing) about, basically, George Washington Evil Slaveowner (this was before the Affair of the Mural, so prescient or simply reading the tealeaves?) and Bogi Takács whose name I recognise as a person (preferred pronouns: “e/em/eir/emself or singular they pronouns”) who had a public meltdown on Twitter over not being treated with the respect, deference, and accommodation they deserved as an invitee to Worldcon 2018 and extorted a grovelling apology from the organisers.
@Nancy Lebovitz,
It’s hard for me to much care about ‘SF’ awards, including the Hugo’s after 1984’s Neuromancer swept them, that book just seemed so overhyped, good god I just don’t get it!
Besides “cyberpunk” the other blight on science-fiction has been “transhumanism” I don’t want to read about any damn homo-superiors!
But even earlier the Mariner space probes showing Mars and Venus being as lifeless as they are hurt the genre, without canals or jungle much of the romance is gone.
Of works after the ’60’s Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle was okay, as was Niven’s The Intergral Trees, but (aside from a couple of short works by Ted Chiang) I’m drawing a blank on any good science-fiction written in the 21st century, maybe you have a suggestion?
As I’ve said elsewhere the quanity of fiction is much greater than in the past, and the authors who get published is now more “diverse”, as far as I can tell average quality is unchanged, presumably with so much more published there’s more works now that I would like, but with the giant deluge of new works I have no idea how to find what I’d like other than if the words “cyber” or “virtual” are mentioned I likely won’t.
I didn’t get it about Neuromancer either– it seemed like fairly ordinary sf, but with an emotionally numb viewpoint character.
I agree that losing desert Mars and jungle Venus was sad. There are collections called Old Mars and Old Venus, but I’m not sure how possible it was to bring them back.
While we’re talking about plagues in current sf, I really don’t want every novel to have a murder mystery and a romance.
At least Burke’s Semiosis (lost colony on a planet with intelligent plants) doesn’t have a romance. It’s a fairly old-fashioned idea-centered science fiction novel and I liked it.
Can you give a list of contemporary to Neuromancer scifi that was comparable? I’ve looked into similar statements before by people and they typically don’t hold up historically. Maybe something by Dick or Vinge might have been comparable? True Names came out in 1981. Electric Sheep was in 1968 as a possibly good example. Neal Stephenson was first published in 1984 and Snow Crash wasn’t til 92.
Harry Potter spawned a massive craze even though dozens of good quality magic school books had existed beforehand all the way back to the 50s maybe?
John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider” (1975) might be called proto-cyberpunk with mainframe-era computer technology.
The Stars My Destination (originally released as Tiger! Tiger!)
TSMD seems more like To Ride Pegasus to me. I’m not sure if that’s really cyberpunk per say.
@axiomsofdominion
It reads a LOT like Gibson to me, but with Golden Age-flavored descriptions of megacorps. But think of the Mr. Prestos, or the shady government collusion with Preston.
@axiomsofdominion,
No mostly because I really didn’t like Neuromancer, the only work of Gibson’s I liked was “”The Gernsback Continuum”, and the only work of ‘cyberpunk’ that I liked was When Gravity Fails by Effinger, I mostly wish the genre hadn’t existed nor do I much like the reality it’s visionaries have conjured up.
Not sure if this is what you want, but Delany’s Nova strikes me as proto-cyberpunk. It’s got the human machine interfaces, but not the grimness.
@plumber, you dislike the fatalism or nihilism? My comment was mostly directed at Nancy, where she said it seemed like typical sci fi to her. I’m not a fan of cyberpunk specifically but its surprising to me that people might consider Neuromancer as generic.
axiomsofdominion.
Other people’s aesthetic preferences can be amazing. One of the most surprising things I’ve seen online was someone who liked Stockhausen better than Mozart.
Calling something “generic” or “ordinary” seems more like an assertion of fact than an expression of taste. Are you sure you aren’t doing the “Hamlet is so full of cliches!” thing where a a work that codifies a lot of tropes feels dated and cliched because you’re more familiar with the later imitators?
@nancy, as someone else noted, I’m not talking about thinking it was bad. That’s different than thinking it was generic.
I didn’t get it about Neuromancer either– it seemed like fairly ordinary sf, but with an emotionally numb viewpoint character.
It’s that thing about being married to the Spirit of the Age – Gibson managed to hit the exact sweet spot of writing about new technology coupled with the then popular notion of “Japan will take over the world due to its business dominance” and throw in a bit of the ol’ anomie of the disaffected and rootless urban youth facing an uncertain future in a heartless world of corporate ‘greed is good’ (ah, the 80s…)
The trouble with being so exactly in tune with the mood of the moment is that when the moment passes, your work bursts like a bubble. And cyberpunk is more fun as a game concept or a movie, anyway 🙂
I mean cyberpunk, perhaps minus the Japanese part, still seems pretty damn relevant to me. But I suppose there is some relation to how your life is going. Perhaps Nancy isn’t living a life disaffected enough to relate to cyberpunk now that the time as a leading trend has passed.
Although the current grimdark genre is basically just fantasy cyberpunk with a larger scope.
I only read Gibson when I was in my early twentys, some time in the late noughties. What hit me was that it carried a lot of the No-Future feeling that was still really noticeable to a child in the ninties, but is dead today.
That is was Punk means to me, and really isn’t in all the other stuff that ist called *punk today.
I’m going to have to figure out the difference between disaffected and depressed.
It may be that I still think it’s a pretty good world, I just have some trouble appreciating it and acting in it.
A fair number of Gibson’s characters seem emotionally numb, or at least emotionally suppressed. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t bother me. It seems appropriate for his plots.
I found Neuromancer awesome at the time, and actually re-read most of Gibson’s work every five years or so. (I may have to draw the line if it is really true that his upcoming novel is about an alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won in 2016.)
I also regularly re-read (among others) Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. For example, I re-read Reamde in preparation for Fall. Oddly, or maybe not oddly, I read and enjoy Scalzi and Stross, but I don’t re-read them.
I may have to draw the line if it is really true that his upcoming novel is about an alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
I don’t know what to think about that. On the one hand, if it presents the “awesome First Female Ever solves every human problem!” take that accompanied Obama’s first election victory (the LightWorker! the Indigo Child! And can anyone ever forget that he claimed in his nomination victory speech that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”, bless his heart?) then it will be So Bad It’s Good and I might have to indulge in it.
On the other hand, if it’s a ‘realistic’ take where First Female Ever could solve every human problem except Sexism and the Evil Republicans block everything because they’re just that evil, forget about it, there’s already one of those websites I can read for free.
The question is not who is reading SF or even who is writing SF, but who is writing the kind of “serious” and “thought-provoking” SF that wins Hugos. I can easily believe that white men are a vanishingly small minority among Hugo-bait writers, even though Hugo bait is a vanishingly small minority of SF as a whole.
(Bird’s eye view from someone who doesn’t read much SF. Take with a few oceans’ full of salt.)
Hmpf! A penguin’s eye view is too non-central an example to fit the meaning of the phrase!
Ugh. I waddled right into that one, dood.
Of course a cat would want us to ignore the bird’s perspective!
Hugo-bait circa mid 20th century and early 21st century are vastly different genres.
Of course. Oscar bait has changed a lot too. But nobody accuses the Academy of having been taken over by entryists because they started preferring politically relevant dramas to splashy big-budget musicals. Times change and tastes change with the times.
Plenty of people have accused the academy of becoming distant from normal humans. In fact, they doubled the number of potential best picture nominees to try and alleviate this perception (instead they just nominated more Oscar bait films). The last best picture that normal people really were enthusiastic for was 2003:
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Even recently, the Academy has made blunders where an Oscar bait that people actually kinda liked could have been chosen, but instead they picked a more-baity one.
2017: Dunkirck, vs. Shape of Water
2016: La La Land vs. Moonlight
Also, they made a huge blunder in 2010 that probably permanently hurt their reputations by not giving Toy Story 3, the best movie of the year by far, and the best movie in probably a decade, the Oscar. It was an obvious choice to everyone not in the voter class, but they failed.
This seems to…I don’t know what the right idiom is. Something about “conceding the point while offering it as a refutation.” The accusation is that the Hugos are doing Culture War politics instead of just sci-fi. If the defense is that the Hugo award winners are writing Hugo-bait, and what qualifies as Hugo-bait is SJ Culture War politics, that seems to concede the point that the Hugo voters are doing Culture War politics. If they weren’t, Culture War politics wouldn’t be baiting them.
That’s not what I’m saying. The argument I’m responding to is that the Hugos are biased against white men, and I’m saying that white men aren’t writing the kind of “ideas” science fiction that the Hugos like anymore. When the Puppies were able to stuff ballots they nominated a bunch of remainder-rack milSF and ranty blog posts that would never have been considered for a Hugo until then.
If there were “serious” right-leaning SF, or even SF without much salience to our current political moment, that was getting repeatedly snubbed, then yes, I’d say there was bias. But right now the left is winning because the right isn’t even playing the game.
Yes, and they’ve redefined “big ideas” to mean “race/gender/trans SJ culture war stuff…in space.” No nomination for the Revelation Space novels, which imagined a vast civilization (and its ashes) resultant from the implications of realistic physics and technology hundreds of years from now. I’d say that was a “big idea.” But it’s a big idea in fiction based on science, rather than fiction based on race/gender/trans SJ culture war stuff in space.
Is anyone here willing to entertain the idea that women may simply be better at writing at this particular historical/cultural place and time? I think most of us could (should) certainly acknowledge that women are better at doing well in English class by an overwhelming amount; how far downstream does that sort of thing go?
Women are also overrepresented in writing fanfic. If women just write more, that’s going to help their representation, and practice never hurts. I’m definitely willing to entertain this theory.
While I’m open to the original theory, I don’t think fanfic is a good example. It is mostly trash. Royal Road is a great example. Even the most popular stories are mostly horrible from a writing perspective. And editing and formatting? Unheard of.
I’d say the best fanfic is very good. And fanfic is in an environment where writers get a lot of feedback.
Fanfic is mostly bad, but that’s mainly because the barrier to publication of fanfic is just this side of nonexistent. The top 10% of fanfic is on par with most of the published original fiction I’ve read. The top 1% is on par with good published fiction. Multiply that by the huge volume of stories out there and you’ve got plenty of good fanfic to read.
And yes, they’re mostly female-written. Successfuly making the jump from fanfic to professional writing is still somewhat rare, but it’s nonetheless plausible that the rise of fanfic has pushed the SF writing field more towards women in recent years. Yet that wouldn’t fully account for the gender skew in recent Hugos: the skew’s too big, and there’s still lots of white male incumbents writing good stories. Plus, it wouldn’t account for the racial skew at all (fanfic is not particularly racially diverse).
Well Nancy with 10000000s of people writing fanfic and it basically being the “Unity Engine” of spec fic where its super easy to get your stuff in front of eyes relative to the past, of course you have some that are amazing. Same for web novels and such in general.
But I’m not sure there are more S+ tier authors than existed previously.
Most writing of all kinds, not just fanfic, is trash. The difference is that no publisher or editor has to read fanfic before it’s released into the wild.
I’ve read a lot of fanfic, including a lot of the dreck, and I think Sturgeon’s Law is actually too generous. I’ve written about this before, but my impression is that writers are getting lazier and readers less critically engaged. The percentage of fluff and “drabbles” and the like is going up, and reviews are less and less contentful, more and more hyperbolic, performative positivity.
@Nick
Nah, it’s just that more people are online now. The lowest dregs used to stay in people’s diaries and whatnot, private spheres. Now the default is to share all of that with the world.
The argument that the average photograph and/or video is lower quality composition is the same, as we’re swamped in a deluge of amateur social media uploads.
And that isn’t even a bad thing! The function of the shitty family photo or home video or fanfic is fundamentally different from that of professional productions.
For fanfic specifically, I’ve found that the best fanfic-as-fanfic deliberately eschews being the best writing, because its function is to evoke the feel of its source material, and so is optimizing for the source material medium, and not for the medium of prose. I tend to be put off by fanfic that can become original fiction once the serial numbers are filed off, because it is no longer serving its fanfic function of recreating the enjoyment I get from consuming the source material.
@AG
That doesn’t ring true to me. Part of what lowering the barrier to publication does, when this sort of writing is such a social activity anyway, is increase how much and what is produced. It’s not like fanfic writers today are sitting around developing their best ideas to one day market; rather they’re in a tumblr community sharing ideas, and gifting each other stories based on the ideas that resonate best, then collecting that stuff and putting it on AO3. I’ve seen this pattern dozens to hundreds of times now; as a fraction of fic published there, it seems to be really common these days, if not still increasing. And all the writing in question is singularly terrible.
Some of it would have existed regardless, yes, but I’m not convinced it’s all the same in the end. For one thing, I take serious issue with the format. Back in my FF.net days, young writers would publish what were in effect web serials, sometimes dozens of chapters, regularly and with advancing plots and consistent characterization. Not everyone lived up to this, of course—and some folks made the one-shot format work really well—but the standard was there, everyone knew what they were aiming toward, and reviewers could actually engage in constructive criticism, though even then, most reviews were a simple “This is great!”
The pretense of standards is gone. I’m not going to visit AO3 at work, but last time I did, a particular work’s front page was almost entirely crap. Most of it wasn’t serial, and the one-shots were under a thousand words and nearly all fluff. Several were drabbles, sometimes as few as a hundred words. One might have even been a songfic—a gimmick I hate with a passion. Reviews, meanwhile, are hyperbolically positive, something like
Try improving as a writer when that’s all you receive.
So 1. I simply don’t believe all these fanfics would have been on their hard drives anyway, or passed around on notebook paper in the days before web fiction. And 2. I think it actually matters what incentives are in play, and if the reviews I read are any indication, writing some lazy fluff will have a dozen people wetting themselves at its sheer existence. And 3. I don’t think anyone grows as a writer that way or is inclined to produce something the rest of us would like to read, so I don’t see how the situation improves with under current conditions. It’s gotten so bad that, even with the advanced filtering a site like AO3 allows, I’ve given up reading fanfic.
@Nick
The incentives here are “fanfic is optimizing for its function as fanfic, and not its function as independent writing.” It’s a feature, not a bug. I don’t read fanfic and original fic with the same goals in mind. Again, it’s like going to Youtube, looking at what’s on the front page, and declaring moviemaking to have no pretense of standards these days.
Your ff.net days are still subject to my first point, as well, which is that there was still a filter of who could get online, find ff.net, upload a file, etc. That people are deriving their fanfiction from community trends is also a function of that many more people being online.
Thirdly, I highly question your memory of the ff.net days, and any associated quality. There was a post in the exact opposite direction, where someone wondered why, when they re-visited the fandoms and fanfic of their youth, what was good then was revealed to be garbage writing now. ff.net was notable for banning songfic and scriptfic after a certain time, meaning those formats were actually way more prevalent in the past.
And finally, I think you have a skewed view of how much better or worse fanfic is than all of the slush pile manuscripts that editors thankfully filter for us. And even with that filtering, we can still have such delights as the Bad Sex in Fiction Award!
It is absolutely a plausible theory. Sci-fi used to be the most male dominated, but as sci-fi has gotten less “hard”, it has gotten more female. Military fic is probably the more male dominated place than sci-fi these days.
Hard sci-fi is still male dominated, but hard sci-fi tends to be a bit colder on character and relationship writing. Given that most evaluators of fictional writing are taught that character and relationships are what you primarily evaluate writing on (something something “substance over style”), then of course hard sci-fi is going to get the shaft.
I would certainly be open to a theory that women are much better at writing what is popular these days, especially among the white middle/upper class female audience that dominates fandom.
Women read more, and write more visual-media fanfic, which should logically lead to more published books.
Since the other hypothesis proposed is that the class of people in charge are bigoted against white men, we could check the female-male ratio split up by race of authors to see if/how much women are over-represented.
Like I told John above, SF readership appears to be somewhere between 60-40 and 40-60. I’d assume authorship follows readership.
Mmm – women SF authors is a tricky proposition; take Margaret Atwood, who writes some of her novels as standard SF tropes, but is treated as a Proper Literary Author instead of one of those dreadful genre types (and they can have her, as far as I’m concerned).
I think it’s a combination of finally enough of a critical mass of women who read and watched and were fans of SF (yes, we’ve been there all along) finally breaking through as published and publishable authors, without the “use initials for your author name because boys won’t read anything written by a woman” nonsense, and definite agenda-pushing to fix the perceived imbalance of the past re: women, minority, and minority women writers.
@Deiseach >
C. L. Moore was an awesome writer who’s far too little known today.
Vonnegut did the same thing, so it’s not just women. (And except for Cat’s Cradle, the literary types can have HIM too. And I’ll throw in much of Bradbury too, though he was generally recognized as SF because it’s hard to get away from that _Martian Chronicles_ title.)
And I’ll throw in much of Bradbury too
Nah, Ray was One Of Us, whatever about the critics. I can’t speak to Vonnegut one way or another, but Russ Ballard was one of those who went the “Ackshully, I write speculative fiction, not science fiction” back in the days of the New Wave when he was getting mainstream recognition. Atwood uses staple SF plots but is very happy to be lumped in with Proper Writers, Bradbury never made any bones about being one of the Filthy Genre Fans as well as writers (see Ursula LeGuin’s piece for Ansible back in 2007).
To be fair, Heinlein was the one who invented the term “speculative fiction”, and he was trying to push it (because he said he thought it was more accurate, which is fair enough, but given that it was first used when he was addressing librarians he was probably also trying to up the genre’s respectability) starting in the 50s.
I *think* this is probably a big stretch. We don’t know that doing really well in English class correlates very well to writing the best book of the year in a way that’s comprehensible. I would guess doing OK in the sense that you “know where the commas go” is part of it, but English class isn’t very much about actual creative writing skill so much as it is technically correct use of grammar and punctuation.
English class work also isn’t judged by experts in literature as such, but rather just other people who did well enough in English to get a education degree (read: just OK) and who in a lot of cases don’t have an English degree so much as 20 credits in English.
After the part where you don’t actually have to be that creative or compelling to get an A in a high school English class from a non-expert in literature who grades mostly based on rule-following, we then have another big confounder: If it’s really about doing GREAT in English class, like if you are really substantially the best in English you have an edge, then we’d need to know who was really, really exceptional, and they don’t keep that data.
So we then need to find a test that quantifies what one learned in high school re: writing and reading which then also tells us what proportion of people are in Writing Mensa. The closest I can quickly is here and says:
The same data gives girls, overall, about a 2-3% edge on writing scores, so not much in terms of support for “well, but what if geniuses are the thing?” OR “well, aren’t they better on average?” and a whole lot of support for “boys don’t care as much about HS English class for whatever reason, but easily make up this gap on the first test they get to that has anything to do with their future”.
If males achieve excellence more often because hormonal effects on the brain are a cause of ambition, “slack off until the first test that affects my future” totally fits.
Better, yes, probably. But 60/40 or maybe 70/30 better, not the alleged “42/0 better” that Nancy Lebowitz noted across the fiction-writing categories this year. At that point, we’re basically looking at a software shop with 42 all-male coders and saying “Yeah, but maybe men really are better at math”
Depending on the distributions it could be 42/0. The Fields Medal winners are 59 men to 1 woman.
Right, but the Fields Medal was always mostly-men. That may say something about women and math, or maybe we just don’t want to talk about that. But it would say something very different if the Fields Medal had been 50/50 or 70/30 a generation ago and then suddenly shifted to 100% male.
@herbert herberson,
Sure, I’ve noted that a lot more of the new-ish fantasy-fiction that I enjoy that has been published in the last 20 years has been written by women than is the case with the older fantasy-fiction I’ve enjoyed (though I still like some new works by men, and some old works by women).
I can’t say that of science-fiction, but I’ve just plain haven’t read as many new “SF” works, some “SF” short stories by Gene Wolfe (white man) and Ted Chiang (Asian man) were good, at the urging of my wife I read much of the “Silo” trilogy by Hugh Howey (white man) which was mixed, and I started to read The Buried Life by Carrie Patel (Asian woman) but I just couldn’t get into it, Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven was good, but I’d consider that sci-fi flavored fantasy rather than straight science-fiction, and I liked The City and The City by China Miéville, but I really don’t know how to classify that work.
“Cyberpunk” in the ’80’s really turned me away from science-fiction, and I just haven’t bothered to explore the genre as much as I did previously.
I’m fine with entertaining this model for all sorts of surprising statistical imbalances in observed success, but my impression is that this isn’t so widely accepted in the big wide world….
Relevant XKCD
Any societal group with a writing hobby (no matter how lame/low quality) will end up with better writers from it, since it enables all proto-great-writers to identify their interest and talent early (and then provides a low social cost community practice environment.)
This seems fairly implausible for the speed of the shift. I am totally willing to entertain the idea that black people are better at basketball than white people as they make up 75% of the NBA currently, but that shift happened over many years despite relatively short careers of basketball players vs writers making it easier to dislodge basketball players. Even with this skew there is still typically a (or two) white player considered a top 10 in the league at any one time, and certainly over a decade there will be at least one.
I would guess it unlikely that women have come to dominate sci fi writing to the degree or greater that black men have come to dominate the NBA but in a dramatically shorter time.
I’ve never paid much attention to the Hugos, though I’ve known plenty of people who do. In general, though, I suspect a difference between cognoscenti and people looking for something fun to read. Perhaps the Hugos have become “high brow”, at which point “doing something new” matters more than “doing something fun”.
What I’d like to know, OTOH, is whether there was any science fiction published last year – i.e. something related to a plausible future, not a fantasy world – and with science/technology as a real factor. Or even speculative fiction – not warmed over medieval worlds with magic, American West with space ships, etc. etc.
Maybe I should check whatever was on the lists you may have read. But that’s been the disappointment for me, in general. Plenty of fantasy, and no sci fi.
At least some of the diversity authors do a lot of alternate social structures, unlike either what we’re living in or any of the bog-standard-SF-setups.
The Calculating Stars was a scientifically plausible past– that is, an alternate history with a good bit of science and engineering.
Thanks. I’ve added it to my ever growing list of things to read.
Alastair Reynolds best works, Revelation Space and Chasm City never even got nominated. Harry Potter 4 won, which makes almost no sense. They have never made sense.
Harry Potter fans Bernie Sanders’s the Hugos. I say this as a long time Bernie supporter. At least ideologically. It is pretty easy. Worldcon is not that well attended really. And a large percentage of Harry Potter readers read literally, actually literally, nothing else, and another large percentage read only major popular stuff.
There’s no objective measure for quality. It has pretty much always been, what is the popular thing at the moment?
If you go to r/fantasy right now you can see a post by a Nigerian about how CoBaB, which is one of those hip African American writer writing about a culture that is from Africa but really has nothing to do with them, is actually almost offensively ignorant of Nigerian culture and history. Also very lazy world building.
The target for the current sci-fi organizations/publishers is woke white women and the men who love them. And that tells quite a bit in the awards. Meanwhile the kind of men who were involved in the community have mostly moved on to video games and that has been the case for nearly 20 years. Meanwhile the audience of women who play non-casual games is not comparatively large. Reading is vastly more popular among women generally than men generally.
I mean, I don’t mind HP4 winning, if HP3, 5 & 6 all also win or place highly. I like Harry Potter, even now as an adult. HP4 is a woeful slog in the middle of the series. Its the longest book (IIRC), and it doesn’t deserve to be at all. After 1 (which I think is magical and youthful) and 2 (which is universally derided as the worst book), HP4 is easily the worst book of the “mature” Harry Potter books.
The rest is fair, I suppose. In my HS years us guys played more video games and read more scifi than the girls. I’m obviously older now, but I read more than my GF. She reads Neil Gaiman, I suppose, and I’ve moved to historic nonfiction as my preferred books, but IDK if thats the norm.
Chamber of Secrets is my favourite Harry Potter book (though it is the worst film, with the possible exception of the Visit Britain advert they distributed as Deathly Hallows Part 1).
I’ll go to bat for 3, maybe 6. Goblet is a slog but has fun moments and the ending is strong. Phoenix is pretty much the worst one all around. Chamber is a repeat of Stone, which is a cool little book. Hallows is another slog.
axiomsofdominion
You don’t have to attend Worldcon to nominate or vote for Hugos.
You just need a supporting membership, which is much cheaper than an attending membership.
A supporting membership will get you progress reports, the program book (a major production), the voting packet (a lot of free reading material and art– I’m not sure about things to watch, but in any case, there’s a lot of what’s nominated for the Hugos), the right to nominate and vote for the Hugos, and the right to vote on the location for the two-years-hence Worldcon.
That was from memory.
From the website.
“Supporting members have the right to receive the current Worldcon’s publications, to nominate and vote on the current year’s Hugo Awards, to nominate on the previous and subsequent year’s Hugo Awards, to vote for the site of the Worldcon two years from now (subject to paying an additional fee that is the supporting membership to the two-years-hence Worldcon), and to propose changes to the WSFS rules through the Business Meeting. Supporting members cannot attend or vote at the Business Meeting”
Yes, yes, I’m aware of the various qualifications for voting. I discussed this issue here back when the puppy stuff was going on originally. I was just condensing rather than detailing all the possibilities.
Looking at this from a bit different angle, I generally add books to my reading list if they’re from an author I’ve read and liked, or recommended by a friend or trusted source like SSC. It’s weighted pretty strongly as a result toward older writers, though I do read some contemporary ones. Glancing down my reading list, they’re mostly men and mostly white.
*thoughtful* I use a similar algorithm, supplemented by suggestions from LibraryThing.
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of books that came out 20 years ago. But I’ve got a number of friends (or at least bloggers I follow) who are specifically interested in fiction by women of colour, so I’m not noticing a skew towards white or male. (And on the third hand, I don’t pay much attention to either attribute in a writer, unless it’s somehow relevant – half of them could be Martians for all I’d notice.)
@DinoNerd,
I’ve generally found that if it was written more than 25 years ago and I liked it a man probably wrote it (but not always), and if it was written less than 25 years ago a woman probably wrote it (but not always).
Since I mostly grab books based on title and covers first I haven’t built a system based on that observation, nor do I intend to, I do however tend to put books back on the shelf if I see that they’re part of a trilogy or longer series, though if I started reading from the first book in a series before the rest are published I tend to read the second book as well.
So, the Graphic Story category. It’s what I read first– a couple of months ago, which means (even more than in other categories) that there are things I don’t remember.
Paper Girls, volume 4 by Vaughan and Chiang; Why does this even exist, let alone getting nominated for a Hugo? It’s completely undistinguished, though I grant I didn’t think there was anything especially wrong with it.
Saga, volume 9 by Vaughan and Staples. A friend said it would be much better if I read the whole series, and I had enough time that I tried that. I love those comics. I found the weird inventiveness very satisfying and the interactions between many of the characters hit a sweet spot of alternating affection and hostility. (There were also bad guys who were pretty hostile.)
This is one of those things which is sort of science fiction but mostly consists of just making things up. There is no logical reason to have people with monitors/television screens for their heads, but granting that, I’m pleased to say that the king has a wide screen head.
This series influenced my criteria for voting in general– I decided to vote for what delighted me the most.
To tell you the truth, I should have basically voted on the ninth volume, but I liked the series so much that it influenced me. I’m not sure that the ninth volume was the best, but it did bring the series to a satisfying stopping point. The creators are planning on taking a long break from the series.
The artwork isn’t amazing, but it’s better than many and quite good enough to express the story and characters.
It’s about a war between a planet and its moon– one has people with horns, the other has people with wings. A man and a woman from the sides fall in love and have a child with both horns and wings. There’s complicated family issues, an absurd variety of body types, ghosts, politics, economics…..
I’m bewildered by Paper Girls which I liked so little and Saga which I liked so much being written by the same person.
Monstress by Liu and Takeda, volume 3– the conclusion of a series. The artwork is stunning. And it doesn’t come through on a computer screen nearly well as it does on paper. The very rich colors are muted on a screen and the details aren’t as interesting. This is the only thing I feel so strongly about for screen vs. in person– you get a better fraction of a sunset on a screen than you do from this graphic novel.
I’m told the art has a strong Asian influence, but I’m not seeing it. It’s more like art from a culture with a very literal take on three dimensional space, extreme richness of detail and ornament, and beautiful people from all over the world.
However (and I read the whole series) I didn’t love the story. Too much confusion, too much pain, didn’t love the lead character. Authors should either tell me a story I can follow or pile on so much stuff I like that I don’t care.
Abbott by Ahmed and Kivela, first of a series of unspecified length. A black woman reporter in the 1970s is up against an occult threat. This is a solid piece of work, thought the occult threat takes a while to show up. Nice to see a main character whose skills are intelligence and determination while not being a hand-to-hand fighter.
Surprisingly, while the art is generally merely decent conventional comic book art, the black tentacles are disquieting, much more so than the black tentacles in Monstress.
On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. This is a 500 page story complete in one volume or free online, and quite an achievement being written and drawn by one person.
The artwork is striking, especially the landscapes. The people are a little stiff and anime-ish but at a level that didn’t really bother me. Unfortunately, the lettering is somewhat small and scratchy.
It was a good idea to have the characters make their living by rehabbing old spaceships. It’s a fine excuse for having them run into weird shit.
A good bit of the story has faded from memory, but I remember liking it enough to intend to read it again look up more of Walden’s work.
Black Panther: Long Live the King by Okorafor and Coveington. This just didn’t work for me– undistinguished story, faces were flat. Setting sentient vibranium free would have been interesting if the story had done something with it.
How do they verify which authors are white men?
Fair question, though I don’t think the proportion of people who aren’t obviously in one category or another is all that high. I could be wrong about this.
I’ve been wondering about a related question. These days, would it be possible for a writer to have a career like James Tiptree’s? Years of well-respected work without ever being seen in public and with race and gender unknown. Even then, she was eventually tracked down, and the tools for tracking people down are much better now.
It might be “possible” in the strictest technical sense. I think we still don’t really know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, right?
But it would be incredibly difficult to stay anonymous and become famous/successful in the creative arts. Without the ability to promote your own work in public, the work would have to be amazingly superior to other works.
That’s my impression from hearing writers talk about this stuff. Publishers encourage you to have a social media presence if nothing else, and of course it helps to go to cons.
Off the top of my head I can think of one author who doesn’t, Greg Egan. He claims there are no photos of himself on the Internet. Funnily enough, though, I still encounter him on social media, because he posts (posted?) in the comments sometimes at John Baez’s blog.
Banksy would be the obvious counterexample.
Perhaps the one that proves the rule… not sure.
But what’s the minimum level of fame/success you need to be nominated for or win a Hugo? I would think it’s low enough that you can still viably conceal your gender and race. But I don’t know much about the Hugos…do they pretty much only consider people who’ve already been special guest presenters at sci-fi cons for ten years or more, etc.?
Egan got a Hugo in 1999 for Best Novella for his work “Oceanic.”
Recent years have seen the best-novel Hugo awarded (not just nominated) for an author’s first published work, and for their first work published in English translation in spite of their never AFIK having set foot in an English-speaking country.
So, it sounds like it would be a good idea for a white male sci-fi author with Hugo ambitions to simply use a pen name like “Shamika Ndelele”. The publishers have an incentive to help the author conceal his race and gender, since this would increase the odds they can boast having published a Hugo-winner. Plus this way the Hugo panel of judges can feel happy having given the award to someone named Shamika Ndelele rather than to someone named Allen Schellenberger. And the angry torches-n-pitchforks mob demanding the Hugos be given to women & minorities can feel victorious seeing the name Shamika Ndelele on the list of winners. And since the number of people with real names like Shamika Ndelele writing sci-fi are so relatively few they’re almost zero — and the law of large numbers works in reverse as the law of small numbers — nobody loses! It’s a win-win-win-win.
Well…:
“do they pretty much only consider people who’ve already been special guest presenters at sci-fi cons for ten years or more, etc.?”
Sometimes the Hugos are called a popularity contest, and I’m sure being well-known in person and well-liked helps, but I’m grateful to the people who listed Hugo winners who weren’t on the con circuit.
These days, are there writers who are personally well-known fandom through text-only? This would include social media as well as being published.
I can’t remember the exact example, but I recall some white author did exactly something like this a few years ago, naming himself as an Asian woman and submitting poetry to some contest or journal or such. IIRC, he got published in part thanks to his deception (I believe he had submitted same works under his real name to similar places without success), but he obviously got found out and faced repercussions. I think the risk of the negative repercussions when such a deception gets found out completely mitigates all the win-win-win-win-ness of what you’re proposing, unfortunately.
I wonder, did he get found out because he jumped out from behind his disguise and said “Ah HAH!” or did someone “dig up dirt” on him? If it was the latter, how did they do it? How deep did they need to dig?
One upside of his getting found out was it maybe helps bring criticism to and thus erode the dumb racist/sexist system they’re using. If he plays his cards right, of course.
From here
When the poems were reprinted in an anthology the truth was noted.
How you can be savvy enough to know this is effective at getting an advantage but not enough to know people will resent you having that advantage under false pretense, I don’t know.
There’s also the Rachel Dolezal example. She seems to have been “hiding in plain sight” if you will. It’s less that she was skillfully masking her identity so much as it was that for several years, nobody was willing to question her about it…
Reading a little bit about Rachel Dolezal, it didn’t seem like she was after a job or other tangible benefit.. I think that, growing up in a black area with a black adopted sibling, she just basically saw her self as part of that culture/group. If it was deception, it was self deception.
As I recall it she outright lied on her admissions application and said she had a black father and took positions you would expect would give a leg up to a woman of color.
I think it isn’t terribly uncommon for white Americans to identify primarily with black culture. It is unusual for them to actually pretend to be black. Style your hair to look African American? Maybe. Apply something to your skin to make it look more African American? Probably not, but uh, I mean…I guess? Lie about who your parents are? That’s not just self-deception (she also supposedly asked her brother “not to blow her cover” which suggests she was well aware of what she was doing).
Edit: @baconbits9 beat me to it
I’ll bow to your more up to date knowledge.
The difference with Rachel Dolezal is, by pretending to be black she wasn’t trying to bring attention to the racism of a system that would have disqualified her simply for being white (the way she might have if she was trying to get her sci-fi novel nominated for a Hugo); rather, she was just sort of LARPing as a black person.
I was going to go the other way. In theory, it’s the story that’s being judged and not the author. Instead of the author concealing their race or gender, would it be possible to conceal the authorship from the reviewers?
Not for the Hugos. A lot of people will have read the story already, and it will have the author’s name attached.
You could have an honor system (here’ the story, don’t look it up) for those who haven’t previously read the story, bu I don’t think it would work very well.
In particular, I don’t see how you’d do blind nominations, and if we’re seeing male authors excluded from nomination across multiple categories, “,,,and you have to pinky-swear you won’t try to find out which female author wrote the story you are voting for” is not going to fix the problem.
@John Schilling:
Yeah, you’re right that if the issue is selective nomination, blinding the reviewers to the author wouldn’t be much help, and there is probably no reasonable way to do the nominations blind.
My instinct, although I’m uncertain if it’s true, is that authors aren’t actually being strongly discriminated against for being white and male, but rather that books are consciously being selected for because of the political viewpoint they espouse, and avoided if they present the wrong message. But I’d guess there’s a correlation between female and minority authors and certain social justice themes, making it difficult to distinguish negative discrimination by author from positive promotion by message.
The existence of some smaller number of nominated white male authors with acceptable messages would appear to point in this direction. Do you see a way that one could tease apart these two effects?
The ranking system that I have been using to try and track this has five author/publisher-specific factors and seven story/character factors, so I can pull them apart and score them separately. So, a bit of spreadsheet-fu, and
[calculating]
OK, for author-related factors in combination, there is a +1.1 standard deviation shift in the direction of pro-SJ credentials for novels nominated after 2010(*) compared to before. For story-related factors, the shift is +0.8 standard deviations. Considering both in combination, the shift is +1.2 standard deviations (because more raw data points means a smaller standard deviation).
So, maybe slightly more of a concern with authorial SJ credentials than with the stories, but not to a statistically significant degree.
* 2010 was the first set of nominations after Racefail ’09, an event which substantially transformed the character of discussion in the the major internet SF forums influential in any collective “what should we nominate this year?” discussions. It is as good a break point as I can find for when the character of the nominees changed.
K.J. Parker wrote, it looks like thirteen novels and an anthology’s worth of short fiction over, over a seventeen-year period, before being “outed” as a pen name of Tom Holt. And during that period, I believe actively courted the mismpression that “Parker” was a woman.
But I think that was unique and mostly a marketing gimmick. Having one pen name for e.g. light SF/F comedy and another for dark and gritty quasi-historical fantasy is standard publishing-industry marketing practice, but usually with the connection between pen names openly acknowledged to anyone who gets as far as the title page or back-cover blurb. Never mind showing up for conventions. Holt and Orbit thought that throwing in an extra bit of real-world mystery, and the prospect that such dark and gritty and technically detailed fantasy was being written by a woman, would sell a few extra books, and they were probably right.
Still, it is proof of concept that if an author needs to conceal their race or gender, they can likely manage a successful career within that constraint. Positively masquerading as a different race or gender would probably be harder; Holt never flat-out stated that Parker was female, nor hired a model to pose for author-bio photos or the like.
A tale of someone who probably could have maintained a secret identity if they hadn’t started a professional sf career.
Well that was depressing as was the comments section, but at least I saw my first use of “folx” which I had wondered if that was a figment of @Deiseach’s imagination.
Deiseach rarely makes stuff up, but she does — or at least did — hang out on Tumblr, which historically harbored some of the fringiest, most extreme social justice culture anywhere on the Internet. If you can find a particular piece of moral entrepreneurship anywhere, you can find it there.
Much like how one might end up with a distorted view of economic trends if one lives in a city run by well-meaning idiots in the center of an exploding housing market.
@Nancy Lebovitz
If we don’t limit it to SF, then Elena Ferrante is the obvious example.
@Nancy Lebovitz,
As an aside, in the ’80’s I had subscriptions to “Omni” and “Asimov’s”, and in the late ’90’s and early 2000’s I subscribed to “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction”, plus I’d pick up Year’s Best anthologies, but that was then not now, and I’m really impressed with how “with it” you are with the new fiction.
I’m not especially with it about new fiction. I volunteered to read all the nominees for the Hugo panel. So I read them.
Previously, I’d read two novels and three of the short stories. I’d seen four of the movies.
One quiet night you disappeared from your home. Anyone investigating your disappearance had little to work with, because there was no sign you prepared for an absence. You simply were there in the evening, and weren’t there in the morning. And no one saw you anywhere nearby that night. Six months later you reappeared with no memory of were you had been and what had happened to you.
In this scenario, what would you think had happened to you? What would your friends, family, and any investigating authorities conclude happened to you?
Definitely sounds like a case of alien abduction to me.
I would definitely investigate my body for any signs of probing.
I would guess that I experienced a dissociative fugue and wandered off somewhere, right before being abducted by aliens.
Definitely not cooking meth out in the desert
Probably a brain tumor with a tiny chance of hypnotism being a real thing.
Hmm, if I lost my memory how would I find my way back home? I guess I must have been kidnapped and drugged and brought back. Don’t know of any drugs that can produce this kind of amnesia. Whoever kidnapped me must have access to currently unknown drugs or technology. Aliens? Shadowy government experiment?
Attempted suicide and brain damage from the same. Not terribly likely (don’t worry) but more likely than the alternatives.
Depends. I would immediately go to the relevant authorities and submit myself for testing. I had to be somewhere during that relevant period, and the exact state of my body would give me a lot of information as to where.
In six months, I have to have been eating something. A stomach pump + examination of faeces and urine would tell me something about what I had been eating. Have I lost weight, gained weight, or stayed put? I am a fairly strict vegetarian, so my adherence to that diet would tell me something about whether I had been in control of my diet. A blood test would check for things like vitamins and iron. Have I been drinking alcohol?
What do my hair (head, facial, and body), fingernails, and skin look like? Have my muscles built up or atrophied, or stayed the same? Is my hair the same length as it was when I vanished, or longer or shorter? Has it been recently cut? Is there my usual product in my hair and on my skin?
The missing memories are also highly suspicious, given that my memory stops as soon as I disappear and restarts as soon as I return. This makes it highly unlikely that it was an accident, or coincidental amnesia. It is more likely that whatever made me vanish stopped my memories as well. Of course, if I reappeared somewhere far away from home, such a coincidence might be more likely.
For one example, imagine my skin looks pale, I’m low on vitamin D, my muscles have atrophied, my hair is cut, and my diet looks like basic rations and has meat in it. In this case, I’d guess I’d been kidnapped by someone with some form of drug/device which prevents the formation of memories, applied when I disappeared and removed when I returned. Given my relative unimportance, I would assume that I was a test subject, as such a device blocking the formation of memories could be very usefully applied to all kinds of situations. Presumably the organisation wanted to test how long a subject could be subjected to the memory blocker, and is now observing me to watch for long-term effects.
Different example, if my hair is still the same length but with no sign of being recently cut, my muscles/skin look the same as usual, my diet matches what I had picked up from the supermarket the week before I disappeared, and I still have the products I usually use on my hair and skin, I would assume that I had been in some kind of stasis field or time warp, likely applied by technologically advanced aliens. Would have no ability to speculate on how or why.
I guess I would ask if anyone had seen me hiking into the Catskill Mountains, and whether anyone had heard tales of archaic-looking men drinking strange drinks and playing a game of nine-pin bowling in a lonely valley in those mountains.
Did I have only one sip of the drink from their keg, rather than multiple mugs?
Prolly went to live in Buenos Aires for a bit and came back when money ran out or got kicked out.
Yeah uh I have amnesia. No idea what’s going on. No, I don’t have a funny accent.
If I wanted to learn (about) Stoic philosophy, where should I start?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/
And links from there
Does your house have a porch?
Does your house have a porch?
I’m torn between groaning at the audacity of the pun and admiration for the appositeness.
@Deiseach,
Going over my head.
Please, please, please, with sugar on top explain!
I guess you need to be a stoic to sit on your porch all day, and watch all the
idiotsinteressting people out there.Stoic comes from the Greek stoa, which mans porch, so Stoic roughly means “having to do with the porch” or something like that. That’s because the first Stoic was Zeno, and Zeno taught at the “Stoa Poikile”, the Painted Porch or Great Hall of Athens.
@FLWAB,
Thanks!
Also, I feel even more under-educated for this crowd.
Sorry Plumber, came back late to the party but I see everyone has explained for you 🙂
And honestly, this is about as educated as I am re: Greek history and philosophy, that I knew “Stoic” came from “those guys hanging around the Stoa” which is “porch” in Greek, so you’re plenty educated for us!
@Deiseach,
Thanks for the kind words.
I know Greek and still missed the pun, so you have nothing to feel bad about, Plumber.
Thanks @Nick
I thought stoics nested on chimney tops, not porches.
Pun of the week.
If you’d like a primary source, the Enchiridion of Epictetus is very readable and very short.
A great place to start is The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, probably followed by the Enchiridion.
Podcast update, for those that care. I’ve been out of town at GenCon all last week, so the podcast is behind the blog, but I should catch up over the next couple of days. To tide people over I published another one from the top posts list:
Who By Very Slow Decay (Original here)
I quite enjoyed this one. I think it lended itself to an audio treatment. If for some reason you’re on the fence about listening I think you should.
Also you may have noticed that this is the last of the current top posts list, there are other lists, which I’m going to start working on, but this is also the time to make requests.
Why is Julius Caesar so famous?
He was a great general who took over Rome. But Pompey, Marius, and Sulla were also great generals, and Sulla also took over Rome, and nobody remembers any of them. Caesar ruled a few years, after which Rome plunged into the same kind of civil war it had been in on-and-off for decades – no lasting effect.
Compare to Augustus, who succeeded where Caesar failed and founded the Roman Empire, but isn’t nearly as famous.
So why is Caesar the one Roman who everybody knows? Is it all downstream of an Augustus-era PR campaign?
I don’t know how old this phenomenon is, I really don’t, but there are a hell of a lot of people in Europe for whom the answer will be Astérix comics.
First mover on a popular title and Shakespeare.
+1 to Shakespeare.
In a more just world, someone would make a box office hit movie about Augustus where Marc Antony is the bad guy.
I think it’s really this. Most people don’t know enough history to distinguish among various roman emperors. But “Caesar” as a title is something they know, so they lump pretty much everything they know into that, which also happens to be the name of Julius…
Yeah, it’s all Augustus. Since being the first of a dynasty always makes your position precarious, he pushed the line that no, really, it was Caesar who was the first emperor, and Augustus was just carrying on his legacy.
This. Julius Caesar legitimized Augustus, who changed the Marian constitution of Republic-with-a-generous-side-of-anarchy to the first stage of Empire, from which so many future monarchs traced continuity.
I think this is the most likely. With added firepower from later famous works cited, but mostly Augustus.
Plus, the more Augustus venerated Caesar, the more impressive his reign became. Same as how in North Korea the cult of Kim Il Sung really kicked off under Kim Jong Il.
I don’t think this is right. I remember reading somewhere that Augustus was much more well known than Julius during the Roman Empire. He was an important political player for nearly his entire adult life and was the sole ruler for nearly three decades. His face was on every coin for that time and he made a pretty concerted propaganda campaign.
I think that attributing Julius Caesar’s much higher fame to Shakespeare is probably right. Another reason might be that he was a much better military leader than Augustus, and that’s a very big deal in the ancient world. Later Romans, who we get our sources from, were much less likely to criticize a great general.
Julius is the surname here, which Augustus received as he got adopted into the family. Caesar’s given name is Gaius, but half of Rome was named Gaius so it’s not helpful.
Augustus went by Gaius Julius Caesar after he was adopted in Caesar’s will, and used Caesar in all of his titles/names afterward.
Yeah, it’s in no way convenient.
Is there a convention used to differentiate the two? Because when I hear “Julius”, I think of “et tu, Brute” Caesar even though they both shared that name. But when I hear “Caesar”, it’s ambiguous. In Adrian Goldsworthy biography, he would call Augustus “the young Caesar” for part of the time but it seems awkward to say that of a guy who lived to his 70’s.
You call the older of the two Julius Caesar, and refer to his successor as Octavianus or Augustus depending on when he was doing things.
Julius Caesar was one of the three pagan members of the medieval Nine Worthies along with Hector and Alexander the Great (but not Augustus), so his fame was strong in post-Roman Europe well before Shakespeare wrote.
There are a few things. Firstly, there was the Augustan PR campaign and that Caesar’s faction (unlike Sulla’s) won so completely it got to write history as it pleased. It also can’t hurt that the surname Caesar became a title that lasted, in some places, into the 20th century.
Secondly, Caesar was an uncommonly good writer (though not sparklingly brilliant) and wrote in a very plain, easy to understand yet grammatically correct style. His own propaganda has been a Latin textbook since medieval times at least.
Thirdly, Caesar was the direct predecessor of the first real monarch of Rome since the kingdom period. When monarchs in the early modern to modern period wanted to defend or praise monarchy, they often pointed out the chaos of the Roman Republic. They eagerly adopted the line that Caesar had founded a dynasty and ended the chaos. This served as a sort of anti-democratic propaganda that was in line the Ancient position in the Ancient-Modern debates. In contrast, the more democratic factions used Caesar as a sign of dictatorship. For example, British Prime Ministers who got overly cozy with executive authority were called Caesar in the 19th century.
Also, I might be wrong here, but I think most people know who Caesar, Augustus, Marc Antony, and Cleopatra are. In other words, they know more figures from the Civil War after Caesar’s death (the one that did establish a monarchy) than about Caesar’s time.
Poor Cicero.
Actually, it looks like Cicero does pretty well. Though I’m guessing that’s more for his non-political abilities.
Why does Caesar peak in the Spring, but Cleo at Hallow’een?
Time of his murder and women dressing up in a Cleopatra costume, I’m guessing?
Most likely.
Alas, ‘Sexy Caesar’ does not show any results.
Sounds like you’ve a budding market to exploit then.
I dressed up as Mitt Romney one year, and tried to convince Cleopatra and a dog to vote for me.
Julius Caesar is famous for founding the Roman Empire, which is a pretty big deal. He conquered a bunch of historically important places(*) in the name and to the expansionist glory of Rome, and then he conquered Rome in the name of Caesar, and then he conquered Rome in the name of Caesar, and then Rome wasn’t a republic any more but was an Empire that endured as such for hundreds of years.
Pedantically, Caesar’s official title wasn’t “emperor”, which one might argue should disqualify him as the founder of the Roman Empire. But when the Romans got around to recognizing that yes, they were in fact an Empire, they backtitled their emperors “Caesars”. And they deified him, which had never been done before. And his rule was more like the emperors that followed than like the republican governments which had come before. So, technically, “first quasi-emperor of Rome before they made it official”, which most people just simplify to “first emperor of Rome”.
Augustus, as you note, did much of the same stuff and he made it official. But he did it second, and he couldn’t have done it if Julius hadn’t done it first, and he pretty much officially said “Julius is the Man, I’m just following in his footsteps, you got a problem with that, take it up with him. He’s a God now.”
* Especially where “Western Civilization” is concerned, and yes, the history books will count you greater for conquering England and France than they will for conquering Yugoslavia or Egypt.
Caesar and his successors were called Imperator and their domain Imperium before those words took their present meaning. They originally meant “commander” and “that which is commanded”, respectively. Later they came to mean the type of ruler that the leader of Rome was, and the type of state that he ruled.
Modern historians have decided that Augustus was the first “Emperor” because he set up the Empire’s bureaucracy, but this usage does not correspond to any ancient title.
(Caesar also claimed other titles: Dictator, which had been a special emergency executive under the Republic, Princeps Senatus (leader of the Senate, and the origin of “Prince”), and Pontifex Maximus (high priest, now one of the Pope’s titles).)
Doesn’t the word ”prince” just come from princeps (”leader, chief”) generally, rather than the specific title of Princeps Senatus?
Could be, but I had the impression it was specifically because it was one of the Emperor’s titles.
Caesar’s military victories are important not just because of his talents, but because his campaigns were invasions of Gaul and Brittania, two regions which went on to be Empires themselves, so they’ll naturally be more interested in their own legendary history for provincial reasons and propagate it appropriately.
But yeah Augustus reigned a long long time so he got to really control the narrative.
Because Caesar was a canny self-publicist. He produced The Gallic Wars specifically to burnish his reputation, and so successfully that for centuries students had (and have) to read it when learning Latin.
And this wasn’t his only dabbling in the field of literature, he wrote one other major work and has a couple minor ones attributed to him.
Pompey, Marius, Sulla and so on had others write about them, and those writings are slanted in one way or another depending on the author’s politics and allegiances. Caesar knew the value of publicity and creating your own image to embed in the mind of the masses (all that stuff about the descent from Venus via Aeneas and his son by Lavinia, Iulus was to establish family pedigree as Roman of the Romans from the start and blessed by the gods), and this is the result.
Helps that as well as engaging in the usual Roman politics, he was also an astute, capable and successful general and his military victories would stand out even amongst other generals (not as unique as Alexander, but who is?). Things like the affair with Cleopatra also gives plenty of grist to the mills of later writers wanting romance and drama in their history. And having yourself assassinated by your best friend, amongst others, on grounds of wanting to re-establish the kingship is certainly one way to ensure your memory lives on in history!
The better question is why does everyone know about Hannibal and his elephants. His invasion didn’t work, wasn’t the only one who tried it, and he wasn’t even the only one with elephants. Caesar makes sense for the reasons articulated above, but why does everyone still know hannibal?
He brought Rome to the brink of destruction, no one else managed that after him, for five centruies.
Also he was a great political reformer, who’s work was essential to the resurgence of Carthage which lead to the third Punic war.
Source dependence leading to a critical mass of knowledge in popular culture, probably. I suspect that popular knowledge of the classical world mostly traces back to classical educations. And I don’t think that the curriculum designers for those were terribly concerned with making sure that they had a properly balanced view of ancient history. If works were selected on a combination of literary merit, availability and tradition you can easily end up with a situation where Hannibal is much more famous than equally deserving generals because the story is interesting and someone wrote a good book about him. I suspect it may have been Polybius in this case, but I’m not sure.
Polybius and Livy, I should think.
right, but the classical education has been dead for, what, almost 60 years? If teenagers today know two names from ancient Rome, they’re Julius Caesar and Hannibal. Where’s it coming from in the modern world?
It’s a leftover from that time. Hannibal and Caesar got into popular consciousness from the classically-educated, and have stuck there even though those people are rare on the ground these days. I’d guess this has to do with them having prominent, interesting details (elephants across the Alps and “Et tu, Brutus?” respectively).
Because it really very terribly freaked out the Romans and they made sure he lived on in infamy, intentionally or not.
The calendar that was used all the way to the 17th (20th in Russia) century was developed and implemented under him as Pontifex Maximus. Seems like a good reason to remember his name.
As far as I can tell, both of them are more famous than other ancient roman leaders. A large reason why is that they managed to get months named after themselves, and most languages still use those month names.
A lot of reasons which have been mentioned, but also: Cleopatra. A little sex livens up your historical memory.
In addition to what others have said – why is JFK such a famous American President when he only served for three years and accomplished very little of substance? I think the answer is the same.
XKCD once cynically noted that a tradition is anything that happened to a baby boomer thrice. JFK doesn’t seem to have managed to get murdered three times just yet, but the answer is almost certainly ‘because it left an impression on the generation with the biggest cultural weight’.
@DeWitt,
The boomers had their time in the sun for four decades, so far the millennials have had two decades, and we in “Generation X” got three weeks.
I would suggest that (culturally) Gen X had the late 80s and 90s. Still less than 2 decades, but a little more than 3 weeks.
Part of the reason “millennial” will claim so much time is that people expand the definition of millennial to include like 3 decades of births.
Millennial is code for young person doing thing the author dislikes, yes.
Where “young” can mean anything from 10 years old to upper 30s.
Gen X gets and got nothing, as we’re too small to matter.
I dunno, South Park has been running for well over 20 years now.
@DeWitt
I think the real problem is that some Gen X’ers didn’t like the dominant Gen X culture that won out (which is a perfectly reasonable position to hold).
I’m not actually entirely sure what cultural dominance millennials have achieved, other than “Internet/Social Media culture” which is not uniquely millennial and was generally put into motion by Gen-Xers*.
*Ok, this depends a bit on your source. Some sources place all people born in the 80s as millenials (this seems incorrect to me), in which case the social media part was largely built by millennials.
Video games. It’s not as visible just yet, because it’s a much more recent medium, but watching people in their 20s whinge about kids these days doesn’t bode well for the future.
Are they whining that kids these days don’t play enough video games, that they play too much, or that the play the wrong ones/wrong way?
In any case, the “kids these days” in this case would not be millenials, correct? (I’m assuming this is late 20s people complaining about early 20s people…the late 20s folk are millenials, the early 20s folk are whatever the next generation is going to be called).
The kids in question are younger millennials or gen Z. The complaints tend to be that they tend to play Call of Duty or Fortnite or whatever the hell else, and that back in my day games were actually fun, or something.
Minor correction, it was “twice” not “thrice”.
Not that it really changes the point.
Has anyone tried the explanation of Christianity’s influence? For a lot of people in modern times, their first exposure to old civilizations is from The Bible, so they get exposed to Rome first, as well as the name “Caesar.”
And perhaps that first-mover advantage is why Shakespeare himself picked Caesar over another figure.
Meaning that the thing that made it possible was that Caesar successfully made his name into a title, unlike the other dudes.
I know Caesar Augustus is mention in the Gospel of Luke, but I don’t think Julius appears, does he?
How many people are aware there is a difference?
Augustus is named in Luke, Claudius is named in Acts, and Tiberius and Nero appear without being named (Tiberius was the Caesar with whom Pilate was threatened at the Crucifixion, and Nero was the Caesar to whom Paul appealed) but are repeatedly named in ancient traditions around and references to those scenes.
Has anyone here read Ferdowsi’s Iranian national epic Shahnama?
The author purports to tell Iranian history from God’s creation of Man down to the defeat of the last Shah by a Caliph, and the contents can be really surprising. Ferdowsi started composing it in the last quarter of the 10th century AD, and earlier in the century Muslim historians like al-Tabari had tried to synchronize the Bible (and of course the patchy references to Biblical figures in the Quran) with indigenous sources of Iranian history. Ferdowsi was having none of that: he wanted to preserve the indigenous tradition in its pure form… and once you get past the most mythic times, it’s fascinating to see what Iranians had lost about their own history. The Achaemenid dynasty is collapsed to Kay Bahman (maybe Cyrus the Great), a mythical daughter who ruled for 32 years after him, and then Darab and Dara, the latter of whom is defeated by Alexander the Great in his Romance form. Ferdowsi knows that Alexander’s empire in Greater Iran was replaced by the Arsacids (Parthians), but he mostly has to skip from Alexander’s death to the Sassanids (about 550 years) with an apology for not having fuller sources!
The earlier, more mythic part is fascinating too. Kingship starts with Keyumars, who lives in a time when humans are cavemen who wear animal skins, who start obeying him because God (Ahura Mazda) gives him a supernatural radiance. The second Shah is his grandson Hushang, who’s such a Culture Hero that the discovery of fire, all the elements of the Neolithic Revolution, and iron-working are all attributed to him. His son Tahmuras invented the spinning and weaving of wool, domesticated chickens, invented falconry and bred hounds: but way more exciting was his career as a slayer and enslaver of demons, defeating two armies of equal size with sorcery and the last third with his mace, then learning how to write thirty scripts from his demon slaves. His son’s name is Jamshid: from Avestan Yima Xšaēta, showing that he was originally the first man (Hindu Yama) or first of all beings (Norse Ymir).
Jamshid eventually loses the kingship to Zahhak, a kind of serpent man based on the three-headed dragon Azi Dahaka. A pawn of Ahriman, he oppresses the world for a thousand years, killing two men every day so his chefs can scoop out their brains to feed the two serpent heads on his shoulders. At the end of his thousand year rule, he’s mystically imprisoned under a mountain by Fereydun. After he secures the kingship (circa 1779 BC), Iranian ethnogenesis takes place: his favored youngest son Iraj is murdered by his brothers Tur and Salm, who partition off Turan (the steppe) and Rum (“Rome”, meaning the Greek-speaking world).
This is awesome.
I read the first… 40% of it, in translation?
I thought it was interesting, but the translator did too much of it in prose and not enough in poetry, so it felt more like the summary of an epic than an epic itself.
I should say that I did not get out of the mythic bits. I’d made it to the person who’s apparently the central hero in them, Rustam, who goes around wearing a tiger skin and killing demons with a mace, but who is apparently still not Hercules, but I hadn’t gotten past his career.
I think I know the translation you’re talking about. +1 to your take.
Another +1 to “Rustam is apparently still not Hercules.” 😀
Has anyone tried taking seriously the idea “car crashes are the leading cause of sudden death, they should be publicized more than other causes”? That is, does anyone closely track and report on trends in traffic deaths, how different countries compare, which govt policies affect the numbers the most, etc?
French media certainly do so. We regularly get to hear about how many road deaths there were last month, or last semester, with comparison to last year at the same point of time, along with discussions of the trends and how/which government policies affect them, and how specific events lead to variation — the grand narrative these days is that the lowering of speed on intercity non-highway roads from 90 to 80km/h initially lead to a measurable decrease, but the effect was then lost as, in the wake of the Yellow Vests movement, a lot of automatic speed radar were destroyed.
There’s also regular campaigns of advisory messages warning car users to be more careful and to mind speed limits for their own safety and the safety of others. These messages tend to multiply arround holiday times when a lot of people are travelling long distances.
We get similar things for tobacco, and to a lesser degree for alcohol and other drugs. French libertarians have often mocked the France as a nanny state due to the strong proactive focus on these issues.
I have an odd problem with my mobile phone, a Samsung Galaxy S4. A week or two ago I began seeing various web pages open on the device when I hadn’t asked them to open. This happens approximately once per day, and the pages seem like pretty innocuous informational material. They also open using the Samsung Internet application, which isn’t the browser I usually use.
I thought this might be caused by a couple of games I downloaded from Google Apps, but the pages keep appearing even after I have uninstalled the games. I also tried uninstalling Samsung Internet, but it comes with the phone, so it can’t be uninstalled.
Suggestions?
Factory reset the thing. (“Nuke it from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure”)
Second that. Older phones can get another 1-1.5 years of very useful life with a factory reset. Most of the degradation in performance is due to bloatware or old update data piling up.
Can you forbid the app from using data? I worked on a fairly spartan 100 MB plan for several years and forbade basically all of the background apps on my phone from using the internet.
Of course this doesn’t work if you’re on wifi most of the time.
You still should be able to disable an app that can’t be uninstalled.
Or, at this point in the phone’s life, you might choose to unlock it or root it and strip it to a bare bones install as I imagine it’s pretty slow by now.
Are there examples anywhere of the space below elevated highways/freeways in urban areas being used for anything besides parking and homeless camps?
It’s not exactly prime real estate so I’ll believe that such spaces are finding their best use given the circumstances/laws restricting it. Many American cities have been drawn and quartered by such highways and are faced with struggles like the Big Dig or Seattle’s Bertha incidents. I’m just wondering if you couldn’t build some storage units or something underneath. Something that doesn’t mind the noise/vibration/air quality.
There was an overpass in Atlanta where the Department of Transportation was storing “nonflammable” plastic tubing in a fenced-in area. Some homeless guys got in (the gate was locked but there was a large gap in the fence), which somehow resulted in the tubing catching fire and burning so hot it destroyed the overpass.
Here in Seattle, just south of the Ship Canal and somewhat north of the publicized homeless camps, I-5 overpasses a public skate and mountain bike park. I don’t go by there much, but the last time I did there were a few people using it for its intended purpose.
Ooh, lovely, I can imagine an interesting paintball setup might work too.
I walked through it a few weeks ago. Watch out for the piles of shit and the used injection needles, and watch for the mutterers who will follow you on the walking paths.
Sorry to hear that – especially the needles, since that’d seem to impede cycling.
“Burnside” is a DIY skatepark under a bridge in Portland that has been there for a few decades.
Here in Manhattan there’s a restaurant under FDR Drive, and a grocery store under the Queensboro Bridge.
Something like grocery stores seem ideal, but the space under Queensboro was closed when I walked by. (Didn’t there used to be a dim sum place in a bridge?)
The Boathouse (EDIT: Boat Basin, apparently which is a stupid name) restaurant was the inspiration for this question. Obviously not replicable in most places, but still I thought an interesting space and not unpleasant for being under a road.
Hrm, there was a Food Emporium but it’s been closed since 2015…goes to show you how long it’s been since I was around there.
There’s an ice rink under I-95 in Philadelphia.
Ah, brilliant. While we’re at it, why not a bowling alley? Loud crashes to cover the noise.
Here in Toronto, the space under the elevated highway near the waterfront is another road.
Storing salt for salting the roads.
In Boston there’s a skate park underneath some overpasses (and adjacent to railroad tracks).
In Hamburg there is the Isemarkt, which is an attractive farmers market and a popular tourist destination.
Not seen much under roads, but it’s quite common for the ends of railway arches to be bricked up and the space used for light industry/commerceial space.
Here in Huntsville we’ve got a dog park where the fenced in area is about half under an elevated highway. The portion beyond the highway is where all the nice grass is, though.
In Pittsburgh there are some office buildings under the freeway.
Does anybody by chance do green-sand casting, particularly with iron?
I don’t but I gotta say, casting iron is difficult, difficult business, especially in sand. You have to get that metal hot hot hot! Most home-made smelters can’t handle that kind of heat. I mean you’re going to need to get that almost a 1000 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than smelting copper, and casting copper is tricky enough as it is.
Oh, for sure. The actual “building something that can melt iron” part of things isn’t really the part I don’t have a firm grasp on, believe it or not; it’s more the “keeping things from exploding unexpectedly” part.
It’s not something I’m going to be doing particularly soon, it’s just something I’d like to do before I die so I work on plans for blast furnace construction and similar during my free time.
Keeping things from exploding unexpectedly seems like a really important part.
I dunno. I weld stuff now and then, but I’ve never tried to cast anything.
I’ve cast aluminum into delft clay / petrobond, but not specifically green sand, and obviously aluminum melts much easier than iron.
To prevent the explodey, my recommendations include making sure everything is really dry (steam explosions are bad), making sure the mold is properly insulated (resting on ceramic / concrete, etc), and having an up-to-code fire extinguisher, or preferably multiple (ie a class-D dry powder and maybe also a class-B CO2) nearby.
Green sand casting involves not really dry material. I don’t have the experience with it to say how far you can push it in the drier direction, but some intentional moisture is part of the process in order to get the right consistency to prevent the mold from collapsing. It might be possible to use a drier mold if combined with the lost-foam method.
In some cases (depends on the temperature of the coffee, maybe) I’d rather be the person who was trampled than the buffoon embarrassing myself, sure. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the buffoon who should be apologizing, it just means you don’t want to apologize. An apology is an attempt to rectify an actual harm, not to try to level the social playing field.
But if you like, you can preemptively laugh off awkward situations with, “Oh, man, don’t worry about that, happens to all of us.”
Have you? Were you standing where you shouldn’t be? Were you particularly unobservant? Did you call undue attention to the situation? If any of those are true, feel free to offer your own apology. But if you aren’t at fault, or even negligent in the matter, you can’t really apologize, but you’re free to offer sympathy (which conveniently use the same word, so you can say “Sorry about that” either way, I guess).
Going on to say “Wow, this must be embarrassing for you” or anything similar, of course, will probably just compound the issue.
I feel like people conflate them purely to be annoying, or as a defense mechanism because they don’t know how to properly respond to sympathy even though they identify it as such.
@acymetric
Or to avoid an argument about who is actually at fault.
I can say sorry, tell myself it was mere sympathy, and let you believe it was an apology.
It helps not to have much ego, I suppose.
@Deiseach, responding here because I can’t fork the discussion in an already max depth thread:
I’m interested in comparing reading lists with you, as this too sounds like something I’d enjoy. A couple of my favorites:
A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter Miller, where after the apocalypse an order of monks seek holy relics in the fallout shelter of Saint Leibowitz (former electrical engineer).
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell, whereupon the discovery of signals indicating intelligent life around Alpha Centauri leads the Jesuits to scramble a secret Mission mission to make first contact.
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn, where a statistical research historian puts together records that indicate the abandoned medieval town of Eifelheim may not have been visited by demons, but was definitely visited by something…
That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis, which you really won’t like if you thought that the Narnia series was a bit on the nose, but is is pretty good for how he lampoons Modern Education.
And of course there’s Orson Scott Card, particularly in Speaker for the Dead which takes place on a Catholic colony world and the Ender’s Shadow series which has an interesting subplot about the rise of a Caliphate.
The Solar Cycle books by Gene Wolfe, of which The Book of the Long Sun is by far the most explicitly religious. Uploads of earthly bigwigs set themselves up as gods aboard a generation ship; a priest of this cult receives a vision from the true God telling him the ship has arrived at its destination.
Lord of Light: The officers of a colony ship use their privileged access to high technology to re-create the Hindu caste system on their mostly-primitive new world, with themselves at the top as the gods themselves and the planet’s fantastic indigenes as rakshasas. The renegade titular character instead assumes a Buddha-like role. A subplot concerns the fate of the ship’s (Christian) chaplain.
Out of the Silent Planet: CS Lewis’ Christian re-telling of HG Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, more or less. Part of a loose trilogy with That Hideous Strength (which you mentioned) and Perelandra, which is great but I couldn’t define it as “science fiction” in good faith.
Count to a Trillion: A series of seven books by John C. Wright. This series has a lot of flaws including many very strange choices regarding focus and tone, but contains (among many other things) some serious if implicit attempts to reconcile Christian beliefs with radical transhumanism.
The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick. A sort of Gnostic fable about Yahweh being brought back to Earth, from which he was exiled after the fall of Masada in 74 AD, by space colonists.
I think you’re the third person I’ve seen recommend me Count to a Trillion. I think I’ll actually put it on my To Read list now.
Beat me to it, god damn.
There’s also Anathem if your tolerance for bricks made entirely out of weapons-grade jargon is high.
I liked Anathem even though I thought it dragged itself out far too long, but I wouldn’t consider it religious sci-fi. Its philosophy, as its characters steadfastly insist, is not “deolatrous.”
Isn’t it, though?
@Hoopyfreud, in what way? At most, it talks about the relationship between the universe and certain other universes.
Count to a Trillion is really good, but I liked the early to middle books better. The last book is the weakest of the series.
Architect of Aeons should have been written from Azarchel’s PoV.
Wright fell out with Tor over Sad Puppies or something around Book 5, and David Hartwell died immediately after that. The last book reads like it was dashed off except for the ending and not edited much at all, which was particularly disappointing because “the moral” of the series was nearly glossed over. The ending was pretty well done, though.
I’m not going to read the series (I can’t take Wright’s prose, even in his early books, which is a shame because it seems like he’s writing about things I’m interested in), so I don’t mind just being told the moral.
Thanks, sfoil. I knew about his falling out with Tor but did not know Hartwell died.
As far as “the moral,” introducing it in the seventh book was a serious mistake, and it amounts to a lazy analogy for religious faith. And since it’s an analogy for Catholicism in particular, I’m going to have to take issue with Rania as Space Jesus. Wright has pedestalized women before, but this truly takes the cake. This was around the same time, no less, that he started self-identifying as a “philosopher.” So color me unimpressed with the ending to an otherwise great series.
@Nancy Lebovitz
If you can’t stomach Wright’s prose, don’t even think of trying to read Count to a Trillion. I think I can sum up what happens for you well enough however.
The series concerns two Great Men with dueling visions of the universe (the characters literally duel, with some twist or another, in each of the books) as well as competing claims on the Space Princess, Rania, although Montrose is validly married to Rania and Azarchel, by exclusion, obviously is not. The protagonist, Montrose, is tl;dr a democrat/libertarian and his enemy, the bad guy del Azarchel, is an authoritarian/monarchist.
Throughout the books, the actions of Montrose and del Azarchel form a sort of dialectic, in which their efforts cancel each other out. The standard logic of escalation as well as the threat of pre-existing superintelligences lead the two men to continually scale up their attempts to control history/people/space/everything, so that we go from struggling for control of the Earth in the first book to the observable universe in the last.
The “moral” concerns the fact that gurfr gjb punenpgref’ pbasyvpg fhccbfrqyl obvyf qbja gb na bcgvzvmngvba ceboyrz: vs gur bofreinoyr havirefr vf nyy gurer vf, be zber trarenyyl vs rkvfgrapr vf obhaqrq, gura gur bcgvzny fbyhgvba vf gb pbafbyvqngr barfrys vagb gur Bzrtn Cbvag, naq pbyyncfr gur havirefr vagb n fgngr fhpu gung vg cebivqrf nf zhpu raretl nf cbffvoyr gb pbagvahr fbzr rhqnvzbavp rkvfgrapr ohg fhccerffrf gur rzretrapr bs nal pbzcrgvgvba. Ba gur bgure unaq, vs rkvfgrapr vf vasvavgr (v.r. vs Urnira vf erny, nygubhtu arire rkcyvpvgyl chg vagb gurfr grezf), gura fhpu mreb-fhz guvaxvat vf vapbeerpg naq frys-qrsrngvat. Ubjrire, fhpu na vasvavgr-nohaqnapr fgngr, vs vg rkvfgf, zhfg qb fb bhgfvqr bs gur svavgr bofreinoyr havirefr.
N ehaavat gurzr vf gung zrtnfpnyr vapernfrf va pbzchgvat cbjre/vagryyrpg qba’g npghnyyl nyybj Zbagebfr naq Nmnepury gb erfbyir gurve qvfnterrzragf. Ng gur irel raq bs gur frevrf, guvf vf gnxra gb vgf ybtvpny pbapyhfvba: gur ragver havirefr vf pbagnvarq va fbzr fbeg bs Qlfba furyy naq gur ragvergl bs nyy culfvpnyyl cbffvoyr gubhtug vf pbafbyvqngrq vagb n srj “Frencuvz” jubfr pbapyhfvba ertneqvat gur ceboyrz va gur cerivbhf cnentencu vf: vg pbhyq tb rvgure jnl. Guvf vf n ceboyrz orpnhfr gurer’f abguvat yrsg gb qb ng nyy rkprcg qrpvqr jurgure gb tb vagb rgreany fheiviny-ohaxre zbqr be qvffbyir gur havirefr naq zbir ba gb gur Urernsgre.
Fvapr gur frencuvz pna’g qrpvqr, gurl unir Zbagebfr naq Nmnepury svtug bar ynfg qhry. Ivn Enavn’f fnpevsvpvny vagreiragvba, Zbagebfr jvaf ohg qvrf zvahgrf be frpbaqf nsgre Nmnepury. Gur phegnvaf snyy.
Gur zbeny, gb chg vg va gur zbfg erqhpgvir jnl cbffvoyr, vf gung Ybir Jvaf orpnhfr Tbq vf Erny naq ivpr irefn, naq nyy gur vagretnynpgvp fpnyr genaf/cbfg/fhcre uhzna qrivprf naq fpurzrf gung pbhyq rire cbffvoyl rkvfg ner whfg jvaqbj qerffvat. Irel yvggyr bs guvf vf rira uvagrq ng orsber gur ynfg obbx.
@Nick
I don’t think Rania was, or was intended to be, Space Jesus. She’s a highly idealized vision of the Perfect Catholic Wife maybe, but there’s quite a bit more to being Christ than fnpevsvpvat lbhe yvsr.
Thank you.
@sfoil
Vg’f abg whfg gung fur fnpevsvprq ure yvsr. Svefg, fur’f gur svefg cbfguhzna va gur fgbel. Frpbaq, fur znxrf vg ure zvffvba gb fnir rirelbar ol crefhnqvat gurz gb gnxr gur Urnira fvqr bs gur qvyrzzn, naq vf fhcreuhznayl fhpprffshy ng vg, pbafvqrevat fur crefhnqrf fhcreulcretvtnoenvaf. Guveq, fur’f abg whfg fnpevsvpvat urefrys sbe nal pnhfr, fur’f qbvat vg gb fnir rirelbar, rireljurer. Gung’f zber yvgreny guna lbh znxr vg bhg gb or.
Yeah, I think those paragraphs of rot13’d text saved me from several increasingly-unreadable books and what would have been an inadequate reward. Balancing the pretty good story and the neat ideas against Wright’s prose and one-dimensional characters, I count only the first book as being good in its own right and was debating whether I should struggle through to the end. So, as Nancy says, thanks.
I don’t think Rania was, or was intended to be, Space Jesus. She’s a highly idealized vision of the Perfect Catholic Wife maybe
Rania is a Christ-bearer, as all the Redeemed and Blessed are, and as we the faithful are meant to be to each other. To quote you some criticism on the character of Beatrice in “The Divine Comedy”:
Rania is a post-human, a Swan, and though she is not divine, she has more nearness to the ideal of Unfallen Humanity (see what Tolkien did with the Elves re: this and and the union of mind with body so that the will and the reason rule the appetites and the desires are controlled, not controlling, and the spirit tunes the body to be its perfect instrument; see Catholic teaching on concupiscence) as we would have been, had not our First Parents fallen (not by her nature as such, since she is under Original Sin like all humans, but post-baptism she has better avoided sin than the rest of them) . So she has characteristics of a saint, the same powers and abilities to influence, because her will is conformed to the will of God more perfectly than ordinary humans; it is therefore not strange that she should mirror Christ in what she does and what she has come to do. This is, in one sense, the Orthodox idea of theosis, as from the epistle of St Paul – “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?”
That’s really interesting background material, Deiseach, and would come a long way to redeeming the last book if any of it were in there, or even better, set up in the earlier books. But none of it is! In fact, Montrose suggests just the opposite—that no matter how big your brain gets, you never leave your humanity behind, and your faults scale up right along with everything else. His certainly do, and so do Del Azarchel’s, and we even see it in some of the alien powers, like the one that hid in the sun. So Rania’s posthumanity seems to me to be a red herring. If on the other hand she’s only mirroring Christ because she’s more perfectly conformed her will to God, you would think we’d hear a little about that, and why it is imperative that the superhypergigabrains accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, but we get talk of infinite games instead. Look, I see the cleverness of translating the concept of salvation when death only threatens at the end of the universe, and it is genuinely clever. At the same time, this is not a Catholic eschatology; where’s the Second Coming, if it isn’t Rania?
Oh yes, definitely “Lord of Light”, Zelazny in general is fantastic. Gene Wolfe is also fantastic, in the “the effect of this book is that my brain just melted and ran out my ears but this is good, this is fine, I like it this way” fashion 🙂
I loved “Count to a Trillion”, which is not to say I loved every single thing in it, and it certainly has its flaws, but man. I love a good redemption story where the villain repents in the end, and that series has several villains which badly need to do some hard-core repentin’. And Menelaus is so smart that he’s stupid, and continues to do “well that was dumb” things throughout history, but it all works out in the end. The sheer gigantic scale of space and time is staggering, and I mean that.
Also, I love Mickey the Witch and Sir Guy for different reasons 😀
A Case of Conscience, James Blish. About a planet with no original sin, but there’s more to it than just that.
And R. A. Lafferty. Catholic, with a tall tale background and a fondness for scammers.
Past Master (Thomas More is brought out of the past because people are abandoning a society based on his Utopia to live in slums– has programmed mechanical people, hinting a giant hydra, the ansels who walk on two legs or four or none and play fan tan), Fourth Mansions</i (the four conspiracies which run the world– brain weavers, patricks who know a lot but God just won't let them into the Castle, immortal ghosts which take people over, and fascists (not like modern fascists)). Nine Hundred Grandmothers and the recently published The Best of R. A. Lafferty are good sources for short stories.
I really liked Eifelheim. Have yet to read Leibowitz or The Sparrow.
The Ball and the Cross is slightly antiquated religious SF.
Tim Powers’ Declare is more religious spy thriller, but there’s some overlapping appeal.
Still absolutely amazing. Second vote.
And also The Man Who Was Thursday.
For that matter, there’s Charles Williams, the third Inkling.
I don’t know that I consider The Ball and The Cross to be sci-fi; it’s kind of got a framing device, but most of it is pretty contemporary.
It’s great, though. I really want to see it made into an episodic TV show or a miniseries or something. It’s got the perfect odd-couple pair of bozos who go around having weird adventures for contrived reasons.
Also The Napoleon of Notting Hill. That’s an amazing story.
A short story, but Arthur C Clarke The Nine Billion Names of God is memorable.
More fantasy than SF, but Bujold’s “World of the Five Gods” starting with Curse of Chalion is one of my favorites.
If we’re including short stories, The Star by Arthur C Clarke and The Last Question by Isaac Asimov both bear mentioning.
Ones that I have read that you mention:
The Sparrow – didn’t like it that much, though I could see why it won awards and critical praise.
Eifelheim – enjoyed it immensely and the setting (mediaeval Germany) was fun.
The Space Trilogy – liked them all, though like many I think I like “Perelandra” best and “That Hideous Strength” the least, which is not to say I don’t like it, just not the highest-rated. “Out of the Silent Planet” is the most traditional SF one, and my only objection is that we never got to meet the Pfifltriggi the same as the Hróssa and the Sorns.
Others:
A Case of Conscience, by James Blish – part of his “After Such Knowledge” trilogy and which is very good (the last volume, which is two novellas cobbled together, is very unsatisfactory). This particular story sags a bit in the middle but picks up for the end very strongly.
Various short stories from Asimov to Bradbury to Chiang (we’ve discussed his “Hell is the Absence of God” on here previously), including Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon which is in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star”; I think stories grappling with theodicy from the non-believer’s side count just as much as more conventionally religious tropes. Way too many of these to remember.
The Divine Comedy – what? he journeys to the centre of the Earth, visits the other hemisphere of the globe, then travels to the Moon and other planets of the solar system before going beyond space and time altogether! that counts! 😀 Particularly as later SF writers have no problem riffing on Inferno etc.
Orson Scott Card’s _Memory of Earth_ series is pretty good, has a lot of religious themes, and is apparently based on the Book of Mormon. (I don’t know the Book of Mormon, but I thought the series was pretty good.)
His Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are also quite good, and feature various interesting ideas about religion.
I like the scene where the strict Catholic priest is martyred while preaching to the trees.
(makes sense in context, really).
If I’m alone I don’t avoid people who are obviously walking incorrectly and don’t apologize. I don’t really ever bump into people accidentally on the sidewalk because I am pretty aware of my surroundings. As such, I don’t really understand your problem all that much.
I’ve never had your coffee situation occur to me, for instance. On either side.
Yes, but the thrust of my inquiry now is: Do you ever accidentally bump into people, coffee or no?
If yes, does this mean you are a phone walker?
@Hoopyfreud,
I’ve got some pretty incoherent thoughts right now and come Wednesday and the 133.75 thread I’m hoping you’ll help me get them together, maybe with the help of @HeelBearCub as well.
-Thanks
Sure. I’m flattered.
@Hoopyfreud,
In the wake of the El Paso mass shooting (so soon after the Gilroy one) I had a bunch of thoughts that I wanted your take on, but with Dayton so soon after that I’m mostly just sad now and discussion of it seems pointless.
As you wish.
Not sure what exactly you are looking for, but if you post on Wednesday I’ll be happy to add my thoughts. But Scott isn’t exactly regimented (AFAIK) about when he makes the OT available, so it’s not a great coordination point. It’s not unlikely you will get a fair number of responses before we end up replying.
@HeelBearCub,
Thanks.
Suffice it to say the three-day-tragedy-window was involved but at this point I’m despondent regarding the use of saying much.
Has anyone of you read The Technological Society (1954) by Jacques Ellul? If yes, what are your thoughts?
I started reading another book by him, and found it incredibly dense, verbose, and difficult to understand.
I’m Canadian, so I apologize when someone bumps into me. (Canadian Bacon by Michael Moore is a terrible movie, but there is one scene where they make fun of that and it’s a reasonably funny 10 seconds.)
I think shrugging off minor inconveniences is the correct thing to do.
My take: Nobody likes apologizing, because nobody, as you say, wants to admit that they are in the wrong. We are a social species, and even minor social setbacks can result in strong emotional effects. So I think you’re correct to feel that the apologizer is, in some sense, the one who suffers the most (although I suspect you’re overstating the degree of the suffering for rhetorical effect). But that’s kind of the point. When you do something wrong, you indicate that you acknowledge your transgression as a sign that you can be trusted, etc. Which requires some kind of sacrifice on your part.
You could consider this harmless situation practice for the cases when you do something that genuinely does cause others harm, I guess.
Brits also do this, and I’d be astonished if Kiwis didn’t too.
I would guess no, but that’s just a guess.
Coming from a latino-germanic culture, apologizing serves the confessionnal prupose of “well i was i the wrong, but i apologized so everything is fine and over”*. I apologize to feel better about myself more than receive absolution from the other party.
*: With an option for “stop being mad you FUCKING CUNT” if the other party keeps pushing the issue, so maybe there are some potholes in which the process falls apart as a conflict-defusing mechanism.
The webcomic XKCD has a fun challenge. Find a movie you genuinely like, that came out during your adult life, and is rated below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. The idea here is that few people have truly unconventional taste.
I’m finding this exercise quite hard. The best I have been able to do is “The Cutting Edge”, a 1992 sports romance film. I was 22 when it was released, so it counts, and it is rated 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought Terminator 3 might qualify, but it’s rated 69%.
My first try was We Own the Night (2007), but this is rated 57%; I got it right on my second try with Only God Forgives (2013) at 41%.
I really liked The “Amazing Spider-Man 2”, which seems to be hated by most. Turns out its 52% on RT. Damn it!
Trivial for me. Act of Valor (2012).
Got absolutely panned by critics, but its audience score was 72%.
Honestly, this one is basically just “Find a place where critics and audiences are disconnected”.
The harder challenge is finding something you like that both audience AND critic are under 50%.
Only God Forgives is still a win for me under that criteria: audience score 37%!
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is close (48 critic, 53 audience).
Ah, got one!
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (38% critic, 48% audience). I liked the whole franchise, but most of it was too high in audience to qualify.
Ooh, another one: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (45% critic, 48% audience)
Apparently I like a lot of bad movies. I have no shame.
Pretty sure The Spirits Within isn’t actually a bad movie, it just triggered the uncanny valley effect on a lot of people so they instinctively hated it. Personally i liked it a lot, but my uncanny valley effect sense seems to be both weaker and misaligned in comparison with most people’s.
As a heavy gamer, I was used to the mediocre special effects at the time, so that didn’t kill my enjoyment at all.
“Blood and Chocolate” (2007) gets 11% from critics and 52% from the audience, so it’s barely off from your mark but okay on average.
(I really liked how the werewolves looked, and didn’t mind the extremely stupid title so much, I guess.)
Got it on my first try – Eurotrip (2003, 47%).
Next, Max Landis’s films – American Ultra (2015, 42%), Mr Right (2015, 44%). I think Bright (2017, 26%) also qualifies – I genuinely liked it, though I haven’t rewatched it.
After some more searching: The Net (1995, 38%), though it technically violates the post-2000 requirement in the XKCD comic.
Wait Eurotrip has <50% on RT? That movie is a goddamn classic! There's no justice in the world!
That’s just the Critic score, the Audience score is 75%. It seems to me that picking movies that critics hated and audiences liked seems contrary to the spirit of the exercise, which is to have a truly unpopular opinion in liking something lots of people hate. So we really should be using Audience scores for all of these.
“Eurotrip” is one of only two movies I ever walked out of the movie theater on. The other was “Stranger Than Fiction.”
Uwe Boll trump card: Postal with 7%, but it’s more a “not as bad as I expected with some good bits”
Martyrs almost cut it, with 58%
Jupiter Ascending is a work of genius and should have inspired a ten movie franchise.
I would have watched a sequel, at least.
Jupiter Ascending was pretty and fun.
Also, the central idea that all the ID in this futuristic society was based on DNA, and WHOOPS RANDOM DUPLICATE DNA person is pretty hilarious.
That’s one of mine! I think about that movie way too much because I keep trying to figure out what Jupiter’s next move should be. At the end of the movie the galactic aristocracy recognizes her as the legitimate owner of Earth, an extremely valuable planet. Why is it valuable? Because it’s almost ready for harvest and harvested human cells are the currency of the galaxy. But Jupiter isn’t going to harvest the Earth, so she is essentially “land rich and money poor.” So what is she going to do? She has the de jure right to the Earth but since she won’t harvest it she doesn’t have the resources to project power or meaningfully defend her assets in the case of hostile action from other aristocrats. So what’s her game plan? She seems to have one spaceship and a few animal-people servants: is she going to give the Earth advanced technology? If she reveals the existence of the galactic aristocracy to the people of Earth, will she be accepted as owner of the Earth? Doubtful: the US isn’t going to submit to her just because some aliens think she owns the planet. So what’s the right play to make? Become rich by “inventing” alien tech? Arm the Earth so it can defend itself? Take over he Earth in earnest? She has to do something: since its unlikely she will use the human cells to stay immortal for ethical reasons, she will get old and die and then the aristocrats are going to be jumping over themselves to get their hands on the Earth. Maybe she could get around that the old fashioned way by having kids and starting a dynasty, but the fact remains that without cash or capital she’s going to be at a major disadvantage in protecting the earth from galactic machinations. It’s such an interesting problem!
Of course the movie isn’t interested in any of that, but by gum I sure am!
Figure out which Earth-humans she hates the most(*), and lease the right to very selectively and secretly harvest those. Exploit the resulting artificial scarcity to at least partially alleviate the “money poor” part of her situation. Use the resulting galacti-cash to invest in a few more spaceships and a covert-operations force.
W/re the rest of galactic civilization, we know that the police/military forces will defend her legal claim to Earth against any violation that comes to their attention, so she just needs to make sure infiltrations don’t go completely unnoticed and are met by a token cutter or gunboat. A few spies in her major enemies’ camps, and a PR campaign about the plucky barbarian princess who made good, would also be useful.
W/re Earth and the Earth-humans who presently think they rule it, a little bit of alien tech goes a long way, particularly in orbit. Maybe also surveillance technology, but that’s not clear from the movie. But it seems pretty clear that with a modest bit of galacti-tech she could spray-paint “Jupiter Rules!” across the solar arrays of every high-value military satellite in the great power constellations and there’s not much they could do about it. Let them stew on the implications of that for a bit, then offer herself as Earth’s covert representative to the galactic community while they pretend that they still rule their respective nations and aliens don’t exist.
Then, yes, go about quietly introducing galactic technology to the terrestrial economy.
* She used to clean toilets for a living; I doubt this will be an insurmountable obstacle.
The big problem is your first point: harvesting a selected group of humans. That is to say, its a problem because we’ve been led to believe by the movie that Jupiter is a standard good person who will not be okay harvesting any humans whatsoever: but if she doesn’t get some cash somehow then she can’t buy any more spaceships! There’s the rub.
I considered maybe secretly harvesting people who are terminally ill or on death row or something like that, but putting aside the logistical challenge involved in doing that secretly, I’m not sure how much money a single human is worth. I mean the movie leads us to believe that there are multiple planets that have gone through this cycle over thousands of years: harvest planet of all humans (potentially billions), seed a few primative humans on the planet, wait several thousand years for them to multiply to the billions again. We know that Earth is extremely valuable, in no small part because it is an investment that is just about ready to be cashed out, a “ripe” planet of over 7 billion. So we know that 7 billion humans are worth quite a lot in galactic terms. But what does that mean for the price of a single human, or a dozen humans, or a hundred, or a thousand? How many humans do you need to harvest to afford a quality spaceship, or some of those cool battle mech suits? Probably a lot.
Also, are old people and sick people cells worth as much as young people cells? Or are old people cells just by-catch in any harvest operation? This movie is kind of stupid and yet it raises so many interesting questions!
Road House! (39%). But I don’t know if that counts, because I only liked it ironically.
No ironic liking. It has to be genuine to qualify.
Oh that’s easy: Hudson Hawk was released just before I turned 23 years old and I thought it was fun when I saw it in the theater, “Rotten Tomatoes” gave On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 26% ‘TOMATOMETER’, 57% ‘AUDIENCE SCORE’, but in looking at the XKCD link I see that the criteria isn’t just “Adult life” but is also “post-2000” which is a bit harder as I just haven’t seen as many movies in the 21st century as I did in the 20th and the movies just haven’t been as memorable, I’ll try Dude, Where’s My Car? which had the guy who played “Data” from Star Trek: The Next Generation ranting about ostriches in a ‘French’ accent: 17%
TOMATOMETER
Total Count: 58
47%
AUDIENCE SCORE
User Ratings: 367,383
Haw!
Oh wait, it can’t be “SO BAD IT’S GOOD”
Oh dagnabbit, I don’t have time to scroll through every post 2000 movie and see if I remember watching them and liking them, I’ll try three that I saw recently and thought were good;
Locke
90%
TOMATOMETER Total Count: 209
72%
AUDIENCE SCORE User Ratings: 27,826,
Alright, I’ll try ’71:
96%
TOMATOMETER
Total Count: 135
81%
AUDIENCE SCORE
User Ratings: 17,34
Last try, Widows:
91%
TOMATOMETER
Total Count: 384
61%
AUDIENCE SCORE
User Ratings: 4,762
Well, that’s it then, I’m out.
I don’t see a lot of reason to obey the post-2000 rule. Randall Munroe is 14 years younger than I am, so his idea of recent times is just plain different from mine.
I agree, the spirit of the challenge probably suggests any movie that came out after you [turned 18, 16, graduated high school, something along those lines].
On the other hand, there might be good reason not to go too far back before 2000, because the kind of people who go back to retroactively rate movies from the 80s or early 90s on Rotten Tomatoes…seems like an even less representative group than movie critics generally.
I think that’s one reason the post-2000 rule is good. Also cultural attitudes change so you may not have been a maverick for liking it when you saw it, and now you like it nostalgically. Also RT was launched in 1998.
I think I liked Dude, Where’s My Car unironically (despite it having plenty of dumb parts), but I was under 18 so womp womp.
I was 32 (and caught Hell when my wife found the ticket stub).
Me too, it’s a stupid movie but it’s not “so bad it’s good”, it’s just regular good.
This one is easy for me
Sahara (2005) 38% on rotten tomatoes.
The plot is kinda meandering, but I really love the dialogue, and soundtrack.
It just generally has a very laid back, fun feel to it.
I randomly found this on streaming and watched it with my girlfriend when we first started dating. Nothing amazing about it, but we basically enjoyed it!
I’d agree with this: even if looking back on it I seem to remember two different films (one which should have been from 1985), I’d be happy to watch it again.
I saw the second half of the movie on TV one day and it seemed decent. I’d be up for watching the thing through.
It definitely feels like 2 films. There is this weird subplot about the water being polluted but it feels like it was just shoehorned in. IMHO It would have been much better if they focused on the confederate battleship in the middle of africa.
Ehh, the book was better.
The Reckoning (2004), 39% critic score and 57% audience score.
Though I haven’t seen it in a while, maybe it’s been visited by the Suck Fairy since.
Can I cheat by looking for loopholes in “came out” and “rated”? “Three Amigos” came out on Blu Ray for the first time post-2000, and that’s how I greatly enjoyed it for the first time as an adult, and although its audience score is 67% it’s got a tomatometer of 46%.
Without cheating … I guess The Angry Birds Movie counts? 2016, 44% and 46%, and although it’s obviously not great cinema I did like it overall, got it for my kids, and might watch it again myself someday.
I bet I could find more if I had an easier time finding quick-to-skim lists of low-ranked movies. https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/movie-tv-scorecards/ has a few years of blockbusters, but for the most part the web’s only “worst movies of X” lists are the *worst* of the worst, not the slightly-below-mediocre stuff that I might have actually seen.
I am a huge fan of Dude, Where’s My Car. I think it’s basically the perfect archetype of a dumb, fun, stoner comedy.
*looks up*
17% tomatometer, 47% audience score.
Come at me, critics!
Hey, this one works for me too!
Also on my list here was the early 90s romantic comedy with some bizarre dark philosophical elements, Joe Versus the Volcano. Although I was surprised to see that RT treats that one pretty well…
The challenge probably should have excluded “dumb comedy” movies, maybe comedies entirely (so that we don’t have to argue about which ones are “dumb”). Those are almost universally panned by critics (who crave substance) but loved by people (who crave entertainment).
Having said that, Dude, Where’s My Car was bad and you should feel bad.
Which is one of the reasons I proposed “both critics AND audience under 50%”. Bad comedies that are still fun and entertaining will get above 50% for audience.
Dude, Where’s My Car is below even that bar, and definitely qualifies for the challenge.
Well, the rules do exclude “so bad it’s good”, which is pretty close to that. It seems clear these are supposed to be movies we actually like, not just stuff we consider fun trash or “good” with irony quotes or could be persuaded to watch on a long flight with no other entertainment available.
I want to be very clear on this. Dude Where’s My Car is not “so bad it’s good.” I don’t enjoy it “ironically”. I legitimately consider it one of my favorite comedies ever made, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand why it gets panned while far-more-mediocre teen comedies like, say, American Pie, get at least a modicum of respect.
Unlike say Plan Nine From Outer Space (which may be the best/worst movie) Dude, Where’s My Car?‘s silliness was intentional, and I had fun watching it.
If they’re being ridiculous on purpose does that still count as “so bad”?
Regardless, Dude is the only unpopular film that someone else has listed so far that I’ve actually watched
I have to back Matt up here. I’ve seen Dude, Where’s My Car several times, and it’s just really funny.
To me, the major point in favor of Dude Where’s My Car isn’t even that it’s “funny”, which it is. I just think it’s well structured, for that sort of movie. It integrates several different groups of characters, all of whom represent generic “teen movie” plot points and stereotypes, into a coherent (but still silly and enjoyable) plot about saving the universe from an alien invasion, which the main characters basically stumble their way through.
And in the end, it all sort of just comes together, like a late-season episode of Seinfeld or something.
It’s not necessarily the greatest work of fiction to ever do something like that, but most of its competitors in the “teen stoner comedy” genre don’t even try.
Also it has Brent Spiner with a thick French accent screaming at and threatening torture upon Andy Dick. You can’t tell me that’s not entertaining!
Or for another, how is the Chinese drive thru scene not gold?
@Matt M,
I can remember expressing approval for Dude to a young lady and she told me that “That’s really only a guy’s movie”, and I asked her “You didn’t like French Data?”, and she admitted that was good.
I’m going to stop several tiers below “favorite comedies ever made”, this one doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same room as e.g. Young Frankenstein or even the original Ghostbusters. But it is a solid attempt at a straight-up comedy, without the pretense of social relevance that many more “respectable” comedies try to attach to their jokes, and it is a legitimately funny movie. Mostly in the places where it is trying to be funny, so not “so bad it’s good”.
I don’t think the original Ghostbusters made me laugh even once, but I’m almost certainly too young to appreciate its cultural context.
Young Frankenstein is good, but it does strike me as one of Mel Brooks’ more high-brow efforts. For pure comedy, I’d probably go with something like Men In Tights myself!
Hot Shots and Hot Shots Part Deux are the greatest silly comedies ever made, and Lloyd Bridges as Admiral / President Benson was the greatest comedic performance ever.
Lloyd Bridges in Hot Shots 1 and 2
I always preferred “Top Secret” to “Hot Shots” myself…
Where was the car, anyway.
I’m not going to rot13 anything, but I’ll give you the hint that something outside of what’s usually in the teen stoner commedy genre was involved.
*checks wikipedia*
what the fuck
@JPNunez,
For what it’s worth as fun as Dude was, I think a movie with some similar themes that was even better was 1984’s Repo Man, which is a movie that the closer you are to a teenager the better it is so don’t delay!
Hard to believe, I know, but the film is even better than the Wikipedia plot summary implies!
Well, you like what you like, right?
But having tried to watch “Dude, Where’s My Car?”, I can see why few critics approved. I just can’t stand the two protagonists. They’re such doofuses, and not in a fun way.
Speed Racer (2008) at 41% IIRC
Is there an easy way to see a fuckton of movies rated less than 50%?
You can go to movies on DVD/Streaming and filter by tomatometer. This only affects critic, so you’ll have to check if the audience score is also bad, but it gives a headstart.
What I’d really like is to set up an automatic filter to exclude anything where the critics score is >15% of the audience score.
Late night on obscure TV channels works pretty well…
If you have a broadcast antenna, also regular daytime obscure channels (the secondary channels *.2/.3/.4 etc).
DOOM (2005).
The Expendables was rated 42% by the Tomatometer but 64% by audience score. I don’t know if that counts.
This would be a lot easier if there was a way to query for movies matching criteria so I could see which ones I like.
Depending on whether we can pick-and-choose critic vs audience score, I can have The Last Jedi. Fun fact, the Last Jedi has 91% critic score and only 44% audience score. The latter fits my intuitions, the former does not!
I am very jealous of the fact that you don’t know why this is the case, and I choose to improve your life by not telling you…
Well, my biased explanation as somebody who enjoyed the film would be that it was “objectively” not that bad, but a lot of Star Wars fans were upset that it didn’t do what they hoped it would.
Did you happen to read some of the SSC threads about it when it came out? The film has plenty of negatives even setting aside fan concerns.
@Nick:
Even the first Disney Star Wars was atrocious, its much better audience reception notwithstanding.
@Le Maistre Chat
I felt like the first one was bad overall, but the tone was enjoyable and it set up the potential for good or at least decent followups. TLJ, in addition to being bad, was not enjoyable and didn’t really appear to set anything up other than “throw out all the stuff that happened so far, we’re basically starting from scratch in the third installment”.
The Last Jedi had some interesting ideas which could have been developed into an interesting third movie. Unfortunately it wrecked all of those ideas just a few minutes after introducing them.
“Beyond light/dark” was an interesting direction for Star Wars to move in; a maturing direction. Which it scrapped almost as soon as it suggested it by splitting back into clear good and clear bad guys.
Luke as a burned-out hero was likewise an interesting idea. Which it also trashed by having that character arc close before the end of the movie.
Whats-her-face as a nobody – also kind of interesting.
What’s interesting is that TLJ could probably be turned into a good 90 minute movie with basically no additional footage, just by removing an hour of nonsense.
@Thegnskald
I basically agree. Every time they introduce something like “beyond light and dark” it seems promising for a moment, but next thing I know, I’m nursing my head from the whiplash of the stupid twist that follows it.
I think The Last Jedi was really badly paced, and that killed the normal amount of leeway it would have gotten for being a flashy Star Wars movie.
Like, you can get away with a lot by being fun and moving fast enough that people don’t stop to ask questions.
But Last Jedi had, like, four or five major sequences that felt like they should have been movie climaxes, but then were not. Rey and Kylo fight the not-Emperor! It doesn’t affect the primary plot driver of the movie. Finn and Rose infiltrate the enemy fleet! They actually make things worse, then it doesn’t matter when the ship is blown up without their intervention. Hyperspeed ram is super-awesome! (It really was, that was an amazing bit!) Doesn’t accomplish anything; the rebels are still chased down by overwhelming force.
I really think it’s a movie that could have been made pretty solid action sci-fi just by trimming it down a bunch. Tighten up the Finn/Rose plot line, cut out a bunch of the mutiny subplot, and end the movie right after the hyperspace ram, with a bunch of rebel shuttles escaping a damaged and disorganized enemy fleet.
The end, accept your dump trucks full of money.
@fion
I was really excited to see it in theatres. But honestly… I remember about half way through I was thinking “How much longer is this going to run?”
Nothing to do with expectations… it was just the first Star Wars film I was actually bored with. I should never be bored while watching a Star Wars movie for the first time.
Yeah, I think I’ll claim this one for mine.
Clash of the Titans (2010 version!) has 27 % Tomatometer and 40 % audience. I quite liked it.
The Cell (2000), which I remember vividly as very good movie, altough it is too old too count by “during my adult life” has 45 % Tomatomater but 57 % audience.
I think I might have the lowest critic score so far (at least for legit, Hollywood type productions): Knockaround Guys
I love this movie. Supporting cast includes Seth Green, Vin Diesel, and John Malkovich. Mob movie. Good fun.
Critic score: 21%
Audience score: 51%
Oh, I really enjoyed that one. My friends still quote Vin Diesel’s line about being in five hundred fights.
“John Carter” just misses the mark at 52%. But “13th Warrior” is rated 33%, so got it on my second try. Both classic fantasy tales, done right by Hollywood in the filmmaking department but not so much in the marketing.
Wait, 13th Warrior has 33%, “I feel like I can’t quote every sentence of 13th Warrior from memory anymore, time to watch it again”, is like a standard joke around here.
Oh!
II didn’t see John Carter (but zIp liked the book when I read it years previously), but I did see really liked 13th Warrior.
I thought I was alone.
Thanks!
Huh, I can’t imagine why 13th Warrior scored so low. It was perfectly fine, I thought, as is the Crichton book it’s based on.
Apparently I like middlebrow action flicks.
I know some people who for some reason take offense, at the “their Mother” line. Because they took it literally.
Why anyone can make the mental leap from “the Dragon” to the snaking column of cave men, but does not get that “their Mother” was meant figuratively is beyond me, but you know, people.
What was the line? I can’t remember it.
The scene when the old women/witch told them to kill the mother of those cave people, to end the threat.
“The 13th Warrior” is a good catch. 33% is just a weirdly low rating for that film.
“In the Mouth of Madness” comes in at 59%. Damn it.
And I finally found a qualifier of my own. “Bloodsport” (1988), a martial arts movie with JCVD. 39%. I was 18, which just barely qualifies.
Bloodsport is a legitimately great martial arts movie. I don’t understand how it could have 39%.
I mentioned in another subthread, but movies released significantly before Rotten Tomatoes launched, and especially in this case where the movie was released before the Internet was really even a big thing, are going to have weird/non-representative RT reviews.
My first try: Lucky Number Slevin (2006) at 51%, just missed it.
2008’s The Incredible Hulk got 67%, this is hard.
Found a website that lets you filter movies by rating: https://flickmetrix.com/
Baywatch (2017) fits at 17% Critics, 55% Audience, but part of why I liked it was that it was so self-aware about how dumb it is to have lifeguards solving crimes. That probably counts as ironic.
The clear winner is Be Cool (2005). 30% Critics, 42% audience. I thought it was hilarious.
I checked Lucky Number Sleven after checking Knockaround Guys…the critics are so wrong there. Lucky Number Slevin was freaking great.
I know a lot of people I’ve talked to hated how the dialogue didn’t sound the way anybody talks in real life. To me it sounded how people would talk in real life if they were way more badass.
That…seems like a terrible reason to dislike a movie. A lot of movie/TV dialogue* would sound ridiculous if someone talked that way in day to day life. Conversely, if they scripted movies and TV with the way actual normal people talk to each other, that would probably be…pretty awful.
*Edited to use the contextually appropriate spelling
Yeah, I always thought the whole deal with Quentin Tarantino was that he wrote dialogue that was actually similar to how people talk in real life.
… with the implication being that all other movies are clearly and obviously NOT like that…
Be Cool is solid gold. How is that at 30% Critics, 42% audience?
Ooh I was assuming I wouldn’t be able to find anything, but I did quite like Lucky Number Slevin. Also Smoking Aces, which gets 30% critic / 62% audience, which must be one of the highest differences I’ve ever seen.
Act of Valor is I believe the highest on Rotten Tomatoes at 26% critic/ 72% audience.
I think The Last Jedi topped 50% difference for a time, but it’s currently only 47%. Still beats EC’s example.
Very true in the opposite direction. I was working with obsolete data!
Yeah but I think that its audience score should have an asterisk beside it.
Why should _The Last Jedi_ audience score have an asterisk? There’s no way it’s external manipulation.
I thought there was a very concerted campaign to give it low ratings? Or am I confusing two different things?
FWIW I thought it was highly flawed but overall decent and quite entertaining, like every other Star Wars film ever made, except the prequels which didn’t manage to be decent.
@Enkidum
That’s what HuffPo claims, but Rotten Tomatoes denied it.
I mean, there are various degrees here.
What RT denies is that there was some kind of well coordinated hack/botnet spamming the site with “fake reviews.”
What seems intuitively obvious is that a whole lot of people went out of their way to leave negative reviews based primarily on the politics of the film rather than their estimation of the overall quality of it, and that they likely encouraged others to do so as well.
Didn’t they disable reviews entirely for Captain Marvel for a time over something similar?
Lots of films get reviews bot-spammed. Captain Marvel got it from “both sides” (though I suspect false-flagging for publicity purposes as well). Being able to detect and remove most of that sort of thing is part of the price of doing business for review sites. Actual meat-based political audience reviewers might be able to affect a niche film, but there’s no way there would be enough of them be able to affect a Star Wars film.
My impression, though I may be misremembering, is that the backlash against TLJ was led more by “fanboys” while the backlash against Captain Marvel was more over politics. There was definitely some of the latter with TLJ, though, like the problems with Admiral Holdo’s character.
@Nick
I think the amount of dislike for TLJ driven by racism/sexism or whatnot got massively overblown because
a) That story played will in the media
b) Disney encouraged that narrative because “the people who didn’t like this movie are sexist” sounds a lot better than “a lot of people just didn’t like our movie”
It was definitely something that visibly existed, I don’t think anyone can deny that, but I don’t think it accounts for more than a small minority of the people who didn’t like the movie. There were several articles I saw written specifically about this (that all the publicity of people disliking the movie for those reasons made it hard to publicly admit you disliked the movie for real reasons, because people would accuse you of secreatly disliking it for the bad/stupid reasons).
I think your recollection of Captain Marvel is accurate as well, although I haven’t seen the movie. I will admit, though, that if the movie had anything in common with how she came off/was used in Endgame I’m skeptical it could have been anything better than average.
I’ve asked a few coworkers who saw Captain Marvel and they said it was all right, above average for the Marvel Cinematic Universe even. From what I’ve heard the politics in it is pretty subdued—unlike Brie Larson’s tour for the film, which I where I remember a lot of criticism being directed.
When I got around to watching Captain Marvel, I was pleasantly surprised that the politics were only “female Air Force pilots face discrimination in the ’90s” and “I have nothing to prove to you [Kree man]!”
As a story, it was serviceable superhero/mindless SF stuff. I don’t think it contributed anything positive to the worldbuilding that’s Marvel’s selling point, though.
Thanks for mentioning that one. I will go re-watch it.
The Producers (the new one) is rated exactly 50%.
Mr. Right (2016) is delightful, but has a score of 43%.
Passengers was good (if obviously flawed), but has a score of 30%.
+1 Mr. Right, it was very good. I read the screenplay before I saw the movie, and I think the original script was even better. I didn’t like the changes to Tim Roth’s character.
I remember liking the new Producers, but I didn’t think it succeeded in justifying its existence; rewatching the original would have been at least as pleasant. But it is the first one people have mentioned in this thread that I definitely remember enjoying watching.
Upon actually watching Passengers (the Chris Pratt/JLaw thing, I assume; there’s at least one other movie with this title) I was impressed that the trailer told you “what happens” but withheld the circumstances that gave it an emotional point.
I didn’t get around to watching that one until I was on a long airline flight with inadequate reading material, precisely because the trailer and other marketing suggested a much lesser story than the movie delivered. Definitely well done, and deserves much better than 30%.
Passengers is really annoying, because it could have been so much better with very minor changes.
Option 1: Make it a not-creepy romance. This is easy: Pratts character wakes up Jennifers character because she has a skill set he does not, but which is required to fix the ship. He does not lie about this. Still plenty of drama in “Sorry, I kind of sentenced you to life in space for the greater good”.
Option 2: Go all fucking in on making it horror.
Instead we got a story about why a generally decent person would commit a truly unforgivable sin, and what can happen when the victim offers forgiveness anyway. Plus a decent SF adventure on a doomed starship, and a bit of Laurence Fishburne. I’m OK with that.
I love Chappie from 2015, which gets an abysmal 32%.
Tried Justice League, but that’s got a 72% audience score. I thought for sure I’d be safe on Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, but the audience score is still 63%. I didn’t like Suicide Squad, so it wouldn’t have counted anyway, but even that got 60% audience score. Trying to beat the self-selected audience score really is a challenge, especially for big-name tentpole films.
Aha, if I stretch the category slightly to include “movies I am glad I saw even though I probably wouldn’t go so far as to say I strictly ‘liked’ it,” then Tomorrowland gets me 50% critic, 49% audience score.
“Movies featuring Buffy the Vampire Slayer Alumni” seems to be a rich vein:
Eurotrip
Soul Survivors
Wrong Turn
The Grudge
Ooh, this reminded me! I found one! I was definitely an adult when the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie came out, and I definitely liked it. 35% tomatometer and 43% audience score. I still think Kristy Swanson was a better slayer than Sarah Michelle Geller.
Wait what? Buffy is a modern classic of camp. It’s worth it for Paul Reubens death scene alone…
Yes it was most definitely!
What?
I was 24 when I saw the Buffy movie, it was great!
I brought three dates to it (not all at the same time though).
Yeah, I’m not trusting “Rotten Tomatoes”!
Joe’s Apartment (1996) was fun, campy, and had good musical numbers. No cinematic tour-de-force, but deserves more than it’s 17% rating
I liked Joe’s Apartment!
Dragnet is 50% exactly.
A movie with a score of 49% would qualify, at which point almost half the audience already likes it. Unless it’s consistently the same people liking the less popular movies, this idea already can’t hold water.
Mmmm, that’s not quite correct.
The set of people who go and see, random example, The Fast and the Furious, is highly selected for the people who like that kind of movie. You know from the trailer and the marketing and the title that it’s action and racing cars and presumably there is some plot, maybe.
75% of the the public may be predisposed to not like the movie, but they won’t be but a tiny fraction of the people who go see it.
… as for an answer to the question, I recall liking Showgirls well enough when I saw it a long, long time ago. Yeah, Berkley can’t really act, but you knew that going in if you saw Saved by the Bell.
Not that I’ve ever seen it since, and I’m not going to sit here and defend it. I didn’t find it memorable enough, except that I thought Gina Gershon was another in a long line of supporting actresses who stole the show.
Not being willing to defend it may be part of this, actually.
Hmmh. Fair enough, I suppose.
Van Helsing (2004) might count — 24% critical, 57% audience. I’d never call it a good movie, but I had fun watching it.
Yeah, I liked it too. I was disappointed that the rumors about a sequel never turned into anything.
It proved that you don’t have to pay rent-seekers to make a Castlevania movie.
Bunraku (2010, 17% critic, 49% audience) – A heavily stylized post-apocalyptic martial arts movie. One of my all time favorites, I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it.
Stolen (2012, 20% critic, 34% audience) – Nick Cage robs a bank with a flamethrower, because that’s the sneaky way that won’t be noticed. Come to think of it, any Nick Cage movie I genuinely enjoyed might be a contender here. Let’s see…
Ghost Rider (2007, 27% critic, 48% audience) – Yep, this seems to work because the internet hates Nick Cage.
This thread contains several movies that I very much enjoyed, but never thought to look up because I didn’t think they could possibly have a low score. 13th Warrior and Valerian are the best examples here (especially 13th Warrior).
This challenge is also harder than Munroe implies because the median score on Rotten Tomatoes is substantially higher than 50%.
If my pick for best movie ever made has a 66% rating from both audience and critics, that fails this challenge but still seems to refute Munroe’s thesis. On a related note, watch Cloud Atlas. As far as I can tell, motion picture was invented so that this movie could exist, and the recent slump (that we seem to be coming out of) was an entirely reasonable response to fulfilling its purpose and needing to find something else to live for.
And just for fun, I’ll throw out two of my all-time favorite movies that are only disqualified by the release date requirement:
Cuthroat Island (1995, 38% critic, 40% audience) – Gena Davis is Erol Flyn’s only modern competition for the mantle of best big-screen pirate.
The Postman (1997, 9% critic, 50% audience) – This is the movie that convinced me that the words “post-apocalyptic” and “terrible” were not synonyms in the context of visual media.
You’re not the first person to mention Valerian. Can I ask what you liked about it? The intro was outstanding, and I really dig the Euro SF comics aesthetic, and the plot and script were cookie-cutter but not actually bad, but the acting and casting were literally some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a big-budget film. Bad enough that being a spiritual successor to The Fifth Element, which is one of my favorite movies, couldn’t save it.
(13th Warrior was okay, though. The costuming ticked off my inner medievalist [16th-century Spanish breastplates on Vikings!], but that’s more of a pet peeve and not enough to ruin it for me.)
The intro was definitely part of it, strong emotional high-points like that can lead me to forgive a lot of mediocrity elsewhere in a film. That also set them up to get a lot of mileage out of interesting implied world-building and spectacular visuals.
I also liked the way it played with the the “bumbling male partner, hypercompetent female partner” spy movie trope, presenting it in the first act, inverting it in the second, then subverting it into balance for the finale.
I also thought the shapeshifter subplot was well-executed (if a little predictable) and the action scenes were generally enjoyable.
I may just have a higher tolerance for bad acting; I can see in retrospect how that label fits here, but it didn’t bother me during the movie.
But they threw away the part from the original comic, where the female partner is hypercompetent in a way that usually outshines her partner in spite of his being a trained galactic secret agent and her being a (very smart and determined) peasant girl from 13th-century France. Not sure it was possible for them to fit that into the movie, and maybe they made the right decision leaving it out, but I’d have liked to see them pull it off.
As is, I liked the intro and the aesthetic, but the rest was utterly forgettable.
Valerian just felt like a waste. Visually it’s a delight, all kinds of cool settings and wacky action sequences… but we’re stuck watching those two cardboard cutouts in the lead roles. I really wanted to like it, I’d love to see more blockbusters based on obscure foreign comics (and original ideas, but that may be too much to ask).
+1
I think the movie was ok, until the Rhiana scene. Espacially her song, can anyone explain to me why there was a song?
Iron Sky. God that movie made me laugh.
Bingo. I was gonna name this if someone else hadn’t. It’s at 39%.
I like Battlefield Earth, the Happening, and Babylon AD. These have audience scores of 12%, 24%, and 26%.
Roman Polanski’s “Pirates” has a critic score of 33 and an audience score of 52, which is pretty darn close. I wasn’t an adult when it came out, but I was an adult when I first learned about and watched it, so that should count dammit.
“Bio-Dome” (critic score: 4) came out when I was a kid but I friggin love that movie. I’m disqualified by age already, but its audience score is 51 which is even closer than “Pirates.”
This is harder than I expected. My first two picks — king Arthur legend of the sword, and hansel & gretel witch hunters — both got above a 50% audience rating. But just barely in the latter case, and its critical score is 14%. Both were ridiculous but in a very fun way.
Gnomeo and Juliet almost qualifies, with ratings in the 50’s for both scores. (That movie is far better than it has any right to be.)
Going down my list of favorite movies, Lucky Number Slevin is fairly high and almost made it. It has 51% on RT, as mentioned in an earlier post. It didn’t come out during my adult life, but I still like it a lot today. The point that it’s difficult and most are high rated on RT is certainly valid.
Also, I would not have predicted a low score on RT for L#S, I was just trying out a bunch.
My biggest challenge here was to find a movie that satisfied both:
a. genuinely like, and
b. came out post-2000
This does not compute.
(Okay, there are some post-2000 movies I actually enjoyed and I’ll get to one in just a second, but overall I’ve mostly soured on cinema over the past couple of decades. The rot set in around the Star Wars prequels/LOTR and we’ve only been on a downward trajectory since.)
Given that any post-2000 movies I enjoyed are likely to have been well-rated, I was just about to ditch the millenial qualifier and go for “adult life”, which gets me the first Mortal Kombat (1995), 46% Tomatometer, 57% audience, but the my wife saved the day by reminding me of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, that not only satisfies the period requirement, but is actually rated lower than MK (33% TM, 54% A).
I actually like POTC IV better than any of the previous ones (to say nothing of just liking it). For me, the winning POTC formula would be to put Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush on a boat with a fun supporting cast – Penelope Cruz most certainly qualifies – throw trouble at them and let it run for two hours. Hell! It would probably work even better as a monster-of-the-week TV show.
Crucially, the movie should contain not a hint of Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley or anyone even vaguely resembling them. POTC IV fails in this respect, but that particular little subplot is ignorable.
Speaking of ignorable and keeping with the spirit of the challenge, I – honest to God – enjoyed Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith (can’t really say the same about TPM), even if:
a. I consider them inferior to any of the original movies,
b. I don’t understand why anyone thought Christiansen or Portman were good choices for a Star Wars movie. Both are terrible, with Christiansen proving to be just what was needed to make Bloom look good in POTC. (Neither Portman nor Knightley have any redeeming features, so I won’t even try.)
Funnily enough, I don’t really mind Jar Jar Binks. He is what he is. Not something I would have done, but whatever…
Aside: Munroe is, of course, right about the fact that hating popular stuff is easier, but I want to know why I should have been the one to stumble into the bizarro universe where Fury Road is an irredeemable pile of shite, but that nevertheless gets Rotten Tomatoes from the universe where it is a great movie.
I mean, inside every Mad Max film there’s a much better Mad Max film struggling to get out – except Fury Road where the only hope is to fire everyone involved, burn the script, destroy any remaining properties and start entirely from scratch.
I understand space-time is particularly convoluted around this nexus, so if you happen to read this from the universe where it is a great movie, be thankful for your blessings.
It’s a long time since I saw it, but I genuinely liked I Know Who Killed Me (9% critics, 26% audience).
Now I’m a development exec. What could possibly go wrong?
I liked Last Knights. I know it was panned by critics. Checked RT. 13% Tomatometer, 46% Audience Score. There are quite a few Nic Cage movies that I like too, but guess those are in the “so bad that they are good” category.
I agree with others that it’s super easy for me to find movies I liked that critics hated but audiences liked; pretty sure there are quite a few I love that are disliked by both critics and audiences (e.g. Toys starring Robin Williams). The lowest critic Tomato-meter I can find for a movie I unironically loved is Oscar, starring Sylvester Stallone. 12% on Rotten Tomatoes. Related, I haven’t seen it, but a friend whose taste I trust says Dark Phoenix is the best X-Man movie.
Tank Girl (38%)
Act Of Valor (26%)
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (40%) – Nicolas Cage cosplaying Harry Dresden with a decent budget. It’ll have to do until we get an actual -good- Dresden Files show.
I could keep going, probably, but I think I’m going to stop with Soldier, starring Kurt Russell (12%!).
Ishtar (1987) – 38%. I don’t know why it is so hated; I thought it was a scream. It’s a bitter herb.
According to a podcast I listen to, Ishtar was beset by delays and budget overruns and the usual litany of Hollywood disasters during its production, which led to lots of bad press well before it was released. So everyone was just expecting it to be awful and didn’t let the actual finished movie change their expectations. Elaine May has quipped that if everyone who hated Ishtar had seen it, she’d be rich.
@BBA,
I saw Ishtar when it was in the theaters, and I remember almost nothing about it, so it couldn’t have been that bad or I’d be slamming it like I do Neuromancer (which to be fair I don’t remember much from when I read it in the ’80’s either, but I do remember being bored, and thinking “Not much of this is far from existing reality, I can open my front door for this!”).
Now The Return of the Jedi I renember and I’ll gladly slam: What’s with the smirk Skywalker, that’s the plan to save Han?
Stupid freakin’ Vietcong Teddy Bears!
Luke should’ve fought with the rebellion not hob nob with his Dad and his Dad’s boss!
Lord of the Rings: Aragorn and Frodo are ponces, Sam’s the hero!
And Aragorn, what kind of choice is that? The blonde.lady is a women, that Elf chick is a girl, c’mon man!
The Ewoks were supposed to be Wookies, damnit.
I was denied having wookies actually tearing some damn arms off.
“Can you find a way we can reduce the plastic in our action figures for this film by 50%?”
“Heck, I can reduce your vowels by 50% while we’re at it.”
If you want to see more wookiees, you can always watch the Holiday Special.
@HeelBearCub & @Randy M,
Preach it!
@Nick, the Holiday Special was very disappointing, but I think it only pre-empted the Muppets or Sha-na-na, so it wasn’t a big loss.
Yeah, I remember that. When I gave the video to my wife (she liked the movie, too), I made a fake wrapper with a fake review:
But it’s not like it cost me extra money. And it was actually my first awareness that Warren Beatty could, you know, act.
I had completely forgotten that it was written and directed by Elaine May.
Grumpy Cat Worst Christmas Ever (27% critic 38% audience) was actually good. It wasn’t really original or deep, but it was a fun cheesy comedy. Kinda reminds me of Sharknado (nobody was expecting this to be good, so may as well make it fun) except better executed
For well-brought-up people, bumping generally produces apologies from both bumper and bumpee. Of course, few people these days are well-brought-up.
This is definitely what I do.
More interesting than “who apologizes” is the conundrum of who is supposed to move out of the way when two people are approaching each other in a space (like a harrow hallway) where it isn’t wide enough for them to pass without one person turning to the side/hugging the wall.
I usually apologize by saying something along the lines of “my bad” though, so maybe not well brought up enough 😉
When someone bumps into me, it’s probably because I wasn’t paying attention and walked right in front of them, so I usually feel like it’s appropriate for me to apologize.
I don’t think I’d feel unhappy about apologizing in either direction, because (a) there’s a good chance I’m actually in the wrong, and (b) even if I’m not in the wrong, incorrectly taking blame isn’t going to hurt me in the long run because I’ll never see this person again.
The purpose of these sorts of ritualized apologies isn’t to admit you’re in the wrong, and they typically don’t have much (if any) dominance content. The ritualized apology is actually just a signal that the error was made without malice. It’s there to disarm suspicions that you’re attempting to provoke a dominance conflict.
It’s also somewhat common for the stationary person to apologize as well, since it’s also possible for someone to attempt to provoke a dominance conflict on that end as well (by intentionally obstructing or tripping the mobile person.)
A common occurrence on crowded sidewalks or public transportation vehicles is that one person bumps into another. The bumper apologizes profusely, and the bumpee chooses to either graciously accept or angrily reject the apology. Seems reasonable enough.
Well, if it’s an accident and you get an apology, I think the “angry rejection” is the wrong way to go, but this is simply because my intutitions are that this is all part of common civility. It’s a rule of behaviour to help lubricate social interactions in situations where space is crowded, things like this are going to happen, and you need to reduce friction and keep things from escalating like the gang-members feeling disrespected and pulling out guns or knives to attack the offender.
I don’t think you should feel so extremely about it whether you’re the ‘offender’ or the ‘offended’ but I can’t tell you how to feel, and if this is your reaction that’s valid for you. Maybe don’t think about it in status terms? It’s all just a social game that we all learn our parts: knock into somebody, apologise, accept apology, carry on – nobody need feel bad (unless they’re a jerk who deliberately or carelessly knocked your coffee all over you because they weren’t paying attention, then they don’t apologise because they don’t accept they should have been more careful) or that they’ve got one over on the other person.
I have a half-baked thesis that this is a broader issue in modern blue-tribe culture: the importance of moral high ground has lost proportion to the object level issues, to the point that being a victim is often far preferable to being a perpetrator, so we end up in tons of generous conflict illusion situations.
That Russell piece is remarkable. I’m not sure the modern version is quite like that– it’s more like oppressed people are superior because they understand their oppression and they don’t have the history of being evil.
Rate your favorite settings for fictional media, among the following options:
Modern/familiar (current time, location and cultural context relatively familiar to intended audience)
Modern/unfamiliar (current time, but location and/or cultural context assumed to be unfamiliar to intended audience)
Historical/realistic (takes place in a historical setting, specific events may be false/exaggerated but there’s no, like, magic or anything)
Fantasy (not historical, low level of technology, likely includes magic, elves, dwarves, etc. but doesn’t necessarily have to)
Science fiction (not historical, high level of technology, likely includes space travel, aliens, lasers, etc. but doesn’t necessarily have to)
@Matt M,
Gladly!
If it’s a comedy film (Raising Arizona) this is a favorite, otherwise meh.
If it’s a comedy film Hot Fuzz, Tropical Thunder yes! a favorite, otherwise? I can’t think of many examples that I’ve liked. The Secret History was a murder mystery with an east coast Ivy-ish college setting (so unfamiliar to me) that I don’t remember much about other than that I liked it and nothing else comes to mind.
Old movies (The Third Man, The Seven Samurai, Double Indemnity, The Grapes of Wrath, Billy Budd, The Maltese Falcon , et cetera, are a favorite, as are films that take place in the past (Saving Private Ryan, ’71, A Knight’s Tale), so are old books, and I enjoyed Cornwall’s Agincourt, so high rated by me.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was the first movie I loved, and Grimm’s Fairytales,.and The Arabian Nights strongly imprinted on me, and I loved The Hobbit cartoon when I watched it at nine years old (the book was good too), probably the genre I most love.
Star Trek, and Lost in Soace where the first television shows that really grabbed me, as for films? Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run. Books? Foundation and The Martian Chronicles. Recently though Gattaca is the most recent science-fiction film that I thought was really good, and I just can’t think of any science-fiction novels that were first published after the ’80’s that I was really impressed by (“the golden age is 12”)..
So:
1) Fantasy
2) Historical
3) Science Fiction
4) Modern familiar
5) Modern unfamiliar except for film comedies as Hot Fuzz and Tropical Thunder were hilarious and favorites.
@Atlas,
A Knight’s Tale was just plain one of the most fun films that I’ve seen, I’d like to see more movies like it.
Science fiction>fantasy>modern
There’s a genre I like that is somewhere between historical and fantasy, where you have a realistic setting but in an invented place. KJ Parker’s Engineer trilogy fits here; the technology of the time is realistic, as far as I can tell; something like early industrial. But the sociology and geography are new, while there is nothing non-human or supernatural. It’s kind of like past sci-fi or historic fantasy.
If we’re talking movies, I like the kind where weird stuff starts happening, but then there is a reasonable explanation that makes everything make good sense. But most of the movies that start looking like this end up being weird stuff happens, then a bad excuse is offered that doesn’t make sense of much.
The good ones usually involve time travel or messing with people’s brains. Occasionally a supernatural element will be satisfying enough to accept.
So, to put a setting on it, these tend to be neear term sci-fi.
Sci-fi
Modern Unfamiliar
Historical
Fantasy
Modern Familiar
I generally care less about the setting than what they do with that setting. If it’s just a set piece in your generic story, then it’s not very interesting. It’s just easier to make a sci-fi setting interesting than 2019 America.
My favorite settings may be strange, because they don’t really overlap with my favorite media for the most part. A lot of settings are clearly tailored to the specific story they’re a part of, which may be good writing but also means that there’s not much to explore outside of the narrative. If you’ve ever tried to run an RPG in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, for example, you’ve quickly realized that there’s very little room for interesting adventures to take place within the canon timeline.
That said, my #1 pick would be the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. Westeros in particular feels absolutely massive, where just riding from one end to the other makes for a book-length exciting adventure. Essos is much more poorly sketched, and consequently feels smaller and less interesting, but even then it’s bigger than a lot of author’s entire worlds. You could pick virtually any time and place and set an interesting story there as long as you have a basic respect for the themes and style of the source material (looking at you D&D…).
After that, my #2 pick would be the world of Amazon’s two-season run of the Tick. I liked earlier versions of the Tick but I had never really cared about the setting, because it previously had only existed to set up gags. This one is different because, in tapping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe zeitgeist, they built a deep and consistent superhero universe. Even bit characters feel like cameos by established heroes or villains, as though the show had been made in an alternate universe where there were twenty movies worth of shared continuity to draw on.
My #3 pick would be Hellboy. Everyone and their mother has made a contemporary setting with a secret occult history by this point, but Hellboy is particularly dense and interesting. The main reason that the 2019 remake failed, in my opinion, was because they tried to incorporate too much of that backstory to the detriment of the pacing and focus. But there’s an enormous amount of room in that universe to have fun without worrying about messing up continuity.
Arthur’s step-Dad going to see the book signing by the talking dog gets even more interesting with the context of the second season. And if that strange sentence doesn’t sell you on the setting of the show…
The best work in the modern time I know of is Breaking Bad, if only because it knew how and when to end. Unsure if you’d call the business of producing metamphetamines familiar to the viewers though.
Modern/unfamiliar.. Man, I don’t even know what would count for this. Don’t know what to say without examples.
For historical settings, the 2010 Romance of the Three Kingdoms series is impressive for being much more honest a depiction than most other works about the era. In gaming media, I’ve played Crusader Kings and Total War religiously enough that I’m obliged to mention them, though the former does realistic better than the latter.
My favorite fantasy setting is Runequest’s Glorantha, hands-down. I know of very few other ones that have had such extensive effort put into making such high magic settings seem realistic. Very excellently done.
I’d say the setting of Breaking Bad was about as familiar as can possibly be. The whole genius of the show was applying unfamiliar circumstances (the details of running a large drug operation) to an incredibly familiar setting (an average middle class family with various problems)
The setting becomes increasingly unfamiliar as the show goes on and as Walt has to adapt to weirder and more abnormal circumstances, but that’s the whole point. Seasons 1 and 2 are almost entirely familiar though.
@Matt M.,
Me and my wife watched a few episodes of the first season of Breaking Bad and we just couldn’t get into it (we also watched a few episodes of Vikings together and she vetoed more, I sorta agreed with her as except for the protagonist vs. the actor from The Usual Suspects conflict it was dull and “Floki” was annoying, but I wanted to see more because of the setting.
Jeremy Irons television show The Borgias was good, as of course The Soprano’s and Game of Thrones was mostly good (until it just became just about the visuals with the scripts not adding much).
Mostly “prestige”/water-cooler television has been disappointing though.
I don’t think I have a favourite setting, or if I do, it doesn’t match what i generally end up reading. That’s because themes seem to be strongly correlated with setting. I’d like to read more modern/unfamiliar and historical, because of the opportunity to learn things I don’t know, and read a lot of historical fiction as a child, before discovering that biographies scratched many of the same itches.
But what I read in practice is fantasy, and the kind of sci fi that has a future theme but little or no scientific premise. That gets me more adventure, and hero-overcomes-adversity, and less angsty-person-displays-emotions-introspectively or critique-of-subcultural-norms-that-aren’t-mine. Occassionally I find something fun in other genres, e.g. my current adventures with An Irish Country Doctor – which probably qualifies as historical, rather than modern/unfamiliar, even though the setting is still within living memory.
One sub-genre I like is otherwise-historically-accurate fantasy (or sci fi, for that matter). Medieval Europe, except their religion is true – saints do intervene, etc.. Roman Empire with some technology discovered centuries earlier than in our past. Medieval army kidnapped en masse by aliens to act as a miltary force dealing with other primitives. This doesn’t really fit in your categories above – or disappears into sci fi or fantasy. Likewise the related genre of “Connecticut Yankee” – modern transported to past, adds modern ideas. But of course these are all more than just a setting – they are the key to whatever story ensues.
Not quite this way, but I have a similar inversion of preferences in a different situation. When someone holds a door for me (am male, but that hardly matters in 2019 California), this is supposed to be nice on their part, the more they go out of their way to do it the nicer. But instead I perceive it as them being a jerk proportionally to the amount of inconvenience they go into. If someone just goes through the door right in front of me and holds it just for a second longer just enough for me to pass that’s fine. But if they are way ahead of me, and stand there holding the door waiting for me to pass, I feel like I’m obliged to accelerate so that I don’t make them to wait longer than necessary. Which amounts to the fact that someone makes me go faster for no other reason than their desire to be seen as polite – it adds literally zero value to my life, opening a door is zero effort. Even worse when someone comes to a door just ahead of me, opens it, and invites me to come first. “First come first served” is a convenient commonly accepted Shelling point in such situations. By letting me to go first that person destroys it which results in confusion and delays for everyone involved (there may be more than us two before the door) – again for no other reason than their desire to show off their politeness.
After much of frustration and confusion I adopted the policy of never altering the pace when someone holds a door for me, always coming first when suggested, and only thanking if the other person went to zero inconveniences to hold the door. And of course I myself hold a door only insofar it’s possible without altering my course.
I feel this way when cars wait for me to cross on street corners. It’s polite, but since it’s a 3-4 second wait for me and up to a minute wait for them, I’ll usually just wait and prefer they go, feeling bad for pushing my prerogative. That changes if there’s a long line of cars, of course, and as a driver I understand waiting if there’s unpredictable kids involved just to minimize risk.
This almost certainly makes me a jerk, but I almost always wave for the cars to go ahead unless I can tell they’re moving aggressively to make sure I don’t have the chance to go.
The “let cars go first” also goes all the way out the window if it is raining. It is dry inside the car, let me get where I’m going as quickly as possible (people usually seem sympathetic to this).
I don’t know whether it’s a jerk move, but I’m reminded of the Driver’s Ed advice: Don’t be dead right.
I don’t actually just run in front of moving cars.
I do make it appear that I’m going to do so.
As a frequent pedestrian, I have grown to hate everything to do with street crossing. There are intersections in my area where even if I use the pedestrian signal, wait until it’s my turn, look both ways, and start crossing, lunatics will begin accelerating right through. I have tried playing chicken with them, seeing just how far they’ll let me go into the intersection before stopping, and they never stop. So sorry, but f$%^ no am I obeying road crossing etiquette, it’s going to get me killed. I wait until there’s no traffic and jog across.
I’ve been in your position where a car wants to let me pass even though it’s not my turn. If I see the driver wave me across I’ll generally go. But most of the time I have my phone up, pretending I’m not paying attention, in which case they never try to wait for me. And I keep an eye on things and cross when there’s no traffic.
In both cases this lunatic state of affairs only occurs because no one respects pedestrian crossings.
For sure, it’s a different matter if there is a signal or not.
When I’m with my kids, I’ll hold their hands or bikes, not because I don’t trust them, but to signal to the drivers that the children won’t make any unpredictable moves. If they still want to wait, we’ll cross, but that can be a veritable parade at times.
In Spain, everybody respects zebra painted crossings. Unless there’s a traffic light, pedestrians always have priority.
In the UK, they seem not to have them. They also don’t respect pedestrians.
In Russia, traffic lights are a suggestion.
@ana: In Russia, traffic laws obey YOU!
@ana53294 > “…In Russia, traffic lights are a suggestion”.
In Russia YOU stop the light!
ETA: I was too late on the draw and I like ninja extraordinaire @Le Maistre Chat’s one better.
@Nick,
One frustrating thing for this driver is often I’ll stop on Sacramento Street in Berkeley
(four lanes with a grass median) on my way home to let pedestrians pass, and other drivers keep going getting within inches of the pedestrians I’ve stopped for, terrifying them.
Do other motorists think I stopped for no reason?
They have zebera crossings here (UK), and they’re ususlly respected.
But I think they’re highly clustered. Some towns have none, some have a dozen.
I haven’t seen them anywhere in North Wales.
North Wales is a bit of a hinterland.
Couldn’t help clearing some common misconceptions about Russia in this thread.
Myth:
In Russia traffic lights are a suggestion
Fact:
It’s mostly true only of the traffic lights guarding zebras. As with Russian laws, their multiplicity is compensated by weakness of enforcement.
Myth:
In Russia, traffic laws obey YOU!
Fact:
In Russia traffic laws obey the police officer who pulled you over. But he usually doesn’t mind to change them to your convenience, either for a small fee, or just because he’s a nice fellow and genuinely likes such a simple honest blind drunk child of the local governor as yourself.
Myth:
In Russia YOU stop the light!
Fact:
In Russia NOBODY can stop the Light Of Putin’s Wisdom And Glory That Shines Brighter Than The Sun!
@AlexOfUrals,
This thread has gems, but none has made me laugh as much as your post!
Thank you.
Not only do they have zebra crossings in the UK, but one of them’s a tourist attraction.
Yep, that too. That also kind of promotes false and unsafe expectations that all cars will yield to pedestrians even where they don’t have to.
This is probably a bizarre idea, but I’ve been thinking about “consumer confidence” as in “you ought to buy more; that would be good for the economy,” with the implicit idea that a good economy will tend to result in you having a job, or a better job. It’s a bit paradoxical, and subject to the free rider problem – if you buy more, it’s just as good for the economy as if I do, except I also get to save against a rainy day.
Somehow, the average American may or may not buy the logic, but they spend enough that they can expect a desperately poor retirement, if they should live that long – even those who are solidly middle class+ durign their working lives.
Meanwhile, the idea of vaccinating one’s children – which prevents epidemics if enough people do it, and provides real benefits to the children concerned, if herd immunity levels are not reached – but at the same time requires effort, and carries a fairly small risk – doesn’t seem to be anywhere near so popular.
Of course this thought came to me as I ignored yet another phone call, almost certainly from some auto-dialer programmed to either advertise or solicit donations. I guess the problem is that there aren’t many people who profit by other people’s health, whereas there are plenty who profit by other people’s spending, so there just isn’t the profit motive to support incessant advertising about health ;-( (And don’t look at the health insurers. They try to promote healthy living, doubtless in the hopes of reducing their future costs, but are singularly inept at it – they do a much better job saving money by forcing the insured through kafkaesque hoops, and even there often shoot themselves in the foot – as with me, on a more expensive med after United Health denied my perfectly effective prior medication, trying to force me onto something both cheaper and ineffective.)
Household debt in the US has fallen from 99% of GDP in 2007 to 70% now, on the whole households have been more prudent recently than they have been given credit for.
2007 was a historical extreme; The debt to GDP ratio is still well above pre-2001 levels.
Yeah… I read this a few days ago and it does NOT seem encouraging…
Just because it’s the Wall Street Journal doesn’t mean it’s not pushing a narrative. Household debt service as a percentage of personal disposable (after-tax) income is at a long-term low. This is dominated by a drop in mortgage debt, other debt seems to be in a fairly normal range. As for the family in that WSJ article who decided that right after a significant loss of income was a great time to finance two new cars… well, there’s no accounting for foolhardiness.
Perhaps what we need to be accounting for is what percentage of our peers are fools.
I’m not that experienced with using FRED. But you seem to be linking to stats about debt service and debt payments. I thought the article suggested that those may be down because of low interest rates.
As in, just because your debt payments look sustainable given low rates doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t borrowed entirely way too much and you’d be able to weather a recession without some defaults.
I mean, I suppose one could say “yeah but the fed will just keep rates this low forever so it won’t really matter” which I suppose is possible? I’m not sure how but they seem to have found a way to keep printing money without inflation going up.
And the answer seems to be “about the same percentage as usual”, at least with regard to non-mortgage debt.
That would depend on how much of the debt is variable rate. Revolving credit is generally variable rate, but credit card rates are not really low at this point. About 3/4 of outstanding consumer credit is fixed-term, but I don’t know how much of that is fixed-rate. You might find more by digging into the source data.
Debt service payments are low because interest rates are low. The actual amount of debt itself is still pretty high. In fact, consumer debt as a percentage of GDP is at a historical high.
Debt with lower payments is an easier burden to bear, debt should (theoretically) be higher with lower payments. That debt has reduced while payments have remained low/decreased is plausibly significant. Ideally we would also have net assets vs debt vs payments of course.
Dividing a stock by a flow results in a meaningless quotient.
I’m not sure that household and nonprofit debt to GDP is that important a ratio, but the quotient isn’t meaningless. It’s not the unit-less quantity it appears to be, however — the units are time. If the debt to GDP ratio is 1, it means outstanding debt is equal to a year of production.
If I buy a rental house then that property is a stock, and the rental payments is a flow, so knowing what my rate of return is on that property is meaningless?
Disagree. The velocity of money is GDP divided by the money supply, and it’s considered (in most orthodox economic theories) to be very important. Debt-to-GDP is similar, just inverted.
It seems to me that lots of people spend lots of money, perhaps more than they should, but few if any of those are doing it for the economy. Generally they are doing it so that they can get whatever good is promised in exchange. Which is for the best, because you want the money to go to producers making goods people want and need, not whatever promises to recirculate it fastest.
Whereas, I think plenty of people both get and promote vaccinations for the public as well as personal good. I don’t know whether vaccine abstainers are greater than spending abstainers, but the latter don’t generally seem to get regarded as particularly virtuous or admirable, while the former are admired–even if not envied until the metaphorical rainy day.
The entire premise is wrong.
The economy grows via savings and investment, not via consumption. It is the savers who are selfless sacrificers benefitting us all, and the consumers who are the free riders.
This is wrong, without consumption at the end investment returns would be negative and economic growth wouldn’t exist. The economy grows because of savings, investment and consumption, cut investment and there is no growth, cut consumption and there is no growth.
Savings and investment cannot exist, in the first place, without a cut in consumption.
I’m not suggesting that if you cut consumption to literally zero we’d live in some sort of fantastical utopia. Only that growth comes from savings, which requires one to consume less than they otherwise would.
No, it requires one consume less NOW than they otherwise wood, but they can consume more LATER. GDP is literally calculated in final sales, and for good reason. Production itself isn’t a good metric (see goods produced in the Soviet Union), end consumption is a necessity. This isn’t about hyperbolicly talking about zero consumption, if you cut consumption to save you do so with the expectation of higher consumption later. If that higher consumption never materializes then growth is negative.
Whether or not consumption ultimately rises or falls as the result of any particular investment is simply based on entrepreneurial skill.
The only actual decision you can make NOW is to either save or consume, and of course the reason you save is to increase consumption later. That much is obvious.
What DinoNerd is implying at top is that somehow, people who consume less now in order to invest (because they think they can increase consumption more later) are somehow being selfish and free riding on the backs of all of the people who are consuming everything they possibly can right now. This is absurd. Particularly given that a whole lot of our capital structure (most notably, but not exclusively, intellectual capital) is passed down via generations, ultimately in a way that rewards all of society, rather than the original saver or entrepreneur.
Steve Jobs didn’t make society poorer by deciding to build a company rather than buy luxury cars. The opposite is true.
Your claim was
Which is equally absurd. Neither exists without the other, no free rider exists in general on either side.
In Matt’s defense, he was responding to a post that explicitly mentioned free-riders (going the opposite direction) but I think you’re spot on…both are needed, if it swings too far one way or the other it can be bad for the economy.
Consumption is its own reward, you don’t do it for the good of the economy. Saving is its own reward, too, you do it so you can have more consumption in the future.
“Do it for the economy!” is kind of alien.
To the extent there is a problem, it is when there is a sudden scare in the economy (blah blah blah Animal Spirits) and desired investment goes down while desired savings goes up. That’s describing a depressed economy, not a full-employment economy.
Is it closer to truth to say that investment and consumption are like two dimensions of a 2-D space, whose area we wish to maximize? Both are measured in money/time, and come out of a fixed pool at any given time. Set either to maximum, and the other goes to zero, so the area is zero.
So the real discussion ought to be how much to allot to each dimension, in light of real world irregularities of the 2-D “space”.
Its an ok first approximation, but you need time in there. Successful investment = more consumption in the future, but 100% savings rates will lead you to starve in the winter and never get to plant all that grain in your basement, so you don’t have successful investment. Then everything needs to be weighted, if you are hungry a hamburger now is worth more than a hamburger tomorrow, but if you are full a hamburger tomorrow is worth more than one now. It is maddeningly complicated, but we can say, pretty safely, that neither consumers nor savers should be treated as free riders as a group..
@Matt M,
“One mand spending is another mans income”
“One mans savings is another mans job”
I suppose there should be a rejoinder to “the paradox of thrift”.
The paradox of thrift should be renamed ‘the paradox of being smart enough to think yourself into a paper bag’.
I’m gonna need a citation for this one. If you take your kids to the doctor on schedule, they get shots as part of their regular checkups. If you want to enroll them in public school (and many private schools), you need either a record of them being vaccinated or a valid reason for them not being vaccinated. When I was looking for a daycare provider, I asked if they required vaccinations. Since there was a recent measles outbreak in IL, one said “yes, we do now” and the other said “of course we do” and looked at me like I might have grown an extra head. I haven’t checked if our public school district offers vaccination coverage for low-income kids (because we aren’t low income and our kids are vaccinated) but I suspect they do.
That said, not every state is rigorous about requiring vaccinations and the anti-vax population isn’t randomly distributed, so you’ll get outbreaks because anti-vax people cluster together. But overall vaccination rates for the DTaP vaccine are between 80%-95% for most states, and higher for MMR.
“Somehow, the average American may or may not buy the logic, but they spend enough that they can expect a desperately poor retirement, if they should live that long – even those who are solidly middle class+ durign their working lives.”
Is this true, though? Consider the lifestyle that most retired people live: they aren’t trying to impress a mate or climb mount Everest or raise a family in a neighborhood with “good schools” or do any of that trendy stuff. I think it’s not unreasonable to decide to just live off of social security and medicare and consider the fact that so many other people are adopting the same strategy as insurance against anything really bad happening.
“It’s a bit paradoxical, and subject to the free rider problem – if you buy more, it’s just as good for the economy as if I do, except I also get to save against a rainy day.”
And then you’ll spend the money eventually, giving the same “benefit of spending” as the spender. It’s productivity growth that causes economic growth, not spending growth: you can only consume more if you can first produce more.
I may be biased by living in an area where social security, even at maximum, really doesn’t provide enough to live on – at least not when you start factoring in medical expenses (generally increasing as you age) and the need to pay someone else to do things you can no longer manage.
And for many of us, society is atomized enough that expecting younger family members to drive you to the doctor, pick up groceries for you, etc., is just not realistic. (This bridge partner is likely to be an exception; at least one of his grown sons is working for a tech firm locally, though not in tech.)
One of my bridge partners, a widower who raised 4 boys, and has worked in tech most of his life, told me yesterday that according to a Schwab advisor his savings wouldn’t last for 10 years of retirement.
Or I may just be biased by oft-repeated headlines about total lack of savings ;-(
Either way, you have a point, and I do know people who retired (from here!) to a mobile home in a small town far away, with much lower prices.
Another advantage of retirement is that you don’t have to live where the work is – you can move to cheaper pastures. There are some who do this, though I understand that a substantial amount of people prefer not to.
Right, but the biggest reason not to is the social network that you’ve built in the community you live in. If you live in $Expensive$Cosmopolitan$City$, and you don’t have friends you can hit up for a ride to the doctor or a grocery run, then your case for needing $bignum$ in retirement money to pay $Cosmopolitan$City$ rents is looking pretty weak. If it’s just that you enjoy the view and the ocean air, yeah, great for you if you saved enough or bought early enough to keep enjoying that into your golden years, but the rest of us probably aren’t going to lose any sleep over it if you can’t.
Yeah. There are significant advantages for me in staying right here – notably California’s proposition 13, in combination with a paid-off house that I purchased more than 20 years ago. But also the weather – no worries about snow and ice, and excess heat is manageable – highly relevant for an eventually frail oldster.
But at the same time, I’m also checking out places I might move in retirement. I haven’t found a compelling answer yet – and I really don’t want to move. But if I were expecting to have social security provide most of my resources, I’d pretty much have to move, and I’d probably have to settle for a place with significant disadvantages.
I would think the quotient would be a time.
A time which answers a specific question. “If our economy’s size holds constant, and we devote all our production to paying down the debt, and we pay no interest, how long will it take to completely pay it off?”
Of course, adjustments for the real world need to be made for the growth of our economy, the growth of our debt, and because we have to pay interest, and because no one can pay 100% of production to debt. But notably, three of these four modification push “Time to pay off debt” back, so it seems at least reasonable to treat this ratio as s lower bound for how long it will take to pay off our debt.
This isn’t a very useful question to answer, but there are useful questions that you can answer with it. Knowing you stock of debt to gdp means you can (better) understand the impact of interest rate changes, a 1 percentage point rise in rates obviously has a larger impact on the economy if debt is 100% vs 50% of gdp.
I agree! I don’t think this is a very intrinsically useful question, but I do think it is a meaningful one, and it can provide useful intuition for other more actionable considerations.
Also, to properly answer the useful version of this question, you need to
be omniscientuse stochastic differential equations.Yes, when people talk of a debt to GDP ratio of 133% they mean 1.33 years. (Which peeves me both because of the wrong dimension, and because I find it pointless to use percents for numbers which are not small.)
I sometimes write things like “Even if you support this position, it’s easy to compromise in a way that gives your opponents most of what they want.”
For example, in today’s links, “even if you want strong borders, you don’t have to detain illegal immigrants in camps”. Or a few weeks ago, “even if you don’t care about global warming, you can just allow a carbon tax and cut other taxes the same amount”.
I notice both of those are liberal. Is there a conservative version of this – ie something conservatives really want, where it would be easy for liberals to compromise in a way that doesn’t cost them much of what they want?
“Even if you oppose Trump’s internal immigration policies, you can support a wall”. The wall doesn’t actually hurt leftists stated goals in any way. The reasons given for their opposition is cost and symbolism. The idea that anyone cares about its cost is laughable and the idea of the symbolism being wrong doesn’t mean anything materially. In a less dysfunctional government, immigration would be an easy issue to forge a compromise on.
If anything wouldn’t the wall help denecessitate the camps? The camps are someplace to put people who’ve broken the law by getting in without permission. By making it harder to get in, the wall makes it harder to break the law that results in the (perceived) need to detain.
This is a good example of why this kind of exercise is harder than it looks–symbolic victories matter a lot in politics. Trump wants a wall, and Democrats don’t want him to build one, almost entirely for symbolic reasons. A wall probably wouldn’t have much effect on immigration enforcement (certainly not if the next administration doesn’t want to enforce immigration law), but it’s a symbol that Trump could use to claim a victory, and for that reason, the Democrats were never going to be in favor of it.
More concretely, I suspect the wall would increase Trump’s chances to be re-elected, and that could lead to a lot of things liberals don’t want at all.
This is pretty false unless there is massively increased funding to detain them in nicer areas.
I believe the idea (and research shows) that those seeking asylum are highly likely to show up for their trial. So releasing them into the community is likely to work. It’s unknown how well this scales, though, and what kind of post-trial results there are.
Those favorable statistics that I see are consistently misleading in 2 ways.
1. They look at old stats before the asylum surge, so it was generally far more meritorious cases where the seekers were winning over 80-90% of cases.
2. They only look at stats for those showing up at the first hearing. I haven’t seen anyone show favorable stats for self-deportation of asylum seekers who have had their claims denied.
Plus, isn’t there a huge difference between detaining people so that close to 100% of them, presumably, will show up to their court dates, versus only getting 85% or whatever showing up when you let them just wander in and pinky-swear? How many people does that translate to who never show up and disappear inside the country each year?
TLDR: I don’t see why even the generous 80-90% figures are supposed to make us feel good.
That’s an argument against bail and locking people suspected of all other crimes up, too. It’s an argument some are in favor of, but are you?
Some people are flight risks, so there are greater restrictions around letting them out. I would say most illegal immigrants seem to qualify as flight risks, don’t they?
Besides, it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Criminals suspected of crimes and let out on bail are US citizens/residents with certain rights granted to them by our constitution. Foreigners trying to illegally enter the country are not protected by all of those same rights.
Someone showing up at the border claiming asylum is not doing anything illegal. A bunch of them show up with fraudulent claims, at which point the illegal part is in falsely claiming asylum, not in showing up to in fact do so.
Do you think all foreigners suspected of any crime should be detained until court as a matter of policy?
Bail is also set based on the assumption that if you skip out on it its a pretty big punishment. And, often, if you are a rich person or criminal thought to have profited off criminal activities, your money is frozen. There is no such leverage on an asylum seeker you release, unless you make them pay a bail bond. Which most of them probably can’t do unless you set it too low for it to be useful.
@DeWitt:
False analogy.
As I mentioned to our host in the links thread we’re asking two things here: is the person present in the U.S. and do they have valid title to be there?
Clearly, we cannot presume the second is true, because most people living in the world do not have the right to enter and reside in the U.S. You may object to the laws that make it so, but nevertheless that’s what the situation is right now.
On the other hand, if we take any particular crime – even one we know for certain that occured – and take a random person present in the area at the time, the chances are overwhelmingly that they are innocent, unless we’re talking about a mass pogrom, or equivalent.
So how does bail figure in all of this? Once you’ve detained someone pending a trial to determine if they’re guilty of whatever it is you’re charging them with, you’re already causing harm – because not being detained is the default state. Given how heavily the odds are weighted in favour of any particular person being not guilty of any particular crime, this harm may be expected to overwhelmingly fall on innocent people, unless the bar for detention in the first place is set very high (essentially, we don’t arrest anyone unless we have a rock-solid case against them).
With immigrants in general and asylum seekers in particular, the reverse is true. We’re perfectly justified in asking someone to prove their right to be present in the country – once they’re already there – because most people don’t actually have that right. If you do have the right – you are a citizen, have a visa, etc. – it shouldn’t be hard for you to prove it (and if it is, you have a different problem), in which case you do so and go your own way. If you can’t prove your right to remain, we’re perfectly justified in sending you back where you came from pretty much immediately.
It gets interesting if you’re an asylum seeker, because at that point you’re only just attempting to establish that you do have a valid title to enter and remain in the country.
Of course they aren’t, but just showing up and making a claim doesn’t mean anything. For a start, it does not mean that the person making the claim has a right to enter and reamain in the country. That is yet to be established, by due process of the law.
Whilst going through the process, it is not unreasonable to propose any of the following:
1. that the person remain outside the U.S. until it is established that, yes, they do have a valid asylum claim, or
2. that the claimant remain in a government facility, pending a decision in their case; such facilities probably shouldn’t be straight-up prisons (we’re not seeking to punish anyone, yet), but they don’t necessarily have to provide more than a modest standard of living.
It isn’t immediately clear that “let them go and hope they show up for the hearing” is a reasonable proposition. Bona fide asylum seekers might, but as soon as word gets around that “I want to claim asylum” is the magic get-out-of-jail-free card, you may well find that bona fide asylum seekers are the minority.
As I’ve said on the original post: if you’re a bona fide asylum seeker, you’re running away from some pretty terrible things. Having to wait around in a processing centre should not seem like a huge price to have to pay for what you’re trying to get in return.
Unlike bail, there’s no prima facie harm to the asylum seeker while they wait in such a facility. Their chief interest, qua asylum seeker, is to get away from the oppressing entity in their country. That box is ticked. Any additional benefits – such as the right to live and work in a particular country – are just that: benefits, perks. Not getting a particular benefit at any particular time is not harm, given that not having that benefit is the default state.
It’s probably also worth pointing out that nothing herein speaks to what the actual facilities are like. People being locked in cages, ‘coz that’s what there is, is a completely separate issue from people not being free to leave the facility and/or its immediate surroundings until their claim has been approved.
Note that all the people who are being held are not “people who showed up at the border and claimed asylum”. Such people are vetted at border crossing stations and allowed in temporarily while their claim is processed if the border guard determines they will plausibly be granted asylum. They have a very high rate of showing up to court and can be released on their own fairly safely.
The people being held are those who crossed the border illegally, were captured by the Border Patrol or ICE and have made a defensive asylum claim. Making a defensive claim is legal, but such claims are far less likely to succeed (or they would have shown up at a crossing) and therefore the risks of letting them go, given that they have already attempted to evade US law at least once, are much higher.
The argument can be made that we don’t have enough officers at crossings to check all the asylum claims that are being made, but it’s not exactly like Democrats are willing to give more money for the border.
@EchoChaos:
> The people being held are those who crossed the border illegally, were captured by the Border Patrol or ICE and have made a defensive asylum claim.
I feel like this is an essential point, and wonder if much of the disagreement here is because some people are assuming this is true, and others are assuming it is false. Personally, I have much greater sympathy for the person who illegally crosses a border and voluntarily reports to the authorities to claim legal asylum than someone who crosses illegally and at some later point is involuntarily arrested.
Are there reliable numbers for how many people fall into each of these categories? Do others here agree that a distinction between these two categories is useful?
@nkurz
Personally, the distinction between the two is irrelevant to me. The people who show up at a legal border crossing and make an asylum claim haven’t illegally crossed at all and are doing it the right way and I want our law to encourage that.
Once you’ve taken the step of illegally crossing the border, I would be in favor of permanently banning you from all asylum claims in order to deter that method of trying to get asylum and moving people to legal border crossings, which is safer for them and more likely to result in just outcomes.
This is no longer the case.
Yes, people who were legitimately seeking asylum from political or religious persecution from war zones in the middle east or something were likely to show up for their hearings. Economic migrants from south America, where there is no significant political or religious persecution (except maybe Venezuela?) are abusing the asylum system. Perhaps Units of Caring can be afforded legitimate asylum seekers unable to make their claims because economic migrants are abusing the system?
Putting every detained immigrant in the United States in a Motel 6, two to a room, with meal vouchers for McDonalds’ Happy Meals breakfast, lunch, and dinner, would cost less than $0.5E9/year. That’s a whopping 6.5% of ICE’s budget.
Also, you’d think that “Gosh, I just discovered that the last POTUS has left a bunch of people locked up in literal concentration camps on US soil”, even if not the most central example of such, might qualify as an “emergency”. You know, the kind of thing that allegedly allows a POTUS to shift gigabucks of federal money by fiat, not that this should really matter after two years with a border-focused POTUS having his party control both houses of congress for two years. Yet, crickets chirping, children crying.
It is true that, to maintain reasonable control of the US border, some finite number of children will need to be “locked in camps” or “ripped from their parents’ arms”, broadly defined. But to hear Trump and some of his more vocal supporters talk, I think even here, this isn’t considered a necessary evil but a virtue of the current system, in that the enhanced suffering of the children will punish and deter their damn dirty illegal-border-crossing parents. So long as that is the case, you’re probably going to want to be extra careful with explanations of how it is technically necessary to sometimes detain children, because for now those arguments are going to be less convincing than they perhaps ought to be, and more likely to tar you as the sort of person who punishes innocent children over politics than you deserve.
Yes, catch and release is cheaper than holding people in detention facilities, but then 90% of them don’t show up for the asylum hearings, so we’re back to open borders.
If you want to make the case for open borders, great, I’ll listen. But if not I don’t know what to tell you.
For the record, I don’t think the children ARE suffering. As far as I know, they are in a safe. climate controlled facility where they under 24/7 monitoring by qualified adults, and are being fed regular meals. If any of that is untrue I advocate for federal law to mandate that that is made true.
I think where you and I disagree, is I consider many/most of these asylum claims to be economic based and therefore fraudulent. The parents choosing to violate immigration law means the parents need to be held accountable.
Sadly, with the parents being detained the children need to be either sent home to a guardian, or taken care of by the government. But having dependents is not a “Get out of jail free” card.
I am all in favor of funding ICE in order to take better care of the children. But can’t agree to look the other way on the parents crime.
Yes, all these claims about children suffering rely on stupid right-wing propaganda about some kind of “parent-child bond”. Rational socialists like ourselves know that purported benefits of nuclear families are at best misguided nonsense originating in religious fairy tales. The current behaviour of the ICE is a step in the right direction, but for societally optimal results we should extend it by putting *all* children in the US “in a safe. climate controlled facility where they under 24/7 monitoring by qualified adults, and are being fed regular meals”. Replacing randomly chosen unqualified parents with care workers who have been trained and regulated by the state cannot fail to improve outcomes.
I would have been happy to engage with you on the issues, but based on your reply it looks like you’re more inclined to put words in my mouth.
I’m not inclined to give you anymore of my time.
All debates are Brave New World debates.
@souleater
The issue in question is “do children love their parents”. An affirmative answer is self-evident to most people. Either you have a very atypical mind/life experience and disagree in general, or you do agree in general but have deceived yourself into thinking this case is different for whatever reason. Regardless, I don’t think debating would be very productive.
@thisheavenlyconjugation,
Are you referring to the compulsory schooling of the last 100 years?
This feels like evil-robot talk. The humans are being kept at optimal temperatures and receiving the required number of calories, so all is well, yes?
A gilded cage is still a cage, and kids need their parents. I’m with you that the blame lies with their parents more than ICE, but it’s still a bad situation.
@Plumber
I was more thinking of early communist ideas about the inevitable withering away of the nuclear family (e.g. the 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship which banned adoption of orphans on the grounds that the state would do a better job of raising them).
@Jackologist
It absolutely is a bad situation. I am not trying to convince anyone otherwise. I feel bad for the children, and I would love to change the laws in order to try to improve their situation. The parents, however, need to be held accountable for their decisions.
I’m not asking you to change your perspective, but I hope you can get a sense of mine when I say that if a person commits a crime, they need to be held accountable for it, and that means not profiting off it. I believe that’s true if the parent was caught breaking into a home, beating their wife, or sneaking into the country.
My position is:
South American migrants are, in general, a very high flight risk.
If they’re allowed to leave custody, many will disappear.
They need to be either held in the US, or sent back to a safe third country to await their hearing.
If they elect to stay in US custody, something needs to be done with their children.
Either the children are sent to stay with relatives here legally, sent to relatives in their home country, or stay with the government.
I am willing to work with the democrats on this, but the conversation needs to start with the acknowledgment that catch and release is equivalent to open borders and unacceptable. I am 100% willing to replace our current situation with anything that doesn’t involve releasing illegal aliens or asylum fraudsters into the US.
I want to make this perfectly clear: applying for asylum is not a crime. It’s a perfectly valid and legal action under both US and international law. Skipping out on a trial date might be illegal, but a) none of the people being detained have done that yet, and b) if given the opportunity to leave detention and return for a trial at a later date, asylum seekers usually do so. There is no legal or ethical necessity for detaining asylum seekers. It is being done purely as a punitive measure to discourage asylum seeking.
@broblawsky
And we’re not detaining asylum seekers who properly present themselves at a port of entry and make a request (that I have seen any allegation of).
We are detaining those who have already illegally entered the United States and are making an asylum claim as a defense against deportation.
You do know we aren’t actually currently accepting asylum claims at ports of entry right now? Something of a catch-22.
Also, asking for asylum however you got on US soil is a right. You don’t have to present at a port of entry to avail yourself of that right.
@HeelBearCub
That’s false. We still are. However, we are overwhelmed by the quantity of seekers and need more people to process them, so the waits are quite long. Trump has repeatedly asked for funding for more immigration officials. The Democrats have denied that.
Correct. And we are giving them that right. We are processing all asylum claims. However, we are backed up (see above) and for people who have entered illegally and hence are deported if their claim is denied, they are a massive flight risk (the Director of ICE says close to 90% do not show) so we need to hold them while that claim is being processed.
For those of you who think that current asylum applicants are not a flight risk, do you honestly think this would not change if the government had a policy of immediately releasing all illegal immigrants in to the population who said they were seeking asylum? If I’m an illegal immigrant who came to the US for economic reasons and gets caught, what incentive would there be for me to tell the truth?
It’s perhaps hyperbolic, but it’s not false.
Since May, 2018 we have implemented a new process (metering) that only allow a limited number of asylum seekers to cross at the port of entry.
We don’t need to. The administration has chosen to do so, in order to intimidate people and prevent them from exercising their legal rights. Do you dispute that this is the purpose of the forced separation and detention policies? Because they’ve admitted it under oath. I would suggest that you consider the implications of this kind of selective enforcement being applied against you and the people you love.
@broblawsky
If I was accused of a crime that had a 90% chance to not show up in court, I would expect an extremely high bail or to be denied bail entirely. That’s not selective justice.
And I would be very angry at all the other people who had filled the court and made it so my trial took months instead of days because of frivolous claims.
If you genuinely want asylum claims processed quickly (instead of back door open borders), then people filing false defensive claims being deterred is a GOOD thing, because it means those with genuine claims can have their claims processed and go free in America sooner.
Asylum seeking isn’t a crime, I absolutely acknowledge that, but fraud is. Would you agree that most of these asylum seekers don’t meet the definition?
source
I really don’t want to discourage legitimate asylum seeking, I want to discourage fraudulent asylum seeking.
Do you believe me when I tell you that I want American to give refuge to legitimate asylees, while preventing the fraudulent claims from succeeding?
@HeelBearCub
That is accurate, but I think we need to recognize that there is a big difference between coming across the border to request asylum, and coming across the border to live and work here for 5 years illegally, then claim asylum after you get caught.
If I bring my child along while committing a robbery, the police will arrest me and hold me for trial. They will not allow my child into the jail cell with me. They will separate me from my child and put him in the care of some kind of child protective services agency until I am either released or they can locate another relative or sponsor for the child. This would be very sad for my child and I because we love each other very much. The desire to not be separated from my child is among the reasons I do not commit crimes.
As far as the child detention facilities are concerned, here is video from inside the centers from the Washington Post, which I have not heard anyone claim is a right-wing propaganda outfit. These appear to be clean and comfortable lodgings run by the very nice people at Health & Human Services. There is food, games, sports, and school. There are call centers so they can contact relatives, and case workers trying to find them more permanent homes. If you feel these facilities are insufficient, I will gladly join you in petitioning Congress to increase funding to provide more services or construct more and better facilities.
@souleater I believe that your intention here is not cruelty for cruelty’s sake, yes. However, I do not believe that the majority of these asylum seekers are fraudulent, and even if they were, I’d support giving them the benefit of the doubt because that’s how the criminal justice system is supposed to work. Innocent until proven guilty.
@Conrad Honcho You’ll have to excuse me for not being impressed by Potemkin villages. Lawmakers have visited CBP camps that weren’t prepped for their arrival and observed dehumanizing and cruel conditions. I don’t see any reason to reward CBP for their incompetence with more funding when they could better fulfill their legal mandate without mandatory detention for asylum sekers.
Well I think that’s the core of our disagreement.. I think a great many (very possible a majority) are fraudulent.
I agree, innocent until proven guilty.. but I think you would agree that if someone is suspected of a crime, and are a high flight risk, it would be reasonable to hold them without bail?
Changing the focus a bit.. Would you be willing to agree to a change in the law, so that defensive asylum submissions are invalid? That would go a long way to ease my concern about fraud, and legitimate asylum seekers could still cross the border illegally, provided that they affirmatively turn themselves in and request asylum within… say 6 weeks.
@broblawsky and you will have to excuse me for not believing hysterical lies from political hacks. AOC wanted everyone to believe inmates were being told to drink from “the toilet,” neglecting to mention holding facilities use combination sinks and toilets to save space. The very first thing she did coming out of there was lie to you, so I don’t know why you want to believe her over the Washington Post.
@Conrad Honcho, broblawsky
Is there a check we could perform to overcome your objections with the other’s example?
Pick a detention center at random, give them 30 minutes notice, and have a group arrive to film whatever they want within the center, with at least 1 cameraperson assigned to a person from each political party and recording whatever they want, and then released unedited?
I sort of like the idea of two recordings of the same event from different perspectives. Makes it way harder to spin in any direction.
@moonfirestorm
That would be the best adversarial collaboration ever.
I wouldn’t want to give them any notice, and I’d want a sampling of at least 5% of the existing detention centers being used for this purpose, not just one. But yes: if that test showed that migrants were uniformly being treated humanely, that would address my concerns.
Honestly, from a utilitarian perspective, it depends on the crime. There’s a cost associated with holding people, both moral and financial. If that cost is high enough, and the crime is minor enough, I’d prefer to accept the flight risk. We regularly allow bail for people who commit assault, a far more serious crime than undocumented immigration.
Maybe at one point, but the asylum metering process makes defensive asylum submissions necessary in many cases. If we could bar asylum metering by law, I’d be willing to trade away defensive asylum applications.
Civil unions? “We don’t want you to get ‘married’ but we’ll let you do everything except use the same word for it”
‘Separate but equal’ has a bad history in the US.
So the US warps the cognition of people throughout the West so much that they have to treat two boyfriends or two girlfriends identically to couples making babies?
There is no warped cognition in the slightest to truthfully recognise it has an awful history.
@DeWitt: But why should it matter for any European country (and other governments that started calling male-homosexual and female-homosexual bonds “marriage”) that the concept “separate but equal (races)” has an awful history in the United States? Are they our provinces?
It’s a good argument, not the only good argument.
Yes. Look at how often people in the UK dial 911 instead of 999. If we’re good at anything, it’s exporting our ideas, including our bigotries.
@Le Maistre Chat
A lot of people seem to think so.
Also, it’s called a vassal state when you don’t actually get a vote.
@Aapje:
Oops, you’re right. Things are worse than my words indicated. 🙁
This is just mood affiliation. In the alternative world where the Supreme Court allowed civil unions but not gay marriages, we wouldn’t suddenly have laws segregating all gay people from straight people.
It’s not unreasonable to make sure it’s not so easily done despite that being probably true, though we obviously have no means to verify if it even is.
Not immediately, no, but they’d have opened the door for it.
How can anyone honestly think today, when gay pride parades get more enthusiasm than regular American parades, that we are suddenly going to start criminalizing homosexuality? I will never understand the mindset from many on the left that we are in some critical period of time, where if we don’t immediately stamp out all resistance, that we’ll end up in The Handmaid’s Tale. What could possibly make someone think that’s a reasonable thing to believe?
We’re right here. Do you mind asking what we believe first, or are you going to keep bulverising people?
EDIT: typo
The bulverism lies in the critical part of history bit he’s going on about, something I don’t ascribe to and which he needs to knock off.
I’m not bulverizing. I’m confused why broblawsky could possibly think that we’re this close to segregating gay people, one example of a general tendency I’ve noticed from some on the left that I don’t understand.
@Wrong Species
It’s a good question, but framing it in a “how can anyone possibly think that” way is unhelpful, given you’re talking to two people who apparently do think it. Same with speculating that they believe resistance has to be stamped out as soon as possible. Just ask them directly.
We aren’t that close, because the Supreme Court chose to make it legally difficult for state legislatures to discriminate against homosexuals. The fact that pride parades in cities are well-attended is irrelevant, because state legislatures in many states are heavily gerrymandered and therefore weigh the opinions of city-dwellers less than the opinions of rural citizens, who are, as far as I can tell, less accepting of the idea of LGBT rights than city dwellers.
Well yeah, it’s an example meant to question the premise as much as to demonstrate it
I that might be more “just give everyone civil unions and make marriage a private religious matter”. But I think that’s a compromise nobody wants, since both sides want the cultural status (or denial of status) that comes with state declaring someone married.
Not literally nobody; I want that, as does at least one of my friends. But probably pretty close to nobody.
Like bullseye, I too know people (a lot, actually) who want that. But I don’t, and the reason is that state-sanctioned marriage has an important social engineering purpose. It affects taxes, healthcare benefits, legal representation, etc. in a way that incentivizes marriage and family-building, which is a necessary counter to a capitalist/materialist culture of individualism that still turns lots of people into lifelong bachelors/bachelorettes.
But those are the bits you still get from a civil union
Yes, I agree. I’m just pointing out it’s more concrete than merely “cultural status”, which I interpret as more like “social status”. Though maybe you meant it more in a social engineering sense.
I want this.
This is exactly what I want. In fact.. I want to make it so that anyone can designate anyone their “government sanctioned teammate” So I can decide my brother and I have medical/legal/inheritance benefits/responsibilities in exchange for a tax benefit.
You okay with your brother getting half your stuff when you meet a nice girl out at the bars and want to change your official teammate?
Well, no. But thats why I wouldn’t choose my brother as my official teammate.
My point is, I would like to see civil unions not be inherently sexual. The government has a clear advantage in incentivizing people to partner up, in that the government gets to look at household income when considering a safety net.
I think you can make a long-term commitment to mutually support someone without having an intimate, physical relationship with them.
That particular incentive doesn’t seem inclined to stop at two.
Randy, do you mean that an official teammate may be equally beneficial for poly relationships?
Assuming yes, I think there would be huge issues with who specifically gets power of attorney or next of kin benefits. and don’t even get me started on who has rights/responsibilities to the child. but I suppose that could be handled the same way as a child out of wedlock or of an extramarital affair.
That being said, I think there is some truth to that. In fact, even if some absurd number like 10 people wanted to commit to supporting each other financially in exchange for tax favoritism, I think that would work out fine from the government perspective. If one person wants to “divorce” they get a tenth of the assets, If one person gets laid off, the remaining 9 have to pay. (although I imagine the 10 people would have a lot of internal issues, but hey, you do you)
I do want to be clear, I don’t think many people would want to have a semi-permanent partnership with someone other than a spouse, it would seem a little crazy to me. But the government requiring two people to have a sexual relationship in order to receive benefits just makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Removing the presumption of sex would just seem to solve all the problems to me.
Marriage is a good institution, but it is a church institution, and has a biblical definition that predates the US government. I wouldn’t mind the government using it, but it doesn’t get to change its definition like it did with gay marriage.
Other way around. The government would want to count as many people as possible as your family in terms of considering your resources. (I should have said “advantage” to keep the referents the same as yours)
Whether you think that is good or not is another question.
Personally I don’t have a problem with non amorous people making marriage like contracts. Whether we also want to remove special incentives for reproductively likely people to be joined long term is another (increasingly answered in the negative) question.
@Sylvester > “Well, no. But thats why I wouldn’t choose my brother as my official teammate.
My point is, I would like to see civil unions not be inherently sexual….”
Interesting, except for the very big caveat that fast changes to the status quo are usually bad (the U.S. was incredibly lucky that those of the ’30’s to the ’60’s turned out as well as they did), my gut instinct is the the state supported institution of marriage should be for parents whether they want it or not with the unmarried parents both put in stocks and pelted with garbage when they refuse the duty, perhaps shock collars if they utter the words “divorce” or “seperation”, in return have extremely generous stipends and housing allotments to prevent long absences by both the fathers and the mothers due to work and commutes.
I want the best of contemporary Sweden and Utah combined with colonial New England, maybe make it hard like the Quakers did to be allowed to start families as well, perhaps a lottery system?
@Randy
That may well be true, but I would envision the non-amorous contract to be an “opt-in” sort of a thing.. but I don’t really like the idea of common law marriage either.
@Plumber
I absolutely agree that fast changes are usually bad. We should definitely be cautious about making any major changes. If I was dictator for life, I would just start with changing the name from “marriage” to “permanent economic partnership” and after 10 years see how it shakes out.
I think I detected a bit of hyperbole in your comment (Shock collars!), but I’m not sure to what extent. Stipends and housing allotments seems expensive, and, while I do care about children, and think your policy would benefit them, I am concerned that if the government starts such a generous policy, we would inadvertently create a “breeder class” as distasteful as it sounds. I’m afraid too many people are short sighted enough that under your policy, people will have children in order to enjoy the free money
Basically I was wondering if you had other justification as well or were in favor of expanding these unions to any size.
@Randy, I would not initially be in favor of expanding the union to more than 2 people. But I could imagine circumstances that would convince me to change my mind.
I can see a lot of problems with more than 2 partners..
It would be very easy for 2 partners to gang up on a third,
If you have 2 partners, and you slip into a coma, who gets to make the decisions for you?
If 2 out of 3 partners want to adopt a child, is the 3rd partner responsible?
It gets very hairy very quickly. I don’t imagine there is a suitable 1 size fits all contract for more than 2 people.
Now, that’s really the same issue with 3 person weddings, except in that case its viewed as discrimination as opposed to legal practicality.
Also, on an unrelated note.. Bravo Randy, you are really prolific with your new web serial. Be careful not to burn yourself out.
People tried that compromise in the UK; it didn’t work (where “work” is defined as “result in a stable equilibrium which lasts for a considerable period of time”).
“If you are in favor of gun control, you’re fine with repealing the Hughes Amendment.”
The National Firearms Act is one of the most effective pieces of legislation ever made. Only two crimes have ever been committed with NFA firearms, both by law enforcement officers.
“If you are in favor of gun control, you’re fine with legalizing silencers.”
Despite the movies, silencers don’t make a gun make no sound. They are mostly a safety device to reduce hearing loss in shooters and do absolutely nothing to make it easier to commit a crime.
I’ll add this: if you are in favor of gun-control, you still should be willing to allow all States to recognize permit-to-carry the same way they recognize driver’s licenses and marriage licenses.
Over the history of relaxation of permit-to-carry, the kind of people who take classes and request a permit-to-carry-a-firearm have tended to be the kind of people who have very low rates of criminal behavior.
However, some States (among them are States like New York, Illinois, California, Massachusetts ) will not respect any permit-to-carry that was not issued by the State itself. And those States tend to have rules that restrict such permits to people who are rich and politically-connected. As well as not allowing non-residents to apply for a permit. [2]
People in favor of gun control tend to be against the thought of permits for carrying guns–even though the permit process shows pretty good evidence of being able to weed out people who would be a danger to themselves or others.
If the Federal Government passes a law that reduces Law Enforcement subsidies to States that don’t recognize out-of-State-license-to-carry, that is roughly equivalent to the Feds reducing highway subsidies to States that don’t recognize out-of-State driver’s licenses.
[1] I would say “license to own”, but many States don’t even issue licenses of that type.
My own State has a quasi-license-to-own for handguns. It’s two distinct pieces of paper, which used to be called a “Safety Inspection Certificate” and “State Permit to purchase a handgun”. However, the license-to-carry-a-concealed-handgun was treated as a waiver on the permit-to-purchase, and safety-inspection doesn’t require an actual inspection anymore.
To sum up: a Federal standard for States respecting licenses to own a firearm would have to deal with the fact that many States treat resident-without-criminal-record status as an implicit license to own a firearm.
[2] The permit process in such places typically has legal verbiage about showing a ‘need for protection’, and allowing the local Chief Law Enforcement Officer the discretion to decide whether the application has shown the appropriate level of need.
The actual implementation usually results in filtering out known criminals, with the whole process being smoothed along by the applicant being a known donor to certain local politicians, or a donor to charities that are affiliated with aiding families of policemen.
“Even if you support gay marriage, you don’t have to make everyone bake cakes or file paperwork for it.”
Even if you don’t want the government forcing you into a church, you don’t need to get upset about some small town nativity scene.
Even if you want to help the global poor, you don’t need to move them into western countries to do so.
Even if you want the environment clean, banning plastic straws is pretty much just empty symbolism.
Even if you want to give women maximal sexual freedom, you can acknowledge the moral hazard of calling inconvenient humans non-persons.
The second and fourth of these at least are just your opinions shoehorned into the format.
Scott’s rubric was
Can you specify how you feel I failed to conform to this model?
Certainly, in all but the second it does not represent giving the opponent most of what they want. It’s a much smaller ask.
And in the second, there may be other reasons to support immigration, but this specifically addresses supporting it for humanitarian reasons.
Perhaps you feel that I’m not charitably characterizing the opponents position, in, say, “you want to give women maximal sexual freedom”? I’d like other opinions on whether “we should maximize sexual freedom is a straw-man. (The “of consenting adults” was assumed).
Compare with:
In both cases, it’s essentially begging the question.
For the second, my criticism is different in the way you suggest. Few people support immigration primarily because it helps the global poor. Compare with something like:
Going to have to go pedantic and dispute this. I talked about moral hazard–without establishing that a fetus is a person, can we consider the dangerous precedent in ruling definitively against is this edge case?
But of late, that seems to be the liberals point in the matter. Liberarians tend to talk about the boost to the economy; liberals about helping the less fortunate. Do you deny it is at least ~an~ argument in the debate?
Dispute on what grounds, that my analogy of an opposite statement is false? You need to go into more detail about why that is so with a meta-level justification: I’m sure you can argue why your moral hazard is important and my inaccuracy (which could also be reframed as moral hazard in terms of bodily autonomy) is not, but that’s more or less equivalent to the overall debate.
Quite possibly my perception of the debate is inaccurate, but my impression is that most (American-style) liberals mainly support immigration on the general principle of it benefiting people (in particular immigrants). Some of this is immigrants from very poor countries working low-paid jobs and reaping huge benefits in quality of life, and some of it is immigrants from rich countries coming to do PhDs and gaining relatively little. But I think it’s only the extreme or libertarian leaning who distinguish between those types — “ban high-skilled immigrants” and “ban low-skilled immigrants” would receive broadly similar responses.
I took from the accusation of begging the question that you interpreted me of requesting that the other side adopt my point of view. I don’t think that’s how my statement reads; here, at least, I’m merely asking that they accept the gravity of the debate. Because past instances of defining the humanity out of human beings have not been looked back on with pride.
It could be that this is a special case. But you don’t treat the category of question with the weight it deserves with a lot of liberal abortion rhetoric about clumps of cells, parasites, and so forth.
To be fair and consistent, I don’t see any good from mocking vegans, either. Even though I’d argue they are on shakier grounds in most cases.
Hmm… Maybe. But why do “high skilled immigrants” deserve or need help? It seems like the argument in that case is one of mutual support, while in the case of those desperately poor, we get told that turning people away is not who we are, we have an obligation, and so forth. And I feel that we can meet those obligations without granting that they have claim on residency or citizenship.
@Randy M
This is still a claim about the issue. I actually agree with you on this point (i.e. I think a lot of anti-life people don’t adequately engage with anti-choice arguments). But doing so is still a concession from the perspective of an anti-life person who share my opinion, just as you would be conceding something if you accepted my request.
I’m describing not justifying. Personally, I think that the two kinds of immigration should be distinguished and that accepting immigrants from very poor countries is a lot more important morally but that pushing for that may not be the best use of political resources. But what I think doesn’t matter.
Right, sure. Wasn’t the thread about giving away relatively small concessions that can satisfy a lot of the opposing demand? Maybe ultimately Pro-choice people view that as the thin end of the wedge.
In any case, perhaps we have differing views of the prompt. I may well be taking it places Scott didn’t intend, but I’ve explained my intent.
My interpretation was that he was looking for things where the group making the concession shouldn’t be that bothered by it on reflection, and where the group being conceded to can count it as a victory (even if just a small one).
The two good examples of this I’ve seen are carbon tax (assuming no slippery slope) and legalising silencers. For example, for the first point I imagine right-wingers saying “well, I’d prefer generally lower taxes but this doesn’t really bother me” and left-wingers saying “well, really no-one should have guns to silence but this doesn’t seem that harmful”. I don’t see that happening in your example.
Although probably this interpretation is somewhat narrower than what he intended, since the immigrant camps example fails the second point.
The impression I get is that since left-wingers see guns primarily as killing tools, and probably also since Hollywood shows a lot of suppressed pistols in the hands of assassin types, they see suppressors primarily as tools to aid clandestine killing — rather than for hearing protection in hunting or sport shooting, which is their main use in countries where they’re relatively unregulated, or in home defense, which isn’t but is generally considered a legitimate use in the US. Empirically wrong, but pretty reasonable in the framework they’re working in.
I really think the symbolic aspect is a much bigger deal in politics than this line of reasoning allows for. Politicians go for symbolic victories *all the time*, and most of what Scott’s thinking of as plausible compromises are things that the side making the compromise would see as a symbolic defeat.
Legalizing silencers wouldn’t have much impact on gun deaths, but then, neither does mandating trigger locks or banning assault rifles[1]. That wasn’t really the point–the point was to bring home a victory that could be shown to the voters, and maybe to move the ball down the field toward some more meaningful victory later.
Imposing restrictions on very late-term abortions would only affect a very small number of women, and wouldn’t really have much impact on womens reproductive rights. But that doesn’t mean the pro-choicers are going for it. Nor does that dissuade the pro-lifers from trying to get such restrictions.
Many years ago, the state of Missouri had several successive years when they passed laws against gay marriage in the state. There were already laws against it, the DOMA had been passed, and those laws had no actual impact. That didn’t bother the state legislators in the least.
[1] To a first approximation, all gun deaths are either suicides or garden-variety homicides carried out with handguns.
Would you mind elaborating?
Even if you believe in a woman’s right to choose, you could agree that it is a matter which can be decided by the states and find other ways to assist women in those states where abortion is banned to receive what they need. We might be surprised as to how many states eventually approved abortion.
I guess I’ll fight with the premise. Things like this are often either not true or in bad faith or both. If you want strong borders, you need to do something with the illegal crossers. This means either making illegal border crossing so difficult that pretty much nobody gets across (e.g. a wall that would make Erich Honecker’s body rise from the grave and dance for joy), expedited deportation so there’s no need for any long periods of detention, or detaining illegal crossers _somewhere_. None of those is acceptable to most of those objecting to the camps.
The tax thing… what’s to keep the other taxes from going right back up? Speaking as a NJ resident, they inevitably will. The previous governor cut a deal to cut our sales tax in exchange for a big gas tax increase. Now the sales tax is back up, and the gas tax has increased again.
It’s always wise to be suspicious of an opponent claiming there’s an “easy” compromise.
My memory of when Scott put forth the “carbon tax for a tax cut” hypothetical was that it was actually from a conservative standpoint, ie: why don’t liberals offer this? The conservative answer was that they don’t really want carbon taxes all that badly after all, which is why they won’t offer such a thing.
You can encourage racial diversity and provide opportunities to minorities without blatantly discriminating against white and Asian people.
You can discourage sexual assault without railroading young men for engaging in drunken sex. Or even insulting lonely virgins for wanting to be loved.
You can reduce greenhouse gas emissions if you stop having an irrational fear of nuclear power.
You can protect consumers without forcing hair braiders to obtain costly licenses.
You can improve health and cleanliness without banning soda and straws.
You can improve access to health care without taking the literal Little Sisters of the Poor to court to force them to pay for birth control.
You can ensure fair payment to government workers without forcing everyone to pay dues to unions that are major players in one side of partisan politics.
You can promote your values without Twitter mobbing people into getting fired for wrong think, assaulting college professors whose research you don’t like, or swinging bike locks at people who vote for the wrong candidate.
You can win an election without pretending that reparations for 19th century slavery are a good 21st century idea.
You probably can’t be against open borders (or at least unlimited legal immigration) without accepting that some number of otherwise sympathetic brown people are going to get detained at the border and/or forcibly deported from wherever they are living their lives in the U.S.
Along with symbolic victories, you also run into issues of precedent. If you want to force employers-provided insurance to cover birth control then you might be willing to go to court to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay to provide birth control, because otherwise there will be a precedent that will be used by less sympathetic employers.
Though honestly, this seemed like one of those issues that was all about making sure we had lots of outrage and yelling at each other. Entertainingly, later on Republicans tried to make birth control pills over the counter; Democrats opposed this, probably (IMO) because the issue made a good hammer.
I don’t think this is a political issue at all. Making fun of lonely virgin dudes is just something that shallow assholes do, regardless of their political affiliation. If anything, I imagine that conservatives would be even more likely to engage in this sort of behavior. Square-Jawed Broad-Shouldered Business Suit Man and Thin Blonde Fox News Anchorwoman seem like exactly the kind of people who would’ve made fun of creepy loners back in high school and college.
Lonely virgin dude here, and to overgeneralize from myself, every single one of us deserves all the scorn and mockery we get.
That is your depression talking.
You likely know this statement is irrational on some level. Perhaps rewording it for yourself would be helpful?
I’ve realized that something close to the core of my identity is that I’m not “marginalized” in any way. Society is set up for people like me. If I fail, it’s nobody’s fault but my own.
And therefore I have an intense loathing for “manosphere” and “incel” types who are people like me, but rail against society for things that are their own damn faults. I have an even dimmer view of “PUAs” who, being unwilling or unable to improve themselves, resort to vile tactics of social manipulation.
Of course I’m also unwilling or unable to improve myself. Yeah, I’m depressed, but the depression is totally accurate, isn’t it?
Society is not really set up for people with untreated depression. “Marginalized” is a loaded term, but if you have untreated depression, you’re going to have a bad time, and that’s going to show up in your observable life outcomes.
A lot of PUA advice does involve improving oneself. Like starting to work out, for instance. Or cleaning your room, for advice from a different source. You can do that without trading vile tactics of social manipulation.
You need to get more concrete about what you mean when you say “social manipulation.” Everyone uses “social manipulation” of some form or another.
Virgin Nerds have poor social skills in general, and desperate men come across as Thirsty, which is not a good look to have.
@BBA
Society is not set up at all for men who are unwilling or unable to improve themselves.
—
The idea that PUA mainly or only involves manipulation is a lie that mainstream believes and tells you. The PUA’s I talked to focus a lot on improving yourself and are against manipulating people more than is normal*.
* If you think that ‘normal’ people don’t manipulate, I have a bridge to sell you.
And the most important PUA advice is ‘just keep trying’. Get over your fear by forcing yourself to interact and play the odds and learn by doing.
@BBA,
Two quick things:
Firstly, you’re clearly a smart, analytically-minded guy. One thing that really helps me when I’m slipping into anxiety or depression is to take a step back and analyze whether my self-assessment as a failure is even remotely accurate. It’s probably the single most useful skill that you can pick up from cognitive behavioral therapy. I mention this because, as an indifferent third-party, you hardly seem like a failure.
Secondly, if you actually want to improve yourself vis-a-vis attractiveness to women and lose your virginity without paying for it then you need to get your head out of your ass about PUA. There’s nothing vile about learning to approach women without coming off as a desperate oaf, or how to hold an engaging conversation that emphasizes your more attractive characteristics, or how to structure a date so that it’s more likely that the woman you’re with will want to sleep with you. I guarantee that every horror story you’ve been told about “negging” or “last minute resistance” are based on things that haven’t been taken seriously within the community since before the Obama administration.
Well, that’s “white male privilege” in a nutshell. The irrebuttable presumption that everything that goes wrong in your life is your own damn fault.
This probably isn’t a useful way of thinking at all. But if you insist on it… it’s also just not true. Are you as good looking as Brad Pitt? Do you have the family connections of Nicolas Cage? Did you grow up as wealthy as Paris Hilton? Do you have the raw charisma of Bill Clinton? I’m guessing “no” on all of those. If society is set up for anyone, it would be naturally charming rich handsome extraverts from close-knit families of the same. Everyone else has to struggle.
Although I haven’t looked too much into it, there were some PUA that I found objectionable, but there was also lots of advice on personal hygiene (showering daily is a must, deodorant is highly advisable), and style coaches teaching men to combine clothes.
Also, a lot of it was about not looking desperate and gaining confidence.
BBA may not need advice as common sense as women like men that smell nice, but there are many men who do need such advice. And I encounter them regularly enough on public transport, especially in the summer. Young teenage boys tend to stink especially strongly.
I think BBA ought to go back and read the thread where everyone was telling Atlas to stay away from ideological fora that convinced him he was unlikely to ever measure up and consider how it might apply to him.
Human interaction involves a fair bit of manipulation and deception by default. If nothing else, most people learn which emotions/desires/interests are acceptable to express in public, how to dress and speak to present themselves in the best possible light (women spend a lot of years learning to do their hair and makeup and choose clothes that flatter their bodies–watching my goddaughter and daughter slowly pick these things up was/is fascinating in that regard; young men often have to cram a bit to learn grooming that makes them acceptable to girls, as opposed to their buddies), learn manners that set others at ease and indicate that you were raised well and can fit into polite society, etc.
This seems to me to be a basic property of human societies everywhere; it is certainly a property of our own human society. Given that, it’s sensible to learn how to do that stuff.
A lot of the white privilege line of thinking seems to me to be based on confusing the mean of the distribution with individual values drawn from the distribution. On average, white kids have an easier path than black kids, but that’s just on average–Malia Obama probably has an easier path ahead of her than 99% of white kids, for example.
@Randy M
The thread is here, if it helps. This subthread might be a little more on point.
Given that BBA commented right there, I guess he wouldn’t learn anything new. Then my advice is, maybe look into a more grace-full version of ‘consensus’ morality.
If I said the dominant version of left morality required all non-apex white men to feel worthless, I’d feel like I was straw-manning.
@bba:
You should not try to run a race in the oppression Olympics. That is not how this works. Stop measuring yourself by or against anyone but yourself.
Your challenges are yours. There are many like them, but those are yours. There is no shame in having challenges. There is no shame in needing help. There is no shame in seeking help or accepting it.
I have, on more than one occasion, burst in to great gouts of tears during a music lesson. As a grown man in my 40s. I have gone home and wept inconsolably for hours because I felt, literally, broken. Like something not fit even for the Island of Misfit Toys.
It did not matter that I have CS degree, a good job, a good salary, a wife, two kids (and really four kids at this point). It did not matter that I was white and male. A lifetime of depression, anger management issues, as well as undiagnosed ADD, and undiagnosed sleep apnea all put me in a position where I could not function.
I have had challenges all my life. I needed help to move forward. I still need help.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” — Ian MacLaren
@albatross11
I think a lot of what you’re saying is true, but I don’t think it’s right to call it manipulation or deception. (It’s a funny way of putting it, though; I’m reminded of MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue that we moderns can no longer distinguish between manipulative and non-manipulative actions.) A lot of grooming, for instance, involves actually making yourself cleaner or more presentable, not just masking things under nice smells.
@HeelBearCub
Strongly agreed and seconded.
@BBA
Ignore whatever ANYONE tells you about “should”. Just look at an area of your life you are dissatisfied with and improve it. Find people who are talking about how to improve it and implement their suggestions. Ignore all of their suggestions that violate your moral code.
There’s something in this about a habit (belief?) that attacking oneself is the best strategy. I’m working on digging my way out of it myself, and thoughts on the subject are welcome.
@Nick
I once got into a probably way too lengthy debate here about whether women applying cosmetics is deception or not. (I can’t find it, as there are too many threads that use the words “make up” in other senses).
I hold that it usually isn’t, since making yourself look pleasant or alluring or whatever is a good end in and of itself, even if your morning face isn’t so hot.
You can paint a house to hide structural defects, but most of the time you do it because it would look nice and wood or plaster don’t come in blue.
The privilege stuff is rigged. Notice how the privilege of having secure legal permission to live in a place isn’t applied to black Americans, even though that’s privilege by the definition that it reliably makes life better.
@Randy M
Yeah. I think that deodorant, for instance, is plainly not deceptive, even though I’m masking how I actually smell. The reason is that I’m not in fact, nor in intent, deceiving anyone thereby; everyone knows I wouldn’t smell like a spring meadow without it, I know they know it, the fact that they know it is why they’re expecting me to and why I am complying. Other norms work the same way, like when someone asks how I am and I say I’m fine.
There are cosmetic things that wouldn’t pass this, like breast implants or toupees. I doubt there’s anything wrong with them all the same, for basically the reason you say; we want other folks to look presentable, and we in general have no expectations about whether that’s your natural hair color or whether you’re balding.
@Nick:
There is a big difference between:
a) showering, putting on laundered clothes and then putting on deodorant
b) not showering, putting on the same clothes every day and trying to AXE the result into submission.
@HeelBearCub
That’s true. But the question I was addressing is whether wearing deodorant in itself is deceptive or manipulative, not whether it ever can be. I thought it was clear from the context of what I and Randy said, but I guess I could have added “in itself.”
My whole point is that some level of deception and manipulation is just standard human behavior, and so isn’t morally wrong. We draw some lines (different societies have different lines) about where that manipulation or deception becomes unacceptable, but those lines are necessarily a little fuzzy. Every time the cute waitress smiles a little more to get a better tip, or the speaker at the academic conference shaves extra carefully and dresses a bit more nicely than usual before the presentation, they’re engaging in a certain socially-acceptable (and indeed, socially expected) level of manipulation and deception.
If you don’t do these things, you’ll have a needlessly harder life–your job interviews and dates and presentations won’t go as well, you won’t get as generous tips or make as many work connections, etc. A woman or man who doesn’t spend extra time making themselves look good before a date won’t have as much success dating.
One assumption here is that everyone knows we’re all doing these things. When you look at an adult woman in a social setting, she’s usually wearing makeup and clothes that make her look nicer than she’d look without them, and everyone kind-of prices that into what they expect. (By contrast, if you see the same woman at the emergency room at 3AM, she won’t look very put-together, and you won’t be surprised by that, either.).
@HeelBearCub
You can’t fool anybody by AXEing an unwashed body, though.
The same way you can’t cover up acne with makeup (other than a small pimple). Does anybody get fooled by makeup live? I get that in photos/videos they use lots of light and photoshop, but I’ve never seen a person I am familiar with and not noticed the makeup. And in quite a few cases, the girls look better without makeup.
HeelBearCub:
As those of us engaged in raising teenage boys have noticed. Though social pressure (aka trying to get girls to be interested) seems to be pretty effective in convincing them to shower regularly and apply deodorant, brush their teeth, etc. Much more so than the concern that their parents or siblings will complain about the smell.
@albatross11
But my point is that it doesn’t even qualify as deceptive, under any reasonable definition of the word. To take your example, if a waitress smiles at me when she takes my order, I am not going to conclude from this that she likes me. (It would be a first, at least!) I know what she’s doing and she knows I know, so there’s no sense that I see in which she intends to deceive me, and without intent I don’t see how you can call it deceptive. And at a tangent, I think we’re on a very slippery slope when this is what we start calling deception.
Or shaves what seems a little bit less carefully, makes sure their clothing looks just a bit crumpled, and optimizes for that “just disheveled enough that he must spend all his time thinking deep thoughts and solving hard problems while still looking respectable enough”. 😛
I’m not sure how a female academic would get the same schtick going. I don’t think there’s a symmetric stereotype.
Academics do that on purpose? I thought that was just sort of what happened when they tried to look as neat as possible, the way Homer Simpson gets a beard shadow right after shaving.
This thread made for some interesting discussion fodder with my therapist today. I’ll leave it at that.
@Nick
Waitresses who exaggerate their niceness or who flirt for tips get approached by men for a date whom they don’t actually fancy a lot more than more sour waitresses, so I don’t believe that all men know they are being deceived.
Even if all men realized and were OK with it, that doesn’t mean that they are not being deceived at some level. If men like flirty women because of mating instincts, because their brains equates this state with ‘sex imminent,’ but sex is not actually imminent, then the brain is being deceived.
Compare it with wireheading. If you put me in a machine that gives me continuous orgasms by way of an electrode in the brain, without actual sex, then I would argue that the machine is deceiving my body. I may enjoy and want that deception, but that means that I enjoy being manipulated.
PS. Note that deception can also be partial. Imagine that a woman wears make-up that raises her looks to 48, the average man discounts this to 38, but without make-up would judge her to be a 30. Then he is deceived by 8 points, if he makes decisions based on her being an 38, rather than the actual 30.
@BBA,
FWLIW, I’ve also been depressed this week, especially since reading the news of two additional mass shootings so soon aftet the one in Gilroy, and part of that is some shame at being male in a “What is wrong with so many of us?” sense that I just haven’t been able to shake.
Usually these kinds of things make me a bit sad, but are soon filed away as “far away and doesn’t effect me”, but this time thr initial sadness is really lingering, likely I’m ascribing some internal cause, not enough vitimans or alcohol this month to coincidental news, but maybe news consumption is having the same effect on you.
@Aapje
Yeah, that does happen to waitresses, but it is, ironically, also not intended. Waitresses don’t want that sort of attention (unless you’re hot, of course).
I don’t doubt that a waitress can deceive in this way—compare HeelBearCub’s smelly AXE teenager example—but that’s not in general what they’re doing and not what I’m talking about. Frankly, a lot of the time when this happens to men it’s because they’re fooling themselves. Desperation can do that, and that it was instigated by a perfectly ordinary smile from a waitress says everything about them and nothing about her or her actions.
@BBA
Setting aside whatever factual disagreements we may have over how much of PUA is manipulation vs. genuinely good advice, we’re all trying to help here, and we hope you do and feel better.
@Nick
These waitresses want extra money, so they exploit male sexuality to get it. They just don’t want the full consequences of this behavior, but only the consequences that benefit them.
This is how it works: signs of sexual interest causes men to (consciously or not) see the woman in question as being open to being seduced. Flaunting wealth in general* or giving gifts to a woman specifically is traditionally a common method to seduce women (by giving ‘free samples’ of the man’s ability and willingness to be a provider). The waitresses that exploit male sexuality want these samples, even though they never intended to evaluate the man on his ability to provide, as a potential partner. They don’t like it when men interpret the signs of sexual interest as permission ask them out or even touch them, because those men don’t follow a script** that allows the waitress to exploit them.
Note that offering free samples or allowing the good to be returned for a full refund is a very common sales technique, that presumably offers great benefits to the buyer by greatly reducing the chance of wasting their money on a bad product.
People can exploit this by taking (or asking for) samples even if they never intended to buy the full product, even if the sample is very nice. Or they can buy a product that they only need once, use it to solve their problem and return it afterwards***.
Ultimately, feigning interest to get something that you wouldn’t be offered otherwise seems to me, to be an obvious case of manipulation.
* I’ve been told that the best tippers are men on a date, who demonstrate their providing ability by tipping a lot.
** Arguably, the existence of men with other scripts benefits the men who use the ‘free samples’ script by increasing the downsides of exploiting men for their ‘free samples’.
*** Which is similar to how men may feint interest in a long term relationship, to have sex with a woman, where she is willing to have sex as a ‘free sample’ of what she has to offer in a long term relationship.
@albatross11,.@Nick, @Aapje >
This talk of waitresses has inspired in me yet another trip “down memory lane” to the very late ’80’s/very early ’90’s:: She didn’t smile, ever.
Instead she called be me by my name and mentioned places we’d known each other, and mutual friends.
She was cute, albeit blonde instead of the dark-haired girls that usually held my interest, and I saw her again at the restaurant a few more times, when she’d come up and say hello, even when another waitress was assigned my table, and also later at a bookstore where she was a cashier to my surprise (yes, yet another cashier girl who knew me at yet another bookstore), but I never persued a date with her, probably because I was usually near or all the way broke, but also because, while I remembered the people and places she mentioned, I had no memory of her at those places and with those people, which I was ashamed to admit to her.
Aapje, IMHO you’re ascribing more intent and self-awareness than most of us have. Speaking from my personal experience, when I “turn on the charm”* to try to get a ticket agent to rebook my flight or try to get a job or just to make a friend of a friend feel welcome at a party or whatever, most of the stuff I do was learned in a Pavlovian way.
I have a sense of which expressions and body language are likely to produce a result (travel agent takes a minute and helps me rebook my flight, friend of a friend seems more comfortable at party, etc.), but I don’t have a lot of conscious thought about whether I’m sending sexual signals, paternal signals, or what.
I suspect it’s the same for service staff. There are behaviors that get rewarded and that their patrons want to see, and through selection and repetition, people learn them.
* I don’t want to overstate how much charm I can turn on, but I definitely can turn on some, and suspect most people can and do.
@J Mann
Nowhere in my explanation am I claiming that the waitresses have awareness of what they are doing. I’m describing what they are actually doing, regardless of (lack of) intent.
If people exploit a causal mechanism that results in A and B, to get more A, but then deplore getting more B; my sympathy for their plight is much more limited than if they never could influence what happened to them or if others get A without getting B as well.
Note that male waiters seem to get structurally fewer tips, as they don’t get to exploit male or female sexuality for bigger tips. One of my frustrations with the narrative is that men’s lack of access to certain benefits as well as women’s access to those benefits is typically taken for granted. The demand is then that women get those benefits without any downsides. This is anything but equality.
Sure, but conservative bullies don’t pretend they they are nobly fighting against the patriarchy when they do so.
I mean, look at Sean Hannity and look at John Oliver. Who do you think is more likely to have bullied socially-inept losers back in their youth? Hell, which one do you think would be friendlier to nerds, geeks, and outcasts now?
John Oliver. Nasty snarkers are the worst to the socially inept.
I think that Hannity is more likely to have been the bully in his childhood, but that Oliver is the kind of person who is really happy to have gained so much status that he gets to bully people who he imagined bullied people like him.
Again, I’m not arguing that liberals are necessarily more likely to bully lonely nerds.
But they are more likely to justify bullying of lonely nerds as a necessary political effort to advance women’s rights.
As someone noted below I’m referencing the kind of stuff Scott talked about in Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled.
The point of this exercise was to point out areas where political positions are causing a lot of unnecessary-to-the-stated-goal collateral damage, and I think this is one of them. You may not agree, but Scott should, since he is both the one who asked and the one that wrote Untitled.
Agree with Echo. At the very worst, Hannity ignored them/didn’t really know they were around. I don’t blame people who think otherwise, but that general thought process is the result of a prolonged anti-jock/high school propaganda campaign that has been in TV/Movies since before I was born.
I have to admit, this whole line of discussion reads to me as variations on the theme of “my outgroup are bad people who should fall in status relative to my ingroup.” There’s basically no way you can look at a media personality’s professionally produced image and infer whether or not they were bullied ora bully as a kid.
+1
@albatross11
I think that you can tell a lot about people from what image they feel comfortable with.
I don’t think that John Stewart could act like Hannity or Oliver for show after show, even if you’d pay him 1 million dollars a show.
For what it’s worth, Oliver has done a lot of appearance-shaming, including of his own appearance. I’m not sure if this means anything about his personal behavior.
Aapje:
How about Stephen Colbert?
Even accepting this at face value, you pretty much created a tautological statement and have fooled yourself into thinking it is somehow meaningful.
What makes it tautological? Is this a dig that the right doesn’t care about women?
HeelBearCub, you’ll need to expand on that a bit because I don’t see how “you can advance women’s rights without bullying lonely nerds” is any more or less tautological than Scott’s original prompt for this thread. I mean it should be obvious, but that doesn’t make it tautological. And tautological or not, some people don’t seem to believe it.
Do you deny that the phenomenon exists? That seems unjustified give no Scott’s previously writings. Hell in this very thread you’ve got BBA being an apparent victim of something similar.
Anyway I’m annoyed by where this conversation has gone, I gave 10 examples fitting Scott’s prompt and everyone is talking about a derailed sidebar on half of one example.
@gbdub:
No, I don’t deny that it exists. There are conclusions that people draw from its existence that I would argue against, but I certainly don’t deny its existence.
I’m simply pointing out that the right doesn’t believe that the political rights of women are in need of any particular advancement.
@Gobbobobble:
The tautology is simply “I don’t see PolGroupA arguing positively for Y as necessary to advance PolGroupB’s preferred priorities”
“I don’t see environmental groups arguing in favor of gun rights as necessary to advance reduced regulation.”
No, but the left does, and I’m saying that’s something they can achieve without some of the obvious negatives.
The left doesn’t particularly think that border controls and immigration law need stricter enforcement either – so again, take up your beef with Scott’s original prompt.
@HeelBearCub
I notice that where gbdub was taking about women’s rights in general, you are limiting it to political rights, which seems strange to me. Most people care quite a bit about certain women’s rights, like women being safe from rape, although they can disagree a lot on how to achieve this.
The idea that women’s problems are largely due to a lack of (direct) political power exercised directly by women and/or that women are kept out of positions of political power (rather than opting out) seems axiomatic to certain ideologies. Treating (direct) political power for women as a goal, rather than as one possible means, collapses the goal and means into one.
I see this in debates a lot, with the common result that disagreement about means is taken as disagreement about goals, as a causal relationship between the two is often considered obvious, although one can usually reasonably doubt this connection.
@albatross11
Colbert’s persona seems to be based on Colbert’s fondness for sneering and satirical exaggeration.
@gbdub:
Was I denying that lonely awkward virgins get bullied? No, I’m aware that’s a thing that happens. I was denying that it was a particularly liberal/leftist/feminist phenomenon.
Honestly, I didn’t expect my comment would lead to such a long string of responses, and I didn’t intend to derail the discussion like this. But that half a sentence really stood out to me, because it came across as more of a strawman/accusation than an innocent example of something that most people would agree was a common left-liberal stance.
For instance, when you brought up “wanting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also being opposed to nuclear power,” that didn’t seem uncharitable. Most left-liberals want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and while I’m sure there are a good number who either support nuclear power or don’t particularly oppose it, there are enough who are anti-nuclear that it doesn’t feel like cherry picking. Furthermore, being opposed to nuclear power is almost exclusively a leftist stance, since you generally don’t hear conservatives or libertarians or independents or apolitical people complaining about nuclear power (unless the debate is about building a nuclear plant close to where they live, in which case NIMBYism transcends political alignment). Likewise, trying to ban plastic straws and plastic bags and large sodas is something that a number of prominent liberal politicians have actually tried to do, so it’s not really controversial to use that as an example.
But the part about making fun of lonely awkward virgins just seemed totally out of left field. When you bring up something that’s obviously bad in a completely apolitical way (like bullying virgins), and then attribute that behavior to a specific political group (like social liberals), that’s bound to be controversial. If someone gave an example like “you can support some amount of wealth redistribution without endorsing bank robbery,” then I wouldn’t blame economic leftists for getting upset and taking it as a totally unwarranted attack on them. Most people agree that bank robbery is bad, but there’s no evidence that leftists are more likely to be bank robbers or endorse bank robbery, so the example seems downright accusatory. Even if there’s a small minority of bank robbers who justify their actions by saying “we’re really just going this to fight capitalism and bring about economic justice,” that doesn’t change the fact that the crime of bank robbery is largely unrelated to politics, the majority of bank robbers are not leftist revolutionaries, and the overwhelming majority of leftists don’t support robbing banks.
@LadyJane
I think that traditional society has always had a fairly negative view of lonely nerds, but that SJ has added a lot of (extremely ideology-based) negativity on top of this, without meaningfully subtracting anything.
To take your example further: lots of conservatives would, just like progressives, oppose a nuclear plant close to their home for NIMBY reasons. However, if it is nearly exclusively progressives who oppose nuclear plants far from their home, then it seems fair to argue that only progressives truly oppose nuclear power.
Similarly, if both progressives and conservatives tend to dislike lonely nerds in their vicinity for NIMBY reasons, but mainly progressives go out of their way to be extremely uncharitable and nasty to lonely nerds, also when those nerds are far away from them, it is not fair to argue that it is mainly progressives who truly hate lonely nerds?
@Aaple: Alright, I think I get what you and gbdub are saying now. In which case, I simply disagree with the object-level claims that “SJ has added a lot of (extremely ideology-based) negativity on top of this” and “progressives go out of their way to be extremely uncharitable and nasty to lonely nerds, also when those nerds are far away from them.”
And yes, I’m sure you can find examples of individual progressives who do that, I just haven’t seen any evidence that it’s a trend. And when it comes to those individuals, I’m rather skeptical that their claims of ideological motivation are the real cause of their actions, rather than merely a paper-thin veneer of justifiability.
@LadyJane
Lonely nerds often fail by acting too much like women in their dating strategy, being very passive in many ways.
What I see is that feminists tend to very strongly interpret all problems as being caused by hypermasculinity.
For example, ‘nice guys’ are typically men who adopt the fairly typical female strategy of getting close to someone they like, demonstrating their qualities and waiting for that person to make a move. In the feminist definition of ‘nice guy,’ this is not interpreted as a well-intended strategy that fails when the other person is also passive, but as an entitlement to sex and a manipulative way to get it (and such an interpretation is only ever applied to men, as I’ve never seen a feminist talk about ‘nice girls’).
Masculinity is often seen as having agency and femininity as lacking it. So male behavior is often interpreted differently from female behavior, as men are assumed to be in control and to have ‘willed’ things, where women are often assumed to be controlled by circumstance or others. This results in enormous double standards, which are certainly not exclusive to feminism, but a lot more prominent, because feminists believe far more strongly that gender roles drive behavior.
It is actually extremely ironic that feminists tend to demand more feminine behavior from men, but are so bad at noticing when men adopt feminine behavior and at interpreting their problems as being due to overly feminine behavior; with the result being that men who truly adopt feminist advice often face abuse from feminists.
I’ve repeatedly seen lonely nerds on feminist forums complain about their dating problems, whose statements demonstrated no extreme entitlement* in my eyes, but rather a feminine strategy, be chastised for their entitlement and abusive nature. The attacks by Penny and Marcotte on Aaronson fit that pattern.
If by paper-thin veneer of justifiability you mean that misandrists seek out feminism because it allows them to express their hatred of and bias against men in socially acceptable ways, then I agree with you. However, I don’t see how it absolves the ideology in any way. The existence of the veneer makes it far easier for people to be abusive, as they can do it in a socially acceptable way.
If feminist makes misandry socially acceptable and more common, then attacking feminism may help to reduce misandry.
* Pretty much everyone feels and should feel some entitlement, like being treated decently by others. Those who have too little entitlement have got self-esteem issues and are prone to be abused by others.
The core complaint about ‘nice guys’ is that they expect to be rewarded for basic decency and get upset when they’re not. Which is definitely a complaint I’ve heard aimed at women too, just in non-romantic/non-sexual contexts.
What? Isn’t it mostly conservatives and traditionalists who believe that gender drives behavior? Granted, there are some older schools of feminism that take more of a gender essentialist approach, but they’ve largely fallen out of favor.
I wasn’t referring to misandrists, but rather bullies in general. I’d imagine the misandrists would be more inclined to attack men in general, rather than focusing specifically on lonely virgins. If anything, the misandrists would be more likely to attack the romantically successful alpha male types, since (as you mentioned) they tend to be very opposed to hypermasculinity. In contrast, the kinds of people who make fun of weird awkward nerds tend to be the kind of people who admire the alpha males, which makes any claim that they’re motivated by feminist ideals seem disingenuous.
Actual misandrists are an extreme minority, even in feminist circles. And again, the types of people who specifically make fun of lonely virgins are probably not misandrists anyway, just bullies. And their bullying is largely orthogonal to any feminist views they claim to espouse.
LadyJane: +1
This seems right to me–most of the time when you see someone kicking around vulnerable members of the outgroup, it’s because they like kicking people around and these are easy targets. Any ideological justification they give is likely to be spun up after the fact, to justify doing the thing they wanted to do anyway. I think the tendency to enjoy kicking lower-status people around is a very widespread one in humans–it’s one of the things you hope culture and upbringing and morality will help you overcome.
However, I also think people can and do get trained/accustomed to different kinds of behavior. A culture or society in which being extra-nasty to some hated outgroup is praised and rewarded is one in which a *lot* of people will find themselves willing to do those things.
@LadyJane
Yes, that is how these guys are attacked. However, this attack is often used against men who, instead of ‘forcing’ the woman into expressing either interest or disinterest, judged her interest passively and then felt deceived when what seemed to him to be a strong signal of interest, was not. So in actuality, the sense of entitlement is not to be rewarded with a relationship or sex for being decent, as is the typical accusation, but to not be deceived.
For example, a classic complaint is about the woman complaining about her boyfriend and saying: “I wish he was more like you.” The real meaning of this is usually: “I wish he was more like you in 1 respect, but not with these traits of yours that I dislike.” However, quite a few men apparently interpret such statements as them being considered a suitable partner, if the current relationship ends and/or if he shows more of his qualities.
Note that this passive strategy is very feminine.
That this complaint is not voiced in the romantic context, but is in others, just supports my point that there are double standards and inconsistencies at play. The idea that a man may be the victim of the feminine strategy is rarely considered by feminism and in fact, men who complain about this are themselves regularly accused of abusing women. The opposite is not true.
This is defacto misandry: harm to men is ignored and/or men who complain are called misogynists to silence them.
I said gender roles, not gender. Conservatives and traditionalists tend to believe in biological gender differences and/or that gender roles should drive behavior.
The latter is different from the idea that gender roles are strongly encultured, even in the absence of intent to enculture them.
I never said that feminist misandrists exclusively, mainly or even equally often target lonely virgins. However, you have to keep in mind that pushing an open door is way easier than pushing a closed door.
Imagine that I live in 1930’s Germany and hate both my neigbors. On my left there lives a Jew who plays loud music. On my right there lives a Nazi Party member who keeps listening to loud speeches by some weirdo. My equal hatred of each will probably result in highly different outcomes, as I can call upon the brown shirts to bully my Jewish neighbor and in general, get a lot of societal support when I seek to harm him. In contrast, the Nazi Party member is relatively untouchable.
In SJ, there does seem to be recognition of this, where a distinction is made between punching up and down. However, the incentives are huge to falsely interpret punching down as punching up, because actually going after powerful people is often dangerous, futile and socially unacceptable. Punching down is so much more pleasant.
SJ advocates seem to very commonly make explicit or implicit claims that all people with a trait are ‘below’ all people with another trait, which favors cherrypicking a trait by which the target is supposedly up and thus the punching is up, even if that target has traits that are clearly below the aggressor.
It seems to work that way in colleges, where black students, whose sexual culture seems more aggressive on average, seem to be persecuted by Title IX courts way more often than white students.
These kinds of situations typically seem to cause a short circuit in SJ, as such complexity undermines the typical narrative.
I see most feminism as extremely hypocritical, so a claim that feminists can’t both speak out against hypermasculine behavior, while still admiring strong masculinity is not going to convince me.
Note that a common complaint by men is that women tend to raise their acceptable level of sexual aggression, the more attractive the man is. This was even pointed out on SNL, back when they could get away with this.
Imagine two men: charismatic Bill C and nerdy Scott A. Bill is so attractive and smooth that 9 out of 10 women not merely accept, but also respond to very sexually aggressive behavior. In contrast, only 1 in 10 women accept that level of sexual aggression from Scott. So Scott is likely to act less sexually aggressive than Bill, due to getting negative responses when doing so far more often than Bill. However, this also means that many women who would respond to Scott if he was very sexually aggressive, don’t respond to his more subdued behavior. So the result is that Scott does not merely have 9 times less chance with women than Bill C, as you’d expect from their 9/10 vs 1/10 attractiveness levels, but actually far less.
Feminists can have the same behavior, where they get very upset at (even very low levels of) sexual aggression from less attrative men, while being receptive and not at all upset over fairly high levels of sexual aggression by more attractive men.
In fact, this can even lead to the situation where these feminists are only able to find a man in a subculture with high levels of sexual aggression, where they also get very upset at those same levels of sexual aggression coming from men they don’t fancy.
Note that I’ve never seen this conundrum examined by feminists, which is understandable, since recognizing that many women actually want a fairly high level of sexual aggression (if the man is otherwise attractive) and are turned off by less, severely complicates the situation, where blame can’t just be placed on men.
But even then, he’s blaming her for his own misinterpretation of her signals. So even if the situation started out as an honest misunderstanding, it’s still wrong for him to resent her for “deceiving” him.
The misunderstanding itself isn’t the problem; things like that happen all the time, to men and women, and while it sucks, many of them still manage to deal with it gracefully. (I’ve been on both sides of that, and I never acted like an entitled Nice Guy, nor did any of the people who I rejected.) The problem is when people refuse to accept that the other person isn’t romantically interested in you, or get angry with the other person for “leading them on” when that wasn’t their intent at all.
That seems like a terrible mistake on their part. If someone said “I wish my partner was more like you,” I would take the “I wish they were more like you in this one specific way, but not in other ways” part as implicit, unless they also signaled their romantic interest in other ways. If I was interested in the other person, I’d probably respond by probing further to discern their intentions, but I wouldn’t automatically take their statement as a sign of interest in itself. On its own, that just seems like venting.
Have you considered that perhaps women simply don’t “expect a prize for basic decency” in romantic contexts as often? And the women who do take rejection poorly are criticized for it.
To some extent, this is just human nature, particularly among women but also to a lesser extent among men. (Back in college, I remember a jock laughing to his friends about how this fat nerdy girl randomly came up to him and offered to give him a blowjob, in much the same way that people laugh at awkward unattractive men who come across as creepy and/or ridiculous by being too sexually aggressive towards women. If the girl had been more attractive or maybe just less socially inept, I have no doubt he would’ve jumped on the offer and bragged about it to those same friends.)
It might not be fair, but I don’t see any reasons to blame “feminists” for this particular double standard. It’s not even necessarily about gender. I’m a lesbian, and I’m the same way when it comes to other women. I remember an ex of mine stroked my arm on our first date and commented on how soft and smooth my skin was. Coming from a girl who was less attractive or less confident or more hesitant or more objectifying, it could’ve easily been creepy, but coming from her, it felt flattering. Sorry for being wired that way, I guess.
Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that a single creepy action does not forever define a person as an awful creep to be avoided at all costs. If you say or do something creepy, and the other person tells you it makes them uncomfortable, and you stop doing it, then it’s typically not treated as that big of a deal. It’s when someone has a consistent pattern of creepy behavior and refuses to change it that they start facing social consequences. There’s room for people like the nerd in your example to show assertiveness with women without becoming pariahs, as long as they know when to back down, so to speak.
@LadyJane
Our society is filled with implicit expectations & messages, to the dismay of many a person with Asperger’s. Normal people typically don’t want a ‘cold’ and blunt society where we make everything explicit, as that typically means that many a feeling gets hurt. Making things explicit allows us to rationalize the hard truth in a way that protects the ego.
If implicit expectations and messages are the norm, it is perfectly valid to be resentful when people send an implicit message that means X according to the norm, even though they don’t believe that X is true, in the same way that one might reasonably be upset when people explicitly lie.
However, with the norms themselves being implicit and bottom up, people can easily have a norm mismatch, where it is very subjective as to what norms people should adhere to. Did the guy misinterpret signals that should have been clear to him, if he’d interpreted them with the ‘correct’ norms? Did the woman send signals which express romantic interest, when interpreted with the ‘correct’ norms? Did both make mistakes, according to the norm? Are there two separate (sub)cultures with different norms and if so, which norm should be adhered to in a specific context?
—
What I’m objecting to is:
– The apparently immediate conclusion that the man is entirely to blame (as I’ve never seen any willingness to criticize the woman, even a little)
– The tendency I’ve seen to frame him as a predator who seeks to exploit the woman, rather than as a person who wants something mutually beneficial (I’ve twice seen a man who indicated a desire for a long term relationship be falsely accused of merely wanting sex, which presumably fits better with a sex predator narrative).
– The lack of empathy with a person who invested a great deal of effort into wooing a person whom he thought was interested in him.
– The claim that his behavior is misogynist and thus exclusively behavior that happens to women, rather than something where any gender can be on any side of the equation.
– The inability for the observed feminists to recognize that the man in question seemed to be acting in a very feminine way, as often demanded from men by feminists, both explicitly and implicitly (as an example of the latter, I’ve never gotten a feminist to give even one example of positive masculinity).
I’m not objecting to these men being criticized for misinterpreting the signals. What I’m complaining about is that the intent of the discussions I’ve seen seemed to be to make the man feel bad for being a misogynist asshole whose behavior is abusive to women, rather than just a person who tried to create a mutually beneficial outcome and who made some understandable mistakes. Furthermore, I object to a general unwillingness to teach norms to men that actually allow them a decent chance at finding a partner, even if they are not top tier.
But less so by feminists than by others. I’ve seen a lot of feminists writing in favor of anger and against the idea that the anger should result in introspection, rather than be expressed at the ‘oppressor.’
Metoo is a good example. Women were encouraged to tell one side of the story and to shout down any attempts to add nuance. Whenever a woman complained, it was #BelieveHer aka no criticism allowed. Even male victims are/were typically shouted down, showing how misandrist the narrative (to be protected) is/was.
The result is that women who ignore even very overt signals of interest and continue to send signals back that seem like an indication of mutual interest, resulting in the man making a move, get encouraged when they angrily call the man a predator, rather than a more nuanced response where their own behavior is criticized (as well).
I’m not blaming feminists for the existence of this double standard. I’m critizing them for claiming that society is misogynist (‘rape culture’) because many men are sexually aggressive, when the reality is that very many women want attractive guys to be sexually aggressive, but not unattractive guys, which is an unfair demand, as men can’t read minds and know whether the woman is attracted to them.
Assuming that we agree that relationships are very important to most people and that out cultural norms should allow people to seek a partner in a reasonably effective way, then men should be allowed to behave in ways that women tend to respond to. The fair way to change the norms is to not just encourage men to be less aggressive, but also to criticize women who respond to high levels of sexual aggression and thereby reward sexually aggressive men. In the absence of the latter, the men who adopt feminist advice will far more often end up sad and alone; while many women will actively seek out groups of men with high levels of sexual aggression, as the combination of attractiveness and high sexual aggression that they seek, can only be found in those groups.
So aside from how abusive feminism tends to be towards men, it’s also simply ineffective. This is actually a general failure of feminism: ignoring or even advocating female entitlement to something that is strongly linked to a negative outcome for women. You can rarely get rid of just one side of the coin.
But the consequence of the double standard is that men have to keep up a fairly high level of sexual aggression to women they like, in the hope that one of these women likes them back and thus is flattered by that level of aggression.
The ways to avoid social consequences are:
1. to be very attractive, but this can be hard to change
2. to dial down the aggression, resulting in less chance of finding a partner
3. to have good social skills, allowing the guy to better judge whether the other person is interested, resulted in fewer attempts to woo the uninterested
Nerds tend to be low in attractiveness and have poor social skills, so they often choose 2, to avoid social consequences.
I don’t think you get it at all. What you say is only true if the level of allowed sexual aggressiveness is fixed, rather than fluctuating wildy, depending on how attractive the man is considered to be (I’m assuming a male nerd for now, but female nerds might have similar issues, although probably much less so).
Imagine two men, Bill and Scott. Bill has a moderate base attractiveness, so every woman allows him to compliment her, feeling flattered rather than creeped out. Scott has low base attractiveness, so most women feel creeped out when he compliments them. There are also three women: Mary, Anna and Jane. Mary is an average woman who fancies Bill, but thinks that Scott is very unattractive. Anna is a nerdy woman who likes Scott because of his quirks and doesn’t want to date Bill because he is not nerdy enough, although she does see him as fairly attractive. Jane is a nerdy woman who fancies different quirks than Scott has and neither fancies Bill or Scott, although she considers Scott very unattractive and Bill moderately attractive.
Now imagine that Bill approaches Mary, Anna and Jane with sexual intent and gives them a compliment. Mary is going to accept and reciprocate. Anna and Jane are going to feel flattered, but will gently turn Bill down. Yet when Scott approaches Mary with the same compliment that Bill gave, she is not flattered, but disgusted and calls him a creep. So does Jane, because in the absence of a preference for his quirks, she falls back to judging Scott’s base attractiveness, which is low. His behavior is only accepted by Anna, who is exceptionally quirky herself.
Now imagine that we live in a society with very many Mary’s and Janes for every Anna. Scott may reduce his risk of being called a creep by avoiding all ‘normies,’ although at the cost of not having a chance with the relatively average women who do like quirky nerds like him. However, he surely can’t distinguish between Jane and Anna, whose quirk preferences are not going to be obvious.
So in a society where a large gap between the allowed and expressed amount of sexual aggression is considered a crime against
humanityfemininity, Scott is screwed. There is no level of sexual aggression that makes people like Jane attracted to him (or even just realize he is interested in her), that doesn’t result in the Mary’s and Jane’s of the world seeing him as a predator.In cases like these, I think one should always assume good faith. There have been times when I felt led on by various people who rejected me, and it was always upsetting, but I never blamed the other person or accused them of deception. I simply accepted that I’d been wrong about their feelings toward me and moved on.
Maybe it was her fault, maybe it was his fault, maybe they were both responsible. In any case, if it was an honest mistake, then I don’t really consider it fair for him to accuse her of trying to manipulate or deceive him.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s consider three hypothetical examples:
1. A man pretends to be a woman’s friend to manipulate her into sex, despite having little interest in her as a person. When she refuses, he gets really angry with her and starts yelling about how she led him on. She calls him a two-faced predatory creep and cuts off all contact with him. I think we can both agree the man was in the wrong here.
2. A man is genuinely friends with a woman, but misinterprets some of her comments as flirting (let’s say that he’s bad at reading social cues and she’s bad at giving them, so they’re both partly to blame). He tries to pursue a relationship with her, but she refuses. He accepts her answer and doesn’t push the issue. Maybe they remain close friends, or maybe one of them decides it would be too awkward, but neither holds any enmity towards the other and they stay on amiable terms. I think we can both agree that the man didn’t do anything wrong here.
3. A man is genuinely friends with a woman, but misinterprets some of her comments as flirting. He tries to pursue a relationship with her, but she refuses. He gets really angry with her and starts yelling about how she led him on. She calls him an entitled creep and cuts off all contact with him. Now personally, I think the man was in the wrong here. He’s not guilty of manipulation like the first man, and he started out with good intentions, but he still acted inappropriately. At best, he wildly overreacted to an honest mistake on her part. At worst, the misunderstanding was his own fault and he lashed out at her for his own social ineptitude and/or wishful thinking.
A lot of your objections boil down to the fact that a lot of Type 3 men are unfairly assumed to be manipulators like the Type 1 men. And maybe you’re right, they don’t deserve to be lumped in with the actual predators, they’re not that bad. But they still act in shitty and entitled ways, and deserve to be criticized and called out for it.
Male victims weren’t shouted down, though. When Brendan Fraser and Terry Crews came out about being sexually assaulted, there was plenty of support for them within Social Justice circles. And Kevin Spacey’s career was ruined by accusations made against him by other men. Maybe you can find a handful of radical feminist thinkpieces arguing that men shouldn’t appropriate #MeToo, but that’s just nutpicking. It certainly wasn’t the majority opinion in the Social Justice community; I don’t know a single Social Justice advocate who espoused that viewpoint.
@LadyJane
I agree that it is perfectly fair to tell the guy that his perception was wrong and that his expectations were unreasonable & that he shouldn’t have been angry. However, that is a very different response to telling him that he is feeling entitled to sex for being a decent person. Ultimately, feeling entitled to certain forms of communication is not at all the same as feeling entitled to sex or a relationship. The latter accusation leveled at the ‘nice guy’ is itself often not in good faith.
Pretty much everyone regularly acts in somewhat shitty and entitled ways, though. What I am pointing out is that the response to a lack of perfection in men by feminists is often to portray them as a perpetrator, far in excess of actual guilt and without judging the woman similarly. Being unfair like that is not deserved criticism, but scapegoating.
Ironically, feminists have discussed this issue as the myth of the perfect victim. The idea that people are not seen as victims or even as perpetrators, when they don’t match the stereotype of the perfect victim. Yet in reality, women are much less victims of this than men, who are very often only regarded as victims if the narrative fits the stereotype quite closely.
Except for this and this and this.
What I’ve noticed is that key to not angering a large mass of SJ advocates is to not criticize or accuse a woman or women in general. Terry accused a man, which makes him far more acceptable to SJ than if he had accused a woman. Even then, Terry seems to feel so shouted down, that he wanted a safe space for black men.
So if you are a man who was assaulted or raped by a woman, what support do you get? Why would you take the risk to speak out if you don’t have the wealth and status of a movie star to shield you and which grants you a plethora of adulators?
Note that CDC survey studies suggest that half of adult victims are men, with 3/4 of those victimized by women. They are nearly completely absent from #metoo, nearly completely absent from the newspapers, nearly completely absent from most research, etc, etc. If they aren’t shouted down, excluded and discriminated against, then what is the cause of this state of affairs?
Yet it was Mary Koss, feminist founder of the field of rape research who argued that men could not be raped by women, as the harm is not comparable and who decided to nearly completely exclude male victims of female sexual violence from her research. For decades, researchers, very many of whom identifying as feminist, copied this methodology without question, not even remarking on or justifying this exlusion, as if it is self-evident (which it probably is, in SJ circles).
If anything can be called systemic discrimination, it is deciding that victims with a certain trait don’t merely deserve to be excluded from victim reports, but that even the exclusion doesn’t deserve notice.
It can be true that the majority support perfect victims, whose narrative matches with the SJ narratives extremely well, but support almost no real victims, who have one or more disqualifying features:
– a female perpetrator
– having non-SJ beliefs
– they don’t preface every mention of male victims with a claim that female victims are more common, have it worse, etc
I don’t credit people for saying that they equally support male victims equally to female victims, but who in practice react completely differently to actual male and female victims.
@Aapje:
Yes, this is a very real problem, but I think you’re off-base about both the nature of the problem and its causes.
It’s not that people don’t believe male victims; as you said yourself, they’re willing to believe and sympathize with men who’ve been sexually abused or assaulted by other men. It’s that people tend to disbelieve or simply not care about stories with female perpetrators. This seems to be true even when the victim is female, judging by how little people seemed to care about Lena Dunham sexually molesting her younger sister. And this attitude isn’t unique to women or feminists; it transcends gender or political affilitation. If anything, the few people who are talking about the issue are almost exclusively feminists.
So I don’t think feminism is to blame at all. On the contrary, I think a large part of the issue is that many people still (perhaps subconsciously) view women as weak, kindly, passive, and chaste, which is very difficult to reconcile with the idea of women as sexual predators. It’s ultimately rooted in sexism against women. Positive stereotypes are still forms of discrimination, and many of them aren’t all that positive once you actually examine them. The idea that all Asians are good at math is not a form of racism against Whites or Blacks, it’s a form of racism against Asians. Likewise, the idea that all Jews are good with money is a form of anti-Semitism, and while being financially-savvy might seem like a positive trait on the surface, it’s tied to a whole bundle of negative stereotypes about Jewish people. The idea that women are simply too weak to be rapists is a horribly misogynistic one.
There is some genuine misandry involved in the treatment of male victims, though. Many of them are often mocked for either being too weak to physically resist a woman, or told that they should be glad to have received sex (sometimes with the implication that they’re gay or otherwise unmanly for not liking it), or just told to “man up” and deal with it. But these attacks don’t usually come from women or feminists, they mostly come from masculine dudes with regressive attitudes toward sex and gender.
@LadyJane
I’m not blaming feminists for the existence of this bias, but for doubling down on it, as well for being hypocritical, as feminist theory ought to result in a rejection of this bias. That this doesn’t meaningfully happen made me conclude that for most feminists, the ideology is a rationalization for strong bias in favor of the ingroup and against the outgroup (aka misandry).
I also greatly dislike what you are doing: this tendency to frame benevolent sexism that provides large benefits for women and large downsides for men, as well as lesser downsides for women and lesser benefits for men, as misogyny, thereby erasing the benefits for women and downsides for men. This erasure enables the misandry and denial of agency by establishing a narrative where men harm women and, to a lesser extent, men and themselves. Women can do nothing but demand that men change and/or harm men.
That is where we are with #metoo too. Women attacking men, but not reflecting on how they date and can improve the situation, including by allowing men to act differently.
I’m sure that the stereotype about Jews being good at finance has sometimes worked to the benefit of Jewish people. That doesn’t mean it’s any less of a racist stereotype, nor does it erase the fact that this particular stereotype was responsible for directing a truly colossal amount of distrust, resentment, and anger toward Jews over the centuries, and has almost certainly caused them vastly more harm than good. Likewise, an idea like “women are weak and helpless and not responsible for their own actions” has certainly provided some benefits to women, but it’s also caused a great deal of exploitation and oppression, often justified as being “for their own good.”
Women can harm men. Women can harm other women. Women can be misandrists. Women, including feminists, can be misogynists themselves. I never denied any of that, and in fact made the opposite claim, rejecting the sexist idea that women can do no wrong.
But whenever I hear about some male teenager being sexually exploited by his female teacher, there are always a barrage of men who come out of the woodwork to make comments like “What’s he complaining about? He should be thanking her!” and “Lucky bastard, I wish my high school teacher had done that with me.” And it’s always men. Typically not the sort of men likely to hold feminist views either. Are there some women and feminists who diminish the seriousness of those crimes too? Yes, but not nearly as often, and not to nearly the same extent.
I’m honestly not sure what you mean by this. If you’re implying that women need be more careful around men to avoid being assaulted, then that sounds more misandrist than anything mainstream feminists are saying. And if you’re saying that women shouldn’t “provoke” men into assaulting them by being flirty or wearing revealing outfits, then suffice to say, I very strongly disagree with that logic.
Sexual assault victims, male or female, are not responsible for the actions of their attackers. I don’t find it particularly helpful to focus on what the victims could’ve done differently. Too often, that line of thinking seems to lead to “she was asking for it by dressing so slutty,” or “it’s her own fault for being so careless, she should’ve been smart enough not to be alone with an older man.”
@LadyJane
“Some benefits” like not being sent to suffer and die in wars, having much safer labor on average, not having to build up substantial capital before they can marry, etc. These are not minor.
Historically, we see that suffragettes/feminists were mostly from the upper (middle) class, where the men of that same class didn’t have the burdens of the lower class men. Upper class men didn’t work the land or in the mines and if they did go to war, they were typically much safer. Very many lower and middle class women seemed to have little appetite for the life of men at their level, until the industrial revolution and socialism made the life of the average person much better. Arguably, most of us are upper middle class now, at least compared to the past.
I probably wrote in an unclear manner. I meant ‘attack’ in the sense of criticism and prosecution. My point is that if most women demand hypermasculinity in the men they (like to) date or have a relationship with, but many women strongly criticize and perhaps seek punishment of hypermasculine behavior in men they don’t (want to) date or (no longer) have a relationship with, then this requires men to approach perfection to be able to date: they can only date women without being called a misogynist or punished for their behavior if those women like them sufficiently, so they have to judge that perfectly, as well as the level of hypermasculinity that the woman in question prefers.
Similarly, we see that historically, men and women often needed alcohol to reduce their inhibitions, but we seem to increasingly blame men for taking advantage of drunken women (but not vice versa), even if her level of intoxication is quite unclear.
The result is that an increasing number of men don’t have the skills to relatively safely woo women. They either need to take large risks, use methods that only work for very few women or avoid seeking a relationship. In my view, the only way to address this if you dislike hypermasulinity, as feminists tend to claim they want, is to put pressure on women to demand less masculinity and/or to become more masculine themselves. Have women approach men, for a change.
Ultimately, my complaint is that the claim tends to be that the proposed solutions allow for a safe and effective way to date, but that the reality is typically different. In many cases, this is because the solution only works when both men and women change, but the pressure to change is nearly exclusively applied to men. They are not listened to when they complain, but attacked.
It’s like blaming regular farmers for animal abuse, killing insects, etc; while most consumers refuse to buy organic food. If farmers switch to organic farming en masse, without enough consumers being willing to pay the premium, those farmers will simply go bankrupt, as they get outcompeted by other farmers. This dynamic is invisible to people who see farmers as a single entity, rather than people who are competing, just like most feminists seem to see men as a single entity, rather than as people who compete with one another.
Treating men as a single entity is part of the dehumanization that seems inherent in the very idea that we have a patriarchy with men oppressing women.
No, what I’m saying is that women can’t reasonably demand a society where they expect such provocations to result in fairly aggressive advances by men they fancy and where those women respond to those men, but punishment of similar advances by men they don’t like.
Such a society is hostile to men and extremely hostile to men who are generally low in attractiveness and/or who are bad at judging the implictly communicated desires of others.
—
Ultimately, it seems to me that we have a choice. Either we decide that revealing female clothing should be ignored by men; or we decide that men are allowed to react to it and equally so for every woman who wears similarly revealing clothing.
The standard that many feminists seem to fight for, that women should get what they individually want, without previously having to communicate those desires, seems not just utterly unfair, but practically impossible. It’s a recipe for eternal resentment, to feel entitled to something so unreasonable.
Conservatives might view lonely virgins as pitiful losers, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across any right-wing equivalents of the stuff Scott describes in “Radicalising the Romanceless”.
Yeah. My impression is that conservatives tend to the PUA “learn how to be a weightlifting badass who seduces women” reaction to lonely virgins.
I’m in a really conservative circle and I’ve never seen any virgin mockery.
Bullies come in all political stripes and lack of sexual success is a common enough thing to make fun of men for.
I do think it’s kind of unlikely that an (adult) conservative would tell a lonely guy that he’s an entitled probably rapist for wondering why he can’t find a girlfriend when lots of jerks can, to the point he considers chemically castrating himself, and then, when finding out their abuse had this effect, basically double down.
You are simply blind to it.
The right wing version of this is the pervert character, portrayed as weak, unattractive and disgusting. The appropriately manly character is portrayed as being welcomed by women, but the “nerd” character engaging in the same behavior is a creep or a pervert.
Macho men rescuing women from perverts is an old trope.
@HeelBearCub
That’s a fair criticism.
Would you agree that “Revenge of the Nerds” and “Animal House” are left-wing fantasies?
I would put “Porky’s” as the right-wing equivalent, would you agree? Lovable regular Southern boys use the legitimate authority of the County Sheriff to beat the pervert owner, macho up and become attractive to the gals.
I think the “lonely socially awkward guys are pervs” is maybe bipartisan but I wouldn’t call it conservative exclusive.
Progressives just prefer that the heroes be Strong Womyn rather than Macho Men. See: like half of all SVU episodes.
But anyway this whole thing is a derailment. If Scott had asked for “other areas conservatives could achieve their goals without obviously bad side effects”, I could have said “conservatives can promote positives masculine virtues without bullying”, but that wasn’t the prompt.
“Left wing” and “Right wing” have to be evaluated in the context of the political era we are talking about. (I probably erred in saying right-wing rather than conservative in my response).
In any case, Animal House was certainly a left-wing fantasy for the time in which it was produced, drawing heavily on the hippy, anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. As such, it heavily anti-authority AND anti-tradition, which doesn’t map particularly well onto the left-right spectrum of today.
Revenge of the Nerds is also reflective of the left of its day.
I’ve never seen Porky’s, but my sense is that it reflects a”Dukes of Hazard” style right-wing leaning of its day.
They are ALL puerile, adolescent, male sex fantasies (although Animal House is perhaps less so). I’m not sure these are all that much in fashion these days (perhaps owing to the easy availability of porn on the web, as much as anything else.)
Huh. I would have said Animal House more so. Porkies is all the things you said, but can also be viewed as a coming of age story mixed in. Animal House was very explicitly a ‘we aren’t growing up, but everything will work out the way we want’ movie.
@baconbits9:
It’s not any less of a fantasy, it’s just that sex isn’t nearly so central.
… and I would argue they are all coming of age stories (again, Animal House less so, as you noted).
Porkies starts as a sex fantasy and ends as one for a single character, but the bulk of the ‘plot’ turns into a coming of age, kids against (some) adults, us against them revenge story.
Animal house ends with them being kicked of campus, and then intentionally destroying the parade for everyone else even though they recognize that it is totally futile, then they stick on their fantasy endings in text. There is as much (more?) sex fantasy stuff in Animal House as I recall.
A critical failure that must be corrected!
Do you have any examples of recent works with such characters in them?
“Upchuck” from Daria?
@gbdub:
In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t emphasized the “if anything, conservatives are even more likely to be bullies” part of my argument so much. My intent was definitely not to flip the script and say that making fun of lonely virgins and socially awkward nerds was a conservative-exclusive phenomenon, simply to point out that it’s not a liberal-exclusive phenomenon.
Most Americans don’t have particularly strong political views one way or another, and that’s doubly true for teenagers and young adults. So in all likelihood, the majority of high school/college bullies are apolitical, or have weak political leanings that don’t really shape their personality or drive their behavior.
Liberals could get healthcare reform by agreeing to repeal the payroll tax, or ban state and local governments from requiring a statement of need to open a new care facility, or mandating transparent pricing on care.
They could get immigration reform by allowing citizens to agree to formally host immigrants (of said citizens’ choice) in their vicinity, bearing partial responsibility (think security deposit) for any violent crime or civil damage committed by said immigrants.
I had two more, but they were licensing laws and nuclear power, and gbdub covered those.
Uh, this is a thing liberals are actively asking for.
In what way does this accomplish healthcare reform?
Hmm. I only ever heard Claire McCaskill calling for it, and she lost her re-election. But in the spirit of this subthread, this can be a point conservatives could concede in the other direction…
It would remove the incentive corporations have to offer non-salary benefits instead of salary. This includes insurance. Instead, employees would just get the money, shop for insurance that better suits their individual needs, and the common complaint of losing one’s insurance when losing one’s job (or seeking a new job) disappears.
I think the confusion is your use of the term “payroll tax.” That usually only applies to the 15.3% combined FICA paid half by employer and half by employee. Health insurance benefits interact with the tax code because there is no income tax paid on health benefits. They are not taxed as income to the employee, and they are deductible as a business expense by the employer.
I don’t think I’m confused. The facts you laid out mean the employer has an incentive to offer group insurance instead of salary. This is precisely the problem. An arbitrary tax code has ensured that the insurance choice is made by someone other than its beneficiary, who now has to give up money if they want a different choice.
We’re not disagreeing about the distortionary nature of the tax treatment of health care. It’s purely a semantic issue with the phrase “payroll tax.” “Payroll tax” usually refers only to Social Security and Medicare, not to all taxes applicable to a company making payroll. I think that’s why there’s confusion. Using that phrase makes it sound like you’re saying “eliminate the employee’s ability to get Social Security in exchange for healthcare reform.” If you said “eliminate the preferential tax treatment of health benefits in exchange for healthcare reform,” we would be entirely on the same page.
Suppose a reasonable person from 200 years ago was brought to the present day in a time machine, and lived here for a few years. After weighing the pros and cons, this person decided life in his own time was better than life today. When asked why, what rational arguments might this person use to defend his decision?
The most obvious two are community and morality. 200 years ago is the eighteen-teens, which was a particularly strong religious revival in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening).
Small communities are also very powerful. The Amish live in a rough approximation of that time even today and have a much stronger community than the “English” do. I could see a rational preference for those two things over the modern conveniences.
Yeah, the answer is almost certainly religion.
There’s a pretty big chance someone from 200 years ago seriously holds some rather strict religious beliefs that are blatantly and flagrantly violated on a consistent basis in modern society.
I know that today Andrew Jackson is judged for the trail of tears or whatever, but at the time, the scandal that did the most political damage to him was the fact that he married a woman who was previously divorced!!!!.
Wasn’t the scandal because her divorce might not technically have been finalized before he married her?
That was part of it, but I think the fact that she was divorced at all was still considered significant.
That sort of thing was also considered significant in regards to the English monarchy within the last 100 years, wasn’t it?
@Matt M
It was a modest scandal amongst the more conservative British in the last year.
I saw moderate objections that Prince Harry was marrying a lowborn divorcee.
@EchoChaos: … I didn’t realize Meghan Markle was old enough to be a divorcee. I see she’s 38, huh.
@Le Maistre Chat
As someone who works with the American working class, let me tell you that the lower age limit to be a divorcee is terrifyingly low.
As someone who was prior military enlisted, let me assure you that as low as you think it is, it’s even lower than that!
In Spain, the current king, then prince, marrying a divorcee was a scandal.
I am not sure how much of the scandal was due to them being married by a Catholic bishop, and her being previously married, albeit by a civil ceremony.
People who, under similar circumstances, were not allowed to marry in the Church were quite critical. Also, the Spanish church makes the most conservative wing of the church; it was seen as hypocrisy at the time.
I would have thought this was in reference to Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, not Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
@Dack
I think it initially was, but I was emphasizing that it was not only a hundred years ago, but even two years ago.
@Well…
Got hit by a moving automobile, said “To Hell with this”
Well, I warned him not to trust the pedestrian crossings….
Although I personally do not think one time is better than another a person from 200 years ago might realize that the lack of communication in his world led to considerably less stress. He had relations with maybe a few dozen people. He had little contact with the world outside his small circle and daily life. Communicating with others IMO is the main cause of stress, so his life has a lot of appeal for that reason.
Is there a satisfactory empirical way to measure stress?
Given where 200 years ago lands you in American history, I suspect they’ll hold their racial ideas more dear than the concept of streets free of horse shit.
His friends and family are all dead in 2019.
Secondarily, the modern world is confusing and weird, and, as FrankistGeorgist notes, has values that don’t make sense to him.
This seems like the incredibly obvious answer, to the point where I’m disappointed in myself that I did not think of it immediately. Any dissonance around values and tech is going to pale in comparison to every single person you love or care for being gone.
The person was an aristocrat and wasn’t allowed to keep all their slaves/serfs in 2019 and do with them as pleased. If that person is immoral enough, that can be perfectly rational.
I have never been swayed by the idea that slave ownership in history (and in the present day in much of the world if you didn’t know) was driven by evil; the idea that everyone was evil and evilly doing evil things until one brave man (onto which in our stories about history we happily project 21st century morals) stood up and said “hey fuck this evil shit”, and he fought to end the evil (in this case slavery; there’s an analogous story about feudalism, and suffrage for women, and so on) and then because of his valiance, the evil was ended forever. You can crucify me if you want, but you can’t make this story credible to me. The way I see it, the viability of slavery is controlled by economic factors, as well as political factors. The American South was growing cotton and tobacco and such, and that made slave labour (if slightly) economically viable longer than it was in the North, and the story is a bloody-yet-boring one of money and power and civilisation struggle. If our antebellum time traveller were unhappy in a time beyond slave labour, it would probably be because he was stranded as a stranger in a strange unheimlich land, alienated from economic and social modes he is used to; not because he just really wants to beat and rape a noble negro woman and is sulking that it’s not allowed or something (insert whatever Quentin Tarantino bullshit fantasy you want here). And if you think the existence of television and such is going to change his mind, maybe you’re the slave.
The claim isn’t (usually) that slavery is driven by evil. The claim is that slavery is evil, in and of itself. You are largely correct about the economic factors driving things, any standard history of the time will say much the same thing. (A common line is that slavery wasn’t caused by racism, racism was caused by slavery.)
There is a great deal of evidence that, after slavery was outlawed in the South, former slaveowners and their kin were enraged that they could no longer use black people as they saw fit, and were required to treat them equally. One piece of such evidence being that they spent almost a century after that codifying racial differences into law, for no apparent economic reasons at all.
@Enkidum
There was a lot of anger at blacks in the North, which your explanation fails to account for.
Do you mean that “slavery caused racism” doesn’t account for the racism in the North?
Assuming you do, then I guess I’d say that:
a) It’s a somewhat glib phrase, not meant to account for every single manifestation of slavery or racism.
b) There are a variety of ways I can think of in which Southern slavery would lead to Northern racism, mostly boiling down to “white Northerners tended to view white Southerners as more of a in-group than black southerners, and so were sympathetic to them”.
In the aftermath of the Civil War there was also a tendency in both regions to charge the horrors of the war to blacks, leading to stuff like this.
Despite social taboos and this being a low-status thing, there are people who enjoy being dickheads to waiters, flight assistants, and anybody they perceive beneath them. So people seem to do that even if it in generaly is a bad economic strategy; you generally need to pay people more if you treat them like that.
You can be even more of a dickhead to slaves.
My guess is that there are people who would greatly enjoy the level of control they would get with that.
There’s a throwaway line in a Dave Barry essay I read probably 25 years ago, something like “Don’t trust people who are rude to waiters but nice to you, they are not nice people.”
It’s never failed me yet. In fact literally last week it confirmed to me that a co-worker who has been trying to get friendly with me is not someone I wish to be overly close to, after he bitched out the poor clerk at a coffee shop for giving him a disposable cup, when he hadn’t asked for anything else and disposable is the default at said shop.
In a probably futile attempt to connect this to @Secretly French’s post, I don’t think there’s much of a relationship between being an asshole like this and slavery (or other evils), save that under certain systems, pathological personalities can thrive more than they can under others. Thus after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government admitted that many of those who had taken leadership roles of various committees were sadists to the extent of being mentally ill. I’d imagine the same was true of, e.g., slave drivers and so on. But again, their rising to the top is more of a consequence than a cause of the system (although I’m sure there’s some two-way causality going on).
(I don’t have a link to the Chinese anecdote, and I can’t remember where I learned it from, so take it with a grain of salt.)
Pretty much what Enkidum said, yes. Being evil (by modern standards) may not be sufficient to be a slaveowner and enjoy it, but it sure as hell is necessary. Or are you claiming there was no slaveowner who enjoyed beating and raping other people regardless of the skin color? That’s a weird thing to claim.
I’m pretty sure that raping slaves was not a requirement. Beatings may have been, but for a long time beating children was thought to be a necessary part of raising children. Do you think that all those parents who beat their children enjoyed it and/or were evil?
@Aapje
What I’m saying is two different claims. None of them is about all slaveowners.
First – yes I agree that people might’ve been genuinely mistaken, thinking as you said that beating slaves is necessary as well as children, or that black people are less sensitive to pain, or that serfs will get sick and die without hard work, or whatever. But, if after that hypothetical aristocrat spent a few years in our time and learned that no, none of these is the case and whomever he was abusing are just as much humans as himself and suffered from it just as much as he would, if after learning that he still wants to be a slaveowner and enjoys it, I think that makes him pretty evil by modern standards at least as I understand them. Probably I didn’t make that “after” part clear enough. (Also you can invent some scenario where he now helps his slaves as much as possible and works to bring the revolution about etc an enjoys that – I’m not talking about this scenario, I’m talking about keeping his lifestyle unchanged) So the first claim is that there was a non-empty proper subset of people like this among aristocrats.
Second, I’m sure that within the first subset there was a non-empty proper subset of slaveowners who genuinely enjoyed abusing that power and among them some who used it to rape yes (though that last part is by no means important to my argument, I mentioned it just because Secretly French did).
Hope now I’ve defined my position carefully enough so no slaveowner was accused falsely.
PS I know using aristocrat and slaveowner interchangeably as I do is not technically correct. I do it just to make clear that all I’m saying applies not only to antebellum American slaveowners but also to Eastern Europe serf-owning aristocrats of the same time.
The odds of any random person from the past being a slaveowner are quite small. It’s probably at least an order of magnitude more likely that a random person from the past was a slave and will be quite impressed that sort of thing doesn’t exist in modern times anymore (in the west at least)
Yeah, I find this more persuasive than what AlexOfUrals said.
Sure, but I understood the question about what is *the* most likely explanation, just about what may be an explanation. Ditto, conditional on the fact the person didn’t like it here, they more likely weren’t a slave or something close.
The person is Circassian, or Armenian, or Comanche, and hates seeing the people he despises squat on his land.
Alternatively, perhaps he believes that with the knowledge he’s accumulated in the present, he can change history for the better, or invent the 20th century a century early and become insanely rich and famous.
@albatross11,
Oh jeez, I imagine that learning about the events of the first half of the 20th century would make one want to prevent the giant skull piles.
It’s possible, but how would he do it? If you learned we were headed for similar problems in our century, what’d you do to prevent them?
@DeWitt,
Leaflets then, blogging now?
@DeWitt
Someone argued in a part thread that we are already living in an alternative timeline, where someone shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand to change the course of history.
While here, he can do enough research to work out some surefire investments, and enough technical knowledge to invent at least a few things. That should give him the money to fund a Thomas-Edison-like operation where he starts with technology he knows is possible with something like available technology (which he remembers from his research), and then hires people to try lots of alternatives until they get each of those new technologies working.
The world in 1819 is ripe for an industrial revolution–we know because one happened. Make a few of those things happen a few decades early, and you can be insanely rich and influential. (Your influence will come not only from your wealth, but also because you will be widely hailed as a one-of-a-kind genius inventor and entrepreneur.) Maybe buy/build a major news organization to get even more influence.
You may simply want to develop your business in ways that will shift the world–for example, a Southerner who wants the South to have a better chance in the civil war could try to build up more industry in the South, maybe build gun factories, even invent some better military technology and give it to the South. Or you may want to try to head off the civil war by backing a movement to phase out slavery–having such a proposal backed by the South’s most famous son, with vast wealth behind it, might manage to get abolition of slavery starting with people born after 1850, and thus eliminate the main issue that drove secession.
If you want to make the world a better place, bringing modern medical knowledge back would be a pretty big deal. Probably that would involve bankrolling a medical school and hospital that taught newfangled stuff like the germ theory of disease, use of antiseptics, anesthesia, etc. Getting your research labs working on experimenting with anesthesia and making a few basic antibiotics would be a win. Somehow memorizing enough to “invent” a few basic drugs (antibiotics, antiparasitics) would have a huge impact on the world.
Once you’ve done that, you will have largely rerandomized a lot of history, so there’s probably not much point trying to hire assassins to knock off Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. But at that point you’re a very rich old man who’s got piles of money, so why not give it a shot?
@albatross11
It was tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society
And at about the right time. Do we know for sure that Robert Finley wasn’t a time traveler?
That was me.
(Mostly I was just amused by how duct-tape-and-paperclips the whole incident seemed to be, almost as if some disillusioned ragtag gang of Marty McFlys were barely pulling it off.)
Is this “life was better”, “life was better for me”, or “I’d prefer to go back”?
I think the “life was better” question is very difficult, because I doubt any of us have a good grasp on what people of that time valued. It may also depend on specifically where they came from – geographically/culturally, and also in terms of power and status. Gender too.
It’s easier the longer they stay here, as their values and ways of thinking will be changed by what they encounter, whether they recoil in horror, embrace what they find with the fervor of a convert, or even have a more nuanced reaction.
I imagine I could find some corner case societies where the average person lived longer and ate better in 1819 than the average person in that area lives and eats in 2019. The New Guinea Highlands might be interesting that way. Mostly, though, it would be the other way round.
Lots of specific-to-the-culture-of-then values won’t be much followed currently, to the distress and possible despair of someone who found those values especially important. Status hierarchies will be especially broken – the wrong people will have status for the wrong reasons.
A nature lover might easily despair, but I’m not sure how many could be found in that period. (John Muir was born in 1838. Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817.)
Overall though, I don’t see it. I’m too much a creature of the 20th century.
I’m not sure how much a nature lover would despair, at least if they’d been in urban or industrial areas in their own time. In the western world, there’s at least some measures on which nature is better off now. For example, at the start of the 19th century, Blake was writing about “dark satanic mills”; during the lives of Muir and Thoreau, London had the Great Stink.
Please recommend me a good gift toy for a technically skilled 4 years old boy.
I was told he can sometimes play with building kits for 12 years old, only if it takes too much time, he gets bored. A friend recommended me this, but that seems too soon, and also his mother disapproves of buying a computer. Needs to be a technical toy that doesn’t contain a computer, nor requires a computer to run.
Magnetiles have seen a ton of use here.
Any of the hundreds of “magnetic bar and ball building toy” variants.
Does Lego still make the Techniks (sp?) varieties?
Yep, Technic Lego is a central example of “he could do it, except it takes too long so he gets bored in the middle of construction”. Then he insists on parents finishing the construction for him.
Too long for what? Let him just play with it.
Snap Circuits, marble runs, Trio blocks, and ditto to Magna-Tiles
These are all good, we did especially well with Trio blocks. When slightly older, polydrons. When older yet, zometools.
I had one of these when I was that age. It taught me well.
Is that basically a Galton board?
A really good set of wooden blocks.
What makes a set of blocks good is the proportions: each dimension should be an integer multiple of every other dimension. (Typically, 1 x 3 x 6 and 1 x 3 x 12; a few 1 x 3 x 9 blocks add some options.) And you need a lot of them.
When I was 12 or so, a friend who made commercial cabinets gave us a banana box full of blocks like that made from plywood scraps. I think that is the most played-with toy in my parent’s house (I’m the oldest).
PlusPlus is an extremely cheap and simple lego-like building toy that is ideal for putting in the “restaurant bag” that I assume all parents of young children keep in the car. For something more obviously technical, 4 is a pretty good age for Robot Turtles, a board game designed to teach basic programming concepts.
Does anyone have any experience collecting ancient coins, more specifically ancient Roman coins?
I’m really looking for:
#1 Can I really get a coin from Tiberius’s time with his face on it?
#2 How would I store it?
#3 Is there a safe/reputable place to buy these at the $20-$30 price point?
#4 Is there any resell value in these?
I’m looking into this for birthday/Christmas reasons. Anything I really need I’ve either already bought or is way too expensive for a gift, so my birthday/Christmas gift list is pretty lame. I want something my elderly aunt can buy, that I will enjoy or at least think is cool, for about $20-$30, without it taking up a lot of space. Ancient coins feel like they could fit this niche well.
1.) Yes, if you’re willing to accept one with some imperfections. The really nice ones get very expensive but one that’s been tarnished by age or might not have a very firm imprint is readily available. Pottery and common coins from the ancient world are extremely common.
2.) Keeping it in a basic case should do fine, unless you want to have it restored or something.
3.) There are many websites and authorities that verify them. Most of them are pretty good. These aren’t particularly rare items so counterfeiting is mostly of high value, rare coins. I’ve heard vcoins is good.
4.) They hold value reasonably well but aren’t likely to appreciate.
You might be slightly underestimating price. They’re probably going to run you like $50-200 for a cheap one.
Erusian covers it pretty well.
I have one (from Marcus Aurelius’s reign) that I bought from a dealer at a coin show. It’s been awhile but I think $50ish is about right. I haven’t actually had it verified by another party, but I have never had an issue (so far as I know..!) with a coin show dealer peddling counterfeits.
Someone recently ran a demographic poll on the Board Game Geek forum, and the results were interesting in showing that the population of board gamers doesn’t necessarily conform to the celibate geek stereotype:
A large majority of respondents (77.5%) were in a married or unmarried relationship (59.9% married overall).
A slight majority of respondents (50.6%) have at least one child.
A plurality of respondents (38.2%) identified as some denomination of Christianity (slightly ahead of atheists at 37.9%).
On the flipside, 84.5% of the respondents identified as male and 85.9% of the respondents identified as white.
None of this surprises me at all.
I was never into board games at all, until my first serious relationship. Prior to that, I did what all lonely isolated bitter young men do, played video games.
But now I suddenly had this situation where I had to routinely spend several hours with another person who had some viscerally negative opinions towards video games. So what to do? Board games fill the void nicely. It seems to me that women aren’t generally super into them, but not at all opposed to them either. It’s a way for us to spend time together that she enjoys while doing something that still scratches my itch for interesting/challenging entertainment.
Yeah, the only modest surprise to me is how high atheist is.
It’s a geek community. My gaming club in college (which was largely board games, not video games) had a similar proportion.
Did they ask about age? The results sound consistent with the forum skewing higher in age than you might expect from a board game website.
BGG is mostly a mix of Eurogamers and board-wargaming grognards, with the latter group well known to average older; I suspect we also account for a lot of the heavy male skew.
Most represented age range is 30-39 (40.1%), followed by 40-49 (28.8%), 50-59 (14.1%) and 18-29 (12%).
I wasn’t in the survey, but would have been another married father data point. In fact, I had kids in order to build a gaming group that would be reliably available.
That, folks, is commitment.
Obviously tongue in cheek, but I have to say that I kind of get it now that I have children. One of the things I am looking forward to most with my kids is introducing them to fun stuff I like, which will be all-new to them. Fun places, interesting subjects, enjoyable experiences. One thing I like is games, and I’ll enjoy teaching them to play with me.
The reply was tongue-in-cheek as well.
And you are correct that this is one of the greatest joys of parenthood (as well as one of the more irrationally large pains).
Nah, commitment is when a baseball player says this.
+1
Y’know, there are actually a bunch of geeky hobbies you can do with children once they’re ~8 years old. Board games, Dungeons & Dragons (start with B/X), building with Legos… it’s just a huge commitment to get to that point.
Just make sure that they don’t tell a mandatory reporter.
I’m pretty sure that making a kid learn how to use the Attack Tables or calculate THAC0 qualifies as child abuse. And that’s not even going into the Thief Skills table… /s
Pro tip: the real test of patience and calm is when they start consistently winning games.
@Nabil: haha! But seriously, there are like 3 B/X or B/X+ retroclones that remove the 1980s attack tables and print something that’s basically BAB (one of the positive 3rd Edition changes). I’m running one of them, Adventurer Conqueror King, over Discord. Just strip out the domain economics and proficiencies when playing with little kids, or the Weapon Mastery slots from Dark Dungeons (BECMI clone).
It’s worth noting that in addition to being expensive, the hobby has been around about 20 years in the current form–growing niche of complex games. I’d expect MtG to also skew older than the common perception.
And being a social hobby, it’s not unlikely to meet potential spouses through it, or new friends that might be able to help you find one.
I feel like my group of friends got in on the early part of the wave of games that came to the US from Europe. This was around 20 years ago. Two of them (married) had gotten into the MtG scene when it was first forming, and that lead to hanging around gaming stores and that lead to
dancingbuying Carcassone and Settlers of Catan.A group of at first three and now four families all go an an annual beach trip together. We all went to college together, lived in the same dorm, and cut our gaming teeth playing Hearts, Spades and Whist in the dorm lounge. Naturally that has meant that gaming came to the beach with us, and that started a tradition of late nights staying up playing games while the kids all slept. Fast forward and now the kids all play and part of the trip is planning which of the many, many games will come to the beach.
My wife and I and the original couple also have semi-regular game nights during the year as well.
When I was a kid, the complex games were more WW2 simulation produced in the US (like Axis and Allies and Squad Leader), and that did not favor the mixed gender group we have now. Whereas my D&D groups were almost always mixed gender to some degree.
Basically my thesis would be that the complex board games which dominant the market now had the origins in Europe and that resulted in a cultural shift in the US board gaming community.
Yeah, I would genderize (generalize?) modern board gaming as a man-centric hobby that appeals to a lot of women. 15.5% is actually lower than I’d have predicted. My personal experience is that it’s a lot of grown men (and 86% white sounds about right) recruiting their GF/wife or a couple they socialize with.
To be fair, this is the people who go to a boardgaming website where board games are reviewed and discussed.
For example, my wife bought Gaia Project so we could play it together on a vacation and we had a great time. She is into board games at an above average level for a woman as I compare her to her friends.
She had literally no idea BGG existed when I said that Gaia Project was highly rated there. She just bought it because it was the coolest looking game in the store.
Indeed. I’ll also add that traditional gender roles are still such that men are more frequently expected to take the lead in proposing activities and doing research and stuff.
The first time I ever went to BGG was under explicit instructions from my girlfriend: “Find us a game to play.” It’s not that I was more interested in board games than she was necessarily, it’s just that I was the one who was expected to do the research and make a decision and make a purchase.
Remember, they didn’t poll board gamers. They polled people who like to talk about board gamers.
Edit: Whose the echo now??
Speaking of boardgames, has everyone here seen Cyanide and Happiness’ new Trolley game kickstarter?
I’m not a backer, I’m just amused to see a utilitarian themed game.
Recently, somebody on SSC linked to an article about Pearson trying to make textbooks “digital first” and remove printed books because they are re-sold in the second-hand market.
But at the same time, publishers are trying to squeeze libraries with e-books.
With print books, a library can just buy a book, preferrably a hardback (they last longer), or as many books as they need to reduce queues. It’s a one-time fee they pay, and they use the book until it breaks down or goes to archives. And when a book gets damaged, they just buy another, if they have money. But if they have money, they can just purchase it, with no bans or embargoes or other silliness.
But with e-books, it’s not the same. MacMillan’s Tor, for example, first limited sales of books to libaries 8 weeks after publication to just one book per library system (and if NYC is just one library system, that means millions of users!).
I love ebooks, as my limited shelf space really limits my book buying, but this makes me want to only buy print from the Big 4, and sell them second hand, ‘cos screw them.
It’s generally better for the students, though, as the e-books are generally under $100 and often come with good interactive packages (quizzes while you read, that sort of thing). Not as good as using open resources of course, but better than buying a new textbook (and often cheaper than used ones too).
But the real cost of a printed, even second-hand textbook, is not the price you bough it for.
Its = buying price – selling price.
As I see second-hand textbooks for more than new book$ – 40$, if you do resell it, you lost less money. Of course, you have to front the money, but you do get it back.
No, that’s the cost of renting a printed textbook. And you have to add things like shipping, merchant fees, etc. on both ends of the transaction. And possibly the labor/annoyance of selling.
Which part of her post are you referring to? I don’t think any part of that post describes the cost of renting a printed book.
Buying price minus selling price implies that you will only be in possession of the book for a short time (and that you will actively minimize doing things to it that may reduce its resale value)
It’s not technically a rental, but from a price perspective, it’s essentially the same calculus.
When you rent a book, you can’t make notes on it, you have to be careful with it, and if you decide you want to keep it because it’s so valuable to you, you still have to return it and buy the book.
When you buy the book, you can decide whether you need it for the entire duration of your Bachelor’s for example, or until you need to move, or forever. In which case
selling price = 0$
@Matt
When you upgrade a car, can you meaningfully be said to have been renting the old one?
Assumption of liability and direct control over the disposition of the object are much more salient features of ownership than perpetuity.
Ah, Hoopy’s response has clarified what Matt M was saying for me, we can ignore my earlier post.
In response: actually renting the textbook will virtually always be more expensive than buying used and selling used. Maybe even more expensive than buying new and selling used depending on the book. As far as the hassle/extra costs of selling, the extra costs aren’t very high (source: did this every semester for 5 years) and the hassle just isn’t that great anymore (source: people buy/sell online and ship stuff sold online all the time, and I did this every semester for 5 years about a decade ago when it was even less convenient than it is now).
Additionally, as Hoopy and Ana have mentioned, you get the option to decide at the end of the semester “this book was really valuable, I’m going to keep it instead of selling it back” (or if you know the book will be used for future classes, which would be the case for some math classes for example).
It’s probably also worth mentioning that, although it is probably becoming more and more a minority opinion, a a not-insignificant number of people just don’t like reading on PCs/tablets (even the tablets specifically designed to make reading as pleasant as possible).
You don’t “actually” own the e-books either, you just pay for a license to use it until Pearson decides it’s not worth supporting any more
@acymetric
Heck, I was last in college in 2012, and I purchased hard copies of textbooks two months ago, since as you note it’s more convenient and easy to read on paper rather than screwing with a pdf on screen.
As an aside, I hate the “paperless office” for engineering with a burning passion. Trying to work two drawings together on a computer screen is infuriating. I usually end up printing the drawings out, throwing it away when I’m done with it, then printing them out again a few months later when I need them again. You used to be able to go to a big room down the hall and get binders of drawings. It was also easier to stumble over things you didn’t need to know while paging through the hard copies.
Disagree…I can buy a book used and then sell it back at near the same cost. I could even occasionally turn a profit if I found a particularly good deal on a book.
Additionally (unless things have changed, which they very well may have) a lot of e-books used to require an active internet connection (you basically had to log in every time you used it).
If you can do that, then yes, it’s obviously better. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case that used textbooks are available, and it’s not always the case that you will sell it back for near what you paid for it.
To illustrate, one of the problems students who try to sell back run into now is that textbooks will come with codes for online stuff. Another is that a new edition comes out and the professor claims students need the new one. Fortunately, the latter isn’t as big a problem, since that claim is usually bullshit.
Unless they use the problem sets from the book, which publishers intentionally change between editions even if the content is the same.
The textbook market is a racket, and any professor that cares about their students will use open resources to the furthest extent possible, but I view the e-books as a (distant) second best: cheaper than a full textbook, and it functionally matches the behavior of most students today (read on a phone or tablet, never glanced at again after the class is over).
I don’t know about the e-books students use as e.g. textbooks with exercises, etc. but my library saves a lot of money and space on e-versions of many books and I hate it. It’s actually better when they don’t have e-access to the book because then I can quickly request a copy from a different local library rather than being told, basically, our library already has access to this.
Why don’t I like the e-versions? Well it would be great if you could just download a pdf (like e.g. JStor) but that’s never the case with the ones I’m “checking out.” Instead you always have to “read” the book, i.e. painfully attempt to skim for the info you’re looking for using some sort of awful proprietary in-browser java-based system designed to prevent piracy but also making it such a pain you’d much rather just search for a pirated copy.
Yeah, in-browser readers are uniformly terrible in my experience.
Yeah. I never borrow e-books from my local public library. I’ll bring a physical book there via inter-library loan instead, if that’s an option.
Meanwhile, the library offers me recommendations every time I check out a physical book – and they are always for e-books. I’ve asked staff why it’s always e-books, and they don’t have an explanation.
I do have a kindle containing a large number of e-books – but what they have in common is that they were almost all free. I use it only when travelling – physical books weigh a lot, and I can easily read 4 or more just during the air flights to and from wherever I’m going, never mind reading in the evening to help myself fall asleep. Very rarely, I’ll buy an e-book just before a trip, rather than a physical copy of the same book, because I intend to read it on the plane. Or more likely, one of those wretched publications that have no physical counterpart, if by an author I really like, and I’m about to travel – mostly though I just refuse to read anything that’s both e-only and not free; I want to encourage paper books.
And as for text books – I’m 61 years old, and still have many of the books I used in college. And I have no expectation that an e-book acquired today would be usable 40 years from now – so no thanks.
The obvious answer would be that the e-book process is sufficiently automated such that it requires zero actual human labor. So it’s cheaper for the library to have you use ebooks rather than physical books.
In my experience (academic library, not public, and I don’t work directly in acquisitions or circulatoin) that tends not to be the case. E-books are often surprisingly pricey and have usage limitations that can be inconvenient, and neither processing nor check-out/check-in labor tends to be a huge limiting bottleneck for physical books. (Especially since the shift to electronic PDFs for journals has substantially reduced workload elsewhere. And while we haven’t yet, a lot of libraries have moved to self-check-out stations.)
On the other hand, they have some advantages: they don’t take up limited stacks space that probably isn’t ever going to expand. They can also be part of a demand-driven acquisition program where titles can be in the catalog, but they’re only actually purchased when someone checks them out, allowing for a much wider choice to patrons without having to buy most of the books offered. And some of the better ones (notably Overdrive/Libby) allow for reading on a Kindle, which obviates a lot of the inconvenience of proprietary reading software. (At least for Kindle users.) Some others can export to epub which will work on other e-ink readers.
The acquisition cost is irrelevant, we’re talking about the marginal cost of one more check-in/check-out. Labor cost may be low, but it’s non-zero. Even if the check-out process is self-automated, someone still has to re-shelf the book when it returns, etc.
Anecdotally, I have never heard any acquisitions decisions made based on cost of processing or circulation. The economic gravity may be there, but it’s not a direct driver.
And honestly, our marginal cost of circulation transactions right now is pretty close to zero given that someone has to staff the desk and there’s almost never a line. If/when it’s practical to automate away circulation desk staff entirely, maybe. But that’s more at the “get rid of the physical collection” stage than marginal decisions between individual print and electronic purchases.
A couple Open Threads ago HeelBearCub recommended Steven Johnson’s “How We Got to Now” book. Just got it from the library and it’s pretty interesting. Just saying thanks for the recommendation.
Seconded. I’m most of the way through the first chapter.
Makes me wonder if thanks to HBC’s recommendation there’s been an international rush on libraries for this book and if so, have the librarians noticed?
Glad you guys are enjoying it.
Has there ever been an attempt to start something like an SSC book club?
Like, we somehow arrive at a certain book, everyone is given a month to read it, and then we discuss?
This sort of ends up happening whenever Scott reviews something and then we all go read it, but maybe we could be a little more proactive?
johan_larson tried it for a while with science fiction.
Yes, there was some interest, but it seemed thin. Eventually it just felt like too much trouble for too little participation, and I stopped.
@Matt M, if you do this, expect the number of people who actually read each book to be in the single digits, and probably the low single digits at that. Maybe that’s enough for you.
Tentative idea: ask people what books they’re already read that they’d like to discuss.
I really enjoyed the Murderbot Diaries (a series of four novellas, so far).
2+ years ago there was a regular OT book club run by … I can’t remember. It lasted quite a while.
jaimieastorga ran one for scifi short stories, which had the advantage of requiring much less commitment.
That was it.
@Matt M,
A book club sounds like great idea!
I hope @Nancy Lebovitz will suggest some fiction (not as much as you read please!).
Of @Scott Alexander’s book reviews the only one’s that I remember reading fully have been Albion’s Seed, and The Two Income Trap (both before I started reading SSC, my book reading has gone way down since I’ve discovered this blog!). and Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber after I read the blog but before I read Scott’s review.
I haven’t fully read either of them (only bits of each), but how about Charles Murray’s Coming Apart for a “conservative” perspective, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice for a “liberal” theory of society?
Oh, I think most men (and many women) should read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft.
I can probably only handle two non-fiction or one fiction a month (I don’t want to supplant much more of the reading that I already do) so some “on high” decider instead of dozens of suggestions at once would be nice, though really I’d be cool with us discussing almost every Ross Douthat and Thomas Edsall New York Times columns.
Paging bean: Naval Gazing appears to be down.
I’m aware of this, and have sent Said Achmiz an email. I don’t have other information, and can’t do anything about it.
It’s back up now.
With respect to the recent blog post about the unaffordability of all major UBI proposals, has anyone considered that this might change in the distant future thanks to real GDP growth?
https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/culture-tax-and-sustainable-capitalism/
Isn’t the obvious rejoinder that in 45 years, $30K per year will no longer be considered by UBI advocates to be sufficient to achieve “good quality of life”? If you looked at the material conditions of people 45 years ago, I suspect that (including EITC, welfare transfers, Medicaid, etc.) pretty much everyone now is already living a lower-middle-class life, or thereabouts, according to the standards of 1974.
@hls2003 >
I really doubt that as 1973 marked the peak of a long boom and while average living standards in 1974 had fallen compared to the year before, the mass homelessness that we see today didn’t start until the early 1980’s, also there was more of a social “safety net” then as “welfare as we know it” wasn’t destroyed until the ’90’s.
For most Americans returning to the living standards of 1974 would be a loss, but I strongly suspect that the bottom third of Americans in 1974 were better off in 1974 than the bottom third is now.
As bad as living in “the projects” was back then, I can’t imagine that living in a tent today is better.
1/3rd of people don’t live in tents. Estimates of homelessness in the US are well below 1% of the population, and the homeless problem has largely been decreasing over the last decade (some nudge up the past two years, but from 2007-2017 there was a notable decrease and that includes the largest recession in the last 80 years).
There is virtually no chance that the bottom 3rd would vote to swap places with the bottom 1/3rd of the 1973 population.
@baconbits,
That doesn’t mean that @Plumber isn’t seeing a massive homeless-ness problem in his local area.
Not to disagree with you, but a local increase in those problem will make them very worrisome, even if they are counter to the national trends.
@Plumber,
one other factor in the problems of homeless population before/after the 1980s is the huge changes in mental-health laws (and in hospital funding) in the decade previous.
That entire subject is a huge rabbit-trail which will take things away from the discussion of better-since-1973 or worse-since-1973.
Further, disentangling what you’re seeing locally from national trends can make discussion pretty hard to finish.
@baconbits9,
Homelessness in California has been growing, which has been clear to my eyes, I’m curious about the national drop, have more been reaching the magic year if 65 when tontine-socialism kicks in?
Or are the just dying off?
@S_J > “….one other factor in the problems of homeless population before/after the 1980s is the huge changes in mental-health laws (and in hospital funding) in the decade previous…”
The Lanterman–Petris–Short Act that was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, especially after a 1987 court decision expanded the “protections” really emptied the psych wards onto city streets, and last decades meth use epidemic made a bad situation worse.
> really emptied the psych wards onto city streets
Sure, the question is, since this seems to be where this argument started: are people worse off because of it? The background population almost certainly is, by some amount. The newly homeless? Being homeless may be better than being locked up in a psych ward (or not, probably depends on the person and on various factors). Would they likely have actually improved in the psych ward?
Living standards measured how, exactly? Because other that 8 tracks per household, I can’t think of any objective measure of standard of living that’s lower today than the 70s.
This is straight up wrong, as I think I’ve mentioned to you before. Welfare was cut in the 90s, yes. Every other social safety net program was dramatically expanded, and social spending, no matter how you measure, is higher than ever and goes up almost every year.
This is just wrong.
Worse now than in 1974:
Proportion of children living with both the same parents as when they were infants.
Proportion of two-parent families with only one wage-earner
Proportion of people who could pay out of pocket for a normal labor and delivery
That’s not really a standard of living issue.
Again, that’s more a social question. Earnings per earner are up.
Closer than the other two but not a very good metric. First, the average number of baby deliveries in a life is less than one if you’re looking per person. Second, a “normal” delivery today is a lot different than a normal delivery in 1974. Stillbirth and infant mortality rates are half what they were then and at least some of that must be attributable to better care. Third, why does the manner of payment matter? By your metric, if a number of people decide that instead of saving X dollars a month, they spend it to buy insurance that covers their delivery, living standards would go down, which makes no sense.
@cassander,
“Every other” social spending looks to me mostly like tontine socialism for an aging population, uo till the Ford administration public housing was increasing, afterwards less, when and if I see less tents will be when it looks to me to be an additional safety net.
@SamChevre,
Thank you, and I’ll add that there was a growth in divorce, drug abuse, children growing up without knowing their fathers, and murders in the ’70’s, all of which turned into an explosion in the ’80’s (followed by mass incarceration in the ’90’s), just how much worse my neighborhood was in ’85 than in ’75 was pretty damn clear and fast.
Plumber,
The reason you see tents today and didn’t in the 1980s isn’t because the poor got a lot poorer.
It’s because back in the 1980s if you pitched a tent in the city, the cops would kick you out, and now they don’t. So all the tent people had even worse circumstances, having to pitch tents in places they prefer less than pitching them in the city (in places where you wouldn’t see them)
That may depend on how real and how important the Westermarck Effect is. If parental authority figures who lived with you in infancy don’t want to have sex with you when you hit puberty or peak nubility, but parental authority figures who are swapped in in later do, that might have a significant effect on quality of life for teenagers.
@plumber
(A) the US welfare state has always been more about transferring money from young to old than rich to poor.
(B) According to that chart, Social security as a share of GDP was actually higher in 1975 than it was 2008.
(C) Even if you just look poor programs like medicaid, welfare, SNAP, and the EITC, they’re all bigger. medicaid has grown the most, and welfare shrunk a bit, but overall you have a lot of growth.
(D) as others have pointed out, the number of tents has much more to do with factors that aren’t overall level of social assistance.
@John:
Holy #$@& yes.
Call it Natural Law, call it science, whatever: children are better off with their biological parents, or at least their mother and the daddy they had when they were an infant.
Are there any studies confirming that sexual abuse is more common for children/teenagers who were adopted later in life? If not, then this seems like nothing more than another “just so” story, albeit a credible-sounding one.
Also, leaving aside that whole can of worms, is “living with both parents” really something that has a meaningful impact on a child’s development, or is simply being raised by both the same parents enough? I’ve seen studies indicating that fatherlessness is a problem, since children who have little to no contact with one of their parents tend to have worse life outcomes, but is the same true for the children whose separated/divorced parents see them every weekend and play an active role in their life? If it isn’t, then that strongly undercuts a lot of the anti-divorce arguments that Plumber is making.
This meta-analysis seems to point to better outcomes for children in joint custody arrangements over sole custody: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15379418.2017.1422414?journalCode=wjcc20
But I haven’t been able to find anything that compares joint custody arrangements with intact families with ten minutes of Google. Personal experience (I come from a divorced family that implemented shared custody) suggests it’s not a fully adequate substitute, but we all know how much that’s worth.
The linked Atlantic article says:
“The original welfare program cost around $30 billion in today’s dollars, he said, while the government now spends twice as much on that on the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanded in the 1990s to incentivize the poor to work.”
I don’t know if the claim is correct, but it doesn’t support the claim that benefits to the bottom third have been cut dramatically. I don’t think welfare reform has much to do with modern homelessness because the demographic that dominates among the homeless, single men without dependents, never received much welfare in the first place.
Most of the poor aren’t homeless living in tents. And almost every material good on offer – health care, consumer goods, cars, computers, etc. – is superior in quality-per-unit-price today to its 1974 counterpart. If offered the quality of 1974 goods, I don’t think the poor of today would trade with their lower-middle-class counterparts from 1974. For example, if they’re on Medicaid, they have access to modern hospitals, and if you’re sick, I suspect you’d take the worst modern hospital in 2019 U.S. over the best hospital in the U.S. in 1974. Maybe I’m overestimating those gains, but I think you’re underestimating how much better some things have gotten, materially speaking.
I’m not talking about culturally. I probably agree with some elements there, but if we’re discussing UBI, that is literally a money transfer. It seems hard to get much more “materially speaking” than that. I don’t think you can throw cultural changes in there without a deep dive into how they interact with material circumstances, and which direction a UBI would influence those things, and so on.
I just think it’s very, very hard to set a “good quality of life” standard at one fixed set of material goods from one point in time and then stick to it. If I thought it could be done, without “poverty creep” I would say fine, we’ll grow our way out of it. But that’s not how we do it. In fact, we usually define poverty based on the income of the time, so that there’s literally always a bottom of the distribution. Compared to a dirt farmer in 1350, there are practically no poor people in the U.S. in an absolute sense of material privation. I think the same claim is true, though to a lesser extent, over the last half-century. The article seems like more goalpost moving – this 45-year stretch we’ll finally give people the good life (as re-defined in 2020). Then in 2065 the exact same piece will be written (probably by a digital human in an AI simulation, I’m told).
The guy is full of it. He wants a return to 2.5% growth per year and then proposes taxing the very things that might produce that growth and then also subsidising people not to work (eventually). No automation + UBI means dramatically higher prices for goods and no economic growth in the future. He also presumes that his number for what people could clearly live on without feeling impoverished would still be the benchmark in 45 years after the economy triples, despite the fact that the numbers he cites as to low now would clearly have been ‘enough’ for people 45 years ago as his currently possible UBI would be average wages then.
Among the big issues that he won’t face up to
1. If GDP triples in the next 45 years then why the hell are there poor people left in any significant amount? Why do we need a UBI in such a world of plenty (ie why do we need a UBI today in the most plentiful society ever seen?)
2. If Automation is concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands (which it explicitly hasn’t done to date at all) then it will be concentrating political power in those same hands. How is democracy going to survive with 1% owning literally everything and 99% starving in the streets. If that isn’t his vision, again why do you need a UBI?
3. Average UBI WOULD NOT ALLEVIATE 100% of poverty. It would (maybe) alleviate poverty for those in average situations, people who were born with medical issues (for one example) would have much higher than average expenses and you still end up with an underclass and cries for ever higher spending.
Really I never noticed how much like Randian villains (probably because I dislike Rand so much) the left acts like until someone pointed it out here a few days back. His whole position boils down to ‘rich people don’t really contribute much, we can pretty much take their stuff and society will work just fine.
@baconbits9,
Relative to today for more than 40 years the U.S.A. did “pretty much take their stuff” and society really did “work just fine“, indeed better than it ever had before.
I listened to my parents and (especially) grandparents, and I remember the early ’70’s, and I remember all-too-well the 1980’s, that plus the subsequent years makes it clear to me that life usually gets better when top marginal income tax rates are higher.
The US never stopped taking their stuff. Taxes from 1950-1980 averaged exactly the same share of GDP as from 1980 to 2010, and the code has gotten more progressive over time.
Do we have to go over this again? You keep making claims like this, and people keep pointing out the problems with them, and no one ever seems to learn anything.
You really think the 1970s were better for the lower third in purely economic terms(not talking about social decay) than they are now? I don’t remember the 1970s, I know many people seem to think this, but can’t ever find it in the data. People have more refrigerators, more televisions, bigger houses, ect. I think one reason is because people are not making the right comparisons, comparing the unionized manufacturing job in the 1960s to the McJob of today.
These conclusions are largely based off a subset of tax rates, not all actual tax rates, and unjustified definitions of the rich. Top marginal rates are of little value on their own because the actual number of people (% of population) and the level of income being taxed vary greatly over time and the top percent and top decile and top quintile rates can show different trends.
Here is one description of the situation at the end of WW2
And then
If you combine the two links you have substantially higher tax rates for the top quintile now (2016) at over 26% compared to 18% in 1975 and 21% in 1945.
Here is another link saying something similar for total tax dollars paid
and
In short the worsening economic conditions that you claim are associated with higher tax rates and tax receipts from the rich with the exceptions off increases in SS and medicare tax increases. The narrative being pushed by certain NYTs economists is misleading to outright false.
@Alexander Turok says: “…You really think the 1970s were better for the lower third in purely economic terms(not talking about social decay) than they are now?….”
Compared to the early 70’s?
Yes.
The decline during the ’70’s was pretty damn obvious, and the decline during the ’80’s was obvious and fast, and it’s hard for me to not think that anyone who was also alive during those years to witness them and says otherwise isn’t straight up lying, I could cleary see for myself the changing conditions, just as I’ve seen a giant increase in tents and discarded needles in the last ten years.
The early ’70’s were the best it got in my lifetime until the late ’90’s after which it started to decline again, and after 2008 it was awful, until around 2012 when it just gets weird, jobs get easier to get after 2011, but so do the numbers of tents, which I don’t see only on weekends.
And you live in one part of one city, not the whole country.
If you assume quality of life is measured perfectly by wealth then obviously things weren’t better in the 70s. But that seems like a pretty stupid assumption.
@Plumber
That’s funny, I have pretty much the opposite reaction. I grew up in the ’60’s, and I don’t see how anyone growing up in that era (which I think includes the ’70’s) could not see the enormous increase in prosperity of the middle class from that period. It was quite common for two parent families to have one car, traveling outside the US was only for the rich, long distance calls were only for emergencies, houses were much smaller, many people died in their 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s of things that are no longer fatal, and we simply have so much more stuff than we used to (especially electronics). That’s why I don’t believe those studies that seem to show that middle class income has gone up only slightly in my lifetime.
@Mark V Anderson,
I was born in the ’60’s but I don’t remember them, the ’70’s I remember, and the ’80’s I remember very well, the crack cocaine epidemic ruined what had been a much better neighborhood, 1985 has to be the year that I heard more gunfire than ever and the nadir, but even in ’82 I could tell they’re had been an explosion in beggars and people sleeping on the sidewalks, which subsided a little in the late ’90’s but never went away, and now there’s even more sidewalk sleepers today then even in the ’80’s.
From my childhood observations the least homelessness I witnessed was in the early 1970’s, the most now, the least violent crime was in the late ’90’s (I’ll believe someone who says then was better than the early ’70’s) statistics say the early ’90’s was worse, but for crime I’d say the mid ’80’s, and I list the ’80’s as the worst decade of my lifetime just on balance awful.
I’d call now mixed, worse than the early ’70’s and late ’90’s, better than the late 1970’s, but way better than the ’80’s.
1972 (the earliest that I can remember) to 1978 were pretty good, 1979 was noticeably worse, 1985 was a cursed time, 1999 was great! 2009 was bad, now is mixed.
Please make it a mix of the best of ’73 (or earlier!) and ’99, and almost nothing so ever of 1980 to 1987 especially 1985 HATES THAT YEAR AND IT’S BEGGARS AND GUNFIRE FOREVER!
@Alexander Turok
Frankly, I’m unclear on how even more televisions improve people’s lives in any significant way, and much the same for the other two, if starting with at least one.
I doubt we got less enjoyment from our single black and white television than a modern family gets from a high definition colour television in every room room, complete with remote controls. We may even have gotten more enjoyment, because we watched TV together, rather than each watching their own choice in the privacy of their bedroom.
If you’d asked my mom, she would have regarded a larger house as “even more to clean”. And I can’t imagine her having a real use for more than one refrigerator, though she might have appreciated a freezer.
@Plumber, America is more violent today than it was in the immediate postwar period, and the 80s was much more violent. The homicide rate is about equal,(it should have gone down if nothing else for the reason that more people survive gunshot wounds) while the violent crime rate in general is up, a fact that contradicts the whole Steve Pinker World Always Gets Better mantra that I otherwise largely agree with. And there are more bums. But what’s that got to do with the question of economic growth? Not a lot. If you view crime and homelessness as inevitably flowing from poverty, you’d view them as signs people are getting poorer. If you see them as flowing from issues of character and societal tolerance, you don’t.
@DinoNerd,
There’s a law of diminishing returns with regards to McMansions and giant TVs and stuff, but if we’re talking about the conditions of the poorest third of the population, I definitely think the extra house space made a difference.
@Alexander Turok > “…. If you view crime and homelessness as inevitably flowing from poverty, you’d view them as signs people are getting poorer. If you see them as flowing from issues of character and societal tolerance, you don’t…”
I think it’s both as it’s circular, but also including a flood of highly addictive harmful drugs put the bulk of the blame on de-industrialization and the When Work Disappears explanation more than the Coming Apart one, now maybe a Borderlander/Cavalier culture is a bit more likely to become a “culture of poverty” than Puritan/Quaker ones but it sure seems to me that if both inner-city blacks thrived from the ’40’s untill the beginning of the ’70’s (and how the closing of factories and shipyards effected them is well described in the book I cite), and that small town whites did better until China entered into the W.T.O. (which made former libertarian Tucker Carlson change his tune about a “culture of poverty”.being the only cause) it’s hard not to see the link.
@Alexander Turok
True enough.
My father called himself a labourer, and would have called us poor – and when I was a very small child, we were doubtless well into that bottom third.
But by the time I was describing in my earlier response (my early teens), he’d accumulated some seniority in a union job, and was no longer being laid off regularly. We’d upgraded from the tiny basement apartment – and I’m sure mom welcomed that increase in space! But she was happy to stop with 3 bedrooms, one bathroom, living room and dining room(!), for a family of 5.
Your opinions on this stuff are irrelevant.
The masses have expressed a pretty obvious revealed preference for two televisions rather than one, for iphones rather than corded home phones, for big houses rather than small houses, etc.
Even when these things come with pretty obvious trade-offs such as, say, both parents having to work instead of just one.
If nothing else, multiple televisions mean people can all watch the shows they want to see.
Revealed preferences don’t say shit about happiness because people are shit at pre-determining what makes them happy. You can’t just handwave addiction and trillions of dollars of advertising away as “well if they for realsies didn’t want that stuff they just wouldn’t do it“.
@Matt M
So my opinions are irrelevant. How about my revealed preferences then?
No television, exactly one refrigerator, less than 1200 square feet, and only one bathroom.
And I’m just as much a part of “the masses” as anyone else; I’m just in the inconvenient-to-business part of it that’s hard to influence to buy things I don’t need and probably wouldn’t enjoy if I had them. (Some excuse not trying to sell stuff I’d like by insisting my demographic has little or no disposable income. To which I respond by ROFLMAO, even while getting books from the local library that I could easily afford to buy from Amazon.)
If you can think of a better way of approximating “what sorts of things make people happy” OTHER THAN observing the sorts of things they actually choose to do, I’d love to hear it.
And yes, I can just handwave advertising away. If advertising was 1/10th as effective or relevant as people like you claim it is, all well advertised products would be super successful, and all non/lowly advertised products would be failures. Neither of those things are even close to true.
If “what people do” was a good way to reveal what made people happy, then nobody would be unhappy. Do you think anyone is unhappy?
Your revealed preferences are plenty relevant, for yourself and your own life.
True, in the sense that you are technically included as a part of the masses and no other single individual has any more or less representation than you. But not true in the sense that your preferences seem to be very atypical. Just because an extra TV wouldn’t improve your life, doesn’t mean they won’t improve the lives of others.
Incorrect on two levels.
1. I’m not claiming that revealed preferences are a perfect and 100% reliable lens on what increases happiness. Only that they’re the best lens we have.
2. Even still, your logic is flawed. The claim isn’t that revealed preferences guarantee happiness, it’s that they are the means by which people attempt to maximize their own happiness. Success in doing so is never promised or guaranteed.
If the best hammer I have available is an earthworm, that doesn’t mean I should try to use the earthworm as a hammer or that using the earthworm as a hammer gives better results than just not doing it at all.
It also seems fairly obvious that not all, maybe not even most, of people’s decisions or actions are made with the goal of increasing happiness. Do you have any way to establish that in fact this is the case?
This probably doesn’t happen enough to make up a study, but if there are situations where someone loses all their things and gets a lump sum of cash to replace them, looking to see what they buy and don’t buy could be interesting.
Like restarting with insurance money after a fire or flood, for instance.
You look specifically at the people who do feel happy and fulfilled and examine what they did. Demonstrating a basic understanding that humans can and will be irrational also helps.
Interpreting miserable bastards punching Skinner boxes for what little dopamine fix they can get as “well they’re just doing what their revealed preferences show makes them happy” is evil robot thinking. At best it tricks you into declaring local maxima to be the most desired outcome
The author pays lip service to this and just assumes the numbers would be small. Senior citizens in the US (googling) pay 4-5,000 out of pocket a year for health care, that is with medicare+medicaid paying large chunks. Strip out government programs to pay for UBI and a 10 grand payment won’t be nearly enough, nor will a 20k, or a 30k. That is ~15% of the population right there who will be demanding UBI + national health care since obviously we are rich enough and promising a UBI defacto declares that the government is both capable and responsible for providing a basic living.
I think there’s some space between ‘rising tide has lifted all boats out of poverty’ and ‘1% owns literally everything’. Consider “top 10% opens half of everything (including human capital), top 30% owns practically everything, top 60% owns literally everything, bottom 40% is unemployable.’ Objection 1 definitely doesn’t apply here, and I don’t think it’s obvious that objection 2 does either.
(#3 remains a hard problem)
Its practically impossible to make the math work out if 40% of the population is unemployable.
Lets say that currently 5% of the working age population is unemployable and that 1/3rd of the population is to young/old otherwise so that ~36% of the population is currently being supported by 62% of the population. Now strip out 40% of the working age population, and keep 33% to old/young. Now 60% of the population is being supported by 40% of the population, to get a 3X per capita increase in wealth which is what he needs you need 4.5-5X increase in productivity. That would be as large or larger than the productivity increase from 1950 to 2018, so what he is doing is simultaneously trying to make his position sound reasonable (all we need to do is go back to 2.5% growth) while predicting a simultaneous explosion in wealth as big as any the world has ever seen coupled with a collapse of living standards for the bottom half (Absent government intervention).
He is basically predicting a combination of things that has never been seen before, and this vision is hard to reconcile in other ways. Wealth wise the top has much more, but consumption wise the gap is much smaller. If the bottom X (insert significant percentage here) is unable to produce under capitalism then who is buying all the goods that will cause GDP to triple in 45 years? The marginal propensity to consume for the wealthy is much lower than for the poor, and GDP is a measure of the final sale of goods and services (supposedly).
This is Marxism without ignorance of the following 150 years as an excuse, the future will violate current laws of economics because *waves hand* but I have this simple solution that totally ignores other laws of economics because *waves hand* and I am going to describe to you how it will be if you don’t listen to me and how it would be if you do despite no one ever being able to predict better than taking the last X years and just projecting forward another Y, because *waves hand*.
In a perfectly equal society where everyone gets the same salary at 18, gets the same raise every year, saves the same percentage of their income, gets the same rate of return, and dies at the same time, the richest 1/5 end up controlling 60% of the wealth just through cohort effects. We should always expect a minority to own most of the stuff for no other reason than stuff accumulates over time.
Let’s assume that automation leaves the vast majority of people unemployable, and doesn’t create an abundance of new jobs like previous technological booms. (I’m not saying I believe that will happen, but let’s just go along with the hypothetical for the sake of argument.) Even if production ramps up to the point where all consumer goods become incredibly cheap and plentiful, people will still need to get money from somewhere; the price of goods will never drop down to literally zero. Without a UBI or some sort of welfare program for the unemployed (who now comprise 90-99% of the population), where will they get that money from?
The whole point of UBI is to keep people from starving in the streets. Also, a world where the majority of the populace can’t afford to buy anything wouldn’t be ideal for the capitalists either; they’d find their consumer base had shrunk down to an unsustainably low level, even if they raised prices to the absolute minimum required for them to make a profit. At some point, they’d all end up going out of business and capitalism would implode, provided the masses didn’t rise up and overthrow the capitalist system first. So it would be in their own long-term interests to support a UBI, even if it meant paying considerably more in taxes.
No one claimed that UBI would bring about perfectly economic equality. In fact, most actual socialists and communists oppose UBI for exactly that reason. But the combination of UBI and massive technologically-driven GDP growth would ensure that even the poorest citizens are still living decent lives by modern standards.
If the people don’t have any money why are we ramping up production? Production without expected consumption doesn’t happen outside of communist countries. Assuming that automation is producing everything and no one is working is just assuming your future, not actually explaining how it could happen.
No, it that were the point UBI proponents would be saying we could do it for $2-3,000 a person in the US. People are talking $10,000 a person, and this author is imagining a world where people are getting 30,000. Average SS payments in the US are around 17k, and it is often decried as not enough for some people and that is with extra benefits on top.
This isn’t about perfect equality, it is about costs. You can’t give everyone decent living standards by targeting the average because you leave out all the people who aren’t average in some way.
Only if you assume your conclusions, how do we get massive GDP growth with massive UE again? What is the actual model, and ‘automation makes things cheap+people get fired because automation is cheap’ doesn’t work.
Again, I’m going along with the author’s assumptions here. If you’re saying “these predictions make no sense and could never happen,” then that’s a perfectly fair argument, but you’re not really engaging with his premise.
In terms of my personal opinions, I’m really not sure how things will play out. I don’t think the author’s predicted future is an inevitability like he does, but nor do I think it’s an impossibility like you do. I think it’s something that could potentially happen, and I’m genuinely curious what people think should be done if it does.
I am engaging with what his assumptions require, saying that we need 2.5% growth has a very different implication when you add in that we are also dropping 40% of the workforce. He doesn’t combine his assumptions into a model, he makes the case for one assumption (we had 2.5% growth for the past 45 years, why not for the next 45 years) completely separate from the other assumption (we are going to lose 40% of the workforce). I view this as a bait and switch, first he is trying to make one assumption reasonable by comparing it to the recent past while ignoring that his other assumptions state that the near future will be nothing like the recent past.
I get your point, and I can see why you’d view it as a bait-and-switch, but I don’t think his assumptions are entirely unreasonable or self-contradictory. It seems like you’re imagining a sudden 40% drop in employment rates all at once. If that happened, then yes, obviously it create an enormous shockwave that would dramatically shake up the entire economy. But let’s say automation causes a 1% drop in employment rates each year over the next 40 years. If that happens, then I’d imagine the economy would remain fairly stable for at least the first decade, so we could reliably count on growth rates remaining steady for the first quarter of the period he describes.
@ LadyJane
For the actual pathway the distinctions matter, but for the final result (we need 45 years of 2.5% growth) both are the same. You need more per worker growth if workers are dropping out regardless of if they are dropping out all at once or piecemeal to hit the target. One may be more realistic than the other path wise, but what he is actually guessing will happen requires much higher real productivity growth than occurred over the past 50 years.
This is also probably biased in his favor since over the past 50ish years labor forces have generally grown in both absolute and % terms from pre 1970 levels, and that growth is partially responsible for the GDP growth, so he is in effect saying that we can get the same growth as we had during an employment boom with an employment decrease but ignoring that contradiction.
“However, if we can get back to an average 2.5% growth per year in real terms, and surely we can, it would only take 45 years to get there.”
There’s the problem. “Economic growth” is not a natural, inevitable phenomenon. For most of human history it was close to 0. Perhaps phrasing it in terms of “if we can make the average worker three times more productive over the course of 45 years,” will drive home the point.
Or if we can replace all of those average workers with machines which are vastly more productive, which seems likely. Even if machines are ultimately only as good as humans per hour, they can be worked under conditions that would be unacceptable for human workers and over time frames that are unacceptable, with only maintenance breaks. One of the fundamental problems of economics is that workers and consumers are the same people and so if you try to make workers more productive whatever you add without substitution with technology tends to take from these same people in their role as consumers. Machines change that because they take us back to the super-exploitation of a pure slave economy, but without any of the ethical or biological limitations. Machines are the perfect slaves.
Look at modern meager attempts to implement high levels of automation, and you can see the trend. I see UBI as being not just affordable in the future but fairly considerable, at least until we hit up against fundamental resource constraints, but in many ways our entire future is a race between downwards pointing indicators and upwards pointing indicators.
We’ve all read stories that take an interesting idea or two and really explore it. We’ve also read stories that throw ten or fifteen at the reader instead. What are the most idea-packed ones you’ve ever read? Do you like these best, or do you think it’s better when, say, relatively few ideas are explored more exhaustively?
One that springs to mind is The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. For a standalone novel, it contains a pretty bewildering variety of novel ideas. Another one that might fit the bill would be Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. Both are space operas, which is probably not a coincidence – it’s a genre that lends itself to throwing a bunch of new ideas and concepts at the reader (perhaps so quickly that you don’t notice the ones that don’t survive deep analysis).
Neal Stephenson comes to mind, specifically Anathem and The Baroque Cycle. Both are among my favourite fiction books that I’ve read in the past decade, so there’s that.
I don’t think either of your options is necessarily better, just that they have distinct pros and cons. For instance, Stephenson-like prose can sometimes devolve into what are essentially just lists, which isn’t necessarily a bit thing – some of his lists are pretty golden, and to take a radically different author, Henry Miller had some of the best lists. But then something much more focussed and sustained can be just as appealing. (Off the top of my head, I think the more exhaustive exploration style of writing tends to be more emotional/internal than do novels of ideas.)
Anathem might count, but The Baroque Cycle is probably the least idea-dense Stephenson book, except perhaps REAMDE. Mostly because it’s such a brick: the ideas are there but they’re not as dense as his more aggressively edited stuff.
That’s a good one, but perhaps it illustrates a difficulty with this kind of project. I feel like the Baroque Cycle deals with a lot of ideas, but separately, rather than looking at how they intersect. Here’s a section on crytography. Here’s a section on the origins of the stock market. Here’s a bit on the Royal society inventing a microscope. Here’s what the politics were of the 1750s. Etc.
That’s not saying the book is bad, by any means, and a historical book full of setting detail will by necessity have a lot of that.
But when I think of ‘works dealing with a lot of ideas’ I’m going to want a plot that interweaves them all. Because of A and B and C, then D. Rather then A, and now B, and now C, just because.
For an example, that may not work because I don’t remember it well, but Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain series deals with the ramifications of genetic engineering. The population so altered no longer requires sleep, which gives them advantages they leverage to gain political power, which makes the ruminations on democracy relevant, and … well whatever else happened, I don’t recall.
Charles Stross’s Accelerando is up there — it benefits greatly from reading it with a Wikipedia tab open.
Accelerando‘s a great example, if my memory serves.
Unsong is probably one of the most idea-packed works of fiction I’ve ever read, and that is part of what I love about it. Not sure if one way is better necessarily, but a ton of different ideas that fit together well is the ideal to me.
Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series is up there for me. Any one out of the ambiguously utopian future setting; the specific ancapish mechanics behind it; the magical realism element; the Enlightenment philosophy going down a different path part; and each of the moral questions addressed could easily be the basis for a book by itself. On a more concrete level, most of the hives would be interesting standalone settings, and there are like 10 of them.
Yep, it’s hard to beat this series for idea density. Also they’re just really good.
@Nick,
For “ideas” fiction many of the works of Larry Niven come to mind.
_A Deepness in the Sky_ is one of my favorite books of all time. It is very densely packed with ideas about the universe and society and technology. It’s also rather aggressively hard science-fiction–I’m not sure how readable it would be without having read some other hard SF. (Ramscoops, interstellar trade networks, radio communications, endless cycles of expansion and collapse of societies, coldsleep, centuries of old (buggy, poorly-understood) software libraries, steganography, autism as a computing strategy, etc.).
Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams. It’s an anthology, but all the stories are connected.
My favorite book, Spin State, and its two sequels, especially Spin Control do a fantastic job of exploring a variety of hard SF concepts while still relating them to the narrative in a coherent way. It sat on my shelf for a few years since it was dense and intimidating and I was 15, but it definitely fits this category.
Well, to be a bit arrogant, my two novels, The Powers of the Earth https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JPPMS6 and Causes of Separation https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B5283G2/ref=series_rw_dp_sw , which won the Prometheus Award in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
My aim was to make each book at least as idea-packed as a Neal Stephenson novel, so if you like Heinlein and Stephenson, you may like them, and if not, not. For an overview, John Ratburger of Autodesk fame wrote a review here https://www.ratburger.org/index.php/tag/the-powers-of-the-earth/ .
(not a drive-by commenter spamming; I’ve been reading SSC since long before it moved to this domain name).
Unsurprisingly, people rate their romantic partners as higher in attractiveness, kindness and status than the general population do. But interestingly, this inflation is uniform; if the general population ranks my partner as having status > attractiveness > kindness then I will too.
This reminds me, a bit perhaps, of a trick I use with my writer’s group.
One of the most valuable pieces of info you can get in a critique is simply how good a story is, so you know if you should keep working on it or give up. But people are understandably hesitant to be frank with you about your failures. Even an honest, good-natured person can’t help but be more positively inclined to a yes-man than the bearer of bad news.
My trick is to solicit readers to rank stories in order of best to worst. I get all the information I need about successes vs failures, but simultaneously, since a ranked list says nothing about objective quality, no-one’s ego is on the line: I can tell myself that every one of them is great, and some are just better than others.
Just watch out for them groaning when you assign them six stories to read and rank. 😉
Yeah, it takes a while before this kicks in as a viable strategy.
How many of you have actively solicited the judgment of your friends regarding romantic partners? Of those of you who have, how many have ended a relationship (at least in part) based on that assessment?
It’s a cliche that people tend to ignore friends’ warnings about romantic partners. I’m wondering how true to life that is. I know that “seeking assessments of romantic partners from trusted friends” is something I’ve done, and not because I was feeling uncomfortable or unhappy in the relationship – I just wanted to make sure that the person I was with wasn’t giving off any bad vibes I couldn’t see from the inside (she wasn’t).
I haven’t ever solicited advice, but I certainly have received unsolicited advice from friends that in hindsight I should have paid more attention to.
When someone who normally doesn’t give advice speaks up you should listen!
Go back in time and tell my 21 year old self that! I mean, no lasting damage or anything, they were just ultimately correct haha.
@Hoopyfreud,
don’t remember asking “What do you think of her?” anytime after I was a teenager (and not much then!), but I’ve been with my wife since ‘ 92 when I was in my mid 20’s.
My friends have generally been too polite to say anything negative while we are together. More generally, have external feedback on relationships can be really important, as it can be difficult to assess unhealthy behaviour from the inside.
I have actively solicited freinds judgment. I began a relationship based on their judgment.
Not friends, but I did break up with my first girlfriend because my dad told me to, and sought his advice about whether to marry my current wife.
He was right both times.
I’ve been on the other end of that equation, having a younger female friend ask me (and a couple of other friends) to vet potential boyfriends on the grounds that she was estranged from her parents but felt she needed that perspective. Never had to say “this is not the man for you”, but the two guys who bailed on dinner when they realized we would be collectively playing the “judgemental father” role were never heard from again.
I believe she’s happily married now, so that seems to have worked.
I find that sort of apology is very low cost for me, and I’m wondering whether it’s a gender thing.
I even apologize if someone bumps into me, and it seems weird but I’m not upset by it. The underlying reflex seems to be that an apology ought to happen and if the other person doesn’t supply it, I do.
Wow. That’s really weird. I mean, I’m not trying to call you a weirdo here, it’s just totally alien to my experience.
I don’t even think of it as an admission of moral culpability in this case. It was an accident, accidents happen, but they don’t make you a bad person unless they’re happening so often to imply negligence on your part. Your “I’m sorry” is just there to clarify that it was an accident and smooth any ruffled feathers.
It happens to use the same language that you’d use when you are culpable, but that’s more or less coincidental.
On the Eastern coast of the Black Sea (Samegrelo, Georgia), what’s the highest Caucasian mountain you can see? Trying to figure out where Prometheus was bound. 🙂
During the day or by torchlight?
During the day, when you can see further…
Does it say somewhere that he was chained to the highest? Or is that just a solid place to start?
Count me on as very invested in the results of this investigation.
Just a solid place to start. It was just called “Mount Caucasus”, and Strabo states, for instance:
So you’re looking for prominent Caucasians?
According to the list on Wikipedia, the tallest mountain in the range (Elbrus) is also the most prominent. It’s also more westerly than the others in the top 5. I don’t know if it’s line-of-sight to the place you mention, though?
Mt. Elbrus… Where do I recognize that name from?
Oh right:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth
All along we were one step behind the master.
Doesn’t seem like that would be visible from anywhere on the coast of the Black Sea. It’s a little closer to the other side of the Caucasus range.
It’s only 66 miles from the closest point on the sea. The real problem is that there’s a 9000′ mountain directly in the way that’s only 23 miles from the coast.
Yes, I was more thinking about the other mountains in between being in the way than about the mere distance.
What’s the name of the 9000′ mountain blocking the view from the Black Sea?
Google Earth wasn’t naming names, but one of the photos I found there identified it as part of the Kodory Range, which runs right along the 43rd parallel about 20 miles south of the main Caucasus divide, between 41.6 and 42.0E.
What’s a decent rule of thumb for separating the actually poor from those who don’t have a lot of money but aren’t actually poor?
I expect this is going to be subjective, but I’d be interested to hear what standards people use. I started thinking about this because John Scalzi sometimes goes on about how he grew up poor, but everything I’ve heard sounds more like a working class childhood.
By my standards, you are poor if you can’t afford a proper place to live, meaning a house or apartment. If you live in a car or a tent or on a tarp on the street, you’re poor. You are poor if you as an adult can’t afford a car. If you can’t afford to own even a cheap old beater, so the best you can do is a bus pass, you’re poor. You are poor if you go hungry involuntarily. You are also poor if you can’t afford basic utilities: water, power, heat, and phone service. I’d be willing to call you poor if keeping up with utility payments is a constant fight, particularly if you’ve ever been cut off for non-payment.
I’d put a lot of qualifiers on that. In NYC, London, not to mention Singapore or Shanghai, you need to be quite wealthy to afford a car. If a person living in the countryside cannot afford a car, that’s true.
The cost of a car is much higher than the cost of buying a car + insurance in cities like London, where you need to buy a parking space, pay for parking, and all the zone entries. Using a combination of busses, trains and Uber is much cheaper.
I would be unable to own a car in London, and I don’t think I’m poor. Just low earnings (I’m a PhD student).
From my childhood with single mother and 2 kids, the things that made us feel poor:
– no car (luckily, that wasn’t much of a practical hardship)
– no money for proper repairs to the house and furniture, lots of make-do and duct tape fixes and ‘hope this holds’
– wearing almost entirely hand-me-down clothes
– eating only cheap food towards the end of the month (not that we ate sumptuously the rest of the time, but from ‘at least some meat’ to ‘pancakes 4 times a week’)
– no or only the cheapest extracurriculars
– extreme budgeting for vacations
– mom’s extremely highly developed talent for finding free things to do for fun and cultural education
– and, despite all that, a fragile situation with constant stress about making ends meet
Still, always had enough to eat, never had the power cut off, always able to go to school, was never even required to pick up a job to help cover family finances.
Maybe that’s just a working-class childhood, but no reason why that could not also be poverty. As I recall, Scalzi also grew up with a single mom? That makes financial situations much more precarious, with the single adult being the single point of failure and likely without enough support. A couple can more easily deal with worries without leaking to the kids.
Rule of thumb is tricky, though.
Would you care to expand on the free things to do for fun?
Why that was a result of being poor or why that made us feel poor?
First off, of course, having a mom with very creative ideas is pretty awesome. We hosted dance troupes from far-flung countries one week per year for a few years, because that way we got free dance festival tickets at the cost of a couple of spare mattresses and some extra food. We got a big pile of wood and a pot of nails that she got for free somewhere and made endless projects out of them. (Of course, half the boards had something wrong with them and we had to make sure to first remove the old, bent nails, but we didn’t care.) She always knew when the local museums gave away tickets. She volunteered for more things than I can count to get reduced or free tickets, like being den mother/cook/attendant at camps so my brother and I could go.
In fact, today, those things are all hailed as markers of excellent childhood development – no expensive, fancy single-purpose plastic toys but just lots of experiences and stuff like old scrap and cloth to build and be creative with. And if she’d just leaned into it and had been able to confidently declare ‘this is how I do parenting’, it’d been completely awesome. (Most kids from our neighbourhood loved to play over at my place because of the opportunities to do random projects.)
Still, she provided all those things with the very tangible fear and guilt that she was letting us down and only ever able to provide second-best. That may also be the difference between a ‘real’ working-class childhood and mine. My dad had a university degree and got a PhD later in life (we just didn’t live with him and didn’t really benefit from his good financial situation) and my mom also had some university and got a MSc later in life, so she valued stuff like theatre and museums and music lessons and continuously felt awful that we had to do it the ‘wrong’ way or miss out altogether. Brother and I also tested as gifted early on, so it was extra important to her to feed those brains with a varied diet of ideas and opportunities.
There’s a difference between doing these things because you want to and think it’s a good idea or because you feel it’s the only way to not fail as badly.
Thank you– I was just interested in free/cheap ways of having fun.
I didn’t think about a possible connection to feeling poor.
@johan_larson says:
There’s “broke” and then there’s “poor”.
‘Broke’ is a temporary condition, ‘poor’ likely isn’t.
“Broke” may be in school, grew up ‘middle-class’ or above, but doesn’t have much money right now.
“Poor” likely never had much money, and doesn’t really know how tomorrow collect some other than theft or blind luck, usually grew up poor as well.
Some peers off mine growing up (that I just mentioned in another post) come to mind, one had a black mother who’s biological Dad was white, and left soon after he was born, and his Mom became a drug addict when he was a teen so he moved in with me until he was old enough to join the Mariner Corps, if he had stayed with his Mom and tried to support her as “the man of the house” he’d likely have been poor and stayed poor (I hope he had good luck with the Marines, I don’t really know his fate), another friend had many multiple brothers, half brothers, and a half sister, and while some of his half-siblings could stay with their Dad’s sometimes, his Dad was long gone, but he was smart, and more importantly his Mom’s brother was well-off and encouraging and was a role-model, and he became a research scientist like his uncle, another come from a fairly well-off, but large family, her Mom was a housewife, and her Dad was an English professor, and she was ambitious but with many siblings who also needed support she didn’t have much spending money, but she was sent to Catholic schools and college, and is now an academic.
Temporary vs. Permanent.
BTW, studies have been done and when public assistance helps poor adults move to better neighborhoods they tend to become…
…poor adults in better neighborhoods, the same with the poor adults older children but the children of those poor adults who are moved to better neighborhoods when they’re still infants or toddlers are less likely to stay in poverty as adults.
One might consider if Dickens’s rule (the Micawber principle) applies.
(Fortunately even the UK has decimal currency nowadays.)
It’s easy to find a person who “can’t afford” a car with plenty of other unnecessary expenses (from avocado toast to heroin). I don’t know about Scalzi, but there’s kind of a platonic ideal of “struggling” characterized by at least one parent working full time (sometimes with an extra job), the other taking care of the kids (and probably working part time), with one old car (always on the verge of breakdown), and meeting expenses with just enough left over that the next inevitable unplanned expense or drop in income usually brings them to zero rather than wiping them out.
There’s also the cautionary example (which exists in real life) of the family where one or both parents work high-pressure-high-paying jobs, live in a mansion mortgaged to the hilt, travel often to exotic locations, drive twin leased Mercedes, and do a lot of cocaine (powder, of course). Eventually either there’s a loss of income or their overspending catches up to them (despite high income they spend more than they earn), and drop all the way to the bottom (with a divorce, often enough. Sometimes jail time if one or the other tries to embezzle their way out)
The rule would argue that both these families are poor. This doesn’t fit with intuition. Intuition says the struggling family is poor and the overextended one is not. But intuition isn’t consistent; we still call people “poor” when their slightly immoderate lifestyles are too much for their moderate income. So, this post has been a long way of saying “I dunno, but I don’t think your rule works”.
You can be poor without being an irresponsible moron. But if you’re an irresponsible moron you’ll feel poor no matter how much you make. In most contexts it’s important to distinguish between the two groups. I don’t see what is gained by categorizing high-income irresponsible morons as “poor” other than enabling moronic irresponsibility
@johan_larson
I think that you are poor if you can’t afford relatively basic things. If you can’t afford the things that the median household can afford, but can afford the basic things, I’d call that living in frugality, not in poverty.
“Can afford” isn’t quite the right way of putting it, though. There are families that are running out of food at the end of every month but won’t cancel their TV package. If they lived frugally they could nearly always afford the basic things, but since they don’t, they can’t.
‘Basic things’ seems to inflate over time. In my country, the expected expenses of those living on welfare is tracked to see if people on welfare get enough money. The expected expenses includes a lot more than just food and housing nowadays.
It’s also location-dependent. In some places a car is a huge luxury even for the rich and public transport is quite good. In other places, you can’t realistically get to the shops or to work without access to a car.
I don’t think that people who severely mismanage their finances are poor, but I also don’t think that poverty requires the ascetic spending pattern of a self-flagellating monk, who takes pride in evading all forms of pleasure.
Man this is a tough one.
My dad grew up poor by most people’s standards, a single mother who was a school teacher who had bouts of not being able to care for him or his brother. His early education was funded charitably (iirc) and at 6 years old he went to said boarding school, alone, on a train, across an international border. He smoked at a young age (12) by picking up loose tobacco on his uncle’s farm and rolling it in newspaper.
However most of the people who currently live in the country he grew up in are significantly poorer now than he was then, as in ‘don’t have their own national currency’ poor.
Poor is normally defined as lack of money.
It seems like what you’re actually going after are class differences?
Like the difference between a mid-upper class college student with no income or assets (but who is supported by their family) vs a homeless person or a worker who lives paycheck to paycheck?
Pretty much no one has no money at all and nearly everyone has less money than they could spend, so ‘lack of money’ doesn’t seem like a workable definition.
By my standards, if you don’t have enough money or assets to be able to keep a roof over your head or hunger out of your belly if you’re out of work for a month, you’re broke.
If you don’t have a way to stop being broke, you’re poor.
Which definitions include/exclude Google workers who live in their car because they can’t afford Bay Area prices?
In my little corner of the English speaking world, that distinction doesn’t make sense. Poor means not having a lot of money 😉 I think you are trying to make a distinction between some level of significant deprivation and simply not being rich.
Reinterpreted that way, I’d agree with most of this, except the bit about the car. I’d add not being able to afford medical services, or having paying medical bills be a struggle. I’d also add a bit more nuance to “proper place to live” – if the roof leaks/the place is a fire trap/the neighbourhood is seriously dangerous and you can’t afford to do anything about it, you count with me as deprived, even with 4 walls and a roof. Ditto if there are rats biting children etc..
I’ve no socially acceptable place else to discuss and vent/confess this in all but a very shallow and flippant way that comes to mind, so I’ll spill my guts here, I did a websearch of my best friend from elementary school who was my second D&D DM (his eldest brother was my first DM) who I met back in the ’70’s, and he’s dead now I saw his obituary, he had beautiful second wife and kids whom I never met (I was at his wedding with his first wife, who later cheated on him and they divorced) he became a scientist (he seemed far more imaginative than me in our youth and I guess was smarter as well), moved to Santa Cruz, and died of cancer not too long ago.
I looked up my other friend from the same time who who’s mom became a junkie when we were teenagers and he moved into my Mom’s house so I moved into my Dad’s house because it was too crowded, when he turned 18 he joined the Marines, and I was a little glad to see him get out of town, but I couldn’t find any trace of him on-line so his fate remains unknown to me, and then I made a mistake that kept me from sleeping last night/this morning, I looked up the girl that came with me to my best friends wedding when I think I was 21 or 22 and she was 18 or 19, but we met when we were both still teenagers, and I fell for her hard (as only teenagers can) she lost interest in me (as most women do their men, but luckily for us older women resign themselves to staying with us sometimes) and I never fell as hard for another girl of women again including my beautiful wife who I met when I was 23 and have been with since I was 24.
For the second to last sort of “date” I had with the girl I’ll call “K” (when we were at the “just being friends” stage) she called me to invite me to a house party concert, and then when I called her back she was very angry with me because I called her by her childhood name and not the new name she had chosen for herself, and I decided then that further friendship wasn’t much worthwhile, though I saw her a few times afterwards, once when I was on a motorcycle that I was proud of and I saw her and said hello, once on an actual dinner for the two of us at a fancy restaurant (which we never did when we were actually boyfriend and girlfriend, mostly we just rode on my motorscooter) that she indulged my whim to try to LARP a “date” despite usually being too poor for such things;, and the last time I was at a bookstore that I was at with my future wife for a reading she wanted to attend, and I got in line to buy a book the cashier said my name (twice!) until I realized that the cashier was “K”, who said to me: “I thought you were moving to Seattle” and I replied: “I was there for months, but it was just too dark”, and I haven’t spoken to her again for decades, and I assumed that she moved out of town like most of the friends I had in my youth.
Well…
… “K” did go to college out of town, but she came back and has been teaching at a nearby university (the University!) for many years, and the reason she was easier to find out about on-line than my other old friends was she’s had five books published and a lot of articles on-line (some at websites and publications that I’ve read sometimes like Slate, and Foreign Policy, making me feel like a dunce that I never noticed her by-line.
In many way my wife was like “K” when we met, my future wife was a student at the University law school, had ambitions to be a musician and a writer, was more educated than me and had impressive books – and she met me, dropped out, never got published, the drummer left our “band”, she stayed in an apartment with me that had a leaking roof for 17 years, and for a year with me from jobsite to jobsite sleeping in a truck with a camper, we buried one son who didn’t live a year, had two other sons, and finally bought a house in 2011 when we were both in our 40’s.
“K” instead married a drummer, became an academic and a prolific writer, and (this will interest you @Deiseach) became both very “woke” and returned to Catholicism and has written a lot on faith and politics (including many essays for a Jesuit publication), no children, but much prestige, got hate mail after Fox News criticized her, et cetera – yes it’s been a long night of reading!
Reading first my old best friend’s accomplishments, and then my old girlfriend’s accomplishments has made me feel pretty insignificant, but more than that it’s made me feel that my wife could’ve done so much more without me, because I really did have a “type”: long dark hair, middle-class background, and my educationak and intellectual superior, and yes future Mrs. Plumber reminded me of “K”, and given what “K” accomplished and Mrs Plumber had ambitions to, I’m feeling like a bad influence and an anchor right now.
For what it’s worth, my wife is the only one of her college friends who doesn’t have a full-time job because she stays home to take care of our four kids. She’s also by far the happiest of them.
Odds are good your wife prefers being your wife and mother to your kids over lots of prestige. Reading about your old girlfriend made me think the opposite. She seems like she missed out on a great family life for prestige.
+1. If you’ve “only” helped your wife raise two children in a happy family, that’s a much bigger deal than you’re giving yourself credit for, and it has probably made her happier than a prestigious intellectual career would have. She did, after all, choose you, and I’m told she’s pretty smart.
Likewise. I’m going to be unchivalrous and conclude that my wife probably wouldn’t be a world class leader or scholar without me, but she likely could have found her way to greater material or social success either personally or through a different spouse. But the number of her friends with a crazy ex, or a husband who makes their life miserable, or a boyfriend who won’t marry them, indicates that she could have done way worse on a metric that’s equally or more important.
It’s cliche and facile to say money can’t buy happiness, but it’s true that there are a lot of rich people who are miserable despite it for personal reasons that we’ve to date avoided. Domestic tranquility is worth a lot in a life.
Now, I wonder if there is some connection here. My wife and I are disciplined, but we aren’t terribly ambitious; you (@Plumber) strike me as similar. Someone who is relatively very successful needs a strong drive for it (or perhaps a stupid amount of luck), and that ambition may carry over to other aspects of their lives–dissatisfaction with their “average” but compatible spouse, for instance.
I dare you to walk up to your wife and ask her if she would trade her two sons for being a published author.
@baconbits9,
I’m far too cowardly to risk that, though I did risk asking tonight if she regretted being “stuck with me instead of a published author”, and she answered “of course, but it wouldn’t have been a guarantee”, and she cited our former next door neighbor who had one hit book, but no more and is now on smaller financial ground and had to move back to so cal.
Most books result in an income that is lower than minimum wage, if you count the hours worked. If you want to be an author and have a decent income, this typically requires either having writing as a hobby or to write books as part of a larger money-making scheme (like professors writing books and forcing their students to buy them at premium prices).
@Plumber
K’s husband wouldn’t have married your wife if you wouldn’t be around (or if she had, wouldn’t have married K), so you can’t assume that without you, she would have married someone like K’s husband. Perhaps she would have married an abuser or someone similarly bad.
A husband is also merely one influence and K is not equal to your wife, even if they have some similarities.
So there is no reason to believe that without you, your wife would have ended up like K.
Also, as EchoChaos notes, achievement is not the same as happiness. Are you familiar with Simon & Garfunkel’s song Richard Corey? What our culture tells people should make them happy, doesn’t necessarily do. I would especially be wary to assume that a culture warrior, like K seems to have become, is happy. War is hell.
Is it possible your wife would like more free time to work on something she’s interested in? Would you be able to help with that?
@Nancy Lebovitz,
Now just more rest I imagine, so I suppose less of my dawdling after work hoping for lighter traffic and to use the restroom.
Honestly, other than the tragedy of losing a son, it seems like a wonderful life.
I don’t think it’s possible to “have it all” where “having it all” involves a great career, multiple kids, and actually spending lots of time with your kids, without burning out with stress. And having that sort of career and dealing with the tragedy of losing a son would be very, very hard.
And as for the house quite late, considering price houses in California, even UC professors will probably have a hard time.
Also, you shouldn’t go looking up exes. It’s not good for you.
It seems like you have a lot of status concerns a lot of the time but I for one don’t get it. Maybe I’m different from society at large but to me it seems like you have a deeply respectable and quintessentially non-Bullshit Job (I’m frankly kind of jealous because I have a total Bullshit Job.) Meanwhile, I know a couple people who get op-ed pieces published once in a while. I’m not impressed and I don’t get the sense they are, either.
That’s a hard one. Life involves making choices; to gain one thing, people often have to give up even trying for something else. Sometimes they know it at the time; sometimes they only figure it out decades later. And these choices are often made in part because of other people’s influence.
My sister might have done a lot better if she hadn’t married the man she did, when she did. And she certainly has some regrets, and frustrations she vents about to me, and probably even more to my other sister. OTOH, she could have done a lot worse too, and her goal was never material success. I think overall she’s happy with the life she made, and probably wouldn’t change it significantly if she could go back in time to give her younger self advice. (At least, not that part of it.) But if my brother in law were less self centered than he appears to be, he could easily be concerned about his impact on her life.
I doubt that your wife believes she made a bad decision, or that you’ve been a drag anchor for her. She didn’t pick you randomly – and note also that she’s stayed with you. Raising children has costs as well as benefits, and while I suspect everyone underestimates the lifestyle/energy costs before they have children, it’s still a decision made knowing that there are costs. Ditto with getting married in the first place.
Note also that she could have wound up like another friend of mine – doctorate, but never got tenure. Moved down the employment scale over time. Never married. Doesn’t regret her life, but objectively a lot worse than your wife’s. And probably smarter than either you or your wife – she’s smarter than anyone else I know, including me.
Consider the possibility that your wife would have turned her intellect and ambition to evil, become a criminal mastermind, orchestrated a military coup in Iceland and briefly instituted a reign of terror as she ruled with an iron fist before being overthrown by a multi-national military coalition.
Instead she’s had a happy life, a couple of kids, and Iceland remains relatively pleasant and prosperous, all because she met you.
@Phigment,
Admittedly the thought that without my influence my wife may hsve become a tyrant of Iceland, failed to cross my minf, but it’s a pretty amusing one!
I’m not going to reflexively suggest that your wife is living her best life. It does sound like she has a good one and you two have done well for each other, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have frustrated ambitions or couldn’t have had a better one. Instead, I’m going to try to convince you that that doesn’t matter.
You don’t know what could have been. Neither does she. For all you know, your presence in her life meant she wasn’t hit by a car, or that she didn’t win the lottery. Or it means that she will tomorrow. You can look at her peers, or at her demographic, or at her personal history to try to get a glimpse of what could have been, but all that is is over-fitting. Nothing is guaranteed. All we really have are the choices we make and the accidents that happen to us.
You can argue that being with you has denied her opportunities she would otherwise have had. That that’s made her choose between a rock and a hard place too many times, and that regardless of “what actually would have happened,” she’s worse off now. Well, the way I see it, she went in with her eyes open. She chose you. And then she stayed through all the hard times. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that she loves you, Plumber, and that I think that matters a lot. I think it matters a whole lot more than whatever it is you think you’ve done for or to her. You don’t get to disagree.
And you know, even if she does, that’s not up to her either. She’s done what she wanted with her life, and there’s no way for her to take it back. All she can do is go forward. If she actually has frustrated ambitions that still gnaw at her, there are things she can do to try to attain them. But she doesn’t get to blame you. As long as you haven’t lied or cheated or stolen from her, she has no cause for it. It was all her choice.
Talk to your wife, Plumber. Ask her if there are things she wishes she could do. Tell her you’ll help if you can. Be her teammate and her friend. You can’t afford to be afraid or ashamed; she deserves better. Not because you’ve taken something away from her, but because she loves you, and you’ve accepted her love.
There’s two types of people in this situation, Plumber. One looks at the other woman and thinks, “Wow, look who my wife could have been!”
The other looks at the other woman and things, “Wow, look who my wife could have been!”
You certainly had the humbler of the two responses. Your wife is well off for having you.
Thanks for sharing.
For what it’s worth, my wife worries from time to time that being married to her and relatively heavily involved in raising our kids has held me back relative to the success of some of my classmates and friends, but (a) I’m not sure she’s right, (b) this was the life I chose and (c) it makes me very happy.
I wouldn’t mention the ex-girlfriend, but if you find a good non-confrontational way to do it, can you ask Mrs. Plumber? If she has some frustrated ambitions, maybe you can help her, and if she’s happy where she is, she can tell you.
You have mentioned multiple times before that, rough your words, your roots as a working class kid consigned to working class schooling has made you feel both self-conscious of your status and robbed of the education you dearly would have loved to have. This seems to me to be roughly two sides of the same coin, and this is just that self-conscious face having flipped up.
As I said before, don’t compare yourself to others. Everyone has their own path to walk.
Let me relay one of my own personal bugbears, and perhaps that will make you feel some solace.
My family tree is basically working class from the grandparents back. One grandfather ran a gas station, the other did a little of everything: infantry, border patrol, carpentry, … preschool teacher. My father, while a University professor, is the kind of person who dug his own French drain system at our house, made many pieces of our furniture, etc.
I went to college, I have a CS degree.
The fact that I don’t trust myself to do plumbing or carpentry makes me die a little inside every time some fresh new home repair presents itself. I’d rather have a Civic I put an Integra engine in than a Bugatti. I’m not ever likely to do that. And honestly that really should be OK.
Basically what I am saying is that our demons tell us lies and we need to recognize them for the fouls devils they are.
It seemed to me to be like getting a reversed It’s a Wonderful Life vision, and I very much thank you for your kind words @EchoChaos, @John Schilling,.@Randy M, @Aapje, @ana53294, @j1000000, @DinoNerd, @Hoopyfreud,.@J Mann, and @HeelBearCub
Like a fool I read further (sorry @ana53294), and it looks my long lost ex and her husband were getting evicted from their house soon after my wife and I bought ours, plus the life that’s brought “K” fame and/or infamy has also brought herself pain that I don’t think my wife would wish for as she values her privacy too much I think, plus she wanted to write stories not “creative non-fiction”.
One thing the almost accidental research has shown me is that there’s a stronger “culture war” inside Catholicism than I guessed, I had a delusion that following all of the church’s teachings would disqualify one of both the “Right” and the “Left”, and finding a hefty debate instead saddens me some as well,
Huh. Are you a practicing Catholic? If so I would have thought this wouldn’t haven’t slipped past you.
“Cafeteria Catholic” is a phrase that has had quite a bit of salience throughout our lives, but it’s also true this culture war has really amped up since, oh, say the turn of millennium. A fair amount of coverage was devoted to this with the ascendance of this Pope and the last.
When we were young, the Catholic church was the reliably progressive Church in the US. Their position on social welfare was front and center, and their less progressive views on sexuality weren’t (and were less out of step with the country as a whole).
Like most religions in the US, Catholicism has shed members over the years (for a variety of reasons). That has resulted in a sort of evaporative cooling, leaving the over all body more conservative. Support for social welfare and opposition to the death penalty are far less important to emphasize for the current US church than their conservative stances. Look at how the Church weighed in on the debate over passing the ACA. Very little advocacy for ensuring universal healthcare availability, a great deal for making sure that healthcare didn’t include the wrong things.
At least that is my take.
@HeelBearCub,
Your take seems to fit, the post 1999 “culture war” ramp up really seems spot on as well, I had assumed that since my press consumption was greatly curtailed during my apprenticeship and immediatelly subsequently due to long hours, long commute, and parenthood I simply wasn’t used to it and that’s why it seemed so much more now, but hearing from someone who wasn’t “out of it” for 15 of the last 20 years like I was that it really has ramped up is valuable.
Thanks.
As for my religious identity I had one great-grandmother who’s supposed to have been Jewish, but that was unknown to me when I was very young and shr was still alive, the one grandfather that I knew I’d say his religious was effectively the United States of America and patriotism with no other creed (except maybe aviation technology) one of my grandmothers was Lutheran, the other was Catholic and was the only one in my family who was strongly religious, my Dad went to Catholic school and was raised in the church but was a very anti-religion though he sort of still identified as Catholic as among other leanings he was a bkt of an Irish nationalist (despite being born in New Jersey and living his whole life in the U.S.A., my Mom’s religious identity is complex, for lack of a better term I’ll call her “Unitarian”, I’m bassically an atheist but have very warm feelings for St. Ambrose and Newman Hall (two local Catholic churches), but unlike me my wife went to Catholic schools and had negative feelings, so I’m not going without her on Sundays and I”ve been to few services since I’ve known her, and I suppose what affection I have for Catholicism is because of my grandmother and if I could be considered Catholic it’s in the same sense that my stepfather can be considered “Jewish” heritage more than belief, nevertheless the church just being there in existence is somehow valuable to me, if this makes sense finding out that a house you lived in as a child but haven’t seen in years has been torn down is saddening in a way that isn’t rational, I don’t know how else to put it.
That all makes perfect sense.
Twitter thread on intellectual honesty.
It’s interesting to me to ask:
a. What fraction of the ideas expressed by the intellectuals in our society are honestly what they believe, and what fraction are lies or at least shaded to avoid some kind of pushback?
b. What fraction of the claims of fact expressed by respectable information sources are honestly their best picture of reality, and what fraction are lies/spin/shaded to avoid some kind of pushback?
c. How would we know?
It seems to me that if the answers to (a) and (b) aren’t extremely small, they represent ways we are blinding ourselves as a society–making sure that even the people whose job it is to think hard about serious ideas and learn what the world looks like are producing a distorted picture of the world to avoid getting hassled by activists.
You mean the answers to the second half of the ‘or’ questions?
Basically you’re asking how effective is the policing of the overton window. And it’s probably pretty effective. So then the question is how usefully is it positioned.
@albatross11
You could make a forum where people have an average IQ of 195.3 (as self-reported and thus surely completely reliable) and then look at what people say there anonymously.
If only there was such a forum…
😛
That’s the average???
Well, if I self-reported an IQ of, say, six million, that would bring the average up quite a bit.
@J Mann
It was absurdly high, although I forgot the exact number and decided against looking it up. I chose hyperbole over accuracy to make it more obviously satirical.
Which is probably exactly what the people reporting those numbers thought!
Taleb on IQ.
What do you make of this?
I’m pretty sure IQ and SAT select for a sort of ADD, if you happen to have the right sort. Here’s a little problem that you can get right. Before you get too bored, have a different little problem.
It doesn’t select for the ability to follow through on an extended challenge (a personal issue for me) and it doesn’t select for the ability to look for larger context or handle ill-defined problems (Taleb’s main points).
Now that I think about it, I think power relationships are well-defined problems for some people, but they aren’t the kind of well-defined problems you get on IQ tests.
Taleb is probably over-generalizing when he shows such a strong preference for only practical problems. He likes the way his own mind works (to put it mildly), but people who like impractical problems aren’t necessarily incapacitated by it and have done a lot of good in the world.
It’s amazing how much more tolerable Taleb’s insults are when I more or less agree with him.
It was a real shock to me when I heard Taleb on the Econtalk podcast, and realized that he actually had interesting insights and things to say that were worth hearing. His public persona is basically all blowhard and Eulering and insults and intellectual bullying.
I haven’t read the linked piece (I will when I have some time), but everything I’ve seen from him about IQ so far has indicated that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about–I mean, literally, he doesn’t understand the field he’s critiquing, doesn’t understand how the tests are constructed, he makes factually wrong claims about empirical results, etc.
The most important thing to know about IQ tests is that they’re practically useful–knowing someone’s IQ score lets you make good predictions about how they’ll do in school or at work, across a wide range of intellectual demands. (That is, knowing someone’s IQ score lets you make good predictions about how well they’ll do as a janitor, an accountant, or a mathematician.) If your test makes useful predictions about the world, then all the handwaving arguments in the world about how it’s not meaningful because of some complicated reason you claim don’t really do you any good.
I find Taleb to be the most original and insightful person I have ever read, and yet I rarely read him because I know that it requires wading through much to get to. In his case it isn’t just muck around gems either, his gems have muck all the way through them for no apparent reason. In The Black Swan he takes an incredibly important piece of context that effects the entire book and puts it in a foot note (and a footnote in the introduction iirc) without which the rest of the book is fairly mundane. There are days when reading him makes me think he would fail a Turning test, and that is both a compliment and an insult.
Which footnote?
I used the logical metaphor of the black swan (not capitalized) for Black Swan Events (capitalized), but this problem should not be confused with the logical problem raised by many philosophers. This is not so much about exceptions as it is about the oversize role of extreme events in many domains in life. Furthermore, the logical problem is about the possibility of the exception (black swan); mine is about the role of the exceptional event (Black Swan) leading to the degradation of predictability and the need to be robust to negative Black Swans and exposed to positive ones.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto) . Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I am a bit short on time now, but I have to say this: Taleb is a known troll. Yes, he is a smart guy and says a lot of interesting things. But he also exaggerates and talks nonsense for the sake of controversy. He would easily dismiss (and misinterpret) anything he dislikes, and just call everyone opposing him an idiot. Please remember that just because he wrote a clickbait article on Medium, it didn’t make an entire field of research evaporate instantly. I really needed to say this, because he has many completely uncritical fans.
I will try to write a more detailed reaction a few hours later, but for now… his arguments in the article seem to be, roughly:
* IQ is not everything, therefore it is nothing.
* Increasing IQ correlates with improvements in life only until it reaches 100; after 100 the effects of IQ instantly disappear.
* There are many high-IQ losers, just look at an average Mensa gathering.
A quick response:
1) Higher IQ can be better, ceteris paribus, without it being a superpower or a cure for everything. Do not compare e.g. “smart but lazy” with “average but diligent” to conclude that IQ means nothing. A fair comparison is between “smart and lazy” and “average and lazy”, and between “smart and diligent” and “average and diligent”.
Same for whatever other character traits you insist are better than IQ. The question is not whether X is better or worse than IQ, but whether “same level of X with higher IQ” is better than “same level of X with lower IQ”. Of course, in addition to IQ, other good traits improve your life outcomes, too; this was never controversial.
2) This would contradict many known things, I suppose.
3) Base rates falacy. Most people are “losers” (in the sense that they do not achieve anything revolutionary). Even in the world where high-IQ people are 10x more likely to be extraordinary than average-IQ people, as long as the fraction of extraordinary people in population is sufficiently small, most high-IQ people will not be extraordinary.
More later…
Ok, now I have time to read the article more carefully.
1)
So, one objection against IQ is that — according to Taleb! — IQ tests provide, uhm, not a completely random number, but still something that varies a lot. If you take two or three IQ tests, you get two or three quite different numbers. Which one of them is the one true result that is supposed to correlate with your success and whatever?
I feel pretty sure that the randomness is smaller than Taleb claims. The data is out there, I am just lazy to search it now.
I suppose that the differences between retests will be quite big for people with high IQ. That’s because when you convert the “number of problems solved correctly” to “IQ”, you get greater spaces at the extremes. Also, because most IQ tests are capped; if score “30 of 30 problems” corresponds to “IQ 140” in a specific test, then of course you cannot achieve a result higher than 140, even if you solve everything correctly. But in another test a 100% score may correspond to IQ 120 or IQ 170.
On the other hand, I have an anecdotal evidence about people who keep going every year to take a Mensa test, and keep failing. Which, if true, would suggest that below IQ 130, the randomness is actually quite small. Otherwise, anyone could become a Mensa member by perseverance.
My conclusion is that even if the “80% correlation” that Taleb mentions is true, what it actually means is that values of IQ above 150 are mostly noise. What it does not mean is that values between IQ 70 and IQ 130 (i.e. 95% of the population) are noisy in the same way. In other words, you are quite likely to get test outcome IQ 140 on one day and IQ 170 on the other day; but you are much less likely to get IQ 120 on one day and IQ 150 on other day; and you are very unlikely to get IQ 100 on one day and IQ 130 on other day.
2)
Factors other than intelligence have an impact on IQ test results. For example, a disability can make it extra difficult to follow instructions, resulting in IQ value being lower than it would correspond to actual intelligence. As an extreme case, if you give a paper with IQ test to a blind person, without providing them any help, they would get the lowest possible value. Which again, could be IQ 70 in one test, and IQ 40 in another. Now this is a strawman example, but other disabilities could have relatively smaller but still significant effect.
I suppose this is in an important thing to notice, and for the people with disabilities it makes a difference. It is just very unlikely that this (i.e. “yeah, disabled people have problems in life, news at 11”) explains everything about the relation between IQ and life outcomes.
And about the obedience and creativity… yeah, if someone is so obstinate that he or she refuses to provide answers in the IQ test… or so creative that instead of solving the given problem he or she decides to choose e.g. the most aesthetically pleasing answer… then yes, the measured IQ will be much smaller than it should be. And yet such person can be successful in life. Again, true, but I don’t believe this is the usual case.
3)
“To measure someone’s expertise at X, have them do X, instead of measuring IQ and then inferring their skills at X.”
Uhm, yeah. Obviously. (Unless measuring X directly would be too costly or too slow.)
But this doesn’t imply that IQ can’t correlate with the skill at X.
4)
Insufficient relationship between IQ and income/wealth. Checkmate, psychometrist!
Seems like the argument is that higher IQ helps you avoid poverty, but isn’t really helpful at becoming very rich. (This is of course Taleb’s trademark topic: how people ignore the extreme values, although they are often game-changing.)
I don’t know. My first instinct would be to check the origin of the graph he provides and examine the data carefully. First, it seems a bit suspicious to me that the number of people with IQ 100 is about the same as the number of people with IQ 130. But perhaps the values are normalized. Second, does it include also sources of income such as winning a lottery, where higher IQ obviously does not provide much help?
On the other hand, maybe he is right. Maybe high IQ is good at avoiding poverty and making “the kind of income most people would consider decent but Taleb would laugh at”, but irrelevant at making miraculous fortunes. Maybe. Still seems like a useful thing.
Regarding income and IQ:
It’s a correlation. If you have a bunch of people with IQ = 110, and a bunch with IQ = 120, the second group will have a higher median income, once the group is large enough. But there may be a guy in the first group who inherited a lot of money and made sensible-enough investments, or who works really hard, or is particularly creative and charismatic, or who got lucky in some significant way that puts his income above everyone in the second group. (Millionaire pop musicians are likely lower IQ than most other millionaires, for example.)
The same is even true if the second group’s IQ is 140. It’s a lot less likely, but not impossible.
Isn’t one of Taleb’s books, literally called “Fooled by Randomness”?
That is exactly what is happening to Taleb.
You didn’t read the whole piece, and Taleb is not this dumb.
Taleb directly addresses this, his claim is that correlation below 100 (90? 80?) is what is driving the results.
1) Taleb has an annoying habit of calling everyone he disagrees with an idiot, a mountebank, or what have you. I’ll grant that I’m not smart enough to rule out the possibility that he’s correct that everyone he disagrees with is a fool or knave, but in general, it makes me trust his judgment less. IMHO, if he wrote “So and So makes a critical error,” there’s a higher possibility that he read So and So fairly and is therefore more likely to be correct, than if he says “So and So, the prattling mountebank, claims . . .”
2) The meat of the disagreement, as far as I can tell, is whether IQ correlates with relevant measures of success. Taleb claims no, and uses wealth as his example. Almost everything else I’ve seen says yes, there is a substantial correlation. I’d be interested in hearing more about why they disagree.
3) From what I’ve read, it is pretty hard to get consistent cross-national IQ comparisons, because of language and cultural differences that make it had to normalize your tests. I suspect you could, in some cases, do tests of descendants of immigrants in various countries – there’s a lot of noise, but if you do it in enough countries, you might get some useful data.
4) I don’t think even Taleb denies that some people are born smarter than others, and that some of that is hereditary, only whether IQ tests measure that quality.
Not just the tests themselves, but the very very selection of who gets to take the tests, at what point in their life and under what circumstances, seems very hard to normalize.
The problem with this is that migrants are not average, both due to push (people who want to migrate are not average) and pull reasons (people who are allowed to migrate are not average).
But the fact is that IQ as measured by IQ tests is one of the most solid predictors of outcomes. Denying this pretty much requires a complete dismissal of all social science findings, as nearly all of it is supported by weaker evidence.
Not quite, Taleb says yes it correlates but mostly because it correlates very highly with low IQ people and barely at all (if at all) with high IQ people.
@baconbits9,
Are you saying that Taleb said that not having a certain minimum IQ means your likely to be poor, but being further above that minimum doesn’t noticeably correlate with any higher income beyond what others above the minimum get, or are you saying something else?
That appears to be what he is saying here.
@baconbits9,
Thanks
Good clarification, thanks.
Has anyone qualified responded to this point? It seems hard to believe that a generation of researchers would miss it, but not impossible.
I should also say that Taleb partially buries it in his other criticism that high IQ scores qualify you to be a tiresome bureaucrat who he hates, not a disruptive genius innovator like him, because:
1) Citation needed. I would have guess that disruptive genius innovators would tend to score well on IQ tests, but I could easily be wrong.
2) Even if all IQ selects for is the ability to be a top quintile researcher, doctor, or what have you, isn’t that good notwithstanding that Taleb holds those people in contempt?
One more slight digression: I am beginning to suspect that Taleb has a contempt function something like Trump’s – if you are kissing Taleb’s butt or he is kissing yours, you are terrific, but if you’re not, you’re boring, and if you’re criticizing him or in his way, you’re a mountebank and an idiot. (Although it probably takes more skill to kiss his butt and not get caught than it does with the President.)
I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t looked particularly. I have seen a handful of responses that totally miss the point, but I have mostly seen responses on SSC and ones that Taleb has mocked, so its not a very good sample (I don’t even follow Taleb enough to look at more than a small percent of his rebuttals).
I thought about that comp myself, but Trump seems to have succeeded in certain arenas because of his personality and Taleb may well be succeeding despite his personality and because of a particularly prodigious intellect. NNT also seems very willing to punch down, which is something I mentally associate with Trump.
My understanding is that IQ scores become less meaningful, as they get higher. The problem is in how you construct the tests–if you want to distinguish between top 1/10,000 and top 1/100,000 people, you need to give your sample tests to a *lot* of people–probably in the range of 10 million people. Without that, you’re not constructing your test in a way that you could expect to distinguish those people. It’s also possible that IQ tests are good at capturing some general kinds of intellectual abilities, but miss out on specialized kinds that can drive extreme success in some field. And they certainly miss out on work ethic, drive, study habits, social skills, and similar things that also drive success.
Famously, Terman’s study on mathematically precocious youth showed that kids who did very well on math tests as kids tended to be very successful in life, but his criteria for selecting those kids narrowly missed two guys who ended up with nobel prizes in the sciences. They both had high scores, but not quite high enough to get included in his study.
Terman’s study shows two things, IMO:
a. Measured intelligence predicts success, even at the high end of the range.
b. Measured intelligence still misses a lot of the picture, even (especially?) at the high end of the range.
I haven’t really looked into this stuff, but Ternman’s original studies are definitely not above reproach, with several criticisms. From Wikipedia
I didn’t know about the intervention by Terman, and that probably messes up the results somewhat. (It’s hard to say by how much.)
I’d have to go back and look at the results, but I am quite skeptical that the number of PhDs and academic papers from the high-scoring group would be at all typical from a sample matched by family income or socioeconomic status. Even kids from very wealthy families usually don’t get PhDs.
Definitely true. If you read the criticisms he links of him they often misrepresent/misunderstand his points but I also don’t believe that he is picking the best of his critics either.
This certainly comports with my experience, as someone good at well-defined problems and lousy at the big vague stuff. I’m great at standardized tests and an absolute disaster at job interviews. So I’m naturally skeptical of the tendency around here to insist that IQ is the sole determinant of success, or anything along those lines. Of course, I also have *gestures downthread* other issues.
Aren’t you strawmanning people by saying this?
Can you give one example of a person arguing this?
“Insist” was the wrong word. “Strongly imply” better? It’s one of those things you never see being argued explicitly, but is treated like an unspoken baseline assumption which makes it hard to call out.
OK, let’s go with “strongly imply” instead. Can you point to some examples of where you see this happening? Viewing IQ as the sole determinant of success seems so wrong to me that I’m surprised you see it as a baseline here. At the least, I think there would be a lot of pushback from people who disagree, and I haven’t seen that pushback. I certainly don’t think it’s the case that majority of people here believe that IQ is any sort of a sole determinant of success.
My guess is that Aapje found the word “sole” to be the strawman more than “insist.”
I would describe the pro-IQ position as “IQ measures a quality that is a ‘substantial’ or ‘important’ determinant of success, but there are many others.”
Ultimately, I’d be very surprised if anyone on the board believes IQ is the sole determinant.
ETA: Ninjaed by nkurz!
Flip it around.
“Differences in outcomes are determined by the average measured IQ of the group and not other things.”
If you think people around here aren’t strongly implying that …
There’s a big difference between individual outcome and group outcome. Individual outcome will have much less correlation with IQ–and less still with the average IQ of their demographic.
But even speaking about relative group achievements, I don’t think that’s anyone’s opinion. There’s something to the luck of the initial geography, or a particular innovation at a particular time having an outsized impact (I don’t think the relative difference between England and Japan during the British Empire was due mostly to average intelligence).
But I think this is the impression BBA and HBC have of the other side because this is where the debate happens. People
like Taleb[?] deny almost any real world impact to innate intelligence, or else deny any way to meaningfully measure it. They get pushback on that point that may or may not come with a raft of disclaimers, but that doesn’t mean the other argument boils down to believing IQ is everything. But it comes off that way because that’s where the disagreement, and thus most of the discussion is.Personally I believe intelligence is real and meaningful and probably positively correlated with many other good things. But whether it’s 25% or 75% I would stake a strong opinion.
(There’s a lot of room for personal bias to creep in when talking about what other people are implying)
I don’t think Taleb denies that there’s such a thing as innate differences of mental capacity, it’s that he thinks that what’s measured by IQ tests isn’t very important for the vast majority of people.
I don’t know where Taleb would stand on this, but I think it’s at least plausible that some of the difference in life outcomes correlating with IQ scores is a result of gatekeeping which filters out people who are bad at IQ tests and similar tests like the SAT.
@HeelBearCub
I still don’t think anyone on this board thinks that, but that helps clarify.
Person 1: Acme hired fewer Purpletonians as managers than their proportions in its worker population. Since there are no other credible explanations, we can reasonably infer discrimination on Acme’s part.
Person 2: No, it’s possible that the Purpletonians don’t compose an equal share of the most qualified managerial candiates.
Person 1: So are you implying that the difference in hiring is entirely due to IQ?
Person 2: Although I believe that IQ is an important measure, of course innate intelligence is not the only factor. Purpletonians might have different educational qualifications, experience, availability to work unusual hours, or other qualities that make them a successful manager.
HeelBearCub:
What we can say from available data is that IQ is correlated with a bunch of positive life outcomes. Most of _The Bell Curve_ is spent documenting this stuff, using this gigantic longitudinal study (NLSY79) to gather data. People with low IQ scores are a lot more likely to have been disabled, divorced, unemployed, or in prison during one of the interview periods (I think every 5 years) than people with high IQ scores. There’s a positive correlation between IQ and income, and IQ and highest educational level achieved, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Other research shows that IQ scores are positively correlated with work performance, even for pretty basic menial jobs like being a janitor that you wouldn’t think would need a lot of brains to do well. And that this correlation persists across the range of measured IQ scores, despite NTT’s claims.
Now, it seems very likely to me that many of these differences in outcome are substantially caused by differences in intelligence, which are approximately measured by IQ scores. I don’t know that for certain, but in some areas (differences in academic success between groups[0] with different average IQ), it’s easy to see how the causal mechanism would work, and why it would matter. It’s not especially mysterious that when Alice is smarter than Bob, she usually gets better grades in school and does better in hard classes[1]. I suspect that many other differences in outcomes are to some extent caused by differences in intelligence, but there are also a *lot* of other things driving those differences in outcomes. So, as an example, the black/white difference in life expectancy is probably somehow related to intelligence differences[2], but my not-very-informed guess is that it’s mostly social or biological stuff unrelated to intelligence.
Some links:
Vox article summarizing some results from Stuart Ritchie’s book on IQ
Linda Gottfriedson’s paper on g (what IQ tries to measure)
[0] This isn’t just about racial groups. If you take one group of white students with average IQ of 100 (average) and another with average IQ 140 (very smart), the second group will beat the first in almost any academic outcome you can imagine. Indeed, racial groups tend to have a bunch of other confounding stuff going on that makes interpreting different outcomes a lot harder.
[1] For any given Alice and Bob, there are a ton of individual differences that may make Alice do worse or Bob do better, but over large numbers of people, all those differences will tend to average out and the Alices will do a lot better than the Bobs.
[2] There’s a positive correlation between IQ and life expectancy. Some of this probably comes down to the effect of intelligence differences, but I imagine mostly this is secondary effects–smarter people usually have safer jobs, have more money for doctors, etc.
I suppose that’s how some people view it. To me, it’s more like Acme is explicitly known to be discriminating against Purpletonians and there’s mountains of evidence that it’s happening, and the people making claims about the Purpletonians’ inherent qualities are saying that Acme’s discrimination is justified. Or at the very least, they’re arguing that the discrimination somehow makes no difference at all and the Purpletonians would be just as unsuccessful at getting Acme jobs even if it wasn’t happening.
We know for a fact that institutional and systemic discrimination against racial minorities was the norm for most of U.S. history. And while it’s not quite as much of an absolute certainty, the majority of people would agree that some degree of systemic (if not institutional) discrimination against racial minorities is still happening, even if there’s a lot of debate about how severe the problem is. To me, it’s absurd to think that these factors aren’t largely responsible for the fact that racial minorities tend to have worse life outcomes on average, even if the claims about those races being inherently less intelligent are true (and I strongly doubt that they’re true).
Scott made this point back in 2013, in the Anti-Reactionary FAQ, and I wish more people would take it into consideration when making these sorts of arguments:
With respect to Scott, I think he misses the mark badly here. If we’re trying to create a post-racial society (there’s some debate on that point, but let’s just run with it for now), it’s enormously relevant just what kinds of equality that implies, because that bears directly on what kinds of policies we should deploy to its end. If we decide we want equality of outcome, then aiming for equality of opportunity isn’t a logical first step, it’s almost a red herring; they are fundamentally different goals that are best tackled with fundamentally different tools. And this is true no matter where we are on the way to either goal.
@J Mann:
I mean, just look at the reply from albatross right after yours. Sure, there are caveats, but the core is that group IQs explain group outcomes. He even says it outright:
I’m not particularly interested in debating the truth of it, that’s really a separate conversation. I’m just pointing out that the argument is prevalent.
@HBC
You suggested that many on SSC would believe:
Then used Albatross’ quote as indication:
You don’t see that these two comments are way far apart? Most especially your addendum “not other things.” But also the adjectives changing the tone, such as “very likely” and “many of the differences” on Alb’s part. I think your comment caught the direction of the belief, but in an uncharitable way. By the way, I agree with Alb’s comments but not your interpretation, for the reasons I indicate above.
@HeelBearCub
I’ve agreed that lots of people think that general intelligence is substantially measured by IQ tests and is a significant component of success in many areas, but I’ve said that I would be very surprised to find that anyone thinks it is the “sole” component of success. (See my comments in this thread here and here.
Albatross’s comment is consistent with that.
I guess we’d have to ask Albatross what percentage they associate with “substantial.”
@Ladyjane
I’ve heard this many times, and it always comes off as question begging (in the actual sense) to me. You’ve arbitrarily set a cutoff point during which you choose to base you decisions.
For instance, “We know for a fact that institutional and systemic discrimination against racial minorities was the norm for most of U.S. history.” Yes, but allowing this to drive your conclusion is silly. Its extremely plausible, even likely, that the same traits that caused minorities to end up in the oppressed group rather than the dominant group are still relevant traits.
We can go even further back, perhaps the people who emigrated Sub Saharan Africa, which is an ideal place for humans to live, were forced out because of their traits. The traits that are now advantageous for Whites & Asians. We don’t know, and you don’t even inquire. Instead you assume your conclusion at the start.
@Clutzy: I don’t believe any of that to be true. In terms of why Europeans were able to develop faster than the rest of the world, there are plenty of more credible explanations out there. For the most part, I agree with the narrative that Jared Diamond lays out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, or at least the broad strokes of it.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that your proposed narrative was correct. The fact would still remain that the racial groups in question have faced centuries of systematic discrimination and oppression, regardless of what caused their ancestors to end up in that position. Any difference in life outcomes caused by genetics would be greatly exacerbated by the addition of institutional and systemic factors specifically designed to keep these racial groups from succeeding. By setting up those barriers, the dominant racial groups are effectively creating a feedback system by which initially small differences get magnified over time, until all non-dominant groups are ground down to the bottom. That doesn’t seem like a desirable situation at all, unless you’re a racial supremacist who’s actively seeking to further your race and yours alone, at the expense of the rest of humanity.
@HeelBearCub & BBA
The way I see it, there are three possible (and not exclusive) explanations possible for why black Americans do so poorly:
1. Discrimination
2. Cultural differences between ethnic groups
3. Black IQ differences
You guys seem to completely ignore the many discussions about cultural differences, which in my perception, are considerably more common than discussions about racial IQs. SJ advocates seem to get far, far, far more angry about (tolerating) claims that IQs differ, so could it be that you consider those claims more common than they are because they irritate you way more and/or have a belief that tolerating those discussions means agreement?
Note that even if some people would solely blame low black IQs for the entire group difference in outcomes, which I can’t remember anyone arguing, that doesn’t necessarily imply that other factors like laziness or poor social skills don’t play a role in personal outcomes. It does imply that those factors do not explain the group difference, which is true if these factors doesn’t differ between groups (in other words, if an equal fraction of black and white people are lazy, have poor social skills, etc) and not just if these factors have (almost) no impact on outcomes.
Note that outcomes do not merely differ between ethnic groups, but also between men and women. I can’t remember anyone arguing that women are stupid, which people would presumably would have to believe if they think that IQ fully determines outcomes.
Ultimately, I am really rather irritated by this insistence that we form a hive mind with a certain belief & when pushed for examples, we get this combination of claims being walked back and hand waving about how things are “unspoken,” which seems almost like a conspiracy theory where people apparently gesture to what they really believe and explicitly say things they don’t believe.
@LadyJane
It is unquestionably true that Asians Americans have faced discrimination and yet Asian Americans earn more on average than whites. Furthermore, there are white groups with generational poverty.
To the very limited extent that your narrative is falsifiable, it doesn’t match the facts very well. However, the falsifiability is low since the SJ narrative tends to beg the question, by taking outcome differences as proof of discrimination. So then the argument becomes circular:
Certain groups have worse outcomes due to external factors that they cannot evade or transcend (in time) and the existence and immense strength of these external factors is evident due to the much worse outcomes for these groups.
Yet if you actually try to measure these super strong external factors directly, then you often see relatively unimpressive results.
I agree that the two comments Mark V Anderson quotes show a more significant difference than HBC represents, so I think trying to get him to acknowledge that he’s inaccurately characterizing the right/conservative opinion on the matter will be largely futile going forward.
One thing that complicates the “We see historical discrimination against group X and group X has worse outcomes, therefore the worse outcomes are due to the discrimination” model is that we also see groups that have suffered historical discrimination and yet have better outcomes than basically everyone else. There was substantial discrimination against Asians (particularly Japanese and Chinese) and Jews over a lot of history, including US history. And yet, both groups do better than the average American in most outcomes.
J Mann:
How much of the variation is explained by differences in intelligence is an empirical question, and one that will differ between different cases.
There’s this funny thing that happens in a lot of group-outcome discussions where IQ is involved:
Alice starts by pointing out that there is a history of discrimination against group X, and that group X is doing badly now, and infers that the discrimination is the cause.
Bob starts by pointing out that group X has a substantially lower average IQ than the surrounding population, and that group X is doing badly now, and infers that differences in intelligence are the cause.
Now, both of these are still in correlation-is-not-causation land, and need to be nailed down with more and better evidence before they can be asserted with much confidence. However, my sense is that a lot of people in the big wide world are perfectly fine with Alice’s comment, and will get mad as hell about Bob’s comment, even though they’re each taking one visible possible cause of the outcome difference and assuming it explains the difference.
Similarly, if Alice responds to criticism by digging into the data to find some strong evidence that a particular outcome difference is very likely due to discrimination, very few people get mad at her for doing so. If Bob does the same, he’s a f–king Nazi. There’s this huge moral/political reaction to the explanations that often seems to swamp any actual logical or empirical explanation.
I’ve seen an argument that slavery did more damage than most discrimination because of the break in cultural continuity. I’m not convinced this is right, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong, either.
Yes, and this is more evidence for my point. Among both Whites and Blacks, most families that were poor several generations ago tend to still be poor today. The difference is that for all intents and purposes, Black people weren’t allowed to be anything but poor for a long period of American history, which explains why a larger percentage of Black families are born into poverty.
This also explains why Asians tend to have better life outcomes than Whites: many of the Asians in the U.S. came from families that were wealthy before they immigrated here. It would also explain why African immigrant families tend to have better life outcomes than American-born Blacks.
I’m not really sure what kind of measurements or results you’re referring to here. Do you have any examples?
@ladyjane
Diamond’s narrative spinning in GGS is exactly the kind of question begging I was talking about. Apart from the places he states as fact things that are factually incorrect (like that the Zebra is not suited to be a pack animal, in fact it is even in a non-domesticated state; or that wheat was an easy to domesticate high calorie starch, both corn and potato outperform it in natural and cultivated varieties, and it is basically on par with SSA’s sorgum) he also states things that are set up as to be non-refutable, like that spreading culture and tech is easier east-west than north-south (no strong evidence) even ignoring things like the proliferation of potatoes north-south in the Americas happening quickly. He’s also among those the often takes the most extreme population numbers available so as to suit his narratives, both for SSA and pre-colonial America.
BBA:
If I’ve left the impression I think that, I’m sorry, because it’s not at all what I really believe.
I think intelligence (as approximately measured by IQ tests) drives a lot of life outcomes to some extent.
For academic success and ability to do very intellectually demanding jobs, intelligence matters a great deal. (You simply can’t be a successful programmer or lawyer without a fair bit of intellectual ability. And without a fair bit of smarts, you’ll simply never make it through a graduate program in any demanding field.) For other stuff, intelligence matters, but not as much.
And for everything, intelligence is only one factor in what drives success. You can have the brains of a Gauss, and if you never try to learn anything, your amazing natural intellect won’t do anyone any good. I think of this the way I think of performance in professional sports–you can’t be in the NBA at all unless you’re an amazing natural athlete, but within the NBA, there’s a range of different things that drive success–some guys work extra hard, some really understand the game at a deep level, some just coast on their immense natural talent, and there’s a large helping of luck involved in personal success or failure, too–an injury at the wrong time can wreck your career; get drafted onto a team where there are already two really good guards, and maybe you spend a few years mostly warming the bench and never get a chance to shine.
But all that said, some people have more athletic talent than others, and that matters even within the NBA, and nobody without a lot of that talent ever gets close to the NBA.
In the same way, intelligence matters a lot for success in (say) science. But there are a ton of other things that also matter. You can’t even get into the game without a first-rate brain, but you also need hard work and luck and people skills and lots of other things, and different people have more/less of those things. And all of them matter.
I don’t think this caveat really does much. That’s all correlated with IQ as well, except, perhaps, luck.
Positively correlated, but not very strongly. There are tons of people in the world who are both very smart and also have no people skills, or are very smart and have a lousy work ethic.
In general, it seems like you’re taking my words and parsing them into a much more extreme point of view than I actually hold or argue for. I’m not really sure if this is you being uncharitable, or me just not being clear about what I’m claiming, but I tried to make a pretty careful statement above, and I feel like your “So what you’re saying is…” summary would have fit well in that infamous BBC interview with Jordan Peterson.
Let’s take a simple example. We have a classroom full of suburban white middle-class kids, overwhelmingly from intact homes, all native English speakers, etc. We give them all an IQ test, and then separate them into a high(>110), medium(90-110), and low(<90) IQ group for purposes of analysis, without telling them or their teachers. We later observe that the high-IQ group ends up taking a lot more AP classes, and a much larger fraction of them end up going to college, than the low-IQ group. In this situation, my guess is that basically all the difference in performance between the high and low IQ group is likely to be due to differences in intelligence. The smart kids did better in school, exactly like you'd expect.
At another extreme, we might imagine two groups: Group #1 is mostly poor white kids being raised by single moms. Group #2 is mostly middle-class white kids being raised by intact families. Suppose we give them IQ tests, and determine that Group #2 has a 10-point higher average IQ than Group #1. And then suppose we observe that Group #2 takes more AP classes, gets better grades, goes to college more often, etc. In this situation, it's harder to say how much of the outcome difference comes down to differences in intelligence. Probably some of it, but Group #1 has a lot of disadvantages, and it's hard to say which ones drove the disparity. You can try to tease the effect of IQ out by using tricky statistical techniques or clever experimental/observational design, but then you risk fooling yourself into thinking an artifact of your techniques is a real effect–something that's happened to a lot of social scientists over the years.
And with all this, I think the most important thing to note is that this is an empirical question, not a moral one. The answers to these questions are knowable (though perhaps hard to get because of all the confounding variables), and you don’t learn anything about the right answer by determining which answers would be morally better.
I have a pet theory, with no evidence for it currently, that doing this will generate specific results. It goes (basically) that kids right at the cutoff levels will have surprisingly different outcomes, that the 111 kids will struggle more than the 110 kids, and maybe even as much as the 89 kids.
I think looking for that kind of effect is the whole point of regression continuity design experiments in the social sciences.
Mmmmm, I understand why you are saying this. I really do. But what I am really attempting to do here is holding “your” feet to the proverbial fire the proverbial “you” lit. (Note that I didn’t mention you in my original post. I’m responding to BBA and attempting to clarify their position.)
Allow me to explain. You mentioned up above the idea that Alice might say “look at this evidence for historical discrimination and the bad outcomes that have resulted from that discrimination”. Then Bob says “actually, that group has lower IQ, so we would expect them to have poor outcomes.”
Now, if I am taking you at face value, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with Alice’s comment. Past and present discrimination has effects and they matter. Or, they don’t, but we need to show why they don’t. Bob’s comment, under the model you are proposing, isn’t particularly responsive to Alice.
Conversely, if Dave comes along and says “We show that grit substantially effects outcomes in this study”, I expect Ellie to come along and say “Actually grit is positively correlated with IQ. You are probably just measuring IQ”. I am reasonably sure I have seen Scott make this argument. Once you lean on IQ’s positive correlation as as substantially (and ultimately) causal, the argument gets used over and over.
Schooling doesn’t matter, education attainment doesn’t matter it’s just signalling, positive/growth mindset doesn’t matter, teachers don’t matter, environment doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters. All that matters is how smart you are. Why, one of the foremost mathematical minds of any age grew up in the slums of India and taught himself mathematics on his own.
Again, I am not particularly interested in the moment at debating the facts of the matter, just the logical implications in meaning of leaning on this correlation.
HeelBearCub:
It’s responsive to Alice in exactly the same way that Alice’s comment is responsive to Bob. Alice claims an explanation for an observed set of group differences, and Bob claims a different explanation. They presumably disagree on whose explanation is a better model of reality.
There’s no way to decide who is more right a priori. The only way forward is to actually examine the claims and evidence and see what we find out. In some cases, Alice probably has the better model; in other cases, Bob does.
HeelBearCub:
This is a fully general critique of any model for complex social phenomena. It applies just as well to the model that racial discrimination/animus (or structural oppression, or whatever) explains all differences in outcomes across races. It applies just as well to the model that differences in outcomes between
people are mainly down to differences in family income/socioeconomic status. And so on.
Any model is subject to being over-applied. And again, the solution isn’t to dismiss the model you dislike, it’s to examine the arguments and evidence. Is grit predicting good outcomes independent of IQ? Is IQ predicting good outcomes independent of parental income and socioeconomic status? Do SAT scores measure something more than just how much your parents spent on test prep classes? These things are knowable, and indeed researchers can and do (and should) try to answer them.
This is a wonderful strawman, but literally nobody in this conversation, nobody in the SSC comment threads, and hardly anyone in the world actually believes it.
I’d write a long post explaining which of those things I thought mattered in what circimstances, but what would be the point? You’d just go back to beating on your strawman.
Nancy Lebovitz says:
I’m not familiar with Taleb’s previous work, but the arguments and arithmetic in that piece largely went over my head and I couldn’t follow them.
If the general argument is that the results of a written test poorly correlates with actual on-the-job performance that fits my experience in working with fellow plumbers with the City and County of San Francisco as the results of our civil service exams is public record and I found enough bottom scorers to be better plumbers than those we got top scores that I very much questioned thr use of the test.
Is there a good way to kill ivy in a lawn without killing the grass, or do you just have to go scorched Earth and then reseed the lawn? I’ve poked around online but as best I can tell none of the solutions are “grass safe”.
Roundup (glyphosate). Apply it carefully to the leaves and right at the roots of the poison ivy and make sure it isn’t going to rain for 30-60 minutes afterward. You may kill a bit of grass right around the plant, but it’s remarkable how precise you can be with it if you’re careful.
Alternatively, wait until winter and very carefully pull up the poison ivy (wear gloves, full clothing, face mask, etc since it can still irritate your skin but it’s easier to deal with with the leaves gone.
This is just regular ivy, not poison ivy, luckily.
Incidentally, I am as best I can tell not allergic to poison ivy, which is pretty handy (I mean I still try to avoid contact just to be safe in case something has changed).
Doh! I should read more carefully I’ve had a lot of poison ivy spring up the last few weeks so I’m seeing it everywhere apparently. 🙂
Round-up will kill regular ivy too.
Yeah, I figured the advice still held. I was just clarifying.
The ivy is pretty pervasive though, I think I would end up taking out a lot of lawn along with it even if I were careful.
Backstory: I’m renting a house from a friend. The lawn was already in rough shape when I got there a year ago, so I don’t feel responsible for the current condition, but I thought if I could do something nice for him and clean it up a bit it would be nice to do that (I’m not going to go through the effort or expense to completely redo the lawn though, which I ultimately think is what is necessary).
If the ivy is pervasive enough, then frankly you don’t even have to be all that careful. No matter what you kill it with, you’ll be left with big patches of dirt throughout the yard that you have to re-seed, right?
Right now it is…baby ivy? It’s coming up through the grass but the grass is pretty much still there. It’s not like thick, bushy overgrown Ivy.
Like I said, I was just curious if there were any relatively simple ways to get rid of ivy without killing the lawn as a courtesy, but I’m not interested in undertaking a massive (possibly costly) lawn restoration project on a lawn I don’t own.
Looks kind of like this throughout large patches of lawn, as opposed to this (but obviously it won’t stay that way).
@2181425,
I have the opposite deal, it’s only the grass I want to kill, not any other plants.
Roundup works for that too, but so does shade/cover. Visqueen (cheap thin plastic sheeting) kills grass so fast it’s unbelievable. Problem is it just grows back unless you do something semi-permanent.
Depends on the type of plants you’re trying to keep and how widespread your grass problem is. I have a shady wet area I flatter myself is a moss garden and the only thing that really works there is hands and knees weeding. Moss is a non-vascular plant as I understand it and so really dilute roundup will kill the grass but not the moss, but I haven’t wanted to risk it by trying it yet.
Thanks,
I’ve used roundup before and I’ve found the grass is usually resilient in a way that the other plants aren’t, but I was hoping there was some secret to not having to jusr pull grass (a duty my older son now suffers).
Dicamba. You can just pick up the Ortho Weed B Gone from Home Depot, which contains Dicamba. You’ll want to spray twice during fall, in 2 week intervals. It may take a few years to get it totally reduced, and you’ll also need to practice regular good lawn maintenance so the lawn will fill in. Anything not filled by lawn will be filled by one weed or another.
Our lawn was about 50% ivy when we moved in. Mostly grass now.
Dicamba is not exactly grass-safe, but it kills weeds faster than it kills grass.
Just pull it out and be fastidious about it. Every time you see a leaf, *immediately* trace back as much vine as possible, and then pull out as much vine as possible.
In three years, most of the roots will have starved and died.
After that, any ivy you see will be runners from the neighbors, or starts from pieces transported by wind or by animals. Pull them immediately, before they root deep again.
This same technique works for morning glory, and for poison ivy, and on about the same timeframe.
It doesn’t work for blackberry. I no idea what blackberry roots live on if you keep pulling the surface growth. I’m starting to suspect they have extra-dimensional darkmatter reactors or organic phase room temperature fusion reactors as organelles.
Glyphosate is faster, taking only two years instead of three, or only one if you are really really fastidious. But I am getting more and more uncomfortable with the idea of handling the stuff, and wish that it had not been so prevalent sprayed on the gardens and flower beds of my youth.
Blackberries are powered by hate. It’s the only reasonable explanation.
Question for anyone who knows enough about statistics to answer: let’s say you’ve got two people competing in betting on a sport – doesn’t matter which sport, but let’s say soccer/association football, because there’s a lot of games. If they each bet on half a dozen to a dozen games a day, figuring out what they think the chances are and then betting more or less depending on their predicted chances of one team or the other winning versus the bookies’ odds (if it’s 50-50 odds but they think one team is 60% to win, they bet on that team; if it’s 60-40 odds but they think it’s 50-50, they bet on the underdog, etc), betting more or less depending on the size of the margin – how long would it be before you have a significant sample size? How long would the competition continue before you could say one is better than the other? (I imagine that the degree of the disparity between our two betters would matter as well).
it depends on effect size.
If one is correct 99% of the time while the other is secretly flipping a coin you won’t need very many test at all. How many depends how certain you need to be.
if one is genuinely 0.000001% better at the task than the other it may take many millions of tests to be sure.
If both are secretly flipping fair coins then there’s no set point where you can say “these 2 are definitely equally good at this”
it also depends on how important is is to you to not get a false positive: if they’re actually equal, how bad is it if after 1000 tests you wrongly conclude that one is better than the other?